OK, I have officially had enough of teeth-whitening ads on the internet. They are the new Evony.
If you’ve been online for more than 20 minutes in the last few months, you’ll have seen these ads. Hundreds of them. Before/after comparisons, gushing testimonies about scientific advances “discovered by a mom”, animated banners that dance around and swap places.
Tonight I actually clicked on one.
Hi I’m Janice Powell from beautiful Nottingham . I’m a proud mother of 2 and a devoted wife of 12 years to my husband Bill. I recently whitened my teeth with an amazing Free Trial product that I found online. I’m so excited that I need to share my story with you!
Cute, no? And with my US proxy settings on…
Hi I’m Janice Powell from beautiful New York .
Finally, from my work PC…
Hi I’m Janice Powell from beautiful Thorpe-le-Soken .
From where? Yes, from the beautiful (if obscure) Essex village located southwest of Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton-on-Sea and northwest of Clacton-on-Sea. You know – Thorpe-le-Soken!
Why not take a look at Janice Powell’s blog and discover where she’s from today? My money’s on the picturesque town of document.write(AdShuffle_Geo_GetCity()).
Update 27/10: Looking via my iPhone this morning, Janice declares herself as being from “beautiful Slough”. Which is stretching credulity a little too far.
Realised a couple of days ago it’s almost exactly two decades since my first major label recording session. Bloody hell, I feel old.
It was late 1989 and I’d been asked to add a rap to new material by Sheffield’s electro pioneers Cabaret Voltaire.
The Cabs were – and still are – considered godfathers of experimental UK music (to understand why, watch this clip from BBC4′s Synth Britannia).
Sadly – like my lyrical contribution – the album they were brewing at the time wasn’t among their best. Groovy, Laidback and Nasty was their last release for EMI, an (understandable) attempt to parlay their electro roots into hit singles, via house music.
It didn’t really hit the spot, and the pair – in particular Richard Kirk – returned to producing tense, technical mood music pretty much straight after.
But I’m very proud I got the chance to contribute, proud I made it onto vinyl, and proud too that EMI have re-released the album electronically within the last few weeks.
Here’s the track in question. All pre-work was done by sending cassettes in Jiffy bags back and forth between Nottingham and Sheffield. Those were the days.
I’ll doubtless return to the fertile blogging ground of Sheffield’s music scene in the future.
But for now, here’s something stronger from Cabaret Voltaire’s catalogue – the tremendous, still-fresh Sensoria. Watch out for the late, lamented Tinsley cooling towers at 2:49.
Oh – and I first saw this video on The Max Headroom Show. It literally does not get any more 80s than that.
On the way home from work tonight I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers – specifically, his chapter about how the character of a society affects its airlines’ likelihood of fatal disasters.
(To summarise: deferential, hierarchical societies crash more planes because co-pilots don’t dare question their superiors’ judgements. There – I just saved you £9.99.)
As an element in the book, this chapter floats completely adrift – it bears no real relationship to Gladwell’s central thesis. But no matter. It’s practically impossible to write a boring piece about aeroplane disasters. By definition, they are gripping events. And gripped I was.
So much so that I’ve spent most of the evening searching the web for more about air safety, and (let’s be honest) plane crashes.
Why?
I have no idea, except that I know I’m not alone. On TV, Discovery and National Geographic seem to thrive on a diet of air disaster documentaries, and God knows I’ve watched a few of them (scaring the hell out of myself each time, of course).
Even in written form, plane crashes are utterly gripping: something about the calm, clinical jargon of air traffic controllers and pilots brings the sudden descent to chaos into super-sharp relief.
Appropriately, it’s our vivid (if statistically irrational) fear of death while flying that inspired that most calming of musical genres – ambient – 30 years ago, in the shape of Brian Eno’s album Music For Airports. Here’s the man himself to explain:
And while we’re talking music and air travel…
I remember fondly how the clichéd reaction on seeing a studio mixing desk of the old school (i.e. one like this) was to compare it to “the flight deck of a 747″. This was always a flawed comparison, given even the most complex mixing desk basically consists of the same knobs repeated 96 times – one set for each channel.
