Tag Archives: music

Video Fridays: Bon Iver, Auto-Tune

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If you’re as old as me, and you remember the ubiquitous commercials for Memorex cassette tapes, you’ll remember the company’s tag line: Is it live, or is it Memorex?

The claim was that their tapes were so good you wouldn’t be able to tell a live performance from a recording if you were blindfolded.

Anyway, I thought of that old ad copy when I saw a video at Pitchfork of Bon Iver‘s Justin Vernon performing with The Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

When it comes to music, as I’ve written before, I’m often very late to the party, so I admit that it’s a bit ridiculous that, when Justin Vernon first put his mouth to the microphone and out came this vocal drenched in Auto-Tune, I was seriously taken aback.

The debate’s been raging for quite some time (just Google a while, you’ll see) as to the artistic legitimacy of this technology, a technology that can both correct bad singing or digitally embellish a vocal to create sounds that would be impossible to recreate without it. But, I’m pretty sure that this is the first time I’ve ever seen Auto-Tune used in a live performance, and I have to say that I have really mixed feelings about it.

On one hand, it seems like it’s no different than a tremolo bar or Wah-Wah pedal or a thousand other electronic effects for an electric guitar. It’s just another tool in a musician’s tool box, and it can be used well or used poorly or overused, depending on the quality of the artist using it.

On the other hand, in a live setting it just seems odd. That’s it. Not wrong, just odd.

The truth is, there’s no doubt that Justin Vernon is a talented vocalist, and there’s a wonderful video of him singing a cappella with two of his mates to prove it. At the same time, I had no problem falling in love with his Auto-Tune-heavy song Woods, as I wrote in June 2011.

For now, I’ll leave it up to you. Here’s the clip from Fallon, an extended version of the Bon Iver song Perth.

Monday Morning Chillin’ With Fruit Bats

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You know, this whole social media “sharing” thing is a mixed bag, most of the time you have to sift through all this stuff people feel is worth sharing, separating the crap from the gems, but occasionally the gems are so totally worth it.

This morning I came upon this tweet by a longtime favorite musician of mine, Aimee Mann…

…I immediately fired up Spotify and now I can’t thank Aimee Mann enough for turning me on to this great album by Fruit Bats.

As I then explored some of their earlier music, I have to admit that I tended to agree with some detractors who found that Fruit Bats sounded too similar to The Shins, another band I like a lot, to be overly interesting, even though I’ve known about and loved their 2003 single When U Love Somebody for a while now.

But as I made my way through their catalog, I started picking up on their particular vibe, the really, REALLY good songwriting by frontman Eric Johnson (who, ironically, was a member of The Shins for a while), the nice blend of folk-rock and pop that they spin, they’ve evolved nicely, sounding more and more unique, and by their 2011 album Tripper I no longer see any point in the comparisons with The Shins.

Anyway, here’s a great song from Tripper via KEXP.org:

Video Fridays: A Change Is Gonna Come

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This morning, when I stumbled upon an unusual clip at Paste of Lou Reed performing the Sam Cooke classic A Change Is Gonna Come, I really, really did want to like it.

I’ve been a Lou Reed fan for years, including his Velvet Underground days, and I’ve known about his love for early Rock & Roll and soul music from his discussion with Elvis Costello on Elvis’s show Spectacle. And yet, despite a stellar performance by a very good backing band, despite the fact that I got a kick out of Lou reading the lyrics off of an iPad, occasionally scrolling and pinching a zooming, I just couldn’t abide his vocals for this particular song.

Now, I’m not a snob who thinks that all vocals have to be pretty (I’m a HUGE Bob Dylan fan, nuff said), and I can see that Lou really feels the emotional intensity of the song. But, A Change Is Gonna Come is so special to me because of Sam Cooke’s gorgeous, soaring vocal delivery, and Lou’s voice just doesn’t work here.

Please do go and check out Lou’s version, because if you’re a music geek like me it’s still TOTALLY worth it from an academic standpoint. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d post a version of A Change Is Gonna Come by someone other than Sam Cooke that I think does work.

In fact, it works in a big, BIG way.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the incomparable Al Green:

Video Fridays: Yeah Yeah Yeahs

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For this installment of Video Fridays, I was inspired by a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, their 2003 debut hit Maps, a song that I’ve loved for a while, but then I saw the following live acoustic version and it knocked my socks off all over again.

I thought it would be interesting to post both the acoustic and the original electric versions here for comparison’s sake, but it took some time for me to decide in which order to post them. Ultimately, since one of the pleasures of hearing an acoustic version of an electric song that you know well is noticing the differences — how the instrument choices, playing technique, and in this case the vocal delivery are changed to suit the arrangement — I figured I’d start out with the original for the sake of anyone who isn’t familiar with the song.

