Category: Music

From the “This Is Why They Call It The Daily Fail” Department:

In the UK there’s a long-running TV show called University Challenge, in which teams from universities – especially posh schools like Oxford and Cambridge – answer ridiculously difficult questions for points. The team with the most points at the end of the show continues on in a knockout tournament not unlike March Madness.

Since 1994, the show has been hosted by TV personality Jeremy Paxman. And if you thought Alex Trebek was “snooty” and “condescending” when a Jeopardy! contestant gives a wrong answer… let’s just say that Paxman puts him to shame. This article in the Daily Mail refers to Paxman’s “withering put-downs” and “goading” of incorrect answers.

But it seems that Paxman got a comeuppance of sorts recently. A team from Claire College Oxford was asked to identify the composer of a snippet of classical music. They guessed, incorrectly, that it was by Bedrich Smetana. Paxman replied that it was Antonín Dvorak.

The problem? The music was from a piece by Dvorak, but the specific snippet the show played was actually an ancient plainchant (or, if you prefer, a Gregorian chant).

To give a modern analogy, it was as if the show played the first ten seconds of the Fugees’ “Ready or Not” (which is nothing but a sample of an Enya song called “Boadicea”), and the team answered “Enya” but were told they were wrong because it was the Fugees:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA1PAkKD3Q4

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKQwgpaLR6o

Anyway, the Daily Fail wrote the linked article, gloating that Paxman had gotten it wrong. But within their article – ABOUT HOW PAXMAN WAS WRONG – lies this whopper:

For those too lazy to click the thumbnail, the Mail asserts that “St Gregory the Great is said to have standardized [plainchant] in the mid 18th century”.

Pope Gregory I lived from around AD 540 until March 12, 604. Which, you’ll note, is not the mid 1700s. I’m not sure how the hell the Mail managed to make such a huge error. At first I was thought “maybe the author was thinking ‘seventh’ century and accidentally added the ‘-teenth’ at the end”. But then, most of what Pope Gregory did – if he did what he did – would have been done in the sixth century. And although traditionalists have long asserted that Gregory was the man who made them part of the Western Church, many scholars are convinced that the chants weren’t invented until AD 750 (and in France, no less), and that the chants weren’t standardized until the 9th or 10th centuries, well after Gregory passed.

Either way… good job, Daily Fail!

UPDATE: They have since corrected the error, and added another Paxman screw up on University Challenge to the linked article.

I like Parralox. I really do. But their new album is nothing but covers, and to say that covers “aren’t their strong point” would be too kind. This album is AWFUL. You’d expect an Australian synthpop band to do a crappy cover of Alan Parson’s “Eye in the Sky”… but (amazingly) their cover of Front 242’s “Headhunter” sucks just as much.

Imagine a bad German techno band covering some iconic rock and roll song, and even though you can’t stand AC\DC, and even though rednecks in AC\DC shirts used beat you up every day in high school, you just can’t bear to have “Highway to Hell” slaughtered this way. And even though you love synthpop with all your heart, there’s just something… fundamentally wrong about a crappy Kraftwerk knock-off turning “Born to Run” into a campy European dance club hit.

True story: I once went to a castle in Austria that had horrific statutes of disfigured animals all over the place. According to the tour guide, the Archbishop of Salzberg who built the place in the early 1600s sought out deformed animals and mated them with other deformed animals, just to see what would happen. He’d then commission artists to make statues of the poor creatures for posterity. And just as a three-headed cow shouldn’t exist, neither should this album.

Thanks to the good folks at Last.fm, here are my Top 10 songs for the first half of 2013:

1) Marsheaux – “So Far”
2) Owl Eyes – “Nightswim”
3) Marsheaux – “Secret Place”
4) The Raveonettes – “She Owns The Streets”
5) Anya Marina – “Whatever You Like”
6) Marsheaux – “To the End”
7) The Raveonettes – “You Hit Me (I’m Down)”
8) Marsheaux – “Alone”
9) Marsheaux – “Summer”
10) The Raveonettes – “The Beat Dies”

And here are my artist playcounts for the first six months of 2013:

1) Marsheaux (392)
2) Saint Etienne (297)
3) The Raveonettes (145)
4) Owl Eyes (73)
5) Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (69)
6) Nightlife (39)
7) Françoise Hardy (36)
8) Stumbleine (28)
9) Anya Marina (28)
10) Carla Bruni (27)

Billboard magazine is an American publication that compiles the official music charts for the United States. It was founded way back in 1894 as a magazine about outdoor advertising… hence the name. After a few years it started reporting on “outdoor amusements” – like fairs and carnivals – as these were a big thing in the days before television and movies. They were also one of the biggest billboard customers of the time. Billboard soon became the unofficial “newspaper of record” for amusement parks, circuses, carnivals and fairs.

When jukeboxes became popular in the 1930s, Billboard began publishing charts of the most popular songs in the country. On August 4, 1958, the magazine started publishing its famous “Billboard 100”, the list of the top 100 songs for each of three categories: Pop, Country & Western, and Rhythm & Blues.