A real flight deck – and I’m only guessing here – seems somewhat more involved.
Finally got my Google Wave account today, thanks to a very kind colleague I won’t name, to save him from being swamped by further requests. (You know who you are – thank you!)
First thoughts? As anticipated, the current pre-release service is populated entirely by geeks (four dozen World Of Warcraft Waves, anyone?). I love that.
Almost all current Wave usage is trivial, chaotic and dysfunctional – 50% “is this thing on?” and 50% “how do you shut this thing up?” – shot through with classically geeky humour reminiscent of the Wild West days of newsgroups. I love that too.
Even Wave’s error messages are nerdy in-jokes derived from Firefly, “an American space western television series created” – thanks Wikipedia, incidentally – “by writer/director Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel”. I cannot imagine a TV programme I would less want to ever watch – and yet I love those error messages too.
In coming weeks I’m looking forward to exploring practical, productive uses for the service. Wave is – in essence – a souped-up, real-time document collaboration tool… so for someone like me who works with a matrix of colleagues spread across England (not to mention a core management team who are always geographically dispersed) the applications should be numerous.
This weekend, though, I think I’ll just arse around with it.
This time we head back to the Eurovision Song Contest, 1977.
In the hot seat: Stewart Morris, a respected light entertainment director for the BBC throughout the 70s and 80s. This is a highly pressurised production with millions watching worldwide – and not everything is going according to plan, especially at 2:21 when the caption roller is accidentally triggered ahead of time.
Here’s the live programme’s talkback. This clip contains, as they say, “strong language from the start”.
And here’s how the final few minutes of the programme looked on screen – this time, expletive-free…
An obscure scientist from Stanford Research Institute stood before a hushed San Francisco crowd and blew every mind in the room. His 90-minute demo rolled out virtually all that would come to define modern computing: videoconferencing, hyperlinks, networked collaboration, digital text editing, and something called a “mouse.”
Doug Engelbart was that scientist. And it’s his introduction to the mouse – just a snippet from his historic talk that day – that you can view below.
I thoroughly recommend you watch the whole presentation if you get the chance. Its heightened degree of innovation puts announcements like “we’ve added a camera to the iPod Nano” or “Windows 7 doesn’t crash very much” firmly into context.
Where pop music’s concerned, I’m a sucker for overkill.
Some of my favourite producers (like Trevor Horn) are notorious for over-egging the musical pudding until… well, until it no longer resembles a pudding. Just a big bowl of egg.
There is another way, however.
Hearing You’re A Jerk by New Boyz on the radio the other day, I was reminded how much I also love minimalism in pop.
Whether it’s LL Cool J’s debut album Radio – whose stripped-down production inspired the credit “reduced by Rick Rubin” – or Prince’s When Doves Cry (renowned as one of the few hit singles in pop history with no bassline), sometimes pop music is as much about what isn’t there as what is.
So here’s today’s philosophical question. What’s the minimum number of components for a satisfying record? How many instrumental elements can you lose before it no longer makes sense?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you four case studies.
Prince – Kiss
I love the story of this song. Prince wrote it for a set of protégés called Maserati, who tried to record it but couldn’t get it quite right. Prince decided “sod this”, chucked all their parts in the recycling (apart from a few backing vocals) and kept it for himself.
I count precisely five instruments here: a kickdrum, a snare, hi-hats and a guitar, plus little tiny bits of synthesized marimba. Now that’s economy.
To make the production even sparser, the guitar that’s strumming throughout the song has a “gate” applied to it, which means it can only be heard in time with the hi-hats. Which means it stutters. Which means, in turn, when the first major bit of “ungated” guitar appears (at 2:12) it rings out like a bell. Beautiful work.
Ying Yang Twins – Wait (The Whisper Song)
Think five musical elements means minimalism? Ying Yang Twins’ US Top 20 hit makes Prince’s palette look obscenely bloated.
Here we have precisely three instruments.
In the verses: a bass tone and a fingerclick. For the choruses we raise the orchestration by a massive 50% by adding… some hi-hats.
