Here are some interesting facts: • A cockroach can live off of the nutrients in the glue on a postage stamp for a month. • A lightning bolt generates temperatures five times hotter than those found on the surface of the sun. • It takes glass one million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be recycled an infinite amount of times. • Repeating children’s nursery rhymes has been sighted as the cure for at least one case of “spasmodic dysphonia.”
It is this last fact that is the subject of today’s charmingly obtuse blog post. In Shakespearean times, the ability to speak in verse was an indication of nobility and mental acuity. In a time when a clever turn of phrase was a way of showing off one’s education and social standing, it’s no wonder that a playwright like Shakespeare was so popular. His words are still quoted today when somebody needs a poetic rejoinder or a stylish flourish to end their term paper (”All that glitters is not gold,” etc.).
Speaking in rhyme also helps children learn reading, writing, and language skills. According to one education specialist, “Early rhymes and songs help children see that language has patterns. Even very young children can identify words with similar endings. As you read or speak rhymes to them they soon begin to anticipate these rhyming words. They also begin to recognize the beat or the rhythm of the poem or song, which is useful in developing musicality.”
So it’s interesting then that the main forum for rhymes these days is hip-hop. This is a genre that was never supposed to be more than a passing fad. Even today it is still scorned by many for its lack of musicality and relevance. Yet you have to wonder, how would a rapper have been received back in the day of The Bard? Can you imagine a top MC stepping through a time machine and onto the stage at The Globe and just ripping it up with a 10 minute freestyle? The crowd would be all like, “Oh Snap! Me thinks he doth come correct!”
I know that all the rules of time travel say that you’re not supposed to mess with anything, lest you affect the outcome of history (see: Martin Lawrence in Black Knight). Still, it would be fun to go back in time and add all kinds of academic authority to rap music. Imagine introducing King James to the RZA! You would probably read about Bobby Digital in your 8th grade history book! Can you picture the teacher saying, “Ok class, today we’ll be listening to the classic rap compostion entitled The Trew Law of Free Monarchies?” That alone would make junior high twice as awesome.
Of course, the argument has been made that a time machine will never be invented, because if it were that would mean that the future in which the machine is invented already exists. And it stands to reason that if a time machine already does exist then somebody would have already used it to go back into the past - which is actually today - so we would have known about it.
Just in case that turns out not to be true or in case there is some law of metaphysics that makes it possible, I’m going to start preparing my list of MCs to be sent back to the royal court. At the top of that list will be LA-via-Chi Town rapper Hi-Fidel. Riding the line between Mos Def and Del Tha Funky Homosapien, Hi-Fidel spits the proverbial fire. Not only that, but he does it with intelligence and swagger, which is a must in today’s hip-hop game. (I don’t know what the standards would be for the 1600s.) Long time partner in crime DJ Crucial provides the beats, giving them enough thump to reach the people in the cheap seats.
Of course, that rhyme is fine, but it would be hard not to leave you with a word from the Bard:
“The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”
First, let us say that this another band that comes to us via our friend Larry at Future Sounds. We were going to do a whole post about his latest comp - which is fuckin’ rad, btw - but we thought that might be bit redundant. So here’s just one of the many awesome bands he is introducing to the world on volume 32.
The Yelling hails from North Hollywood. They sound a little like The White Stripes with a better drummer (and really, who isn’t a better drummer than Meg White?) plus the guy from Cold War Kids on lead vocals. They rock real good and their drummer has an afro.
The peeps over at Inflight At Night reviewed them recently and used the words “polyembryonal gametophyte” in their article. We can’t hope to top that, so instead we’ll tell you this: The Yelling’s MySpace page lists their band website as www.theyelling.com. Apparently, this is not (yet) the case, because right now that URL leads you to one of those squatted dot-coms covered in advertising. Here’s the thing though: one of the ads is for a computer animated service that allows you to punch in a sentence and then have it read by an automated female voice.
You can have a lot of fun with this. For example, type in “Scott is a chode smoker” and then call your friend Scott and leave the message on his voice mail. Or type in the lyrics to “Baby Got Back” and then hit the play button while your co-worker is on the phone with his grandmother. Seriously, you should give this a try. It will lift your spirits and make you want to listen to some loud rock n roll. Speaking of which, have you heard The Yelling?
Every once in a while I experience a strange personal phenomenon that makes me ponder certain unseen forces that may or may not exist in our world. It’s a strange and slightly befuddling experience, and it makes me feel like I’m in the Matrix or something. Before you get the wrong idea, let me just say that I’m not talking about ghosts or Ouija boards or anything like that. I’m talking about vocabulary.
Sometimes when I’m on the train or brushing my teeth, a random vocabulary word will pop into my head. It’s always one that I don’t immediately know the definition of, like “diaphanous” or “welter.” I’ll turn to whoever I’m with at the time and ask them if they know what the word means. Oddly, whoever I happen to ask never knows the definition. And it’s not like I’m turning to the nearest 1st grader for answers either. It’s usually somebody with an advanced degree and a pretty decent score on their SATs.
Anyway, because I can’t ever get the answer by asking, I’m forced to look it up. (FYI, “diaphanous” means characterized by such fineness of texture as to permit seeing through; a “welter” is a confused mass or a jumble.) It’s after I look up the definition of the word that things start to get a little mysterious. Immediately after putting the dictionary down, I will hear or see the word used several times. And let me just preempt all you skeptics by saying that I understand that once I’ve made such a conscious effort to define these words, I am unconsciously paying closer attention to them - like when you buy a blue Honda you suddenly start noticing more blue Hondas on the road. This is not that. I’ll use the case of “diaphanous” to illustrate my point.
The word popped into my head while I was brushing my teeth one morning. My wife couldn’t define it off the top of her head, so I looked it up. Then I went to read a magazine. The word “diaphanous” appeared in the first sentence of the first article I started to read. I told my wife what was going on so she wouldn’t think I was high on drugs when it inevitably happened again and I started going, “See!? There it is again!” When I went into the living room to tell her, she was watching the news. I tuned to see what she was watching and the guy on TV used “diaphanous” in a sentence. Then I left the house to catch the train for work. There were two hippie chicks sitting next to me talking about some dress they were knitting or something. One of them turns to the other and, swear to god, describes the material of the dress as “diaphanous.” What?! What kind of hippie uses the word “diaphanous?” Up until she said that, every other word out of her mouth had been either “mellow” or “vegan chocolate chip cookie.”
Fast forward to last week. All of a sudden I start hearing the expression “soft targets.” I’m sure it has something to do with one of the wars currently being fought somewhere in the world, given that “soft targets” is a military term referring to unarmored/undefended targets needing to be destroyed. While not technically a vocabulary word, the phrase did catch my ear. I didn’t know what it meant, so I turned to the guy sitting next to me in the movie theater and asked him. Ironically, that guy happened to be my brother, who just got out of the Marines. He gave me more-or-less the exact same definition as Wikipedia (see above).
So this is weird because, for once, somebody does have the answer. But get this: it’s not the right answer. In fact, Soft Targets is a rock n roll band from Chicago. Note that I’m specifically using the term “rock n roll” and not “indie rock.” These guys are certainly independent, but their songs are full of big guitars, big pop hooks and, best of all, big endings (big endings are totally rad! -ed). Their sound is more similar to The Smithereens or Urge Overkill than to any of the shaggy blog rock bands pouring out of Brooklyn. And like any good rock band, they’ve been through about a thousand line-up changes since they formed in 2005, which makes their solid, cohesive sound even more impressive.
Thus we come full circle. I sought to define Soft Targets. I did, and then, in keeping with this mysterious trend, I heard them right away. And since I keep listening to them I’m likely to hear it several more times today.
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