“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, February 20, 2012

Oh No, Autotune



I promised myself I would never do this. But this one particular song I wrote with Mike Snyder seems ripe for it, since the chorus is “I'm integrated into the machine.” I still do really like the laconic quality, and the Robert Wyatt-ish “zang be dang ba diggety boing”s. I also kinda like the lyrics—on the edge of nonsense: “They know about lovin' if you know what I mean: / Lovin' Jesus and a small Dairy Queen.”

I can also imagine the video. It would have to do with the abject failure of a spacecraft powered by sparklers and roman candles to lift off.

Of course it means that I spent quite a lot of the last few days tweaking it when I could have been unloading philosophically : )

3 comments:

allwhitelegos said...

Maybe it's because I'm unattuned to the specifics of the English accent, but this reminded me of 'Rainbow Voodoo' by Clark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGFyL2VCKJ0

The delivery of the lyrics, the modulation on the voice in the later movements.

I liked it, even if it did mean less 'philosophical unloading'.

Aaron said...

I liked it too!

But you know, when I met you in NYC you didn't seem to be walking like a lawnmower, at least not to me.

Aaron said...

And speaking of the (original) lawnmower man, check out the line about "writing objects" around 1:30. Actually the entire introductory poem in this performance seems rather object oriented--describing as it does an explosion of unexpected effects from a concealed subsurface zone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M58wE8GTGp4&feature=related