And my good friend Frankenstein is now Frankenreagan

[vovat]

On the way to work yesterday, I heard a commercial on the radio for CarSense, a website where you could order a car and they'd deliver it to you. So does that mean you can't look at it before you buy it? Doesn't sound like such a good idea to me. Maybe you're allowed to reject it after they bring it to you, but the commercial didn't address that.

Speaking of advertisements, there was a billboard on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for a store called "The Fish Factory." I remember when I was in college, I decided that "Fresh from the Fish Factory" would be a good album title. I forget exactly why. Hopefully, if it turns out I ever DO use this title, people won't associate it with the store. {g}

Last night, bethje and I watched In Search of Dracula, a documentary from the seventies narrated by Christopher Lee. Some of the information in it was interesting, but it suffered from bad visuals and reenactments. They'd occasionally show inaccurate images, starting with when they were talking about Bram Stoker's research at a museum, and, for some reason, there was a graveyard on the screen. Perhaps the most ridiculous image, however, was when they were talking about how Mary Shelley had a nightmare that partially inspired her to write Frankenstein. In the documentary, the dream involved a really crappy-looking robot. Then, towards the end of the film, they started showing way too much footage of silent movies. I mean, we get the point without their showing five minutes or more of these films. So it wasn't a particularly good documentary. I do think I should read both Dracula and Frankenstein at some point, though.

Along the lines of my thoughts about long albums in my last entry, I've been thinking about song lengths. There sometimes seems to be a certain amount of prejudice against short songs. I think it was on the Frank Black Forum that I saw it suggested that all (or at least almost all) short songs are "filler." Honestly, I think that's a term that would be more accurately applied to songs that are long for no reason. I specify "for no reason" because some songs NEED to be long. Indeed, that's sometimes the whole point. What I don't like is when a song is padded, usually through unnecessary repetition or uninteresting solos. I tend not to enjoy jamming. Instrumental solos are fine. Drawing them out to the point where they get incredibly tedious is not. There are exceptions, but I think the general rule is that a song shouldn't be any longer than it needs to be. If it's said what it's supposed to say, why drag it out? I think that good long songs tend to be ones with multiple parts, and a lot of musical changes. (I'm sure there are technical terms for this, but I don't know what they are.) This could be something epic like, say, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or pretty much anything by Meat Loaf, but it can also be something simpler, as long as it doesn't just repeat itself over and over again.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it here, but I know I've said on other online forums that I tend not to like it when an album starts with something long. I can't totally explain why, but I think a good album should start with, well, not necessarily something short, but something that catches your attention, and lets you know that you're in for a collection of songs. A long beginning can draw attention away from the album as a whole, if that makes sense. I kind of think "S-E-X-X-Y" wasn't a good choice as an opener for They Might Be Giants' Factory Showroom, both because it's the longest song on there, and because it doesn't sound like much else on the album. It sort of seems disconnected from the rest. On the other hand, I think "Blast Off" works well as a beginning track for Frank Black's Dog in the Sand, and that's much longer than "S-E-X-X-Y." So I guess there are always exceptions.

Comments

[majellen.livejournal.com]

After you read Shelley's Frankenstein, you should read the Koontz version. He's stretched it out into a series in modern times...kind of creative, and moderately interesting.

[revme.livejournal.com]

The funny thing -- if I had to choose between which type of song I typically thought was filler, I wouldn't go with short songs, I'd go with long ones. Partially because:
a) They take a good chunk of real estate on a record
b) Long songs are considered more "real" or "serious"
and
c) Not all long songs can really support their length. I mean, really, how many long songs have you heard that would be great if they were 3 minutes, but are skippable at 5 or 6?

(Part of this, too, is because when I was doing the TODCRA records, I'd usually have one long song or two on there, just because, well, one 10 minute song is easier to do than, say, 3 3 minute ones.)

