Thursday, June 5, 2008
Cheap Thrills Thursday
While discussing some possible video ideas for a band I'm playing in, a friend brought up the Residents One Minute Movies based on songs from the Commercial Album. I hadn't seen or listened to this stuff in a long time and now thanks to YouTube I can scour around for videos by them that I have missed.
The Residents, like other performers with boundary-pushing artistic vision and massive output, can just as easily amaze as annoy. (Frank Zappa, John Zorn, and Miles Davis fit that category in my mind as well.) The Commercial Album contains 40 one-minute tracks. The idea is that pop songs are generally three minutes long, but mainly alternate a verse and chorus three times. So, for the Residents, we only really get one minute of music in a pop song. Many ad jingles are also one minute long, so for the Residents, ad jingles are truly the music of America and they attempt to capture that on the Commercial Album. Of course, they capture that in their own intensely creepy way.
I love the Snakefinger guitar solo on "Moisture." I love the dramatization of that guitar solo. I'd love to look and play like the kickass Jughead/Derek Bailey-looking spacetronaut guitarist. Unfortunately, I'll have to settle on pudgy, mediocre bass player.
As far as intensely creepy goes, here's "Hello Skinny" just for kicks:
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3 comments:
First of all, you have to get your "word verification" under control. My characters I need to type to comment here are, approximately, "xhumdhlm." I mean, seriously.
Today, the third last day of the school year, one of my students said: "You're not like the other teachers here. You actually like me." I replied, "Oh, I don't know about that. I don't like you either." I thought he was gonna cry, so the joke kind of failed. Anyway, I thought of that with your "pudgy, mediocre bass player" bit, there, and was tempted just to comment "You're not pudgy." But then you might cry. I need to quit making jokes.
Wow, Kelly. Don't you teach third grade? I know of about 4 of my sophomores that I could say that to and get away with it. Two would have loved it and often attempted to provoke me into cruel humor. I have to use this judiciously around Amy. (I haven't posted for a while because we had to get married and stuff.)
My grandpa, the minister, gave me four things: a sometimes bitter sense of humor, an unfortunate love of puns, a love of books, and a retreating hairline.
Keep making the jokes. Please keep making the jokes.
I teach kindergarten and sixth grade. It was a sixth grader, and I guess I misjudged him a bit. Sometimes it's hard to tell on what slender thread their self-esteem is hung -- occasionally, it's that you (and only you) talk video games and anime to them between classes.
I think Michelle just floats above my "humor."
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