Sorry there wasn’t a Music Monday last week. I’ve been working a lot on a project at work and I had zero time to write, or sleep, or anything. But now that it’s done, on to the music. Let’s start off with 5 songs that sound like each other:

Garbage - Cherry Lips
Stone Temple Pilots - Big Bang Baby
Nikka Costa - Everybody’s Got Their Something
Better than Ezra - Juicy
David Schwartz - I get up

There are slight variations in the sequence but they’re still oddly similar. Am I missing something? Are they all paying tribute to some great song I don’t know about? Is it some subconscious thing? Whaaat’s going OOoon? I can understand the last one by David Schwartz, it’s for the show Arrested Development, and since the song opened with Everybody’s Got Their Something they needed something similar.

There’s been a lot of talk about the upcoming death of the RIAA given that Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Madonna left their traditional labels. It’s been reported that Radiohead’s In Rainbows sold about 1.2 million copies at an average price of $8. It’s great these guys are trying new things but I wonder how long they’ll like being without a label deal. Let’s face it, you cannot be as famous as Radiohead is without a label promoting your music. Any indie band, no matter how good it is, will never be able to pull these kinds of numbers. Thom Yorke has talked about the leaving the “decaying business model”, but come on! They’re still capitalizing on the fame their label got them. And they still did the same shit the RIAA does - making fans pay for music more than once. Initially they didn’t tell anyone they would also release the album as a CD, so anyone who wants a high quality recording will have to pay for it again.

It kinda sucks that only big names can leave their labels successfully. I used to listen a lot to VAST. Once Jon Crosby left his record deal I lost track of his latest stuff. By the way, I found an awesome video of Touched that uses footage from Equilibrium, it’s ridiculously better than the original.

I’m still waiting for the next big artist to be fully independent and right now it looks like it’s Jonathan Coulton of all people. And his success is fueled by the fact that he releases his music under Creative Commons license. He says he makes just enough from MP3 to make a living, but Valve asked him to write a song for their game Portal. How cool is that? Unfortunately it looks like the mp3 for that is only going to be available via Steam, sometime in the future.

There is a Bleach Musical. W… T… F?

Another song that has stuck with me for about a year: Kirei na Kanjou by Akino Arai. It sits at position #3 on the all-time playcount right behind La Ritournelle. I have no idea how I started listening to her, but I’m a huge fan and several people have asked me for her stuff upon listening. Her voice resonates with me for some reason. As it turns out, this song is the ending theme for the anime Noir, so I was able to find it on YouTube.

On the Mexican music front, I want to share the song Chilanga Banda by Cafe Tacuba. It’s originally by Jaime López, and 90% of the words start with “ch” and it’s mostly Mexico City slang. (lyrics here). We Mexicans love the ch sound (Chile, Chilango, Chinga tu madre, for example). Don’t ask me what the lyrics mean, cause I have no chingada idea.

And lastly, I’m going to start linking to Amazon’s MP3 store for any songs in here that are available to buy. That way if you like something you can get it legally and I don’t get in trouble. Yay! Cake for everyone!

I’ve been trying to figure out how to type Japanese characters for about a week now. The top search results on google didn’t work for me, but I finally figured it out, and the solution comes from Microsoft. I don’t know why this isn’t the first search result. I got halfway there, but the key for me was making sure that “Microsoft IME Standard” is the only input option for Japanese. I can now type Japanese characters in notepad at least. It’s useful if you set up keyboard shortcuts to change language.

Read:
Installing and Using IME
Language Keyboard Shortcuts

I’ve always hated Japanese rock groups that sing in very low voices with extreme vibrato - it’s a rock song, not a freaking opera. L’Arc～en～Ciel has been one of the worst offenders and I’ve resisted listening to them for a long time, but they finally got me with My Heart Draws A Dream. I’ve been listening to that song over and over, trying not to think about the shame of being reeled in like some trout. I think I like it because for some reason it reminds me of listening to Miguel Bose songs when I was a kid - random, I know.

I’ve been thinking about the reasons why people like songs (besides a real interest in the musical quality of a song). I’ve come up with four so far:

Peer Pressure: you want to be able to talk about music with our friends. It’s 100% the reason why I started listening to Green Day when Dookie came out.
Saturation: A song keeps playing on the radio over and over and over. It’s the only possible explanation for Britney Spears and Rhianna’s Umbrella.
Memory Road: A song might remind you of something. I hated, hated Seven Mary Three’s Cumbersome, but now I kinda like it because it reminds me of high school.
Nonconformity: you want to listen to what others aren’t. I’m guilty of this, for a long time I felt very proud that I listened to obscure stuff, how douchy of me. To this day I hate Zach Braff for the Garden State soundtrack. “Oh, it’s that song from Garden State!” *CRINGE*.

None of these reasons can explain why anyone can listen to Creed and Nickelback. These people just plainly suck and have no soul.

New Rule: It’s ok to be a music snob, but if you don’t play any instruments and have no concept of music theory, you’re not cool, you’re just a pretentious asshole.

I want to introduce you to a song that I’ve been listening to for a year straight - Sebastien Tellier’s La Ritournelle. It’s pretty impressive that this song hasn’t gotten old for me yet. I was listening the Ministry of Sound - Chillout Sessions cd and this song came up when I was halfway asleep. Usually chords are looped in fours, but what got to me was that this one has them grouped in fives. It’s a little bit awkward at first but as you listen it makes sense. I listen to a different mix than what I’ve posted (here’s the closest thing) - on the one I listen to the song builds and builds and the lyrics don’t come in until 2:12 and end at 3:00. It’s an interesting decision and that’s why I love it.

This song by Hayashi Miki… can’t… stop… watching… song… stuck… in… head. It was written by Yasuharu Konishi, who was part of Pizzicato Five. It would have been better as a Pizzicato Five song. This singer doesn’t have much talent but still…. song… stuck… in… brain. By the way, from the P5 wikipedia entry: “The catchphrase ‘A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular’ captured the group’s ironic stance and eager attitude.” What the hell? “A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular” is the name of a Hooverphonic CD. Someone’s plagiarizing someone here.

It’s a little bit weird that I write a lot about Japanese music since I’m sooo Mexican (ah, the wonders of globalization). Therefore I’m going to write a little bit about Mexican music from now on. I’d like to introduce you to the song Amores Perros by Julieta Venegas. It’s one of those songs that has stuck with me for years. Please enjoy.

Instructions: Write the romanization of the phrase above (I got the romanization from here). When you press enter you’ll move on to the next entry if your answer is correct. If you need help click the hint button.

Bugs: I’m aware of two bugs right now - the blinking cursor doesn’t appear for some reason, and sometimes you’ll get “undefined.” Just refresh the page if you get that error.

I wrote this trainer application because, while I can recognize the symbols by themselves, I’m having problems recognizing hiragana in words. Don’t expect the words to make sense, all this does is put together 5 kana together at random.

Hopefully this is useful for others as well. I’ll be updating this as time goes by, and the code can easily be made into a trainer for katakana. The next step is to start building a word database so that it can be a vocabulary trainer as well.

I’m posting the source files as well. If you make any improvements, please let me know. Please excuse the messy code, I rushed this.

Source Files:
Flash: Here
XML: Here