I spent much of today out in the rain, collecting footage for a little video project I’m helping with. With a video camera in your hand, it’s amazing how quickly you come to consider the city as your own private film set.
Pedestrians, traffic and background noise constantly interrupt your shots, and it gets a little frustrating. Next time, we’re going to call the police to shut down a couple of streets for us.
To help us construct a storyboard, we used Charlie Brooker‘s indispensable guide to “How to Report the News” as inspiration. Even if you’ve seen it before, it’s always worth watching again, because it’s very clever:
Now I’ve got nothing against Justin Bieber in particular or teenage pop sensations in general. As music critic Graham Reid expressed on his blog today, the kids are going to scream at whatever they want to scream at. too. (Although this footage reaffirms why 13 year-old girls are still the scariest thing on the planet).
No, my point is about Auto-Tune. It’s clear that Mr Bieber can actually sing quite nicely in a radio-friendly monochrome fashion, and even plays the guitar – you can check out all the original YouTube videos if you want, but here’s JB on ITV in the UK back in January:
So why-oh-why do they channel his voice (and all of his right-on offsiders like Ludacris and Usher) through a freaking Auto-Tune on allhissongs?
Auto-Tune’s been around for a while now. I wonder if in ten years’ time we’ll regard it as a hopelessly outmoded sonic token of the current decade. Just like all song titles at the moment must include the letters “ft.”, (as if artists are afraid to be heard performing without at least one celebrity friend), singers must warble through Auto-Tune’s digital downpipe in order to satisfy 2010′s well-tempered-robot aesthetic.
“Auto-Tune”, with its Bryl-Creem hyphen and teen-snaring smoothness, is like fins on a Studebaker: the fins serves no practical purpose, but made the car look cooler. Similarly Auto-Tune has become the indispensable appendage to modern pop.
In many ways, not a lot has changed since that shiny atomic age when asbestos was futuristic. In the first 8 bars of Baby compulsorily ft. Ludacris, Justin’s Ooooh-Aaaah resembles the same shoo-wop-doo-widdy nonsense as Da Doo Ron Ron in 1963.
And the rest of the song is based around the same I-VI-IV-V progression that has served so many chart-toppers well – 1964′s Leader of the Pack by the Shangri-Las, and 1961′s Stand By Me by Ben E. King…
I hope Justin Bieber survives the screaming hordes and that he grows up to be happy and fulfilled in whatever he does. Time will tell if his musical career will be durable and interesting.
Maybe one day Justin’ll make an album without Auto-Tune.
And maybe one day I’ll write that follow-up post about Joseph Stiglitz.
If I ever think that music has lost its power to move and excite me, I find some Frank Zappa. Here he is in concert in Barcelona in 1988, playing one of my favourite Zappa instrumentals, Watermelon in Easter Hay. Music like this proves Zappa wasn’t just a Stravinsky fan – he could write with glistening simplicity too.
I only took one photo while I was at Les Deux Alpes, and this is it – the view from my hotel window on Friday afternoon. It was the best weather of my stay: on Saturday and Sunday the clouds rolled in, making skiing well, not impossible, but certainly difficult with 20-metre visibility.
As is traditional when I head to the mountains, I made a video. The 2010 edition is fairly modest compared with the meisterwerks of 2007 (Slovenia and Switzerland). But at the end you do get to see a bunch of clueless skiers traversing a fresh avalanche on Monday afternoon…
The avalanche came down over one of the blue runs, and must have been very recent – soon after we crossed the avalanche, the ski patrol arrived with rescue dogs to check whether anyone had been buried… as the weather warms up, more of these snowslides are likely across the Alps, and the ski patrols are on alert.
The other drama of the holiday was getting caught in the nationwide strike on SNCF on Tuesday. It took me 10 hours to get back to Paris instead of 6, and I stood all the way from Lyon to Paris in the restaurant car of a TGV. However all the passengers were very tolerant of the crowding and the young train crews (it seems it’s the new employees who are left to provide the service minimum during strikes) were having a lot of fun running a TGV all by themselves.
Arriving back in Paris, spring had well-and-truly established itself. The city seemed to have a smell again, and there were birds singing in the still-nude trees on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Arriving back at my apartment, the gardien was clearing the mailboxes as I walked in the front door.
“Bonjour monsieur vous allez bien? Ca commence à faire beau maintenant, hein?”
There aren’t any leaves on the trees yet, but something’s in the air. This week it got to 18 degrees in parts of Paris, and the café terraces are filling with people who still look like they don’t quite know what to do with the glorious weather. I took this photo the other day on the way to a business meeting…
However winter is not quite over in the etnobofin household: I am off to the Alps for a long weekend sliding around on a mountain. So in the interim, I’ll leave you with a taste of one of the pinnacles of French culture – Pigloo:
John Dankworth passed away on Saturday. Here’s a recent performance of his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing, still going strong at 81 at the 2008 North Sea Jazz Festival, and only hung up his saxophone in December.
This clip epitomises a lot of what Dankworth’s music meant to me – his close partnership with his wife Cleo Laine (one of the great voices of the 20th Century), his penchant for tight, witty ensemble writing, and his consistent ability to connect with a wide audience well beyond the regular jazz public.
Something to watch out for in 2010: Brèves de trottoirs is a new web-documentary project lead by journalist Olivier Lambert and photographer Thomas Salva. The objective is to bring together a collection of short documentaries focused on personalities met on the streets of Paris.
Their first subject was Elie, the famous “Papy Dance” who dances outside the Italie 2 shopping centre in the 13th arrondissement. His performances have made him an internet star, but his life story is far more poignant… (this video is subtitled in English)
Also recently released is the next short film, an interview with Violette, a florist on Place Monge in the 5th arrondissement.
Brèves de Trottoirs provides an interesting example of how journalism, film-making and internet are coming together to create new modes story-telling. It’ll be fascinating to watch the project develop during the year. You can follow their Twitter feed or their blog.
Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg seem a strangely appropriate duo: America’s pop wunderkind of the 1990s teaming up with the daughter of one of France’s most famous performing artists.
Heaven Can Wait is the first single off Gainsbourg’s new album Master’s Hand, but it sounds like a Beck song through and through. And the video is completely fabulous:
Although officially it’s on a Charlotte Gainsbourg disc, Heaven Can Wait sounds almost like a return to form for Beck. He’s frankly showing a little of his age in this video, but the music contains some of the hallmarks of his classic period: honky-tonk beat-making, lyrical bricolage and a story of misfits played out under the sun of East Los Angeles.
The video even contains sly visual clues to Beck’s earlier work (and the visual is almost as important as the music with Beck). See if you can spot:
The hemp rope guitar strap (from the interior album artwork on Mellow Gold)
Guy in a horse mask (a Human Jackass partly made his Odelay tour of 1997 such a gas. Still the best concert I’ve ever seen.)
The goat skull that’s another reference to cover of Mellow Gold
(Don’t know if I should confess that Mellow Gold was the first CD I ever bought. Given that the first cassette I bought was Arrested Development’s 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of…, I’m not sure if my taste improved. But I do own all of Beck’s albums. Including the pre-Geffen indie obscurities).
Muchas apologias. Writing on the blog has been intermittent lately. The last week has been a blur of trains, meetings and sleeping in strange beds. And somewhere among all this I’m pushing towards handing in a thesis at the end of September. Things have been kind of busy.
If anyone wants a clue about what’s going on in Montpellier, read Ed’s blog, because I’m kind of out of the loop.
However, I was introduced to Le Quatuor last week – and thought it was worth sharing: four highly accomplished classical musicians who have turned to physical comedy… well, for laughs.
I think the entire performance on their DVD is funnier as a whole, rather than the few excerpts you can find on YouTube. I’m surprised they aren’t more known outside France: most of the jokes are physical or musical, and their dialogue-based sketches are carried out in a surreal mélange of German, Italian, English, French and Spanish (check out their music lesson sketch).
If Montpellier has an internet celebrity, it’s Rémi Gaillard. He’s been making prank videos on the internet for ten years, and his clips have received over 350 million views on Youtube.
Many of his gags are filmed right here in Montpellier. One would have thought the locals would have got used to his antics by now, but Monsieur Gaillard always finds new ways to amuse and annoy: last year he turned the streets of the city into a Nintendo Mario Kart racetrack:
There is obviously an anarchist and possibly dadaist streak in Gaillard’s humour, and his motto “C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui” (roughly – “By doing whatever you can become whoever”) suggests that there may be a philosophy behind what he does. There is also money – he was hired last year by Orangina and Nike to make viral videos.
You can find dozens more videos on his site, nimportequi.com. Although his gags are largely harmless, it really is a wonder that Rémi hasn’t ended up in jail yet…
