Tag: Music

Lively Up Yourself – Bob Marley & The Wailers – Live At The Rainbow Theatre, London / 1977

via Google AI:

“Lively Up Yourself” by Bob Marley & The Wailers is a celebratory reggae anthem urging listeners to shake off negativity, energize their spirits, and embrace joy through dance and music. It encourages a vibrant, active, and positive life, serving as an invitation to “wake up” and dance (“skank”), freeing oneself from stress.

Lively up yourself and don’t be no drag
Lively up yourself, oh, Reggae is another bag
Lively up yourself and don’t say no
Lively up yourself, ’cause I said so

You, what you gon’ do?

You rock so, you rock so
Like you never did before
You dip so, you dip so
Till you can dip through my door
You skank so, you skank so, oh yeah

What you got that I don’t know?
I’m trying to wonder, wonder why you
Wonder, wonder why you act so (lively up yourself)
And don’t be no drag
Lively up yourself, oh, Reggae is another bag
(Lively up yourself)

(Lively up yourself) oh, keep livening up your woman in the evening time
And take it, take it, take it, take it
(Lively up yourself) I wanna be lively myself
Got no socks and no shirt (lively up yourself) I gotta lively up myself
(Lively up yourself)
(Lively up yourself) your woman in the morning time
(Lively up yourself) your woman in the evening too, now
Now! (lively up yourself)
(Lively up yourself)

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natty_Dread#Content

Roses are Free – Ween – Live from Bonnaroo 2002

Take a piece of tinsel and put it on the tree
Cut a slab of melon and pretend that you still love me
Carve out a pumpkin and rely on your destiny
Get in your car and cruise the land of the brave and free

But don’t forget to understand exactly what you put on the tree
Don’t believe the florist when he tells you that the roses are free

Take a wrinkled raisin and do with it what you will
Push it into third if you know you’re gonna climb a hill
Eat plenty of lasagna ’til you know that you’ve had your fill
Resist all the urges that make you wanna go out and kill

But don’t forget to understand exactly what you put on the tree
Don’t believe the florist when he tells you that the roses are free

Throw that pumpkin at the tree
Unless you think that pumpkin holds your destiny
Cast it off into the sea
Bake that pie and eat it with me

Reddit discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ween/comments/sbeyb1/daily_song_discussion_85_roses_are_free/

Studio Version
From the comments:
@timusowski3065
12 years ago
Lots of solid advice in this song! Thanks, Ween!

Phish Cover

Phil Collins – Psychological Thriller Vibe of Songs

In ”One More Night,” Mr. Collins’s recent number-one hit, a ticking snare drum injects a whisper of lurking fear into a song that suggests a sweeter, tenderer reprise of ”Against All Odds.” And in the impassioned ”Don’t Lose My Number,” the singer offers solace to a criminal suspect- turned-fugitive. Like many of Mr. Collins’s songs, ”Don’t Lose My Number” is defiantly vague, sketching the outlines of a melodrama but withholding the full story. The album’s final song,”Take Me Home,” is another interior monologue, in which the protagonist may or may not be a discharged mental patient. ”I’ve been a prisoner all my life,” he sings. ”They can turn off my feeling like they’re turning off my light, but I don’t mind.” The singer wants only to be taken home ”because I don’t remember.”

Mr. Collins’s astringent voice, with its petulant undertones and grim, wound-up edge is as important as the drums in sustaining a mood of dramatic suspense. And by double-tracking and electronically phasing the vocals, Mr. Collins and his producer Hugh Padgham, accentuate the sense in his singing of ominous psychological submergence.

On the surface, ”No Jacket Required,” is an album bursting with soulful hooks and bright peppy tunes. But beneath its shiny exterior, Mr. Collins’s drums and his voice carry on a disjunctive, enigmatic dialogue between heart and mind, obsession and repression. The jacket that the album title assures us is not required may not be a tuxedo but a straitjacket.

