http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2007/04/11/10-23-25-sm.jpg
^ max and kshighway
― won't you be my GAPDY / come and make it rain down on NME (Curt1s Stephens), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:51 (fourteen years ago) link
Chased by a bear. x-post
― We should have called Suzie and Bobby (NickB), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:51 (fourteen years ago) link
can I just, as a public service to kshighway, suggest listening to Owen Pallett / Final Fantasy, if he has not already? depending on what precisely you like about Ys, you might really enjoy his new one. thank you for your attention.
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:52 (fourteen years ago) link
^^^ should've someone expressed this via a funny jpg
― scent of a wolfman (s1ocki), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:52 (fourteen years ago) link
(somehow)
http://www.searchviews.com/wp-content/themes/clean-copy-full-3-column-1/images/the_more_you_know2.jpg
― tylerw, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:55 (fourteen years ago) link
Is that thing under the fence supposed to be a bear? It looks like some sort of badger.
― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:55 (fourteen years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyBn8kGCsg8
― velko, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:58 (fourteen years ago) link
my main problem with Ys, by the way, is that a lot of the arrangement seemed really ornamental and distant (as opposed to integral and necessary), which I think is why so many people prefer hearing small-group live recordings -- it'd probably have been a better record if she'd recorded it that way.
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:58 (fourteen years ago) link
also "words that rhyme" is not the same as "clever wordplay"
― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, January 26, 2010 9:48 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark
and the little white dovemade with love, made with love:made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers
― schlump, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:04 (fourteen years ago) link
xpost
nabisco: Thanks for the Pallett recommendation! (I really love your P4k review of it too.) I just went to Amazon Mp3 and bought it, and I'm looking forward to listening to it later.
― kshighway (ksh), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:04 (fourteen years ago) link
Saw her once a couple of years ago at the Royal Albert Hall, Roy Harper was the support act and he did all 4 (long) songs from Stormcock. JN later on referred to it as one of her favourite albums, and suddenly Ys made a lot more sense.
― Joe Pass Filter (MaresNest), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:12 (fourteen years ago) link
i think she is the least jordan-friendly artist maybe ever
― rinse the lemonade (Jordan), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:15 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah, she said you're a douche
― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:16 (fourteen years ago) link
Have One On Me Unless You're That A-hole Jordan
― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:16 (fourteen years ago) link
i told her to stfu that your a nice guy btw
― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:17 (fourteen years ago) link
thx bro
― rinse the lemonade (Jordan), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:17 (fourteen years ago) link
Douche is the least rhymable word in the english language I think, she would not have used that word.
― We should have called Suzie and Bobby (NickB), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:19 (fourteen years ago) link
jordan's a douche, like lyndon larouche
― scent of a wolfman (s1ocki), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:20 (fourteen years ago) link
works 4 me tbh
that mr. que is such a douche/he should learn how to fermez his bouche
― that sex version of "blue thunder." (Mr. Que), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:20 (fourteen years ago) link
jordan i heard tony allen is guesting on the new one
― max, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:21 (fourteen years ago) link
Okay, you all know this is a regular horse of mine, but: that dove bit is at best a play on two already similar senses of the phrase "made with," no?
The reason this is a regular horse of mine is that I would really hate it if we reached some point where using any kind of basic poetic or rhetorical technique in your lyrics -- even a really simple and straightforward one like that -- suddenly became an occasion for "oo, aren't you clever" and "how pretentious / 'twee' is that," etc., because I'm pretty sure we don't collectively want lyricists to feel like they should speak with unadorned, monosyllabic directness to avoid seeming too uppity about it.
I realize Newsom is not a great person to ride this particular horse for, because yes, she really pushes and foregrounds the use of poetic language and very planned/crafted phrasing. But, you know, still. It's not like she's exactly symptomatic of a giant glut of that sort of thing, right?
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:22 (fourteen years ago) link
Spelunking rhymes with clunking.
― Joe Pass Filter (MaresNest), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:27 (fourteen years ago) link
quoted re: the suggestion (i think - couldn't actually tell which side plaxico was coming down on) that she was just long words and rhymes, you know - was just pulling some example of a technique. i maybe don't belong here because if i've got a horse it's selective quoting to prove or disprove quality of a lyricist; i think just about anyone's going to write something which fits one of the profiles of basic or pretentious lyricism (be it 'be my, be my baby, be my little baby' or 'i don't believe in an interventionist god' or whatever). maybe this precludes lyrical discussion altogether.
― schlump, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:30 (fourteen years ago) link
I would really hate it if we reached some point where using any kind of basic poetic or rhetorical technique in your lyrics -- even a really simple and straightforward one like that -- suddenly became an occasion for "oo, aren't you clever" and "how pretentious / 'twee' is that," etc.
nabisco I don't know how to break this to you
― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:31 (fourteen years ago) link
this is why we cant have nice things
― max, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:31 (fourteen years ago) link
that dove bit is at best a play on two already similar senses of the phrase "made with," no?
from erik davis profile in arthur:The easy rhyme of dove and love reflects the hackneyed ease of the cliché, which she then promptly takes apart. The word glove is a splice of glue and love, held together, as it were, with pliers and glue. This wordplay is not just surface but sense: it reflects the provisional and patched-together quality that exists beneath our idealizations of love, as well as what Newsom calls the “the Frankenstein phenomenon” that emerges when that love actually creates a living being.
