Damn the man

Vampire Weekend's first album is a decent amateur effort that hipsters the world over have been eating up like organic vegan soy chips. There are a couple of stand out songs, namely "Oxford Comma", which I have been aching to play on my radio show. Unfortunately, the first line of the chorus is "Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?", planting it firmly in the "unplayable" category. So, subversive anarchist rebel that I am, I'm posting it here for your enjoyment.

Oxford Comma - Vampire Weekend

And, in the spirit of censorship, Adam Buxton's hilariously clean version of "Fuck tha Police" by NWA.

Title of the post

As you may have noticed, music is one of the greatest loves of my life. For those of you that don’t already know, I also have a profound relationship with comedy. And there’s one other thing: I’m having a serious love affair with musical comedy. Here are four of my recent trysts.


I saw Tim Minchin for the first time a month ago in New York, where he had a six-week run at New World Stages. The man is a genius, if a bit mad. He is a talented pianist and witty as all hell, and I was hurting from laughing by the end of the show. His style is often dark and vulgar, but he performs with such eagerness that it’s difficult to be offended.

You Grew On Me - Tim Minchin
Inflatable You - Tim Minchin


After the show, we walked down to the UCBT (Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre) and saw Olde English’s variety show, Very Fresh, where they debuted a brilliantly made video, “Akon Calls T-Pain”. If you’ve ever heard a song by either of them and thought, “I can appreciate this very original music and the artist’s clever use of vocoder,” this is not the video for you.



(The three songs parodied are “Buy U a Drank” by T-Pain, “I Wanna Fuck You” by Akon, and “Sexual Eruption” by Snoop Dogg.)


Improv Everywhere is a project headed by Charlie Todd (or Agent Todd, in IE terms) that he started with fellow comedy students of the UCBT improv school. (Todd now performs and teaches there.) Their goal is to “cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places”, which they have been doing since August 2001 with over 70 missions. One of their recent missions, executed in Los Angeles, struck me as particularly great.

I’ve been known to have a slight problem with suspension of disbelief. I walked out of “Superman Returns” because I found it so implausible that Lois Lane did not die in the opening scene that I physically couldn’t sit through the rest of the film without shouting obscenities at the screen. So I definitely understand the problem many play- and movie-goers have with musicals. Strangers shouldn’t be able to effortlessly harmonize after breaking into song about something that, let’s face it, doesn’t deserve to be sung about. Like, say, spilled lemonade:




A bit closer to home, I managed to get a taste of musical comedy on campus at the latest Mixed Company a cappella concert. They invited the Johns Hopkins Mental Notes, and both featured a comedy song; Mixed Company sang “Title of the Song” by Da Vinci’s Notebook, and the Mental Notes sang “Your Love Is (Love Song with Metaphor)” by former Da Vinci’s Notebook members Paul and Storm.

Title of the Song - Da Vinci’s Notebook
Your Love Is (Love Song with Metaphor) - Paul and Storm

I wish I had a recording of the performance to share-- the soloists, Nemo Swift ’11 of Swarthmore and Tom Murphy ’09 of JHU, did a wonderful job. But the real beauty of these songs is in the lyrics. I’ll leave you with verse two of “Your Love Is”:

My love is a sailing ship
Seeking out a friendly shore
To cast out my anchor, happily never to sail no more.
And your love is the ocean that drowns me
Leaving my bones to be picked at by crabs
And bringing settlers to the New World with smallpox and influenza
And wiping out the indigenous population.
Smallpox
Your love is smallpox.

Seeing Sia

Take that smile, and multiply it by twelve. That should give you an approximate level of Sia's energy for her entire show a month ago at Webster Hall.

Watching her was like watching joy personified. She was so thrilled to be on stage and singing (and damn, did she belt):


It came as somewhat of a shock how strong and clear her voice was, nearly replicating the sound of her album. Listening to her CDs first, it is easy to overlook that while she has a produced-pop feel, her voice is natural and honest to her talent in the recording.

I don't know if I've ever met a true star so concerned with everyone else in the (very packed) room. Sia paused between songs to ask how everyone was-- but without the "How's everybody doing New Yoooooork?" that so many artists deem an acceptable form of banter. "How is everyone? You're all good? You sure? Does anybody need anything? Let me know, okay? Write me a note or something." Sure enough, one group of fans did, to profess their love and request a song which the band had unfortunately not prepared for the concert. One of the girls asked to trade scarves with Sia, a proposition which the singer accepted with glee, and slight hesitation: "I like yours a lot! Are you sure you want to give it up?"

Sia also revealed a project called The H Crusader: it's an alter-ego of sorts, the H standing for humanitarian. With the character in mind, she wrote an upbeat album as a sophomore effort and presented it to her record label.

