Plastilina Mosh - Millionaire

en las cosas que no llegan cuando esperas demás This song which I first came across on internet radio invariably reminds me of the Latino community in the United States. To be sure, I can’t claim to be very familiar with it, given that I have never been to the United States and I have only ever met a handful of U.S. Latinos. But many years ago when I started my short-lived exploration of rock music internet forums, I was a member of a page called rockero.com, where I left comments on other forum members’ pages, added friends and even chatted sometimes, without many lasting impressions, given that I could hardly understand the mostly Mexican chat slang, so I spent my time trying to decipher answers like “sip”, “k peds” and “haber”. At this point I have met many Latinos and many Americans and I feel there is something tragic about the Latino community in the U.S. Sure, many of them may have a better life there economically, but if you have ever been to a Latin American country, you will know the sense of community and support structures that can be found in many of them and which are simply absent in the barren landscapes of the big "Western" cities. If you can empathize with both sides, you can understand how many Americans may misunderstand the Latino community and how many Latinos may feel unwanted in America which certainly amounts to a tragedy if you know anything about how Latinos are. This song reflects some of that, namely an indistinct hope for a better future, a day that never comes, becoming a millionaire one day. Going through some bleak times myself these days, living in one of the most expensive European metropolises somewhat against my will, for an indefinite time and with little enough money to exclude me from much that I used to take for granted during times in less absurdly expensive places, I understand exactly how it feels. What I like about this song is its light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek character; the rapping sounds off-the-cuff, close to normal speech, and the rhythm of the rapping blends well with the beat. In a way, it sounds like a Friday afternoon song, like a song for people who have a dull routine and need something to keep up their spirits, who are working towards a better future. But there are two weak points to this song: First, the video is pretty stupid. While I was transcribing this song, I must have watched it a hundred times and I still find it pretty stupid… they could have made more out of that. But far worse, it is never ever acceptable to rhyme “millionaire” with “Tony Blair”. Not only because the song rapidly loses actuality, but because the last thing I want to be reminded of when listening to light-hearted and fun Latino rock/rap is the memory of this American lapdog and terrible war-monger who is personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, and has single-handedly ruined a country, leaving it in the state in which I am forced to cope with it today. Who would not want to be a millionaire? Probably no one you or I know, but probably everyone would be better off not becoming one, that is even a statistical fact. Research shows that people who do not lack the means for basic subsistence live happier lives than those who don’t, so up to a certain point, yes, you can say that people’s happiness increases proportionally to their wealth. But once you get past a point of being wealthy enough as not to have to worry about your subsistence, additional wealth does not equate to increased happiness, and I am absolutely certain that being a millionaire is already way past the point of meeting your basic needs. My problems and those of most people I know cannot really be solved with money. Surveys indicate that most people who describe themselves as happy point out that their happiness is owed to things such as family, friends, sex and sports, yet still most people have the erroneous belief that it will be money which ultimately affords them happiness. Living where I do nowadays, I occasionally catch myself increasingly subscribing to this view which is a surefire sign that I should get out of here as soon as I can.

