music Archives - Page 197 of 264 - Ramblin' with Roger

H is for “Happy”

Pharrell is overwhelmed by the experience of watching a simple idea—film yourself being happy—as it spreads around the world.

Pharrell Williams is a successful singer/songwriter/producer who was associated with a lot of hit songs in the past decade, including 2013’s “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk, and “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke.

He wrote and recorded HAPPY for the Despicable Me 2 movie soundtrack, with a video featuring characters from the movie released that summer. The song was disappointing, commercially, in the US.

Then in November 2013, Pharrell decided to make a new video with “appearances by Magic Johnson, Steve Carell, Jimmy Kimmel, Jamie Foxx, Miranda Cosgrove, Janelle Monáe, and many others.” It had “received approximately 5.5 million views as of Christmas Day, 2013,” and over 140 million by now. In case you missed it, LISTEN to the 24-hour version of HAPPY.

For all his previous success, it was the breakthrough of HAPPY that made Pharrell Williams most emotional. “Pharrell’s reaction is the one many of us have had to the remixes of his video: he cries for a long time, overwhelmed not only by his success but by the experience of watching a simple idea—film yourself being happy—as it spreads around the world.”

The song even made news when some Iranian young people were briefly arrested for appearing in a remake of the video.

It was #1 for four weeks on the Billboard charts, starting March 29, 2014.

Here’s Rico and Rebecca’s JibJab version. (Rebecca’s my first niece.) It was used in this Daily Show with Jon Stewart segment.

LISTEN to Jeremy Green’s viola cover of HAPPY. PLUS Weird Al Yankovic’s parody, TACKY.

WATCH this Soul Train mashup:

Post by Carol Rosenthal.

BTW, song titles aren’t copyrighted. LISTEN to HAPPY by the Rolling Stones.

In honor of ABC Wednesday’s Leslie getting married to Lorne recently, LISTEN to HAPPY TOGETHER by the Turtles.

ABC Wednesday, Round 15

August Rambling: Deep dark secrets

I wrote this blog post about my ambivalence about blogging on the Times Union website.

The Hook-Up Culture Is Getting 20-Somethings Nowhere. On the other hand, Casual Love.

How we get through life every day.

Nixon’s still the one. And What We Lost 40 Years Ago When Nixon Resigned. See Harry Shearer recreate Richard Nixon as he preps and delivers his resignation speech. Plus George Will Confirms Nixon’s Vietnam Treason.

New Zealand’s non-partisan Get Out the Vote campaign. I don’t see such things often in the US. Sure, there’s get our SUPPORTERS to vote, but that’s a different animal.

Deep Dark Fears is “a series of comics exploring those intimate, personal fears that mostly stem from your imagination getting darkly carried away.” Read more about it.

Rod Serling’s closing remarks from The Obsolete Man episode of The Twilight Zone. “It remains profoundly prescient and relevant.”

All these in a 48-hour period: How games’ lazy storytelling uses rape and violence against women as wallpaper and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has come forward with several stories of being called “chubby,” “fat,” and “porky” by her male colleagues in Congress and Fark prohibits misogyny in new addition to moderator guidelines and Snappy response to sexist harasser in the tech field.

Modern Office with Christina Hendricks.

FLOWCHART: Should You Catcall Her?

Guns and The Rule of Intended Consequences.

What our nightly views might look like if planets, instead of our moon, orbited Earth.

Cartoon: Pinocchio, Inc.

Remember when I wrote about flooding in Albany this month? Dan explains the systemic reason WHY it happened.

Arthur makes the case against “the case against time zones.” I’m not feeling the abolition of time zones either, at this point.

Nōtan: Dark and Light principles of Design.

The jungle gym as math tool.

The disaster drafts for professional sports.

The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It.

One of my favorite movie quotes, maybe because it’s so meta: “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” (Grand Canyon, 1991)

Seriously, Rebecca Jade, the first niece, is in about four different groups, in a variety of genres. Here’s The Soultones cover band – Promo video. Plus a link to her latest release, Galaxy, with Jaz Williams.

Tosy’s U2, ranked 40-31 and 30-21.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, 2004.

August 22, 1969: The Beatles’ Final Photo Shoot

Coverville 1043: The Elvis Costello Cover Story III, in honor of him turning 60.

