Hot Chelle Rae

I see that Hot Chelle Rae has just released a new single.  I implore of you, do not buy it.  Do not watch it on YouTube or listen to it on Spotify or Vevo or any other website.  Call into your local radio stations and personally request they play anything else.  If you are wondering why I hate them so much, do not indulge your bile fascination by looking them up, as it is not worth the .0001 cents it earns them.

Perhaps I should elaborate.  I hate this band.  I truly despise them.  In case you couldn't gather that.

I first became familiar with Hot Chelle Rae thanks to a very poor choice in song from whoever controls the speakers in the dining hall.  Their single "Tonight, Tonight" struck me as particularly awful, first of all because it was being played so loudly I could hear it through my headphones, which I specifically use to drown out the sounds of the obnoxiously loud, talkative, screechy-voiced people that seem to populate the campus quite thoroughly and the aforementioned awful musical choices.  The other reasons are quite a bit worse.

Hot Chelle Rae is the Pauly Shore of music.  I went there.  They have no talent, instead relying on being able to copy the basic outline set up by other performers, although not the particularly skilled, whom they lack the talent to emulate in even the loosest sense; worse, they don't even copy the poor format well, instead just taking the basic cheap tricks with none of the context that makes it passable.  The only reason they have careers is because of nepotism.  They contribute absolutely nothing except a hollow, empty shell, distinguished only by being even worse than the dull, boring middle mark by which their media are judged.  "Tonight, Tonight" is a party song, but unlike other party songs, it has absolutely no energy or flow or any of the other things that make good party songs.  They have the absolute bare minimum amount of talent to qualify for a local talent show and get a "Participant" ribbon.  They do not want to make music, they just want to be musicians.

Other performers repeat words in their chorus because they are thematically relevant or at least fit the song ergonomically well.  Hot Chelle Rae constructed a chorus consisting primarily of "Tonight" because they clearly could not think of anything else.  "Tonight" is already the most overused word in the pop lexicon outside "love", so much that it has become white noise.  I don't hear it.  By the time "Hey Soul Sister" hit, it was pretty clear the definition of "tonight" had become "n., too-NITE; a word with two syllables and no meaning".  Constructing your hook out of it strikes me as lazy.

Hot Chelle Rae probably chose their name so it would sound awkward when critics inevitably labelled them "lukewarm".  Listening to their music is the auditory equivalent of drinking flat soda.

I beg of you, force their careers into the ground.  You, as an audience, have the power to drive these hacks out of business and into the dead-end jobs pumping gas they so clearly deserve so that actual good musicians, or at least those whose existence is merited by literally anything, can sell a few more songs.

Trends, Music, and the New Decade

I'm sure anyone with a decent memory or an old yearbook could tell you that trends change.  That jacket you thought was so cool in the 80s now looks ridiculous.  Personally I like to divide eras up into decades, since they have a tendency to approximately punctuate American (and in many cases, international) culture.

For example, we can look at trends in music.  I like to define each decade by who was, in retrospect, the most popular, lasting, and/or influential example of the biggest genre or style in music for the time.  Counting up from the 40s:

1940s: Sinatra

1950s: Elvis

1960s: The Beatles

1970s: I'm not really sure.  I'm not particularly familiar with disco.  The Bee Gees?  In terms of the also-prevalent rock and roll of the time, Queen definitely deserves a mention.

1980s: Michael Jackson

1990s: Nirvana

Naturally, a lot of this is subjective, and of course the decades are only a rough cut.  The 80s were not all explosive, high-energy pop; 1987 saw Kenny G's "Songbird" reach #3 on the pop charts.

If we go off of this, we can see some of the other trends of the period.  In most of culture, the 90s were a period when things became grimmer, darker, more serious.  This was the Dark Age of Comic Books, when basically every name that could be derived from "death" or "blood" was in use as the trends started years earlier by Watchmen started sinking in, but with none of the intelligence or relevance that justified the darker tropes.  This was the decade of Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles; of gangster rap and dark, quarter-hungry arcades.

The reason I bring this up is because it is now 2012, and we're starting to get some clarity on the trends of the last decade.

What are some of the things on which we can now look back and laugh?  The most pervasive trend in music for the last ten-twelve years or so has undoubtedly been, in the words of Todd in the Shadows, "club dance music about dancing in clubs to club dance music".  The decade started off with the boy bands and pop idols and quickly turned sluttier.  While it is still too early to decide accurately who will be venerated by history as the most significant contributor, I believe we can declare the Black Eyed Peas as the frontrunners of the genre, as many other artists take their influence, knowingly or otherwise, from them.

