The Fermi paradox is brutal and sad. Civilizations in the Milky Way more advanced than us us seem vanishingly unlikely. The Milky Way galaxy is only 90,000 light years across. So any civilization that managed to reach our level on a planet orbiting one of the Milky Way’s 100M+ stars more than a million years ago has had more than enough time to spread across our galaxy. Which inexorably leads to the only good explanation for why nobody’s contacted us:
Stardate 10,000,000 BCE, alien Elon Musk: “I’m going to take my quadrillion credits and develop a self-replicating fleet of probes that will spread to all the stars in the Milky Way looking for biosignatures of life, which will then wait for techno signatures from each developing civilization. I need to bring the fruits of my vast intellect and insights on how civilization should be organized to every corner of our galaxy that harbors life.” Stardate 9,999,990 BCE, alien Elon Musk: “Unfortunately I lost all my credits after purchasing the Zqitter social media network, and have canceled the program.”
Great to see Jack Stratton acknowledging the Titans of funk R&B, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards (RIP) of CHIC, in his Don’t Steal This Groove music production video. He recreates their chucking guitar sound and clear bass.
But I’ve been listening to Sister Sledge (try “Thinking of You” (below) and “You Fooled Around” before playing their hits) and… CHIC is on another level. Tony Thompson (RIP) is a rock drummer beast that Nile and ‘Nard kept on a tight leash, his feel can’t be matched by a drum machine, then they often brought in Sammy Figueroa on percussion (the tubular bells on “I Want Your Love“, the sleighbells on “You Fooled Around”, the congas on “Thinking of You”!!). Rob Sabino’s sparkling piano is š on all those tracks and of course the killer “Spacer“; the piano fills on Vulfpeck’s “Disco Ulysses” are a sweet homage). Then CHIC could hand the chords to Nile’s rhythm guitar OR Ray Jones/Andy Schwartz on electric piano OR the neutron bomb weapon, the CHIC strings. And behind the lead singer, the twin female singers and the unheralded Fonzi Thornton singing those insistent choruses. As football commenters say, “So. Many. Weapons.” All while leaving more space than today’s 100+-track stems on a DAW, with that fabulous honeyed warm sound.
Another couple of days in the studio in 1979, god-tier results
On Sister Sledge’s Love Somebody Today album, Kathy Sledge’s great vocal on “You Fooled Around” is followed by “I’m a Good Girl” with a sensational great vocal performance by Joni Sledge. The way Nile Rodgers’ guitar tracks and interplays with their vocals is sublime.
I’m not pulling a tired “Today’s music cRap get off my lawn!” Vulfpeck isn’t just slavishly copying old school, they’re making their own good music; “Vulfpeck Live at Madison Square Gardens” is one of the greatest live show videos of all time. But, folks, listen to the people who inspired them. There’s gold in them thar vinyls.
Video now consumes most Internet bandwidth. But video is terrible for imparting information about… stuff on web pages, or for teaching me about music.
Videos that scroll through web pages
Forget about scrolling that PDF down to read the next paragraph, this is a 2020s video, not 1990s interactive multimedia
It is nuts that in order to read about, say AI news, I watch 12-minute videos wherein a good commenter like AI-Explained or Yannic Kilcher talks about recent announcements WHILE I WATCH THEM SCROLL UP AND DOWN through Xitter threads, other web pages, and PDFs. It’s a colossal non-interactive waste of bandwidth. What happened to multimedia apps?! I should visit their site and view their web page “2023-12-07 AI News.” As they talk (or as I scroll through their text), the different URLs appear in a nested frame. They can still highlight bits of text, but at any time I should be able to pause and read the source web page. Instead I have to pause the video, load the URL in another window, scroll to the text that the video presented, continue reading, then return to the video. And/or, what happened to the various attempts decades ago to let people annotate arbitrary web pages, so that I could go on a guided tour of the various URLs and read the commentator’s take on each one? We have far more powerful interactive capabilities in web pages, but they’re only exposed in closed apps and (as I understand it) web sites like Brilliant.
