"Movie star, gonna drive around in a fancy car"

 I have a song in my head and the internet is failing me. 

The line I remember is something very similar to "I'm gonna be a movie star, gonna drive around in a fancy car"

I've made an approximate rendering of the tune here, although it doesn't make sense from a music theory perspective so one or both of the higher notes might be a semitone off.

I remember first hearing this song in childhood (so sometime between 1980 and 1990, although it's possible it's older). I remember the singer as being female. It may have been a song in a cartoon.

I have a vague impression that it's from Jem and the Holograms, but none of the titles on Wikipedia's list of songs from Jem and the Holograms match this song.

 

It is not "Drive my Car" by The Beatles or "I’m Stoned in Love with You" by The Stylistics (or any cover thereof).

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

The French words in Let Me Go by Cake

Ce poste est disponible en français ici.

Every time I hear to the song Let Me Go by Cake, I wonder what the French words spoken under the melody line are saying.

I do understand French, but I'm also lyric deaf, so the music gets in the way of my hearing all the words (in any language).

Every time I wonder this at a time when it's convenient to google, I try to see if anyone on the recorded internet has written down what the French says, and I can never find anyone who has.

So we're going to have to do it ourselves.

Here is Let Me Go by Cake, cued up to the point where the French starts.



Here's what I hear:

"[unintelligible] au contraire [unintelligible] conserver les échantillons [unintelligible] papier, plastique [unintelligible]"

Can you fill in any gaps?

For those who don't speak French:

au contraire = the same as in English: literally "to the contrary", a general indicator of disagreement
conserver les échantillons = keep/store/preserve the samples
papier, plastique = paper, plastic

Adventures in persistent spoonerisms

Chipo[l/t]e 

The first time I ever saw the word chipotle, my mind inverted the T and the L and read it as "chipolte".  Then, after some time, I realized I had it backwards.  So I set a sort of mental flag. Whenever the word came up, I'd tell myself "Wait, you have it backwards, remember to invert those two letters." Then I'd successfully say "chipotle".

However, I didn't realize that I'd cured my spoonerism.  The mental flag persisted.  Whenever I went to say "chipotle" I'd stop and tell myself "Wait, you have it backwards, remember to invert those two letters."  Then I'd say "chipolte".

So then I had to tell myself "Okay, you got this, no need to invert the letters any more."  But it was too late.  I'd gone charging right past "chipotle" back to "chipolte".  So I had to tell myself to invert it again.

This pendulum has swung back and forth over the years, and somehow I've never arrived at the ability to permanently and consistently pronounce or spell "chipotle" correctly. No matter where I am in the cycle, I seem to get it right less than 50% of the time.

I looked it up multiple times while writing this post, and I'm sure I got it wrong at least once.  (Weirdly, spellcheck isn't consistent about when it gives either spelling squiggles.)

Jolelujah 

The internet told me that Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah (link is to the k.d. lang version because that's the one that speaks to me) and Dolly Parton's Jolene can be sung to each other's tunes.

I tried it out, and it turns out they can! The choruses you have to fudge a bit, but the verses work perfectly - and Leonard Cohen's melody really adds a delicious anguish to Dolly Parton's lyrics.

Then I had the idea of a comedic arrangement - the singer starts singing one song and somehow gets lost and ends up in the other, or, perhaps there are two singers trying to upstage each other and getting stuck in each other's songs.

So I was workshopping this in the shower, trying to figure out how the comedic timing worked, and I suddenly lost the ability to sing the verse melody of Jolene.  I tried, but it kept coming out as Hallelujah!

So when I got out of the shower I listened to a recording of Jolene and got that melody back, but then I lost Hallelujah - it kept coming out as Jolene!

Now I can't hold the melody of either song, even when I'm trying to do just one song without any mashups whatsoever.  It keeps changing, it's completely beyond my control, and it never comes out the same way twice!

And, to add insult to injury, it never once comes out with effective comedic timing either!

Jason from Iowa who lived in the last trailer on the right and was born on the 4th of July

The Ani DiFranco song 4th of July, which tells the story of a child she met while driving through Iowa, contains the following lyric:

He says his name is Jason
He lives in the last trailer on the right
And he'll be seven
On the fourth of July

This song is from Ani's 1993 album Puddle Dive, which means that, if Jason is real, he was at least 6 years old in 1993.

That means he's at least 29 years old now.  And every time this song comes up in my playlist, I wonder what happened to him.

