I guess I can try to resurrect this blog too if I have a little energy right now. I haven't been listening to anywhere near as much stuff as usual, both because I haven't had the energy to and because my ears have been ringing so much more than usual this year. Like they literally haven't stopped since my early 20s, but the past several months it's just been louder and louder. Not great.

Anyway, I'm sort of surprised I've never done a Stefanie Sun/Sun Yanzi post before. I sometimes forget to check what she's been up to for multiple years, but I've really liked a bunch of her stuff since I randomly stumbled across it in like 2006 or whenever it was.

This one in particular is interesting because in a lot of ways it totally sounds like what I guess might be called "adult contemporary" from the early 00s in the US, except it's less than a year old and she's a Mandopop singer from Singapore. But also mostly I just like how it sounds.

I know this one mostly because my mom got the CD it was on when it came out. It's a pretty good version of the song to begin with (pretty much any Dylan song being performed by anyone but Dylan is usually off to a good start), even before learning that he recorded it shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and less than a year before he died.

Room temperature take, years past relevance: We Appreciate Power by Grimes is just Jillian Mayer's MegaMega Upload with any self awareness replaced with edginess

I feel like I don't hear KRS-One mentioned as much as you'd think from how influential he was (although maybe I'm just not hanging out in the right spaces for that to come up more?). As far as I know he was one of the first people doing stuff like this in particular, and this song is still sadly relevant 30 years later.

The bassist for this band is very gender. They're a big on the feminine side of androgynous, but there's really no way to tell what their deal is, especially with the mask. They obviously play the bass, but more than that they play with a pick like I do, which is somewhat unusual. They have long, straight hair parted right down the middle. They dress in all black and tend to be fully covered, and their aesthetic leans kinda 19th century vampire, especially in the video for the first song, which I have elements of even if I lean a bit more modern overall. No one can figure out who they are or what their gender is (and I kind of love that when people start asking, someone associated with the band doesn't even used gendered pronouns to refer to them), but they generally seem to agree that whoever it is is hot/sexy/whatever regardless of gender. Honestly the only real things that stand out as being not me at all are seeming comfortable performing in front people and those sleeves (I pretty much never wear anything that poofs out in that way around the shoulders/upper arms).

Oh, also the music's not bad too.

For someone who keeps claiming to be oblivious to lyrics most of the time I sure think in song lyrics a lot. @a-square-6-28-496 quoted something to me from a fic she was reading, and my thought process trying to figure out how to respond immediately got derailed by this song. I hadn’t heard or even thought about it in forever, but it popped right into my head in a way that I swear almost made sense in context...

I didn't notice when I first saw this post, but when someone liked my reblog of it I noticed it was by someone with the name Tam Lin. I immediately thought of this song, which is probably my favorite on the album it's from. People might be more familiar with Anaïs Mitchell for Hadestown, but she's also done a bunch of stuff like this too. Mostly I tend to like well done or just interesting takes on traditional folk songs like these, and the Child Ballads are a pretty good bunch of them, of which this album is just a tiny sample.

You know, I was going to just make a silly little post about how this is the only remotely spooky thing I've done or watched today (it's Halloween when I'm writing this), but that was when I'd only listened to the song and hadn't seen the video yet.

The good news is that it's still one of my favorite songs from Freezepop's most recent album, and some of the remixes and stuff on the single that just came out this weekend are ok I guess. And if you only go by the song itself, not the video, it's very superficially seasonally appropriate because of the ghost thing, but the lyrics read as being about depression instead. I was searching for the lyrics online so I could be lazy and copy and paste them instead of writing them out, and the internet informed me there was a video too.

And it's a super low budget and low effort video that I think they threw together entirely this weekend, and that's fine with me too. They're a modestly successful little local band that's been doing their thing successfully enough to keep going for a couple decades but never really made it big or anything, and I like their quirky DIY stuff. And it was fun realizing they went up to Salem to shoot it and recognizing lots of stuff even though I haven't been up there in a couple years.

And that's when it struck me how weird it was to watch the video. This is a nearby place I'm personally familiar with, and this stuff is happening Right Now basically...and like 20% of people in the video have masks. And like it's all outdoors and that's kind of fine, but a lot of it is still dense crowds right in the center of town. And I can't even tell how much is a reasonable amount to be bothered by that anymore.

