I hate it when music is seriously chopped up for commercial purposes. This happens a lot in commercials, but also on TV shows and other things. They’ll just cut from one point in a song to another, cut out a phrase, cut out a chorus. As an example, take Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” which is used in some car commercial.
This happens to both pop music and classical. It’s especially heinous when there’s a classical piece and they’ll just play one little catchy theme over and over again, and nothing else. Also I hate when people play just the finale of the 1812 Overture on the 4th of July.
The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” was used in some kind of commercial a few years ago, and they edited the song to exclude the phrase “shoot 'em in the back” and, uh, “Blitzkrieg,” which left “Hey ho let’s go” and a few lines from the rest of the song.
Hey now! Neither I nor my namesake is to blame for the overuse of “Mad World”. The fault for that lies with one Mr. Gary Jules, whose adaptation of the song from a cynical, emotionless pastiche of everyday soulless existence (which is what it was supposed to be) into an inexorably generic, albeit well-executed, “sad song”, plucked the public’s heartstrings – presumably because they didn’t listen to the lyrics, but hey, “Born in the USA” was used as a polictical campaign anthem – and ensured that the damn thing would be used in every aspect of pop culture for years to come.
To be fair, Jules did the cover for Donnie Darko, and I don’t think he expected it to become popular, so on second thought, the blame doesn’t really lie with him either. I’m content to pin it on the people who feel an emotional connection with it, and (perhaps even moreso) on the people who want to capitalize on them.
There is no answer to that question, because it’s such an integral element of the human voice. The use of it in popular music, however, has a clear lineage back through to blues and beyond, quite separate from the Eurocentric history presented in that article. (Which has no mention of Africa at all.)
It’s just a bad (or at least insufficient) article from start to finish, I suppose is the point I’m really making here!
Here’s a really seriously bad example. Most guitar geeks know that there’s a guy called Eric Johnson who recorded a pretty damned good tune called ‘Cliffs of Dover’. Even people who may not like the rest of his output tend to rate this track as very, very good. It’s a sublime piece of instrumental rock guitar.
It’s based around two riffs, both very listenable. On the recorded version, there’s also a solo or ‘cadenza’ section where Eric just takes off and goes into higher orbit (very impressively) before coming back down to finish the tune by reprising the earlier sections as per normal. I was so intrigued by this track that I wanted to (a) see the notation for it and (b) see Eric playing it so that I could watch the furious fingers do their thing.
The notation was a bit elusive but then, hallelujah, a British guitar mag published a note by note transcription. Great! I also tracked down a DVD that has Eric playing this particular tune in a live concert. I had to import this, at modest expense. I needn’t have bothered. The camera work and direction is as bad as anything in life ever gets. It is obvious the director hasn’t a clue about guitars or guitar music or anything that a fan might actually like to see. There is very little attention paid to the fretboard at all. And when Eric plays Cliffs of Dover, and gets to the ‘flying high’ cadenza section… (a) it’s about a tenth as good as the studio version, if that, and (b) the director cuts to a shot of the BACK of the BASS player. I’ll write that again: the BACK of the BASS player. I’m not kidding.
Thank you for letting me share. I feel better now.