Does he still live in the trailer park? Did he get married? Did he have children? Did he join the military and get PTSDed in Iraq? Did he go to university and become a professor of comparative literature? Has he ever heard this song? Does he know it's about him?

Late-breaking story on the CBC

I know this has already been thoroughly commented on in many, many places, but I feel the need to post it here for the record:

The CBC's coverage of the Tragically Hip's final concert was an outstanding example of our public broadcaster meeting the needs of Canadians.

We had a need that could be met with a television broadcast.  But, at the same time, this need was not super compatible with the conventions of television broadcasting.  The format required it to be commercial-free, despite the fact that it was in prime time and had a huge number of viewers.  And it happened to be during the Olympics, for which the CBC held broadcasting rights.  It was of unpredictable duration.  The content would likely contain some swear words.  Canadians abroad needed to be able to see it just as much as Canadians at home.

And the CBC overcame all these obstacles to make it happen, prioritizing the needs of Canadians rather than bureaucratic or penny-pinching requirements or the need to put commercials in front of eyeballs.  They could just as easily (actually, far more easily) have shrugged their shoulders and said "Sorry, we're committed to the Olympics", or "Well, we have to run commercials to earn our keep," or "You can't say 'fuck' on television!" or "Broadcast only available in Canada" and we wouldn't even have noticed. But instead they stepped up, figured out a way to make it work, and served a huge number of Canadians - more than twice the number of Canadians who voted for the winning party in any election in my lifetime!

Many people noticed and appreciated this, and I hope that creates and sustains the political will to give the CBC the resources it needs to keep meeting our needs in the future, even when they don't correspond tidily with the conventions of broadcasting.

Weird Al

From a New Yorker profile of Weird Al:

With his parodic versions of hit songs, this somehow ageless fifty-four-year-old has become popular not because he is immensely clever—though he can be—but because he embodies how many people feel when confronted with pop music: slightly too old and slightly too square. That feeling never goes away, and neither has Al, who has sold more than twelve million albums since 1979.

Anxiety starts early for pop audiences. For decades, I have had twenty-somethings tell me that they don’t know what’s on the charts, haven’t listened to any new artists since college, and don’t “know anything about music.” They feel confused by how quickly the value of their knowledge of what’s current fades. Weird Al’s songwriting process, almost without exception, is to confront that anxiety and to celebrate it. Yankovic will take a mysterious and masterful song and turn it into something mundane and universal. He makes the grand aspirational concerns of teen-agers in Lorde’s “Royals” into a story that includes a lesson about the hygienic advantage of taking food home in aluminum foil. (You’ll see the rhyme there.) Charli XCX’s boast of being “classic, expensive, you don’t get to touch,” in Azalea’s “Fancy,” becomes an ad for a handyman who can resurface your patio in Yankovic’s “Handy.”

The opening lyrics of “Smells Like Nirvana,” Yankovic’s 1992 version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” are as close to a mission statement as he has: “What is this song all about? Can’t figure any lyrics out. How do the words to it go? I wish you’d tell me, I don’t know.” Weird Al has been cool for so long because pop makes everybody feel uncool; that he is the only one to admit it has made him a pop star.

If I'd seen this theory written about anyone or anything else I'd assume it's bullshit, but that's actually an accurate description of how my Weird Al fandom began, with Smell Like Nirvana.

I was 10 years old when Smells Like Teen Spirit was released and 11 years old when Smells Like Nirvana was released.  I was attending a middle school at the time (Grades 6-8) so I was surrounded by people who were into teen pop culture, but I wasn't quite ready for it myself.  I had absorbed the message from the adults around me that being into teen pop culture was Bad, it was giving in to Peer Pressure, and I wanted to prove to them that I'm Better Than That.

But, at the same time, it was problematic on a social-survival level to be completely unfamiliar with teen pop culture.  You couldn't just walk around having never heard of stuff.

Weird Al provided the perfect solution.  With Smells Like Nirvana, I could be familiar with Nirvana and enjoy how the music rocks without claiming to be a fan.  In fact, I was mocking it - surely something that could be used to demonstrate I'm Better Than That when necessary! But, at the same time, enjoying parody certainly suggests enough familiarity with the original, so I didn't come across as never having heard of stuff. Weird Al allowed me to save face without having to commit to anything (in the bizarre preteen landscape where such things demanded commitment.)