Radiohead - Optimistic

this one just came out of the swamp This song moves like a wall. It brings me back to one of my darkest times when I roamed the streets of a major South American city with misguided and a little naïve thoughts. It seems a representative song of Radiohead’s sound on Kid A – an album which I would argue is conceived as a whole more than any other and should be listened to in the original order. But then again, I know now that this may be only because it is the way I got used to listening to it. Maybe another order would be fine, but the songs on the album certainly seem to work as a whole (Amnesiac in comparison seems a lot more fragmented, albeit with great individual tracks). Together with its artwork, the bear hunts, pools of blood, mountains threateningly looming above post-apocalyptic snow plains, pockmarked by dots of fire. Das Theater des Todes, never pick up the phone, rather take the money & then run. If you want to understand the conceptual idea behind this album better, watch the so-called “blips” that can be found on Youtube and which were aired on TV as an advertisement for the album. I wish I had been a Radiohead fan already when this album was released and had been watching TV enough to come across one of their blips during advertisements one day. I imagine that it would leave a lasting impression on anyone. From the outset, I have to concede a minor flaw: Just like Radiohead themselves seem to do when playing this song live, or, for that matter, in the “Basement”-version, my performance is sped up as compared to the album version. Which is a flaw because a lot of the song’s character lies in the menace of its slow plodding and pounding, relentless and inescapable. Having transcribed the whole song meticulously, it still holds some mysteries to me: One of them is the exact fingering of the characteristic guitar lick that Johnny enters with after the first chorus. I have watched the Basement-video repeatedly and experimented with different tunings and open strings, but what I see and what I hear don’t seem to match each other. It clearly appears that the lick is played by sweep picking the strings from highest to lowest, maintaining the same finger position without use of hammer-on or pull-offs, which does not match what I hear which is the unmistakable sound of the four highest steps in a D minor scale. The second mystery is what you could call “the song’s coda”, the part that on the album version that leads over to the next track “In Limbo”; I wish I could have been there when Radiohead decided why they wanted such a coda, why they wanted it to sound like it does and when they composed it. It sounds so … unconceivable, in the sense of “impossible to conceive”. It certainly works very well and provides a smooth transition, but seems so airy, at the same time marked by a dense drum rhythm, reminiscing the song’s main riff, cut half a bar short somewhere along the way, then suddenly dying away. I don’t think there is anything optimistic about this song; sure “the best you can is good enough” has become something of a motto for me in stressful situations, but I doubt that people would really find it uplifting in the context of this song. Rather, what this song, the album it is on, and most of Radiohead’s music transmit to me is resignation. At one point in my life I have lived a life of total immersion in resignation. It feels good for a while, sometimes I still enjoy it. It may just be the cross that my generation is carrying. Resignation provides us with an illusion of power, by seemingly giving us the option of withdrawal as a way out, as a way to refuse to make a choice. But in the end, we probably realize that the grapes were just hanging too high all along. Because it’s certain that resignation has never moved anyone to a different place. Resignation is stagnation. One day, I learned how to turn resignation into anger, anger into motivation and action, and from there things went uphill. For five years I have never let resignation gain a permanent foothold again. Maybe the learning experience about absolute resignation is that it can only get better from there. It’s a sort of nothing-left-to-lose scenario. And maybe the really sweet grapes were on the other side of the hill all along. All of this being said, I still love Radiohead for the mere quality of their music. And I don’t think all Radiohead listeners are living lives of resignation. Some, as me, may come in this way. Come for the resignation, stay for the music.

At The Drive-In - One Armed Scissor

is this the comfort of being afraid: Much of what I have written in my previous analysis of At The Drive-In’s “Non-Zero Possibility” (they do like hyphens, don’t they) applies actually even more to this song, what with the disharmonious chords and awesome guitar lines – I am especially thinking of the “Banked on/Memory” part. This song, certainly their biggest hit, was the first song I heard and learned to love by At The Drive-In and it was the chorus that hooked me up in the first place. The song actually displays a curious structure: Aside from the chorus there is little that objectively connects the parts. We have what we can call three verses between the chorus parts, but they show no resemblance whatsoever, neither musically nor in terms of the sung phrase lengths. The first verse is in ¾ unlike the rest of the song; the lyrics here are spoken rather then sung. The second verse contains what is arguably the most awesome guitar riff of the song and proceeds with increasing entropy on Omar’s guitar, over a descending chord progression by Jim that repeats over and over. The final verse then brings us a stumbling drum pattern with an extended descending melody running in octaves, played by Jim, complemented by a repeating riff played by Omar that at four bars is only half the length of what Jim plays; during the later half of the melody this creates some interesting dissonances and illustrates my point from the other analysis mentioned above, showing how At The Drive-In combine different melodies/ licks in unusual ways creating new “Gestalts” that are as a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. This is also certainly the most difficult part of my arrangement as I have tried to have the running eights in the bass played by the left hand, the melody in octaves in the right, and Omar’s part divided between both hands. In a way, this song barely provides an angle of analysis: The lyrics to me certainly seem like what you could call a collage, juxtaposing loosely related ideas and words that seem to be used for their immediate “color”, that is their effect, sound and association, rather than in a strictly semantic sense: It is hard to claim a literal meaning in phrases like “hallow vacuum, check the oxygen tanks”. This is of course not to say that the song is meaningless or that it does not have a theme; I think of the theme of this song as being a vague reference to alienation and distance, probably with a generous helping of drugs – very much a tale of alienation if you will. The title brings the first moment of confusion: Wouldn’t a one-armed scissor defeat the purpose and thereby defy the very definition of what it means to be a scissor? How is a one-armed scissor not a knife? Are we talking about a knife? I read on the internet that At The Drive-In say a One-Armed Scissor is a cocktail of Red Bull with Vodka, but I don’t see it bringing us any closer to the song’s meaning and I think it’s intended just like those movies with an open ending, where the artfulness actually consists in the fact that it is open for you to interpret. With all this said, I still think drugs are probably a good guess; if we think about At The Drive-In’s heavy drug abuse it would seem hard to believe that drugs wouldn’t at some point invade every aspect of their lives. On a musical level, however, another observation is in order: If you ever saw a live performance by At The Drive-In, you may get the erroneous idea that they are high on coke, banging out whatever sounds their guitars can create and that half of what they do is chaos: While transcribing this song I found the version played on Later with Jools Holland where Omar has thrown away his guitar during the latter half of the song effectively not playing for the last chorus and the end of the song! So while you may be right about the coke part, transcribing this song has made me realize again that what sounds so chaotic live must actually have been put together very carefully: There is an incredible lot of immensely ingenious musical ideas and details hidden – from how Omar’s awesome riff blends with the rest of the band to the last verse with its intermingling guitar voices. So while I agree that At The Drive-In’s music is in good part about the energy and just rocking out, I hope that with this arrangement I have been able to sort of strip away some of the loudness, distortion and chaos, and put a spotlight on the musical skeleton behind it.

