Well, we seem to have gotten to the bottom of the problem that was keeping me from even seeing my blog, much less posting on it.
So here’s a nice multi-topic post to get us started:
- N.F.L. Says Patriots Probably Deflated Footballs Purposely — See? Bryan’s not the only one who gives you sports topics to talk about, is he? And you don’t really like him better than you do me, do you?
- Black Box Suggests Germanwings Co-Pilot Practiced Crash: Investigator — That guy was one sick puppy. Apparently, he tested the settings for flying into the mountain, but reset the controls before the plane could respond to the settings, so no one noticed.
- Borrowing plan for SC colleges, tech schools on shaky ground — Because fiscal conservatives believe government should live within its means, just the way families have to do, and everyone knows families never borrow money. Right? What’s that? What’s this “mortgage” thing you speak of? Some socialist plot?
- Baltimore Mayor Asks Feds To Investigate Police Department — The sad saga continues. On a side note, anyone see this Margulies cartoon last week? Seemed to sum up the cognitive divide in the country fairly neatly.
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@Ariail
“Its the home of the brave
And the land of the free
Where the less you know
The better off you’ll be”
~Warren Zevon
https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=lyrics+warren+zevon+disorder+in+the+house&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-002
I just came across this click-bait:
Computer Scientists Prove 80s Pop Music is Boring
The article doesn’t support the headline, but it is interesting. Brad should be pleased to see this:
The team highlights three years that represent musical revolutions — that is, years that sparked a boon of innovative styles and variety: 1964, 1983 and 1993.
Of the three revolutions, 1964 was the most complex, enriching the styles of soul and rock, before ultimately spawning the dance crazes of funk and disco. The trends seems to come at the expense of Doo Wop, which dropped off the charts.
Music historians attribute this wholesale change to the British Invasion of the early 1960s, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones arrived in America and were followed by dozens of other Brit bands. Computer analysis paints a different picture. The signature features of this era — such as loud guitar, major chords with no changes and bright, energetic melodies — predated the arrival of Brit bands. [Emphasis added.]
Digging deeper into the journal article (a tough slog, but also worth the time.) , the early 2000s were the most diverse period (greatest numbers of styles) and rap was determined to “be the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts in the period that we studied.”
I’m glad the piece doesn’t bear out the headline, because I thought the 80s brought a revitalization to pop music, courtesy of music videos. The MTV era — which in my book ended all too soon — may have killed the radio star, but it brought us a lot of fun, new stuff, presented in multimedia format.
What’s the ’93? Grunge? I thought that started a year or two before that. Those were the waning days of the music video — Nirvana, Soundgarden, REM, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers. After that, it’s just seemed like a desert. I can’t imagine what they think was so good about the early 2000s. Guess I’ll have to read the piece…
Dang. The piece never got back to explaining about ’93…
The journal article has a neat graphic about one-third the way down the page that shows the prevalence of different styles of music in different years. The big deal in the early 90s was the explosion of rap and hip hop. What the graphic seems to show in the early 2000s is that most genres of music were pretty strong all at the same time. In other periods, one style of music expands at the expense of another. For example, in the 90s dance music expands at the expense of country music.
and art rock, like Emerson Lake and Palmer was just three chords writ large?
Easily the most complex music is bop and post-bop jazz. Anything after that is basic.
Why do people keep talking about three chords? Don’t even basic blues progressions involve four, or more?
I’ve strummed my guitar to a lot of pop songs over the years, and relatively few of them are limited to three chords.
Basic 12 bar blues is I(7), IV(7), V(7). There’s another popular standards/rock/pop I VI II V. Heart and Soul, The Way You Look Tonight, Blue Moon….etc.
So you’re counting a G and a G7 as the same chord? That would explain it.
To me, any time I have to move my fingers — G, G7, Gm, Gm7 — it’s a new chord.
I know nothing of the theory…
They are all V in the key of C, for ex. The dominant. G, G7, G6, G9 sus4, etc.
Well, maybe not the minors, but they were possibly thrown in for color.
12 bar blues = the TV Batman theme. There are plenty of variations, some with 7, some not, but they all are variations of I, IV, and V.
Just take a non-Beatles pop-rock-folk song and write the chords out on a piece of paper. I bet you’ll see a pattern you might have missed.
The Beatles expanded chords dramatically, in part b/c they didn’t know what they were “supposed” to be doing. A lot of the songs you strum may also be in a fairly basic structure with suspensions and other modifications added.
