Blow me, Pink.

I really hate to be the arbiter of morality.

Anybody who's ever met me knows that I don't have any significant objections to what my grandmother used to call "strong language." Anybody who's read my stuff, or walked near me, or sat next to me in church...

A very wise man once said "sometimes, you just have to say 'what the fuck'," and I've always tried to live by those words.

That being said, Pink's latest hit bothers me just a little.



There's a difference between "some inappropriate language," and the carefully calculated insertion of cuss-words, specifically to make your song appeal to 13 year olds (when the radio-edits are specifically built in to the phrasing, that can often be a giveaway).

I'm not the biggest Pink fan, but I like her well enough. And several of her previous hits had a "bitch" here or a "damn" there, and I had no problem with that. But with this, it's like she decided that part of her popularity was due to the prurient value of her language.

(That's your new vocabulary word of the day, folks.)

I don't know anybody who says "I had a shit day." Maybe that's local slang from someplace; as an adjective, the word should be "shitty." But then she goes and conjugates it (or, you know, would have, if first-person, second-person and plural had different forms in English).

I'm not likely to clutch my pearls and swoon about this being Hollywood having an agenda and trying to destroy civilization as we know it. This isn't some Satanic influence over a singer, this is just a musician trying to make money with some carefully-inserted controversy.

But that's kind of fucked.

Three idiots, balanced by a genius.

Mitt Romney is going to speak before the Values Voters Summit, which is another gathering of God-botherers that happens every year, this one put on by the Family Research Council, the American Family Association and other evangelical groups.

Now, Bryan Fischer (of the American Family Association) said just last month that the First Amendment doesn't apply to Mormons. So the New York Times asked the Romney's people to comment on that, but the campaign didn't reply.

Why is anyone surprised about that? It's Romney's people! How could they reply? They don't have the right!

Ought to be a short speech, though.

But this move of Romney's is only... interesting (you know - the polite way to say "pandering"). Other people are just outright stupid.

On ABC’s Top Line today, Rep. Paul Broun, a tea party Republican from Georgia, said the ("Occupy Wall Street") protests amount to an “attack upon freedom” — one that he said is now being hijacked by labor unions in attempt to reelect President Obama.

“They don’t know why they’re there. They’re just mad,” Broun told us. “This attack upon business, attack upon industry, attack upon freedom – and I think that’s what this is all about.”

“Attack upon freedom”? Exercising your right to peaceful assembly is now an “attack upon freedom”?

Congressman, please define what you consider “freedom.” And for that matter, define “attack.”

Especially ironic that, having gotten everything bass-ackwards like that, he went on to say that the president’s policies were “ignorant and incompetent”...

Meanwhile, Eric Cantor tried to whip up anger against those same protesters that broke Rep. Broun's brain.

"If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country," he said.

And then, completely straight-faced, he found the perfect follow-up comment.

"Believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans."

You mean, like trying to pit Americans against working-class Americans who might be protesting economic injustice?

But, just because there are useless policians out there, that doesn't mean we have to pay attention to them all time, does it?

Instead, join me in wishing a happy birthday, on this late hour of October 7, to the brilliant Tim Minchin.

How Rebecca Black and Glee Are Destroying the World

Pitch adjustment has probably been around as long as there's been recorded music. George Martin is famously credited with getting two different takes of the same song, originally played at slightly different tempos, and splicing them together using a Vari-control pitch shifter to match them together (this is most obvious in the slight distortion in John's voice during the line "Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to...").

But then, in 1997, Dr Harold "Andy" Hildebrand, a former geophysicist studying seismic activity, developed and patented a process called Auto-Tune™. And in doing that, he may have destroyed the concept of music entirely.

Auto-Tune™ is phase vocorder, an audio processor which can be used both live and in recorded tracks, which adjusts the voice to the nearest true semitone and correct the pitch to match whatever scale is specified.

It can also be used to distort a voice - most famously, Cher's warble in 1998's Believe.

Auto-Tune™ is still considered the industry standard. In 2009, a 24-year-old Brooklyn musician named Michael Gregory started a viral series of videos making extensive use of the technology.

Although the success of Autotune The News led to the first release of original music by the Gregory Brothers, the strategy backfired to a certain extent:

Andrew (Gregory, the guitarist in the group) also makes folk music, but, unfortunately, many of the Brothers' new fans have no patience for anything that's not "Auto-Tune the News."

