“Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor.
Let’s go to the tape: Continue reading “A Rousing Anthem Extolling Cannibalism”
A Rousing Anthem Extolling Cannibalism
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Category: Music
The Eric Clapton / Bob Marley Answer to the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Two men are arrested, but the police do not possess enough information for a conviction. Following the separation of the two men, the police offer both a similar deal—if one testifies against his partner (defects/betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates/assists), the betrayer goes free and the cooperator receives the full one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail for a minor charge. If each ‘rats out’ the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; the decision of each is kept quiet. What should they do?
Their solution after the fold.
Continue reading “The Eric Clapton / Bob Marley Answer to the Prisoner’s Dilemma”
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Were I a Couple of Years Younger, I Would Never Have Figured It Out
As you know, I’ve been listening to LPs on my little Crosby turntable. I discovered that RCA, if not everyone that puts out sets of records, doesn’t put side 2 on the back side of side 1. Instead, you get, in a two volume set, side 1 and side 4 on a disk and side 2 and side 3 on a disk. If you have a four record set, such as The Barber of Seville, you can see sides 1 through 4 with sides 5 through 8 on their back sides.
What the dickens, I thought. Those guys at RCA are just crazy.
Continue reading “Were I a Couple of Years Younger, I Would Never Have Figured It Out”
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Overheard in the Music Library
As you might have noticed in one of my DeRooneyfication posts, I have been moving LPs to my parlor. Where were they before that? Some of the ones, the ones scene in the picture in that post, were in boxes in my storeroom. Others were in my beautiful wife’s office.
You see, the ones in boxes were mostly records I inherited from my mother, some of which she inherited from her mother, which is why the collection is so heavy on Reader’s Digest boxed sets and Elvis Presley titles. Many of the titles I owned or recently purchased were on my wife’s bookshelves since she has been, off and on, ripping the records to MP3s.
Since we still had room even with the polished and repackaged 45- and 78-rpm records, I went down to her office to get more of my albums to move upstairs and to listen to. Not to steal LP Cover Lover‘s thunder, but I found some things familiar and some things strange. Continue reading “Overheard in the Music Library”
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Country and Western Music Can Stop Right Now: It’s Reached Its Pinnacle
Billy Currington, “Like My Dog”
Sorry, David Allan Coe, but this is the perfect country song, lack of Mama, prison, trucks, trains, or getting drunk aside.
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Brian J. Noggle and the Adventure of the Accidental Collectible
Back in the very early 1990s–like 1990 to 1991, which is really the very late eighties and the first year of the nineties if we must be technical, but since this is a personal narrative essay we don’t, so it was the early 1990s, dammit–I was a student at the University, living in the far northwest corner of Milwaukee, and about two blocks from the Mainstream Records at Fond du Lac and Silver Spring roads. Which explains where much of my non-tuition grocery store paychecks went in those days.
One of the things they offered was cheap 10-packs of used 45 rpm singles. Continue reading “Brian J. Noggle and the Adventure of the Accidental Collectible”
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Graffiti Suspect, 45, Seen Wearing Clown Pants
It’s like the Vanity Fair article says, pop culture has stalled. And this modern graffiti referring to a hit from 1990.
Alternate quip:
20 years later, we reflect upon the successful protests of the 99% who could not touch this that removed the 1% that purportedly could from the pop charts.
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Question for the Day
Justin Bieber: Is he more like Andy Gibb or Shaun Cassidy?
(Handy Wikipedia links provided for the portion of the audience that falls into the market segment “Damn kids.”)
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Robert Frost Would Salute Him
The songwriter behind Brad Paisley’s “Camouflage” is a poetic genius for seamlessly blending in so many words that actually rhyme with camouflage and are not French:
I salute him.
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How’s That Generation Working Out For You
Twenty-five years ago, Genesis was ready to throw out the Greatest Generation and put the Baby Boomers in charge.
My generation will put it right.
We’re not just making promises
that we know we’ll never keep.
Um, yeah. Thanks for that.
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I Don’t Want To Make You Feel Old, Old Man…
But as J. Christian Adams points out, the U2 album Achtung Baby is 20 years old this month. Which would make The Joshua Tree, what, 25? You remember the olden days, when bands had comeback albums after their initial success, and that time period was like five years? And it seemed like a long time?
Here’s my favorite U2 song, “One”, which is from the album:
Like all good U2 songs, and by which I mean “both,” (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” being the other), the song starts out highly personal, where the listener can relate in a very raw fashion, and then all of a sudden we take an Automan-like left turn and Bono is singing about Universal Harmony and Feeding Africa (but not manufacturing there). Strangely, I spent most of my youth thinking the song was about a man and a woman rehashing, again, their broken relationship, but apparently I was enjoying a meaning at odds with the song’s real meaning. So it’s my failure as a listener that makes this song my favorite from U2.