Music is multimedia ā nope, it’s more video
Forget about an Illustrated, Interactive Musical Exploration 30 years later, but you can watch a non-interactive video instead
Similarly, I can’t enjoy an interactive analysis of a music track, I have to watch a video about it. When Adam Neely or Rick Beato talk about a piece of music, I should be able to seamlessly jump from them talking about a particular riff or chord to hearing it, or vice versa: as the track plays, their video and transcript jump to the relevant part of their commentary, and when they say “diminished B-flat over F sus,” I can pop up the music notation of the chord on a staff and click a play button. Years ago you could enjoy interactive multimedia explorations of Beethoven and opera made possible by multimedia authoring tools like Macromind Director. Now you have to start and stop a video and manually synchronize your own playback of the music. And imagine if, as the expert discuss chords, there’s an on-screen keyboard showing the notes that you can play. I guarantee there were multimedia CD-ROM apps that let you do this in the 1990s; an article about the Microsoft Home multimedia title shown above says
Multimedia Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony is the first of the titles to be available under the Microsoft-Voyager agreement. The package uses a mixture of sound, text and graphics and the user can delve into sections of the four movements of Beethovenās Ninth Symphony, explore Beethovenās life … have an in-depth look at the musical architecture of the symphony or review a measure-by-measure commentary.
30 years later, we have computer a million times faster and much of the creative output of humanity digitized and available online through high-bandwidth connections, and we’re stuck watching VHS tapes, but with faster rewind and fast-forward.
Technical solutions got steamrollered by the easy monetization of YouTube videos constantly interrupted by ads.
If only publishing thoughts and images to your own web site had gotten as easy and good-looking before posting to social media sites took over; and Google had stuck with RSS readers and the iGoogle home page; and a federated identity program like Mozilla Persona had taken off (instead of having to create a login to each site); and search engines did a better job of indexing trackbacks/backlinks/pingbacks; and an easy way to identify your public and private posts (restricted to a particular group) had been established. Then Denny would have written this on his blog, I would have seen it on my iGoogle home page or feed, I would have replied on his site or written a follow-up post on my site (I did, this one, but Facebook will never acknowledge it), and search engines would notice and promote the interlinking because that’s the very essence of A WEB.
I kept hoping it would happen, I kept hoping ISPs would offer basic web hosting instead of leaving it up to commercial ad-supported sites, I hoped that when Google+ (circles!) failed, Google would have fallen back to heavily promoting the open web to fight the rise of Facebook, then Snapchat, then Instagram, then TikTok, …
Coulda, shoulda, woulda. Thanks to anyone who still comes to personal web sites like this one!
Hey cunning linguists, what’s the German word for “Fear of buying something new because that would still leave you with the old thing that kind of works as well and it’s not eco to just throw it out so you try selling it for a nominal amount on Craigslist but all you get are incoherent replies from flakes trying to put food on the table by buying lots of stuff low and selling higher, so then you try giving it away on Craigslist and Facebook and you get some sweet housebound invalid who says they’ll come in a week but nothing happens, but you know if you take it to Goodwill they will toss it in a huge cardboard box of other goods and it will probably end up in a landfill, so you’ll wind up stacking it in the garage with all the other stuff that’s hard to get rid of and it’s easier just to not buy the new thing.” It’s not neophobia (fear of new things), it’s hassle of dealing with the replaced stuff responsibly. Surely more creative languages have a neologism for this?
I looked for the word and I mostly found articles like “Why we always want to buy new stuff.” Who are these people?! We’re living with a 5-year-old TV streamer that reboots regularly, a 10-year-old TV with the CBS logo burned into the corner, a 15-year-old vacuum you have to turn over and jiggle to unplug attachments, a 20-year-old microwave that can barely warm a Hot Pocket, chipped plates, etc. They were all premium, expensive products in their day. It would be nice to have the new shiny improved model, but not if it’s going to leave the old thing.
“Now and Then” is sweet and has a good backstory, but this is not the last Beatles song.
2024: Sean Lennon finds a tape of his dad whistling a fragmentary tune and muttering a few lines. The remaining Beatles and Giles Martin run it through AI trained on John Lennon’s music that hallucinates the rest of the melody and harmonies, and then has another AI sing John’s vocals in his voice. (These AI voice impersonations already exist, but it seems the YouTube videos of the ones I found when I blogged about AI music have been taken down due to copyright claims, and when I search for “AI generated John Lennon voice”, of course I get thousands of news stories about this official song.)
2027: the Beatles run a population of AIs in virtual reality that are exposed to skiffle music, post-war hardship in Liverpool, and family tragedy, and develop into virtual John Lennons and George Harrisons. The remaining Beatles and Giles Martin select the virtual John and George that produce the best Beatle-esque songs and performances, expose them to recent events, have them chat with actual Paul and Ringo, then prompt them to write new songs. (Large language models can already generate do-re-mi melodies, chord notation, and/or sequences of pitch and duration numbers.)