Tool - Schism

watch the temple topple over: Much has been talked about this song’s technicalities and indeed I never stopped to find out about its lyrics until I decided to make this arrangement. I am not a progressive metal expert, but what I like about Tool in particular is how they make use of musical sophistication to support their statement, creating musical symbols which at times say so much more than mere words possibly could. Different interpretations have been attached to the lyrics from referencing the need for communication between different religions – the schism in question would be a quite literal one in that case – to what lyrics and video seem to imply in a more immediate fashion: Relationship problems. While everybody is of course free to apply whichever interpretation they prefer, I would like to interpret it in the latter way; it turns out that this might actually be one of the most intelligent, immediately provable songs about relationship problems ever written. The basic idea, then, is laid out quickly: A couple’s relationship is not what it used to be, due to the fundamental differing between the sexes. They say differences attract each other which may be all the more true when mechanisms of evolution come into play: The more different the genes of two persons, the more resistant will the children they engender be, in their fertile days of the month women tend to be attracted to rather masculine men that they might in other moments find impossible to stand etc. It turns out that that difference can be “a light that fuels the fire” at first, but “burns a hole” between the couple once the first infatuation has passed. The pieces “fall away”, although there is a definite belief that “they fit” and can be “brought together”; after all men and women need and cannot be without the other – an insight so obvious that you would have to ask how the human species could have survived otherwise. What has been proven, too, is that male and female communication differ from each other – it is telling that in the video the male character does not have a mouth while the female does not have ears. The only way to overcome misunderstandings seems to be to communicate more, in order to make sure that what has been said is what has been understood etc. Lack of communication, likewise, leads to a cold silence that creates an atmosphere of alienation, disconnection and callousness; the fact that the people in this situation are supposed to be lovers makes it all the more absurd. I vaguely recollect a myth from some part of the world, which advocates the “hermaphroditic primordial shape” of the human being: Man and woman are one before they are born, are separated at birth and spend all of their lives looking for their lost halves. The song reflects some of this: In the end of the video, the two characters reach out for each other, presumably having overcome their communication problems although not without what seems a fit of rage, and consequently blend into each other, becoming one again. “Schism” refers to the separation of a whole, pieces of the same thing that belong together; the hermaphroditic being from the video could be a symbol for a bond like matrimonial union then that turns two people into a unit. Let’s talk about the music: The main riff is composed of a 5/8 and a 7/8 bar each, odd time signatures which sum up to 12/8 which is a regular meter again; an example of how the split or schism is symbolized musically. The verse starting from “The light that fueled…” is quite notable too: The guitar plays the bass riff here, but a fifth above, creating a rather neutral accompaniment. However the vocals are at the same time doubled by a second voice which runs in thirds: Closer analysis reveals that between the guitar and the second voice, both fitting the part they accompany, dissonances as severe as a minor second actually occur. I like to think of this as the couple talking to each other, their intentions perfectly in tune with what each of them they says himself, but somewhere these “unspoken overtones” without anybody noticing have drifted apart from each other and clash. And yes, polyrhythm occurs: For example in “Pure intention juxtaposed…” where 12/8 in the vocals runs against the main riff in the other instruments. The main example however is the bridge at 3:14: The guitar part in 7/8 runs against 7/4 in bass and drums, with a displacement, however, of one quarter note – arguably the most complicated part of the song and it took me a few listens to figure it out. So remember – it is only communicating that the pieces can be brought together again.