Oh my GOD
I am vehemently opposed to the use of artificial intelligence, at least in the casual capacity it’s been used as of late. What’s that quote? “There’s no AI, just other people’s data.” I refuse to willingly give my data over to AI to make it “smarter” and I refuse to willingly take advantage of other people’s data by producing things via AI said people probably didn’t give consent to the use of their data in that form. ChatGPT, art-generating stuff…nope.
So I’m a bit conflicted on this, because while I didn’t produce it myself, it is AI and I’m willingly consuming it while knowing it’s AI. But I didn’t seek it out on purpose. But I am listening to it.
And I like it. It is the catchiest goddamn thing I’ve heard in a while and I cannot get it out of my head.
“Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on glue”
I mean. Come on.
Waiter! There’s a Gas Giant in my Orchestra!
So one of my favorite composers is Gustav Holst, and like many people (I’m assuming), I was introduced to his music via The Planets. We played the Jupiter movement in high school because the grade above us had chosen it as their senior song* to be played at their graduation and it was one of my favorite songs I’d ever played.
Anyway, I have three different recordings of Jupiter because they’re all a little different and I like each of them for various reasons. However, I just found a new version that I really dig. Check it:
I’ve never heard a performance of this song where you can hear the French horns so clearly in that tiny little section from 1:58 to 2:03. That’s such a miniscule part of this song but it’s so dynamic and cool and different that I absolutely love it.
Anyway.
*And what was our senior song, you ask? The goddamn Pirates of the Caribbean theme.** Some of us petitioned for Holst’s Mars movement, but we were outvoted. Freaking Johnny Depp.
**It’s a good theme, but it ain’t no Jupiter.
Ugh, the BASS
I love the original* so much, and anything that adds more bass to it gets a pass from me.
I say it with every song I listen to, I know, but damn this sounds good on the Sennheisers.
*Technically the original song was called Valerie by Steve Winwood, but Eric Prydz sampled it and the result was so awesome that Winwood actually changed the chorus of his song to match Prydz’ version better.
IT’S A SONG, I’M SORRY
A good portion of my blogs are about music, huh? I mean, I guess everyone loves music (unless you’re a COMMIE), so maybe that’s fine.
It’s better than like half of the other crap I blather on about here.
ANYWAY.
I don’t remember how I found this song, but this was one of the very first songs I ever remember burning to a CD. So I must have discovered it sometime around…I dunno…10th grade? 9th grade? I actually don’t know when I had my first CD player.*
Regardless of where it came from and when I discovered it, it activates some weird part of my brain. It’s not triggering a memory or a feeling or a place. It’s…it’s like it’s reminding me of a different life if that makes any sense. Especially the way that “Vienna” is sung.
ANYWAY.
I figured I’d put it on here to see if this triggers any other sort of weird brain stuff in others or if that’s just me.
*I actually wasn’t really into music until high school, either, which is INSANE.
Flashback (even further this time):
You know what I miss sometimes? Going down to visit my grandparents in California. Their house was huge and interesting and had all sorts of funky things in it and I always enjoyed exploring it (and the yard) every time I went down there with my dad.
My dad would sleep in his old room and I’d stay in my Aunt Vicky’s room, which was right next to his. She had the coolest little desk and windows and dresser in there and my grandma put a tiny little stereo/CD player in there for me so I could play some CDs when I slept.
Anyway, one of the CDs she had in there was this one:
I didn’t really know who Andrea Bocelli was when I was a kid, but I LOVED this CD. The first song on there always reminds me of that house.
Pretty much every song I have links to a certain memory, but this is one of the stronger ones.
Hot Take
My version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is better than Fall Out Boy’s version. Why?
Reason One: Mine is in chronological order. Theirs is very clearly not. You could really hear the care that Billy Joel put into his in terms of getting everything to not only rhyme but to be in chronological order. Fall Out Boy’s version sounds like it’s just cashing in on the nostalgia hit. “Remember this? And this? And this other thing? Who cares that they’re not in order!”
Reason Two: Mine rhymes better, let’s be honest. Like what the hell is this verse, Fall Out Boy?
Elon Musk, Kaepernick, Texas failed electric grid
Jeff Bezos, climate change, white rhino goes extinct
Great pacific garbage patch, Tom DeLonge and aliens
Mars rover, Avatar, Self-driving electric cars
S-S-R-Is, Prince and the Queen die
World Trade Second plane
What else do I have to say?
The “Tom DeLonge and aliens” line does not fit in there at all (and how is that a top event in 1989-2023?). What the hell is that supposed to rhyme with? And “World Trade, second plane” is such a weird-ass way to shove that MAJOR event in there.
