And the Oscar will not be going to........

I don't say this to bash the movie.  I enjoyed it a great deal.  That is I enjoyed it in spite of the state of modern movies.  I've come to expect the predictability and cliches that are rife in films like this, and am desensitized enough to that to overlook them, even though a tiny voice inside of me is screaming that I should be annoyed. 

Now even though a heavyweight like Denzel Washington leads this movie, the real star is the incredibly menacing looking Engine 777 as it speeds on a collision course toward......well it doesn't matter what, because whatever IT is, IT will be obliterated.  The 777 looks mildly ominous enough when sitting still in the rail yard, but each incremental increase in MPH causes the triple 7 to morph more and more into a demonic machine posessed with the intent to unleash havoc.  If this is all you want from the movie, you'll be satisfied.  There are enough action scenes that are thrilling enough to make up for the ones that are prepostorous. 

Now, on to the real point of this post.  The movie won't be getting any awards, and if I'm wrong and it does or has already, than a great injustice has taken place.  It isn't because the subject matter is unbelievable though.  The script writers took an entirely plausible event and added depth only in the form of 1 dimenstional drama.  The setup for an event like this actually occurred 10 years ago just a few miles from where I am typing this.

Obviously this story, interesting and potentially frightening as it is, does not have the dramatic credentials to carry a feature length film. But it certainly has the right elements. All we need is to take what occurred here, imagine how it could have played out if we were less lucky, write a story about how real people would have responded to THAT situation, and make that our movie.

It is taken for granted that action movies are not award winners, so nobody bothers to try to write one worthy of an award anymore. Somebody did write an action movie about a runaway train in 1985. Now I have my problems with that movie too, but it had dynamic characters, and the incredibly dangerous out of control train served as a vehicle to deliver redemption and justice, not just cheap thrills and tidy resolution. 'Unstoppable' had the true elements to base a story on. If it hadn't suffered from a lack of imagination and correctly recognized the opportunity to capitalize on the themes that 'Runaway Train' got right, it would be a superb movie. Instead it is yet another million dollar missed opportunity.

Update:

Now THIS definitely deserves an Oscar.  "Chugga chugga Choo CHOO!........BOOM!!!!" LMFAO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB6QMp_rGIc
(embedding disabled)

Because it's cold and warmer days are ahead

I give you Galactic in NOLA in 2009.........

The view from stage 2

This is the first in a series of posts about The Dave Matthews Band. So much to figure out. So I'll just begin here.

To be a fan of the Dave Matthews Band is both fun and frustrating in so many ways. This is a band that can blow your mind, and infuriate you because you know they can blow your mind. They are so unique, and with their uniqueness, they haven't so much revolutionized music as much as they have created their own rock and roll utopian society. By no means are they the only jam band so don't get me wrong. But for a jam band, there is an interesting interaction of jam band fans along with alternative fans, middle age music lovers, and mainstream radio music fans. Any attempt by the band to cater more to one of these audiences over another results in this weird conflict about a show was great or "was not what I know this band is capable of doing." I'm not in the mood to disect this to the point that the soul of music is lost. But do me a favor, watch this video and follow up afterward:



You watched this video and your reaction was:

a) It rocked, I danced my ass off
b) GFD that song again. DMB is on the brink of collapse.
c) Heard it many times and it never gets old
d) It's fine, but can we get back to why I am a fan of this band?
e) Other (please add a comment to explain)

UPDATE:
To expand upon Sharon's most astute comment, I wholeheartedly agree that Cornbread isn't meant to have lots of bells and whistles.  And to demonstrate the contrast, the Radio City version embedded below (the most well known Dave and Tim adaptation of the song) is one of the most enjoyable tracks on my iPod.  whereas the live, full-band versions of the song like the one you just listened above, are the most frequently skipped (again, speaking only for my iPod).

Free Jim Free Jim Free Jim

We here in the hallowed halls of the Big Empty are with Charlie Crist.

Very belated update:

And there was Justice.


My old hometown of New Haven couldn't contain him, neither could Miami, and now neither can history.


The streets in Madison Wisconsin and now, my new home state of Ohio are taking on a flavor that hasn't been tasted since the days when Jim Morrison took the stages of the New Haven Arena and the Dinner Key Auditorium.  Nobody gives a fucking rats ass about the pigs that put Jim away back then and in 50 years nobody will give a fuck about the toadies who do the dirty work of the powerful now.  And so, as a tribute to the forgotten nameless establishment stooges of yesterday and today, I give you Jim.


".......blood in the streets in the town of New Haven........."