PHIL COLLINS: POP MUSIC’S ANSWER TO ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Review of No Jacket Required by Stephen Holden

Hypnagogic Creativity – Keith Richards on Writing Satisfaction When Asleep

GROSS: You have a great story in your book about how you co-wrote – well, how you got “Satisfaction” started. You co-wrote the song with Mick Jagger, but you originated it and you didn’t know you were doing it. Can you…

RICHARDS: I wish all the songs would come this way, you know, where you just dream them and then the next morning there they are presented to you. But “Satisfaction” was that sort of miracle that took place. I had a – I had one of the first little cassette players, you know, Norelco (inaudible) Philips – kind of the same thing, really. But it was a fascinating little machine to me, a cassette player, that you could actually just lay ideas down, you know, wherever you were. I set the machine up, and I put it in a fresh tape. I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape has run to the very end. And I think, well, I didn’t do anything, you know. I said, maybe I hit a button while I was asleep, you know? So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play. And there in some sort of ghostly version is (vocalizing) I can’t get no satisfaction. And so there is a whole verse of it. I won’t bother you with it all. And after that, there’s – I don’t know – 40 minutes of me snoring.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/29/1119640101/fresh-airs-summer-music-interviews-keith-richards

Then came “Satisfaction,” the track that launched us into global fame. I was between girlfriends at the time, in my flat in Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood. Hence maybe the mood of the song. I wrote “Satisfaction” in my sleep. I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I’d put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was “Satisfaction.” It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn’t have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need. I had that cassette for a while and I wish I’d kept it.

Life
Keith Richards

Grunge – History of Term

1: one that is grungy
2: rock music incorporating elements of punk rock and heavy metal
also : the untidy fashions typical of fans of grunge

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grunge

JONATHAN PONEMAN I read the expression grunge many, many times in music journalism before Everett True used it. Everett took the word from the Sub Pop mail-order catalog description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone that Bruce wrote: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”

MARK ARM The word grunge was tossed around a little bit here and there well before I ever used it. Steve Turner picked up this ’70s reissue of a Rock ’n’ Roll Trio album, and the liner notes talk about Paul Burlison’s “grungy guitar sound.” That was written in the ’70s about a ’50s guitar player.

Grunge was an adjective; it was never meant to be a noun. If I was using it, it was never meant to coin a movement, it was just to describe raw rock and roll. Then that term got applied to major-label bands putting out slick-sounding records. It’s an ill fit.

JACK ENDINO None of us is entirely sure about who used the word first. I saw it in a Lester Bangs record review in Rolling Stone in the ’70s. Mark Arm had used the word in the early ’80s.

Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
Mark Yarm

From the introduction:

First, let’s get that word out of the way. Grunge. Yes, this is a book about grunge. The term that bedeviled and, let’s face it, benefited (at least temporarily) many a Seattle rock musician in the early to mid-1990s. I cannot count how many times, when I described to an interviewee what exactly it was I was working on, I’d get back, “I hate that word …” And here they would go one of two ways: spit out “that word” grunge or insist, “I don’t even like to say it,” as if uttering that one syllable would somehow validate a now decades-old coinage. (For a thorough, yet inconclusive, probe into how grunge got its name, see chapter 17.) Others reacted to the term thusly: “rubs me raw,” “a marketing tool,” “it’s all just music,” “fuckin’ concocted bullshit.” And this: “When I see the word grunge, especially on books, I kind of go”—and at this point, the guy I was interviewing made a rather convincing vomiting sound.

Black Sabbath as Protest Music – Vernon Reid Interview

The greatest protest record
Black Sabbath was never seen as a protest band, but War Pigs is one of the greatest anti-war songs of all time. It’s up there with [Bob Dylan’s] Masters Of War. It’s up there with [Jimi Hendrix’s] Machine Gun. It’s a masterpiece, there’s no mistaking what it’s about. They equated the military industrial complex with the occult, and that was very powerful and very new and cleverer than they’re given credit for.

“What guitar meant for everyone, he changed it, and he did it with incredible songs”: Living Colour’s Vernon Reid picks the soundtrack of his life
Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid picks his records, artists and gigs of lasting significance, and reveals what it’s like to be in a stadium filled with people singing War Pigs

Hip-Hop – Origin of Term

By the mid-1970s, neighborhood D.J.s started holding parties in parks and community centers. In July 1977 — the month of a blackout that left New York City dark — the brothers met a D.J. named Joseph Saddler, who called himself Grandmaster Flash.

Flash worked with a bowlegged teenager named Keef Cowboy, who energized the crowds with simple rhymes and exhortations. When a friend enlisted in the military, Cowboy teased him on the microphone: “Hip, hop, hip, hop!”

