slang

Your Girl (especially that most recent stripped-down, drumless, demo version) is a metaphorical metasong that is autologically about an unreleased song that wants to be released.

And speaking of autological songs, Earthquakes recently made me fall on my butt.

The song inverts the "standing on the shoulders of giants" saying a bit, but it sort of means the same thing? Why the references to critics and negative-hypers in this song? The only possible interpretation I can get is the idea that she attributes her lineage as responsible for all the things that were proposed to have been constructed about her. 

"hands on your knees I'm Angelina Jolie ..." is part of the lyrics from the track by Tommy Genesis (prod. by Father). I didn't know Tommy's female! I thought it was LDR singing everything (because I was garden-pathed by the name). 

Here's the original Tommy Genesis track:

BTW-- I also love the ghost of Go-Go Dancer in the verse lyrics.
 

1 hour ago, genghis khan said:

 

I'm thinking less of any of her music, and more of what she's said. Consider her recent comment on Elizabeth Short, which was basically something like "I could have ended up like her."  Or her 2021 Mojo magazine interview which is a very strong example of her fixating on having a rough past and treating it like a badge of honour.

The Elizabeth Short thing, we have to see how that develops. I think survivor's guilt works there too (and could shore up the interpretation that the Lust for Life video was a reference to Peg Entwistle, which of course LDR famously denies). The mojo article strikes me more about whining about the critics, and not martyrdom, per se. I mean, there's a lot of defiance there certainly, but I didn't see too much "recklessness" with her life. I also read it fast so I got some quotes to make sure it's from the article you reference.

“I mean, I guess I’ll never forget my first four years of interviews. They just fucking burned me.”

“I was discredited for seven years,” she says, her voice rising so fiercely it’s briefly unclear whether she’s laughing or crying. “There’s no other way of looking it.”

The type of survivor's guilt I'm thinking about, involves why she would choose to cover Chelsea Hotel no. 2, or reference Amy and Whitney in a song, and I'm sure other things too. Don't get me wrong, she definitely wants to live, but she's also pissed that people that would have been dear to her were cut off (and we should be too).
 

11 hours ago, genghis khan said:

i think the way she kind of treats living a reckless life as a sort of martyrdom is getting annoying  

I think you've hit on a general tendency of hers (and maybe it's a prominent component of depression -- in general -- -- i.e., not saying it's specific to her). However, "martyrdom" isn't how I would describe it. I think it more like "survivor's guilt". Let's take the song Fingertips, where I think that sense is pretty clear:

"Give me a mausoleum in Rhode Island with dad, grandma, grandpa, and Dave
Who hung himself real high
In the national park sky
It’s a shame, and I’m crying right now
I didn’t get to you, save you"
...
"I wanted to go out like you
Swim with the fishes that he caught on Rhode Island beaches
But, sometimes, it's just not your time, Caroline"
...
"All I wanted to do was kiss Aaron Greene and sit by
The lake, twisting lime into the drinks that they made 
Have a babe at sixteen, the town I was wed in and die

Aaron ended up dead and not me" 

Now if you're interested in songs like "Hollywood's Dead" (which I still am), I think you can still interpret songs like that the same way as I'm suggesting for Fingertips, although you might have to work harder to do so (i.e., that song is less related to her life personally). 
 

Not too bad actually. She's listed as first writer (JS second, Antonoff last) on the physical's liner notes, which makes me optimistic she contributed significantly to the music, as we know JS is solely responsible for the "lyrics". I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when she suggested it to JS, and would have loved to have monitored LDR with all sorts of physio-measures while she played it for him, as well as the whole album (at least, if I were he, I would have requested that), just to see what she was most anxious about. Heck, I would have loved to have monitored the pastor as well. 

As for the sermon's content (i.e., love what you have; don't lust for what you don't?), this could be contradictory from other church positions on familiar issues that I don't need to rehash here. That is, provided one doesn't break any golden rules, the first thing you have is yourself, and maybe the 2nd thing is other people compatible with yourself. The idea of why God would bother with him, when there's the sky, whales, and rhinos, I found quaint, because lots of atheist physicists rationalize the meaning of (intelligent) life as the (sole) means of how the universe gets to know the universe. I watch a lot of youtube videos on philosophy, science, whatnot, among them atheistic/"apologetic" videos (e.g., meaning of life, with or without religion, is a bigee). 

The last para of the interlude reflects the highly personal nature of the album (sort of forcing the interlude to connect to the album); however, that line wasn't quite as comprehensible, for me, in the context of his sermon.

OMG, DM and LDR have contemporaneous album releases. Ought to be interesting. Oh ... and I'm guessing this video is about death for some reason (and I'm also guessing I'm being sarcastic). BTW, love the Ingmar Bergman reference.