Monday night music thread

This one's for you Jay if your're out there!

Why'd ya have to go and.............(insert source of grief here)??????!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've wanted to post about this ever since I first heard 'Let It Die' but life always got in the way. Also, I thought it best to let the debate go on for a little while about whether Dave Grohl is confronting his emotions about the tragic death of his Nirvana bandmate.


So now, I am finally here to put the issue to bed. Yes, the song is about Kurt Cobain. Yeah I know he said it isn't, but why should we listen the artist who actually wrote the song? Especially when he has also said things like this. All one has to do is read the lyrics and listen to the melancholly tone which abruptly becomes emotionally flooded with rage and it all makes perfect sense that this song is the product of a man coming to grips with the death of a friend at his own hands, right?




Or...................maybe the song is about US Olympic Skiing Champion Bill Johnson. A simple man with a blushing bride, but all preceding tragedy and failure. Right again! The song is in fact a tribute to Bill Johnson! I have no idea, btw, if Dave Grohl has a clue who Bill Johnson is. But it doesn't matter. If it works, it works. And the song is both ambiguous and emotionally authentic enough to be the song about whatever is a source of intense grief for the listener.

So if listening to it helps one come to grips with their grief about the loss of Kurt Cobain than that is what it is; and it is also many other things, all of them related to healing from intense grief.....and it is perfect.

Hmmmmmmmmmm............Part 3: Just because nobody has been able to doesn't mean it can't be done

"When you play a great lick that you haven't played before, it's amazing, because it feels like it's been handed down to you from the heavens. It flows through your fingers, onto the strings, to the pickups and out the amp, and suddenly you hear this great thing. You recognize it as the entire creative process..........I know that vibrations connect all of these things.........I buy into the string theory of physics. The basic principle is that everyting in the universe is made of these vibrating strings. It's nice to think that the cosmos is essentially a huge guitar and inspiration comes when I'm tuned into it." (1)

"For me, music is vibration, and the universe seems to be created based on numbers and vibrations. If you want to get down to quantum physics, string theory and aother dimensions, it seems to me that vibration is what holds the entire universe together. The fact that we're musicians and we use vibrations to conjure up moods, atmospheres, emotions, thoughts and concepts-well, a lot of times I think musicians are magicians in that sense!" (2)

Metallica's Kirk Hammett, speaking to Brad Tolinski and Brad Angle on the pages of Guitar World about the universal forces that align when great music is created.
(1) "The Phoenix," December 2008 Issue
(2)"Metal Alchemy," April 2009 Issue

So while I'm no longer pondering whether one of the most haunting death melodies ever written has been improved by adding the words 'oh baby' to it, I'm still going 'hmmmmmm....' over the link between the music written and played by virtuosos of past and present.  Past virtuosos wrote operas and concertos, present ones play guitar.  They are so different, and yet they aren't. 

For purposes of this exploration, a few assumptions need to be established. 

1) First and foremost, cosmic forces that are beyond any persons' comprehension are at work in the creation of great music.  I don't need to dive too deep to make this point hopefully.  Explain harmony, why some notes harmonize with others and enhance music, while others completely clash and hurt the ears.  Somebody or something decided long before we named notes from A to G that some combinations of sounds would work together, some would not, and some, when combined the right way would either kick your ass, stir your soul, or do both at the same time.

2) Second (and this isn't really an assumption), music in the classical days of yore, not unlike today, was filled with a depressing majority of composers who suck.  We only know of a handful of greats, but we don't hear about their 'not so great' colleagues from the day.  Conclusion, most people who write music (or do anything else for that matter) absolutely suck at it.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.  By definition, being above average means you are in very exclusive company.  The difference between yesterday and today is today we are still sorting out what doesn't suck.  For purposes of this exploration, my takeaway is, it doesn't take the J.S. Bach of today to attempt bold musical experimentation.  What is absolutely necessary to succeed though is sincere motives, enough talent and the right inspiration.

3) Third, and sometimes most important: relationships matter.  The relationship from artist to artist, artist to audience, and audience member to audience member must all align in some form or fashion or we have failure.  Either great work does not get recognized as such, or absolute crap is mounted on a pedastal because it was commercially viable.  Either option is unfortunate.

So with that said, how do we fuse classical music with heavy metal?  First we have to answer the question of whether we 1) take heavy metal and make it sound classical, or 2) we take a classical piece and play it as heavy metal.  Metallica has tried #1, and Evanescence has tried #2.  Both came up short.  I won't repeat Evanescence in this post since I've already linked to what they've done to Mozart before, but I will add Metallica's orchestral adaptation of their classic instrumental The Call of Ktulu.