But those are effects. The more insidious use of autotuning is its prevalence in the music industry. It's almost impossible to find a CD where a singer doesn't tweak, warp, or totally alter their voice.

"It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck." Like plastic surgery, he adds, more people have had it than you think. "Let's just say I've had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box."

All of this leads to lazy singers, unwilling to practice; lazy musicians, happy to take someone else's work, loop it, and claim that the result is an "original" composition; and lazy performers who go on tour to lip-synch to their own music.

Sir Elton John's live reputation is second to none. Even when he's not actually performing.

His off-the-cuff remarks at the Q magazine awards ceremony last week, when he reacted with undisguised horror to the very notion of Madonna being nominated for best live act, surely represented the great singer-songwriter at his extemporaneous best. "Madonna, best f---ing live act? F--- off! Since when has lip-synching been live?"

At many of today's big live music events, the only thing that can really qualify as live is the dancing. I once saw Madonna drop her microphone without it affecting her vocal performance one whit.
...
It doesn't matter whether you have the pyrotechnic vocal skills of Michael Jackson or the somewhat more limited range of Kylie Minogue, you cannot throw yourself about like an aerobics instructor on fast-forward while delivering a perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal.

And in many cases, performers can't deliver a "perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal" in the first place.

If you watch Glee, a TV show ostensibly about singers, you won't hear a single note that hasn't been chopped up, glued back together, polished and shined until it's practically unrecognizable.

It's not just the lifeless characters, bad acting, unoriginal scripts and robotic music that can make Glee painful to watch, it's the unreality of the way music is portrayed. Characters burst into "song" without ever practicing a note. This leads to unreal expectations among young singers, that they don't need to rehearse (the Trophy Wife teaches voice, and runs into this problem on a daily basis) - they expect to just open their mouths and watch liquid gold flow out.

Which leads us to Rebecca Black. A 13-year-old girl from Orange County, her mother paid $2000 to the Ark Music Factory (the musical version of a vanity press) who gave her a choice of two songs; and after a 12-hour video shoot and a digital bludgeoning of the vocal track, she became an international sensation with an artificial song sung by a robotic voice with only a passing resemblance to her own.

Friday has been called "the worst pop song of all time," and that's a fair assessment. It's also symbolic of the place music has ended up: lifeless, heartless, pre-processed blandness; uninteresting gruel served to children who don't know any better than to call it "music."

Hört die Stimme

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.

It's calling, but in dreaming's other kingdom, you do not hear.



Wachet auf, weil in diesem kleinen, hervorragenden Moment, hören Sie die Stimme.

1970s: Helen Reddy - I Am Woman

Women have come a long way, Baby. Since the 1970s when Reddy wrote I Am Woman, my sisters have made huge strides in the political and corporate arenas. Yet many battles continue - the fight for equal pay and reproductive rights, the fight to be treated as the victim in rape and spouse abuse. Minority women have an even larger battle.

Women are still fighting the characterization of our sex as mere pieces of meat. Whole magazines feature illustrations of nude or semi-nude women. TV and billboard ads feature women in suggestive poses with pouty lips and curvaceous bodies.

Maybe this is to be expected in the world of advertising and magazines. After all, boys of all ages will be boys and I suppose playing out their sexual fantasies by looking at girlie pictures should be expected.

But I'm having a hard time accepting this - especially on normally progressive blogs published by supposedly intelligent men who usually write well about the issues of today. Girlie pictures are insulting to most women. You have the right to post such crap. We have the right to change channels - perhaps feeling some disappointment that in this day and age, in this year of 2010, all men seem to be created equal in the world of the meat market.

I Hate Xmas

Christmas is fine. Xmas, however, is a blight. The season of Xmas brings an overabundance of crass commercialism and traffic. It removes my classic rock station and replaces it with jingle goddamn bells. Of late, the Xmas season has gotten worse; a yearly drumbeat of cultural warfare has gotten louder, and the Christmas season more politicized.

But this year has brought me a gift in the low ticket sales enjoyed by Glenn Beck. In case you haven't heard, his Christmas-sweater show has bombed. I celebrated tonight by attending an underground punk show at the Black Owl.


Have I mentioned that the musical culture of Muscle Shoals, Alabama is incredibly diverse?