Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Meet the most fascinating and problematic pop star of the moment, Antoine Dodson. If you’re a follower of internet memes, you know the story by now. If not: Antoine, his sister Kelly and her daughter were asleep in their apartment in the Lincoln Park housing project in Huntsville, Alabama. An intruder broke in and sexually [...]
Filed in Emotion, Internet, Music, Politics, Sampling, Social Media
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Also tagged america, antoine dodson, autotune, class, gregory brothers, memes, Politics, pop, race, remixes, youtube
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There’s a commercial on TV right now featuring a bunch of CGI hamsters that reacquainted me with this Black Sheep classic. I knew the song better as the one that goes, “You can get with this or you can get with that.” Thank god for Google, otherwise I wouldn’t know anything about anything. This is [...]
Filed in Music, Sampling
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Also tagged advertising, black sheep, digging the crates, funk, hip-hop, iron butterfly, jazz, mccoy tyner, nineties, rnb, rock, Sampling, soul
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Friday, December 11, 2009
Christmas makes me depressed. I would like it not to make me depressed. I want to have kids, and I want them to at least have the option to enjoy this time of year. In order for that to happen, I need to learn to enjoy it. I remember enjoying it when I was little. [...]
Filed in Autobio, Music
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Also tagged america, Autobio, christmas, dickens, drumming, duke ellington, eighties, elvis presley, Emotion, family, ibm, nostalgia, santa
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Saturday, December 5, 2009
Is lip-synching to a recording a form of music? It’s definitely dance, of a specific kind. But is it music, or just mime? I feel instinctively that Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” routine on the Motown 25th Anniversary is a musical performance, one of the all-time great ones. So I guess I consider lip-synching to be [...]
Filed in Dance, Key Musicians, Music
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Also tagged ashlee simpson, attention, billie jean, dance, lil wayne, lipsynching, michael jackson, moonwalk, purists, singing
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Spoiler alert: don’t read until you’ve watched to the end of season three. Mad Men is well-made television, but so is plenty of other television. Why is this particular show so compelling to me and so many of my buddies? I think it’s that watching Mad Men is like watching a documentary about our parents [...]
Kramer is the name my mom’s father’s parents gave at Ellis Island because they thought it they might have an easier time with it assimilation-wise than Garfinkel. In Eastern Europe, if you want a WASP-y sounding name, you usually choose something German rather than British. My mom’s wing of her extended family calls itself the [...]
Filed in Autobio, Emotion
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Also tagged america, anxiety, Autobio, buddhism, confidence, family, fashion, george costanza, judaica, kramer, monkeysphere, nyc, obama, seinfeld, synths
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See a followup post on the Gregorys’ breakout hit, the “Bed Intruder Song.” The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.
Filed in Composition, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged anxiety, audio editing, autotune, comedy, computers, Evolution, hip-hop, joe biden, katie couric, martin luther king jr, mashups, Music, Music Theory, news, Politics, pop, rnb, steven mithen, youtube
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When I was in third grade, my mom and stepfather went on academic sabbatical to London for six months, taking my sister and me with them. I guess I’m grateful for the chance to experience another culture and everything, but it was a rough six months. I missed my dad, school, New York, the Muppet [...]
Filed in Hardware, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged analog, bbc, delia derbyshire, doctor who, eighties, electronica, keybs, multitracking, scifi, sixties, synths, tape editing, uk, vocoder
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