Kanye West + King Crimson = Kanye

Every time I hear a few seconds of pop music, I really begin to wonder what the hell people are listening to. Generally, it’s really bad, but still.

So anyways, I’m big on the band King Crimson, as I may have let on occasionally, or perhaps not. And apparently this famous Kanye West guy (nothing more than a gay fish) decides to sample one or two seconds of the one KC song possibly qualified to be a “hit” – 21st Century Schizoid Man. Admittedly, it’s not the big intro riff, nor is it the chaotic breakdown in the middle,  just Greg Lake’s heavily distorted refrain that is the title, so it’s pretty insignificant.  But people are astounded about this.

Technically, they’re not astounded, they’re just covering this rapper fellow in considerable detail because that’s what they do. And he’s been around for several albums and some production, so he’s not exactly confined to complete obedience of every pop stereotype (although he might, since it’s profitable). But still, KC seems relatively obscure to most people, does it not?

And besides, is this going to do much for King Crimson? A lot of rock and metal musicians have taken influence from them, but the average pop listener? Kinda doubt it. They’ll probably take one look at the sampled song, see a 7 minute runtime, think “omg its 2 hard” and scurry off to bury themselves in medical waste. If they get to any of the other songs, they’re not exactly in the pop demographic.
Incidentally, KC’s first rumblings were in 1968/1969. Here’s something relatively from 2003. Same band, drastically different lineup, different sound. Robert Fripp remains the core of the band.  If you want to look up King Crimson, I suggest such albums as “Lark’s Tongues in Aspic” (1973), “Red” (1974), “Discipline” (1981) and “The Power to Believe” (2003). And you might as well get their debut too, but much of their discography is criminally underknown.

Quickie: Therion – Ho Draken Ho Megas

Still being a novice at listening to that popular symphonic metal band, Therion, I took the opportunity to listen over their this third album of theirs.

What can I say? It’s weird, and in many ways what I initially expected to hear from “Theli”.  I assure you that I was not ready for traditional heavy metal dressed up with operatic choirs and keyboards and Middle Eastern references in the melodies and riffs when I first heard it, although considering how much more complexity I was expecting, it’s an oddly captivating work.

On the other hand, Symphony Masses, despite having the symphonic elements in relatively minor quantities, has the apocalyptic death metal insanity that I was expecting, to a point. There’s a lot of references to more normal “heavy metal”, mainly being that some of the riffs could be installed into an Iron Maiden/Judas Priest/Dio/whatever else album and not cause essential conflicts with the style of said traditional metal.  Even the more atypical riffs have a good bit of melody built into them. Very early/mid ’90s Swedish of the thing. I assume that this would mesh reasonably with the early foundational works of the Gothenburg scene, and maybe somewhat with earlier swedish works by Entombed, Dismember, and Therion’s previous two albums.

But yeah, it’s a unique album – everything combines to make something apocalyptic, lurching, stuff crazy enough to unsettle me slightly (on the acid scale of insanity, with 1 being entirely normal and 10 being mind bending Lovecraftian madness, this is between a 4 and a 5).

To get an idea of what I’m talking about, listen to the second track, “Dark Princess Naamah”.

Quickie – Machine language contractors

So I’m not very familiar with how high performance software is coded, or who does the work, but it strikes me as a pretty good idea to speed up the underlying assembly code to take advantage of architecture improvements in stuff like Intel’s “Nehalem” and future chips, but more importantly, get more juice out of low power stuff like Intel Atoms, PowerVR SGX535s (The GPU in the iPhone, I think), and so on. Mainly improving instructions per clock cycle, which is one of the reasons the Pentium 4 at 3.73 Ghz is more likely to choke on Crysis than your nice shiny Core i5 at 2.33 Ghz. Apparently, there are a lot of rules governing the creation of efficient assembly code, which I’m not sure how well is done in various companies, but still.

Which brings me to my point – How about a company that works specifically on ensuring programs have good machine code in translation? Writing compilers that make better assembly optimization, tweaking low level routines to reduce pipeline bubbles, that kind of thing. You obviously don’t need assembly for your Python scripts to link the output of various tasks from program to program, but if you can get the output for transfer more efficiently, it’s like the programming language equivalent of sex, no?

Then again, if people already do this sort of thing on a regular basis, I salute them. Incidentally, I also salute the people who work on parallel computing, like the people at ATI and NVidia and the people who write GPGPU software, and the people who are slowly pushing CPUs to greater amounts of cores and writing for them.  Something to specialize in, I suppose.

Quickie: Darkthrone – Transylvanian Hunger

The infamous album, people. The one that’s incredibly low-fi, constant in tempo, minimalistic in riffs. The average listener probably hasn’t heard of it, but oh well. So I’ve made a lot of references to this album, not to its percieved qualities, but other stuff – being cold in comparison to the disease of “Under a Funeral Moon” and the occultism of “A Blaze in the Northern Sky” , the idea that the average person could be trained to like the aesthetic of this album more easily than its structure… actually, no. I haven’t made a lot of references to this album.

But it’s one of those albums. It’s very simple, but not in a pop sense.  No dull choruses, but less riffs and more focus on ambience and the sound that each riff creates. There are slight changes throughout, that keep it from falling into mere repetition, but this is a very droning album. Admittedly, people seem to underestimate the amount of riffs on this album, but only by two or three. More importantly, people seem to underestimate the melodic tendencies of this album – again, they’re typical “evil” black metal melodies, but that’s still melody.

Incidentally, Varg Vikernes of Burzum wrote lyrics on some of the tracks, which might explain why this album was initially proclaimed “Norsk Arisk Black Metal”. Or it might not. And the album art resembles Mayhem’s “Live in Leipzig” album, which is worth noting.

Quickie – International Day of Slayer

For the one or two of you who reads this blog, meet the aforementioned holiday. Have you guys met before? Yes OR no? Eh, whatever.

With this in mind, I have a request to all who choose to celebrate this holiday – play the album “Hell Awaits”, because it’s a personal favorite. I like my Slayer songs convoluted and dark more than the extreme violence of “Reign in Blood”. Not to mention, Tom Araya’s signature screams show up to great degree here – one on Crypts of Eternity, one on Kill Again (appears in approximately the same form at the beginning of “Angel of Death”)…
Besides, most of the people will probably be blasting “Reign in Blood”, so why not balance it out with their other work? You should probably stay away from “Diabolus in Musica” and “God Hates Us All”, though..

Trey Songz to Decency: “Let’s fuck, I get to be on top”

So while this guy’s music probably wouldn’t offend me or most people morally, albeit possibly musically if he does weird, Ke$haesque vocal drunken stumbling, or “acrobatics”, his persona’s a bit over the top (He doesn’t write his own songs, instead various weirdos with odd pseudonyms do the work). I mean, when half your song’s a request for oral, you’re not exactly bubblegum pop, are you?

Well, if you ask me, bubblegum pop and NSFW content are converging, which isn’t a good sign if you’re a fundie, and most people probably don’t care about. Then again, I see bubblegum pop as more general than most people, apparently. If it’s fed to the masses and ignored all the way to #1, while being made solely for commerical gain, most likely by a team of songwriters as opposed to the face on the singles and album, it’s bubblegum pop. So if 2 Live Crew and Dark Funeral decided to sell a song about Satan seducing and raping a faucet for pleasure, then hired half the Southern rap and Norwegian black metal scenes to write everything, ended up producing minimalistic electropop, then got Warner Media Group to convince the media it was the next big thing, AND masses of people bought it, sang along to it for a few weeks, then promptly forgot about it, then I would call it bubblegum pop. That’s an extremely large simile-example. But take into mind, song structure alone does not the bubblegum chew. Take into mind that some bands like Killswitch Engage and In Flames have torn up the Billboard with music, regardless of having some allusions to popular accessible forms of music, simply aren’t bubblegum pop. But someone like Lady Gaga clearly is, because the average person won’t say, “Eew, it’s all heavy and scary!”.

