“music”

I’d never heard of Jerome Kern. Much less of The Platters, apparently a pretty popular “doo wop” (!) group from the 60s. But in 1933, it turns out, Jerome Kern wrote a purdy, small song called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, which The Platters in turn recorded and made famous in 1959.

And in 2006, today, serendipity brought me the song, played by Roxy Music (who are oh-so-very-cool), and it made me smile.

Yup, I am aware of it’s glaring cursileria, but it’s late at night and I’m strangely happy, so shut up and read the lyrics:

Yey! A playlist serendipity has brought me back Roy Vedas’s wonderfully weird Fragments of Life (its weirdness is a fact). If I remember correctly it was Pako who first showed it to me, late nineties, and I hadn’t heard it in years (old, how past starts to pile up). Anyway, it’s definitely one of my favorite songs. Here, enjoy.

I must confess that I love Spanglish in a kitschy, campy, and yet honest kind of way.

It all started with Molotov and their ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas? album of my early adolescence. I loved their mongrel insults (”fuck you puto baboso!”) and their Voto Latino song:

More recently, a song by Yolanda Perez (featuring “Don Cheto”), Estoy Enamorada, has brought it all back to me:

Akwid, a recently famous group from Los Angeles, is a slightly different matter. Their music itself, for one thing, is something both truly different —mixing Mexican Pacific brass band with hip-hop— and truly good —the tuba “burping along like a nimble elephant.” But they don’t really speak Spanglish. It’s mostly just Spanish, but a different one from mine. One even more imbued with American influence.

They have a song called Pobre Compa in which the singer tells about a romantic triangle between him, his best friend and a girl. There’s a voice-over at the middle of the song in which the singer addresses the girl. One hears knocking, a door opening, and the following brief dialogue:

You can’t tell by the text, but the girl speaks her 5 words with a distinct accent that I love: crisp Spanish with an English cadence —which, btw, is completely different to gringo Spanish: broken Spanish with no cadence at all; an English tongue trying to mimic, unsuccessfully, Spanish sounds. And there was something else, beyond the accent, that I found interesting and appealing but couldn’t precisely pinpoint. I know now: it’s that “pienso que si”; a perfectly valid Spanish sentence, of course, but it feels somewhat unnatural to my Spanish sensibilities. “Pienso que si” mimics the English “I think so” where I would have more naturally said “creo que si” (“I believe so”).

It’s similar to the phrase “dulce para mi ojo” in their Taquito de Ojo song. That’s a quintessentially English phrase, “eye candy”, translated to Spanish inside a song with a quintessentially Spanish phrase as its title: “taquito de ojo” (“eye taco”). I like that.

Truth is, I love this blending whatever the language involved, I “delight in mélange.” Just to give an example, yesterday, via Diana, I found about a French Canadian group called K’maro and I was thrilled. They have true talent for Franglais, just look at this gem:

Or think about how “weekend” is now a French word. It’s much more natural to French cadence that the clunky “fin de semaine”.

1. Given a sufficiently complete Beatles discography, every song will include at least one song from the Beatles among its best-acoustic-match recommendations.

(Read more on the wonderful Predixis Mixer.)

Oh, the beauty!

I’m on the verge of screaming. The thing I’m going to tell you about is that good.

Even though I’ve got 9,165 songs in my library—my collection exploded some months ago when I started donwloading entire discographies (which is a brave new way of listening to music)—I find myself falling into the same old ruts, much to my chagrin, with only the occasional shuffle surprise showing me something unexpectedly good.

Enter Predixis MusicMagic Mixer, a new function of the just launched Winamp 5.21. There are detailed instructions of how to use it here, but it’s all incredibly simple. Basically, after letting MusicMagic acoustically analyze all your library, you can now select any song and ask MusicMagic to generate a list of best-acoustic-match recommendations. It’ll surprise you. This thing is so sufficiently advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic (there’s a beautiful relevant eemadge on the statistical process behind this). I can’t stop using it, I’m looking at my music library as I’d never been able to and, my god, it’s full of wonderful songs!

Es un deber basico de toda generacion introducir a la generacion siguiente a los logros mas destacados del pasado. Me molesto mucho pues que nadie—ni un primo, ni un tio—me haya dicho lo realmente genial que es Mecano. Habia oido, claro, clasicos que por alguna razon se cuelan en toda polvorienta coleccion de mp3s—Hijo de la Luna o Mujer contra Mujer, por ejemplo—y me gustaban pero hasta ahi. No me toco su periodo de fama y todo podria haber quedado en eso sino es que Martha me avisa un dia que tenia que escuchar la de Stereosexual. Me gusto muchisimo y, emocionado, baje toda su discografia. Que sorpresa oir canciones tan magnificas y originales como Cruz de Navajas, Aire o El Cine—entre lo mejor que he escuchado jamas. Tienen aparte muchisimas otras canciones destacables; bajenlas (su discografia de una vez), escuchenlas y lean sus letras—lo ameritan. Aqui va una muestra: