When I was younger, so much younger than today / I never was concerned with BLOGS ON SATURDAY
Hi. So as a bit of a “follow up” to yesterday’s blog about music, let’s do another blog about…
…drum roll…
MUSIC!
Because I never blog about music, as we all know.
Anyway.
Since I spend a decent amount of my spare time galloping around YouTube in a vain attempt at finding something that will, at least momentarily, make me forget about the fact that I am Incurably Sad™, I came across Steve Cruickshank’s channel. On said channel, there are a bunch of “negative harmony” covers of popular/well-known songs.
What is “negative harmony?” Um, I’m not 100% sure. I’m not a music person (as far as things like music theory or technical musical terms go), so I probably don’t understand it fully from what I’ve read. But it sounds like it involves taking the key of a song, finding the “axis” of the key, and the reflecting all the notes across the axis. This preserves the “weight” or “effect” of the notes since they are all the same in relation to each other and the axis, but are just different notes. Here is a good explanation with some visualization:
Anyway, here are some examples of negative harmony covers from Cruikshank’s channel.
Cool, huh?
Weezer, I am not disappoint anymore
A while back I wrote a blog about Weezer’s new cover of Toto’s Africa. My main complaint was about just how bland the cover was. They didn’t seem to put their own flair into it; it sounded almost identical to the original. In my opinion, half the reason for a band to do a cover is to put their own flair on a song.
So when I saw today that Weezer had released their Teal Album, an album of cover songs, I wasn’t really too hyped.
But I listened to their cover of A-ha’s Take On Me, and they do a much better job of giving it the Weezer flair than they did with Africa. It still sounds a lot like the original, but you can definitely tell it’s a different band covering the song.
A lot of the other covers aren’t too bad, but this was my favorite.
So yeah.
Weezer, I am Disappoint
There’s nothing wrong with this song, but as a cover, it’s…kinda boring.
And I like Weezer. I like a lot of their songs (favorites include Beverly Hills, Feels Like Summer, Pork and Beans, and Say It Ain’t So). But this just feels so bland. I get that they probably wanted to stay close to the feel of the original because people would likely freak out if Toto was tampered with, but I think you could still get the same vibe across while still making the song different rather than basically just copying everything.
Just my two cents, ’cause what do I know?
Eigenblogger 