Music by Decade.

I was messing around with tagging in Itunes yesterday, and decided to figure out how much music I have from each decade. (Of course, Classical music is going to fall all over the place since it is usually dated when it was recorded.)

Total time: 31.5 days.

50's: 2.7 hours.

6o's 1.6 days.

70's 1.6 days.

80's 2.7 days.

90's 5.7 days.

oo's 16.8 days.

10's 3.2 days.

Apparently I need more 50's music.

Music I Hated, Disliked, and was Disappointed by in 2010

People tend to make lists of “the best” or “their favorite” albums for the past year. I don’t really want to put in the effort, so I think I’ll just talk about a few albums that I disliked/was disappointed by last year.

Plus I feel like being negative.

1. Sigh No More - Mumford & Sons

Quite a few people seem to really like this band. A number of my friends on fb mention them with regularity and they are described as “folk revivalists,” so I decided to give them an actual chance.

I want to preface this by saying that I love folk music. I am a big fan of the Avett Brothers and Nickel Creek and I have played fiddle music from different folk traditions many times over the years.

Apparently all one needs to be a “good” folk band these days is to play up-tempo rhythms on acoustic guitar and throw a banjo on top every once in a while. Seriously though, almost nothing that I appreciate in folk/bluegrass/traditional music is present on this album. The songs are very similar sounding and none of them display any type of impressive musical skill. Every once in a while some horns come in or a number of background vocals appear but other than that it’s pretty much the same thing for 12 chugging tracks of derivative, occasionally whiney, and sometimes downright annoying folk/rock. “Little Lion Man” is the only somewhat memorable track, partly because it is somewhat catchy and partly because it is the only song to use profanity.

2. Congratulations - MGMT

MGMT’s first album contained three songs that are insanely catchy and probably got a little overplayed at Hillsdale. The rest of the album was . . . interesting. I wasn’t a huge fan of the whole thing, but it was more a matter of personal taste. In other words, it just wasn’t for me but I could understand others liking it.

Congratulations doesn’t contain anything even vaguely similar to the highly popular “Kids.” I don’t even know if you could classify any of the songs as pop. I am in favor as treating entire albums as art, but this effort just comes of as weird and arty for weird and arty’s sake.

3. The Age of Adz - Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens has come out with some truly great music over the years. It has been a while since he came out with anything, so I was pretty excited when I saw he had a new album.

Unfortunately the album was somewhat disappointing. Sufjan’s great use of melody and strings are still very present, but the album marks a dramatic stylistic change from his earlier work. It seems to me that he is trying to create some sort of indie/industrial hybrid and I really don’t buy it. There are things that sound like steam whistles, various bleeps and bloops and machine noises and beats that for me just clash with the beautiful harmonies and string sections. It starts out sounding kind of cool but becomes old pretty fast. Combining musical cues from disparate genres often works, just not here.

Honorable mention: I won’t go into detail on these, but Transit Transit by Autolux and The Winter of Mixed Drinks by Frightened Rabbit were both incredibly weak second albums following great debuts.

chaos

This is what happens when three people in the same house are writing research papers a week and a half before finals....

Making music with friends

Maria managed to take this amazing picture with a disposable camera.

The action of Grace.

This is a quote from one of my favorite Flannery O'Connor short stories:

"Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise."

Flannery O'Connor - "The Artificial Nigger"

This vivid description of grace at work demonstrates for me one of the biggest reasons O'Connor is worth reading. I feel that many people start out by reading stories like "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and are immediately turned off by the macabre nature of O'Connor. The thing is, I think one reason she is such a powerful writer is her ability to demonstrate the need for grace in fallen man. This isn't always as obvious as in the above quote, but when one approaches O'Connor's work with this in mind it explains a lot.

I don't belong here.

A reworked version of Radiohead’s song “Creep” serves as the background to the just-out trailer for David Fincher’s latest, “The Social Network.” This brought up a lot of things for me that I wanted to address involving success and how it can be a good and also a regressive sort of thing.

“Creep” is a single off of Radiohead’s first album, Pablo Honey, and it was their first song to gain mainstream recognition especially in America. It received fairly extensive radio play, and is a song in Rock Band 2. All of this to say that it is probably a safe assumption that many people think of this song first when they think of Radiohead.

A somewhat backwards version of this occurred when Blur’s “song no. 2” became rather popular in America. The song comes off their fifth album, on which they dropped their former place of being one of the two major Britpop bands and transitioned to a more lo-fi alternative sound. You may not know the song by name, but if you heard a bit of it I would bet you know it. Its success was ironic, because the song is essentially Blur’s parody of American grunge bands.

Anyway, “Creep” in many ways personifies Radiohead’s first album: bold grungy British guitar-rock. Their second album, “The Bends” serves in many ways as an extension and refinement of their first. The case can be made that all of their albums since then are masterpieces of one sort or another. Radiohead accomplishes this, however, by rising above their original easy-to-pigeonhole genre. I think of myself as somewhat of an “album purist,” and although I don’t claim to be an authority, many would argue and I would agree that Radiohead produced in OK Computer and Kid A the best albums of their respective decades.

By OK Computer the band had started making disparaging comments about “Creep”. “Karma Police” refers to a radio playing popular, disposable music as “buzzing like a fridge.” Thom Yorke in an interview after the album was released said that “Creep” was just that, the background forgettable droning of alternative rock radio.

The interesting point is that without this initial successful single, who knows what would have happened to the band. It is impossible to tell what creative direction the band would have taken if they had muddled about in relative obscurity for years. I, for one, am happy with what came out of their success.

Richard III

I recently read the Shakespeare play Richard III because I was going to watch the 1995 film adaptation of the same name starring Ian McKellan, and I like to read works of literature before I see their counterparts on film. The play is incredible in presenting Richard III as one of the most Machiavellian characters I have ever seen. He will stop at nothing, even marrying the wife of a man he has had killed, to achieve his desire for the kingship. Of course he fails to anticipate the moral outrage of those who are in the know after he is finished with his string of murders and is thus finally undone.

I went in to watching the movie knowing it was highly critically praised, but even so it exceeded my expectations. The film is set in 1930 Britain. Usually attempts to modernize the setting of Shakespeare plays seem to fail miserably, but in this case it works perfectly. The closer Richard gets to becoming the ruler of England, the more the military uniforms begin to recall those of Nazi Germany during WWII. The dialogue is mostly taken directly from the original, and yet the pacing kept brisk enough to make for a solid story arc. Especially effective are what in the play would be Richard's asides to the audience, which in the film arewhen he looks directly at the camera and speaks his real purposes.