2 hours ago, evalionisameme said:

Yeah but that’s pop as in popular, an entirely different thing- it’s just interesting when people slate pop specifically in relation to people who make pop music but disregard it as a genre anyway? It’s odd. 
 

when people say classical-they usually mean orchestra or violin pieces with minimal to no vocals.

It just seems like a really hard problem defining pop. Jazz called itself jazz (and was popular once, and there were a bunch of sub eras in Jazz), and Rock called itself rock (and was popular once and ditto), and Folk called itself folk (ditto., but with maybe fewer sub eras). All of these genres of music still exist, as does (what I think you mean by) pop. Or does pop seem different now than in the past? I mean one could attempt a definition of pop, that includes Britney Spears, but why not include the Andrew Sisters, or Frank Sinatra? My unpopular musical opinion is that there may be the same kind of problem with "pop" as there is with "classical" in time (there was a "joke" in the last of the Abrams-series Star Trek movies about it, and perhaps more credibly, Bob Dylan, whose done a lot of "covers" albums lately of standard pre-rock-era songs, remarked that he was "uncovering the songs" but also remarked that he didn't need to, because he considered them classics in the same sense as Brahms/Mozart; let's just assume I'm remembering the article right, as I probably can't find it). 
 

20 hours ago, evalionisameme said:

Pure pop does exist-its a genre in itself-I’m sick of hearing the same tired rhetoric that pop means “popular”, no it doesn’t necessarily. 
 

The Beatles have always been included in pop because they make pop rock mostly.  Rock has always been called rock.

 

I just heard someone try to argue teenage dream is electro rock  I don’t like Katy but she is clearly pure pop.

 

Baby one more time is pure pop.

Thriller is pure pop.

S&m is pure pop.

Call me maybe is pure pop- a guitar does not mean “rock”.

 

The good thing about "pop" just meaning popular is that "classical" can just mean it's been around for 100+ (or whatever number) of years and people still listen to it. I.E. they're both vague terms that can be objectively defined (and real easily), although classical has some rather specific criteria, if you ask people what they mean by that. So Pete Pardo (Sea of Tranquility; youtube) just had a 1973 retrospective, where he picked his 31 favorite albums from that year (one for each day of January), and argued it was a phenomenal year musically. Maybe some albums he cited will still be played another 50 years out.

36 minutes ago, domandapiano said:

I haven’t looked at this list but knowing Joni Mitchell isn’t in it is all I need to know it’s fully a piece of clickbait trash. 

She's at number 50. I had to click on a red rectangle (under Sade, at 51) to find her (and Ella Fitzgerald too).

On 1/2/2023 at 9:25 AM, cherrytropico said:

help why is billie eilish on this list  

Because she's a better singer than Lorde, and they wanted somebody like Lorde on the list (Lorde isn't on the list right?)?. Also in cognitive psychology, there's something called a "recency effect" for recalling list items.

24 minutes ago, letterblue said:

......................why are they even on the list at all? Leonard and Bob can't sing for shit.....  i'm crying.....what were the qualifications here?

Well if you're like György Ligeti (Musical composer), you might say something like "Lou Reed's a pioneer in microtonal singing"; if you're an average pop consumer, you might just say he's out of tune or flat. He couldn't have been tone deaf, however, because the stuff he did around his voice on guitar was next level and generally beautiful. Bob and Leonard suffer for age effects, but still glad they chose to sing. 

BTW (to anybody that knows), was K. D. Lang or Annie Haslam on the list (I don't remember them)? The reason I ask is that I conceptualize them as cyborg-augmented (in a good way) Karen-Carpenter type voices (whom I did remember on the list).

6 minutes ago, Vertimus said:

The truth is that of course such lists are completely subjective, and RS is always biased in a great number of ways, including creating lists that are purposefully provocative.

 

In terms of 'influence,' they have Prince before Frank Sinatra, which is absurd. Sinatra and Elvis Presley were two of the most influential individuals and vocalists of the 20th century, on a global basis, but unfortunately they were white, which matters in 2022-2023, and so have to be pushed further back. 

 

And look where they have Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. Ridiculous.  

But the subjectivities are collective, in some sense.

20 minutes ago, Beautiful Loser said:

Joni Mitchell #50
Ella Fitzgerald #45
 

But yeah, I think Michael Jackson and U2's Bono should've been higher up on the list. Jackson has inspired hundreds of artists and left a huge legacy.

 

 

Yeah, I gotta hate on how hard it is to scroll thru the list. They really should've done it by genre, then some of the choice rankings might have made more sense.