Not to mention, The Black Eyed Peas also represented perfectly the inevitable collapse of the same genre, when their latest album "The Beginning" bombed.  I don't think it was just the music; I think people are finally getting sick of club music.  Though to be fair, the album did suck.

Remember the Atkin's diet?

Looking at the pop charts this week, not one of the top five songs could really be called a dance track, and that suits me just fine.  As I said, decades are not definite markers, but two years into the 2010s it's finally being shaken off and cast into the fires of Mt. Doom.

So, I want you to look at the period from about 2000-2010.  What seems silly now?

I figure this is as good a time as any to talk about nostalgia goggles, since I've seen this image (and dozens like it) circulating:

Music now is exactly as good as it ever was.  You just either don't remember the stuff that sucked or your actively filter it out.  1976, often hailed as one of the best years in music (and it did give us some pretty amazing songs; I'm not saying it isn't), still had crappy music.

Both of these charted.  "Afternoon Delight" was the year's number 12 hit song, while "Baby" hit only number 44 in 2010.  This also means looking at only the very worst modern examples and ignoring all the well-made popular songs made around the exact same time.  Your adolescent memories are not an appropriately objective gauge by which to make cultural judgements.

My Public Enemies List

Where I "honor" the "contributions" of those who have made the world that much worse by their continued existence or lingering presence.

- "The Best of Pauly Shore" is an oxymoron.

- Advice to writers: read Twilight.  Do the opposite.

- To music producer Mr. Bangladesh:
Beethoven and Mozart, yes, could famously compose entire pieces in their heads.  This is not what you are doing.  It is called "schizophrenia".

- From what I can tell, Beyonce has gone through what can only be described as an unending cavalcade of bad break-ups where the man was entirely at fault, each and every time inspiring her to write and perform a song on the topic.  Perhaps she has some sort of sac or auxiliary organ in which she stores bile and hatred for future use.

- Chris Brown thanks his fans for his success.  Makes sense, since we know it wasn't his musical ability or personality or that he deserved it.
His greatest hits album is coming out, by the way.  Most of them are to the face.

- I don't think I can properly make fun of Jack Chick.  Anything I say would just make him seem less ridiculous than he already is.

- Whenever I get frustrated while trying to draw something, I like to think, "Well, worst case scenario, it's still better than Rob Liefeld."

- Ronald Reagan raised taxes and increased the deficit while somehow convincing modern political actives that we can and should decrease taxes and spending like Ronald Reagan did.

- Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church disliked a verdict held in Sweden that incarcerated a preacher for using hate speech to decry homosexuality.  So they did what they did... well, not "best", but "most often".  They picketed.  They did not picket the Swedish government, or a Swedish embassy, or an area of the United States with a lot of people of Swedish descent.  They picketed a local vacuum store, one of whose brands was originally from Sweden.  I wish I were making this up.  Oh, by the way, as American citizens, their votes count exactly as much as yours does; more, actually, if you live in a populous state.  Ponder that one for a minute.

- Rush Limbaugh clearly speaks for the common man, as does everyone who makes $55 million per year working three hours per day.  From what I can tell, his opinion counts for about 3,250 times the common man's.

- Congratulations, Hot Chelle Rae.  I award you the title of "Musical Unflavored Oatmeal".

- Here's my hypothesis on Jane Eyre: it was published as a series of literary articles in England during a key period, when scientists were first learning about the causes of disease, specifically cholera, in this case.  Also during this time period, paper was considered a commodity, thus people were unlikely to dispose of it.  Jane Eyre was published to encourage the use of bathroom hygiene by making paper that was certifiably useless and which no one would want to keep.  No one had the heart to tell Charlotte.

"This Is War": A Music Review

While it's hard to complain about the message of the song, seeing as I myself am quite fervently a national pacifist, most good works of art and literature and music that deal with the topic at least have something new or original to offer.  "One More Parade" is an awesome song on the topic, first of all because it's performed by the far more talented Phil Ochs and secondly because it specifically addresses the idea of the pride and glory of war.  Instead of just showing footage of corpses, so to speak, it's taking its time to debunk some of the positive imagery and ideas associated with the topic.  "This is War" is just saying "Duh-hur, war is bad!  People are gonna die!"

The music and production isn't bad, though it seems generic.  I'm pretty sure if you put any other vocals over it, it's work just as well.  Still, the musicianship is solid and it's hard to pick at it too much.

The singing... is less forgivable.  Jared Leto seems to be doing his best Eliza Doolittle impression during the chorus.
"To the rauh!  To the laeeh!  We will fah!  To the daeah!"
Consonants, Jared!  Not to mention it's in that terrible strained voice singers always use when they want to sound deep.  It sounds like he's half garbage disposal.  You know, while passion is an integral part of singing, it's possible to be poignant while maintaining your composure, another reason I maintain "One More Parade" is superior.  If your lyrics aren't strong enough, so you have to sing like you just got hit in the solar plexus, then you need to rewrite your lyrics.

And boy oh boy, are these lyrics weak.  Just listen to the chorus.  A song-writing computer algorithm could come up with those with a pretty simple code.  The rhyme scheme's pretty good (rhyming "pariah" with "messiah" was, I admit, pretty clever), but most of the song is just store-brand stock phrases I've heard a million times before.

I certainly hope singing "brave new world" was not a reference to the novel Brave New World, because that would be the equivalent of Taylor Swift's Romeo and Juliet references, in that it only serves to prove you've never actually read Brave New World.  Brave New World in fact has very little to do with war, and there are many other dystopian works which deal with it in a way that actually counts.  Off the top of my head I can't think of a single dystopia with less satirical point directed at violence.  Brazil, maybe.  You started off the video with an H.G. Wells quote, maybe you could have used When The Sleeper Wakes.

Oh yes, the video.  Probably the worst part of the whole message.  François Truffaut once said "There is no such thing as an anti-war movie" because it will look exciting up on screen.  The more striking anti-war books and movies can avoid this via very careful control of what they show and don't show, such as Johnny Got His Gun which spends the vast majority of the book dealing with the aftermath of the war, a large portion on the mentality to lead to it, and only the tiniest passing slivers on the war itself.  For "This is War", the video director apparently decided to make war seem as awesome and glamorous as possible.  At several points I was convinced I was watching a trailer for the next Transformers movie.  We get attractive young men in military gear firing awesome weapons and humvees driving around in explosions.  Gol-ly, war sure is grisly, ain't it?


Oh, a jab at George W. Bush.  Timely.  Richard Nixon, too?  I bet he's rolling over in his grave.  Because he's dead.  He has been for a while.  You're criticizing the political actions of someone who died before half of the target audience of this song was born.


What are they even shooting at?  I don't see anything dangerous, unless you're trying to fly an airplane through the debris, in which case a bunch of guys on the ground firing machine guns in the air probably wouldn't be helping.

Look, he's got a single tear running down his cheek.  They went there.

Oh yeah, and no one dies.  Way to show us the devastating effects of combat, where everyone lives happily ever after.

Heck, I'm not even sure this is an anti-war song anymore.  Maybe the whole thing is all about how awesome war is, and frankly if you listen to just the lyrics there's not a lot to disprove that.  Maybe the H.G. Wells quote at the beginning is the sarcastic part, and everything else is an entirely sincere praise of the glory of war.

I'm not really sure what was up with all those triangles, though.

In short, if you're gonna try and deliver a message, make sure you don't use satire so sloppily you 

completely undermine your message.  The music itself isn't terrible, but it is pretty bad, and the video is just stupidly composed.


War is bad.  There.  That sentence delivered the message better than this song could ever hope to.  Odds are no one who doesn't already whole-heartedly agree with the intended message will ever be swayed by it, even a little.  I can' think of anything else to say about it, since it would probably just make you pay more attention to it and get more and more devoted the idea that war is awesome.

Dairy

So, you know that "Got Milk?" commercial where there's that rich guy wondering how he can waste his money, and someone says, "We could try making milk from plants." and the other guy says "But milk comes from cows!" and the rich guy's like "Genius!"?  I'm sure it's on YouTube.

Well, that's not entirely accurate.  Soy milk is not milk, it's soy milk, and it's sold as such.  I have yet to see a label that plays down the "soy" part of it.  It's a compound word with a different meaning.  It's just called "soy milk" because it's similar to milk.

The problem I have, though, is the "milk comes from cows" thing.  Cow milk isn't even the most-consumed type of milk by humans, goat milk is.  Milk comes from lots of animals--it's one of the defining characteristics of the entire class Mammalia, and even then there are a few species of snake that lactate.  What they mean to say is "milk comes from females".

So I guess they're left with two real options: recognize that there are in fact multiple quality milk-like products or stick to the most denotatively-correct definition for their product.  They have taken the middle road and done neither.

On an unrelated note:

I like to imagine there's some sadistic crime warlord with a warehouse full of Klondike bars using it to extort illegal/immoral acts out of people as part of a cruel social experiment.