Here’s one of my verses:
O.J. Simpson, Amazon, Oklahoma City Bomb
Hale-Bopp, boy band pop, Dolly the sheep
Harry Potter, Princess Di, Toy Story, Columbine
Napster, Euro, Ted Kaczynski
ExxonMobil, Sarajevo, Mark McGwire, Galileo
Nunavut, Albright, Titanic, baseball strike,
AOL, Deep Blue, Mad Cow, Google
Bill Gates, Y2K, Clinton and Lewinsky
That’s better rhyming. You know it is. I was very careful in matching Joel’s rhyme scheme.
Reason Three: I’m sure I missed a lot of big events in my time frame, but DID THEY FORGET TO PUT IN COVID???
Like, I wrote mine back in 2018 because I wanted it to cover the first 30 years of my life (1988-2018) so I have an excuse, but REALLY? How do you forget a global pandemic?
Just…ugh. It could have been so much better, yo.
Edit: I’m not the only one who thinks this was sloppily done.
Regrets
Every day I think about this video and hate myself for not making it to a Coldplay concert that was literally in the neighboring province.
Next time, Chris Martin, I promise.
Music: 2023 Edition
One of my favorite end-of-the-year things to do is to give y’all my top musical picks (as I’m sure you all know). So let’s get to it! These are my five favorite songs from 2023.*
*Note that these songs are ones that I’ve discovered in 2023, not necessarily ones that were released in 2023.
Call On Me performed by SYNTHONY
Eric Prydz’ Call On Me has been one of my favorite songs since…whenever I first heard it (way back before 2009). Add an orchestra to it and you get this year’s top song. This has such an awesome energy and I LOVE how much you can hear the strings.
Freaking love strings.
http://www.nevergetoveryou by Prozzak
This is such a catchy song. I found this over the summer and my poor mom had to listen to it on repeat when I was down in Moscow with her, haha. I love how it uses the ICQ “uh-oh!” sound (which also happens to be my text notification sound).
Pompeii MMXXIII by Bastille and Hans Zimmer
Adding Hans Zimmer’s influence to anything automatically makes it better, but there aren’t a lot of songs that work as smoothly with that influence as Pompeii. I love what the orchestra adds to this already beautiful song.
Aquatic Ambience by Scizzie
So I mentioned this back when it was really popular on TikTok as background music for slide videos featuring pictures of 90s/early 2000s nostalgia. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently it actually samples a bit of music from the song of the same name from the game Donkey Kong Country, which came out in 1994. So maybe that’s why it’s hitting the nostalgia button so hard? Though I’m sure I’d never heard that song before. Regardless, 0:15 evokes a feeling that is difficult to describe.
Variation 15 by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer
Even without the scene from “Dunkirk” that this music accompanies, this holds so much emotion, pain, and release. “Home” is definitely a close second on this soundtrack, but this one beats it out because of that build starting around 2:40.
THE MASHUP IS HERE!
Thank you for the Christmas present, DJ Earworm.
Oooo I like this one. I’m surprised that there’s not more Taylor Swift, but he must cut the year off at some point so that he can, you know, actually make the mashup. So maybe more of her songs will be in the top 25 next year.
EARWORM!
Y U no release 2023 mashup yet?
Pulse
This song still slaps EVEN WHEN IT’S SLOWED DOWN
I love how chill this is.
Nostalgia!
We’re getting into temperatures where I need to bring my radio on my runs because my on-ear headphones keep my ears from freezing.
The radio station I listen to, C97.7, does a “90s at Nine” every day at 9 AM. This involves the playing of three songs that have something in common. Often it’s a word in the song title or a genre or an artist.
This morning, the theme was “Disney songs” and the first song up was “A Whole New World” from Aladdin.
I cannot express the MASSIVE nostalgia hit I took when that song started. I hadn’t heard it in so long and it instantly took me back to when my mom and I would watch Aladdin back when I was in elementary school and we lived in our old house in Troy.
It just…it felt good.
Hi, excuse me, WHAT THE HELL IS THIS
One of my absolute favorite songs of all time PLUS AN ORCHESTRA????
Those low strings, nnnf I love them.
Edit: screw it, have playlist, this is amazing. Electronic music + symphony = basically everything I could ever ask for.
Edit again: I can’t stop listening to this, send help.
This Song Angers Me
There aren’t too many songs that I’ve come across that actively make me angry when I hear them. But this song makes me want to yeet my portable radio into the Bow.
Part of the reason I hate it is because it’s overplayed. But the main reason I hate it is because of that weird-ass inflection/accent that Sophie Simmons puts on some of the words.
(And no, I don’t care that she’s Gene Simmons’ daughter, FIGHT ME.)