I'm very glad LDR got the recognition but kind of a weird list. They do make a point of saying best singer is not equal to best voice, so Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan are higher up on the list (than say LDR). However, if they had said "200 best genre-defining vocalists" instead of "singers", maybe some rappers would have made the list (or did I miss any)?  Anyway, some highly rational choices (e.g., Sinatra, Bowie, Elvis Presly, Billie Holliday, Robert Plant, Kate Bush, Bjork), but other rational choices were left out (e.g., Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and I'm sure many more). 

Edit-
I don't seem to be able to see Joni Mitchell or Ella Fitzgerald on the list, because my 41-60 link seems to stop at Sade (51, btw, good choice). However, I fully believe they are there, because it would be insane to leave them out, and other people saw them. Sorry anyway.

Of course, I had to click on the red rectangle under Sade to extend the list. 

I'm gonna wish my friends in Russia a revolutionary Christmas, or that lightning strikes twice there. BTW, Sergei Prokofiev, while he probably considered himself Russian, was born in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have an airport named after him (recently trashed in the Russian invasion).  Machine guns at about 4:36 and later 6:25? it's used as percussion (as Zappa might say, you can't do that on stage -- or in a concert -- anymore).

Or, if you're only into shorter things, you might try this visual-midi presentation of JUST the piano part at the end of his 3rd Piano concerto (played by computer-sound generation). Interesting use of zig-zags in music for sure.

Finally, my earliest memory of hearing Prokofiev is hearing the above piano concerto on the radio. At the time, I was into ELP and Led Zeppelin and thought what I was hearing was pretty competitive. So, if whole-piece listening with live performers is your thing: Yuja wears a nice dress (useful for heat-dissipation, I would assume), and she memorized this piece (omg). 

1 hour ago, DeadAgainst said:

 

"I've had like a long time interest in all things ancient and occult like so many people and I guess I draw on a little bit of that inspiration for my music."

 

She's mapped out the Tree for you in her albums. The constraint built by men is the Tower; the two tigers in Born to Die. It's about anamnesis and remembering the Self within that has been abandoned. Alchemical coniunctio is a "death" preceding new life. "Knowing that you're your own doorway to the answers."

 

I mean, did you think she made Tropico just for fun? "Walk in the way of my soft resurrection" was her message.

I mean it's ok that she's mystical and stuff. I just wish she were more explicit about defining occult references, and reasons why we should care. I'm a big fan of "anamnesis" (google dictionary: the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence--often used with reference to Platonic philosophy). One of my heroes, Philip K. Dick, had a bad bout with that, and wrote a whole exegesis trying to be clear about what was happening to him (some of it weird, but not THAT weird). He did not mean for it to be published, but it was posthumously. However, a lot of his later novels did fictionalize the very same concerns as his exegesis. I don't think LDR is in that category of wanting to communicate explicitly about that kind of stuff. I mean if she's mapping out a tree (similar to PKD wanting to "explain" his novels via his exegesis), it's not quite clear to me what the tree is for. I have to read the Wikipedia pages on esotericism and think about it (although I'd rather read a terse set of axioms, and then think about the arguments, if any). Of course, she doesn't have to explain anything. I can just appreciate her art with different agendas. 

3 hours ago, DeadAgainst said:

 

The tunnel is the threshold from the ordinary world to the reveal of the heart. This is an esoteric, not exoteric, death.

The "tunnel" is also a constraint by men? "Handmade beauty sealed up by two man-made walls". Also, orgasms are exoteric, while death, by its very nature, is esoteric.

BTW, in Wikipedia-ing some of your terms, I've seemed to have found a Rosetta Stone for your latest post in the Paradise and the Esoteric Origin of mankind Thread. I mean I was immediately struck by the picture of the "tree of life represented by the Kabbalah" on the right (of the first link), which reminded of that (esoteric, as in puzzling) post. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism

and that has a link to here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(Kabbalah)

The problem with esotericism, for me, is basically: TLDR; I mean that as a serious constructive criticism. I like exoteric axioms (even about esoteric topics), because you can at least read axioms fast and know very quickly what you're arguing about, and/or what conclusions, one is attempting to derive from the axioms. Both philosophy and mysticism need to be more axiomatic, imo. For instance, I can say something like this axiom: "The universe loves repetition and variation", and some people (e.g., me) will think that's plausibly true. However, if I accept that as true, with some more work, I can derive an objective morality (e.g., say "objectively" what I think good and evil mean). It doesn't matter whether I can actually do this, but this would be an example of how much faith I have in saying something axiomatically (and simply) and then using general reasoning processes to get to interesting conclusions.

