Watching TV the other day and I saw this video for Alexandra Burke’s Bad Boys and I have to say that the plot as well as the coregraphy got my sick mind thinking about what could it all mean. You don’t have to watch too closely to realize that this video seems like a 4 minutes metaphor for a gang bang. The girl’s car breaks down in a shady neighbourhood at night and then she is slowly followed and surrounded by an army of thug looking fellows, who keep checking out her bod. They end up in a pool joint, where the guys make their move and she ends up dancing with all of them, while Flo Rida sits alone and sad outside contemplating “She so so addicted to them rougher fellas” or “get them more the merrier” and concluding “You’ll have them shawty don’t worry”. It all ends outside, where the bad boys circle the girl and one final face-off follows, leaving them big guys down on the ground. This is one faulty cautionary tale for girls walking alone at night…

WHAT D’YA THINK ?

And just so you wouldn’t think that I’m raging against The X Factor, because it’s the seasonal thing to do, I’ll focus my sick mind on a classic hit, a video which I actually saw the same day: Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl. The lyrics talk about, obviously, an uptown girl who is “getting tired of her high class toys” and I guess that because “she never had a back street guy”, she decides to look “for a downtown man”. In the video, the girl just so happens to have her chauffeur stop at a garage, where Billy and his gang of Merry Mechanics giver her the full treatment. As soon as she gets down from her car, the dancing starts. Two bikers and two breakdancers with weird tops join in and soon our uptown girl is dancing with 8 guys at once. Her chauffeur doesn’t interfere, which is very Once Upon a Time in America of him. This is a cautionary tale for all of you uptown boys, this is what happens when your girl gets tired of “living in her white bread world”.

Up WHAT Girl ?!

Until April of 2008 (though Mraz’s song might be played on guitar, it is played as to sound like a ukulele)… This is not, in any way, some sort of plagiarism accusation against Mraz, maybe just a demerit, spoiling his golden stars collection. Funnily enough, I’m Yours has started going on the same path as Over the Rainbow: shows, trailers, commercials and you can hold your breath that it will start the romantic comedy/drama circuit soon enough. Both songs evoque a similar feeling, the life-is-short-let’s-enjoy-it-by-loving-someone kind of feeling, a simple philosophy expressed through a simple song structure. It’s a good trick on Mraz’s part, but maybe I’m wrong. Listen to both songs and judge y’rself:

Over the Rainbow I’m Yours

]]> http://www.nikinphaser.com/2009/10/the-jason-mraz-trick/feed/ 1 http://www.nikinphaser.com/2009/09/the-%e2%80%9ckasabian-on-the-next-guy-ritchie-movie%e2%80%9d-bet-i-win/ http://www.nikinphaser.com/2009/09/the-%e2%80%9ckasabian-on-the-next-guy-ritchie-movie%e2%80%9d-bet-i-win/#comments Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:21:59 +0000 Niki N. Phaser http://www.nikinphaser.com/?p=1619 You might find this slightly immature, but it’s always nice to win a bet, no matter how trivial it is. On June 18, 2009 I posted this article , which I called at the time “a public bet I made with myself”. Basically, in it I’m saying (or joking ?) that Kasabian’s music would fit perfectly in a Guy Ritchie brit-gangsta-movie and guess what, it turns out my prediction was pretty right. In a September 12, 2009 article, NME.com is informing us that the director is indeed very impressed with Kasabian and might just ask them to score a movie for him. I guess, I do know my Guy Ritchies…

But since then, The Joker’s Glasgow grin has become a bit of a pop culture icon, finding itself on plenty of pop art items. I am not talking about Heath Ledger, who might or might not become the James Dean of our generation, but solely about his Joker, who makes Jack’s Joker a Joke… (some pun intended). Not only do we see his face on T-shirts and other clothing, but it actually became a hip thing to wear Joker-type make-up, on special occasions, like weddings and funerals… just kidding, but you do see plenty of Joker faces at concerts or clubs or whatnot. Youtube is filled with “Joker make-up tutorials”.

This face of evil might just become the next big thing in iconic pop images. Take down your Don Corleone and Scarface posters, replace them with the “Why so serious ?” series. Tatoo artists, start practicing Heath Ledger’s face lines. Pretty soon, it will become one of those images that few will remember where it came from, but they’ll know it’s cool to sport it. And the truth is, it is cool. I’m hesitant in claiming that it will equal the Che mania, but there will be a few bands in the future that will reference some of Joker’s lines, some parodies very soon, Halloween masks, the make-up craze will hit the mainstream and you’ll see a buch of pop stars all looking like pretty sexy versions of The Joker doing machine-gun moves and wetting their lips after every word. Just keep an eye on the process to see it unfolding step by step in front of us… And if I’m wrong I’ll probably delete this post, so no one will know…

SEE THE SIGN OF THE COMING

The Dandy Warhols Are Sound

Truth be told there are plenty of differences between the two records, it’s not just that one is louder, like with remastered material. First of all, some of the songs are longer, for example The Last High or We Used To Be Friends. The track order is different, the album covers (as you can see in the images) and then, of course, there is the mixing. The songs have a new sound, but if you have listened to Welcome to the Monkey House for all these years and got acquainted with that music in that form, its 2009 “doppelgänger” seems like a collection of rough demos, missing some crucial production. Still, The Dandy Warhols have a strong enough indie following for this release to not have been in vain and they have plenty of irony to not pretend that pecuniary thoughts haven’t crossed their mind. Their official website’s greeting at the moment is: “Remember when we released The Dandy Warhols Are Sound today? And then you bought it? Good times.”

