Monday - April 02, 2012
afternoon dance break
Everybody Polka!!
I’m beginning to love hurdy gurdys almost as much as I love bagpipes. And I’m happy to learn that they’ve made their way into modern popular music ... well, if you define “modern popular music” as “celtic death metal folk music sung in an extinct language”. No, I couldn’t make that one up if I wanted to. Celtic death metal. It’s a big world, and there’s a corner in it for everything. Even celtic death metal, unplugged.
Posted by Drew458
on 04/02/2012 at 03:41 PM
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Permalink • Friday - February 24, 2012
Euphonious NASA Punk
Dragging up the Big 80s sound on a wet and chilly February day.
Surprise, it’s in German! Peter Schiller is still cranking away, playing the same song nearly 30 years on. This video is from 2010. Besides, you already know the words in English. It’s in your head, somewhere.
Friggin’ ScrewTube, won’t let any original studio vids play remotely, even though it gives you the embed code. Another part of Google’s growing digital monopoly.
The original English studio version is here.
h/t to sometimes reader Tara, who sends me links to the cutest baby pictures.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/24/2012 at 02:34 PM
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Permalink • Friday - December 23, 2011
The music of Steve Mcdonald
Dedicated to peiper, who might appreciate the music and historical background.
My most recent music discovery: The works of Steve McDonald. Here’s a sample from YouTube:
I have four of his albums:
Highland Farewell
Legend
Sons of Somerled
Stone of Destiny
They are all good.
Posted by Christopher
on 12/23/2011 at 11:37 AM
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Permalink • Tuesday - December 06, 2011
It’s the little things that matter sometimes
One of the things I like best about country music is the relate-ability of the lyrics. Down to earth. You’ve been there too, done that, and then left the t-shirt somewhere by accident.
Here’s a post-breakup song by Kristen Chenoweth. A happy tune about a sad situation. But it’s still a fun little number ...
This video was done on a hand-held by someone would couldn’t hold still, so the camera work SUX, but the vocals come through nicely. Stupid YouTube and Vevo block their studio quality cover of the song, even though the embed code is still active. What up with that? It’s not like they’re making money off of YouTube, are they?
Well he liked the toilet seat up
But I didn’t
He thought I should be a C cup
And I didn’t
What finally tore our love apart
Was a matter of religion
He thought he was God
And I didn’t
Can’t get much more down to earth than that, can you? 
Kristen is one amazingly talented woman. Comedienne, TV and film actress, Broadway star, singer, dancer, calendar girl, Tony and Emmy award winner ... she’s a high energy all-around entertainer in the old school mold with enough personality for 10 women. And she’s got a really big voice. Ok, she sounds a little like a chipmunk, but then so does Dolly Parton and that hasn’t hurt her career one jot either.
Posted by Drew458
on 12/06/2011 at 10:38 AM
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Permalink • Friday - December 02, 2011
Sunlight On The Lino
If this bouncy little tune can’t get you boppin’ and shakin’ your ponytail, then you’re probably dead. Or bald. Very Cool for Cats.
And lo and behold, Squeeze is still in business, still plucking out the tunes 33 years later. Who knew?
Posted by Drew458
on 12/02/2011 at 10:50 AM
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Permalink • Thursday - October 27, 2011
Monster Ballads
Poking around once again on Ricochet.com. This one is from the ‘member feed’, ie, you have to be a member to get there. I’d long ago given up on music. Everything seemed to be vulgar ‘hip hop’, ‘cop killer’, rape the whore/slut/sister. No one could sing, so they ‘rapped’. Couldn’t play an instrument so they did a heavy bass drum beat. Anyone can do that. So I’ve just been listening to the classics: Simon & Garfunkel, Mozart, etc, for the last twenty years.
So I was jazzed when somebody on Ricochet posted this video of Josh Ritter. I’ll be looking for him next time I’m at my favorite music store…
The music industry claims they’re losing money due to internet piracy. I claim they’re losing money because they publish trash like ‘rap’, ‘hip hop’, etc. This guy is good! But I have a problem: my favorite music store went out of business for lack of music. (sigh)
Posted by Christopher
on 10/27/2011 at 09:21 AM
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Permalink • Sunday - July 03, 2011
Soggy Sunday
Stole this from Theo’s
So of course this tune came bubbling up out of my memory, a good old tune that gets me going even better than a third cup of espresso.
Lowell George; what a talent. Died so young. Drugs are bad, m’kay?
Little Feet was another band that IMO couldn’t record a video or cut a decent sounding album to save their lives, but sounded awesome in concert. Days long gone by. Long, long gone by.
Phish captures the live vibe pretty well in their cover which is no surprise given the intense Dead influence on that band. Plus advances in technology of course.
Posted by Drew458
on 07/03/2011 at 08:54 AM
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Permalink • Wednesday - June 01, 2011
A honey of a problem
Bee swarm shuts down corner in New York City’s Little Italy district. Who knew the NYPD had their own beekeeper?
A giant swarm of bees covered a mailbox on a Little Italy street corner Tuesday, closing down the sidewalk for hours and drawing dozens of curious onlookers.
Thousands of bees attached to the side of a mailbox at the corner of Mulberry and Grand Streets around noon Tuesday, forcing police to close off a portion of the sidewalk and keep an eye on things until the bees could be safely removed.
“It’s like a movie scene. It’s pretty cool.” said Mike Costabile, 25, who works nearby and was out getting coffee when he noticed the swarm. “I kind of wish there were more.”
The mailbox, located in front of the Italian-American Museum at 155 Mulberry Street, was hard to make out under the blanket of bees covering almost one entire side. The museum was closed at the time. It did not appear that anyone had been hurt by the swarm.
An NYPD-sanctioned beekeeper arrived about 3:30 p.m., working with another local beekeeper to carefully herd the thousands of bees into separate containers.
“This is one of the largest [swarms] I’ve seen,” said Elie Miodownik, of the New York City Beekeepers Association, who estimated the swarm at about 15,000 bees.
He arrived at the scene wearing full beekeeping gear after getting a call about the incident, and joined the NYPD beekeeper in corralling the insects after locating the queen bee.
Once the queen was identified and removed, the two scooped thousands of bees off the mailbox to be brought to other hives in Queens.
Looks like another sting operation successfully completed by the NYPD.
Posted by Drew458
on 06/01/2011 at 11:56 AM
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Permalink • Wednesday - May 18, 2011
A remake almost as good as the original
Watch it now before it disappears. The Israeli music group Fishman and the Pioneers recast their Yalla Ya Nasrallah tune from a couple of years ago. This time they did it for dear old Osama. The graphics aren’t quite as good as the first one, but it’s still a great tune. It’s a rush job, but timeliness matters more sometimes. The original Yalla Ya Nasrallah video was pulled from YouTube for “violations of terms of service” but can still be found on Google Video.
Stolen from Jewlicious, a decidedly pro-Israel blog, who aren’t quite wetting themselves with laughter over the news coming out about Osama’s porn stash, but they sure are having a good snicker. Goats Gone Wild!
In public, bin Laden is the pious, self-proclaimed vanguard of a violent Islamic uprising. Alone in his compound, he’s beating it like it owes him cash.
PS - that girl on the train at 1:42 looks familiar, doesn’t she?
Posted by Drew458
on 05/18/2011 at 10:33 AM
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Permalink • Tuesday - May 17, 2011
Expand Your Horizons
If you were an Australian guy in his late teens to early 20s, this girl would probably be one of the ladies who helped imprint your heterosexuality. She’s the pretty girl you’ve grown up with. Indiana Evans has been doing commercials and TV shows Down Under since she was a little kid, and now she’s got a slew of pop music videos out there as well, which are a bit unusual in that they all seem to be barely a minute long. And a short film or two. Right now I think she’s the lead in a teener show called H2O: Just Add Water, in which she plays an ordinary teenage girl who is also a part time mermaid with magical powers. And a rock star. Because life isn’t complex enough when you’re 17. I think. Hey, what do I know about Aussie TV? Hannah Montana with a Splash. She turns 21 this summer.
And here she does a pretty decent 54 second rocker on her show. Guess they ran out of lyrics or something.
Posted by Drew458
on 05/17/2011 at 11:59 AM
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Permalink • Monday - February 21, 2011
Czech It Out
I get all kinds of unusual emails here at BMEWS. A few weeks back I got a letter from this punk rock group in the Czech Republic. “We really like your graphic. Can we use it for our new album?” Sure, I replied, but most of the graphics at BMEWS are borrowed from somewhere else, so try and find the original owner and get their permission.