BTW, Hotel California and Nillson's Don't Forget Me (both exoterically referenced in Ocean Blvd) are pretty creepy songs too. They seem to have lots of death/life/existence references in them, but it's too late for me (ooh, which "late" did I mean?) to think about such things.

I agree with both the people who are put off, and those who are titillated, with the "fuck me to death" line. However, the LDR apologist in me wants to suggest that what LDR is tapping into is the rather strange-bedfellow relationship between sex and death. Namely,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort

I'm sort of familiar with it from some horror literature I read, which can be erotic at times (not familiar from real life, lol). FMTD line does indeed shock me, but the line that comes after shocks me even more: "Love me until I love myself". Well, ok.  She obviously doesn't read (or like) Ayn Rand, and the significant other seems to have replaced God in these existential times. BTW, if God exists (or is at least sentient in the sense I am), It loves her. If I believe in It that way, I believe that. 

As for her breasts ... she's been rather creative with them (e.g., that picture where she inverts the concept of bikini), but she's also been rather diverse in her public physical portrayal and fashion sense, which is a good role model for those who value diversity (IMHUO). 

I would agree with opinions that say Ocean Blvd Tunnel is one of her weakest title-tracks musically, because it's most in the vein of repeating the past that I've ever seen from her (i.e., repeating recent released work; repeating unreleased/leaks I actually don't mind). She still sings it, has decent production, and the lyrics are quintessentially hers, so I don't loathe the song, and my estimation from first listening has gone up some with further listening. 

It's the lyrics that are most noticeable on first listening and (goodly) weird. Comparing herself to some forgotten built over architecture resonates (for me) to all those horror scenarios where monsters, mutants, or whatever happen to live (unbeknownst) to the general public in the submerged realm. That probably wasn't her intention (although "fuck me to death", while pretty iconic, is sort of horrific too).  It's also curious that the title track and lead promo is so introspective, given an upcoming album with so many features. This is the opposite of what she did for Lust for Life. Ought to be interesting (and I hope it exceeds Lust for Life in temporal length).

I'm gonna go with You Can Be the Boss. My specific memory of it is from that music video with the cuts from her head singing to that weird violent cartoon of a guy evading being shot up and shooting, while dragging that mostly naked woman around. I wasn't much into the cartoon but wanted to stick around to know who the artist was. Here's the funny part: this was not a youtube memory but more like watching an MTV "college video" show on cable, and the artist was monickered at the end as Lizzy Grant! Still not sure if this is just an historical confabulation, but it is possibly my first memory of her (as not her), and I must say it's pretty next-level having a suppressed debut Album, whose title suggests the artist has just decided to change her name, which is the only thing that suggests (other than the perception of having a memory), that my memory might be actual.

A Star for Nick would be a close second, and that's from youtube videos citing "release" of the song to some college radio stations (while playing the song of course). I was impressed at the time that it was from the same artist as the one from Born to Die, which I think was just released at that time.
 

The thing I liked most about High By the Beach was that it followed the Honeymoon title-track release the month before (which was not an official single, it seems), thereby giving critics a kind of artistic whiplash about what to expect from the album release. It really didn't matter how good the song was, given it was something designed to be unexpected; however, I did warm up to it on multiple listens (and Lizzy/AKA references in the song were a plus).

And Ride deserved the grammy for best country song of its year, IMUO (although Kacey Musgrave's et. al. pessimistic/anti-natalist classic "Merry go round", which won that year, would have provided stiff competition).  Probably, the video for Ride being so anti-country (or maybe it was so-on point "real" country, idk) prevented nomination from occurring to anybody in the "industry" at that time. 

"Karmic lineage" to me indicates her catholic upbringing. It would be interesting if her father were relatively lax religion-wise (or open-minded) and her mother relatively strict. Anybody know?

Christianity, in general with its original sin concept (i.e., you're guilty just by being born), is pretty depressive, although Sylvia Plath was Unitarian, that wonderfully heretical branch of Christianity that doesn't believe in it, though she still succumbed to depression. We know LDR identifies with Plath through the Hope song.  I'm guessing the Black Bathing Suit and the Black Narcissist (of the Hope song) are just the same concept and equal to depression.

I typically only listen to Blue Banisters in the context of Opheliac (the Emilie Autumn album) in the playlist below (which sort of interleaves tracks). Some people might consider this highly perverted (hence, it's a "confession"). However, it's a practice I extend to other artists as well, to sort of create aleatoric symphonies out of artists (and albums) I like. It also allows artists I like to have an imaginary conversation. I do this more frequently with LDR (than other artists) as a means of figuring out why I like her as much as other artists I happen to like, but I don't do it for all her albums.