But yeah, both long and short songs have a place in my heart. But you know what I hate? The recentish trend of "intro" tracks on CDs. Where the first track will be, say, a 10 second clip of something, and then the 2nd track will be the first song. You know what's even worse? When they don't actually mention the intro track on the back of the CD. Those people suck.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a short song really doesn't fill that much time, so how could it be filler? Maybe if you're trying to have an album that's an hour long and it's only 58 minutes, but that happens more often with mix CD's than with real, professionally-made albums. But yeah, there are plenty of songs that I think would have benefitted from a bit of trimming.

I don't necessarily mind intro songs. I mean, isn't that essentially what something like the Theme From Flood is? That's considerably longer than 10 seconds, though. But not mentioning it on the tracklist is pretty dumb. That reminds me of how my copy of the Pixies' Surfer Rosa doesn't list that "you fuckin' die" track, and so the track numbers are all messed up. When I tried to load it into my computer, the CD database identified both of the last two tracks as "Brick Is Red." I had to change the last few track names manually.

[revme.livejournal.com]

Heh, I actually like "Theme From Flood" too, but I think of that more of as a real song than an Intro Song (even though I guess that's what it is). Don't know if you really dig Primus, but Antipop opens with one of those I'm talking about. It's just a little clip of "Coattails of a Dead Man" before "Electric Uncle Sam" and seems kinda pointless, and for a while, it seemed that every other record that came out had the same exact kinda thing.

And, yeah, the lack of "You fuckin' die!" is annoying; I can't remember if when I put my copy in if it originally came up right or wrong, but I think wrong, too.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I guess "Theme From Flood" is an intro song, but it's an actual SONG, not just a clip or something.

It seems like most albums start with either the first single or something that's just attention-catching. I prefer the latter, but sometimes a song will fit into both categories.

[obsessical.livejournal.com]

I don't like S-E-X-X-Y as the start of Factory Showroom either. Especially when you've got Till My Head Falls Off just waiting to spring into action. I made a tape of that cd fro my car, and I took out XTC vs Adam Ant and put in S-E-X-X-Y in its place, which i now realize was dumb. but eh, i've got a cd player now so it doesn't mater.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

The talking at the beginning of "S-E-X-X-Y" makes kind of a cool opening for the whole thing, but the song itself just doesn't work that well. I think part of it might be that string bit at the end, which I like, but it makes the transition to the next song even more awkward than it already was. I do think TMHFO would have made a better opening. I've also wondered whether "I Can Hear You" might work as a first track, both because that would make the spoken introduction apply to the whole album, and because fake-out beginnings can be pretty cool. On XTC's Black Sea, there's a scratchy-record opening before the "true" beginning of "Respectable Street," and it works really well. Of course, that opening isn't a whole song.

I don't like "XTC vs. Adam Ant" much at all. I mean, I guess the lyrics are pretty good, and the song were sort of responsible for getting me into XTC, which was cool. The sound of the whole thing is a little too, I don't know, pretentious and tedious for my taste, though. But the band seemed to really like it (since it was re-released on Severe Tire Damage and all), so to teach his own, I suppose.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

There are some psychedelic pop songs that absolutely blow my mind BECAUSE they are short. Well, not just because they are short, but they'll be so interesting and mind-blowing that you look at the timer and can't believe they're under 3 minutes long. Floyd's "See Emily Play" and the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" are the two that occur to me off the top of my head. That's just cool. Anyway....

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I get the impression that the average length of pop songs has gradually increased over time. That's not to say that there weren't some really long songs in the sixties and seventies, though.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

Oooo, Amy's Useless Trivia fact time! In the early days of records, the longest record you could have and still have decent playback quality was 3 minutes long. And so even when recording technology improved, it was still traditional for a single to be three minutes long! The trend started to be forgotten as FM radio became popular, because the FM stations were less commercial and structured and would play album tracks as well as singles (and album tracks could be any length), so now people didn't feel so insistent on writing a three-minute song. Okay, I'm done now.

[slfcllednowhere.livejournal.com]

In my Romantics class this semester I will be studying Frankenstein for a class for THE FOURTH TIME. Argh. I had to read it twice just in my senior year of high school, for my English class and for AcaDec.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

AcaDec?

[slfcllednowhere.livejournal.com]

Academic Decathalon, yo.