Comments for Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

Comment on Brief Notes On Last Night’s Beach Boys Reunion Performance by Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:59:16 +0000

Not really – they’re a vocal group, they were never really instrumentalists, and the best instrumentalist of the band, Carl Wilson, the lead guitarist, is dead, as is their drummer. Most of the band’s best music had a *lot* of dense instrumentation on it – Good Vibrations, the song they’re performing here, had six Beach Boys on vocals (multitracked to make eighteen voices total), three of whom (the Wilson brothers) also provided instrumental performances, and on top of that it featured a further twelve session players.

The original had two basses, guitar, five keyboards, drums, percussion, guitar, cello, jew’s harp and harmonica. You can’t duplicate that live with a small band, and when in the early years they *did* try performing as a self-contained unit without additional musicians, it sounded weak and thin, and only the screams of the audience covered up the thinness of the sound.

If the Beatles were all still alive, one wouldn’t expect them to be able to perform Strawberry Fields or I Am The Walrus or A Day In The Life without significant augmentation on stage, and the productions on the albums from 1965 through about 1971 are at least at that level of complexity.

Even on seemingly less-complex tracks, most of the band are needed. Obviously they need a drummer – their drummer is dead – and a bass player (Brian Wilson hasn’t played bass for over forty-five years, having switched to keyboard on stage on those occasions when he has performed, and the bass parts are hard). Several songs have prominent wind parts (horns on Darlin’, flute on Sloop John B, french horn on God Only Knows) so since none of the band are wind players (and they’d need their mouths for singing anyway) Probyn and Paul are necessary. You also need someone to cover the falsetto parts that Brian can no longer sing, so Foskett needs to be there, and you need at least one additional keyboard player, because the songs will often have a prominent keyboard part and some sort of organ pad as well.

So at a minimum, you’d still need at least six of the nine additional musicians, and that would be if you were willing to accept a very stripped-down, inaccurate rendition with important arrangement elements missing.

Fundamentally, this is music that was designed for records, and it was never intended for it to be possible to perform live accurately. It’s a miracle it sounds as close as it does, even *with* the extra musicians, frankly.

Comment on Brief Notes On Last Night’s Beach Boys Reunion Performance by Mike Taylor

Mike Taylor — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:33:45 +0000

Doesn’t it seem a bit absurd for a band of five men to have nine further backing musicians?

Comment on Boltzmann And Boltzwomann by Holly

Holly — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:57:34 +0000

This is so you.

Comment on Boycott The Avengers Opening Weekend by plok

plok — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:35:56 +0000

We do have that as well, in the CBC, but the institutional rot is a much more serious problem. You also have newspapers that do a lot more violence to the language, and that are much more openly propagandistic, than we do...but (as far as I can tell) these are also placed alongside papers where standards of writing and editing and just thinking in general are much, much more advanced than anything we've got. A friend of mine asked me recently if I'd ever want to be a newspaper editor, and my answer was "not anymore; not in North America anyway. Maybe in the UK, where people still give a damn and haven't just checked out." As far as TV current-affairs programming goes, we have a handful of newsmagazines worth their salt (that are constantly under threat for that very reason, natch) but by and large the centre is kinda rotten, and so not doing its job. The BBC definitely beats hell out of it in that sense! So despite the famous shittiness of the British tabloid etc. etc., at least there's news and commentary of a higher standard available! I watched an interview show online with Laurie Penny on it, and in many ways it was just crap infotainment, the moderator was not exactly a sharpest journalistic knife in the drawer, but at least she was a knife, even if she was a butter knife. Whereas with a very few exceptions, we only have spoons to choose from over here.

Comment on Boltzmann And Boltzwomann by plok

plok — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:10:46 +0000

You should change the title to that! The Boltzmann Brains, the “dust” of Permutation City…it’s all very Sisyphean. “The hour of consciousness is when Sisyphus descends the hill after the boulder has rolled down it”, or whatever, “it is necessary to write a manual of happiness, we must presume Sisyphus happy”, etc. etc. I’m toying with the idea lately that the Hadean torments are all bodily ailments writ large: Sisyphus is trapped in eternal asthma: you fight to inhale, then while you exhale you wonder what will become of you.

Can’t crack the code for Tantalus, though. Hunger, thirst, these are too obvious…

Comment on Boycott The Avengers Opening Weekend by Zom

Zom — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:13:54 +0000

It’s not just about caring, it’s about having a publicly funded media organisation subject to stringent impartiality laws at the heart of British journalism. A lot of the British press are fucking beyond awful!

Comment on Sixteen Good Things The Lib Dems Have Achieved by Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #260

Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #260 — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:00:52 +0000

[...] Sixteen Good Things The Lib Dems Have Achieved by Andrew Hickey on Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!. A fantastic list, with a nifty infographic. Go share [...]

Comment on Boltzmann And Boltzwomann by plok

plok — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 03:56:25 +0000

“A recipe for happiness”…that’s straight out of “The Myth Of Sisyphus”. Very apt.

Comment on Boycott The Avengers Opening Weekend by plok

plok — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 01:15:44 +0000

I spoke way too hyperbolically there: the UK's definitely a lot better than Canada and the U.S., as far as access to something you might reasonably call "news" goes, so I have to retract that. Many media people in the UK do still care about the exercise of true journalism, I think. From here, though, the runaway institutional rot makes a very effective screen between the citizen and the world, so it gets a bit depressing. I'm basically down to pure conspiracy-theorizing when it comes to Iran, it's extremely hard to shut out the noise in the news! So maybe I was letting that frustration show in that comment, a bit!

Comment on Boycott The Avengers Opening Weekend by waldo perez

waldo perez — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:10:17 +0000

No.