So I posted on Facebook about the age of Achtung Baby, and a contemporaneous friend said, “And the album hasn’t aged one bit, I still listen to it all the time.”
To which I replied, “You tell yourself that. To an eighteen-year-old today, you might as well be listening to Pat Boone.”
And not the metal Pat Boone:
What? No More Mr. Nice Guy is fifteen years old?
But he was just on Letterman the other day promoting the album.
Now I’ve made myself feel old, old man.
UPDATE: Welcome, VftP readers. Hey, if you’ve got a buck, I’ve got a comedy to sell you. The Courtship of Barbara Holt is now available for the Kindle. It, like Achtung Baby is about 20 years old, but I’ve stripped most of the dated pop culture references from it except a reference to the Spin Doctors.
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I Don’t Want To Make You Feel Old, Old Man…
but the 20th anniversary 2-CD edition of the Spin Doctors’ Pocket Full of Kryptonite is now available:
One, two princes kneel before you because they’ve thrown their backs out trying to clean the gutters, your majesty.
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#occupyelmstreet
Friends, it’s time that we in the 99 44/100 DEMAND that our politicians and leaders stopped helping Wall Street and started helping Elm Street!
How many innocent teenagers must die before the government takes control of our dreams?
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Rolling Stone Poll Voters #OccupyMemoryLane
According to a Rolling Stone poll, Starship’s “We Built This City” is the worst song of the 1980s:
This could be the biggest blow-out victory in the history of the Rolling Stone Readers Poll. You really, really, really hate “We Built This City” by Starship. It crushed the competition. This isn’t the first time this happened to this song. In 2004 Blender named this song the Most Awesomely Bad Song of All Time.
As much as I hate to differ with that aging Boomer hipster magazine of record, that song is a pop rock anthem:
I mean, it’s a bit of raging against the machine in a sort of inchoate fashion that captures some of the angsty adolescents crave. Who rides the wrecking ball into our guitars? They do! Don’t tell us you need us, ’cause we’re the ship of fools. I don’t even quite know what it means, but I know I felt (and still sometimes) feel that way.
I mean, it’s not even Starship’s weakest hit of the decade. Continue reading “Rolling Stone Poll Voters #OccupyMemoryLane”
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A Headline You Would Not Have Seen 25 Years Ago
Judas Priest coming to Family Arena
Well, then, it’s at the Family Arena. Bring your kids.
Hell, old man, bring your grandchildren.
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Annoyance Nostalgia
Good lord, this song annoyed me when WKTI played it over and over again when I was 19 years old. It’s “The One and Only” by some Brit named Chesney Hawkes:
20 years later, I get a touch of nostalgia hearing it. But it still annoys me. How is it possible to feel nostalgic for annoyance?
(Seen on Hot Air.)
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I Suffer From SMLS
I have recently discovered that I suffer from Sudden Music Liking Syndrome.
This struck me today, as I heard the second song by The Who on the radio in two days (“Teenage Wasteland” today, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” yesterday) and decided, hey, maybe I ought to get an album by these guys.
I mean, for forty years almost, The Who has been part of the background soundscape. I’ve been listening to “classic rock” since it was called album-oriented rock and pretty much thought “meh” about The Who until sometime yesterday. I mean, these guys are so old they played during the Super Bowl halftime show in the 21st century, hey?
So where does the sudden “I like that” come from if not some psychological disorder that will be covered in DSM-VI?
Frankly, I lie awake in my own sweat that another outbreak will drive me to like Led Zeppelin.
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Some People On The Internet Have Too Much Time On Their Hands
God bless ’em.
Here’s a guy who has rendered Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as though it was played on a Nintendo:
Oh, my.
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My Money Was On Caroline Kennedy
The catty lyrics were believed to be aimed at an ex-boyfriend such as MICK JAGGER, CAT STEVENS, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON or WARREN BEATTY.
But now the target has been revealed as gay producer DAVID GEFFEN, at the time head of Carly’s Elektra record label.
I’m not going to explain my quip, you damn kids.
(Link seen on Althouse.)
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Kicking Taylor Swift to the Curb
I’m giving up Taylor Swift as my current songstress crush because, frankly, a large number of her songs refer to her Daddy, and each time she does, I’m reminded that her Daddy is probably my age, and that makes me feel creepy. If it makes me feel creepy, it must be creepy indeed.
Instead, here’s Jane Monheit:
I am pretty sure Monheit translates into Hot, man in some language.
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