The ‘Wait’ beat sounds like something you can beat on the table in the lunchroom. If you are in the lunchroom, banging the beat, what do you use for the hi-hat? You will use your mouth. To me, the drums sound like something on a trash can in an alley, and you can just see somebody using their mouth for the hi-hat.
Musically I think it’s brilliant in its simplicity – I especially love the whispering, which means even the vocals are minimal. Shame about the lyrics (some of the crassest in the history of recorded sound). Embedded below, you’ll be relieved to hear, is the radio version.
Ronnie Hazlehurst – Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em
As the BBC’s musical director for light entertainment during the 70s, Ronnie Hazlehurst was a man whose natural home – instrumentally speaking – was with the big band. The TV orchestra. Witness themes for Are You Being Served?, The Two Ronnies and many more.
God bless your musical genius, Ronnie. Now, does a pair of piccolos count as one instrument or two?
Patrice Bäumel – Roar (Original Mix)
And finally.
House can be one of the most stripped-down, minimal musical genres around. But there’s always one constant – the kick drum - which could surely never be removed. It’s called “four-to-the-floor” for a reason. Right?
You’ve guessed where I’m going with this. Here is possibly the world’s first zero-to-the-floor house record. No kick. No melody. Pretty much nothing, in fact – except for what sounds like a revving chainsaw, punctuated by (what else?) the air brakes on a bus.
Amidst all the excitement (and furore) about Google’s move to scan more and more of the world’s books, one part of their offering seems to have gone largely unnoticed.
First - let’s not be coy – I heart the hell out of magazines. I love reading them, I used to work in them, and they’re an incredible source of social history which has largely been unsearchable until now (at least for consumers without access to expensive specialist tools).
Secondly, what’s great about the Google scans is that you get the whole package. This isn’t somebody’s idea of “the best of” Life magazine. This is every last trivial, forgotten article and ad. Often (in fact most of the time, in my view) it’s through these small, low-key details that the true colour of an era emerges.
If you’re anything like me you’ll happily waste hours poring through this stuff, but let me pick one publication to highlight: Billboard. This has been the US music industry’s journal of record since 1894. (OK, so Google doesn’t quite stretch back that far, but will 1942 do you?)
I’ve had fun this weekend tracking entire musical genres back through Billboard history. What’s especially cool is unearthing their earliest moments, when we find the magazine poking gingerly at them with the quaint, quizzical tone of the bush anthropologist.
Rap Records’ distinct appeal is found in their ability to induce listener participation. As rap product proliferates, this unique lure may be finding its way to a larger audience.
This is the observation of industry principals, who note that rap disks can cause more stir on the dance floor than conventional dance records. “The rapper and the audience often exchange the jive talk,” says Robert Ford, coproducer of popular rap artist Kurtis Blow.
“Or sometimes a rapper will call out dance steps,” he continues. “It’s like a square dance.”
What is house music? [...] As with all local music scenes, Chicago house music makers have their own jargon. For example, instead of dancing to the music one ‘jacks’ one’s body to it.
A typical house recording may feature a simple thumping drum-machine pattern and a voice sample of the artist saying, “It’s house” or “It’s time to jack,” with some synthesizer parts providing background.
Previous contracts with EMI and A&M were cancelled by the companies following allegations of “unprofessional” behavior by group members. Now the Sex Pistols’ first product on Virgin is the single God Save The Queen (not the National Anthem).
But in case you thought “punk rock” might be a fad, November 19th’s edition in the same year puts you straight.
Record stores around the country are finding that if you display punk rock product, you will sell it. Some are devoting entire sections of the stores to new wave.
Even dealers who do not provide elaborate punk displays are reporting that while the music has not sparked a run on the product, sales are good and they are growing.
Larry Herman, branch marketing coordinator for Warner Bros. in New York, says that the label considers punk part of pop music in general, but is interested in special punk sections since it brings it closer to the people. [...] One store, he says, has put up its own Sex Pistol awning.
Spot any other jewels in Billboard’s archives? I’d love to hear from you.
OK, I have officially had enough of teeth-whitening ads on the internet. They are the new Evony.