“I remember we were too broke to have a cuuaaar”
“Hitchhiking down the highway to get to the supermoaurket stouuuar”
“Buying beer with uuuoi-dees that don’t even look like ouuuys”
And that super airy “mine” just enrages me for some reason.
Yes, I’m being petty. No, I don’t care.
Wormed
I don’t know why DJ Earworm has just been dropping random mashups without any sort of announcement, but I’m here for it.
Nostalgia, anyone?
Also, there were a good number of songs in here that I didn’t know were 90s songs, haha.
Hans Zimmer, You Magnificent Bastard
What the hell is THIS
Ugh, this makes the song so much better. Dan Smith has a great voice and everything is better with an orchestral backing. Fight me.
Prozzak Reprise
So remember a few days ago when I posted all those Prozzak songs and wondered how I’d never heard of the band before?
Well, I think I had heard of them, I just wasn’t consciously aware of it.
Why, you ask?
(Shut up, pretend you asked.)
Well, the band consists of two animated little dudes named Simon and Milo. Simon, I suppose, is a decently common name, but I wouldn’t say Milo is very common.
As I was walking this afternoon, for whatever reason I remembered a story I was writing several years back (2014?) about two researchers working at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Their names? Simon and Milo.
You can’t tell me I came up with that duo of names without prior influence. It’s an odd combination of names.
So yeah, I take that as evidence that somehow, somewhere, sometime I had been exposed to Prozzak and the names of the two band members was shoved somewhere deep in the folds of my memory.
The brain is odd, no?
I NEED PROZZAK
So I’m 100% addicted to this band now, haha. All of their songs are ridiculously catchy. Plus, most of them have a cute little animated music video with Simon and Milo. Here are some examples:
How have I never heard of this band before I found http://www.nevergetoveryou the other day?
Pumpkin Splice Latte
This is the catchiest song I’ve heard in a while.
Love the animation, too. Prozzak is a Canadian band that started in 1998. Has anyone else heard of them? I feel like I recognize that name, but I definitely don’t recognize this song.
MMMBOP
Um, what?
Hanson released an Mmmbop 2.0?
You can really hear their harmonizing in the chorus in this one, much more than in the original.
I like it.
Earl
This is a great song.
That “Is that all right? GOOD! Let’s go for a drive, Earrrl!” is sung so satisfyingly.
I also like how Zombie Earl is dancing with everyone at the end, haha.
Nostalgia Music
So Nate and I were discussing music that was super nostalgic to us the other day. Surprisingly, I didn’t really get too much into music until the end of high school (probably because CDs were way too expensive for me to ever buy and I didn’t have the incredibly enabling device that is the iPod just yet). But a lot of the albums I did buy are ones that hold a high level of nostalgia. Any time I hear a song on any of these albums, it brings me right back to the time in my life when I’d play said album on repeat on my little portable CD player.
Let’s recall a few, shall we?
Good Charlotte – The Young And The Hopeless
I bought this album at Hastings because I LOVED “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” and then realized I liked all the other songs on it as well. I played this a lot in my junior and senior years in high school, and probably a little bit before that as well. “Girls & Boys” is underrated for how good it is.
Black Eyed Peas – Monkey Business
Senior year of high school. I would start this CD EVERY TIME I drove to school in the morning. I lived close enough to the high school that it only ever got through “Don’t Phunk With My Heart,” haha, but that and “Pump It” immediately make me think of those early morning drives to school.
Ashlee Simpson – Autobiography
Another one I bought because I loved one of the songs after hearing it on the radio (“Pieces of Me”). This was mostly my first and second years of college, I think. “Better Off” is such a sweet song.
Weezer – Make Believe
The summer in between high school and college. I listened to this album SO MUCH, yo. I bought it for “Beverly Hills,” but “Perfect Situation” might be my favorite.
Green Day – American Idiot
Another one I listened to incessantly during that summer between high school and college. I also remember listening to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” back when I was in my bike-riding phase, but that was a few years earlier, I think.
Thoughtz
If the star sign of Aquarius was a band, it would be Animal Collective.
Fight me.
You can’t tell me that the bright chaos of FloriDada isn’t mad Aquarius energy.
Notorious O.M.G.
AYOOOOOOOOOO so there’s a tweet going around (or at least there was) that was prompting people to state their favorite song from each of Coldplay’s albums.
SO LET’S DO IT
- Parachutes: Shiver
- AROBTTH: Clocks (I think this was the first Coldplay song I ever owned)
- X&Y: Fix You
- Viva La Vida: Viva La Vida
- Mylo Xyloto: Paradise (but a VERY CLOSE SECOND is Us Against The World. That is such a painfully beautiful song)
- Ghost Stories: O
- AHFOD: Everglow
- Everyday Life: When I Need A Friend
- MOTS: Human Heart
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