The Best Things About College

BYU-Hawaii: The classes are easy, the people are friendly, and the weather is warm and sunny.  It's my personal hell.


However, my therapist encouraged me to think more positively, so here's the list of what I do like about my college.


-I live on-campus.  This means I can roll out of bed at 7:00 and make it to my 7:30 class with time for a leisurely breakfast in between.  "Community college has everything a four-year has"--never fall for this lie!
-Also on-campus, the health center.  Never before has my hypochondria felt so enabled.  Unlike high school, I'm quite certain these people have received actual medical training.
-Sometimes I legitimately forget whether or not my roommate is in the room.  It's the housing arrangement of my dreams.
-College textbooks are great.  No longer am I distracted by why a demographically-diverse group of people is so manically excited about chemistry.
-My campus is so diverse!  I'm always amazed at the different cultures, ways of life, and perspectives that can be homogenized into oblivion on a religious campus.
-Bulletin boards are everywhere, and with them, the possibility for pranks.  It's good to be alive and mildly sociopathic!
-The library may not have a fiction section (seriously, what?), but today they were giving away their old anthropology books.  FOR FREE.  I got five.
-Film class is pretty neat.  Last Friday we watched La Jetee, a French post-modern soft science-fiction psychological/body horror romantic tragicomic mind-bending photo-roman.  I defy you to name another film that demands that many adjectives.
-"If you don't learn to keep your room clean, what will you do with your dorm when you go to college?"  Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
-I still keep in contact with my friends who are still in high school.  I like to stroke my scraggly neckbeard and act sage over Facebook.
-I have to take the bus just about anywhere outside my 300-person town.  Taking the bus means standing in one place for several hours, doing nothing interesting, and being polite to rude idiots.  This means I can check on my job applications that I have retail experience.

Top Ten Favorite Songs

A Top Ten Movies list is subjective.  A Top Ten Songs list is even more so.  It's pretty hard to put my finger on why exactly I like these songs any more than others; in many cases I just do.  Like my Top Ten Movies list, I'm going to restrict myself to one song per performer.

10. "Comme un Enfant (Freaks remix)"
Yelle

Yes, I listen to French music.  That's just how classy I am.  I'd probably put this higher on the list, except that I only just got into it and I'm not yet sure if it has the longevity of the others.

9. "For No One"
The Beatles

It's hard to imagine any respectable top ten songs list without The Beatles.

8. "Becoming Popular (The Pony Everypony Should Know)"
Rarity, written by Daniel Ingram

It came down to this one or "Winter Wrap-Up".  It wasn't an easy choice.

7. "Mykonos"
Fleet Foxes

I got into Fleet Foxes a while before they started getting popular, but not early enough that I can brag about it.  It's a frustrating nexus.

6. Everyone's a Hero
Nathan Fillion, from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

I know I said I couldn't put my finger on why I liked these songs.  Except for this one--it's the lyrics.  Everything Joss Whedon writes is golden.

5. "Chocolate"
Megpoid Gumi, written by Otetsu

Some people dislike Vocaloids for "ruining music" or not being "real".  That's just dumb.  Vocaloids are closer to an instrument than anything.  It's like saying "Boy, I really do hate this cello song", which people just don't say, unless there's a performer named Cello of whom I've not been made aware, in which case, yes, they would say that.

4. "I'll Take Us Home"
Matt & Kim

There's no greater proof that music is a subjective thing than the fact that I absolutely love Matt & Kim. Objectively, they're pretty terrible (they have virtually no formal training, so I don't think I'm overstepping my bounds in saying that) but I just love their sound.  Plus their songs are really, really easy to learn to play.

3. "Power of Life"
Yellow-Zebra, original version by Zun

If there was ever an argument against copyright law, it would be all the remixes and covers of Zun songs.  Imagine if everything had this much freedom to be redone by other artists, and how much awesome stuff we'd get.  The original version is called "A Flower-Studded Sake Dish on Mt. Ooe" from the video game series Touhou Project.

2. "She's An Angel"
They Might Be Giants

What's this?  They Might Be Giants isn't number one?  Yes, although what they lack in a close contest for the single number one song, they make up for in sheer quantity of absolutely amazing songs.  Without my "one song per performer" rule they'd probably make up at least half this list on their own.

1. This Too Shall Pass
OK Go

Is it weird that I prefer the marching band version?  Anyway, here it is, my single favorite song of all time so far.  I don't have a clue why, but if I had to guess I'd have to say because it's so divinely simple. The chords are: C, F, G, F, repeat.  The rhythm is 4/4.  I really don't know why I love it so much.  I just do.

Feel free to share your own top tens in the comments.