OK, I confess there's a lot I don't know about this trio - like what any of the Turkish text says - but they sound so good that I'm going to let that slide.:)
A MOFO of a festival
No, I'm not being vulgar, that's what it's called: the Museum of Old and New Art Festival of Music and Art as it's known on its birth certificate, MONA FOMA for short, and MOFO for even shorter (and more double-entendred).
I'm not going, there's the slight inconvenience of a few thousand miles and two states between me and Hobart, but it sounds interesting in an artsy sort of way.
John Cale (ex of Velvet Underground) will be there:
And so will Grandmaster Flash. Yes, that Grandmaster Flash:
Rihanna and other success stories
Rihanna's done well for herself at the Cannes music awards - taking out the best international female gong.
(Yeah, it's a 'making of', not a song, I'm just trying to use videos that aren't ridiculously, bandwidth-eatingly huge!)
Robbie Williams took out the male equivalent award. I fail at finding a small version of the vid that's not strangely sped up and chipmunkey, so you'll find a ginormous, normal sounding one here.
Lady Gaga is apparently an international "revelation", and best international group is either the Black Eyed Peas or Tokyo Hotel, because there was a cock-up with handing out the award.
Speaking of cocks...
No reason, I just felt like this blog needed a gratuitous penis song after pretending to be some sort of proper news service. :)
So, sometimes a song that's quite popular and pretty good will leave me totally cold for some comparitively minor reason. It's usually the lyrics.
Let's take exhibit A from Florence + The Machine
It's great, really - catchy, clever, nice video. But because of the implications of domestic violence, I can't personally like it.
Maybe it's the tendency to be literal, which comes with autism, and to be less able to find different shades of meaning depending on the context in which the words were said.
Maybe songs - and jokes and TV shows and ads and the myriad other memes we see every day and take for granted - have the power to make us accept badnesses we should abhor, by making them seem light and frothy and not that big a deal. Slapping up your partner? How bad can that be, when the chick in the video can have a plate cracked over her head and a broken leg and still dance in high heels?
Maybe I'm a pissy politically correct piece of work.
So, am I thinking about this too hard... or are we, in general, not thinking about it enough?
I am familiar with fewer songs in the countdown this year than ever before. Partially it's because work's kept me busy, partially I've been making my way through a lot of CDs rather than listening to the radio, and partially I've developed a strange kind of addiction to Hamish and Andy, which means when I am listening to the wireless it's usually not the J's any more.
I feel old. I'm not 30 yet, but feel like a flippin' has-been.
Sigh. Cue the gloomy, introspective song...
The J's are still well worth listening to, even for an old 20-something fogey like me, because it is a great place to hear decent Aussie music months before the commercial stations pick it up.
This is an experiment with blogging straight from YouTube. I haven't a clue whether it'll work or not, or what it'll look like if it does but since my day job seems determined to get between me and blogging, this might be the next best thing!
Update: well, obviously it worked, because you're reading it!
In other news, we now have a Facebook page. Be a dear and sign up? Ta.
Harping on
I love a good harp solo, I have ever since I was 12 years old and fell deeply, eternally and inexplicably in love with Harpo Marx.
So, because I need cheering up, I've been rummaging around the intarwebs for harp..
This little tacker's great - ignore the siren that belts past at 1:30 or thereabouts, because it's beautiful music:
Birdsong
Birdsong doesn't count towards my "every song in the world" goal... but what about music inspired by birds' positions on wires?
And don't give me any of this "shopped!" talk. You think those frock-wearing chupachups in the charts really look like they do on the magazine covers?
Time
We're just a few days away from 2010, which leads to many important questions:
What happened to 2009? Last time I looked it was March, now all of a sudden it's December 29.
(Sims are creepy as heck, but still less wooden than some 'real' singers!)
What are we supposed to call next year? "Two thousand and ten" or "twenty ten"? How am I supposed to get all cosy and intimate with 2010 if I don't even know what to call it??
(By the way, if you search for songs called What's My Name and What's Your Name - you'll find some total crap.)
How can I fulfil my New Years Resolution to be a more spontaneous, fun person and live more from my heart and less by the book?
I know, I know, lots of people don't celebrate Christmas, and it's all a load of hypercommercialised soulless crap these days anyway.
I'm down on this kind of year, like I usually am - Christmas is probably great if you're Christian and have a big, loving family and lots of cash for presents, but none of those apply to me, so I'd really rather just go to bed and wake up on the third of January when everyone's hungover, skint, bloated, and ready to regain their senses.
But despite my innate grinchdom, I do want to get into the festive spirit. SO, I thought I'd track down some real Christmas carols. Not the piped dirges shopping centres have been assaulting me with since November, but some genuine actual carols that predate all the nonsense that surrounds the season these days.
Same to you, buddy
Some berk bought something from me on Ebay about a month ago, for the princely sum of $2, and three invoices later they still haven't paid.
Fortunately, the video features a cute kitty and women in jeans and bikini tops playing guitars, which helped me forget I potentially have to attempt to negotiate with some scamming toad the week before Christmas.
Christmas songs never written
Because it's the time of the year for chestnuts roasting on an open fire and all that pallaver, a Brisbane-based radio station put the call out for the "best Christmas song never written". Basically, inviting the great unwashed (that's us) to send in their unpublished silly season anthem.
You can listen to a whole bunch of entries of varying quality here, and here you'll not only find the winner, but a link to download the whole "album" of entries, should you so desire.
It's beginning to feel a lot like...
Yeah, yeah, Christmas. That time of year in which snow falls softly over sparkling fairy lights, while happy children ride sleds and smiling, loving families harvest the magical self-refreshing money tree to buy each other endless presents, while hip young things celebrate the festive season with a busy party schedule.
Blerg. I've nothing against Christmas, per se, just all the nonsense that's grown up around it. It's not actually such a great time if you've little in the way of family or friends, it's 45 degrees, you're skint.
Similarly, I'm not usually a huge fan of lights - too often it turns into a tacky exercise in outdoing (and annoying) the neighbours.
But, add synchronised lights and music, and you get something that'll turn up on this blog.
This display synched to The Wizard in Winter has been doing the rounds for about four years now, and is still one of the best.
Others go for the more traditional Christmas music to synch their lights to:
