Tenser, said the Tensor

What's the Connection?

Pop quiz, music lovers.  What's the connection between the two New Wave music videos after the jump?

Nostalgia from the Ashes

In a previous post inspired by watching old music videos on YouTube, in which I called it "nostalgia crack", I was talking about the surprisingly intense memories dredged up by little snippets of old TV.  YouTube has another related use, though: finally getting to see stuff that would have interested you back in the day, but that you had no access to because you lived in a pre-Internet, pre-Google dark age.  After the jump, I've included four examples I've come across so far.

Distinctive Dances

For a member of the MTV generation like me, YouTube is like nostalgia crack.  (Hey, remember that one video, with the guy, and the thing!  Yeah, that one ruled!)  I've recently been conducting an informal research project, and I'm ready with some preliminary results.  I therefore present to you: distinctive music video dances of the 1980's.

Eye of the Beholder

Submitted for your approval, direct from the depths of one man's subconscious.  On the left, Gary Numan, 38 seconds into the the video for "Cars".  On the right, one of the doctors from the Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder":

The same hair, the same eye liner, the same curl of the lip.  Coincidence?  Perhaps, but maybe something more—for you see, this just happens to be...The Twilight Zone.

"Song to the Siren" Video

A few months ago I wrote a long post about my attempts to decipher the lyrics of "Song to the Siren" by This Mortal Coil (the Cocteau Twins in disguise), and I mentioned finding a live version of the song that made it clear that Liz Fraser is singing, "Were you here when I was flotsam?"  It recently occurred to me to check the increasingly invaluable site YouTube—lo and behold, YouTube has a video of the TV appearance containing that version of the song.  You can watch it after the jump.

Eephing

Here's a story about an odd vocal artform from Monday's episode of the NPR show Day to Day.  It's called "eephing" and it's...um...hard to describe.  Kind of like scat meets beatbox, except with more banjo.  Definitely check out the sidebar samples, including a number called "Yakety Eeeph" that you may recognizes as that song from Benny Hill.

Current Top 25

I was patient.  I didn't like the idea of carrying around a hard drive in my pocket—think of the angular momentum, man!—so I waited until the no-moving-parts iPods had enough storage capacity to hold all my MP3s, then, a few months ago, bought a 4GB Nano.  (Whose oh-so-scratchable face is protected by this tremendously cool decal.)  I'm a pretty satisfied customer, although it seems to require somewhat frequent resets—sometimes I hit "play" and it plays but doesn't produce any sound.  I can live with that—heck, I put up with DOS for ten years.

In any case, after the jump you'll find my current "Top 25 Most Played" playlist from iTunes.  Note that iTunes does the right thing when accumulating play counts: it increments the count when a song finishes playing, not when it starts, so that over time the top 25 really does reflect what songs you like, rather that what songs the shuffler has chosen fractionally more often.

Song Meme

I seem to be doing a lot of music-blogging lately [isn't this supposed to be a linguistics blog?-ed.  Get out of my head, Mickey Kaus's editor!], and when I saw this meme over on Byzantium's Shores, I couldn't help myself.

A Kissed Out Red Float Post

Having recently posted about the Cocteau Twins and about the meanless text included in spam email, I realized the two subjects are related in an interesting way.  Liz Fraser, the lead singer of the Cocteau Twins, is famous for the very strange way she articulated the lyrics of their songs.  She's not just singing pure notes—there are actual consonants and vowels in there—but it's not any language I know.

"Song to the Siren"

Every so often a song that I know well catches my attention again.  I listen to it as if for the first time, sometimes parsing the lyrics for the first time, sometimes noticing a musical motif I hadn't heard before.  This recently happened with "Song to the Siren" by This Mortal Coil—or rather, since This Mortal Coil was a series of compilation albums by artists at the UK label 4AD, by Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins.  The song stands out for Liz's vocal performance, and for the sad, classical mythology behind the lyrics.  Fraser is famous for her very strange way of articulating the lyrics of songs, so it can be hard to make out what she's singing.  Curious, I started googling around to find out exactly what the lyrics were to "Song to the Siren", and discovered the surprisingly complicated textual history of the song.