In the years that followed, I would grow into pop culture, and then into the ability to take it or leave it as I pleased, without regard for the opinions of peers and grownups.  But in those few awkward years when I was still muddling through and wasn't quite ready for the pop culture environment inhabited by my peers, Weird Al helped ease the transition for my awkward preteen self.  And, because of that, he will always have a place in my adult self's ipod.

itunes lyrics efficiency

As I've mentioned before, I'm lyric-deaf, meaning I can't always clearly hear all the words of a song I'm listening to.  As a result, often when I'm going about my everyday life, I feel the need to stop and google up the lyrics to the song I'm listening to.

But this morning my shower gave me an idea:

Every time I find myself googling up lyrics, I'll paste them into the "Lyrics" tab for that song. (Right-click the song, click on Get Info, choose the Lyrics tab.)  Then they'll be available for me on my ipod, and apparently you can also download plug-ins that will show the contents of the Lyrics tab in itunes as the song plays.  So if I keep doing this, every song with incomprehensible lyrics will eventually display its lyrics automatically when it plays.

"Hearts as both and cars"

My iTunes started playing the Disney song "I'm Professor Ludwig von Drake", and there was a line I couldn't hear clearly.  I googled it, and got:

I know all about atomic energy
hearts as both and cars and bio chemistry

"Hearts as both and cars"?  That doesn't make any sense.  The first dozen or so google results seemed unanimous, but there's no possible way that's the lyric.

Upon further selective googling, I found, and decided I agree with, this TVTropes page:  "horses, boats and cars."

I know all about atomic energy
Horses, boats and cars and biochemistry
but when it comes to brain surgery then I can only do swell.

 And now I'm blogging it in the hopes of increasing the googleability of the correct lyrics.

Miscorrected mondegreens

The OED Online twitter feed has been talking about mondegreens today, so I thought I'd blog my contribution since I can't get it down to 140.

I'm lyric-deaf, so I mishear lyrics more often than I hear them correctly. Because I'm used to mishearing lyrics, I tend to recognize when what I think the lyrics are must be wrong, and I try to determine the correct lyrics using logic. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work out properly. For example:

1. The song: You Shook Me All Night Long
What I heard: "She was a fax machine"
What I thought: "That can't possibly be right. The song is clearly sexual, it must be "She was a sex machine"."
Actual lyric: "She was a fast machine"

2. The song: Lookin' Out My Back Door
What I heard: "Memories and elephants are playing in the band"
What I thought: "Memories must be tambourines, but I can't figure out what elephants is."
Actual lyric: "Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band". The elephants are actually in there!

Update: just remembered a better one:

3. The song: Land of Hope and Dreams
What I heard: "This train carries whores and camels"
What I thought: "Why on earth would you have passengers on the same train as livestock? And why would it be so specifically limited to prostitutes? That can't possibly be right. It must be horses and camels."
Actual lyrics: "This train carries whores and gamblers"

Things They DID Invent

1. In 2004, I came up with the idea of library drop boxes that automatically scan the books. North York Central Library just installed those this past month.

2. In October, I tweeted my surprise that there is no googleable evidence that Bruce Springsteen ever covered Bob Seger's Old Time Rock and Roll. In December, that egregious oversight was rectified:

Musical interlude

A couple of weeks ago, I ended up crying on the phone to my mother about all the things upsetting me about my GERD diagnosis. I don't often do this (I can't remember ever doing it in my adult life), but it made me feel a bit better. I was rather pleased to discover that crying to mommy still works and glad that that's an available option.

The next day, as I was getting ready for work, I heard that Jack Layton had just died. On top of everything else, he's exactly the same age as my mother, and his son is the same age as me.

This is the song that got me out the door that morning.



PS: Check out around 2:21 - let's just throw a guitar across the stage for no particular reason!

Amy, Amy, Amy.

I was saddened to hear that Amy Winehouse was found dead earlier today. She was only 27.

I first heard Amy Winehouse sing in this mashup, where she put Ella Fitzgerald to shame (Ella is the first voice you hear, Amy is the second).



I had heard of her from media coverage of her private life, but I was rather surprised to discover that someone who attracted that kind of coverage was also such a genuine talent.

The world is now worse off for no longer having that talent among us, with all its potential forever unfulfilled. And it's tragic that even with all that talent and wealth she was never able to find peace.

Here are a few of her songs that always end up on repeat:

In which I fail to eulogize Clarence Clemons

When I heard that Clarence Clemons passed away, my first thought was "But I just discovered him!"

My fandom for both Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga is very recent. I've been familiar with both of their work for a while, of course, but the youtube-marathon ipod-saturating concert-date-googling fandom for both performers started sometime in the past six months. And I only learned in the past week or so that Clarence Clemons had played with both of them, which led me to think that I really must google what else he's done. Which, of course, I procrastinated.