Yeah, we have some of the highest vaccination rates in the country and arguably the best healthcare system, but we're still having something like 1300-1400 new cases a day. Should I be mad? Am I overreacting? Does it even really affect me much if I've left the house maybe five times in 2021 so far? My health is absolutely abysmal these days and I probably qualify for a vaccine booster as a result, so should I actually be angrier instead?

I don't even know anymore. I don't know how to tell. That's all stuff that's part of Outside, and I don't just mean outdoors, outside my house. Outside my bedroom. Outside my bed. 95% of my life takes place within maybe 20 square feet, and most of the rest is within 25 feet of that. I have no perspective on anything anymore.

Anyway, the song is good.

Then I think of you And the black and white returns to color Then I think of you And the daylight doesn't seem so blinding now Then I think of you And that skipping 45's a symphony Then I think of you And the ghost rejoins the living for today

Maybe I'll rejoin the human race Maybe I don't need to haunt this place

I haven't been super into the few other songs of theirs I've heard, but I like this one whenever it comes up. There's just something satisfying about the way it comes together to make the full sound, and it's kinda cute. And I just enjoy something about lines like this:

Take me by the hand and we can sign some papers

Forget the invitations, floral arrangements and bread makers

I was trying to say something about "Tumblr lesbians", but my brain ended up with "Tumblr bitches" instead and reminded me this exists after not thinking about it for years. It's not my favorite thing ever, but it's catchy and really captures a certain point in time.

Guess it's time to do the "selections from my first 100 posts" thing I meant to do months ago. There's no real reasoning behind this list other than stuff that stood out to me as I was going down the list. I was originally going to add a little comment about each or pick stuff by genre or something, but that's not happening right now I guess.

The Mechanisms - High Noon Over Camelot

The Doubleclicks - Love Problems

Lingua Ignota - Caligula

rook - Deep Nausea

Miss Eaves - Exposure Kills

Kesha - Praying

Brandy - Human

The Smittens - Stop the Bombs

Vi Hart - Crazy Snail 2: Ain't More Thing to Climb

Girlyman - Nothing Left

Laura Shigihara - Everything's Alright

Erutan - Raindancer

Laibach - Jesus Christ Superstar

Louis Armstrong - Go Down, Moses

Snow White Blood - Shared Hearts

(heads up that the album art is a bit NSFW and so are a couple tracks on the album, I think Pantscada, Juice and Schranz Chase in particular)

Thanks to @a-square-6-28-496 for unintentionally reminding me that this exists. I hadn’t thought about the show or listened to the soundtrack in a few years probably, but it’s still fun.

Panty & Stocking the show might not be to everyone’s tastes, and I might not even like it as much if I watched it now, but at the time I enjoyed some of the juvenile humor and the distinctive character designs and art style and animation, and of course also the soundtrack. In hindsight I think I just tend to like things that Hiroyuki Imaishi and other Trigger people have worked on, like he also directed Gurren Lagann and Promare which are both great, and even though Re: Cutie Honey was a mess the episode he directed was still super fun visually (and also the OP was extremely catchy).

Anyway, there’s a bunch of fun stuff on the Panty & Stocking soundtrack, like lots of electronic dancy clubby music with strong beats. The first one that really stood out was the villain song, Theme for Scanty & Knee Socks. I just like the dark tones and use of stuff like skewing that synth really heavily toward the attack so the notes really fade in and build to their final sound, which they use for both short and long/held notes. Also the way they chop up and rearrange some of the parts is always fun. Compare that to the equivalent song for the protagonists, Fly Away, and the bad guys are the clear winners.

I'm going to stop pretending I have to have something to say about stuff to justify posting it here or that I have to specifically do anything from the long list of posts I had wanted to make and just post this because it's good and I like it. So there. Also playing a right-handed guitar upside down instead of restringing it is wonderful.

So I've been wanting to do a quick list of my favorite songs/artists/albums/whatevers I've posted on here since I hit 100 posts, both as an excuse to revisit some stuff myself and because I occasionally get random new people following this for some reason. That still hasn't happened because I'm still recovering from it being cold and dark all winter, and I'm still off my ADHD meds, but maybe I'll get around to it some day.