You can compare samples from the two versions here:

Welcome to the Monkey House and The Dandy Warhols Are Sound

Pearl Jam did the same with their first album, Ten, which was rereleased in 2009, both remastered and in a new mix by Brendan O’Brien, as the band thought the original mix by Tim Palmer had too much reverb on it, something that many rock bands seem to complain about when it comes to mixing. But the truth remains that it simply sucks when your favourite band says about your favourite album that is not quite what they were striving for, but, oh, the new mix, which comes in Limited edition, Deluxe edition, SuperDeluxe edition, Vinyl, iTunes edition, Wal-Mart/K-Mart edition, the gas station around the corner edition, oh, yes, that’s the real deal. And, yeah, I know no one is forcing you to buy it, but it has those two damn bonus tracks…

Ok, I need to make this as clear as possible: what you are about to read is a joke, it’s having fun with lyrics interpretation. I’ve listened for many times to When in Rome’s The Promise and at one point, the lyrics started to sound like some remorseful wifebeater’s plea/threat thing. I mean, the song starts with the following verse: “If you need a friend, don’t look to a stranger, You know in the end, I’ll always be there. And when you’re in doubt, and when you’re in danger, Take a look all around, and I’ll be there”. Now… this could be easily read as a violent husband’s calm and ironic threat to his wife. “Don’t look to a stranger” meaning don’t ask for help, it will be futile because “in the end, I’ll always be there”. Then, when she is in doubt and in danger, he says “take a look all around, and I’ll be there”, so maybe that’s exactly the reason why she is in danger. The second verse is filled with other ambiguous stuff like “Sometimes, if I shout, It’s not what’s intended”. This kinda resembles “I’m sorry, but you make me do this. You know I love you” sort of line we hear in movies about violent spouses. The chorus sounds like another shape of the same line: “I’m sorry, but I’m just thinking of the right words to say. I know they don’t sound the way I planned them to be”, which means he expresses himself in all the wrong ways. And there is no escape for the poor woman, since he promises: “if I had to walk the world, I’d make you fall for me, I promise, I promise you I will …”, which means she could run and hide, but it’ll do her no good, because he’ll walk the world to find her. This is what his promise is all about. Crazy stuff. Remember that movie, Sleeping with the Enemy ? Just imagine a montage of Julia Roberts-Patrick Bergin scenes with this song as soundtrack…

I’ll finish up by reminding all of you Napoleon Dynamite fans out there that this is joke, I like this song just as much as you do – after all, it’s by listening to it thousands of times that I came up with these hidden meanings (and I admit, afterwards, it was pretty difficult to listen to it as the love song it was meant to be). So, if you can’t take a joke, go watch an Eddie Murphy movie…

LISTEN TO THE SONG AND READ THE LYRICS HERE

If you are a fan of Beyonce or Bow Wow, you probably shouldn’t read this… If you are that kind of fan that has a problem with seeing the truth about their idols. But, you have to be really psycho-stalker material to claim that Beyonce’s Diva is a good song, or, even more, a… song. It seems more like private bet she or her producers made with someone in the lines of “I’ll make some stupid noises and win the charts with them, just you wait and see…One condition, I need to release it as single”. And the rest is history… a lame repetitive sample, vocals that don’t fit the rest of the song and the hope that the “diva is the female version of a hustler” line will be catchy enough. It’s really a shame that Beyonce tainted the album which contains Halo and If I Were a Boy with such experimental… bets. A lot of a singer’s success is based on inertia. Once they are up there, they don’t have to do much to remain there: the flow goes with itself.

Which brings us to our contestant, number two, Bow Wow, formerly known as… something else. I admit I am not too familiar with the music career of this young hope, I have seen some of his movies and Like Mike is quite the guilty pleasure for my inner child. However, a song by the name Marco Polo, signed by our young thespian was once bestowed upon me and I just needed to say it out loud: WTF ? It’s sort of rappy, but not quite. The verses could pass as low-volume musical background for some MTV dating show, but that chorus… man, that’s classic. A legend in the making. Because of those Marco Polo shouts this track could gather a cult-following, like some Ed Wood movie. At least, this one is less annoying than Diva, because these boys, Bow Wow and Soulja Boy Tell’Em (now, that I spelled it, I get it – soldier boy tell them, right), these boys really seem to think they’ve got something here and their naivete is really heartwarming.

BEYONCE Diva vs. BOW WOW Marco Polo

First of all, this is not any form of news, it is just a public bet I made with myself. Just for laughs. It’s just that Kasabian’s first single off of West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, by the name of Fire (which contributed to them having the second consecutive charttoper album in UK) would fit perfectly on a Guy Ritchie brit-gangsta movie. Maybe the psychedelic-heist video has a lot to do with it, but the song would surely fit on an action sequence or a parallel montage Ritchie-style. I doubt that there will be any Kasabian on Sherlock Holmes (2009) the up-and-coming flick, starring Robert Downey Jr., but the end of RocknRolla did promise a sequel. Remember ?

Picture By: www.popdose.com

The Stone Roses

I was just thinking, shouldn’t MTV2 (Uk) be called Britpop Channel ? There isn’t a day without Blur and Oasis and Suede. Of course, we cannot forget The Stone Roses with Fools Gold (it might not be britpop, but madchester spawned britpop, so you get the picture). And whenever they wanna do something different, they do something like Britpop Week (Fools Gold) or 90′s Anthems (Fools Gold, again) or just Anthems (F. Gold) or just 90′s (FG). There are about two shows that are not Britpop-infected.

Not that there is anything wrong with Britpop…