Once In A Lifetime

[infinite monkey]

lmao!

[Rhianne]

Song analysis isn't really me either but I could sit and watch Tina Weymouth play all day.

[sullage]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

All that may be true, but his dancing is almost as bad as that of Peter Garret from Midnight Oil.

David dancing

[ZenGum]

Type "Peter Gar" into youtube and the first suggestion is "Peter Garret Dancing".



The interruption at 2.52 is because Peter Garret is now a federal politician, and the other side were taking the piss.

As we said, you have to master the rules first, then you can judge when to break them.

[Flint]

All comments noted. Good thread.

I was at a get together this weekend, a former bandmate asks if I can identify the song playing on his tablet. I listen to the layers of instruments (described here by UT) and say 'sounds like Once in a Lifetime' --yep, 'same album' he says.

Regarding Picasso, his comic art equivalent is Bill Sienkiewicz--another guy who mastered strict classical art, and then "went off the deep end" --and the lesson is, you can't go crazy and "freestyle" really effectively until you know your basics extremely thoroughly.

Like jazz drumming. One of Tony Williams favorite exercises for the drums was to play single strokes completely simultaneously with every limb. That's it. Both hands and both feet just going "bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump" over and over, at various tempos. Why? This very basic pattern revealed the micro-inconsistencies that would be hard to detect while playing fancy patterns. Complex artists can be absorbed in simple tasks.



And now, this (song comes in at 24 seconds):

[infinite monkey]

Side story. Hanging at the bar back in the day with ex and a bandmate. We'd each drink an unspecfied amount of beer from our bottles and see if one of them could come up with a song to match the sounds made when you blow into the top of your bottle. Depending on your level of beer (the tone) and what order, they came up with some good ones. I didn't, I don't know from notes but it was fun when I heard what they meant. Does this even make sense?

[classicman]

oddly enough, to me, it does.

[Flint]

Yes, I get it. Sounds like fun!

Now what I do is blow down against the far edge of the top of the bottle, and it whistles.

[BigV]

Interestingly, your youtube clip loops. I don't know why it does this.

[Spexxvet]

Hey, UT! Would you please analyze this in the same way?

[Undertoad]

The Cure massively overuse reverb in their usual way in order to seem more mystical and big. It's a two-note song and the two notes sit on 1 and 3 and don't move at all, with 1 being the root note. The drumming consists of huge snare (large cannon snare instead of bright chirpy small snare) manually playing the same two bars over and over again. This creates the doomy gloomy funeral procession tempo -- we are "locked in" and won't move anywhere for 6 minutes. We must not rock whatsoever; we must slowly sway and share our painful lives. The only relief is the interesting guitar effects that serve as a side dish to Smith's painfully depressed lyrics.

Still, it's all eaten up by the gloomy teens of the day, looking for something real away from both the corporate classic rock of the time and the "Walking on Sunshine" bright pop they had been forced to consume -- including some made by the Cure. Thus an entire generation wears black, and it's original for its time, a pioneering attitude, but not all that musically interesting.

[Spexxvet]

Thanks.

[jimhelm]

Dude,

your calling emerges.

music critic.

go forth and prosper.


but just to make sure you can do more current stuff.... what do you make of this one?
(this is not exactly new, but ....)

[Undertoad]

The orgasm. It's just awesome, but only lasts a few seconds. So what if it could be ALL orgasm? Well, how you do that is you turn the compression way up, multitrack the same guitars to death, have a terribly confident "cock-sure" lead vocal, and only take the whole thing down a step for the first half of the third verse. Basically have all the instruments and vox in a big cage match for who can get the most attention. And if you land on a particular riff, switch it out for a new one before anyone has time to enjoy it or react.

Trouble is, this doesn't allow for anything particularly memorable. If everything's out front, nothing's out front. So there is no opportunity for a hook here. And it turns out the orgasm is an orgasm because it lasts seconds. If the orgasm lasts minutes, it becomes something different and we are probably looking for relief from it. That's why this song is 2:45, because if it was 3:00 we would be annoyed and if it was 4:00 we would be pissed off.

Musicians learn that the space between the notes is where the special is. Well, here there's no space at all. That's not good.

If you* want to understand this song and what I'm saying about it, try to whistle it alone. If you can't whistle it, you can't identify a melody. Now remind me what you hate about rap/hip-hop. Right.





*not you Jim, but the editorial you, meaning everyone

[jimhelm]

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