Listening to Paradise City has got me thinking about intros to songs. I would probably back off a bit from saying Paradise City is one of favourite song intros, as there’s so many good song intros – but it’s definitely an intro I really like to a song I don’t particularly like.
It seems to me that it’s actually very easy to make a good intro – most songs seem to manage it. Whether it’s a long building up/layering approach, which quite a lot of songs do (Layla, Justified and Ancient, Nirvana of course do it) a jump straight in with the words or only a short instrumental that nevertheless represents the instrumentation of the whole song (Beautiful South tend to do this, as does Centrefold), or the plain odd or shock starter (e.g. Batdance by Prince, even Hey Mickey. Possibly even the Shoop shoop song, although this might be a jump straight in). I suppose you could add a fade in too (More than a feeling, by Boston).
Finishing a song seems a lot harder – repeat and fade seems very popular, and the other main one is probably back right off for the last time, quite possibly with a slow down (KT Tunstell, please step forward). A guess the rock ending is to sustain a power chord for a few bars and finish with a big BAM. Occasionally you get endings just to keep DJs on their toes, although I can’t think of an example right now. I guess Batdance is a bit like this. Do you get de-layered endings, where the instruments disappear one by one. In fact there’s a song tickling the back of my mind that does this, but can’t quite remember it.
My conclusion is that, in the main, endings are pretty boring. Intros are many and varied, after all you can choose which instruments to start with when – start with acoustic guitar (Pinball Wizard), leccy guitar (Sweet Child of Mine, Layla, …), drums or other percussion(Obvious Child, Walk like an Egyptian), bass (lovely day), piano (I can see clearly now). Then choose which are next, and so on.
All this pondering led to me to think about the fact that “spot the track” games are almost always based on Introduction. I guess “Bits and Pieces” on Radio 1 (do they still do it?) is a notable exception, but whenever I’ve been to a party that’s had a music game, it’s been based on the intro. The obvious reasons are
It’s a lot easier to grab the first 5 seconds of a track, then it is to have to listen to the whole track and choose a section.
Intros don’t usually have words, which makes it harder to identify the artist and title.
Intros don’t always have an obvious connection to the main body of the song.
These are all good reasons, but I was thinking that if I ever hold a music quiz at a party I’ll do it on either the ending or on an instrumental bridge. It would make a change, if nothing else!
Spooky thing – Guns’n’Roses’s Paradise City is quite possibly one of my favourite introductions of all times. I’m not actually wild about the song as a whole, but the first 80 seconds, until the thrashy overdriven bit starts, just hit the spot everytime. Ok, I’m a huge fan of “layering” in almost any song – by which I mean building up layers of music/instrumentation/harmony a bar or stanza at a time. (I guess Kirsty McColl’s Days struck me the other day as the example par excellence of layering up an entire song). Still, I love the the sort of clean guitar and high-hat, then on to heavy kick and snare, then vocals, bring in some bass and distort guitar, sounds like some pads going on too. The comes the policeman’s whistle, and the song goes downhill for me.
Ok, so nothing too spooky so far (except for the fact that G’n’R are interspersed with The Monkees on my MP3, which is plain odd) – and indeed had it not been for my headphones Paradise City might have passed unnoticed. These are the headphones I bought last year (Shure e2c’s, I think) when was putting together an in-ear foldback system, and decided to actually spend more than 5.99 on a pair of naff bud earphones thingy which are tinny and last about 2 days. Anyway it’s a world apart – fantastic reproduction, full frequency range. All of which meant I heard something on the intro to Paradise City that I’ve never heard before.
What is it? Well there’s a fourth part singing “Take me down to the paradise city…” in the intro. Right down the bass end, almost below hearing – although he’s plain enough when they get to “oh won’t you please take me home.” Actually I can’t decide how many parts there are – might only be three. They’re messing around with reverb and panning, and I’ve never been very good at pulling out parts. Still, his voice is so low it’s almost like the bass strumming a single note in time, and I have never noticed it before!!
