An Ode to My Emotions: How a Certain Song Speaks to Me. #bloganuary

Music has an incredible ability to evoke such strong emotions. It’s as though a certain song can act like a window into your soul and, suddenly, you feel deeply connected to the artist and their words. That’s how I feel when listening to Helicopter by Deerhunter. For me, this shoegaze track is about more than just its captivating energy – it skillfully draws out my innermost feelings in ways that are hard to find elsewhere.

Before Neil Young’s Spotify issue, I heard Helicopter in my living room. I was listening to my weekly Spotify suggestions when it suggested that I might enjoy Helicopter. A few years ago, I became enamored with the song and realized it was unique.

On YouTube, I discovered a television edit that might explain more.

Deerhunter – Helicopter (Official Video) – YouTube

In addition to being blown away by the beauty of the song, I was convinced that everything was not well with the band’s singer.

For example, there is a subtle shot of the young man vomiting in a bathroom. A hangover is not the intention of the shot; it implies a disorder that typically affects young, vulnerable women.

The year of the song is 2010, on an album called Halcyon Digest, and that was long before ByteDance created TikTok, so it is not as if his vulnerability could be attributed, for example, to too much time in front of that app. The young man has sexual concerns (a euphemism by which I mean deviance).

It worried me that I would also appear deviant if I expressed this interest. Suppose my mother or sister were to read what I posted here.

While I think any concern like that is unwarranted, I know I had my mother’s support in seeing PG-type material when I was just becoming an adolescent. As it is often said, if Deerhunter is highly online, I am not sure if he is a boy. However, as Johnny Depp commented about Alice Cooper in Dark Shadows, she is the most unsightly woman he has ever seen.

As the Deerhunter singer has explained, he was a big fan of the Tim Burton movie Edward Scissorhands starring Johnny Depp. Since this was in the late nineteen eighties or early nineteen nineties, he probably saw Dark Shadows. I was close to fourteen when Edward Scissorhands came out, so I did not have any problems watching it.

However, Depp’s heartthrob status might have been a point of conversation between many men and their sons afterward if something like that came up. The girl in our house was young enough that if she had seen that movie when it was new, she would have believed that Vincent Price could actually build a man with scissors for hands.

When Halcyon Digest is being sold, it probably deserves an 18+ courtesy.

The song itself also lyrically explores the singer’s introversion, status as an entertainer, what I think is his substance use, and even his carbon footprint.

It should surprise no one that a rock singer could be troubled by a drug problem. However, I am wary of accidentally implying that I share the same concerns that the Deerhunter singer seems to indicate bother him. It is similar to how I began today’s post.

His gifted musical ability and sense of connection make me feel connected to him.

I don’t think Deerhunter’s Bandcamp account includes in the band’s discography any of their music from the year 2010 onwards. In other words, Halcyon Digest is neither for sale nor streaming, the last time I checked. The band is there, but only their earlier work appears, odd considering Halcyon Digest is proudly on the label 4AD.

Born in 1977

Share what you know about the year you were born.

1977

Merry Christmas!

I was born in the year 1977. About two months after I came into the world, a little-known sci-fi movie was a surprise spring hit that quickly became a sensation with cinemagoers. The film in question was Star Wars.

It makes me wonder if I should become a Jedi or follow Jedi beliefs.

1977 was the year Pink Floyd released their masterpiece Animals. I believe the late godfather of punk Lou Reed made the album Street Hassle that year, which many more years later he admitted he mostly regretted doing. In this day and age of gender identity, Lou Reed is sometimes criticized for being hostile to trans people.

Never Mind the Bollocks, the band’s sole studio album, led the way. In those days, Queen Elizabeth II was the British monarch, and they flaunted their success to the Royal Family.

The Ramones and maybe The Clash made albums in ’77, too. I just read an article about Patti Smith’s integration of her presence in the rock music scene with art’s photorealistic movement in the Washington Post. AI users are now able to use AI to create original images, including some that may be photorealistic.

In 1977, The Fall was already making music and making waves. I believe that they had really just started making music the previous year.