Those sus chords add interesting twists…
Yup. Supposedly the Beatles just noodled around and experimented and found other stuff that sounded good, without actually knowing what they were doing. Lots of jazz covers of Yesterday and to a lesser extent Eleanor Rigby, b/c the chord progression is interesting.
you mean “expanded chords dramatically” within pop music structure, right? because anything they stumbled upon had been explored one to two centuries earlier in Western classical music (or, in the case of other musical experiments of theirs, music of the Indian subcontinent). It was the Beatles’ sense of exploration and of interest in older and diverse musics that allowed them to bring these elements into pop music form of wide appeal, which was their greatest accomplishment.
Also, by “most complex music is bop and post-bop jazz” you mean within somewhat more commercial genres, right? Cause, just to give one example, exactly one hundred years ago a pioneer in the life-insurance business was writing this in his lap on his daily train commute between Grand Central Station and Danbury, Connecticut.
Yes, I meant more commercial genres and within the popular musical genres. Lots of weirdo stuff had fallen by the wayside, including modes other than Ionian and Aeolian, quarter tones, etc.,
and you thought I didn’t know much theory….
Phillip,
That’s really interesting music. I know absolutely nothing about reading music. But this one looks so different from any I think I have seen.
I can clearly see the connection between math and music in this score. It wasn’t surprising to learn that he was an actuary as well.
Thank you for that mini-class, Professor Bush and T.A. Fenner. Will there be a quiz on Friday?
“Right? What’s that? What’s this “mortgage” thing you speak of? Some socialist plot?”
Living within your means doesn’t mean you can take out unlimited credit. Adding debt means you have to find a way to pay for it that fits within your expected income.
OHHHHHH.. you must mean you want to raise taxes to pay for the debt. Just like taking a second job to pay for the second mortgage that pays for the vacation and big screen TV. Now I see the analogy.
What’s this “mortgage” thing you speak of? Some socialist plot?”
Worse! It’s French.
The Norman Invasion!
What’d I do?
Yes, and as one descended from the residents of those isles, I’m not sure who I’m supposed to resent…
The Normans, who came over and oppressed the Saxons (or at least, replaced the Saxon nobility)? The Angles and Saxons, those Germanic invaders who came in and replaced the Celts? Or the Romans, who came in and dominated the Britons before that? Or how about the way the Celts came along and wiped out any memory of those who came before?
It’s just too confusing. I don’t know how peoples who nurse grudges keep it all straight.
But the French are always bad.
Well, yeah.
Which is why yesterday we were celebrating Cinco de Mayo, which was the date of a famous Mexican victory over… the French!
The “French are always bad” meme is one of the fun threads in those Aubrey/Maturin novels that I adore.
Jack Aubrey, who’s a great naval officer and has a big heart, is not the most introspective of men, and will loudly proclaim the prejudices of his day against Papists, the Irish and the French.
Meanwhile, his best friend Stephen Maturin is Irish, Papist, and a lover of France.
But he hates Bonaparte even more than most Brits do…
Actually, I take that back somewhat. The only extended riff on the “French are always bad” meme is during a dinner party at the home of an admiral early in The Letter of Marque…
“French are always bad” would probably sell pretty well as a bumper sticker.
3/4 of my ancestors came from the French-German border areas. The French are bad. (Food is good, though.)
Well, maybe they’d be nicer if y’all had let ’em keep Alsace-Lorraine in 1870!
My mom’s family left Alsace-Lorraine about then…
Is any portion of the penny tax increase that was narrowly approved going toward fixing the “crumbling” roads? If not, why not? And does anyone have an accounting for how many of the 16,000 jobs that the tax would create have been created? Are we at 1,000? 100?
Only in Richland County.
So where are the crumbling roads being fixed? It would be a priority if they were crumbling, right? The money wouldn’t be spent on sidewalks and beautification before fixing real problems, right?
The Patriots:
Brady got eviscerated for not attending the White House ceremony for the Patriots last month – the only player not to show up. Despite the flack – and those who yapped that he purposefully snubbed the President by not going – Brady never said why he didn’t go nor did he apologize for not going. The silence seemed odder than the absence.
Did Belickick or Kraft ice him that way because of this report maybe? There isn’t much that a coach can do to a player like Brady, and he and the coach are friendly anyway, but that would have been quite a way for the organization to quietly chastise Brady without doing something that would put him in further jeopardy with the league – and history.