The Four Of Us Are Dying
This is what happens when you download the new, free Nine Inch Nails album "The Slip" (from nin.com) and spot the lovely Creative Commons licence that actively encourages derivative works and sharing. You go and grab some public domain film footage from The Internet Archive – in this case the awesome "Perversion For Profit" propaganda – and you throw the lot together to produce a video for the track "The Four Of Us Are Dying". Well, you do if you’re me. Please note: whilst not explicit this video does contain footage that could be described as titillating to those of you of Amish...
Eurovision 2008
It’s Eurovision Song Contest Party Time. Brown and orange paint for the living room? Check! Beige polyester trouser suit that hugs alluringly around the most manly of areas? Check! Vesta Chicken Supreme meals, fondue, vol au vents, cheese and pineapple on sticks? Check! Advocaat, Babycham, Cinzano, Creme de Menthe? Check! For me, every Eurovision is the 1970s in one day. It’s time for the Eurovision Song Contest to roll around once more and this year I’ve gone all technical and decided to live tweet the event on my Twitter at the annual neOnbubble Eurovision House Party. If you want to follow me then subscribe away there or, better, pop along to Summize during the event and follow everyone who’s everyone tweeting the spectacle. Of course, if Twitter goes down like it has during both semi finals then the fallback position will be Friendfeed’s Search or Friendfeed Eurovision Room. What Is The Eurovision Song Contest? For one evening a year wars in Europe stop. Burglars slink back to their homes. The homeless set their braziers on Cosy and gather around obsolete television sets set up on bricks. The camped crusader Captain Camp emerges from the shadows of night and casts a magical spell over the continent. Sure, some people reject the lure of the Eurovision Superhero and complain bitterly that they don’t see the point or that the whole event is ludicrously crass but the point they miss is that it really does have no point on purpose and is deliberately ludicrously crass and that’s its charm. Regardless, once Sunday blossoms and Europe returns to normalcy those who complained are typically first against the wall. Eurovision takes the form of songs, performed one after another by each European nation to have qualified. Attempts to sing all the songs together were deemed a violation of basic human rights in the sixties. There are limits on the number of performers and tunes praising Hitler’s extermination of the Jews are generally frowned upon but, otherwise, the sky’s the limit. Ballads, gay eurobeat, transgender heavy metal, puppets on fire, and Celine Dion: anything goes! At the end of the songs all European viewers can vote by phone for any country other than their own, the scores are tallied, and the winner is showered with praise and glory and balloons and coupons with their home country then winning the expensive honour of hosting the competition the next time around. Eurovision Problem #1: Bloc Voting "Bloc voting makes a mockery of the competition!" Bollocks. Bloc voting is the myth that people from Latvia vote for the Lithuanian and Estonian songs and vice versa not because they’re...
