Reactable

How do you categorize music?

It's often asked how one categorizes music. "Guess what, that electronic sounding track you're listening to, well it's actually fall under the 'micro-house' category. Nope not electronic music, not techno but 'micro-house'." Most people brush off statements like this, however it's important to note that this way of classification happens not just in electronic music, but all forms of music.

People appear to agree as what are prototypical songs for musical categories, such as "jazz music", "country music" and "rap music". However, within these categories we all know certain songs or groups that are lesser examples than the prototype: the Beastie Boys aren't really rap, Frank Sinatra is not really jazz, or at least not as much as John Coltrane is.

How do we know this? Why are we able to define music?

One hundred years ago, Philosopher Ludwing Wittgenstein supplied an answer: categorical membership is determined not by a definition, but by family resemblance. Let's use an example then of defining music by definitions. We could say that heavy metal is a musical genre that has (a) distorted electric guitars; (b) power chords; (c) loud drums; (d) sexy lead singers, usually shirtless, dripping sweat as they twirl the microphone stand around the stage and (e) frightening band names like Black Sabbath, Spinal Tap, or The Sword.

Although most heavy metal songs do have distorted electric guitars, so does "Beat It" by Michael Jackson - in fact, Eddie Van Halen(a heavy metal god) plays the guitar solo in that song. Even the Carpenters have a couple songs with distorted guitars, yet no one would call them "heavy metal". Led Zeppelin - the quintessential heavy metal band and the band that spawned the genre - has several songs with no distorted guitars at all("Down by the Seaside", "Going to California", "The Battle for Evermore"). "Stairway to Heaven" has no power chords, yet remains a heavy metal anthem. There are no heavy, loud drums either (or distorted guitars for that matter). Metallica is a heavy metal band, yet I don't think anyone would think the lead singer, James Hetfield, sexy. And band names such as Underworld, Burial, Monolake, and Plastikman sure sound dark and scary, right? Actually, these are all artists who produce music on their computers, with no distorted guitars or singers, just lots and lots of bass for people to dance to.

The point here is that definitions of musical genres are not very useful. We say that something is heavy metal if it resembles heavy metal - a family resemblance. In other words, keep listening.

One Day As A Lion

"It's better to live one day as a lion, than a thousand years as a lamb." Zach de la Rocha(vocalist of Rage Against the Machine) took this quote to heart. His solo project is a stripped down attempt to realize this sentiment in sound. It's not what you might think though. These five songs, clocking in at just over 20 minutes, are an intense racket of sociopolitical noise. There isn't any filler here; it's an aural ignition of a gasoline bomb going off in your ears. If you've been waiting for new Rage Against the Machine, download this EP.

Lost Highway: the opera

Opera composers have turned to just about any source available for their work: ancient mythology, the Bible and other sacred texts, epic poetry, folktales, drama, novels, short stories, history and many have created their own original plots. It’s somewhat surprising, then, that cinema has taken so long to catch on as a source for new operas.

This summary taken from AllMusic:

Lost Highway might seem like an odd choice for adaptation to the operatic stage. By almost any measure, the film would be categorized as a “cult classic,” one of the darkest, most disturbing, and most narratively obscure films by any major director. The subject of endless debate, the film raises questions about reality versus fantasy and offers few certainties about its meaning. It leaves the viewer wondering not only “What was that supposed to mean?,” but “What just happened?” The film involves an affluent, unhappily married California couple, Fred and Renée Madison, who receive a series of increasingly intrusive and creepy videotapes, which someone has taken inside their house while they slept. At a party, Fred meets a Mystery Man, who has the unnerving ability to be two places at once — at the party and inside the Madison’s house — simultaneously. The next day Fred receives a videotape of himself, bloodied, beside Renée’s mutilated body, but he has absolutely no recollection of it. He’s sentenced to death for her murder. One day, the prison guards discover that the man in his cell is not Fred, but a young mechanic named Pete Dayton. Pete has no idea of how he came to be in prison; he’s released, and returns to his job in a garage, but detectives follow his every move. He disastrously falls in love with Alice (a thinly disguised version of Renée), the mistress of his sinister and violent mobster client, Mr. Eddy. To escape Mr. Eddy’s wrath, Alice leads Pete on a murderous crime spree and then abandons him in the desert, where Pete is somehow transformed back into Fred Madison. Fred discovers Alice in a motel room with Mr. Eddy, kidnaps him and takes him into the desert. They fight, and Fred cuts Mr. Eddy’s throat as the Mystery Man looks on, videotaping everything. The movie ends with Fred, pursued by the police, fleeing down the desert highway.

Lynch’s movie is a marvel of visual and thematic leitmotifs that often obscure, rather than clarify meaning or relationships. It’s so packed with barely glimpsed images, mysterious connections, and enigmatic details (that may or may not be significant) that it demands to be seen repeatedly. Lynch has vigorously asserted that the movie can’t (and shouldn’t) be comprehended on a rational level. If it has a logic, it’s an intuitive logic that would lose its essence and mystery if it could be explained. Since music can do its most powerful work on a subconscious level, Lost Highway makes an entirely logical choice for an opera. And based on the resulting piece, it’s clear that Neuwirth was just the composer to make it work. She succeeds because she takes the same approach to the material as Lynch does; her music doesn’t “clarify” the story, or tie plot elements together, but it operates on the same subliminal, non-rational level as the film, enriching it with yet another layer of mystery. Like the film, the music may not make sense to you, but you know that you’ve been punched in the gut.

The film’s soundtrack was written largely by Angelo Badalamenti, one of Lynch’s favorite collaborators, and also includes songs performed by David Bowie, the German industrial metal band, Rammstein, Trent Reznor, Lou Reed, and Barry Adamson. Badalamenti’s ominous soundscapes are the perfect accompaniment to Lynch’s dark imagery, but they are so low key that they rarely draw attention to themselves. The amorphous, subliminal creepiness of his score make it clear that he has absorbed some of the same modernist techniques as Neuwirth. Neuwirth doesn’t mimic the sound of the film, but some moments, like the Badalamenti-esque treatment of Alice’s entrance mentioned above, sound like an homage to the searing cool jazz that’s the hallmark sound of much of Badalamenti’s work for Lynch.

New Weezer

A YouTube video about YouTube videos:

Maiden, Mother & Crone

New Portishead!

It's been 10 years, but Portishead is finally releasing their third album(aptly titled "Third") later this month. Here's a preview of their first single, Machine Gun.