Uploaded on 15 Dec 2015
The Monkees perform “Riu Chiu” from Episode 47, “The Monkees’ Christmas Show”.
H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.
December 21, 2018
Repost – The Monkees – “Riu Chiu” HD (Official Music Video)
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QotD: “Baby, it’s cold outside”
Speaking of immorality, MGM’s censors cut the wrong song. A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the US had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:
The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips …
Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as introduced by Esther Williams in Neptune’s Daughter. Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11 to the brief Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt to the Islamic State marching across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Qutb’s view of the West is the merest extension of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — America as the ultimate seducer, the Great Satan.
I’m a reasonable chap, and I’d be willing to meet the Muslim Brotherhood chaps halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like beheadings, stonings, clitoridectomies and whatnot. But you’ll have to pry “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” would be very cold indeed.
Mark Steyn, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, Steyn Online, 2014-12-01.
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December 20, 2018
Remy: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas (EV Tax Credit Edition)
ReasonTV
Published on 19 Dec 2018Government plays Santa Claus with your tax money.
—–
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/reasontv
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—–Have a Tesla on your Christmas wish list? Don’t thank Santa — thank Tom in Ohio.
Parody written and performed by Remy. Video by Austin Bragg. Music tracks, background vocals, and mastering by Ben Karlstrom
LYRICS:
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Everywhere you go
Folks with six-figure salaries
Are shopping in galleries
With a gift card paid by Tom in OhioIt’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Roadsters all around
And while Tom can’t afford a car
He’ll buy part of one for John
Cuz somehow that’s allowedWell a black Model X and a tax credit check
Is the wish of Connor and Ken
And a dark Model 3 that is partially free
Is the hope of Bobby and Ben
While Tommy takes the bus and eats Vienna sausagesIt’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Hear those sleigh bells ring
But what else could you expect
With a tax code so complex?
Ensuring just these things?Yes a car with aplomb that’s, in part, paid by Tom
Is the wish of Victor and Von
A sedan that can drive and takes years to arrive
Is the hope of Lenny and Lon
While Tommy pinches pennies never flushing number oneIt’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Soon the credits end
But the funniest sight to see’s
When typical for DC
They’re renewed again
Everything’s renewed again
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Dropkick Murphys – “The Season’s Upon Us” (Video)
Dropkick Murphys
Published on 3 Dec 2012Music video for “The Season’s Upon Us” from the upcoming album SIGNED and SEALED in BLOOD (out Jan 8).
Directed by Garrett Warren.
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December 19, 2018
Repost – “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute the latest xkcd take on Christmas music:
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December 18, 2018
Repost – Induced aversion to a particular Christmas song
Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why I can — to this day — barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:
Seasonal Melodies
James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:
This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.
It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”
This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.
Back in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameway’s Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.
Note that singular. “Tape”.
Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …
So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (White Christmas and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned Drummer Boy song.
We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.
To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from snatching boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.
Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.
And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
It’s been over 20 years 30 years now, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two three decades.
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December 15, 2018
QotD: New Country music
The Eagles, more than any actual country acts, are responsible for the current denatured state of “Country” music. “In the nineties,” says Considine, “a whole generation of Stetson-topped singers and pickers insisted that the Eagles were as much an inspiration as Hank Williams (if not more).” That jibes with my experience: It takes me ten minutes to figure out whether I’m listening to a country station or some reanimated corpse of KlassiK RocK.
Tim Cavanaugh, “Why Don’t You Come to Your Senses?”, Reason Hit and Run, 2005-03-30.
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December 14, 2018
“Bohemian Rhapsody”
Colby Cosh on the media phenomenon of “Bohemian Rhapsody” … which, in his opinion, isn’t all that good as a song:
… Queen wasn’t really a four-piece; it was a pansexual mutant alien athlete-hero plus three ugly, highly talented Englishmen. And “Bohemian Rhapsody” almost isn’t a song so much as a captured moment. Considered as a song, there isn’t much to it except as a showcase for virtuosity: it’s not among Queen’s 20 best. And ordinary people can’t take a crack at “Bohemian Rhapsody” expecting to do it nicely and competently, in the way they might do “Blackbird” or “Wonderwall.” To be used for performance by the general public, “Bohemian Rhapsody” basically requires a roomful of drunks united in the ironic, non-judgmental spirit of karaoke.
Perhaps there is not much more to be said of “Bohemian Rhapsody” by way of explanation. Queen enjoyed trying on American hats from time to time (ah, if only Elvis had stayed around to receive the gift of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”). But an American group could never have made anything that was weird in this particular way — wallowing in the pathos of a French gangster movie, then diving into a cryptic Dantean nightmare, piling up gestures and word-sounds into a unabashedly hokey panorama. There is no content at all to the thing, per se, except what the band members put into it as performers. In no way, I promise, will knowledge of Scaramouche’s place in the commedia dell’arte or the life of Galileo Galilei unlock some hidden layer of understanding.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is an exquisitely made thing whose intricacy and beauty everybody can appreciate on more or less the same level. That is the special formula for mass popularity in all of the arts. They will tell you the Mona Lisa has a zillion layers of biographical or political meaning, but the painting really is what it is for everybody, and in roughly the same way. Every ordinary grownup can participate in the intimacy and the mystery of it, and it is not really a superior experience, as many great paintings might be, for somebody with a bundle of university degrees. As often happens I am reminded of Andy Warhol’s praise for Coca-Cola. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”
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November 22, 2018
Shipping Up To Boston/Enter Sandman – Bagpipe Cover (Goddesses of Bagpipe x The Snake Charmer)
TheSnakeCharmer
Published on 16 Mar 2018Its St. Patrick’s day and i have something very special for you!! Bringing a mix of Irish tunes and metal for you on the Bagpipes with 3 Female Bagpipers all the way from US, Scotland and India. We love DropKick Murphys Shipping up to Boston and we’re also metal heads so we chose to mix both the awesome songs as a St. Patrick’s day song !!
SHARE , COMMENT, LIKE – Tell us what you think 🙂PATREON – https://www.patreon.com/thesnakecharmer
Buy Now:
iTUNES – https://goo.gl/VD4RqZ
GOOGLE PLAY – https://goo.gl/kvbfs8
SPOTIFY – https://goo.gl/SqoSYPBagpipers :
Archy Jay – (The Snake Charmer)
Jane Espie (Phantom Piper) https://www.youtube.com/user/JaneEspie
Chelsea Joy – (Dame of Drones) https://goo.gl/PBr2aUVideo Credits :
Videographer 1 – Harald Weinkum
Videographer 2 – Neoric Productions
Editor – Karan KatiyarMusic :
Harald Weinkum: bass, guitars, keyboards
George Dum: drums
Mixed and mastered by George Dum at Liquidfish Studios,
Los AngelesFor bookings – archyj03@gmail.com
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November 20, 2018
Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“
Mark Steyn devotes a column to the work of Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, particularly his very well-known ballad on the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior in 1975:
Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971
Detail of a photo from Wikimedia Commons
When it comes to trains and boats and planes, Gordon Lightfoot has hymned all three, but it’s the middle mode of transportation that produced the song he’s proudest of:
The ship was the pride Of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go
It was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned…In November 1975 Lightfoot chanced to be reading Newsweek‘s account of the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter in Canadian waters. He’s a slow and painstaking writer, which is one reason he’s given up songwriting – because it takes too much time away from his grandkids. But that day forty-three years ago the story literally struck a chord, and he found himself scribbling away, very quickly:
The legend lives on From the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said Never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy…“Gitche gumee” is Ojibwe for “great sea” – ie, Lake Superior – as you’ll know if you’ve read your Longfellow, which I’m not sure anyone does these days. Evidently Hiawatha was on the curriculum back east across Lake Huron in young Gordy’s Orillia schoolhouse. The Gitche Gumee reference may be why, when I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“, I assumed its subject had sunk long before the song was written. In fact, it sank on November 10th 1975 – just a few days before Lightfoot wrote the number. When she’d launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, and, when she passed through the Soo Locks between Lakes Superior and Huron, her size always drew a crowd and her captain was always happy to entertain them with a running commentary over the loudspeakers about her history and many voyages. For seventeen years she ferried taconite ore from Minnesota to the iron works of Detroit, Toledo and the other Great Lakes ports …until one November evening of severe winds and 35-feet waves:
The wind in the wires
Made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railin’
And every man knew
As the captain did too
‘Twas the witch of November come stealin’…And about seventeen miles from Whitefish Bay the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, with the loss of all 29 lives. It remains the largest ship ever wrecked on the Great Lakes, launched in 1958 to take advantage of the new St Lawrence Seaway (to be opened by the Queen and President Eisenhower on an inaugural voyage by the Royal Yacht Britannia the following year) and specifically constructed to be only a foot less than the maximum length permitted. Edmund Fitzgerald was the then chairman of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance of Milwaukee, and, as far as I’m aware, the only insurance company executive to be immortalized in a song title. Fifteen thousand people showed up for the ship’s launch at River Rouge, Michigan. It took Mrs Fitzgerald three attempts to shatter the champers against the bow, and then there was a further half-hour’s delay as the shipyard workers tried to loosen the keel blocks. After which the ship flopped into the water, crashed against a pier, and sent up a huge wave to douse the crowd. One spectator promptly had a heart attack and died.
And then came seventeen happy years. Even in the twenty-first century, there is something especially awful and sobering about death at sea: it is in a certain sense a reminder of the fragility of security and modernity. Whenever I’m in, for example, St Pierre et Miquelon, the last remaining territory of French North America, I stop by the monument aux marins disparus, sculpted in 1964 and to which many names have been added in the years since – because a ship put out, and somewhere on the horizon the great primal forces rose up from the depths and snapped it in two like a matchstick.
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November 19, 2018
Corvus Corax featuring Arndis Halla: Hugin & Munin
Corvus Corax
Published on 25 May 2018The new album “SKÁL” – OUT NOW ► http://hyperurl.co/corvuscorax
With “the voice of the icelandic wind” Arndis Halla!
http://arndishalla.isMusic by Corvus Corax
Lyrics: traditionalVideo Credits:
Produced by Swieding Medien
Executive Producer: Corvus Corax & Doro Peters
Second Camera: Sarah Wieding, Serge Foly & Halldór Sveinsson
Color Correction: Sarah Wieding
Filmed, Edited & Directed by Ronald Matthes
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November 10, 2018
Remy: I Love L.A. (Parody)
ReasonTV
Published on 9 Nov 2018Remy updates the iconic Randy Newman anthem for 2018.
Parody written and performed by Remy
Camera and editing by Austin Bragg
Music tracks, background vocals, and mastering by Ben KarlstromReason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
—-
LYRICSNice fall day
In L.A. County
Sitting watching all the leaves change
Temperature dipping into the low 70’s
I dress accordinglyRoll down the window
Put down the top
You know what
Maybe roll it up on second thought
That guy was higher
Than the pension of a state employeeCan’t use straws here
No fois gras here
You can’t park here
Lots of laws hereEvery toilet
Barely flushing
But the sun is shining all the time
Looks like another bill to payI love L.A.
We Love it“Definitely recommend this crystal here.
Oh and this one is our number one seller.”
“What’s that for? Anxiety?”
“No. Typhus.”
“Ah”Public school graduates
Can barely read
And when they try to park
Well this is what they seeSweet regulations
Ain’t nothing like em nowhereBeachside
We love itMountainside
We love itRiverside
We…eh….Fixed streets
We love em
We love L.A.“Unfortunately I’ll have to fail your restaurant.
I found a rat in the kitchen.”
“That wasn’t a rat that was my, uh,
emotional support rodent.”
“Well why didn’t you say so!”“And this right here is a great hemorrhoidal crystal.
Uranus is in retrograde.”I love L.A.
We love it
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October 18, 2018
The Chieftains – O’Sullivan’s March
Beatriz
Published on 9 May 2015The Chieftains – O’Sullivan’s March
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October 16, 2018
Julie d’Aubigny – Duelist, Singer, Radical – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Oct 2018Julie d’Aubigny lived during an unusual time in 17th-century France when political and cultural norms were shifting. She was allowed to exist openly as a bisexual woman pursuing her swordsmanship and singing talents in the court of King Louis XIV.
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
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September 18, 2018
The Sidh – Iridium
TheSidhVEVO
Published on 9 Jul 2015The Sidh – Iridium (Official Video)
Pubblicato il 10 lug 2015 ©&(P) Artis Records.
“Si ringrazia l’Amministrazione Comunale di ZOVENCEDO per aver messo a disposizione il Museo della Pietra nella Priara de Cice”
Google Translate renders the quoted sentence as “We thank the Municipal Administration of ZOVENCEDO for making available the Stone Museum in the Priara de Cice”
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