Sia: Look what I made! It's pop!
Label: This is no good. Your last album was downbeat. You have to maintain your fanbase.
Sia: But I worked so hard!
Label: You can't confuse your fans.
Sia: What fans?
Label: Good point. Well, you still have to record another down tempo album first.
Sia: This is what I made! This is what you get!
Label: We're dropping you.

Since then, she says, she's learned to listen to people, and she put H Crusader on hold to write "Some People Have Real Problems". But now that she has fans that are loyal no matter her genre, she is working on H Crusader again, and she debuted a wonderful song called "The Co-Dependent". The best version I could find is this youtube video.

After her last song, Sia returned to thunderous applause for an encore, and swiftly apologized. "I didn't want to have an encore," she lamented, "but they told me that's how they do it here. I don't like encores because I don't believe in making people beg. So if you come see me again, you don't have to clap if you don't want to. I'm coming back anyway!"

Brilliance, in meme form

Ah, the culmination of a musical meme.

The original Daft Punk song:
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger - Daft Punk



"Daft Hands" video:



"Daft Bodies" video:



Kanye West samples Daft Punk:
Stronger - Kanye West



"Kanye Hands" video: [if it's choppy on the embedded video, click through to youtube]


(For more funny videos, check out www.baratsandbereta.com)

"I'm losing my marbles, it's marvelous"

Review of tonight's Mika concert coming soon. But first, the music video for "Buttons", the hidden track on Sia's album "Some People Have REAL Problems".

My favorite girls (in concert!)

Wow, it’s been ages. Sorry, especially to Becca, for not keeping up with this. Hopefully this is the start of a new era of writing and raving. I hardly know where to start—there might have to be a few entries in a row to make up for my horrible behavior.

I guess I should start with the first concerts I went to this semester—two of my favorite singers, Feist (September 12, Tower Theatre, Philadelphia) and Regina Spektor (October 16, Hammerstein Ballroom, New York). Both of them have unique, beautiful voices, and hearing them live is an experience not to be missed.

For the Feist show, we splurged on killer seats- front and center, no more than ten rows back. When Leslie first came out, her physical beauty was really striking. Her appearance is very tall, strong, and elongated. I expected her to be smaller, probably because of the lightness her voice has, but once she started singing everything matched up for me. Even with its lightness, her voice has great force and matches her strong stage presence. When I listen to Feist’s recorded songs, I am always struck by the twists and turns her voice seems to make. Live, she exaggerated her style, her voice seeming to jump even more from breathy high notes to clear, full belting. This woman knows how to sing, and how to outdo herself again and again.

Tower Theatre is all seated, which took away from the overall mood of the show. You could tell Leslie really wanted the crowd to be more involved, instead of awed spectators of a performance. She finally got her wish a few songs from the end of the show. A possibly intoxicated, possibly very enthusiastic woman ran down the aisle from her seat in back and began to dance like a lunatic. After thirty seconds or so, a security guard instructed her to return to her seat. Minutes later, the woman was back and thoroughly enjoying herself. The security guard followed, this time leading the dancer to her seat by her elbow. Feist started playing 1234, the last song of the set, and crazy lady was back in front, with security guard close behind. As she was led up the aisle for the last time, Leslie changed the lyrics of the song. The new version went something like, “hey security guy, please let the nice lady dance, she was just starting to have a good time, please let her go, I’ll give you some free t-shirts or something.” Crazy lady came flying down the aisle, the whole front section jumped up, and the rest of the audience flooded the aisles. The rest of the song and the entire encore was a fantastic dance-fest, as the whole concert should have been.

1234 - Feist
My Moon My Man - Feist
Mushaboom - Feist

I don’t have quite as much to say about the Regina Spektor concert, probably because I was about to pass out for most of it. Standing in a huge crowd waiting hours for just the opener (on hardly any food that day) was not a pleasant experience. If I could change anything, I would have switched the locations of these two concerts. With just Regina on the piano, it seemed like a performance more suited for seated viewing. I found her live-to-recorded crazy voice fluctuation ratio the opposite of Feist’s. While lilting and beautiful, her voice seemed simpler in person. She was also shy and nervous, stopping in the middle of a few songs because of missed lyrics or notes, apologizing profusely. My favorite bit is when she called out her opener, Only Son, and he beatboxed as she sang Hotel Song a cappella. I thankfully held out to the end, and Samson was the last song. What a gift. Seeing and hearing her play and sing that song was magical.

Hotel Song - Regina Spektor
Samson - Regina Spektor

Here’s the only full-length video I could find of the beatbox Hotel Song from the specific show I was at. The quality’s not perfect, but it’s worth a listen.