Archive for Music
While Various Things Gently Weep
Jake Shimabukuro on the ukulele:
Lemon Demon on the keytar (video is a fan-made mélange of images from MS Paint Adventures):
And, of course, the Wu-Tang Clan (video is one of those dumb YouTube things where someone just sticks a still image in there):
This is a fact
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI 99/4a, so when I heard about the rapper T.I. that’s what I thought of first. But it turns out his moniker is actually short for “The Internet”.
Brevity is the soul of rock
Update: Sadly, Muxtape is no longer with us. It is survived by a spiteful, myopic record industry.
If there’s anything I like, it’s forcing my musical taste onto others in the form of the beloved mix tape. Like so many things, the Internet has made this easier. When I was younger it was a huge hassle: dubbing CDs onto tapes track by track, finding a girl to have a crush on, etc. Now we’ve got Muxtape, which introduces innovations like easy one-click streaming and not letting you include a piece of notebook paper where you explain what each track means to you.
So because I can, I bring you Just a Minute, a collection of songs longer than 60 seconds but shorter than 120. Further mixes will follow as I feel like it (and that’ll remove this one, since Muxtape only lets you have one at a time), and the track list is archived after the jump.
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Stealth absurdity in hip-hop
I like rap music, and I especially like when a rapper slides a really ridiculous line right past me. This is not too hard, because I often don’t pay close attention to the lyrics at first, and even when I do there are more of them per verse than in a rock song, so there are more places to hide something silly.
This is how I was able to listen to Run-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis” dozens of times before noticing the following lyric:
A million dollars in it, cold hundreds of Gs
Enough to buy a boat and matching car with ease
Wait, what? Run wants a matching boat and car? Buying a boat and car is thinking a little small if we’re talking about a million dollars, but this is a matching boat and car. Like a gift set, maybe? I don’t even think that sort of thing is available for purchase.
I’m not even sure how well you can get a car to match a boat, since they are pretty fundamentally different vehicles. You could get the same color, but unless you keep your boat in your driveway they won’t often be in the same place, so I’m not sure anyone will notice. My DS Lite matches my Wii, and I didn’t notice that until I wrote this sentence. Although now that I think of it, if you could get a Mini Cooper boat, I’d buy that set. If I happened upon Santa’s wallet, I mean.
I also like this more convoluted example from Masta Ace and Biz Markie’s “Me and the Biz”:
Cause I’m able to rock a crowd without a cable
Or a Cuban link and… [yo, Lincoln wasn't Cuban!]
So? I still produce def jams like my name was Ricky Rubin
Some other surreptitiously ridiculous lyrics: Ice Cube’s “makes a man cook ‘em in a pot like gumbo”, Nate Dogg’s “Now they droppin’ and yellin’, it’s a tad bit late”, and the fact that anybody listens to the Streets.