Power Pop Dictator

 

If you’ve gone to see a power pop band in recent years, you might have noticed that most fans are pretty old.  If you were ever in a band, went to clubs, spent time in an indie record store, or perused online fora, you might have noticed that some power pop devotees can be surly, limited, and intolerant.  To be fair, that’s probably true of any genre, but you might expect that all those hooks and harmonies would leave power pop fans happier.  Some people grow out of at least some of their intolerances.  Some don’t, and this video has a lot of fun with aging sourpuss power poppers.  Your mileage may vary, but I found the whole thing hilarious.

Something Cringey

I recently re-watched The Beatles Anthology with recent convert, Renfield Jr.  Great series, but I had a hard time making it through this video featuring the hirsute-era Beatles mooning over and frolicking with their significant others.  I’m not sure why anyone thought this would be entertaining, but maybe the point was narcissism rather than entertainment.

This Was Quite A Ride

… experiencing it as it happened, and now watching this.

Some solid tunes amidst the abhorrent soft rock. Boney M was in here two or three times and I swear I’ve never heard of them.

Who Moved Stonehenge?


”Archaeologists believe they may have discovered the true origins of the ancient Stonehenge monument after unearthing evidence some of the materials may have served a previous purpose elsewhere.
Experts have long worked at the site to find out more about why and how the ancient wonder was built – with some of the volcanic bluestones used in the structure being brought 160 miles to the site from their point of origin in Wales.Now researchers have uncovered signs the smaller bluestones originally formed an even older, long-lost monument in the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales.During filming for the BBC documentary Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed, a team led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson uncovered signs the stones had been left in the western Welsh moorlands.
Professor Alice Roberts said the archaeologists “were always up against it”, adding: “they had a terrible time. They’ve been doing this for about 10 years.
“They looked in lots of different places and didn’t find anything. They were almost on the brink of giving up and then they looked at this particular place called Waun Mawn.”
“They decided that they were going to dig anyway and just see if they can find anything, and they found these ghosts of stone holes,” Prof Roberts said. “And they were exactly the same diameter as the outer circle at Stonehenge.”
Archaeologists used 3D scanning techniques, traditional field archaeology, and laboratory analysis to discover when and where the stones for Stonehenge were quarried and where they first stood.
But while the question of where the stones came from may have been answered, why they were transported to England may remain a mystery for now.
Prof Roberts said: “Of course there are questions about why these stones would have been brought from West Wales to Salisbury Plain … but ultimately it’s pre-history and we don’t know.”

—————

Dammit, Nigel.

More here.

How Does It Sound?

“I remember being in a car on Neil’s ranch with him when CDs first came out, and he was lamenting how the sound was so damaged. He was pretty horrified by it, and I was kind of amazed. He really made me aware of the damage the fidelity had taken.
“I don’t have Neil’s ears to really get as bothered as he is by it,” Lofgren says, “but it is an extraordinary difference when you know what you’re doing and you get the sound right.”

This week’s obsession is the fantastic article The Pagan Mechanic Rides Again: Neil Young’s Adventures on the Hi-Res Frontier in Wired.

Stuff I learned, down various internet wormholes, which you all probably know already:

A CD holds about 600-700 MB of data. At the time the format was invented, that was 50X as much as a hard drive, so it seemed incredible. But music takes a lot of memory. The goal was to compress an album (say, 60 minutes of audio) onto that CD. That can be done if you sample at 44.1kHz (roughly twice the max frequency of adult human hearing) and limit the bit depth to 16 bits per sample. That gives a maximum dynamic range of 96dB between the quietest and loudest sounds – thought to be decent enough for the human ear.

A good way to start a fight among audiophiles is to suggest that we don’t need anything better than 44.1kHz/16bit. Many people insist that they can hear a difference; double blind studies do not necessarily bear this out. This blogging nerd set up a great test including the Goldberg Variations, to see if audiophiles could tell the difference between 24 bit and 16 bit. They pretty much couldn’t.

When mp3’s came along, they allowed us to compress musical data by a factor of ten. A 30 megabyte, three minute CD song becomes a 3 megabyte mp3 abomination. It sucks the life out of the music!
Neil Young says so!

His attempt at a hi-res audio player – Pono – is now wreckage in the compression and loudness wars won by lo-res streaming like Spotify. He wrote a book about it: To Feel The Music: A Songwriter’s Mission to Save High-Quality Audio.

But lo! Nowadays since we’ve all got bandwidth coming out our ears, with cloud storage and whatnot, audiophiles are excited about bigger, uncompressed audio files.

– wav: 10 MB per minute
– aiff: 10 MB per minute
– FLAC: 5 MB per minute
– DSD: 40 MB per minute

“DSD [Direct Stream Digital] has become the audiophile standard, higher than the 96-kHZ/24-bit FLAC-based audio of Tidal Hi-Fi, and even higher than the 192-kHZ/24-bit FLAC favored by Neil Young Archives.”

Listen to the inventor of DSD! You won’t understand a single word! Noise shaping and pulse-code modulation! That looks like a damn oscilloscope behind him so you know he doesn’t fuck around:

You can now obtain DSD files of a few of your favorite artists. And Amazon and Apple are getting into the hi – res game. To play hi-res files back, you’ll probably need at least a high quality DAC (digital audio recorder).
The company Qobuz has hi-res Replacements!
Itrax has other power pop like Mozart, Stravinsky, and Glenn Gould.

Mr. Young, in the meantime, has set up the cool steampunk, idiosyncratic, wonderful $1.99-per-month Neil Young Archives where you get what the artist intended. I’ve been enjoying my time there.

I’m Sure We Can All Relate Redux

Somehow never heard Billy Bragg’s original until the other day. Early twenties suck as bad as the teenage years, just for different and more complex reasons.

Sorry-not-sorry for providing lyrics …

I was twenty one years when I wrote this song
I’m twenty two now, but I won’t be for long
People ask me when will you grow up to be a man
But all the girls I loved at school
Are already pushing prams

I loved you then as I love you still
Though I put you on a pedestal,
They put you on the pill
I don’t feel bad about letting you go
I just feel sad about letting you know

I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl
I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl

I loved the words you wrote to me
But that was bloody yesterday
I can’t survive on what you send
Every time you need a friend

I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satellites
It’s wrong to wish on space hardware
I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care

I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl
I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl
Looking for another girl
Looking for another girl
Looking for another girl