What’s this have to do with this popular Trey Songz feller? I’m guessing he’s an inoffensive character who just HAPPENS to be all about having sex and incorporates it into his otherwise squeaky clean music. Nothing wrong with that, right? Not suprisingly, I’m going to say no, because while we do live in a society almost absurdly obsessed with sex, I’m not the type of person who is going to take one random idol and place him as a scapegoat. But obviously, I’m the type to take random people and use them as debate points. See what I just did?

Mini-fiction – “The Ghetto Fantasy”

Based on an exaggeration of a misunderstood aspect of a culture I am unfamiliar with. This story is not intended to be realistic in any way, or be imitated in any way. Furthermore, it may be very offensive to people who actually understand the culture that this story misinterprets. If I keep adding disclaimers, it might become offensive to people who hate disclaimers before they consume their media. Enjoy.

“Just think about it, man!” he said. “A place where you do nothing but listen to rap, drive a big car, get shot at, sell drugs, shoot people, go to clubs, bang hoes, and all sorts of things.”

“I don’t know. You think they going to put up with that? I mean I like bangin’ hoes but most women ain’t hoes and most hoes don’t like bein’ hoes,” his friend responded.

“But if we could be havin’ a place like that, would we?”

“Yeah, I would.”

“What do you mean I?”

“I wouldn’t want you bangin’ my hoes or on my turf.” His friend drew a pistol and shot him several times in the chest. Feeling an immense pain in his body, he looked down – blood was spilling out of him as if from bottles of beer.

“Oh god, what you do that for?”

“I said I don’t want my hoes banged.” His friend walked away, leaving him to collapse in the street and fall into unconcsciousness.

He woke up several hours later in a trauma center, where a nurse was attending to some machinery around him. His friend was there.

“I had a dream while I was dead where that ghetto fantasy I tell you about was true, and it felt good for a bit. Then it got boring, so I’m conflicted,” he told his friend.

“What do you mean it got boring?” his friend snapped.

“I don’t know, maybe it be the fact that it kept going and going and going over and over again…”

The nurse walked over to his bed, and pressed a button. He began to feel drowsy.

“You need to rest. Gunshot wounds don’t heal easily, and if you keep talking like that you’ll only be in here longer-”

He didn’t hear the rest, as the button had triggered the release of tranquilizers into his system. He slept, woke up, lived in the trauma center for two more weeks, then left, and never thought more of the incident. Life continued normally for him and his friend.

Extreme metal vocals

You know what I noticed? People who ordinarily like death growls and black metal shrieks and pig squeals and distorted rasps and all these things still have their limits for other vocals. For instance, I have seen Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy compared to a raped cat, In Flames vocalist Anders Fridén described as ear-splitting (this is in reference to his “harsh” vocals – can’t accurately judge the clean vocals he pulled out in the 2000s), and Sven-Erik Kristiansen(“Maniac” of Mayhem) is just ridiculously abrasive and inhuman to the point that people get frightened away from the Wolf’s Lair Abyss EP (he gets better on later albums, apparently)

But wait, aren’t extreme metal vocals SUPPPOSED to be abrasive? (yes)

I mean, they obviously take some time to get used to. I should know myself – I didn’t just randomly say to myself one day, “Hey, I should become a metalhead spontaneously!” and then just start acquiring a huge collection of heavy metal music. No, I heard tinges of metal and metalesque music long before I got into the genre for real, and I got into the more accessible genres first – the traditional heavy metal, the melodic thrash, the NWOBHM influenced prog, and so forth. But I digress – the way I see it, if you’re complaining that the “extreme” vocals in “extreme metal” are too “extreme” for you… Eh. Just make up your own punishment for yourself.

A more striking problem is when the vocals manage to detract from their own aggression (or at least trangression) somehow, either by poor performing technique (I’m looking at you, Graveyard Classics II era Chris Barnes) or flat out insulting the intelligence of the vocalist (For example, be careful when you choose shouts).