gnat.bsky.social
Beloved banjo player of the people. Co-owner and CTO of an apparel ERP company. In former lives: open source, Perl, O'Reilly Media, new technology. Bereavement is sadder and weirder than you can imagine.
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Pizza Hut better in NZ than US tho.
Apparently McDonalds in Ukraine is like Applebees and people go on dates there.
When Ukrainians visit America, part of the briefing is "ok, so. McDonalds ..." :)
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My nephew worshipped Taco Bell from Tiktok because it is famously hated on, and then had the one at the airport and understood why. Actually crap food is much less entertaining than the idea of crap food.
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OMG 100%. And his version isn't bad, per se. Just not ... wow.
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Different characters. I grew up in his version but appreciate the way she arranged it. I love the dynamic range in her version, moments of sparseness and moments of density and impact.
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Go West was Village People? Huh! Explains a lot though.
PSB were so fortunate with that distinctive voice. The right singer seems to claim any song they record because a charismatic voice owns a song in a listener's ears in a way that an ok voice doesn't.
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Hallelujah is a landmine. That's one of the few songs with a bunch of different versions, and several from the writer of the song, with no clear single version winning. Cale is an interesting choice! Cohen, Buckley, and Wainwright also strong contenders depending on listener's age and proclivities.
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You only have to listen to ten seconds of the Brenda Lee original to admire Pet Shop Boys for how much better it got in their hands!
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Oh man, the original goes hard! Also wtf a Dutch pop song?! I bet there's a moving window of time where producers in their 40s and 50s say "I know an obscure cover you can make awesome" that's drawing on the music that was briefly big when they were teens and twenties but has lost cachet since then.
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Did Rod sing it in a voice that sounds like a sack of depressed gravel grunting a murder confession?
(listens)
I much prefer the arrangement and production on the Waits recording. Chorus needed more welly because I prefer more contrast/vibe range, but the rest is great.
Stewart popped it up. Meh.
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Talking Heads version of Take Me To The River is canonical for me, but I see the original by Al Green making lists of "best songs of all time" so jury not unanimous.
The Wikipedia article says the rightsholders made more $ from licensing the song to Big Mouth Billy Bass than from anything else. Ha!
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Huh! I didn't realise this, but I guess it fits with the Heads vibe of the time where they were using Black funk musicians to make the sound. My source for that might be the Strong Songs episode on the documentary.
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It's so frustrating to my internal sense of narrative that the two artists didn't get along. I don't know if he felt his version should be the best version, didn't like her politics, or what. His estate continued the dickery tho: sister vetoed the use of the song in Sinead's autobio doco.
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I can't believe I'd forgotten "Hello in There" and "Illegal Smile". I guess it's time to fill the bathtub with his catalogue and go for a prolonged soak!
Thanks for mentioning Prine, such a good nudge!
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I'm not into NZ servicing foreign military needs, but that ship sailed in 1989.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waihopa...
Did you see the NZ defence force going "nothing to do with us." That was a sharp reminder of how anorexic our military is. "Rockets? We don't even have planes, bro."
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Thank you! I'm sorry you had to smell my brain fart.
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What a talent he was! Outside of "Paradise" and "Angel from Montgomery", I was wondering which of his endures the best. It might be "Sam Stone" for me. For you?
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100% correct, no notes.
Ok, one. tmbw.net/wiki/Istanbu... is interesting reading.
How absolutely mental to be the heirs of the songwriter and composer, and suddenly money rains from the sky in 1990.
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Also, check out this terrifying rework that drops the video firmly into the uncanny valley ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyKp...
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OMG Torn's history is amazing. Swedish first recording under a different name? And this is the first English language version. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRRX...
I wonder how much of Imbruglia's success was just that trancey beat in the chorus?
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I keep forgetting that song was made famous by Bonnie Raitt! I grew up with a John Prine's Greatest Hits compilation so that's the canonical version in my head. Thanks for the reminder!
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<gapes in amazement>
www.youtube.com/watch?v=k68F...
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OMFG! You're not making this up!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBPn...
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Jimmy Hendrix's "Along the Watchtower" is a Bob Dylan song.
Beatles' "Twist and Shout", was by a band called The Top Notes.
Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" was first recorded in 1979.
What are your favourite now-canonical covers?
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"Soft Cell's Tainted Love", originally by Gloria Love.
Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody", originaly recorded by Todd Duncan, of whom I'm reasonably sure you've never heard, and at least four other times before they did it.
Amy Winehouse's "Valerie", originally recorded by The Zutons.
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Perhaps someone who knows nothing about autism and yet is confident and assertive in their opinions.
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Fellow bereaved parent here. It’s amazing how many opportunities for awkwardness our condition presents. It’s something I loved about the tv show Shrinking — it totally nailed how your day can be derailed by other people’s feelings.
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I bow before “mothershitting fuckerhead”. No notes.
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Rage Against the Machine
No Doubt
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N Sync
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Sorry, "yup" was me trying to acknowledge that world of feelings and infinite sadness and loss without attempting to pretend that I could imagine what that's like when my own journey is different. All that emotional calculus, and I came up with something only slightly better than a 💩. Sorry!
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Yup. We're missing our son. It's not a day of uncomplicated feelings.
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“The Future” is just another way to discount the present and to justify actions now that would otherwise be simply awful. With enough story they can be complicatedly awful.
This AI extinction cult is just another story being used fuck up the now in service of a mythical future.
Ugh.
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Stories about the future must be easier to absorb because the future is not known, vs reality which is theoretically fact-checkable. (For all that seems to not slow spread of bollocks)
But I don’t see the AI story leading people to be kinder people and better guardians of the Earth.
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I guess stories take root where the person has a need for the story.
A need for purpose. A need for a reason to feel aggrieved. To feel better about themselves. To remove uncertainty.
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This narrative mechanism in us gets used as much as it uses. All the stories about Jesus somehow still enable some people to be bigoted, cruel, and selfish. The same stories let others be open, kind, and selfless.
In this case the story isn’t the problem.
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I am a firm adherent to the Pratchett view of the world that it runs on narrative. Stories have power: we tell ourselves a story, then the story tells us what to do next.