Nowadays, of course, Billboard publishes a ridiculous number of charts every week: over 100 different charts at the time of this writing. “Pop” has now been subdivided into “Pop”, “Rock”, “Adult Contemporary”. “Adult Pop”, “Alternative”, “Hard Rock”, “Folk”, “Dance”, “World”, “New Age” and more. There’s the “Top Digital Songs” chart for downloads and “Top Streaming Songs” chart for sites like Spotify and Last.fm. There’s a chart for the week’s “Top Ringtones” (who knew that was still a thing?), “Top MySpace Songs” (ditto), “Top Catalogue Albums” (older albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which are almost pure profit for record labels), as well as “Top Tastemaker” and “Top Heatseekers”, whatever they are.

One of Billboard’s first tweaks to their music charts came in the June 1, 1959 issue, in which it debuted the “Bubbling Under the Hot 100” chart. Usually just called the “Bubbling Under” chart, it featured the 15 songs that would have been numbers 101-115 on the Hot 100 chart. This way DJs and others in the record industry could keep up with new artists. Over the years, Billboard has changed the Bubbling Under chart to include 35, 10 or 25 songs (which is what it remains today).

The Bubbling Under chart of Billboard‘s June 16, 1979 issue of included a song called “Ready ‘N Steady” by a band called D.A.. And the funny thing about it is… no one has ever seen or heard a copy of the record!

Music historian Joel Whitburn – who has a massive underground vault containing a copy of almost every single 78, 45, LP and CD to make the Billboard charts since the 30s, and whose company, Whitburn’s Record Research, is the longest-running licensee of Billboard’s chart information – has looked into the matter with some depth. And, as a former record collector myself, I can see why: Whitburn owns a copy of every single that has ever appeared on the “Bubbling Under” chart… except “Ready ‘N Steady”.

In 1995, Whitburn said that he thought the band might actually be a girl-punk band from Chicago named DA! that was active in the late 70s and early 80s. He has since recanted this, presumably because DA! released a few records on a label called Autumn Records in 1981.

Whitburn has proof that Rascal, the label that released “Ready N’ Steady”, actually existed. He found a small ad for the label in the back of a punk rock “zine” (a type of self-published amateur magazine popular with sci-fi writers from the 1930s, but closely associated with punk culture in the 70s). Whitburn even hired a detective to go to the address listed in the ad – incidentally, a residential address – but the building was abandoned. I don’t know if Whitburn tried to do a title search on the property, or if he did and found that the home was a rental at the time or what. All I know is that it was a dead-end.

But perhaps the most titillating thing of all is that Billboard listed the catalog number of “Ready N’ Steady” as “RASCAL 102”. Presumably, there’s a completely unknown record out there with the catalog number “RASCAL 101”.

It amazes me that mysteries like these persist in the Internet age. You’d think that someone involved with the record – the band, the label, or a fan – would have come forward by now. After all, Ken Snyder’s By Request Only was thought to be a hoax for years… until it wasn’t. But it’s also possible that “Ready N’ Steady” was, in fact, some kind of hoax pulled on Billboard. But if so… why? Having a record appear on the “Bubbling Under” chart isn’t exactly the prank of the century. I mean, come on… the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion? Now THAT’S a prank, my friend. Getting “Ready N’ Steady” on a minor Billboard chart? Not so much.

I’ve mentioned it several times on the site, so I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about it. But I just have to do it one more time: in late 2011 I first heard – and fell in love with – the Greek synthpop duo Marsheaux. And I’m not sure ya’ll really get what I mean when I say “fell in love”. It felt as if I was back in 7th grade, experiencing my first crush all over again. They were the first thing I thought of when I woke up and the last thing I thought of before falling asleep. Any spare moment – any at all – I had one of their songs in my head.

The problem was, the band only had three studio albums, and the most recent one – my beloved Lumineux Noir – came out in 2009. As much as I loved that disc, I could only listen to it so many times. Last.fm says I’ve listened to Lumineux Noir tracks 637 times, and while I’ve enjoyed it every single time, what I really wanted was something new.

The band had a new album in the works, but it was delayed several times. It wasn’t until April 22, 2013 that Inhale saw the light of day. And the second track on that album has become an instant favorite of mine: “Secret Place”.

Please try to fall asleep
What a perfect moment
Dreaming, only you and me
So let’s sleep to be alive

Beneath the bright blue
I hold you tight
Floating, only you and me
So let’s fly and touch the sky

I don’t know much about Brooke Addamo, other than that she is around 22 years old, is from Melbourne, Australia, was an unsuccessful contestant on season 6 of Australian Idol, and that she performs under the stage name Owl Eyes.

Her debut EP, Nightswim, came out a few weeks ago, and the title track is just sick:

Take my hand
and speak to me
Say this nightswim
Will last for an eternity

My 6-month sound cloud via Last.fm and Last.fm Tools: