Beyond The 'C'
July 31, 2024 3:04 PM Subscribe
Louie Zong adjusted Bobby Darin singing Beyond the Sea (original), so that every note is a C. Unjoy! (both links 3 minutes long)
But.....but....why?
Just because you can nail your toe to a stump and jump off backward doesn't mean it's a good idea.
posted by mule98J at 3:30 PM on July 31 [11 favorites]
Just because you can nail your toe to a stump and jump off backward doesn't mean it's a good idea.
posted by mule98J at 3:30 PM on July 31 [11 favorites]
Why is it so tense?!?!?!
posted by mittens at 4:03 PM on July 31 [14 favorites]
posted by mittens at 4:03 PM on July 31 [14 favorites]
Have they done any Jane's Addiction yet? It always felt to me like Perry was singing one note even if he wasn't.
posted by queensissy at 4:11 PM on July 31 [1 favorite]
posted by queensissy at 4:11 PM on July 31 [1 favorite]
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:13 PM on July 31 [7 favorites]
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:13 PM on July 31 [7 favorites]
Why is it so tense?!?!?!
I think it's because your ear keeps anticipating the thing to turn into actual song but is left hanging. Instead, it sounds more like a guy trying to start his car on a cold morning. "C'mon, baby! One more try... rrr rrr rrr... dammit!"
posted by SPrintF at 4:48 PM on July 31 [4 favorites]
I think it's because your ear keeps anticipating the thing to turn into actual song but is left hanging. Instead, it sounds more like a guy trying to start his car on a cold morning. "C'mon, baby! One more try... rrr rrr rrr... dammit!"
posted by SPrintF at 4:48 PM on July 31 [4 favorites]
Yeah, I couldn't even complete the whole thing as it made me so tense and anxious waiting for something to change and it never did.
posted by evilangela at 4:56 PM on July 31 [4 favorites]
posted by evilangela at 4:56 PM on July 31 [4 favorites]
Playing instruments in a big band just got way easier! It's like everybody gets to be timpani!
posted by phooky at 4:57 PM on July 31 [2 favorites]
posted by phooky at 4:57 PM on July 31 [2 favorites]
(I would completely love to see this performed live, the crowd getting increasingly anxious, everybody slipping back to the bar for another drink, but everyone just gets gin, gin on the rocks, and they nurse it for as long as they can but it's never long enough, they're back for another gin, the music makes a slow crescendo, but it's not going anywhere, why is it not going anywhere, none of us are going anywhere and we'll be here forever)
posted by phooky at 5:01 PM on July 31 [16 favorites]
posted by phooky at 5:01 PM on July 31 [16 favorites]
My gosh. "Three notes good, two notes better, one note best."
posted by Transylvania Metro Android Castle at 5:17 PM on July 31 [1 favorite]
posted by Transylvania Metro Android Castle at 5:17 PM on July 31 [1 favorite]
OOOOH fun with autotune: a couple of quickies worth your time
Pulp Fiction the Musical
"Hallelujah" but it's......."
from the estimable There I Ruined it.
posted by lalochezia at 6:30 PM on July 31 [4 favorites]
Pulp Fiction the Musical
"Hallelujah" but it's......."
from the estimable There I Ruined it.
posted by lalochezia at 6:30 PM on July 31 [4 favorites]
that literally made me hurt in my chest. I lasted about 30 seconds.
posted by jburka at 7:42 PM on July 31 [4 favorites]
posted by jburka at 7:42 PM on July 31 [4 favorites]
Hmm.. I thought this was just like, sort of normal. Is there something wrong with me?
posted by latkes at 9:30 PM on July 31 [1 favorite]
posted by latkes at 9:30 PM on July 31 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I sang a lullaby version of Beyond the Sea to my daughter almost every night from birth to 4, and this tears at the fibers of my mind. Jesus.
posted by McBearclaw at 9:45 PM on July 31
posted by McBearclaw at 9:45 PM on July 31
(lalochezia, those are amazing)
posted by McBearclaw at 9:47 PM on July 31
posted by McBearclaw at 9:47 PM on July 31
That's some pedestrian jazz. Real jazz musicians play Giant Steps
posted by milnak at 11:25 PM on July 31
posted by milnak at 11:25 PM on July 31
I kinda liked it, but it did make my chest very tight, but it's more than just C surely? I heard him go a little up or down on some words I thought?
posted by Iteki at 2:54 AM on August 1
posted by Iteki at 2:54 AM on August 1
It does allow him to bend his pitch in some places, but the primary note is a C in all cases, it seems to me.
posted by JHarris at 4:07 AM on August 1
posted by JHarris at 4:07 AM on August 1
Gimme a C! A Bouncy C! ... Oh ... No ... Yikes. We're just gonna put that in the panther cabinet.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:35 AM on August 1
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:35 AM on August 1
Maybe... this has a spot on the soundtrack of any future remake of the (now a decade old) It Follows?
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:49 AM on August 1 [1 favorite]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:49 AM on August 1 [1 favorite]
Honest to god, that sounds like a long-lost Talking Heads tune. It's actually kinda neat. Well, neater than I has expected.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:31 AM on August 1 [2 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 6:31 AM on August 1 [2 favorites]
DO YOU WANT TO INVOKETHE KRACKEN BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU INVOKE THE KRACKEN
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
posted by tspae at 7:33 AM on August 1 [1 favorite]
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
posted by tspae at 7:33 AM on August 1 [1 favorite]
DO YOU WANT TO INVOKE THE KRACKEN BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU INVOKE THE KRACKEN
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
posted by tspae at 7:34 AM on August 1 [1 favorite]
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
posted by tspae at 7:34 AM on August 1 [1 favorite]
This is tremendous. Love it. Love it a lot.
Why is it so tense?!?!?!
Like SPrintF said, a big part of it is just that it never makes a move. A fundamental part of how we experience music is the sense of change in time, in the melody and the harmony. One thing leads to the next, and *what* those moves are changes the feel of it but the tonal movement is basically a given. It's so baked in to our expectations that when musicians play with denying that movement even temporarily in a piece it jumps out as a kind of highly eventful non-event in its own right.
We are waiting for a change that never comes. We are waiting for a melodic/harmonic beat that never drops. It's an uncanny, uncomfortable absence. The tension is because the parts of our brain involved in anticipating future events is literally tensed up, bracing for the shock and relief of the change that never comes.
But in addition to that, it's also lacking any substantial harmonic information, because we're not just hanging on one chord, we're hanging on one note. Is this song in C major? C minor? Some stranger more difficult chord? None of the above in any clear way; we don't have a natural or flat third degree to tell us major or minor, we don't even have a fifth degree which wouldn't disambiguate anything but would at least make it all feel a little more full harmonically.
We just have that one note, in a few different octaves, across a collection of different timbres from voice and instruments. It's closer to monastic tone singing, a monotone single unified voice, but again without even the relief of melodic movement that would come in even the most restrained of vocal chants.
But, but! As a couple people have referenced, there is movement still, in the bits of imperfection in the flattening process. In Bobby's vocals in particular, we get little grace notes in the onset or the tail of a lyrics, as his easy, crooning vocal slides in the original performance don't get fully ironed out. And there's the occasional dip down into the lower octave from his voice, the most clear movement we get in the entire song. (And that tiny blip up to the higher yet octave during the now-utterly-erased keychange in the middle.)
And also, because everything is so flattened to this one note, there's a bunch of microtonal stuff going on that wouldn't otherwise be noticable. The vibrato in Bobby's vocals, kicking the melody up and down by a few cents -- fractions of a note -- and the slight tonal differences and wavers between the brass instruments.
This is sicko art music. It's so good.
posted by cortex at 10:23 AM on August 1 [14 favorites]
Why is it so tense?!?!?!
Like SPrintF said, a big part of it is just that it never makes a move. A fundamental part of how we experience music is the sense of change in time, in the melody and the harmony. One thing leads to the next, and *what* those moves are changes the feel of it but the tonal movement is basically a given. It's so baked in to our expectations that when musicians play with denying that movement even temporarily in a piece it jumps out as a kind of highly eventful non-event in its own right.
We are waiting for a change that never comes. We are waiting for a melodic/harmonic beat that never drops. It's an uncanny, uncomfortable absence. The tension is because the parts of our brain involved in anticipating future events is literally tensed up, bracing for the shock and relief of the change that never comes.
But in addition to that, it's also lacking any substantial harmonic information, because we're not just hanging on one chord, we're hanging on one note. Is this song in C major? C minor? Some stranger more difficult chord? None of the above in any clear way; we don't have a natural or flat third degree to tell us major or minor, we don't even have a fifth degree which wouldn't disambiguate anything but would at least make it all feel a little more full harmonically.
We just have that one note, in a few different octaves, across a collection of different timbres from voice and instruments. It's closer to monastic tone singing, a monotone single unified voice, but again without even the relief of melodic movement that would come in even the most restrained of vocal chants.
But, but! As a couple people have referenced, there is movement still, in the bits of imperfection in the flattening process. In Bobby's vocals in particular, we get little grace notes in the onset or the tail of a lyrics, as his easy, crooning vocal slides in the original performance don't get fully ironed out. And there's the occasional dip down into the lower octave from his voice, the most clear movement we get in the entire song. (And that tiny blip up to the higher yet octave during the now-utterly-erased keychange in the middle.)
And also, because everything is so flattened to this one note, there's a bunch of microtonal stuff going on that wouldn't otherwise be noticable. The vibrato in Bobby's vocals, kicking the melody up and down by a few cents -- fractions of a note -- and the slight tonal differences and wavers between the brass instruments.
This is sicko art music. It's so good.
posted by cortex at 10:23 AM on August 1 [14 favorites]
I'm pretty sure this is the soundtrack to David Lynch's nightmares. Thank you, JHarris and Louie Zong, for this dark gift.
As a palate cleanser, may I suggest the One Note Samba?
posted by ourobouros at 10:31 AM on August 1
As a palate cleanser, may I suggest the One Note Samba?
posted by ourobouros at 10:31 AM on August 1
This is sicko art music.
Yes... ha ha ha... YES!
posted by JHarris at 12:06 PM on August 1 [1 favorite]
Yes... ha ha ha... YES!
posted by JHarris at 12:06 PM on August 1 [1 favorite]
A number of years ago, my late friend and co-worker named his son after Bobby Darin. I was never a big fan but I do like this song.
posted by DJZouke at 12:36 PM on August 1 [1 favorite]
posted by DJZouke at 12:36 PM on August 1 [1 favorite]
And for a palate cleanser, it's back to the source with Charles Trenet.
posted by BWA at 4:26 PM on August 1 [1 favorite]
posted by BWA at 4:26 PM on August 1 [1 favorite]
See, this take on Let It Be is a great contrast to the Bobby Darin; it's still weird but mostly (especially for the major key version in the first half) just kind of an oddly boring kind of weird rather than deeply unsettling.
Because we aren't getting the chord changes we'd expect from a song usually, and that is a weirdly static feeling, but we still have all kinds of melodic movement. The vocals go up and down, there's sort of a half-collapsed skeleton of the original melody there to feel. Also, we have other bits of harmonic information in here: the B major bit in the first half has a stack of major 3rd and perfect 5th notes that reassure us this is an unambiguous major chord; the B minor bit in the second half likewise has those flatted 3rds to sit us firmly in a minor key. And the vocals crawl around the note of those major and minor scales, giving us more incidental reinforcement of the key with the bits of the melody that escape squashing.
It's also important that the melody does a major thing melodies do in service of the tension-and-release flow of a song: it returns to the root note (the "tonic") of the key at the end of most phrases. If it's in B (major or minor, either way) our ears are trained to expect the melody to wander around and then come home at the end (of a stanza, a verse, a chorus, of the song itself) to a b note.
Which isn't a hard and fast rule, but its so common that anytime someone does something else it's likely to prick your ear up even if you don't think about it. Some genres/aesthetics are conspicuous for shirking that principle, like a blues song ending on a flatted 7th note instead of the tonic, or a jazz song ending on some other note (a 6th, a 9th, etc), and those tingle specifically.
The way the melody is half-way collapsed in this is also very evocative of intentional use in various genres/traditions of limited scales; the most ready reference is pentatonic scales, which show up in heavy rotation in classic blues music or in traditional Irish folk.
posted by cortex at 10:06 AM on August 2 [2 favorites]
Because we aren't getting the chord changes we'd expect from a song usually, and that is a weirdly static feeling, but we still have all kinds of melodic movement. The vocals go up and down, there's sort of a half-collapsed skeleton of the original melody there to feel. Also, we have other bits of harmonic information in here: the B major bit in the first half has a stack of major 3rd and perfect 5th notes that reassure us this is an unambiguous major chord; the B minor bit in the second half likewise has those flatted 3rds to sit us firmly in a minor key. And the vocals crawl around the note of those major and minor scales, giving us more incidental reinforcement of the key with the bits of the melody that escape squashing.
It's also important that the melody does a major thing melodies do in service of the tension-and-release flow of a song: it returns to the root note (the "tonic") of the key at the end of most phrases. If it's in B (major or minor, either way) our ears are trained to expect the melody to wander around and then come home at the end (of a stanza, a verse, a chorus, of the song itself) to a b note.
Which isn't a hard and fast rule, but its so common that anytime someone does something else it's likely to prick your ear up even if you don't think about it. Some genres/aesthetics are conspicuous for shirking that principle, like a blues song ending on a flatted 7th note instead of the tonic, or a jazz song ending on some other note (a 6th, a 9th, etc), and those tingle specifically.
The way the melody is half-way collapsed in this is also very evocative of intentional use in various genres/traditions of limited scales; the most ready reference is pentatonic scales, which show up in heavy rotation in classic blues music or in traditional Irish folk.
posted by cortex at 10:06 AM on August 2 [2 favorites]
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posted by paper chromatographologist at 3:19 PM on July 31 [1 favorite]