4 chairs, 4 women; 4 women, no chairs.

12 billion light-years from the edge. A funny bit!

Don Pardo, R.I.P..

Lauren Bacall: always the life of the party. And cinema icon of Hollywood’s golden age, 1924-2014. A Dustbury recollection.

More Robin Williams: on ‘cowardice’ and compassion. Also, a Dan Meth drawing and Aladdin’s Broadway cast gave a him beautiful tribute. Plus, a meeting of Yarmy’s Army and Ulysses.

Jaquandor remembers little Quinn. Damn middle recording made me cry.

The Wellington Hotel Annex in Albany, N.Y. was… murdered in plain sight in front of hundreds of onlookers. “If I were a building, this is how I’d like to go.” Here’s another view.

SamuraiFrog’s Muppet jamboree: C is for Clodhoppers and D Is for Delbert (who evolved) and E is for Eric the Parrot and F is for a Fraggle and G Is for the Gogolala Jubilee Jugband.

New SCRABBLE words. Word Up has identified some of the new three-letter words.

I SO don’t care: one space or two after the period. Here’s a third choice.

The ultimate word on that “digital natives” crap.

Whatever Happened to the Metric System?

Freedom from fear.

Ever wondered what those books behind the glass doors of the cupboard might be thinking or feeling?

The New Yorker thinks Yankovic is weirdly popular.

Here’s a nice Billy Joel story.

Pop songs as sonnets.

House of Clerks, a parody of House of Cards.

Saturday Night Live Political Secrets Revealed.

This Sergio Aragonés masterpiece is included as a fold-out poster within Inside Mad. His priceless gift to all Mad fans shows over six decades of Mad contributors and ephemera within a mish-mash of Mad office walls. The only thing missing in this beautiful mess is a key. Doug Gilford will be attempting to label everything you see with brief (pop-up) descriptions and links to pertinent pages…

Hello Kitty is not a cat. You may have known that; somehow, I missed it.

You May Have Something Extremely Valuable Hiding In Your Change.

Improved names for everyday things

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

I wrote this blog post about my ambivalence about blogging on the Times Union website. J. Eric Smith, who used to be a TU blogger, responds at length.

SamuraiFrog responds to my response to 16 Habits of Sensitive People. Also, per moi, he does his #1 songs on his birthday: 1987-1996 and 1997-2006, and 2007-2013. I’ll go back to this myself, eventually.

Dustbury on the theme song to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which a passage in Schutte’s Mass resembles more than slightly. He discovers a Singapore McDonalds product.

Jaquandor answers my questions about vices such as swearing and politics/American exceptionalism.

He also writes of buckets and the dumping of the water therein, which Gordon thinks hurts nonprofits. Snopes, BTW, debunks the claim that 73 percent of donations to the ALS Association fund executive salaries and overhead.

Do you know that ABC Wednesday meme I mention with a great amount of regularity? I think this recent introduction I wrote explains it fairly well.

Closing TV themes that are DIFFERENT than the opening theme

The show Tayo The Little Bus has a different opening and closing theme.

My daughter wanted breakfast one morning recently. I thought to give her the tossed salad I had made the night before, which she merely nibbled at. Instead, I went with her request of scrambled eggs; the egg carton was under the salad bowl.

That made me think, naturally, of Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs, the end theme for the TV show Frasier [LISTEN to the extended version] . But what was the opening theme of that show? Seems that it varies a bit; LISTEN to this compilation.

What other shows have distinctive different opening and closing themes? By “distinctive”, I mean a totally different song. This eliminates tunes that are continuations of the opening (The Flintstones, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island), or slower versions (The Jeffersons) or weirder versions (Addams Family).

I’ve been told that some cable shows, such as Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and Girls end with different songs for each episode; not what I’m looking for.

The first show I thought of was All in the Family, which opens with Those Were The Days, sung by “Archie and “Edith”, [LISTEN to an extended version] and ends with the instrumental Remembering You [LISTEN].

The other that came to mind was WKRP in Cincinnati, with a sad, mellow song as the intro [LISTEN to an extended version] and that intentionally incomprehensible rocker at the end [LISTEN].

A colleague reminded me of The Monkees program, which, of course, starts with The Monkees Theme. It ends with some song, I must say I didn’t know – I remember the “I wanna be free” part – but it’s For Pete’s Sake [LISTEN] from the Headquarters album. But Headquarters was their third album. In the first season of the show, did it start and end with the same song, as this clip [LISTEN] suggests? And did the ending get changed for syndication?

