“lyrics”

A Spanish version of Mika’s Billy Brown. Apologies beforehand, I just have this hobby of translating songs—if the mood strikes one day I may even hurt your ears with my French version of Gloria Trevi’s Hoy me ire de casa

Update 15/January/2007:

I’m making a list of fascinating things about the English language. As, say, my interviewer at frog design can attest, I overflow with opinionated passion but suck at showcasing. I overtell and undershow. I’m constantly nagging people with my fawning for English, for its beauty, expressiveness, and flexibility, but when pressed to put my love into reasons I’m as vague and mushy as a Christian.

So I do lists. And this particular one is fairly advanced, with so many items and examples that there’s a multi-leveled hierarchy already. One of its headings is titled “informal, unique, almost idiomatic affixes”—y’know, stuff like she- (“the she-Shepherd“), out- (“innovators out-fail the competition”), over- (“don’t overdo it”), -away (“assume away”), -friendly (“gay-friendly”), -up (“trade up”), and so on. I find most of them not only unique to English but uniquely expressive.

One particularly good example is in the phrase in the title. The full context comes from a verse from Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (you can listen to it here, covered by Rufus Wainwright):

The lyrics manage to portray tragic, flawed love in two lines and it all hinges on that magic “outdrew” verb.

Another good thing that stemmed from High Fidelity was it’s introducing me to the first Bob Dylan song I actually liked: Most of the time (mp3, lyrics).

In an attempt to expand my melodic horizons I had previously downloaded his discography, planning to plod through it eventually. The going, though, proved sheer torture. I don’t like his voice nor his instruments, and all his songs seemed to blend into the same inane harmonica.

When I first listened to Most of the Time I thought an old black woman was singing. I liked the pace though, and I started listening. The structure revealed with a couple of lines and I was hooked. In its epistrophe^WP and nostalgia it reminds me a lot of Alberto Cortez’s Distancia (mp3, lyrics).

I started browsing around with more method (listening the intersection between his discography and Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest songs of all time). I “discovered” I want you, Like a Rolling Stone, Lay Lady Lay, Blowing in the wind, Mr. Tambourine man, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and Visions of Johanna. Most I’d heard before, covered, but I’d never really listened to them. A masterful songwriter (he’s been nominated several times for a lit Nobel) with “unusual” voice and renditions, Dylan reminds me a lot of Jose Alfredo Jimenez^WP and Georges Moustaki^WP: they’re all acquired tastes, popularized by covers, appreciated only after attentive overexposure. All of which is fine by me, acquired tastes tend, oddly, to be the most rewarding.

Whoa, just discovered SongMeanings an hour ago. Excellent idea (add criticism to lyrics), clean interface (several ads notwithstanding), massive execution (Artists: 25,245 | Lyrics: 295,933 | Albums: 11,073 | Members: 228,392 | Comments: 723,538). Can’t believe never heard of it before.

Perhaps most intriguing is how clearly it shows the possibilities (instant participation, individuality, the work is the history, evolution is visible, filtering by time is easy, contributions are isolated) and limitations (signal-to-noise ratio, self-healing’s hard or impossible, the work is the history, lack of structure, lack of pruning, parallelism, unnecessary repetition, digressiveness) of criticism based on sequential comments. Reddit’s comment pages are good examples of how simple voting can advance the medium (because though we lack a name for it, “sequential comments/notes” is a medium, just like comics is the medium of sequential images), but, fuck, for the purposes of criticism my bets for medium still go to collaborative-writing, wiki, (my) WikiCriticism. (If only I could fork myself into better, harder-working, single-minded mes…)

I used to dig Greek mythology as a pimpleless child and one of the myths I recall more vividly is the one of Arachne^WP—I still remember my childish confusion and anger at the Greeks’ twisted moral sense.

Annzah’s was the first blog I read, back before there was a word for blogs themselves. A belle with a knack for writing, drinking, geeking, musicking, and partying—all with flair—, she used to blog her life at glitterkitty.net/anna: living and growing up in Sweden, her many girlfriends (wives, she called them), her parents (she’s a single child), her extended family, going through one strange boyfriend, moving to London, reading, cooking, clubbing, living with the second (webdesigner!) boyfriend, working at a bar and a clotheshop, getting hurt—falls, car-accidents (hates cars), whatnot—a surprising amount of times, and starting an English major. Her candid blog got her intermittently into trouble and after many false starts she finally changed to LiveJournal, where she blogs very different stuff, far too far and in between.

She was somewhat obsessed with Suede^WP (whom I know thanks to her) and used many of their songtitles for her posts. Today Suede’s Saturday Night^MP3 played randomly and I missed her suddenly, with a vengeance. “Having a public voice can make you a non-stranger, even to people you have never met.” This is a post to her.

Blogs are many different things to all of us, but sometimes, if the stars align just right, they can be empathic enzymes of sorts. They have been.

Una cancion en contra del “otro” acusa al “otro” de inventar al “otro”!

Somo nosotros los que dividimos y matamos, los que robamos, los que mentimos, los que vendemos nuestros sueños. Somos nosotros los que inventamos la palabra extranjero. No es autoflagelacion, es solo reconocer que somos parte del problema.

I’m in the middle of (among many things) an intriguing music experiment. More to come in a month or two.