Today they write back again and send links, and point out that I got credit on the back of the CD cover. Awesome! BMEWS goes multinational! So I check out his link. And I find
This graphic started showing up about 3 years ago. But I didn’t draw it. The above punk band, Laxní Přístup ( which means LAX access ), does give credit on their album liner to “Angry Mobs”. So they’re trying. But the artist is actually one Peter Clarke, who also does photography. He has a page over at Deviant Art and drew “Angry Mob” almost 4 years ago to the day, as part of his collection of doodles called “Little People”.
I don’t have a clue what the guys in Laxní Přístup are singing about. They have a home page where you can download their album for free, including the graphics. Those are also up online, with the lyrics. So at least they aren’t making money off of Clarke’s creation ... though I have seen T-shirts for sale with variations of that image on them elsewhere. Their album, Kdo s Koho?, translates as Who was Who?. It’s pure punk, with a lean towards heavy metal. I like track 2 the best, Doba Temna, which translates as Time of Darkness. Several other songs show decent potential ... but I’m not really into post-millennial punk.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/21/2011 at 12:44 PM
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Permalink • Saturday - January 29, 2011
Not What You Expected
via comments at Rachel Lucas, from the post after the one linked to by Rich K
Welcome to the wonderful new world of Mash-Ups, twisting musical reality through an alternate universe to prove that oil and vinegar can mix after all.
Posted by Drew458
on 01/29/2011 at 11:37 AM
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Permalink • Monday - January 24, 2011
Learning New Things Each Day
I ran across this thing while thinking about the song from the previous post, and looking up a few songs that I thought had bits in common. I found this instrument in a Scottish rendition of one of those songs. Now, I have heard the name of this thing a few times in my life. Is it also sometimes used as a synonym? But what I did not know was that this device has been around since the early Middle Ages and is still made today.
It’s a cross between a violin, a guitar, and the bagpipes, driven by a crankshaft, with keys to play chords like an autoharp. And then mated to a half coil of rusty barbed wire. So “mechanical droning nasty violinitar” describes it, but that’s not it’s real name. You have heard this instrument before, and probably not realized it. It’s still popular in the near east, and thus part of the musical themes that we recognize as Greek, Gypsy, and maybe Arabic as well.
When I found out what this was, my first reaction was “But aren’t they bigger?” which was a correct one; sometimes these devices are nearly as big as an upright piano. A bit more searching and listening showed me another odd thing: the 60s song written about a guy who plays one of these things does not contain a single note created by one of them of any size.
Listen: it comes in at about one minute, after the ethnic techno rhythm is established, but near the end it takes over the sound in all it’s rough-edged I-stepped-on-the-cat glory. Truth be known, this instrument can be tuned and played to have a lovely sound. This bit was an experiment in extremism.
Posted by Drew458
on 01/24/2011 at 01:17 PM
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Permalink • roots are glue too
American folk music has it’s strongest roots in the Irish and English tunes that arrived here in the middle of the 19th century. Before today I had never heard this tune, but I can hear parts of several other songs that I do know within it. Sometimes songs like this get called sea chanties, sometimes they’re labeled “celtic” or “traditional”. It’s all the same really. But if it’s a moderately happy or lively tune with sad lyrics, or a sad tune with happy or comical lyrics, then it’s folk music.
On a more personal note, and another dose of glue, the tune dates back to the early to mid 19th century, my favorite era of history. And if you’re really Aching to know, Nanny Ogg knows the words too. It’s not all just hedgehogs with her.
For all I know, my UK readers are having a great laugh at my naivety here. I found loads of versions of this song over at YouTube, spanning 70 or more years, recorded in pubs where the crowd joins in, or in cathedrals for that wonderful ambient sound, to the point where I’m beginning to feel the whole bunch of you know the words to dozens of these things and are are liable to burst out in song at your local after a few pints. Believe me, spontaneous group song simply does not erupt in bars in America. Not unless it’s Irish night at some old guys bar in Boston. Almost none of our sports teams have songs either. And the schools no longer teach the old songs to our children; all that has been lost. So I’m not the only Yank who’s in the dark on this one.
Posted by Drew458
on 01/24/2011 at 12:26 PM
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Clear Thinking and Straight Talk
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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
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