Now if we’re talking Guns and Roses, of course Sweet Child ‘o Mine doesn’t have any of Paradise’s flaws, except for when they cut out the riff between the verses in the single release. I challenge anyone not to succumb to air guitar for Sweet Child. Quite possible air drums and air bass too. It’s got everything – instantly recognisable riff, great tune, lyrics, and it just rocks. And it’s got surprise too; just as you think you know what the song’s doing, along comes a bridge and some thrashy overdrive, and the whole “where do we go” back-off, which isn’t really a back off.
Strangely, I hate pretty much every other G’n’R track I’ve heard. 🙂
What an unexpected delight. Failing to read the cover properly, and assuming that because it had Nicole Kidman in it was going to be another Holywood number (itself a strange assumption given the awesome Dogville), I was amazed when it opened with John (Ben Chaplin) recording his pitch for a Russian bride in St Albans on his webcam – in a clearly low budget exercise.
I supposed the involvement of FilmFour should have given this away, but the real surprise was that it was hilarious, low budget, but also very gripping. There wasn’t any doubt from the start that this was going to be a very funny film, although very much black comedy rather than sit-com.
The basic premise is that Nadia (our Nicole) is the bride John has ordered, and after his initial shock at her not speaking English, starts falling for her. Then it’s her birthday, and two Russian friends from her past – Alexi and Yuri – turn up for the party (actually only one of them is her friend, the other is in a band with her friend). Party is probably an overstatement too.
It soon transpires that the Russian guests aren’t quite as nice as Nadia seems to think…
To say anymore would spoil it, but it was only shortly after this point that John seemed to snap and become a much more interesting character – as indeed did Nadia.
A really well executed film – full of ambiguity about who people really are, and what they feel for each other. And the ending was fantastic – very much in the Tarintino vein of not really resolving anything (e.g. Reservoir Dogs, and more modern films like Memento, Sideways, …), which I kind of like. It was a nice length too – very punchy!
I went to an Ebor lecture last week, at York Minster, by the Archbishop of York – John Sentamu. The title was Uncovering the Purposes of God, and he was really talking about the purposes of God through
trust and worship of a loving God
love for your neighbour
care for creation
There were two quotes in particular that stood out to me
Faith is not a crutch to lean on, but the act of leaning, and
Reason and human worth are core to our Christian culture in the UK
The second one was particularly in the context of wanting to rename Christmas Winterval – he said that it wasn’t having a Christian culture that offended, but the cynicism of politically correct people trying to deny it.
The other really good bit was the Chocolate Trinity – Cadbury, Rowntree, and Fry – three Quakers who essentially were the UK Chocolate industry in the 18th,19th, and start of the 20th centuries. A quick Google gives me Quaker food. I’m a died in the wool protestant, and so disagree with some of the principles and beliefs of the Friends Movement, but clearly the principles and ethics are basically Christian.
Well, survived my first day in my new job. It’s always an interesting experience starting a new job – new people to meet, new systems and software to learn. I’m very much a pioneer in my outlook, and am happiest when forging ahead with new things, so in many ways the first few months in a new job are my favourite. The real satisfaction comes from completing projects, of course, but I just love learning new things and starting new ventures.
The applications are really interesting too – it’s a GIS company, so there’s lots of mapping and route finding code which I’m getting to grips with. Takes me back to my undergraduate days at Imperial, when I wrote a GIS tool called GERMS (Generic Environment for Reviewing Municipal Statistics) for my friend Phil. Actually the really interesting about that project was the data structure I used, rather than the graphics bit – but then again the really clever thing about the “RouteFinda” software is the memory management (anyone can find the shortest route through a graph and draw a picture of it – doing it quickly with a small memory footprint is the real challenge). It is weird how you can not understand something, but know that you will understand it after having put in the hours thinking about it. It almost begs the question why we can’t just instantly understand things. I guess it’s the brain making new connections between the neurons and what-not.