Another colleague mentioned Tayo The Little Bus, a program I had never heard of. But yes, here’s the opening theme [LISTEN] and the closer [LISTEN].

I found online a reference to Land of the Lost [LISTEN to opening and closing]. Wasn’t a show I watched.

Nor was I familiar with one found by fellow blogger Chuck Miller:

The original broadcast of the Vietnam drama Tour of Duty (CBS, 1988-91) had a generic drum and flute music at the end, but the opening credits were the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black.” That music was removed from the syndicated and DVD episodes, but there’s still a reference to the opening credits as written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

I took advantage of Ken Levine’s Friday Questions, one of which was about TV themes, to ask the question. Here are some of the responses:
Bosom Buddies (it’s “one show where the theme song (Billy Joel) had to be replaced because of Rights Issues”)
Happy Days’ first season
Gidget (“Ken’s favorite theme”)
The Monkees’ second season
Remington Steele after the first season
The Judy Garland Show
Captain and Tennille (“I’m pretty sure it was ‘Love will Keep Us Together’ at the opening and ‘A Song of Joy’ at the end.”)

What else, people? I’m probably talking about older shows, since, as Chuck correctly notes:

Unfortunately, today we don’t know a lot of the closing theme songs in that the last minutes of episodes are either showing previews for next week’s episode or promoting a different program; the closing credits zip by at lightning speed; about the only time we DO get a closing theme of any sort is if we watch the program via On Demand or in its DVD format.

Music and other miscellany for mid-August

This started off as odd, mostly music, links, that I had saved for some posts that never got written. Then everything I found interesting about music in the last month (except Tosy’s U2 posts, which will be at the end of the month) got added.

The Pink Panther theme.

The Lone Ranger theme.

Playing For Change: Here’s Guantanamera, featuring over 75 Cuban musicians around the world. Also La Bamba.

The first rock and roll record ever recorded.

Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” cover on a mountain dulcimer.

Leningrad Cowboys / Red Army Choir. 1993/2003 mashup of Stairway to Heaven

Michael Nesmith performing Different Drum.

32 miles minus 7 equals 25 miles.

Tedeschi Trucks Band performing “perhaps the most morose song John Sebastian ever wrote”.

Santana’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” featuring Indie.Arie & Yo-Yo Ma

Born To Pump It Up (Bruce Springsteen vs Elvis Costello & The Attractions mashup).

President Obama Singing Iggy Azalea’s ‘Fancy’. Well, sort of.

Non-Beatles songs on Apple Records.

A live version of John Cage’s 4’33”.

Maybe I’m Amazed – Paul McCartney. I first saw this on the Ed Sullivan Show near the end of its run, disappointed not that it was video – the Beatles had done that before on Ed’s show – but that there was no interaction. But I love this song.

Poem: Hellish Mind Music.

Yes, I signed the petition to have Weird Al Yankovic headline the Super Bowl XLIX Halftime Show. Even noted that he was a multigenerational talent who works clean.

The story of Lily the Pink.

What Does a Photograph Sound Like? (You may be able to hear most of the songs on Spotify.)

Sleeplisten with Me to the Los Angeles-based funk band Vulfpeck.

The stupid faux Sonny Rollins article.

Michael Franti & Spearhead : Time To Go Home.

“The True Spirit of American Rock,” by Peter Buck, October 1984 issue of Record.

Short Attention Radio.

According to Pitchfork, people in the US bought 6.1 million vinyl records last year, a resurgence. but still just 2 percent of album sales overall, AND there aren’t enough vinyl presses to meet the current demand.

Four Simple Notes Captured Listeners Across Centuries. Is this the world’s oldest riff? BTW, the article is referring to, according to a musician of my acquaintance, Am-G-F-E7 motif – not specified in the article.

Furor and fuss over Black Jesus, which references Jesus Christ Superstar, Life of Brian and John Lennon.

The Wisconsin Chair Company started the Paramount label. “And they accidentally ended up recording… some of the most incredible performers in American musical history.”

Grooves was a mid-1990s budget subscription that sent out 17-track CDs for $9.99 (cassettes $7.99). It was aggressively targeted at promoting Alternative Rock to the young married adults who had become disillusioned with the music on the rock stations of the time (and there were plenty of them out there).” I have all of these, except #4. They’re great, and the latter volumes have live pieces with a spoken word intro. It has a great version of Brick House by Joan Osborne; I can’t find it online, but here’s a live version featuring Bob Weir.

#1 songs on my birthday, 1964-1973

I’m passing on a great Sly song, and a Beatles anthem, to pick one of the greatest pop performances ever, in my mind.

My friend Dan Van Riper sent me this list of all the #1 songs since August 4, 1958.

I have links only to the middle tune, the song of my birthday. You can go to the website and hear the other contenders. If I’ve heard it before, I won’t play it again. If I’ve never heard of it, I’ll play it once. But I won’t listen to the adjacent tunes. My goal: am I happy with THAT choice to celebrate my birthday? Or (as will be the case in the latter stages of the game), I have no idea?

1/4/64 Bobby Vinton – There! I’ve Said It Again
2/1/64 The Beatles – I Want To Hold Your Hand
3/21/64 The Beatles – She Loves You

Maybe it’s because She Loves You was on a minor label (Swan) that finally became a hit in the US only after the Capitol Records marketing machine took IWTHYH to the top, but I always had the greater affection for it.

2/20/65 Gary Lewis and the Playboys – This Diamond Ring
3/6/65 The Temptations – My Girl
3/13/65 The Beatles – Eight Days A Week

All songs I own. I’ll pick that middle song, written by Smokey Robinson.

2/26/66 Nancy Sinatra – These Boots Are Made For Walkin’
3/5/66 Barry Sadler – The Ballad Of The Green Berets
4/9/66 The Righteous Brothers – (You’re My) Soul And Inspiration

The staff sergeant’s song was #1 for FIVE weeks, two weeks longer than any song that year. It wasn’t my type of record, let’s say, yet I knew all the words. Still, for my week, I’d take either of the other songs. Boots is iconic, though I never actually owned it, so I’ll pick Bill and Bobby.

2/18/67 The Buckinghams – Kind Of A Drag
3/4/67 The Rolling Stones -Ruby Tuesday
3/11/67 The Supremes – Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone

Own all of these, too. A tossup. All decent songs, none my favorite by the artist. Supremes, I suppose.

2/3/68 The Lemon Pipers – Green Tambourine
2/10/68 Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra – Love Is Blue (L’Amour Est Bleu)
3/16/68 Otis Redding (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay

Tough choice! I actually really liked Love Is Blue, the only performance by a French artist ever to top the Billboard Hot 100. “Its five-week run at the top was second-longest of any instrumental of the Hot 100 era next to 1960s Theme From A Summer Place,” which I was also fond of.
Then you have a song with GREEN in the title.
But I’ll opt for what I recall is the first posthumous #1 pop single, as Otis had died in a plane crash.

2/1/69 Tommy James and the Shondells – Crimson And Clover
2/15/69 Sly & the Family Stone – Everyday People
3/15/69 Tommy Roe – Dizzy

Did my sister own the Tommy Roe single? Heard it a lot. I’ll pick Sly, but I really also like how Crimson and Clover changes key near the end.

2/14/70 Sly & the Family Stone – Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
2/28/70 Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water
4/11/70 The Beatles – Let It Be

I’m passing on a great Sly song, and a Beatles anthem, to pick one of the greatest pop performances ever, in my mind.

1/23/71 Dawn – Knock Three Times
2/13/71 The Osmonds – One Bad Apple
3/20/71 Janis Joplin – Me And Bobby McGee

This is an easy pick. Donny trying to sound like Michael Jackson; nope. Tony Orlando; nope. Yet another posthumous #1, a great song written by Kris Kristofferson; yup.

2/12/72 Al Green – Let’s Stay Together
2/19/72 Nilsson – Without You
3/18/72 Neil Young – Heart Of Gold

Another tough choice. I love Neil, and this is perhaps cousin Al’s greatest song. But Without You, I felt viscerally.

2/3/73 Elton John – Crocodile Rock
2/24/73 Roberta Flack – Killing Me Softly With His Song
3/24/73 The O’Jays – Love Train

Mediocre Elton (given his other output from that period), decent Roberta, but anthemic (and geographically-based) O’Jays win out.