2030: everyone who wants to has their own set of John, Paul, George, and Ringo neural weights to write songs for them.
The Fearless Flyers Live in Europe joins the triumvirate, the Holy Trinity of low-volume mostly instrumental handheld-camera concert videos: CORY WONG // LIVE IN MPLS // 9 FEB 2019, Vulfpeck Live at Madison Square Garden, and now this. Hmm, what could be the common element? Hardest working man in show business in 4th position, Cory Wong! They’re all so entertaining to watch, I really should hook up a proper stereo or at least active speakers or a soundbar to our TV.
The real find for me is Mark Lettieri‘s solos (on the “Medium Guitar,” no less). On “Bank Account” 15:09 and “Magnetar Jam” 1:11:08 he reminds me of Nile Rodgers’s post-disco soloing on “So Fine“, plus some of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s more out-there solos with the Doobie Brothers, e.g. “Livin’ on the Fault Line“. And the end of the former is a total Chic homage, while the dual drummers recall the Doobies’ Keith Knudsen and John Hartman (RIP).
Louis Cole live too!
The second drummer joining the Fearless Flyers’ Nate Smith on “Bank Account” is the excellent Louis Cole, who has also made some great live videos, especially of the song “Thinking” by his group Knower. The “Thinking (live sesh)” home recording (literally, musicians playing in the hall, on the stairs, on the outside deck, on top of an oven in the kitchen) is a lot of fun, then he has great orchestrations of the same song with the Norbotten big band, the WDR Big Band (video of the latter has vanished š¢), and other groups. Anyone who says music today sucks is lazy!
Someone said something that reminded me of a lyric, turns out it was from a 10cc song. They’re still famous for “I’m Not in Love,” a song so immaculately crafted that I unwillingly succumbed to its overwraught bathos (pathos? mythos?). It was number 1 in listener polls of “Greatest pop song ever” for years in the UK. But it overshadows the fact that they were four excellent songwriters, four talented musicians, and four decent vocalists who recorded some excellent pop-rock songs.
Their back story is interesting. I knew that Kevin Godley and Lol Creme went on to make lots of music videos. I had no idea that before 10cc the group wrote (as Hotlegs) the intentionally inept worldwide hit “I’m a Neanderthal Man” (one line repeated endlessly), or that one of them wrote some great hits for the Yardbirds and Hollies. We’re lucky that four musicians from the minor industrial town of Stockport in the UK found each other.
Many excellent songs
Their eponymous album 10cc had the minor hit “Donna”, and the “Jailhouse Rock meets pub pop-rock” pastiche “Rubber Bullets”. But they really hit their stride with their next album.
great cover, great album
Not only does Sheet Music (1974) have a great Hipgnosis cover, it’s a great pop-rock album! It’s a mix of heavy songs and light songs, ably crafted with lots going on and a cynical outlook. “The Wall Street Shuffle,” “The Worst Band in the World,” and “Silly Love” all have real lyrical and melodic bite, and have stimulating shifts in tone between different sections. The faux “On de’ ub’er side ob’ de’ island” patois in some songs is embarrassing, but the songs reference colonialism, arms sales, exotic tourism, and other topics that were in the zeitgeist 50 years ago and now make less sense. (More on that below.)
“The Sacro-Iliac” has such a sweet refrain, with lovely chord changes as the vocals jump into falsetto territory. Read the lyrics to see how three of the band hand off the vocal duties. There are other treats, like this lyric shift that spans two different sections in “Somewhere in Hollywood”:
He’s armed and he’s dangerous- -ly Close was the weather when I was a kid
10cc weren’t perfect. They’re “just” really good, but not great songwriters, or singers, or soloists. The keyboard playing isn’t great (but the guitars are solidly inventive; Godley and Creme left to make a triple-LP concept album to promote their Gizmotron mechanical guitar bowing device). The drums and percussion are varied (lots of tuned wooden blocks) but the band doesn’t swing or groove; “The Sacro-iliac” is indirectly about that. The sonics and musical arrangements are nothing special (they chased the pristine perfection of the likewise cynical and highly-crafted pop rock of their contemporaries Steely Dan when they reunited in 1992 to record …Meanwhile with Steely Dan’s legendary producer Gary Katz).
