Here’s Revival Revival’s arrangement of Lionel Richie’s classic “Dancin’ On The Ceiling.”
Ohhh What A Feelin’
[audio:http://ethanhein.com/music/Revival_Revival_Ohhh_What_A_Feelin.mp3]Revival Revival vs Lionel Richie vs Michael Jackson
mp3 download, ipod format download
Vocals, guitar and bass by Babsy. Beats, loops and production by me. The beat is from “Billie Jean.”
We love this song. Here’s the original.
Spoiler alert: don’t read until you’ve watched to the end of season three.
Mad Men is well-made television, but so is plenty of other television. Why is this particular show so compelling to me and so many of my buddies? I think it’s that watching Mad Men is like watching a documentary about our parents and grandparents. In particular, Don Draper is a window into our emotionally inaccessible fathers. For me, the generations don’t line up exactly right – in 1963 my dad was only 21 – but it’s close enough for some intense emotional resonances. I feel like I’m looking through a magic window into events that the old photo albums only hint at.
My dad and Don. There’s so much overlap. Both were authority-resistant guys disguised by suits and corporate jobs. Both underwent name changes and had complex parentage. Both earned a lot more money in New York City as adults than they grew up with in middle America. Both were divorced parents of young kids. Here’s a more detailed rundown of the similarities and differences.
For a long time, “Human Nature” was not my favorite song on Thriller. It took me many years to wise up to how awesome it is. Maybe it’s a gender thing. I played it for Anna last night and she swooned instantly over the delivery, arrangement, melody, the whole thing worked for her. I’m slowly opening up to it too. I was amused to learn that it was written by Steve Porcaro and John Bettis of Toto. I don’t know if they or Quincy Jones thought up the synth intro and outtro, but both are gorgeous.
Kramer is the name my mom’s father’s parents gave at Ellis Island because they thought it they might have an easier time with it assimilation-wise than Garfinkel. In Eastern Europe, if you want a WASP-y sounding name, you usually choose something German rather than British. My mom’s wing of her extended family calls itself the Kramer clan.
For most of you reading, the name Kramer will have a different association. I have a similar build to Michael Richards and some of his birdlike awkwardness. In my early twenties I felt like I wanted to start dressing cool but wasn’t sure how to get started. Kramer is a goofy dude but he always looks sharp. He has some of the same fashion sensibilities as my grandfathers. Papa Kramer was tall like me, not a flamboyant dresser but he liked bright colors and patterns. Grandpa Hein had even more adventurous ideas about colors and patterns. Once I started intentionally modeling my wardrobe on Kramer, my personal look completely came together.
I can’t breakdance. I want to learn. It looks like fun. When I worked for the Parks Department I was involved in their afterschool programs. One of them met in the Alfred E Smith Recreation Center in the housing project of the same name. In the basketball gym, Roc-a-fella (the b-girl, not the record label) and her crew taught classes. Some of the people were beginners, and some were advanced Jedi masters. One guy could spin on his head while nonchalantly taking off his jacket. I watched some of those classes and felt as happy as I’ve ever felt watching other people do anything.
Here I’m going to collect some breakdance media and see if any thoughts emerge. Your suggestions welcome.
Working on Janet Jackson songs made me want to see if she did any tracks with Michael. Here’s what the internet has to say: Michael sings backup vocals on Janet’s early album Dream Street. Janet sings backup on Michael’s “PYT.” She’s in the part towards the end where he says “Pretty young things, repeat after me.”
Janet and Michael have similar musical sensibilities. They like jazz harmony. “Remember The Time” uses C7(9) nine for long stretches. Jazz musicians could go to town on that with diminished scale. Janet uses diminished in the chorus of “What Have You Done For Me Lately.”
Turntablists use record players to play records in ways they weren’t meant to be played. By speeding up, slowing down and reversing the record under the needle, a whole universe of new sounds becomes possible. The record player as musical instrument is still in its early stages of development. DJs already invented the instrumental sound of hip-hop. I wonder what else they have coming.
See also a post about the Dead and electronic music.
Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding like Jerry Garcia. I can’t help it. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning years, there was no musician I cared more about in the world than Jerry. Contrary to popular stereotype, I didn’t care about him because of drugs. I listened to the Grateful Dead for years before ever trying drugs of any kind. I just really liked the music.
My taste in video games mostly runs to the cartoony Japanese stuff: Mario, Zelda, Katamari. But I had access to an Xbox and a copy of Halo for a while, and I couldn’t rest until I finished it. I walked around thinking about it whenever I wasn’t playing. Every aspect of it was familiar, except for the fact of all of the sources being giddily combined together without any concern for logic. It’s like a perfect nerd mixtape.
Janet has been on my mind a lot the past few months, what with Michael, and I was driven to go listen to Control again. It must have been quite a shock for Ms Jackson’s fans when it dropped in 1986. I wasn’t aware of her teenage bubblegum pop stuff as a kid, though I suppose I must have seen her on Diff’rent Strokes. And then, all of a sudden, “Nasty.” It scared the heck out of me in the sixth grade. But the music was irresistible. I didn’t know why I liked it then, but now I can articulate: bebop phrasing over industrial drum machines and synths, that’s the sound of all the music I like as an adult.
Control was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. I always thought that their stuff sounded a lot like Prince, so I wasn’t surprised to read on Wikipedia that they were part of Morris Day And The Time.
The other song we’re working on remixing is “What Have You Done For Me Lately.” The chorus has that ear-grabbing E-flat dimished scale lick in the big synth, but this song’s most lasting effect on musicians was due its bassline, played on a Yamaha TX81Z, which blends overtones into a distinctively harsh sound. The module in the photo just generates electrical signals; you need an external keyboard or sequencer to control it and speakers to hear it.
The Lately bass sound is so popular that now every synth comes with a preset called LatelyBass. I’ll bet you there’s some LatelyBass being played on some dance floor in your town on any given night.
Here’s my favorite track from a much later Janet album, The Velvet Rope, released during the peak of my Grateful Dead obsession so I totally slept on it at the time.
Some notes about the Nasty remix/mashup:
The three singers, in order of entrance, are Candida Haynes, Babsy Singer and Nicole Bishop. I use slightly different sounds on them. Candida’s vocal is doubled, with one copy dry and the other Auto-Tuned to the chromatic scale. There’s quarter-note delay on both copies. The song she’s quoting is “Certainly” by Erykah Badu. Babsy’s sound is the one that’s emerged as our standard Revival Revival patch: three copies of the vocal, one dry, one Auto-tuned to the key of the song and one Auto-tuned to the tonic for extra wide warbles and posthumanness. The tonic track also has Amplitube on it for dirt. (When Babsy first enters, the posthuman track is soloed.) Nicole’s sound is the simplest, the same as Candida’s minus the delay. Everything else on the track is sampled from the Janet Jackson original, with some slicing and dicing in Recycle. Nasty!