There are two notable things about this video:

  1. The story goes that Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer/songwriter Karen O wrote the song for her then-boyfriend Angus (Maps is an acronym for My Angus Please Stay), at a time when the relationship was on the verge of breaking up, and on the day they shot the video Angus was supposed to be there, he was three hours late, Karen went ahead with the performance, not knowing whether he’d show up or not, and the result is incredibly moving. It seems at the beginning that she has her eyes fixed on the back of the room, still hoping Angus would arrive, she tries to carry on but you can see it’s a struggle, holding on to the microphone as if it was a lifeline, and then, at around the 2:50 mark, she’s overcome and the tears are real. Just.Wow.
  2. Musically, drummer Brian Chase’s syncopated beat is trance-inducing and he brings some awesome power to the crescendos; and guitarist Nick Zinner is frickin’ amazing, building an incredibly lush sound that makes you forget that it’s just him and that there’s no bass player.

And at last, the acoustic version, which doesn’t require nearly as much of an explanation. Nick Zinner plays a sweet-sounding Martin guitar, adapting the main power riff into a beautiful, gentle arpeggio, and Karen delivers a subdued, melancholic vocal, still full of sadness, but also a touch of resignation and even acceptance that Angus is never coming back.

Wilco Meets The Flaming Lips!!!

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Anyone who has been reading Fish & Bicycles for a while will know that I’ve blogged multiple times about my two favorite bands: Wilco and The Flaming Lips.

What, then, could be better than the two bands coming together…at least in part?!

Not much.

Well, until today, it was just one music geek’s dream, but this morning The Flaming Lips tweeted a video from their 2012 New Year’s Eve Freakout, wherein, joined by Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, they kick out a 17-minute long, brain-melting cover of The Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road nugget I Want You (She’s So Heavy).

Just be warned, this really will melt your brain, so make sure that there’s nothing important or particularly brain-dependent that you have to do when the 17 minutes is up.

Now, just in case you were left wanting more from the rest of Wilco, I thought it fitting to include another video released today, and while it won’t necessarily melt your brain, it certainly is it’s own kind of freaky, with the band appearing in a Popeye cartoon.

Via Pitchfork:

The Question of Celebrity Obligation

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The Argument is legendary amongst a circle of friends I’ve been lucky enough to know since grade school. We’re all from New Jersey, where arguing is a pastime rather than a friendship-threatening conflict, we’re all very passionate about music, the arts in general, politically several shades of liberal, from far-left to center-left, and The Argument has resurfaced many times over nearly 30 years.

But the instance of The Argument that I remember most vividly took place sometime in the late 1980s, in our favorite pizzeria, Taverna Della Pizzeria in Spotswood, NJ, and it started when someone asserted the opinion that Bob Dylan, over the course of his long, illustrious career, should have leveraged his celebrity more to support important social causes; that he abandoned his activist roots and the legacy of his hero Woody Guthrie to be just another vain rock star celebrity.

This position was strenuously attacked by another from the group, who argued that it is actually oppressive to musicians, actors, dancers, painters, etc., to demand that they have any obligation to anything other than the pursuit of their art; that once you impose any “shoulds” on them you are interfering with the free flow of their creative expression.

Over the years, The Argument expanded beyond Dylan, to include pretty much every other form of celebrity, but when I read this morning that Dylan has authorized the use of his music for a just-released 4-CD set of covers, by 80 artists of 75 of his songs, with proceeds going to Amnesty International, memories of The Argument came rushing back, and I found myself jumping to Bob’s defense.

While it certainly is true that Dylan abruptly abandoned his activism roughly around the time he abandoned purist folk music in the mid 1960s, it is not at all accurate to argue that he abandoned it entirely or forever.

After his famed 1966 motorcycle accident, which I wrote about back in November, and which seemed to wake him up from an intoxicating celebrity binge, the first live appearance he made in twenty months was for a Woody Guthrie memorial concert, clear proof that he still valued the protest tradition. The photo I include here is from three years later, at the 1971 Concert For Bangladesh, later that year he recorded a song mourning the death of Black Panther George Jackson, and four years later he recorded the song Hurricane, a passionate defense of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whom he felt was wrongly imprisoned on murder charges.

In the years since, Dylan has appeared at other benefit concerts, lent his songs to benefit albums, and now we have the Amnesty International collection, which will raise thousands and thousands of badly needed dollars for an essential civil rights advocacy organization.

As for the broader topic, whether or not celebrities have an obligation to use their fame for good, I’m inclined to see valid points from both sides of The Argument. The idea that they need to “give something back” is overly simplistic, and it really doesn’t work, as they’ve already given of themselves via the production of their work. Personally, I treasure the work of artists, much of which has meant so much to me over the years that I can’t imagine a world without it. These are true gifts, regardless of the financial rewards earned by their creators.

Additionally, I do believe that it’s important for creative freedom and development to not put artists into confining boxes, demanding specifics from them, but I do admire artists who do add their voices to worthy causes.