I wanted to put up a Weird Al song, but I couldn’t really decide which one. Weird Al is unique amongst many artists in that his work has been consistently amazing; so it wasn’t as if I had to choose from a specific period. I eventually decided upon this song because it was really what got me into Weird Al and it remains one of my favorite of his songs.
I think the brilliance of this song is how it manages to stick to the material of the original song but not use it as a crutch. I’m pretty sure he used the same beat, which I really enjoyed. It seems that in satire the musical elements of the song wouldn’t hold up to its humorous elements. This isn’t true when it comes to this song and Weird Al’s repertoire in general. He is a talented musician who makes his songs satirical stabs at other songs. And if you’re high, you’d enjoy both how great of a song it is and also how preposterous the lyrics are. The thing is though: I think this song’s lyrics are better than the original, Gangsta Paradise.
One of the main aspects of this song that I find hilarious is the fact that the Amish communities in Pennsylvania are compared to the gangs that populate rural areas. At the end of the day, I guess both are gangs with their own rules, customs and modus operandi. This song applies the violent nature of gangs’ self portrayal to the peaceful, boring lifestyle of the Amish communities. Finally, the overall geekiness he employs adds charm to this already fantastically done and hilarious song.
The music video is amazing too.
One thing that I always loved about Pink Floyd is that they knew how to make an album. The Beatles seemed to grasp the concept at the end of their reign, with gems like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. Cohesive pieces of art that acts as a whole unit, even though each individual song can stand on its own merits. These are the types of albums you just smoke a blunt, sit back in silence, listen to and allow yourself to be bathed in a musical masterpiece. That is how I view Wish You Were Here, just one really song that, even though you could break it up into five parts, why would you?
It’s difficult to describe everything that’s amazing about this album, but I’ll try to touch upon a few subjects. First of all, the songs are superb, which I guess is really all there is to make a good album. The mood throughout this song is fairly consistent in some aspects, but is radically different in others as the style from song to song is distinguishably different enough to make it not seem redundant. Each song has its own, rather slow, crescendo that peaks within the context of the song, but also exists in a general crescendo that the album takes as a whole. Finally, they employ a large scope of instruments that give an eery but extremely cool sound to the album as you constantly encounter new sounds. You’re kept on your toes in some ways and mellowed out in others.
As I said before, when you listen to this song just smoke a blunt, sit back in silence and bask in its greatness.
Filed under: Music | Tags: Alcoholism, Asshole, Capitalism, Cash Money, Crap, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Everything That's Wrong With Everything, High, Junkie, Kitsch, Lil Wayne, Money, Oxycontin, Rap, Selling Out, Xanex, Young Money
The city of New Orleans is one of the cultural gems of the United States. If you want to listen to good jazz, you can go there, the town of Louis Armstrong with an airport named after him. It’s also the city of William S. Burroughs, a cultural revolutionary, if you want to minimize his impact. Also, the town where musicians go to rub off their rust or even reach their zenith (see Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Oh Mercy). That is why I was so surprised when I heard that an abomination named Lil Wayne calls this his hometown. A little bitch who hides behind perceived toughness (with two tear-drop tattoos when he never served a prison stint and a self-inflicted gun wound). He marshals himself as the spokesman of drug abuse and drug addiction, acting more like an ad-man for the companies that produce Xanex and Oxycontin than a Timothy Leary counterculterist. In essence: he is a fraud, a stain on our society and malfeasant that is willing to abuse the music of fighting the system in order to make money. He says as much, as his group is called Young Money and it’s a subsidiary of Cash Money. To make an analogy, if Gil Scott-Heron is Winston Smith in 1984, then he is the abomination who comes out of the Ministry of Love and proclaims his adoration of Big Brother.
This would be less of a problem if Lil Wayne had any music talent to speak of. Sadly, he doesn’t. He continually rhymes a word with itself, a practice that has become so endemic that it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. As a friend of mine who likes Lil Wayne said to me, “that’s just what rappers do nowadays.” Which is true… but it’s also bad. But he doesn’t do that in this song, and I guess I’m getting a little off-track, so let me get back to why this particular “song” sucks.
This song basically amounts to a beat (which isn’t THAT bad, and is the reason why this song got a 20 instead of a 19) with the chorus (if you can call it that), consisting solely of the phrase, “I feel like dying” looped over the beat. Then, from time to time, he tells us of different drugs that he does. I assume the connection to the song is that because he feels like dying he does all of these drugs. But then, wouldn’t the conclusion be that he doesn’t feel like dying, since he’s on all of those drugs? Or maybe their effect has worn off? But that then doesn’t really explain the first lines of the song, which are: “I am sittin on the clouds I got smoke coming from my seat I can play basketball with the moon I got the whole world at my feet Playin’ touch football on Marijuana Street Or in a marijuana field. You are so beneath my cleats Get high, so high that I feel like lying.” Doesn’t that mean he’s happy? I really don’t know, you can’t apply logic to any of Lil Wayne’s songs, which is what makes them bad. And then he goes on to say some shit like: “swimming laps around a bottle of Louis the 13th” which fails to make any sort of sense. What does that mean? How are those two things related? What does it mean to swim laps around a bottle of Louis the 13th? They have only an extremely tenuous connection, which is that swimming involves liquid and a bottle of Louis the 13th contains liquid.
Moreover, on a meta-level this song is bad. It promotes the notion that we are dependent on these drugs for happiness. That means that the drugs are harmful. Why doesn’t he go out and do shit instead of just doing drugs all the time? Especially if doing all of those drugs make him miserable. Now, we don’t know if doing drugs makes him miserable, because he has such a dubious grasp on his figurative language. Maybe for him feeling like dying means he’s happy. We’ll never know.
I singled out this song because it is in a pantheon of his more “arthouse” songs. You know, the way “Here Comes the Sun” was on Abbey Road. All of his other songs are about how great he is, which leads into another fallacy he always commits, because in reality, he isn’t that great. To quote Oscar from the Office, “this is kitsch, it’s the opposite of art, it destroys art.” And yes, Lil Wayne is destroying rap music with this shit he puts out.
Filed under: Music | Tags: Johnny B Goode, Pot, Roadrunner, Sex Pistols, Weed
I don’t know how I came across this gem; it was back in my old P2P, pre-BitTorrent downloading days, you remember those times, when it took forever to download one song, and we (or at least I) downloaded singles instead of albums? Anyway, those days are far gone but some relics remain, and this cover that I managed to stumble across is definitely one of the better relics from this era.
Now, there are many ways you can describe Johnny Rotten. Philanthropist, Jingoist, Asshole, Asian, Violent Revolutionary, Bassist, Payer of Alimony or Pat Buchanon; and most probably at least three of those are true. And one of those traits (guess which one?) comes out most saliently in this song. It starts off as a massively punk version of Johnny B Goode (what else would you expect?) and then he just stops mid song and changes it to Roadrunner. Which, I have to say, even if it’s not the best version I’ve ever heard, it’s definitely the most entertaining.
So… why is this great to listen to when you’re high? It’s very simple. It allows you to have a steady base of music to interact with quite mindlessly yet still enjoy, and on the foreground you have Johnny Rotten doing everything he can possibly do to ruin the song, but somehow not succeeding. And in the end, it turns out to be really entertaining to listen to and at the same time, very good.
Sublime is one of those bands with a truly unique sound, until everyone else ripped it off. They are unapologetic nihilists whose lives consist of music, drugs, happiness and, of course, Lou Dog. They are completely fine with killing cops, and definitely favor opposing their authority at every turn. They are those badasses you always wish you were; and fuck it if the lead singer’s name is Bradley. He died of a heroine overdose.
One thing I love about this band is that there is always some shit going on in their songs. They don’t just have lead vocals and a riff in the background. Nah, they do shit in their songs. This is one of the bands that you listen to while smoking a blunt, because it’s just so chill. The chillness comes through the lyrics (What I Got is a popular favorite), and the funky sounds that come out. But their songs aren’t only chill. They also write about the scummy shit that goes down in South Cal (like Date Rape) or about the political nature of music that they revere (KRS-One).
Filed under: Music | Tags: Addicted To Bad Ideas, Peter Lorre, The World Inferno Friendship Society, Weed
The first time I was introduced to this album I was at a debate tournament and this guy bought that album for a dollar in some bin at some record store located in the village. He then lent it to me so I could copy it to my computer (along with a Black Sabbath and a Black Flag album), and so I did and listened to it right away. It was then that I fell in love with the album and was consistently listening to it for a month or so. Since then I’ve gone through a couple of phases when I just put it on and vibed. It’s an amazing album…
here’s why. It’s a concept album dedicated to Peter Lorre (a famous Austrian actor that you might remember from M (a movie I’ll write a recommendation for later)). In fact (and I’m taking most of this from Wikipedia), most of the lyrics from the songs come from Peter Lorre quotes. In a New York Times interview, Jack Terricloth, the leader of this ensemble, said “’I find Peter Lorre a strangely charismatic, extremely creepy person, which I think most punk rockers can identify with… It’s the lure of the other. He’s the underdog, the outsider.’” And this album really plays to those sympathies.
The best way to describe this album is a punk cabaret epic ballad about Peter Lorre. It’s extremely weird, extremely fun and extremely different from anything you’ve really heard before. Which is really refreshing. Sometimes if you listen to a band like Vampire Weekend, you’ll think, “wait, this song sounds a lot like Barnacle Goose or Tokyo Police Club,” or if you’re listening to Tribe you might think, “Hmm, Souls of Mischief sounds good right now.” That never happens with this band (although I’ll admit, I’m not a savant when it comes to the punk cabaret genre, so they might just be mainstream shit, who knows?).
I feel like I’m being redundant, but this album really has an amazing sound, and even though each song can exist on its own, it really is an album in the finest sense of the word. It comes together in the same way that Dark Side of the Moon or Abbey Road do. And each song makes you want to rock, but also has those really unique and fun classical/cabaret aspects to them. Listen to this album, the whole thing. I initially gave this album a 68, but after writing this review and listening to it again, I’m giving it a 71.
Filed under: Music | Tags: Garden State Soundtrack, Lebanese Blonde, Thievery Corporation, Weed
My first reaction after hearing this song (while high) was to ask my friend who put it on to play it again. He was a bit aghast at the idea, especially because the next song on the album (the Garden State soundtrack) was a Simon and Garfunkel song; and, well, he’s a big Simon and Garfunkel fan. Anyway, this song basically has all the cool different things going on that jazz songs have, except it has a different sound, which arises from the different instruments used and the fact that there is someone singing (which isn’t typical in jazz songs, at least the ones I listen to). The difference in sound comes from the fact that the instruments being played are, well, Middle Eastern instruments (or at the very least they sound Middle Eastern).
I don’t really know what this song is about, but I don’t think it really matters when it comes down to it, especially when you’re high. It just provides with a really cool groovy sound that you can get immersed in. Although I will warn you that you will be a little bit upset when this song finally ends. But it’s okay, you can play it again when it finishes (as long as you aren’t in the same room as a Simon and Garfunkel fan). I could see this song eventually getting old, and when it does I guess you can stop listening to it, but until that time, put it on.
Here is a link for the song if you want to listen to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04bg9IC9N6w
Filed under: Music | Tags: Chameleon, Gettin High, Herbie Hancock, Jazz, Weed
This song comes off of Herbie Hancock’s album, Head Hunters. Herbie is one of those musicians whom I don’t have enough music by, but I try to listen to as much of what I do have and what I can get my hands on. This song starts off the album, and does so in a magnificent way. It just has a really jazzy (bass?) line and a drum come out and play around a little, then the other instruments chime in. It would really be pointless to try to explain every part of the song, so I wont.
But the reason why this song is so great to listen to when you’re high is because it’s just jazzy and funky and fun. It’s also a really well-done song, so it’s not as if you’re listening to something shitty that’s also fun to listen to. I would recommend listening to this song right after you finish smoking; i.e. you should try to be as high as possible when you put this on, if you’re burnt out then you might just get irritated. There really isn’t too much else to say about this song except that I think you should listen to it because it’s amazing.
Filed under: Music | Tags: Can I Get Witcha, Mashup, Notorious B.I.G., The Guess Who, These Eyes, Weed
Somebody showed me this song one day, and I didn’t really like it at first, but that was mainly because the friend who showed it to me usually shows me really crappy songs and I just assumed that this was one of those. Don’t get me wrong though, this song is pretty shitty, but it is also a little fun to listen to. I think what eventually makes this song is the fact that there is a sort of a lead up, and I really like both of the songs that are mashed up. Anyway, just listen to it and decide what you think on your own.
Filed under: Music | Tags: Classical Music, Classical Music When You're High, High, Holst, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Planets
I would like to start this off by saying that the version I heard was conducted by Zubin Mehta, and it was played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
Anyway, I was sitting in my dorm one day (in fact, I think it might have been yesterday) when my friend IM’d me and said something along the lines of, “here, I thought you’d enjoy to listen to this while you’re high.” He proceeded to send the fifth (movement? Song? I have no idea) called “5. Saturn, The Bringer of Old Age.” After hearing it I told him that I needed the whole thing and so he sent it, along with a couple of other classical pieces that I’ll be sure to put up here eventually.
Anyway, this is amazing classical music that will just blow your mind. I have no real idea what is going on, but it’s just beautiful music that tells a story, and when you close your eyes you can sort of see a story developing. I feel really inadequate describing classical music because I’m just breaking the surface of it, but… yeah. It sounds amazing and makes you think of crazy shit when you’re high and just puts you into another place. This is one of those trippy pieces that I would recommend you listen to in the dark of your room, laying on your bed when you’re just blazed.
