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Frank Kogan ([personal profile] koganbot) wrote2010-01-02 12:08 am
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  • Current Music: Untouchable ft. Hwa Young "Tell Me Why"
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Some videos, 2009

I had an ongoing list of videos I liked, then back in May I forgot to keep up with it, so here are some vids from early '09. For further viewing pleasure visit Kat's tumblr.

Will Young "Let It Go": Superhero in his mind, life doesn't cooperate, he tries to adapt. The song hadn't hit me on the album: the chord changes seemed to acquiesce too easily, turned this into a "nice" song while the voice was trying to do something sadder. The video delivers what the music alone couldn't. Will is precisely accurate as the would-be boisterous drunk, flashes of jollity and rage, ultimate defeat, while the bouncers are giving him the old heave-ho.



Untouchable ft. Hwa Young "Tell Me Why": [livejournal.com profile] petronia wrote, "What I'm getting is that the 'interrogation scene' takes place in the head of the male protagonist. His fiancée rejected him, fell into an obvious deep depression and attempted/committed suicide in such a way as to make it seem the relationship was the problem (tearing up photos, etc.), except the guy was basically blindsided - so the rest of the vid is a reification of his warring emotions of anger and confusion (TELL ME WHY YOU DID THIS TO ME) and helplessness at not being able to save the Korean Sylvia Plath from herself (stuck on the balcony watching the proceedings). Why he had to call in a pop group to aid him in the effort I don't know though - presumably Untouchable speak to his emotions during this difficult period in his life?"



The Lonely Island ft. T-Pain "I'm On A Boat"



Enrique Iglesias ft. Ciara "Takin' Back My Love": Modernist design elements become subject and object of "action painting" approach to rearranging apartment.



Nikki Awesome "You Say (It Was Supposed To Be)"



Timberlee f. Tosh "Heels"



Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Zero"



Britney Spears "If You Seek Amy"



Taylor Swift "White Horse"



Taylor Swift "You Belong With Me"



And here's a recent one, "Caesar" by I Blåme Coco ft. Robyn [EDIT: well, this was taken down, and if there's (another?) copy of the music video I can't find it so here's the track but no mv]:

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[identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com 2010-01-03 10:47 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, folk song "Asian melody" doesn't have blues scale. That's the big difference. Obv modern Asian pop does contain jazzy Westernized chords but to someone who grew up on Asian pop (eg. me) there is something faintly unnatural (or rather non-instinctive) about the basic twelve-bar blues progression. I have the barrier going the other way, which I've always suspected is the real explanation for why I like so proportionately little American music.

Two Western pop songs that sound very "Asian pop":

Madonna, "Taka A Bow"
Lady Gaga, "Love Mail"

Oddly enough lots of African music (Malian folk for one) is pentatonic and sounds weirdly indistinguishable to me from Chinese folk music, allowing for instrumentation. When I listen to Amadou and Mariam I find it difficult not to start riffing lyrics in Chinese.
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[personal profile] koganbot 2010-01-04 04:33 am (UTC)(link)
My understanding (or misunderstanding) is that, among other things, the blues is the result of a collision between the European do-re-mi scale and (1) African pentatonic and sextatonic scales (if that's the right word for a six-note scale) and (2) rural English, rural Scottish, and rural Irish scales, also pentatonic because the do-re-mi scale hadn't totally penetrated to the countryside. So esp. in the American southeast where you get the interplay of a lot of people of African descent and rural English and Scots-Irish and Irish descent, the do-re-mi scale is used but with a lot of fucking around on the mi and the ti note - basically bending between the notes so you get neither the major key nor the minor key but rather are refusing to stay steady on a half-step (if that explanation makes sense), and also bending a lot between fa and sol (I'm not sure why, but such a bend is basic to Chuck Berry and hence to a lot of others). So I'd think that someone raised on pentatonic scales might be more comfortable with blues playing than with straight-up European-derived western playing (with major and minor chords), since blues is neither major nor minor. But then, you're talking of discomfort with the 12-bar blues progression, and that might be because the progression is too European, not because it's too blues.

The only Malian musician I know anything about is Ali Farka Touré, and interestingly he did go blues a bit, playing some John Lee Hooker boogie (though without the 12-bar progression); also recorded with Irish traditionalists the Chieftans, iirc.

[identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com 2010-01-04 11:53 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, my grasp of musical theory is abysmal XD; (I actually have some sort of block for it, I think, it shouldn't be this hard to grok when I've close-listened to so much music.) So it's entirely possible I've gotten the wrong end of the stick. But to be fair, the last time I talked to my sister - who has a degree in Classical music and plays indie rock, and finds "this thing that Asian pop melodies do" irritating - she couldn't quite pin down what "this thing" was either.

As a child I was exposed to much more traditional Western classical music than to blues, rock, or non-vocal jazz. Whatever it is, is also something a lot of "easy listening" pop doesn't do - 60s girl groups, Carpenters, Belle and Sebastian.

The chorus of "Love Mail" is very folk but the verse melody sounds a lot like contemporary C-pop as well. In fact the whole thing sounds so familiar it may be cribbed off some Cantopop hit - I even find it difficult to parse in English.

Amadou and Mariam also play blues guitar, although again without the 12-bar (that I've heard).
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[personal profile] koganbot 2010-01-04 05:16 am (UTC)(link)
OK, listening to "Love Mail," which I'd never heard before!, the part that sounds Asian to me, "Honey, e-mail me your love now/We don't use no words though/I don't need to hear your voice/Baby, mail your kisses to me/Send your touches into this love mail" [if I heard those lyrics right] uses what would be both the mi and the ti notes in the Western minor scale but avoids the half step by having no re or la notes.

I obviously don't know the relevant music theory, but that part (without the re or the la) does seem characteristically east Asian.

[identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com 2010-01-05 12:03 am (UTC)(link)
There appears to be controversy on YTube as to whether this is actually Lady Gaga at all!

What's happening in the left hand of "Love Mail" chord-wise is very similar to what's happening in this, which is the #1 track relevant to this discussion that makes me wish I had more theory so I can understand how it's made to work. But then again it's also what's going on in The Gossip's "Heavy Cross", as well as a billion other tracks. (And just by itself it doesn't sound "Asian" to me, it sounds "dubby".)
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