Month: September 2009

I have been — God help me — listening to Top 40 radio.

Top 40 radio. That’s what it used to be called. I’m not sure what they call it today, although I am pretty sure they don’t have 40 songs on the playlist.

See, I was reading the other morning in the Los Angeles Times about the competition between hit radio stations in LA — it seems the upstart Amp Radio (KAMP-FM) is giving the reigning champion (KIIS-FM) a run for the ratings money. Who cares, really, but the story made me start wondering just what it is the kids are dancing to these days, so in the car on the way to work I turned on KAMP-FM.

Apparently everything’s hip hop now. I heard a bunch of commercials, a DJ yelling really loud and really fast and really loud, and then a song called “Hotel Room,” by Pitbull. Ginormous beat, speaker-rippin’ bass, cheesy synth line, misogynist lyrics:

“…after party in the hotel lobby,
then we off to the room like vroom! put them fingers in your mouth uh open up your blouse and pull that g-string down south oooo!”

And the chorus, repeated 5,000 times:

“Forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room, you can bring your girlfriends and meet me at the hotel room.
Forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room, you can bring your girlfriends and meet me at the hotel room.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.”

It’s actually quite infectious in a brain dead, purely physical sort of way. I turned the bass all the way up in my car, but I have a feeling the stock Honda sound system wasn’t designed for that kind of thing, and I didn’t get the full effect. Still, infectious.

I only listened to KAMP-FM for ten minutes, and that’s what I heard. Then on the way home from work, I turned it on again, and guess what was playing? That’s right, say it with me — “We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn…” True, it was nine hours later, but I’ll bet it was more than a coincidence. I’ll bet they play that song and about eight others every hour, all day, every day.

I am a musician, and I perform in public, but I have to tell you that I will not make myself ridiculous by trying to sing this song, or any of the stuff they are playing on the hit stations. I take seriously the obligation to be entertaining, but there have to be boundaries for a man of my age. I’m just exploring, like an explorer, the Indiana Jones of intergenerational musicology. You know, taking notes.

Then the other night I’m flipping through a range of seldom-viewed channels up in the four hundreds on my Verizon FIOS fiberoptic entertainment pipe and I come across a show called “Talk Asia,” or something like that, which has one gorgeous non-asian woman interviewing another gorgeous non-asian woman. I love women, I really do, I don’t care if they’re asian or not, they are all gorgeous to me, and so I watch for a few minutes and it turns out the interviewee is Lady Gaga, who looks like she is going to be the next Madonna. Researching this later I find this video on YouTube (WARNING: Banned in Australia!), and the very next time I turn on Amp Radio there she is! I have been listening to hit radio only a couple of days and already I know one of the big hit artists! I’m feeling so inside!

Anyway, if you’ve listened to “Hotel Room” you know pretty much what’s going on with the Top 40 these days. Gaga sings melodies and uses instruments and background singers, but 85 percent of the progamming sounds just like “Hotel Room.” To me.

One thing they are all doing, even Gaga, that they need to stop right away is using Auto-Tune on their voices. Auto-Tune is a digital technology that you can apply to audio. It detects the nearest “in tune” note to the one the singer is singing, and alters the singer’s pitch to match the “correct” pitch. If you think about it for a minute, you will see that while this could be a boon to a lot of vocalists, it also has the potential to take away all the nuance and character from a performance. Singers through the decades, from Billie Holliday to Mick Jagger to Bono do not necessarily nail all the notes, and in fact it is the “wrong” notes they sing that often give their performances their warmth, humanity, style, soul — whatever you choose to call it.

Auto-Tune could take that magic away, and that’s if you use it sparingly. That would be bad enough, but if you turn it up to extreme settings, it changes your voice to this. This seems to have started in 1998 with Cher’s huge hit “Believe.” OK, fine, it was a cool effect, but enough! Naturally, everybody on Amp Radio (and probably KIIS-FM, too) is overusing Auto-Tune, and the result is that all the singers kind of sound like the same singer. Also, the robot-voice thing gets old and irritating pretty quick, so knock it off. No, really.

I’m definitely going to try it the next time I get near a microphone, though.

Hooray, the recession is over!

Bankers on Wall Street have come up with a plan to save us all. Er, save the economy. Or maybe they are just trying to save themselves, but hey, the important thing is that at least they trying to help. According to this New York Times article dated September 5, 2009, here’s what they’re doing:

They are going to buy life insurance policies for pennies on the dollar from old people who have fallen on hard times and need some cash. Then they are going to bundle a whole bunch of these policies together and sell them on the market as sure-fire securities. What could possibly go wrong?

Does this sound familiar? Remember securitized mortgages? We all know how well that went. Everything was triple-A rated, of course, and yet somehow only a few bankers and brokers survived, while everybody else lost their shirts.

Of course there is no regulation of this proposed market at this time, and by the time the SEC or whoever gets around to that, the market will be — say it with me — too big to fail, and we’ll just have to live with it, and then later bail it out. And can anyone guess how long it will be before armies of salesmen start calling grandpa to let him know what a great deal they have for him on his silly old life insurance policy? I’ll guess: five minutes.

But there might be room here for some regulatory action. After all, once Grandpa sells his life insurance, the investors have to start hoping he will die sooner rather than later, because as long as Gramps is still kicking they have to keep paying the premiums on the policy, and they don’t get to collect the payout. Naturally they’ll want the old guy to sign a promise to die as soon as possible. This is where the government could step in and insist on end-of-life counseling first. These would be Death Panels Republicans could believe in.

So there you have it. The next brilliant idea, brought to you by the folks who gave you credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles and collateralized debt obligations.

Step right up, katz and kittenz, and place your bets.

It’s Sunday morning in my town, and I am doing the weekly grocery shopping —

— the farner’s market down by the marina, Whole Foods just across the street. I have to drop that stuff off at the house and then go to Trader Joe’s for the things it seems you can only get there, like gluten-free, wheat-free tortillas, and then Costco, for the 55-gallon drum of dish soap and the freight car full of toilet paper.

I am filled with wonder and awe and sadness and joy at this beautiful and fearsome universe, at the fires in the Angeles National Forest that thoughtlessly kill and destroy; at the woman sitting on the curb with her dog and her sign “Homeless Veteran, Any Help Appreciated”; at the half hour of Beatles in mono they just played on Breakfast With the Beatles; at the young man working at Whole Foods who spontaneously sang along in perfect falsetto with Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man”; at the red Ferrari I followed on the freeway all the way home from the store, suddenly realizing, after all these many years — “Hey! I want one of those!” — and thinking it’s OK to desire, to covet; at the way we are sliding from summer into fall, and the sun is washing the world in gold; at the friends I have known and lost, and the ones I haven’t yet met; at the brave and beautiful plumeria in the back yard, who brings forth a flower every now and then, in spite of our neglect most of the time; at my little cat Tigger, who stays in the house even when the door is open and unguarded, because he knows it’s what I want him to do — what love, to tame your own instincts to please another!

I’m not who I want to be, and my life hasn’t turned out as I expected, but some days, days like this, I am happy to be here, to be able to go outside and just…Â see what’s there, feel the breeze, and sweat in this heat wave we’re having. I’m happy to have an extra day off my crummy job this week, happy to have my Telecaster and my Blackjack and my Fender Hot Rod Deluxe and the chance to play them in my band a few times a month.

Yes, katz and kittenz, I am Pollyanna, thanks.