So tonight, in addition to mourning the loss of a musical legend, I'm mourning the loss of the opportunity to ever be properly fangirl for him.

In appreciation of my Grade 6 Music teacher

One of the things my Grade 6 music teacher had us do was formal analysis of Bohemian Rhapsody. She basically walked us through it socratically, identifying the genres of the different sections and then pinpointing precisely what characteristics made it that genre. We also read the lyrics, described the plot, watched the music video, and sang through the song ourselves a few times, having fun with the "Galileo! Galileo!" bit and headbanging à la Wayne's World. Along the way, she gave us a brief overview of Queen's other work, including We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions, which came in handy for sports tournaments. It was a good approach that music analysis more accessible and comprehensible than the traditional approach of using classical music, and it got us listening to and appreciating music that was slightly before our time, which is rather a big thing for a teacher to achieve with 11-year-olds.

It wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I learned that Freddie Mercury was queer and died of AIDS - and, actually, he died of AIDS probably just months before we started looking at his music in class, and this in a time and place where that would have been rather scandalous. My initial uncensored internal mental reaction (which I know is inappropriate, that's why it stayed uncensored and internal) was "But that's the guy who wrote the music we used for headbanging and sports!" I was rather shocked that I'd been enjoying his music all these years without having any idea that he was queer or that he had AIDS.

Which, now that I think about it, was probably a very deliberate choice on the part of my teacher. That time and place were more homophobic than I care to admit, and, while I didn't grok AIDS yet, I'm sure people were far more judgemental about it than they are today. But my teacher helped her students escape from this closedmindedness by choosing music that was pedagogically ideal for teaching analysis, unquestionably a cultural touchstone, and just happened to have been created by someone who was later diagnosed with AIDS. She never got into the private lives of the artists, we looked only at the music. But she got this particular bit of rock canon into our heads and normalized, setting us up for an "ah-ha!" moment at some undefined point later in life, when we'd learn that he'd died of AIDS and go "Whaaaa? But he was just a guy!"

Exactly. Point made. Well done, Ms. L!

In my ongoing tradition of substituting youtubes for proper blog posts...

Overtime plus time change are kicking my ass, so this weekend's basically going to have to be a write-off. Which is unfortunate, because I have some important things that I want to get blogged.

So here's Bruce Springsteen covering Creedence Clearwater Revival.

My subconscious does mashups

Last night, I somehow ended up watching a bunch of Springsteen videos on youtube. Then I had dream based on the Dancing in the Dark video, where an oddly attractive young Bruce Springsteen pulls a girl (who the internet swears is Courtney Cox) out from the audience to dance with him on stage. But in my dream, they started doing Billy Elliot-style dancing (like starting at 1:30 here) in perfect unison while singing Born to Run.

I think I'd actually pay good money to see that.

(Unfortunately, that was followed by a dream where I had to stay at in university residence to do on-site training and my room was infested with scorpions, so I woke up edgy despite such entertaining dreams.)

On Money for Nothing

1. I have never knowingly heard Dire Straits played on the radio in my life.

2. The version of Money for Nothing I have (origin unknown - acquired in university, back when it was briefly trendy for people to host internal FTP servers to share all their music and movies with everyone else in res) doesn't contain the offending verse, so I didn't know until just a day or two ago that this song even contained a slur.

3. I have no objection to not censoring individual words or not censoring songs based on individuals words. However, if they are going to censor based on individual words, I think slurs should be censored. I'm far more offended by slurs than by the word "fuck". I was shocked that the radio edit of Cee-Lo's Fuck You still contained the N word. Yes, I'm aware of the cultural conventions surrounding use of that word, but they changed the lyrics to circumlocute a word I use all the time while keeping a word I would never use. That doesn't seem right.

4. I've had this fricking song on my head for like 3 days straight! Get it out!!!

Song of the day

Tragic ungoogleability

This is Monty Python's Galaxy Song:



Very useful for science students! Except who does astrophysics in miles any more?

What this song really needs is a metric version! I've been saying that ever since Grade 12 Physics class, and every once in a while I google to see if anyone has done it yet.

Unfortunately, it seems the band Metric has a song called "Twilight Galaxy", which renders a metric version of the galaxy song very difficult to google. This is a tragedy for science students everywhere!

If you write a metric version of Monty Python's Galaxy Song, or find one elsewhere and want to link to it, make sure you include "Monty Python" in the title to preserve what little googleability is left!

Sexy Tunes

An assortment of sexy tunes to end off the week: