Ordinary Sunday Brunch: Culture Links

25 thoughts on “Ordinary Sunday Brunch: Culture Links”

1. Mu2: When I was a grad student the first time, doing fairly heavy math, I had what my roommate called “the math tapes.” 4/4 time, good solid beat, nothing tricky in the way of solos. The way it seemed to work for me was that I could focus enough for that to sort of fade away, leaving nothing but me and the math.

   Mu3: I agree with the theory in part of the article about getting the worrying part of your mind to shut down. I’ve been working on a science fiction novel and/or screen play in my head for decades. Revisiting the old bits or working up the imagery for the next step seems to do the job. Although I’ve sometimes thought that it works because of expectations: if I do this thing mentally, I know I’ll fall asleep.Report

2. I dare people to defend Christmas music. Especially that damned Mariah Carey song.Report

   1. Some of the stuff from before 1940 wasn’t bad.Report

   2. “I dare people to defend amusement parks, especially ones where rides break down and people die.”Report

      1. “I dare people to defend the idea that Christmas holds any joy for anyone anywhere.”Report

   3. @saul-degraw It makes me happy (yes, even the Mariah Carey song) and most of it isn’t hurting anyone.

      How is that not enough?

      (I have no defense for playing Christmas music over and over in retail establishments though. That’s just cruel. To the salespeople.)Report

      1. It’s sugary to the point of inducing diabetes and unearned sentimentality.

         Musically much of it is just not good. Art isn’t something to be subjective and blase about. Art matters far too much for that kind of lax standard. Art is something to fight for and have standards about.Report

         1. My friend “Fighting The Subjective Standard with Saul Degraw” should be your weekly fixture post on art, fashion, music and other such things. Could be huge. I’d read it.Report

         2. Art matters far too much for that kind of lax standard. Art is something to fight for and have standards about.

            You gotta fight for your right to arty.

            {{…sorry…}}Report

            1. That was funny!Report

            2. OutstandingReport

            3. Excellent. (Though I might have gone with “artsy”.)Report

         3. Are you a musician? I am. At least, I trained to be one.

            Musically, much of it is very good. And in terms of actual qualitative descriptors in music (if we’re trying to be objective), “sugary” isn’t a thing. At best it’s a statement that certain emotions are less deserving of musical expression than others. Which is false.

            So… how do we settle this?Report

            1. Agreed… also even if we look at just one aspect of the Narrative – a Child is Born in a barn… the musical interpretations are vary wildly:

               Gentle: Tu Scendi dalle stelle
               Frantic: Un Flambeau Jeannette Isabelle
               Declarative: Personent Hodie… Female voices/early styling and Male voice/English

               Which is also to say that the arrangments, pacing, and stylistic interpretation allow for very different treatments and offer an almost endless catalogue – some good, some bad, some sublime.

               Where I might agree with Saul obliquely is that a lot of Christmas music is arranged in what I’d call Indifferent Parish Dirge Time (what is that, 2/4?)… and while that might be necessary when sung communally, its really a shame when done so professionally. That’s why half the fun/battle is combing through thousands of recordings for the arrangements done by musicians who recognize the difference.

               I even have room for Mariah Carey and Kelly Clarkson love songs and will throw them on a certain type of Holiday Cheer mix… but they aren’t Christmas Songs in any significant way… in the way that we couldn’t possibly say that Die Hard is a Christmas Movie.Report

               1. I would guess that more Christmas music is in 3/4 time than is proportional in some larger set of randomly comparable pieces (so long as waltzes were selected for how often they’re heard these days not for how many there really are), actually, but that’s just my impression.Report

   4. I admit to a fondness for a number of the Victorian-era British carols, especially the non-dirge-ish ones. But hearing each of them once a week or so in December is sufficient. The “all Christmas music all the time” programming makes for a really low standard.Report

   5. OK:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HT4dMXIr-o

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CIXv-xkS48

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2nxeACcW3I

      Three beautiful songs.
      and of course, The Snowman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXEoqb0_mrg

      The defense rests.Report

   6. Defensum.

      I assume you’ve just bought a new goal-post-moving-machine and wanted to play with it…Report

   7. Mariah Carey can sing very well. Strangely enough, some people seem to enjoy such things.Report

3. Mu2: No mention of classical? I listen to Baroque/Classical at work, it helps me stay focused AND helps me block out the dude down the hall who has loud speakerphone calls (I have pointed out to him I can hear them but he doesn’t seem to care) or who listens to NPR news. Has to be wordless, though, or at least in a language I do not speak, or I listen to the words and don’t pay attention to my own work.

   Most of the pieces that come up in rotation are familiar to me but even those that aren’t, I’m familiar enough with the composing “conventions” of the era that there’s nothing unexpected. Unexpected things throw me off.

   As for Christmas music, I tend to prefer the LITERALLY ABOUT CHRISTMAS, as in Birth of Jesus Christ music – a lot of the old choral stuff or the things from partitas and such, I do enjoy. In the right mood I enjoy the Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole versions of some things. But a lot of the modern stuff is over-sweetened with strings and stuff, and recently, over Autotuned.

   Am not a fan of most modern Christmas music, but I like the old stuff. That said, I hit total saturation on “The Nutcracker” a couple days after Thanksgiving (which is when I start listening to Christmas music)

   Most country Christmas music is appallingly bad, as is most pop Christmas music of today. Once in a while you get a more “roots” band that can do a decent version of Silent Night but I would argue there’s been little to no good Christmas music written in the past 50 to 60 years.

   Okay. I will exempt the soundtrack from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” but that draws heavily on traditional music and is also largely wordless and played by a small jazz group. I like that one, and it’s, what, 55 years old?Report

   1. Charlie Brown’s jazz undertones are wonderful. As to work music, it really depends on the type of work I am doing. I really do tend towards mood specific music.Report

   2. I’m right there with you about Christmas hymns versus songs.

      My first thought is, during the 1940’s they wrote some songs that I have sentimental attachment to, with some great recordings around. Big band instrumentation, crooner voices. Maybe some reference to Christmas in them as a holiday rather than a holy day. In the past 20 years or so, there have been a lot of pop stars (country pop included) who have made poor recordings of much fluffier songs. Mariah Carey’s mess obviously being a good example.

      Now, I do question my narrative though. I’m not enough of a musical historian to know the answer to this, but there may have always been secularish Christmas songs that had shelf lives of 80 years or so. We may be seeing the WW2 era songs fading away now, being replaced by the new generation’s fluff. Or maybe the cycle has always happened, but recording technology has stopped the decay-rate process, or prolonged it. I don’t know.Report

      1. I think a big reason why I like Bing Crosby (And also Gene Autry! We had “Here Comes Santa Claus” by him on a record) is that that’s what I heard as a kid, because it’s what my parents – members of the so-called Silent Generation – had listened to in their younger years. For me, they have a certain nostalgic quality. I haven’t heard Autry’s version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” so many times yet as an adult that I have overwritten those childhood memories: I can still remember the big cheap Sears “stereo unit” we had with the record player in the living room of my childhood home, and the excitement of writing letters to Santa, and the endless anticipation (The days to Christmas seemed to go SO SLOWLY when I was a kid; they go so fast now).

         I’m sure that’s as much why I like that music as any of its own merits.

         I will say I kinda like the Sufjan Stevens versions of some of the old Christmas hymns. Yes, there’s that twee element there, and some of the singers he uses are….not that great, by objective standards….but there’s a stripped-down quality to some of the versions he does that I like; one of my big problems with “modern Christmas songs” is similar to my problem with how some singers do national anthems: they make it all about them and what they can do with their voice (or what technology can do) and less about the words and the meaning of “why are we singing this right now?”Report

4. Nothing captures the true meaning of Christmas like Bon Jovi’s “I’m Your Backdoor Santa”.Report

5. Mu2: Classic rock because you’ve heard all of the songs so often you don’t have to pay any attention?Report

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