Imagine the Wings

May 15, 2013 2:23 PM

Speed up Imagine, slow down Band on The Run. WTF?
posted by timsteil (49 comments total)

Really nice.
posted by oddman at 2:28 PM on May 15, 2013

OK, but once you allow yourself to speed up or slow down music you can probably get quite a number of songs to mash up just as well. Why these two?
posted by dhartung at 2:30 PM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

Then you hit play right as the lion in the MGM logo roars...
posted by kmz at 2:32 PM on May 15, 2013 [11 favorites]

Why these two?

Because it would have pissed both of them off immensely. :D
posted by capricorn at 2:32 PM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

Why these two?

You never played the "if you bring together the best tracks the Beatles recorded as solo artists in a particular year and compile them, you can make a lost Beatles album" game?

To be fair, that would mean putting "Imagine" with "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", "Bangladesh" and "It Don't Come Easy". Or "Band on the Run" with "Mind Games", "Photograph" and "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)".
posted by rory at 2:42 PM on May 15, 2013

To be fair, that would mean putting "Imagine" with "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", "Bangladesh" and "It Don't Come Easy". Or "Band on the Run" with "Mind Games", "Photograph" and "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)".

Still not as weird as the White Album.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:45 PM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

I'm kinda with dhartung. I don't see much connection here. And I like GHP.
posted by mrgrimm at 2:55 PM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

First of all, they don't really line up very well. When McCartney goes up, he goes out of key. Secondly:

Step 3:
Throw one over the other and leave alone for 2 minutes

Bullshit. They cut the first chorus of "Band on the Run" short, for a start.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:00 PM on May 15, 2013 [3 favorites]

I kinda liked it but I was wondering how many edits there were. Because if there were none that place where they both went silent at the same time would be impressive.
posted by benito.strauss at 3:05 PM on May 15, 2013

So mash up the best post Beatles song (Imagine (yeah, it's overplayed)) with the worst ever song in the history of the universe, and get something that is physically painful to hear?

I have never wanted to send hate mail to a stranger more than I want to right now.
posted by DigDoug at 3:10 PM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Sure are a lot of county judges holding grudges in this thread.
posted by sourwookie at 3:27 PM on May 15, 2013 [5 favorites]

I heart everything... except that SINGLE song. (And I'm not at all sure why)
posted by DigDoug at 3:28 PM on May 15, 2013

Ugh, the key departures are KILLING me.

Also, this for people who enjoy the idea of a Gwen Stefani/Mike Doughty marriage with They Might Be Giants presiding (self-link to something in music.metafilter.com)
posted by davejay at 3:32 PM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

OK, but once you allow yourself to speed up or slow down music you can probably get quite a number of songs to mash up just as well. Why these two?

The implication being that it doesn't take much skill to get this kind of work as well as it does here?

If so, then I can tell you from years of chasing a decent mash-up that this is much, much harder to achieve than just shifting tempos. Yes, there is some luck involved, but only after you have mastered many, many subtle skills can you get consistently great mash-ups like HGP.

If not so, then...?
posted by victors at 3:32 PM on May 15, 2013

Woman v The Frog Chorus. Won't someone make this happen?
posted by billiebee at 3:35 PM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

So mash up the best post Beatles song (Imagine (yeah, it's overplayed)) with the worst ever song in the history of the universe

Both ends of this are insane. Imagine is good, but it's not as good as, say, Jet, or Baby I'm Amazed, or Cold Turkey, or Instant Karma, or the No-No Song (heh), and although Band on the Run is perhaps not th BEST song in the history of the universe, it's closer to best than worst.

I think of Band on the Run as the sequel to Paul's medley on side B of Abbey Road. Disparate chunks of greatness, thematically linked.

I agree with the painful to hear part, though.
posted by dirtdirt at 3:37 PM on May 15, 2013 [6 favorites]

Woman v The Frog Chorus. Won't someone make this happen?

I still reckon they should be from the same year to really get into the spirit of it. "Woman" vs "Temporary Secretary"!
posted by rory at 3:40 PM on May 15, 2013 [3 favorites]

I thought this was lovely, and I liked the 'key departures' (aren't those 'modes', really?).

Anyway, I can't stand Wings, and I remember being totally baffled by 'Band on the Run' as a kid. Such a dumb song.
posted by Pecinpah at 3:45 PM on May 15, 2013

does a mashup count if you don't recognize the source material? at all?
posted by gorbichov at 3:50 PM on May 15, 2013

THIS WAS FUCKING AWESOME. That mashup is what the Beatles would sound like if they were a brand-spankin' new indie band with their first single out. Absolutely brilliant and I WILL FIGHT YOU.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 4:15 PM on May 15, 2013 [3 favorites]

So, on a lark, right now I have Two Virgins, Wonderwall Music, Electronic Sound, Sentimental Journey, and The Family Way* playing at the same time in separate YouTube tabs.

It's completely fucking bananas. (In a good way, I think.)

*Actually just one track from it, since I couldn't find the whole thing.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:18 PM on May 15, 2013

I hate mashups, but that was beautiful. I wonder what Sir Paul thinks.
posted by blurker at 4:18 PM on May 15, 2013

"Photograph" and "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)".

Whoops. You've got two George Harrison songs, there.
posted by hwyengr at 4:36 PM on May 15, 2013

George is sounding a bit Starry-eyed...
posted by rory at 4:51 PM on May 15, 2013

Imagine a Jump works pretty well. Stick with it.
posted by sklero at 5:26 PM on May 15, 2013 [6 favorites]

"Photograph" and "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)".

Whoops. You've got two George Harrison songs, there.

He and Ringo both co-wrote "Photograph," but Ringo sang it.

As for this - I think it actually is a good indicator of just how in sync Lennon and McCartney got after working together for so long - their songwriting ended up using similar structure and "Musical grammar," for lack of a better word.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:36 PM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'd always understood that George wrote Photograph and It Don't Come Easy, and just gave them to Ringo. They're too good of songs for him to come up with himself.
posted by hwyengr at 6:11 PM on May 15, 2013

For what it's worth, I always thought Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey and Something In The Air are two entirely different songs with little in common, but right around the 2:20 mark of each, they cross paths. There is some barrelhouse piano heavy on the contrapuntal in both and for a few seconds, you could easily slip from one into the other.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:25 PM on May 15, 2013

Wow, tough crowd.
posted by awfurby at 7:58 PM on May 15, 2013

Bullshit. They cut the first chorus of "Band on the Run" short, for a start.

Oh, fer fuck's sake. You can hardly fault the people who put this together for making allowances for the two songs having two minimally different structures. It is banal to point here are a finite number of chord progressions that get used endlessly in pop music, even within the same band: A C#m F#m(7) D G A is the verse of "Help" and the middle eight of "Something," but unless you know the songs pretty well, you'd be unlikely to notice.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:58 PM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

Oh, fer fuck's sake. You can hardly fault the people who put this together for making allowances for the two songs having two minimally different structures.

I gladly would if they hadn't blatantly lied about it.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:07 PM on May 15, 2013

Anyway, I can't stand Wings, and I remember being totally baffled by 'Band on the Run' as a kid. Such a dumb song.

You know how they say Paul McCartney (like many songwriters) wrote Beatles songs by melody using nonsense lyrics, then wrote sensible lyrics later? I figure in Wings, he just did the first part. Not that I'm complaining, because Let 'Em In is the textbook example of why a good song doesn't need lyrics that mean anything important at all, as long as they make reasonable sense.
posted by davejay at 8:39 PM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

unless you know the songs pretty well, you'd be unlikely to notice.

...those are two of the most widely known songs in the world.
posted by Miko at 8:58 PM on May 15, 2013

Thank you so much. I am not saying "if you have heard the songs before" -- I am saying you would have to have paid pretty close attention to their structures to notice that the same progression (in the same key) is reused. I doubt a lot of people connect "Something" to "Help" the way they connect "My Sweet Lord" to "He's So Fine."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:11 PM on May 15, 2013

I think maybe you underestimate others. I have a strong memory for lyrics and progressions and yes, you can tell this has been tampered with. You don't even have to check, because if you're singing along you go off the rails pretty fast. It really doesn't require close attention, just oh, a lifetime of hearing those songs.
posted by Miko at 9:13 PM on May 15, 2013

You know how they say Paul McCartney (like many songwriters) wrote Beatles songs by melody using nonsense lyrics, then wrote sensible lyrics later? I figure in Wings, he just did the first part.

Paul Simon confesses to this. In fact, he has pretty much said any meaning found throughout the bulk of Graceland is probably on the listener and of no intention of his own--he was just throwing stuff together.
posted by sourwookie at 11:56 PM on May 15, 2013

Finally a way to make Imagine bearable.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:39 AM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yeah, some songs sound similar chord structures to each other.
posted by Diag at 3:55 AM on May 16, 2013

The implication being that it doesn't take much skill to get this kind of work as well as it does here?

Sheesh, the shittiest possible interpretation. No, I didn't say it was a lack of skill, it was a lack of point other than technical conformance. Philosophically and lyrically both these songs are at once great and yet very different from each other, yet I didn't see mashing them up as highlighting anything contrapuntally in an artistic sense. I like my mash-ups to be more than just technically possible.
posted by dhartung at 4:03 AM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's no "Smells Like Teen Spirit/More Than a Feeling", that's for sure.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:41 AM on May 16, 2013

Philosophically and lyrically Band on the Run is great? Gosh. Those lyrics are, as noted above, back of the envelope stuff for McCartney.
posted by Wolof at 4:45 AM on May 16, 2013

he has pretty much said any meaning found throughout the bulk of Graceland is probably on the listener and of no intention of his own--he was just throwing stuff together

He did say that, but to put it into more context, he was working with the idea of the voice as a rhythmic/melodic instrument rather than as an intellectual vehicle. It resulted from his long jag of listening to South African pop in languages he didn't understand, and growing enchanted with the percussive effects of the lyrics without knowing their meaning. So he was attempting to replicate that in English. That said, he didn't just sing gibberish. He wrote complete sentences that are thematically linked and not truly lacking in organization - the songs have mood, settings, characters, and certainly meaning, even if he doesn't say so. They aren't word salad.
posted by Miko at 6:19 AM on May 16, 2013

Sheesh, the shittiest possible interpretation

Nice. How I love hanging out on the corner of hostile and ignorant.

Because it is such a huge stretch to read you can probably get quite a number of songs to mash up just as well as underestimating the skill required to get mash-ups to work as well as HGP. fwiw, it stills reads that way even after your ugly answer.

The point? The concept of mixing two solo Lennon/McCartney songs from the same era as if they had collaborated on it seems like an obvious and, you know, fun idea to me. Maybe if I insult your intelligence it will be clearer.
posted by victors at 8:32 AM on May 16, 2013

It's OK to say whether you think something has merit or not and why. That doesn't necessarily mean you're being "hostile." It can be simply evaluative.
posted by Miko at 9:36 AM on May 16, 2013

"Sheesh, the shittiest possible interpretation" is just petty, alpha mocking. You don't choose that phrasing to advance an argument.
posted by victors at 11:15 AM on May 16, 2013

Finally a way to make Imagine bearable.

It's a mashup of the two lowest points in their songwriting careers. (Don't give me Frog Chorus.
That was actually a charming little kids' bit of fun, not a dire 70s nonsense-rock idiot shriekout).

There must be a word for such mashups?
posted by colie at 11:43 AM on May 16, 2013

You don't choose that phrasing to advance an argument.

That's what the rest of the comment was for. You might want to recalibrate - I read it as voicing an honest frustration that this perfectly reasonable comment was read in the least charitable possible way, extrapolating a dismissive attitude to all mashups which wasn't even stated. But we're veering toward MetaTalking it, and it's not worth it. Nothing here is worth outrage-meter in the red zone at all.
posted by Miko at 1:15 PM on May 16, 2013

Wolof, fondly remembered, maybe not "great". I do in fact have decent respect for some fine lyrical nonsense, but tend to prefer Dylan and early Springsteen in that vein. Or Lennon's books e.g. A Spaniard in the Works.

victors, let me be absolutely, perfectly clear. I made no commentary on the skill of the masher-uppers. That was all in your mind and I don't see why you had to put it on me. I made a commentary on the choice of songs which is artistic rather than technical. You can have all the technical merit in the world, choose the most difficult challenge, but if there isn't a point to it, artistically -- why bother? This combination failed to reach me, and if you want to explain, in an artistic sense, why it should, you're free to do so. But if these guys are as successful at doing it as you suggest, they're not sitting at home pouring themselves a deep cup of spirits because I didn't like the songs they chose.
posted by dhartung at 10:15 PM on May 16, 2013

We get this far into a thread about solo era Beatles remixed together and nobody mentioned Everyday Chemistry, which is an entire (pretty decent) album of exactly this? Daaang. The story behind Everyday chemistry is kind of fun, too, if you're into that sort of silliness.

I'd also like to mention that finding the song in the original post inspired me to look up other beatles related remixes until I found out about a crazy internet genius who remixed Revolver into Revolved and Sgt Pepper into Crushed Pepper by layering in a number of Beatles songs with vocals or instrumentals from the Cure, Bowie and also Stone Roses and Rolling Stones, Hendrix, Hendrix and also the Doors, Madonna and several others. Even a lot of the failures are pretty interesting, but when he finds places where Morrison and George Harrison are singing almost exactly the same line against each other it's pure brilliance.

Also by CCC: Anna, Go to Him + a shoegaze band
not at all by CCC, but in the same vein: With a little help from Sublime

Decent remixes make me far too excited. I'm going to go binge on Go Home Productions now.
posted by sandswipe at 1:31 AM on May 17, 2013