Aha, but someone paid 1.2 million dollars specifically so you would believe this. It goes all the way to the top.
Very cool!
I was not very optimistic about this question, but you guys found it.
I guess that as a total non-gamer I ought to be thankful for the various Guitar Hero style games because they apparently help isolated bass tracks find their way out of the vault, and if there’s one thing that makes a bassist smile, it’s finding an isolated studio bass track for a song he or she admires.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. Surely there are loads of solid working bassists out there who could play that crisp lick at speed all day with two fingers, but I can’t do any better than a pull-off.
I learned about the Guitar Hero et al isolated tracks through the Rush Tablature Project, a group of fans/players working together to transcribe the complete works of Rush. Some of them discovered the separate tracks in the game for a few songs, and they were promptly studied and used to make corrections to some of the tabs in the archive.
This made me think of the PAPA ROACH song “My Last Resort” from c. (2000)- I had heard it many times on radio with no edits, but when I saw it on the Canadian Mtv-like channel MUCH MUSIC, there were unusual edits (to me) that I had not heard elsewhere. From Wikipedia: “On the MuchMusic version–which utilizes the radio edit, the word “f*ck” is completely removed with no replacement. On the MTV and Vevo version, the words “cut”, “bleeding”, “die”, “life” (from the line “if I took my life tonight”), and “suicide” were also muted. After original airings of the video on television, some networks went so far as to additionally censor words such as “suffocation”, and even the title of the song itself.” It was the “the title of the song itself” that I remember standing out to me as being muted. I can’t recall many other songs or videos with this much blanking of words.
Censorship doesn’t follow the rules of logic.
Always bugged me when they started censoring the word “masturbation” in Green Day’s “Longview.” I could swear they didn’t bleep it out when it first came out, or at least the radio station I listened to didn’t play an edit with the “masturbation” cut out (but they did cut out the “fuckin’” from “fuckin’” lonely.) I mean, what the hell? What’s wrong with the word “masturbation”? Christ, “I Touch Myself” got non-stop radio play in the early 90s, but say the word “masturbation” and it’s cut right out. I guess you can sing about it, just don’t say what “it” is. As you said, censorship doesn’t follow logic.
Wow, gotta come back and eat crow. I was operating an electronic wrongluator, apparently.
In my defense, yeah, that’s a bizarre act of censoring, exposing the ignorance of the censors in great relief. Aside from convention around what grain is used, rye is the same damn thing as whiskey, you nitwits. I’m gonna spend a little more and get some nice rye this Labor Day weekend, because somehow it’s not as risque as whiskey.
Although my guess is censorship, for a specific release, I also believe that ‘American Pie’ was mixed as lots and lots of bits and pieces. McLean never liked singing it ‘straight’. By the time he was singing it in concert, most of the people had already heard it as many times as he had sung it, and liked the way he swung it and jazzed it. But when it was originally recorded, it was re-recorded over and over, with him singing it differently each time, until the producer had enough pieces to make a plain vanilla version.
You know Bruce Thomas?? <faints dead away> Well, he probably won’t care, but he’s my favorite bassist. His parts are always interesting and melodic. His work on the first 4 or 5 Attractions albums was amazing.
More of a hijack, but when I picked up Hey Ya for Rocksmith, they bleeped out the last word in the line “I want to make you come-a”. My son, who was probably sixteen at the time had never even thought of that as a dirty lyric until they bleeped it out, and then the penny dropped. So, bleeping it made it dirtier in a way.
I’ve heard he will even sing entirely different lyrics that reference Star Wars.
I think that might be Weird Al’s masterpiece, in terms of just making it all work and telling the entire Episode 1 story. Just amazing.
Anyway, someone created a Rocksmith version of American Pie if you want to try it for yourself:
Honestly, the most impressive thing about it is that he wrote it before the movie came out.
From Wikipedia:
Set to the tune of Don McLean’s “American Pie”, “The Saga Begins” recounts the plot of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, from Obi-Wan Kenobi’s point of view. Yankovic gathered most of the information he needed to write the song from Internet spoilers.[2] Although Lucasfilm declined a request for an advance screening, Yankovic eventually attended a costly pre-screening for charity.[2] He had done such an accurate job with the story line that after the pre-screening, he ended up making only very minor alterations.
I was thinking that maybe he originally named a brand like “Jim Beam” and wasn’t allowed to use it in the song.