Anyway the other people in the office are all very nice, and there’s a really good work atmosphere. I think I’m going to enjoy it. A lot! 🙂
I don’t think the suffix -trix is used enough these days. It is apparently the feminine version or -tor, thus wherever you could have a (male) -tor, you would have a female -trix. The only two uses that seem to be current are dominatrix and testatrix, but I don’t know why we should stop there. Oh yes, and T3 gave us the terminatrix I suppose.
Actrix has a certain ring to it – and the Queen becomes protectrix of our land. A newspaper could have an editrix. If heroes have mentors, why shouldn’t a heroines have a mentrix?
Is a female alligator an alligatrix? Or maybe a woman who debases something is in adulteratrix. Cars are meant to be female, so why don’t they have motrixes to power them? (apparently it’s allowed to be -trixes when it’s the plural of -trix in this sense.) A female blogger becomes a promulgatrix, and a female gardener a propagatrix. And would a fridge full of chocolate be a refrigiratrix?
Or perhaps it could work the other way – clearly The Matrix is female, so what about The Mator?
So this week I will attempt to refer to a female guest as a visitrix.
Sorry about all the parenting entries, but I’ve been meaning to say this one for a while! 🙂
One of the thing Ben really likes watching is Storymakers on CBeebies. The basic premise is that when the library closes for the night, these two creatures and a literary magician appear to make stories using all our imagination and their special storymaker computer. Hang on – there’s bound to be a website… yup, Storymakers on the BBC website. The target audience is broadly pre-school – other programs are Bob the Builder, Teletubbies, Balamory, Tweenies, and so on. Anyway, there are various characters who appear in the Storymakers’ stories, but everyone’s favourite is Blue Cow, who wonders about things, and gets on the bus to find out about them.
The thing I like about Blue Cow, apart from the fact the whole concept and execution is very funny, is that there’s sometimes little grown-up asides, and I’ve not yet worked out if they’re intentional or not. I think they must be, but they don’t happen very often. The two most recent instances are when Blue Cow wanted to find out what her own voice sounded like, so she went to Echo Beach. I know I’m showing my age, but that can’t have been an accident, surely? The only example is not quite so good, but basically set up a “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke – not exactly grown-up, but a bit above the target age for the program, I would have thought.
Anyway, it’s a freeview channel, and Storymakers is on between 6 and 6.15pm everyday.
I think my little boy had his first nightmare last night – well his first conscious one anyway. He woke up around 5am in floods of tears saying I don’t like Honk Honk Honk, which would have been quite funny, except that he was so upset.
The honk honk honk thing might be one or two things – he sometimes rides around on his hobby horse saying honk, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. I usually point out horses say neigh rather than honk, and sometimes his sound changes to neigh, sometimes it doesn’t. This doesn’t really fit with not being liked though, as he clearly enjoys riding around on his little horsey.
The more likely explanation is that he’s referring to Brum, who’s a car on CBeebies who drives around saying the aforementioned honk, and which he watches sometimes at nursery. We know that he doesn’t like Brum.. or more precisely there’s one episode of Brum that involved two clowns that really scared him, so much so that one day he suddenly started crying as we were getting him ready for nursery, saying I don’t want to watch Brum. Anyway, nursery were fine with not showing it to Ben, and in any case this was several months ago, with no further problem. So who knows? I can kind of understand the whole ‘scared of clowns’ thing though, as they are pretty dark. I’ve never found them particularly funny, but then I’m not really into slap-stick.
On the subject of dreams, I’m making my acting debut this morning! At least, my acting debut in the sense of having to learn a script and recite a monologue. The church are running a holiday club for kids, and this year’s theme is learning all about Joseph – who of course was a well known dreamer and interpreter of dreams. I’m playing the part of Pharaoh’s cup-bearer, who gives a 5 minute eye-witness account of Joseph; his time in prison, his rise to prime minister of Egypt, and the dreams he interpreted along the way. It was actually easier than I expected to learn the lines, at least in the context where it doesn’t have to be verbatim, but then I guess most acting is really getting across the gist rather than the exact words? I should probably reserve judgement on how easy it was to learn the lines until I’ve done it for real!!!