I’m glad I grew up to be a nice man.

WordPress Discover: Music

For April 2020, to get bloggers in the same spot, WordPress Discover has returned.  This week WordPress Discover is helmed by blogger Krista Stevens.

Today’s theme is “music.”  Krista asks about favourite albums.  My favourite album going is the Indie effort Groove Denied, by Stephen Malkmus, which came out on the Ides of March last year, 2019.

Sticker

It was exciting to learn about it.  It’s the second reinvention of himself Malkmus has presented, the first his solo career that followed his famed 1990s band Pavement, and now with what I’d estimate is a trilogy of albums so far, after five years between album releases.  What I mean is that Pavement did albums in the nineties, which were Malkmus along with several bandmates, and then there were several Stephen Malkmus solo records in the 2000s and 2010s, which ended with what to me was a fairly loud silence, a paradox.

After five years, Malkmus reinvented himself with kind of a second solo career.  The highlight for me was the album from 2019, Groove Denied.

If you don’t know about record albums, the groove is what the arm of the record player reads to play the music.  I take that the expression “Groove Denied” is a reference to streaming services that play digital recordings.  A record player is an analogue machine.

It is interesting for me that Malkmus’ vocal delivery, although perhaps a little dimmed by the passing of years, remains, to my ear, identical to how he sounded when he played with Pavement.

The songs Stephen Malkmus composes have always been brilliant, in my humble opinion, but Groove Denied seems outstanding.  There are three music videos for Groove Denied, handled in the United States by Matador Records, and it was a treat to watch them last year on YouTube.

Last year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Pavement record that went into the Top 5 of the year, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, in 1994.  The X shape on the cover of Groove Denied reminds me of the X Stephen Malkmus is wearing in the Pavement Slow Century DVD, when he comments on Pavement’s feud with the Smashing Pumpkins.

10 Reasons Radical Success is the Weakest Link Part I

Updated November 22, 2018

In December my brother and his wife and kids gave me an unusual gift, a puzzle celebrating The Beatles’ music on The White Album.

The Beatles

The puzzle is unusual mainly for the fact that the cover of The White Album is entirely the color white, which makes the puzzle an exercise in assembling puzzle pieces all the color white.  It is as if the wrong end of a game of chess game came down on you.

Beatles’ White Album: Five myths the 50th anniversary deluxe edition puts to the test

 

Photographer:
Little Visuals

I have ten reasons I’m suggesting that success like what The Beatles enjoyed is actually a weak link in terms of what it means for individual success and how it is misleading.  Four are presented here.

Photographer:
Suzy Hazelwood MONOPOLY FOR MILLENNIALS MAKES NPCs CRY The YouTube channel Geeks + Gamers fascinates me.  When Jeremy announced that he had fallen prey to a phishing spoof six weeks ago, I wanted to describe the problem in this post.  Jeremy was distracted at the moment and made a rookie error, surrendering control of Geeks + Gamers for seventeen minutes until he could get it back in order.  A second oversight occurred, when Jeremy neglected to secure his Google AdSense funding for the channel after the spoof.  When he realized that an entire month’s worth of  monies designated for Geeks + Gamers was stolen, he finally revealed what happened:  My YouTube Channel Was Hacked, Money Lost – Learn From My Mistakes  I’d been paying attention to Geeks + Gamers because I feel it protests and dissects conventional scholar on media.  The Geeks + Gamers team typically tackle major film projects like the DC universe on film, or more often the Disney Star Wars trilogy, as though the success, usually financial, of studio film output speaks to the conclusion that if a film is not fun, that if it doesn’t “work” in terms of being appealing to an audience, the film is not so much a radical success as it is a weak link.

• It didn’t matter to Jeremy that The Last Jedi is another splendid blockbuster in terms of the money it made for Disney; it was to him a complete letdown and something that was a disservice to the favorite films that remind him of his childhood, the Star Wars films.  Disney Has Concerns About Star Wars After The Last Jedi  It is interesting that while ostensibly the financial success of a film doesn’t mean the film is magical for Jeremy, when it comes to his YouTube channels, Geeks + Gamers and others, it is certainly a problem when a month’s loot is stolen, by cyber-crime means.  I wish Jeremy and the other members of Geeks + Gamers hadn’t had to go through that.Halloween with Geeks + Gamers was interesting for the fact that Jeremy argued that very bold criticism of what he does with Geeks + Gamers had been declared, criticism that included the idea that “code words” were being communicated to Geeks + Gamers subscribers that subscribers should launch literal hate and violence at targets which Geeks + Gamers usually defame, a video you can watch here:  NPC Star Wars Writer Continues To Lie and Spread False Information  Jeremy responded firmly that Geeks + Gamers is in no way is supportive of violent attitudes in any situation, and further that Geeks + Gamers made no attempt to “boycott” the recent Star Wars film Solo, a position I’d heard Jeremy take before in a discussion how Solo ws lacklustre in terms of box office returns.

All this keeps me quite rapt about what this YouTube channel is saying about the Star Wars films–Geeks+ Gamers plays a role in backlash concerning the Rian Johnson Star Wars film The Last Jedi.

• For Geeks + Gamers to become a successful YouTube channel, it meant starting from basics and building a subscriber basis and becoming a success, with people watching the videos and comment and so on.  If Geeks + Gamers were reviewing music, instead of films, and it was fifty years ago, perhaps they would have spoken about The White Album.  Instead, they are speaking out, frequently, about The Last Jedi, in a way which makes it completely clear that they regard Episode VIII of Star Wars as rubbish.When I watched The Last Jedi when it arrived on Netflix, I enjoyed it and even felt moved.  The mods of Geeks + Gamers had no such experience.  Instead, they despise the film and regale in making that clear rather than taking a positive spin on something that’s an extension to something they loved in childhood.I would guess that Geeks + Gamers take such a broad interest in film criticism that they feel they can succeed with a successful YouTube channel.  The idea of success they have is different from the idea of success that’s reflected in something like the fiftieth-anniversary of The White Album, or in the success of the blockbuster The Last Jedi.

• The mods of Geeks + Gamers don’t seem to see The Last Jedi as a success at all because they despise it so much.  Their YouTube channel extrapolates messages like that Star Wars has been mostly reduced to rubbish, or that the DC comics universe could similarly face a death grip in the cinema.  I believe I had misunderstood Geeks + Gamers with my belief that Geeks + Gamers doesn’t desire or see any value in success at the level of the “blockbuster”; instead they expound on problems in entertainment which is compromised by identity politics in the entertainment that they criticize.  Now that I understand some more about Jeremy’s point of view,  it has me feeling a touch more informed about how identity politics show up in entertainment.
  To them, The Last Jedi is a weak link.  They wouldn’t aim for that kind of success in their own lives, for example.  It is notable, having learned of their misfortune with a phishing spoof, that their success has been compromised by their own position as a good-sized YouTube channel.

Photographer:
Rawpixel.com  In addition, an example of underhandedly reacting to what’s been said on Geeks + Gamers is the shout-out they gave Mike Zeroh after film director Rian Johnson mean-spiritedly called out Zeroh who is devoted specifically to exploring what’s going on in Star Wars.  The Mike Zeroh channel is Zeroh’s speculation about “behind the scenes” in Star Wars.  In the initial days of shooting Episode IX of Star Wars, Johnson, reflecting on Twitter about what he was accomplishing with his Star Wars film, referred to YouTube’s Mike Zeroh as being a zero, although Johnson later apologized.

• It is the same kind of weak link that exists when Geeks + Gamers tackles Star Wars because for all the enthusiasm Mike Zeroh puts into anticipating Star Wars, Mike Zeroh has personally explained that he feels The Last Jedi is a poor effort.
  Mike Zeroh Vs Rian Johnson… Thank you Rian Again!!!

I was amused by The White Album puzzle game I got from my brother and his family.  I am also grateful for the opportunity to share these opportunities.  I am glad if you have read this.  You’re welcome to “like,” to “follow,” and/or to comment.