I’m Mandy, fly me
“I’m Mandy, Fly Me” (1976) is probably their masterpiece, with many sections and moods and sound effects. It starts by quoting an earlier song off Sheet Music, “Clockwork Creep” told from the point of view of a bomb on an airplane (!! the 1970s weren’t a happy time in many ways). Again, there are some gorgeous motifs and harmony with the rest of the band; when Eric Stewart sings:
I’ve often heard her jingle It’s never struck a CHORD
, you know the melody is going to jump up and the others will join to sing a chord in perfect harmony, and they do. It’s trite, but it works so well.
There’s a drifting section that elliptically refers to a plane crash, a shimmering acoustic guitar break reminiscent of “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” and another pop song I can’t remember, it’s interspersed with a couple of strong electric guitar solos; the second guitar solo ends in a wordless vocal harmony straight out of Yes’ “Yours is No Disgrace.” Then it turns even more dreamlike as the narrator is or isn’t rescued by Mandy’s kiss of life “Just like the girl in Doctor No, No No No,” and finally he’s back on the street looking at the airline poster. The journey in the lyrics and the musical journey fit so well; the background of the song (read the Wikipedia article and this one) is fascinating. And it reached #6 in the charts!
Complicated pop songs
Rick Beato and nearly every old person in YouTube comments is frustrated by the machined simplicity of today’s pop songs. It’s boring and lazy to decry “today’s music” when there are more talented musicians making music than ever before (I’m partial to Vulfpeck, Cory Wong, Yvette Young, Polyphia, Matteo Mancuso, …). But when it comes to pop music with vocals, despite half-a-dozen credited songwriters there isn’t much going on musically in most hit pop songs beyond intense sonic production.
In the 1970s all non-classical musical artists worked under the Olympian overhang of the Beatles. Many responded by going beyond the constraints of pop and rock: Yes were making complicated long progressive rock masterpieces starting around 1971, other groups advanced genres less explored by the Beatles including hard funk and jazz fusion. Meanwhile more mainstream pop and rock artists responded by making more elaborate songs while still riffing on rock and roll sounds and influences. An early example is Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (1969), then in the mid-1970s there were a lot of complex pop songs in the charts. Wings’ “Band on the Run” (1974, recorded 1973) is the one we all remember, but I recall Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” (1973, 11 minutes long!) and of course the sui generis “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975) from Queen. 10cc were right in the middle of this.
The harmonies are Beatles-esque, the bass is often reminiscent of Paul McCartney… turns out McCartney recorded at 10cc’s studio and one member (Eric Stewart) later composed and produced with him.
Pastiche and Queen
The later 10cc song “`The Things We Do for Love`” (1976) was surely influenced by Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” (1975). 10cc and Queen were both pastiche acts more committed to “the bit” than a particular approach to songwriting. Somehow I find Queen’s lack of commitment and direction (apart from the sensational “Now I’m Here“) more irritating than some guys trying to make good records without the histrionics. And 10cc even nod to the synthetic nature of making yet more pop-rock songs, decades into the form:
[Verse 3: Kevin Godley & Eric Stewart] Well he’s been up all night Breakin’ his head in two to write A little sonnet for his chickadee But between you and me I think it’s
Genius is my favorite crowd-sourced annotated lyrics site (I contribute, I wrote about scanning lyrics), but it’s hit-or-miss at explaining references in older songs; Genius started with rap, and its volunteers only fitfully annotate old songs. It’s easy to laugh at leaden explanations of lyrics like “Cristal is an expensive champagne,” but in 50 years they’ll be essential to understanding references in today’s songs. Eventually I hope people will explain references like “a Panzer division to chauffeur you home” in a 10cc song.
Of course the ^&%$#@! web search result spammers are on the case screwing up the web for everyone, creating web sites full of pages that claim they explain songs but are completely devoid of content beyond an invitation to “contribute” or “discuss with the community.” Like this one (I won’t deign to promote it with a link), that at first seems it will be great:
Discover the poetic beauty in āIām Mandy, Fly Meā by 10cc. This lyric breakdown takes you on a journey through the artistās thoughts, emotions, and the story they aim to tell. From clever metaphors to evocative imagery, we delve into the nuances that make this song a lyrical masterpiece… <lyrics follow> NO DELVING, NO CONTENT š”
F*** you, “sound recording-history” web site!
Music newspapers and magazines used to have long interviews with musicians discussing their latest records; it would be great to link these with songs and lyrics. Rock’s Backpages is a site that has many of these interviews and articles; I should pay for a subscription. What I really hope is some rock star or rock-loving tech millionaire will buy it out and make all that information freely available to the world. Music matters!
There was a Firefox add-on that told web sites “I’m Google’s web crawler” so you’d see what they want Google to index. Now I can’t find it amongst dozens of add-ons in search results for “bypass” and “paywall.”
