the BADCRAP BARFS more like

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. ok so out of "scholarly diligence" i watched the repeated omnibus about syd b last night
ii. and confirmed that barrett-era PF = post-barrett PF = post-PF barrett = ALL AS USELESS AS ONE ANOTHER
iii. except then i slept and dremt ALL NIGHT dreams soundtracked by barrett songs >:(

so this raises the deep poptimist question: is a tune that sticks in yr mind GOOD even if you HATE IT -- isn't the craft of melody a kind of nerve-glue to attach you to a ahem "work" so that yr feelings of some particular moment get externalised into it and there replayed?

anyway i am quite happy to grant that SB had an unusual facility with oddly shaped song-flow, burden and refrain* -- except i think i would also argue that the collective direction of the outfit he founded was increasingly at odds with this gift (cf also curtis and JD-NO)... they were fashioning a monumental high-volume drone juggernaut; his gift was quirkily quaint'Nquiet little broke-back ditties -- and that the split (as with joy div) was inevitable on musical grounds; the psycho-chemical context a pretext for sentimentalists and clueless romantics

ps the documentary itself was incredibly lame and lazy in almost every regard

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This deep poptimist question has been preying on me over recent weeks as I am completely unable to free Sandi Thom from my brain. It is particularly afflicting me when I am doing the washing up, for some reason.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

po' Tom!

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

It is to some degree this very belief which brought me around to what we now call poptimism in the first place, so I am a firm believer. That said there must be a sub category of "good" that is simply "craft good," though, to explain eg Crazy Frog.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Every morning I awake with a particular song in my head. Usually it is something current, or something I've heard in the last week or two eg recent ones have included Lily Allen, T99, My Humps etc.

This morning I woke up with Jon Secada's Just Another Day Without You.

It's still in my head! I have not heard this song for approximately 8 years! Does this mean it is a good song?

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Do you live in Clapham? The taxi rank at the end of my friend's road was playing this really loudly yesterday, and I thought exactly the same thing.

I often get the first record I hear when I wake up stuck in my head. There's a bit in The Shoe which I really like, in which Archie is told by his older and wiser friend that you should never leave the house without listening to a good record first. 'One day he went through his day with Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep stuck in his head. Never again.'

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Nowhere near Clapham! Definitely the most random of my recent Alarm Clock Sounds.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

What disturbs me is when I have a dream and can hear the radio in it. I once fainted in a doctors' surgery and the first thing to return was hearing - Steve Wright in the Afternoon. The first thing I thought was 'I can't be asleep, though, it must be gone two...' I've dreamt whole music videos before.

They seem to be playing Anchorage by Michelle Shocked a lot lately in the mornings.

the legacy

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

fair enough to interview other PF members, manager, gfs etc, for the story of the story (even if NOT A SHRED OF NEW INFO IS GLEANED THEREBY)

but to examine the (yuk) "inflewence": graham "ug" COXON and rybyn :"gah!" HYTCHCYCK is BY NO MEANS GOOD ENUFF ye pitiful L4YM0Rz

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

doc i watched last nigh was about DDR!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Rly? Did they play Cotton Eye Joe?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

no. but he/they did go to some DDR tournament in US of Stateside for top menk DDR action.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

wsn't Syd really the driving force/centre for the high-volume drone juggernaut (can you find anything like 'Interstellar Overdrive' in the rest of PF's catalogue?) AS WELL as someone who had the facility for (ugh) 'child-like' choons?

i wake up with little 5 second Morton Feldman riffs?

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

oops its a full-stop no ? mark there in my last sentence.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ok you may be right abt IO as a tendency -- i think i would have to do more scholarly research (than i want to) to pinpoint the exact split -- what i'm getting at is that the COLLECTIVE, as it finds its feet, is def evolving in a direction which isolates or renders null the various things syd was good at

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think it's more that "high volume drone juggernaut" isn't a great descriptor of PF from about 69 on!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

(for one thing it sounds GREBT)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha yes well i was trying to REMEMBER what PF did and sounded like post-HVDJ and pre-DSotM -- it's not like i haven't heard ALL THE EVIDENCE fairly OFTEN in my long and misspent life* -- and I just couldn't remember! Hence need for more scholarship :'(

*only yes were more popular at school

When Choons Turn BAD

[hoshuteki.livejournal.com]

I'd like to argue that waking up and/or spending every moment of yr day with a tune in the head = a BAD thing, because what is the basis of GOODness if not ENJOYMENT and constant torment ftb a song's catchiness* surely = a lack thereof. Therefore Song is BAD. QED. Or not, perhaps, but sometimes I find myself turning against things for this reason.

[* cf: 'catch' the flu, 'catch' deadly bubonic plague, 'catch' 22, et al.]

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I Do Not Do Floyd, but I quite like the Barret era. I was discussing Robyn Hitchcock (whom I heart) with a friend who compared him to Barrett: 'manufactured whimsy'. I'm a big fan of unusually-shaped songs, and will forever be fond of Bike after a Bash Street Kids cartoon showed the teacher going mad in the last frame and reciting the lyrics from it.

Songs that always get stuck in my head FOREVER:
1. Teardrops by Womack and Womack
2. One Nation Under A Groove
3. Automatic by The Pointer Sisters
4. Love is Contaaaaaaaa-jus by Taja Sevelle

It's easy (well, not easy, but you know what I mean) enough to write a catchy melody. Advertisers do it all the time. But as much as they tend to stick in my head afterwards, they don't tend to come to mean anything to me. Songs are different, I know, because generally they're not extolling the virtues of Charnock Richard Cycles but something a bit closer to the human condition, but catchiness is the work of the artisan and not the artist.

I think.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i am obsessively more interested in the craft of the artisan than the art of the artist i think (mainly bcz it is so under-examined): what is quality in a tune if NOT catchiness is a strangely ignored question

(i have always wanted some mag to run a TECHNIQUE WORKSHOP on melody, in which eg mccartney, lloyd-webber and whoever are confronted with a dozen songs and say which is good and why, which is catchy and why, what THEY would have done blah blah)

1&3 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> anything Barrett ever did

2: I have always been fascinated by as it is simultaneously very extremely ugly yet very catchy

i think Barrett is very squarely in the advert jingles zone!!

[mippy.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of fairly obscure records that are catchy as hell and didn't seem to enter the public consciousness, though - Thames Valley Leather Club, From A to B by Octopus. There are so many records I hear and think 'Why wasn't this a hit and yet x or y was?' Not necessarily because I think they're brilliant and should be No 1 for 16 weeks, but because they sound like hits. So the idea of technique is very interesting. But then it's been done before with musicologists, and I think once you take a tune and start picking it apart you can find the skeleton and the nervous system but the life's gone out of it. You Don't Have To Say You Love Me was written in ten minutes in the back of a taxi - it still seems to mean something.

I think Denim might have something to do with all this. At least one of the albums seemed to be a contrived effort to make a dumb glam pop album (probably not the one with Tampax Ad on it, though) and for me it just doesn't work. Because it's pastiche, or because it's too tongue in cheek and I sometimes lose patience with that kind of archness? I haven't worked it out.

I was actually bought the Womack and Womack album with Teardrops on once as a joke present. That record haunts my life...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"But then it's been done before with musicologists"

mippy if you can point me to ANY musicology which explores this i will be (1) excited and (2) surprised -- "why melodies work" is the great unspoken in musical analysis, in my experience

a small part of me wants macca and webba to pursue this project out of DEVILMENT -- viz their dissection renders them UNABLE TO WRITE ANY MORE SONGS

but basically i think if the life goes out of it it was weak in the first place -- if it's good, ruthlessly close atomic examination will make it BETTER

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I might be slightly wrong then - perhaps I'm thinking of those perennial lyric-analysis features in supplements. There was a Radio 2 doc a while back where they were going into production techniques (specifially autotune on the bit I heard) so I'd be surprised if it was largely uncovered. I've been out of touch with that world a bit for the past couple of years so I'd like to know.

Perhaps you're right, but...pop#s all about the je ne sais quoi, I reckon. Otherwise there would be so many records that are better than they actually are.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Ages and ages ago I read something about Motown and someone talked about how Smokey Robinson taught him how to write a hook. The details are totally fuzzy now, but i remember it because it has forever left me with the impression that there are some "rules," or perhaps "tricks" is a better word. Naturally said writing did not reveal said rules, but always imagined it working the same way I-IV-Vmaj7 demands I again. (If I'm remembering my music theory correctly.)

I think this is actually a great GREAT article idea, although I might pull a few more pro's in, such as someone from Motown, perhaps Elton John, and maybe some of those hired guns that were always being brought in to work with bands in the late 80s and early 90s (Holly Knight, Desmond Child, Diane Warren, et al).

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

if you can point me to ANY musicology which explores this i will be (1) excited and (2) surprised -- "why melodies work" is the great unspoken in musical analysis, in my experience

Mark, I read something about that in this otherwise at times pretty unbearably fawning book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0711981671/026-0054579-5973262?v=glance&n=266239) once -- not Real Scholarly Musicology though, more like The Rules that blue russian mentions. It's back at the library now, otherwise I'd post them.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Coincidentally earlier this morning I read an interview w/composer Julian Anderson and at one point he asked why colleges do not run any classes on melody.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Where is missing footnote?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

a joke about dandelion and burden