'Bawitdaba' would have been a terrible choice

Post by David A. Arnott.

Bruce Springsteen

Post by David A. Arnott.

"Sweet Child O' Mine", blues style

Miche Braden sings "Sweet Child O' Mine" in the style of traditional New Orleans blues. It... just... works.

Selections of grammar in Lady Gaga's singles that bother me and which I've corrected below

"Love Game" -- Do you want love or do you want fame?

"Paparazzi" -- But this photo of us: it doesn't have a price.

"Bad Romance" -- I want your love and I want your revenge. You and I could write a bad romance.

"You and I" -- Something about my cool Nebraskan guy... yeah, something about you and me.

'Wrecking Ball' -- The Gregory Brothers

This only reinforces my point that there's very little about Miley Cyrus's actual music that's subversive. Similar to Avril Lavigne over a decade ago, Cyrus's songs are straight-ahead pop songs that don't say much particularly interesting or variant from any other run-of-the-mill pop songs (your mileage may vary on how catchy they are), but her image is certainly different from other young, white, female pop stars. Separating her imagery from the song makes it clear.

I mean, listen to "Complicated" again without watching the actual video. It may as well have been recorded by Shania Twain, or any other mostly-fangless pop singer.

Sports, music, intersecting... This is the modern world

[Robinson] Cano's agent, Jay Z, is already in the Seattle area, flying in from Los Angeles, a source said. He has a concert Friday night in Anaheim, Calif.

-- ESPN.com, reporting on a baseball free agent's search for a new contract.

The music industry is weird -- OneRepublic: "Counting Stars"

This summer, I caught a really weird (striking!) music video on VH1 that I watched through to the end to see the band's name, and was amused to discover I had no idea what any members of OneRepublic looked like, even though they're a massively popular and successful pop music enterprise.

I haven't thought about that song and video since, until today, when it popped up on a local Charlotte radio show's top five songs of the week. So, yeah, the music industry is weird, as is the OneRepublic video above.

Jolly Christmas Medley with Danielle Brooks and Uzo Aduba

You don't have to be a fan of "Orange is the New Black" to enjoy this Christmas medley video, but it doesn't hurt. Because Taystee and Crazy Eyes (Danielle Brooks and Uzo Aduba) kick ass.

Katie Melua, "Nine Million Bicycles": Meditation on equivocation

Katie Melua is largely unknown in the United States, but a friend at work pointed me to her song "Nine Million Bicycles", which I can't stop replaying. She's got a very Norah Jones-ish vibe to her voice, but I'm more drawn to this song because the lyrics explore a very un-pop-song idea. Sure, a couple of the punch lines are trite ("You know that I will love you 'til I die"? Really?), but introducing a meditation on facts versus estimates, compared to truths versus lies, is the kind of discussion I welcome in pop music.

One has only so much appetite for songs that are satisfied with celebrating superficial love and partying.

Songwriting and producing, as described by the New Yorker in the early 2010s

The New Yorker magazine has done as much as any other mainstream publication to explain in simple terms how the modern pop music industry works. That's kind of amazing, considering that the New Yorker has a reputation for hard-hitting, serious, rigorous journalism, in large part because of the publication's famously detail-oriented fact-checking process.

But like NPR, the magazine wields its considerable powers in the service of describing both events with important worldwide ramifications and -- for lack of a better term -- stories of the How We Live Today variety.

Three articles, in particular, jump out to me, profiling Ester Dean, Afrojack, and Dr. Luke. Aside from telling us about those music makers' personalities, each article describes the music production process as each of them works. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they're remarkably similar.

In Dean's case, here's how John Seabrook described producers Stargate tweaking a song while she was in the booth, conjuring hooks for other artists to sing:

Afrojack figured prominently in Josh Eels's evaluation of the wider Electronic Dance Music movement. Here's how he worked on a song while traveling in a private jet:

In the profile of producer Dr. Luke, Seabrook took great pains to explain that Dr. Luke has instituted a clear division of labor: Luke has nothing to do with lyrics, because that part's "not fun" for him. Instead, people like Bonnie McKee come up with the words to go with his instrumentation.

(Image cc-licensed: "Bonnie McKee 11/09/2013 #4" by Justin Higuchi)

"Country Basket" -- Bill Gates, Donald Trump let me in now

The best thing you'll hear today (new to me, for some reason -- all my music-loving friends have let me down) is Dean Gray's "Country Basket", a mashup of "Basket Case" and "Country Grammar".

Band name etiquette -- make sure to read the comments

Link: Band name etiquette -- make sure to read the comments

Over at the good ship NPR, there’s a wonderful little answer to a question from someone about band-naming conventions. The answer is part copyright advice, part Miss Manners, and part commentary on modern aesthetic.

Really, though, the action gets truly going in the comments, where the crowd has posted a few interesting band names: Full Metal Jackalope is awesome. In the same vein, Mobius Strip Club tickles my fancy. And Combustible Huxtable made me snort.

[youtube=]

The best thing you’ll see today: “Blurring Pains”, the Growing Pains theme song mashed up with Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”.

I think about telling my dad, who worked for 46 years on the railroad, ‘Somebody offered me $100,000 to put my song in a movie, and I said no because it’s a stupid movie.’ He would want to kill me. The idea of selling out is only understandable to people of privilege.

Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, explaining that to make a living at music, one must sell said music.

Songs from the past 35 years with food as the central symbol or conceit, ranked

3,817) “Cheeseburger in Paradise” — Jimmy Buffett

…

721) “Milkshake” — Kelis

…

6) ”Peaches” — Presidents of the USA

5) “Cherry Pie” — Warrant

4) “Chicken Fried” — Zac Brown Band

3) “Tootsee Roll” — 69 Boyz

2) “Ice Cream” — Sarah McLachlan

1) “Candy Girl” — New Edition

(Image cc-licensed: "Ice Cream" by sea turtle)

Audio

29sunset:

Download MP3

This weekend, I finally found some time to throw together another song. If you like it, go to the 29 Sunset page where you can hear a bunch of other songs I’ve recorded over the years.

Pitch Perfect: You know what you're getting, but it's better than that

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F03N-ApQdmw]

Over the weekend, my wife and I couldn’t agree on whether we wanted to see Flight or Argo, so instead we settled on Pitch Perfect. Let me throw this out there: it’s about eight thousand times better than I expected.

[youtube=[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf78alvpxRM?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]]

Carly Rae Jepsen — “This Kiss”

What’s up with present-day pop stars using song titles of hits from the 90s? This is NOT a cover of the Faith Hill song, and Justin Bieber’s song, “As Long As You Love Me” is NOT a Backstreet Boys cover. What’s next? Will One Direction release a song titled “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart”?

Either way, this one is decidedly un-terrible.

[youtube=[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX-xToQI34I?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]]

Jodi DiPiazza, an 11-year-old girl diagnosed with autism when she was two years old, joined Katy Perry on stage for a duet at Comedy Central’s Night of Too Many Stars. Chills commence around the 3:10 mark.

Via Jezebel

[youtube=[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPFGWVKXxm0?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]]

The Rolling Stones — “Doom and Gloom”

Now, if I hadn’t told you who recorded this, and I’d just told you some band from Chattanooga with a devotion to “polished political garage-core” had just released this single, you’d probably want to hear more from these guys. All that’s to say it sounds like the Stones still got it, in the studio at least.