In the meantime there's this. A friend shared some interesting stuff that was neat to listen to but made my inner librarian/archivist twitch because there wasn't useful information about the artists or songs or anything. One was just titled pakistani pashto traditional music, which after a little digging seems to actually be a song called Az dil man raftai biron originally written by Zahir Howaida, an Afghan socialist who sang in Persian, not Pashto, and this version is played on the rubab by Homayoun Sakhi, another Afghan musician, not Pakistani. The other was helpfully labeled tambur music (uyghur), and I haven't been able to figure that one out yet because Google Translate recognizes zero words in the video description as translatable (I assume it's been transliterated and was originally written in the Uyghur alphabet), and the comments are mostly in languages I don't speak either...

Anyway, that reminded me that this album exists. Somehow I have a tendency to find all sorts of interesting people who do interesting things, and I met the guy who recorded this while I was in school. I guess he's a Jewish guy who grew up in the US, but his wife is from Niger, and he went over there in some kind of academic context to study and record folk music there. If I remember right (all of this is from memory because the website seems to be dead and the Wayback Machine crashes when it tries to load an old version, so I may have messed up some of the details), these are field recordings of Malam Mamane Barka, who played traditional Nigerian instruments and musical styles and was popular in Niger but almost unknown elsewhere, and this was the first internationally released recording of his music.

I like it, but just as a warning it can get kinda samey and repetitive if you try to listen to the whole thing at once...

Speaking of things that are better than the original...

Like a G6 is a mediocre song at best. Roll a D6, on the other hand, is excellent. Sure they're occasionally a little sloppy and get a little off beat in a couple places, but even ignoring the change in the theme of the song they made the song sound better musically. I like that it's pitched down slightly, I generally prefer the slightly different vocal effects they used, and the original just sounds empty next to it. It might be cleaner, both in terms of recording and production, but it just feels hollow as a result.

But then on top of that the redone lyrics and video are just fun. Turning a generic "bitches love me because I'm rich and they're drunk" song into this ridiculous thing about their D&D group immediately makes it more fun, more silly, more likable, and stand out more in general. "Steal a wallet from that guy; roll a d6" indeed.

I saved this several years ago when it had like a tenth as many views, mostly because it was an interesting intersection of a couple things: a very popular song (which I thought was kind of overrated) and the "girl with ukulele" trend. The latter in general got a lot of crap, unsurprisingly mostly from guys on the internet who don't like it when people have fun in a way they haven't approved of and who aren't actually creating anything themselves.

Hot take though: this is better than the original. There's a sincerity you get with a girl with a ukulele and a webcam in her bedroom just playing a song because it makes her happy that you usually don't get from a slickly produced major label studio release, and I think that's the case here. Like, the original song is fine, but beyond being catchy it doesn't do much for me. It's been forever, but I want to say randomly stumbling across this on YouTube one night is what finally got me to like it instead of being mildly annoyed or indifferent toward it.

Also I still think it's hilarious that the original is prominently listed as "featuring Janelle Monáe" when she's so barely in it that you could miss it entirely even after hearing it several times...which I absolutely did.

I'm sure what everyone definitely needs right now is not just more Christmas music but Christmas music shitposting, and not just Christmas music shitposting but music major Christmas music shitposting.

In the very early days of YouTube, like 10+ years ago, I stumbled across this guy who went by Jimlapbap, I think probably because of something silly he did changing a song to something stylistically very different in a fun way. If I remember right he was just goofing around having fun while doing a PhD in something composition/arrangement-related, and he'd take popular songs and rearrange them as barbershop quartets or various other cross genre nonsense, and sometimes screwing with the meter or tonality in interesting ways. The vast majority of his stuff only got 2-4 digit numbers of views, but he very briefly had a minor viral success with a sea shanty version of Sail by Awolnation, which hot take is better than the original.

I don't know if he's kept it up because it's been years since I checked in with his stuff, but I remember he used to do something kinda shitposty for Christmas, and also a year-end medley of popular songs from the year. Somewhat indirectly, Carly Rae Jepsen's mediocre new Christmas song eventually led to me remembering this stuff existed, and rather than purging the Christmas music from my brain or making a nice Chanukah post or something I will bestow this curse on you all instead.

The Wrong Tonality Carolers is the more shitposty one, with several Christmas carols mode-shifted between major/minor etc. It's worth noting that he is not particularly a performer, and especially not a singer, so don't expect a brilliant vocal performance, just one that's good enough to present the arrangement with a bunch of pitch correction. The Irregular Meter Guitar Quartet is less shitposty and more actually good, assuming you want to know what Christmas carols sound like in 5 or 7 or whatever.