Give up and run lynx in a terminal.
I feel bad doing this, and a little less bad for running uBlock Origin to disable ads. I subscribe to the Guardian, Washington Post, New Yorker, probably others I’ve forgotten about, donate to PBS, contributed to LWN and Phoronix years ago, … but it’s not enough. I wish the 1990s idea (by David Chaum?) of the cursor changing to a Ā¢ when you hover over a link, then you pay $.15Ā¢ or so to read the article had taken off. Imagine getting hacked though!
Nuala as a puppyNuala at 2 years (already going gray)
The original title…
For years in my mind this obituary was titled “Angry lesbian bitch.” Shortly after we adopted Nuala, a group of teenage boys stayed with us and learned that if you lightly poked her, she would make a cute ‘Rrrr’ noise. This was great, but it taught her to loudly growl when objecting to any circumstance not going her way, and that to actually warn anyone to back off, she had to bark as if she was about to maul someone.
Dog-bed humper!
People always identified Nuala as a male dog (and Timmy as the girl), since she lacked all conventional feminine qualities. She was very vocal about what she wanted and didn’t want, and she was tough as nails. Sometimes when she got excited she would bite her pillow and hump it just like a male dog. And she loved, loved several women. When one of them departed, for days she would sniff every SUV parked on the street in case it was her car. Another female couple would send us presents and Nuala would be giddily excited, sniffing the box, scratching it open, then weeks later still sniffing the empty box for that reverie of her paramour. I asked these beloved to rub napkins on their armpits or other naughty bits and send them to us; is this ridiculously creepy or an easy way with no downside to make an animal blissfully happy?
Proust’s madeleine has nothing on smelling a package from a beloved woman
A dog with 5? 6? 7? lives
Twelve or thirteen is “a good age” for a dog. As she soldiered on past 15 and 16, Nuala declined both steadily and in jolts. She developed pancreatitis and was very sick, but rallied. Then several times over three months she woke up screaming in pain, and could not be comforted for minutes that seemed like hours: whether it was from muscle cramps, a pinched nerve, a waking nightmare, … we never knew. Then over a harrowing 7-day period she threw up all night, threw up anti-nausea medication, and finally settled down after an anti-nausea injection at the emergency vet; then she refused to eat for days. We thought for sure this was it, but vitamin B injections administered by nurse Mom and cortisone pills brought her back. Every time she was diminished: less vision, worse hearing, stiffer; she would fall going downstairs and fall going upstairs, then would fall if you accidentally tugged on her leash (and she never complained). Increasingly I had to carry her on walks, but then she’d trot back home knowing treats were waiting, and show off:
Fetch ball/rope/leash!
And age and infirmity sanded away most of her angry lesbian personality, leaving a smooth worn nub; a soft feeble creature experiencing mere existence but without language to rue her diminishment. (As ever, Henry Beston’s insanely great words on “lesser” animals apply: “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”) With every setback we wondered “Is this the end? Is it fair to keep her around?” But then Nuala would briefly play with Timmy, or bark and wag her tail trying to find a treat on the floor, and the questions would recede. Finally, after two sleepless nights of intestinal trouble in one week we decided to end her life.
Peace at last
Goodbye Nuala, former angry lesbian bitch.
The awe-full responsibility over another’s life
Some of you reading this will be dismayed: “For months you kept alive a dog that couldn’t see, hear, or walk well, fell over, was repeatedly sick past her stomach, and was barely conscious of what’s going on.” Others will be equally dismayed: “You killed a dog who clearly enjoyed treats and seemed content despite her increasing woes.” That’s fine; I have no problem with people imagining what they would do in our hard situation. Try not to judge our decision. You weren’t living with her, you have no idea what it was like. But I won’t sugarcoat it, it was hard to make that irrevocable decision. The video above of Nuala merrily bouncing around performing tricks to get treats was taken hours after we’d scheduled the final appointment with our vet. Jameson’s law, the insight of the great sage, was unyielding:
If you want to be sure you’re doing the right thing, just keep on doing what you’re doing until you can’t stand it any longer.
Jameson, Esq., circa 1982
We could withstand Nuala’s decline, therefore we couldn’t be sure we were making the right decision; we made it anyway.
Itās an awesome terrible power to wield over another, but I fervently hope someone does it to me when Iām near my end. It is utterly inhumane that we donāt extend the same dignity in death to ourselves that we do to our companion animals.
When I don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who you are, I want you to pull the plug!
