No Podcast this week, mostly on account of a lack of stories to tell. After my trip to Jeju Island last weekend, I got sick and was out for Monday and most of Tuesday. What’s funny is that my week has actually been extremely full of drama and news, it’s just that one aspect of it is too personal and the other is litigatingly unfathomable at this time. I’ll explain later when I’m 100% on what I’m doing. Point is, no podcast this week.
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There is No News
Buckley Biobic in the works – From Pitchforkmedia.com
Sometimes in order to get the ball rolling, you need a mother’s blessing. And that is just what writer/director Brian Jun received from Mary Guibert, mother of the late Jeff Buckley, when he proposed a biopic of her son. In fact, Guibert is taking her involvement to the next level; she will co-produce the film with Michelle Sy, who worked on last year’s Best Picture Oscar nominee Finding Neverland.
“I can tell Jeff’s fans with complete confidence that Brian is not the sort of fellow to sugar-coat or manipulate the facts,” Buckley’s mother said in a press release. “I know that he’s a straight shooter. There’s a depth of character to Brian, surprising in someone so young, and I have seen from his filmmaking that he has the courage and the skill to do this the way it should be done.”
In January, Jun’s film Steel City was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Cool moms eat that stuff up.
This marks the second time Jeff Buckley’s life story has been slated for the big screen. Writer/producer Train Houston secured the rights to music critic David Browne’s 2001 book, Dream Brother: The Lives & Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley, last year, according to Billboard.com.
Well, they’ve got my ten bucks. Thing is, the source material has been put through three feature length documentaries already, so I can’t imagine that they’ve got any ground uncovered. Everyone knows what happened and why, and everyone knows the facts. I hope they take that into consideration and forgo screwing with things.
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Free Music
This week’s theme is brand new stuff that pretty much hasn’t seen release elsewhere. I apologize if I get a little mainstream in the selection, but it is the season for picking the big summer hit.
Stereogum has a list of candidates for this year’s big summer hit. I’m going to go with Gnarls Barkley and “Crazy,” because it’s already a monster and seems to have no chance of slowing down for a while.
Idle Wild Blues By Outkast, and Morris Brown by Outkast. Yeah, they still seem to be pretty seperate. They also still seem to be pretty awesome.
A song I played on a podcast a few weeks ago, Harrowdown Hill from Thom Yorke’s The Eraser has a killer bass hook and is like the best moments off of Amnesiac.
And DJ Nature has put together a wholly fascinating remix of Cat Power’s The Greatest. I dunno, do you think the laser blasts clash with the violins?
And if you haven’t heard the velocity that is Tilly & The Wall, well, Lost Girls isn’t the best example, but it’s a nice ballad nonetheless.
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What I read when I should be teaching
Gregory Wind defends the existance of indie snobs, just weeks after I write an article villifying them, even though I am one.
Gloomchen gives us a prettyquick one, while he’s away.
Grut’s rerun of Bret and Shawn in their 70’s is touched up a bit to reflect the times, but still only shown in it’s first act. It’s older articles like this that remind me that reading about Wrestling used to be a lot more entertaining. As a whole, I find I read Eric, and that’s about it.
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Let’s Rave On
There’s this scene in Scrubs where JD wants this moment with his mentor to go perfectly so that, when it does, the right music will play. “Da da da da da da da da,” he whispers to himself, so sure that this will happen. It sounds like every emotional riff from every sitcom ever, and it’s supposed to. Apparently, that jiblet of tunage is not placed there by a mixer or even a musician. No, see, it is created out of the emotion of the scene. When two characters on a half hour dramedy connect and really see what’s going on, this music simply begins to play through. The camera men do not know what to make of it. But they do not question it. No, they simply film the spectre and broadcast it following the news at six.
The term “soundtrack of our lives” gets thrown around a lot. Hell, I think I’ve mentioned it myself in one of my ipod diatribes. At some point, it was agreed upon that a ‘moment’ in life is not complete without the perfect music. Since then, we have all been on this quest to find the best music to fit our lives. Some of us have found it. Some of us never will. Some of us don’t even know that we’re looking, but trust me, we are.
Mostly, up until about 1980 or so, we pretty much let the powers that be dictate our soundtracks. Oh sure, we chose what we would purchase from them, and that changed from person to person, but when the almighty cassette tape first appeared, everything changed.
With the advent of the mixtape, one could – in advance – choreograph an entire hour (or two) of your life at once with music that you chose. No longer did track #2 have to come after track #1. This did so much damage to the quality of the “album” that it never recovered. This is also where classic rock purists place the death of good tunes, and this is why classic rock radio exists at all. These people are tools. Do not take candy from them.
The next big advancement of this was the mp3 player, which allowed you to choreograph up to a week at a time. I’d count the burnable CD, but it showed up pretty much the same time. It became feasible, for the first time in history, to never go without music. It would be the death of silence. That damn racket had become a permanent thing in our lives, and we’ve all become so addicted to the idea of having our own lives be TV shows and movies (we are such a solipsistic group of people, aren’t we?) that the soundtrack will not go away. Not now. Not for a long time.
According to Seinfeld, the way to beat a polygraph test is to believe what you are saying is true. Going with that logic, if I believe that my life is to have the perfect soundtrack, then the perfect soundtrack will be delivered to me.
The reason I thought of this article was because of last Sunday. I was in a pretty bad way. I don’t want to get into details, but I was pretty damn heartbroken. Within minutes, into my possession comes Johnny Cash’s last album, his tearjerker “American V”. I listened to it about 8 times in a row. I thought, “give yourself into the idea that the perfect music will arrive at the perfect moment, and it will.” Johnny really helped me through Sunday. I got better on Monday. So what happened Tuesday? Sufjan Stevens’ “The Avalanche” shows up, an album filled with songs of delight and hope. It gave me the childlike admiration for happiness that I really needed.
I’m going to call this amazing discovery “Flow,” because it’s similar to how great music works in general. When a song has a great flow, it’ll work forever, right? This flow is totally personal and changes with everyone, so naturally everyone’s individual flow is different. When the flow of the song matches the flow of the person, the perfect piece of music for their personal soundtrack is found. This is rather elementary and probably easily fouled up, but on the whole it works. What I’m suggesting is that since our society has become so music obsessed, we no longer find music to fit our groove. Our flow is found by the music, like a parasite looking for a host with black glasses and a sweater vest.
It’s sort of like how In Russia, shirt wears you, the music is now choosing us. Think about it. Can you really change your musical lifestyle whenever you want to? Can you change from loving speed metal to loving candy pop in a fortnight? Maybe, but it’s difficult. You know why it’s difficult? Because your music has trained you to like it. Your music is not a young land. It is old and dirty, evil. Before you knew you liked it, before you were born, the music was there, waiting.
This is neither very cool nor very horrifying. It is obviously both.
