Sunday, January 8, 2012

Owl City

Hey all.

At this stage, I could apologise profusely for neglecting the blog. I could tell you about all the things I've been doing in the interim that have held my efforts as opposed to blogging about them. I could backlog everything from last year that I was going to post and yet didn't.

But that would make for a sloppy post. So, there will probably be a slight backlog. But until then.

Sorry that I've been away for the last three and a half months.

That's all you're getting, otherwise this is just going to be slow and painful and completely unnecessary.

This was an idea that I realise I had early last year and just didn't post. But we'll get along with it and we can both move on from fourth-wall antics.

Sometime in March last year, I started listening to Owl City a lot more.



Most people understand Owl City as 'The Fireflies guy' and immediately react appropriately.





Autotune

Bad Lyrics

Four Chords

Autotune

Autotune

And then a bit more. And they're right. As far as quality music, or music that requires a musician, Owl City will not get you very far. Adam Young, the one-man-band, has successfully created multiple albums of music with odd lyrical construction, overused synthetic sounds and so much autotune that the appropriate phrasing would be 'do you want some singing with that autotune?'



And yet I started listening around about March last year.

Why?

Owl City might not have much going for it in terms of music requiring musical ability. There's not much to say for an artist who classifies his work as 'DreamPop'.

But it was kind of like an antidepressant.

Providing details would be considering oversharing, which is not the goal here. But when almost every other piece of music I owned had memories of stuff I needed to not think about ingrained into it, a source of music that was completely brainless in composition was pretty ideal.

I would get to smile. To bob along. To laugh mockingly at the meaningless lyrics in 'Dental Care'. And for a while, forget that my mental picture of the world needed reforming because there was someone missing.

Brainless music. Sweet oblivion. And sometimes, lyrics would pop up that I'm certain would sound better if they weren't generated by a computer. Take my favourite, Meteor Shower, for example.



"I can finally see,
that you're right there beside me.
I am not my own,
for I have been made new.
Please don't let me go,
I desperately need you."



Adam Young, you have blended elementary rhyming technique with 1 Corinthians 6.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

New International Version (NIV)
19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

If this is the case, then the argument is that mister Young is not singing to some girl. There are other biblical references that pop up in other songs. But I'm not here to prove that. I just happen to think it is interesting. Maybe worth a bit more than 'pfft'.

What else is there to say?

A while back, a friend of mine wrote an article comparing the quality of music to the quality of food. Things that we both consume. Things that have different levels of quality.

Tom went on to argue that the quality of music degenerates from live to autotune in the same way that food grown at the farm will always trump greasy fast-food or the dodgy kebab store in town.

If we follow this, I would compare Owl City to Macdonalds. Is the food that good for you? Not really. Does grease taste good when faced with emotional instability? You tell me. Is it cheap and easy to find? Certainly.

It's like...the small, greasy indulgence. I don't mind listening to it. And I hope that my friends who agree on it being 'the most punchable band in the universe' (according to Triple J) can at least tolerate me for it.

It's not the worst habit I could have picked up.

I mean, I could have gone down the path of Mary-Sue crossovers, fan fiction and yaoi.

But seriously? Yaoi?

No. Not even once. Ewwww.

1 comment:

  1. At first I was excited that you finally decided to update your journal. I was then kinda let down when you started talking about music. However, you managing to end on a yaoi-gayo note was an amusing twist.

    I wonder what made you think of that.

    ReplyDelete

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