At the risk of going totally uber cliche, I'll just say that Eddie Van Halen's Eruption has provided the most classical metal guitar sound that I've ever heard at what begins at the :57 sec mark here:



The question for me at this point is how do we fuse the crisp and piercingly sharp sounds with the full bodied richness and granularity of Baroque and where does a guitar like Eddie's fit in with this:



Both examples fulfill #1 above.  With all of that said, I move into uncharted territory.  I've got a few more nuggets to go and explore, and I'll report back soon.

Saturday Night with STP

Enjoy!!!

We are all Simon Cowell now

Bristol is now the new Sanjaya Malakar, thanks to legions of political junkies that care more about personality than quality or competence. Our race to the bottom just shifted into a new gear. We are all doomed, and on pace to validate the Mayans.

Update:
Ughhhhhhhh.  2012 is perhaps more credit than we deserve.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..................part 2: The question of awesome metal epic or epic failure no longer a head scratcher

First of all (and this will be obvious due to the lack of posts filling up the cavernous archives here), there is no "Hmmmmmmmm.........part 1"; at least not here.

"Hmmmmmmmmm...." started last February when I decided to wrestle with a question that many musicians or music people far more qualified than I am have not solved. There have been enough not-so-successful attempts to fuse classical music and heavy metal for most of the music world to know that exloring the topic seems to do more harm than good to anyone who dares go there. So naturally, I went there. I've got no musical credibility to lose by doing this, and it's always the great ones that seem to suffer when they go there. Maybe bottom up is the better approach.

Our story begins on a very average suburban Tuesday evening. Dad comes home from work, takes his daughters to dance class, sits in the waiting area making casual polite conversation with other parents during the hour long class that is too long to sit still for, and too short to run errands during. That's when my ears caught something, and an old dormant curiosity was completely reawakened. The next day I sent this e-mail out to the most musically astute people I know because frankly, my head was running wild (and I was angry that it was Evanescence that provoked me this way, but more on that later) and I needed their input to help me start to make any sense of it.

From: Steve
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 12:34 PM
Subject: Hmmmmm......

Had a strange experience….last night I’m sitting in the dance studio waiting room while the girls were in their modern class just monkeying around on the Blackberry to kill time. There are 2 dance studios there so I usually tune out the combination of competing sounds/music coming from both of them. But amongst the white noise, I heard a few frames of music that were unmistakably from Mozart’s Requiem. “Good choice” I thought to myself while noting that it was obviously in a higher key than the way I knew it. I then recognized another unmistakable; the vocals of Amy Lee from Evanescence. So I wondered, did Evanescence incorporate the Requiem into one of their songs or am I hearing just another aggregation of noise from multiple studios? The timing of the two musical styles seemed to jibe intentionally so I concluded it was the same song and not 2 separate songs playing simultaneously. Turns out that yes, Evanescence has a song called Lacrymosa on their second album which incorporates the Lacrimosa sequence from Mozart’s Requiem but transposed from D minor to E minor.

Some of you may be saying “where have you been Steve, that song is over 4 years old” and others saying “never heard of Evanescence…where’s this going.” But now that I am caught up, I’m curious on the collective take. I’m hugely appreciative of Mozart, and not a fan of Evanescence really. That’s not to say I dislike Evanescence, I think they have something pretty unique and an artistic edge; I’ve just never felt like it was something that absolutely belonged in my record collection, which explains why I am slow on the uptake that this song existed.

It makes perfect sense to me that Evanescence would be the band to try a bold experiment like this. They are basically a heavy metal band that took the road less travelled and have a front woman, thus changing everyone’s concept of what heavy metal was when they were new. They provided raw and powerful riffs but instead of mixing them with a testosterone charged vocal performance, an edgy and emotionally charged female voice got a lot of peoples’ attention and allowed them to cross over to non-heavy metal fans. While their fans love love love her voice, I’m on the fence about it. It can be pretty, and it can sound whiny and overdramatic too, and I’m never sure whether I like it or am annoyed by it. But anyway……

Does this experiment with the Requiem succeed? My inclination is to say not quite, but the jury is still out. I like the idea of it, partly because I think there is a strong, but very unexplored link between heavy metal and classical music. But that doesn’t mean that I want to hear the Toccata and Fugue in D minor getting ripped to shreds on some rock and roll album just because Evanescence provided a commercially viable example. I don’t mind if the effort is truly inspired out of respect for the original composer’s work. This could be tried again with better results, I think; as long as the artist understands that this is not the same thing as lifting a drum track from Led Zeppelin and appreciates that they are borrowing generations of culture, and need to give it back when they are done with it. According to the Wikipedia entry on the song, Amy Lee seems to maybe understand this although the “make it cool” makes me say hmmmmmm:

“I saw Amadeus when I was nine years old and fell in love with Mozart. The part of Mozart's Requiem called "Lacyrmosa" [sic] is my favorite piece of music ever. I always wished we could cover it, but with programming and guitars and make it cool. It's our moment to try all the things I wanted to and couldn't, so I started messing with it in Protools. Terry wrote some riffs and turned it into this awesome metal epic.”

Ok, full disclosure. I read my own words and am embarrassed to see that I describe Evanescence as having an artistic edge. I'd still say they are, or once were unique in the way I describe them, and they were in front of a new genre of metal bands with female singers like Lacuna Coil. The problem is, Evanescence is mood music. It's not talent driven, theory driven, technique driven, or even musically driven. It's mood driven. It is all about an atmosphere of sound and how that makes you feel. That's ok if that is your thing, but that is why I now feel I was so incredibly wrong to say that "it makes perfect sense" that they would try something so (I believe the word I used was) "bold."

Bold? Meh. Look, what they did was take a composer's work, the work of a man who wrote the score for an entire orchestra and choir, written as a funeral Mass, and treat it like they were asked to write the soundtrack for the next installment of the Twilight Series. And.....they did it with ProTools. Listen to the true work, then the new and "cool" version. The Evanescence contribution does not enhance the original score, Mozart's work caries the entire thing, and all that is added are lyrics about teenage love angst, a 2 note riff, and a single note baseline.

W.A. Mozart Requiem Lacrimosa
Evanescence version

But the single best comment came from commenter "Mike" who said:

"Let’s think about a few popular “cover songs” that were done between different “genres” of music (though none really quite as broad a difference as classical to heavy metal)… Joey Ramone did an interesting cover of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”, Metallica covered Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page”, Jimi Hendrix covered Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, Sublime did a very loose cover of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” in the song “Doin’ Time”, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers did a classic cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” I know what my answer is to my next question, but can you possibly imagine (when asked about covering these songs) any of these artists saying that they were trying to make these classic songs “cool”??? I would be SHOCKED to hear that. Rather, I would expect each of these artists to say (with the exception of the deceased Jimi Hendrix and Bradley Nowell from Sublime) that they covered these songs as an homage to musicians who were greater than they are. Perhaps I am reading too much into the “make it cool” comment, but to me that is very telling.

I like covers and I like crossing “genre borders”, I just prefer that it occurs out of respect for those who came before, not because the “artist” wants to make it “cool.” I also prefer when talented people cover music of other talented people… not taking a terrific piece and turning it into a “musical Hindenberg.”"

Soooo.....now that we can safely say that this attempt was a failure and also thank Evanescence for making it even more difficult for the next composer who legitimately wants to take a stab at this, we will seque into part 3 and try to explore if a path out of the wilderness can ever be forged. Check back soon!

Fueled by Tea, now let's fire up this SVT Mustang Yugo and take it for a spin

In what will undoubtedly be the first in a series of contradictions; via ABL at Balloon Juice, we've got Freshman Senator Andy Harris of Maryland who hates government subsidized healthcare so much, he wants it yesterday and doesn't know what he'll be able to do without it.

Our current political climate....

summarized in 30 seconds and with slightly more maturity.

Rock and Roll: used today as a vehicle to make money, originally created to break chains

For my first "real" post here, I am going to attempt a pretty broad statement, using a specific set of examples...so a few qualifying statements are necessary. This post is not meant to advocate for or against any particular band or style of music. I happen to be a huge appreciator of Metallica and their music, but I am also a fan of many bands and musical styles that are not named Metallica and sound nothing like them. They, however, are a very good example for a case study in musical trends, as they have existed for nearly 30 years; and many steps on their journey are at least evolutionary, if not revolutionary for the music world in general. Agree or disagree, please bear with me and feel free to share your thoughts....

This will come as no surprise to anybody who knows me, but I hate American Idol. I don't just hate it because it sucks (although that would be reason enough). I hate it because it is embarrassing to me that it is taken seriously as a vehicle for cultivating the next generation of artistic creation and expression. The net result is

Why Big Empty? Because the music universe is huge, and filled up with a lot of empty. So here's where we'll share the nuggets we find worth preserving. Enjoy!