Music To Drink Alcohol By
Scottish researchers (or "alcoholics") have recently discovered (or "hallucinated") some quite interesting results with respect to the way that music can affect the taste of wine. Via the BBC: The researchers said cabernet sauvignon was most affected by "powerful and heavy" music, and chardonnay by "zingy and refreshing" sounds. This contrasts a little with my own understanding of wine which has concluded after many years that chardonnay is best improved upon by pouring it down the sink and drinking something else entirely. Some of the specifics of the research (or "party") include assertions that Cabernet Sauvignon is improved by Jimi Hendrix, Syrah is best with Enya, and Merlot can be enhanced with an aural assault from Lionel Ritchie. As a person with ears who enjoys the way that music drowns out the voices telling him to burn and kill and poke repeatedly and as a world-renowned, respected expert (in my mind) in all things alcoholic beverage-related this particular "research" grabbed my hmmm-that’s-appealing-to-me node and strangled it into submission. To put it bluntly: I conducted my own minor examination (or "binge") into the subject and came up with the following list of perfect musical accompaniments to a handful of this planet’s drinks of an adult nature. Campari When I’m running around flapping like a mad thing that’s just been infected with mad mad thing’s disease and scraping at my tongue with hands, feet, gardening equipment, and the talons of freshly-captured birds of prey to try to rid my tastebuds of the face-scrunchingly bitter drink then nothing aids in the Campari Dance quite like "Me Ole Bamboo" from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There is no more powerful force for getting one’s hands, legs, arms, knees, grannies, necks, and elbows moving in and out of rhythm than a good old-fashioned cockney tune. In the absence of Dick Van Dyke’s genuine Londonesque stylings you can try a bit of Chas & Dave. Baileys Baileys – indeed, all cream-based liqueurs – are supposed to be sipped over ice slowly so that they can caress their ways down your gullet and gently coat your innards in a creamy coating protecting it from all manner of ills: ulcers, harsh spirits made in a bathtub somewhere, accidental swallowing during a bukkake marathon, etc. In order to effectively line the floor, walls, and ceiling of your gastric organs a hip-based swirling motion is ideal and so we need to turn to the belly-dancing-encouraging sounds of Lebanon’s Nelly Makdessi and her delightful ditty "Ouf Ouf". Rememer: hip-shaking, not thrusting you filthy pervert. Woods Navy Rum Woods is strong, sweet, strong, sticky, strong, and 300% guaranteed to give you the...
Top 5 Terrifying Music Videos
There follows a short countdown of what currently constitutes my top five terrifying music videos. These are music videos that – whether deliberately or not – I find genuinely scary or creepy or disturbing. 5. Unkle – Eye For An Eye I know what you’re thinking: yeah, that was nasty! All those black things bursting out and killing everything in sight! Gruesome! Scary! Eeevil with three es! Yeah, that’s not what disturbs me. Breast feeding in public is what disturbs me. It’s not big and it’s not clever and yes, it’s natural, but so is defecating and that’s frowned upon so stop it. Big-mouthed, naked things climbing up and suckling on nipples is not on. If it was then I’d do it more often. 4. Mason vs Princess Superstar – Perfect So just what’s so perfectly terrifying about this video for the Princess Superstar remix? I can sum that up in one word: eyelashes. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not scared of eyelashes as a rule. If I was then I’d spend half the day flapping at my face and poking myself in the eyeballs in terror. And I also understand and appreciate that eyelashes serve an important purpose in keeping the mascara industry in employment. However, I’m quite picky in where my eyelashes go. I’m your average, run-of-the-mill "let’s have them on the eyelids, eh?" sort of person. When they start appearing on the cheekbones … shudder. Now that’s just wrong. Freak show wrong. I watch that video and feel I’m seconds away from being kidnapped, having my limbs chopped off, and forced to live out my life with the girls in the video chanting "one of us". No sir, I don’t like it; I don’t like it at all. 3. Queen – I Want To Break Free A moustachioed man in a mini-skirt? That’s not scary. I live in a naval port. Brian May with his hair in rollers and dressed in a silky nightdress? That’s not scary. That’s just how Brian lives. If I had curly hair I might even do the same. People in cow-patterned leotards stretching with no regard for viewers’ sensibilities? A little odd, but not even mildly distressing when compared to the truly frightening aspect of this Queen video. Roger Taylor looking good in that schoolgirl outfit? Aiiieee! Night! Terrors! 2. The Reynolds Girls – I’d Rather Jack It’s a cheesy song with a cheap video and clearly not enough rehearsal time for the dance choreography but it contains some seriously scary elements. Look at the clothing! And that hair! And then factor in that I was studying at Liverpool University not...
Top 5 One-Take Music Videos
A list of – in my opinion because it’s the only one that counts around here – the best music videos filmed in one take. Think of it as the Brian de Palma Music Video awards but try to hide the memory of Mission To Mars that surfaces if you do so. 5. DJ Format (ft. Abdominal) – Vicious Battle Raps This Ruben Fleischer-directed video shows Abdominal walking through downtown Los Angeles rapping to camera while the chaotic world behind him pretends it can’t see the strange man talking to himself. Technically there are some good things happening too; the different speed rates of the video sequences and the scale of the video shoot are pretty impressive. Of particular note in this video is the impressive pimp-walking by Abdominal; a lesson for any would-be pimp-walkers out there. Also, schoolgirls and a nurse in stockings! Oh yeah. 4. Lucas – Lucas With The Lid Off Director Michel Gondry has a unique approach to video-making; he usually utilises seven dimensions of space and three of time to visualise them. Sometimes the result is beautiful and uplifting. Those ones are ditched; nobody must see a beautiful and uplifting Gondry video! The keepers are the videos that hurt your mind in a good and a bad way at the same time. Lucas With The Lid Off is one of those videos that make you think both "Ooh, impressive set-ups and choreography" and "Only a madman could come up with this! A madman I tells ya!" 3. Die Krupps – To The Hilt Compared to the other videos listed, this particular one – by one of the earlier industrial bands I ever listened to, Die Krupps – is by far the simplest in terms of production. Its high rating, though, comes mainly from two elements: firstly, the video takes place in a toilet. A toilet! Would you ever see, say, George Michael perform in a toilet? Okay, bad example. Secondly, one of the cubicles includes a couple of old men in suits dancing with one another. You’d pay top dollar to see a show like that anywhere in the world and here it is in this video for free! Wowsers! 2. Smashing Pumpkins – Ava Adore One of my favourite videos of all time thanks to the feel and production of it features Billy Corgan in the midst of his Nosferatu period along with the other members of Smashing Pumpkins moving from set to set along both sides of a tracking camera. Great use of speed-changes, filled with just the right amount of pretentious shit to remind you it’s the Smashing Pumpkins, and it’s...
The Solaris Bug Situation
Guest article by Brent Murphy. Follow some of the links in the article to grab some free MP3s Back in high school I was with a bunch of guys and we decided to see if the rumors were true: if indeed you watch The Wizard Of Oz with the sound off and listen to Dark Side Of The Moon, will there be a symmetry? We figured weed would help in our scientific explorations. It did. And yes, there is. Well, fast forward to 2006 and a friend of a friend gives me a CD-R of one of my favorite band’s not-yet-released new albums (actually it’s one of the solo projects of my favorite band: The Speakers; the solo project is Brian Miller’s "The Lightning Bug Situation.") Anyway, I liked it. It’s definitely better than the first Lightning Bug Situation, which I thought was kind of disappointing especially considering it followed on the heels of one of my favorite all time albums, The Speakers’s "Yeats Is Greats." So. The new album is good. I really like it actually. But there’s something weird about it. A couple of weeks previously I had rented this one movie I thought was really excellent; so excellent that I had actually watched it twice: the 1972 original Russian version of Solaris. It’s a great movie, pretty tripped-out, very moving, and a very beautiful and visual movie. Anyway, while I was listening to the new Lightning Bug Situation it kept reminding me of Solaris. The lyric "outside with your blue jacket on/green trees and the sea" appears during the very beginning of the album, and in the movie, the first scene has the main character outside, wearing a blue jacket! Later, the album references driving in black and white just as the movie changes to scenes of one of the people driving … all now shot in black and white! And a lot of the scenes seem to change with the songs too. I could go on and on but I’ll spare you. Suffice to say there are a lot of symmetries. Could it be we have another Dark Side Of The Rainbow? Albeit one with a very obscure movie and an even more obscure band? So I decided to be like my old high school self, rent Solaris again, play it, turn down the sound, play The Lightning Bug Situation, and smoke tons of weed. Well, it took a couple of tries (actually about a half an hour; no, not the weed, the movie and CD symmetry). The whole process was pretty fun actually, like breaking a secret code. And, well, ladies and gentlemen, I...
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