Just a fun mash-up to round out the weekend

This post contains a Grooveshark widget

This post is just here so I can figure out how to make Grooveshark widgets work consistently. Carry on.

Music for a relaxed and groovy Friday

Latest musical discovery, via @TravelMaus:

Band bunny

Someone should come up with a band that dresses like a 60s girl group (shift dresses, heels, pearls) but plays really aggressive hardcore punk and/or metal, and is very good at it. They should be classically trained as well, so they can occasionally commit surprising acts of serious musicianship (c.f. Lady Gaga at Glastonbury)

Things They Should Invent: subsidize use of Cancon in TV/movie soundtracks

Most of the rules to promote Canadian music and other performing arts industries fall in the category of requiring people to use Canadian content, e.g. a certain percentage of songs played on the radio must be Canadian. I think a more effective approach would be to make it a good business decision to use Canadian music.

One way people often discover new music is when it's used in the soundtrack to a TV show or movie. I've read that TV and movie productions have to pay a considerable amount of money for the rights to any songs they want to use.

So to promote Canadian music, they should set up a fund to subsidize the rights to Canadian music for soundtrack purposes. The artist still gets paid whatever they'd get paid, but there's little to no cost to the production. The subsidy could go to international productions as well as Canadian productions, to give our artists broader exposure. So you want to use the Hip in your guerrilla indie film, you can have a subsidy. You want to use Caribou in a Hollywood blockbuster, you can have a subsidy.

To promote emerging artists (and, ultimately, to save money), the subsidies would be bigger the less often a particular artist has been used. For example, the first person to use a particular artist gets a 100% subsidy, the second gets a 90% subsidy, the third gets 80%, etc. until the artist has been in 10 movies/TV shows and you have to pay full price. This would also mean that other people are doing the work of finding interesting emerging artists to subsidize.

The process would be very simple. A producer would fill out a form saying "I would like to use this song by this artist", and simply get a message back saying "This song is eligible for a X% subsidy. Do you want to use it? (y/n)". If it isn't eligible for a subsidy, it will cost no more than it normally would anyway.

So Canadian artists get money and exposure, producers get less costly music rights, and the program is very easy to administer because grants are awarded first-come first-served and other people are doing the work of seeking out worthy emerging artists.

Current earworm

(Video is, as usual, irrelevant)

This is one of my favourite lyrics

I build each one of my songs out of glass
So you can see me inside them, I suppose
Or you could just leave the image of me in the background, I guess
And watch your own reflection superimposed.

Mash-ups of the day

Beyoncé vs. Motown:



Lady Gaga vs. Sesame Street:



Yoinked, as usual, from Malene Arpe

Current earworm

Things They Should Invent: Alex Is On Fire

I just found out that the band Alexisonfire pronounces its name "Alexis On Fire". I always thought it was "Alex Is On Fire".

Therefore, someone needs to start a band called "Alex Is On Fire." I think making it four different words would circumvent the trademark issue.

Figure skating music bunny

The Puppini Sisters' version of Walk Like An Egyptian would make good figure skating music. I could totally picture a music video for this song with people skating along the Rideau Canal or similar - skating in a "using it as a mode of transportation to get to a destination" way, not in a "let's skate around and have fun" sort of way. (Iść, not chodzić).

(As usual, the video is irrelevant, it's just the only way I could embed the song)

The smile's returning to the faces

Today, for the first time this year, there was one last hopeful pink ray of sunlight still peeking over the western horizon when I left work.

A gap in my musical education

For reasons I cannot fathom, my parents' Beatles collection never included Abbey Road. So the first time I knowingly heard I Want You (She's So Heavy) was a couple of years ago in Across the Universe:



It only just occurred to me that the Beatles version probably isn't intended to sound militaristic.

We Will Rock and Roll You

Queen vs. Joan Jett, with 50 Cent popping in:

My trip home today

I enjoyed this sequence of songs my ipod gave me on the way home today.

Currently on repeat

Things They Should Invent: divide tone-deaf into two concepts

In general usage, tone-deaf is taken to mean you can't sing because you miss the notes. However, its literal meaning is that you can't hear the difference between notes. If you google for online tests of tone-deafness, they're really ear training tests - they test whether you can differentiate aurally between different notes.

However, there are people like me who can hear music and differentiate aurally between notes just fine, but can't hit the right pitch when singing. I know I'm not hitting all the notes, I can hear that I'm not hitting all the notes, I just...can't make it happen. Similar to how if I try to sink a three-point shot on the basketball court, I'm probably going to miss. I can see the hoop, I can see that the ball isn't going through the hoop, but I can't necessarily make it go through the hoop.

For lack of better ideas I suggest tone-mute for this concept, but I'm wide open to better ideas.

Blast from the past

This song didn't feel nearly so bubblegum when it first came out.

Mashup bunny: Shut Up And Drive My Car

vs.



You'd need to tweak the tempos a bit, but that's doable for people who know how to do that sort of thing.

I'm probably the last person in the world to realize this

But I just realized that this song would totally work as a round, and very flexibly (2, 3, 4, or 6 parts if I'm working it out right).