― schlump, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:32 (fourteen years ago) link
last part of that quoted through laziness rather than to impress the romantic mysticism of her words btw
― schlump, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:34 (fourteen years ago) link
oh, my fault, schlump, I thought you meant it the other way!
yeah J0hn, I know the horse I'm riding is a little bit dead, but still -- bummer that it's so much easier to go "LOL what are you trying," as if the attempt is a bad thing in itself, than to take a stand on how it's working
xpost - haha I took issue with various things about that Davis piece at the time
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:36 (fourteen years ago) link
thanks god my detailed analysis of "emily" has been lost to the sands of the sandbox
― 鬼の手 (Edward III), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:37 (fourteen years ago) link
bummer that it's so much easier to go "LOL what are you trying," as if the attempt is a bad thing in itself, than to take a stand on how it's working
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvFvPKPqCRg
― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:38 (fourteen years ago) link
dont really like that erik davis bit :(
― max, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:41 (fourteen years ago) link
I mean I agree with you, but I'm a doof who reads poetry. the battle, if there was one, is kind of lost. when the terminology of poetic craft does manage to leak into general use at all, gotta just celebrate that people are trying to engage at some level; no gain in trying to explain "it's not wordplay just because you pronounced a word wrong to make it fit your meter" (my own all-time Quixote topic).
― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:41 (fourteen years ago) link
max did you read the rest of the piece about how there's never been music like this, I mean you'd think it was loveless or some other unprecedented masterpiece of incrediblosity
i guess my attitude to lyrics isn't really nuanced or engaged really, its just a case of phrases jumping out and resonating or seeming awesome or something that grabs my attention, so when the lyrics don't have any effect on me already, any explanation abt why its clever (unless it really reframes the lyric for me, or points out something that I hadn't twigged) is unlikely to have much effect on me
― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:42 (fourteen years ago) link
dont really like that erik davis bit :(It reads better in the original French.
― the clones of tldr funkenstein (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:42 (fourteen years ago) link
also, in Newsom's defense, I'm pretty sure my favorite bit of Ys involves a variation on the whole "horse walks into a bar, bartender says 'why the long face?'" joke
xpost - haha, J0hn, I'm not worried about terminology, more about some dystopian near future where well-educated people with good vocabularies are like "oh no a singer loved by middlebrow audiences used a big word or pun, this is critical and potentially disastrous"
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:47 (fourteen years ago) link
I don't get the criticism of the orchestration on Ys seeming ornamental or "surface" at all. I could see saying that for something consistently ~*floaty*~ like... Vespertine. But in Ys, there's a strong sense of congruency in what she's singing and the sounds of the orchestra (e.g., in Only Skin when she sings "we felt the spray of the waves..." the orchestra totally sounds like waves crashing against each other). They're always moving, changing according to some internal plot and I think this adds a lot to the songs harmonically.
It doesn't strike me as mere John Williams-style "oooh, random manipulative swell of strings here" at all and I think the songs wouldn't be half as beautiful and engaging without them.
― Salvador Dali Parton (Turangalila), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:55 (fourteen years ago) link
i don't see anyone making fun of her lyrics for using big words or puns or slant rhymes, they're making fun of her because the lyrics sound kind of silly, or you know
I don't like it because the words sound bad in my ears
i mean, do you really need more than that? some people just don't like her lyrics. does that diminish your enjoyment of her?
― that sex version of "blue thunder." (Mr. Que), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 22:56 (fourteen years ago) link
no but it diminishes my enjoyment of reading peoples posts
― max, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:01 (fourteen years ago) link
in Only Skin when she sings "we felt the spray of the waves..." the orchestra totally sounds like waves crashing against each other
the kind of thing you're describing is actually what I mean about ornamentation and distance -- sometimes it's like she's playing and the arrangements are a marionette show off to the side of her, acting things out. which was not always a bad thing for me! but occasionally I didn't like that relationship between them, I guess, even if imagining the missing marionette show was fun.
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:01 (fourteen years ago) link
after seeing the 6-piece band the record comes across a bit overblown to me, for listening I would definitely go for the live recordings of that tour before the studio LP. I think V.D.P. went a little overboard, and the arrangements seemed intrusive to me after the live experience.
Feel a bit out of depth here talking about her lyrics but I certainly like them and think her phrases are often very well paced in the compositions.
― sleeve, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:16 (fourteen years ago) link
argh paced = placed
nabisco, I get what you're saying, though maybe your analogy would work better if that relationship were consistently obvious throughout the album (which it really isn't). Another problem is it reduces the orchestral part entirely to your assumed function that it should (or even intends) to fulfill in the music.
But I don't know, I'm a sucker for moments of musical "impressionism" of that sort.
― Salvador Dali Parton (Turangalila), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:32 (fourteen years ago) link
Another problem is it reduces the orchestral part entirely to your assumed function that it should (or even intends) to fulfill in the music.
this is where jn's biggest boosters start sounding like cult members fyi. "this part doesn't sound like it really works" "oh you're just bringing your own set of assumptions to the table, it works fine as long as you assume that what you're hearing is completely awesome"
― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:43 (fourteen years ago) link
im pretty sure thats how you are supposed to argue stuff
― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:47 (fourteen years ago) link
"brokencyde is awful" "yes but they mean to sound like that"
― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:52 (fourteen years ago) link
now ur getting it!
― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:52 (fourteen years ago) link
Seriously John? I'm not even questioning his reaction to the music at all, I'm talking about why I think the analogy doesn't entirely work, not why the music is "awesome" or why he should love the album. Commenting in this thread IS also fine if you happen to like the album and don't feel the need to be *~witty~* about your distaste for it.
― Salvador Dali Parton (Turangalila), Tuesday, 26 January 2010 23:55 (fourteen years ago) link