The new culture would soon have a name.

The Fall of Kidd Creole: Inside a Rap Pioneer’s Tragic Descent
As a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, he helped invent hip-hop. He spent the rest of his life trying to recapture that glory. Then, in seven minutes on a Manhattan street, it all came to an end.

Just a Girl – No Doubt

“Just a Girl” is a song by American band No Doubt from their third studio album, Tragic Kingdom (1995). Released as the record’s lead single in the United States on September 21, 1995, it was written by Gwen Stefani and Tom Dumont, and produced by Matthew Wilder. It has also made an appearance on their 2003 greatest hits album, The Singles 1992–2003. Lyrically, “Just a Girl” is about Stefani’s perspective of life as a woman and her struggles with having strict parents. “Just a Girl” was the first song Stefani wrote without the assistance of her brother Eric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_a_Girl

Grease – Franki Valli

The opening credits theme to the 1978 movie adaptation of the 1971 musical of the same name, and one of the singles from the soundtrack album. Written by Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees, “Grease” is a disco song that sums up the central theme of the story, namely the idea of individuality in the face of those that want others to conform.

Being a disco song for a film/musical with a 1950s setting, some critics felt that this song doesn’t really fit with the rest of the soundtrack, either on the film itself or on the musical it’s based on.

https://genius.com/Frankie-valli-grease-lyrics#about

I saw my problems, and I’ll see the light
We got a lovin’ thing, we gotta feed it right
There ain’t no danger, we can go too far
We start believin’ now that we can be who we are
Grease is the word

They think our love is just a growin’ pain
Why don’t they understand? It’s just a cryin’ shame
Their lips are lyin’, only real is real
We stop the fight right now, we got to be what we feel
Grease is the word

Grease is the word, is the word that you heard
It’s got a groove, it’s got a meaning
Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion
Grease is the way we are feeling

We take the pressure and we throw away
Conventionality belongs to yesterday
There is a chance that we can make it so far
We start believin’ now that we can be who we are
Grease is the word

This is a life of illusion, wrapped up in trouble
Laced with confusion, what’re we doin’ here?

The End of an Era – Late 70’s Vibe Shift

The Sex Pistols finally invaded the territory of the ’70s rock titans and landed on the cover of Rolling Stone in the October 20, 1977, issue. The headline: “Rock Is Sick and Living in London.” It was the beginning of the end of the ’70s.

One fine spring day, a student in a big puffy jacket came into journalism class and announced his hero—Ronald Reagan. A new definition of cool was emerging, and it was a long way from the shaggy hippies I knew at the Door house. Now there was a new kind of teenager, a young Republican who savaged the perceived naïveté of liberalism but also really liked rock.

The Uncool: A Memoir
Cameron Crowe
NOTE: Highly recommended book.

From google AI:
A “vibe shift” refers to a significant change in prevailing cultural moods, aesthetics, and trends, coining the term for a major shift in collective feelings from one style or topic to another. It’s used to describe the evolution of popular culture, from the early 2000s’ “bling” era to the later “hipster/indie” trend, and even more recently to the idea of a shift back towards certain aesthetics like “indie sleaze” and nostalgia for the 2000s. The term was popularized by writer Sean Monahan, and can be used to describe everything from fashion and online culture to political and social attitudes.

Debaser – Pixies

“Debaser” is a song by American alternative rock band Pixies, released in April 1989 as the opening track on their album Doolittle and later as a promotional single following the dissolution of the band…

1929 short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film includes a scene in which a woman’s eye is apparently cut open by a razor, which is referenced in the lyric “slicin’ up eyeballs.” According to frontman and songwriter Black Francis:

I wish Buñuel were still alive. He made this film about nothing in particular. The title itself is a nonsense. With my stupid, pseudo-scholar, naive, enthusiast, avant-garde-ish, amateurish way to watch Un chien andalou (twice), I thought: “Yeah, I will make a song about it.” [He sings:] “Un chien andalou”… It sounds too French, so I will sing “un chien andalusia”, it sounds good, no?

The title “Debaser” references the fact that Un Chien Andalou “debases” contemporary morality and standards of art: “I guess it means: one who debases. A debaser. It was an attempt to introduce a new word into the lexicon, but I don’t think it’s been successful, else I would have heard about it.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debaser