Did anyone else see this singer on “The Voice” and feel really, really betrayed by the judges?
They claim that this is a completely new sound, but if you heard (and were annoyed by) Macy Gray in 1999, Erin Martin’s voice shouldn’t seem the least bit exciting to you. And they, the music professionals, should recognize that. Instead, they pressed their buttons in awe, they stood up in their seats, they said things like, “THAT is cool!” She has foot-high hair, a foot-long skirt, and a headband on her forehead. Not. Impressed.
Now, I actually like “different” voices. I love being able to recognize a vocalist. Jack White, Chris Cornell, Andrew Bird, Thom Yorke, Rufus Wainwright, Neil Young, Beck, David Bowie, and of course Adam Levine—these are voices you know in an instant no matter what they’re singing, and I love them all.
Last season on “The Voice”, Dia Frampton was a huge hit with her whispery vocals, and I thought she should’ve won:
The difference is that Dia’s voice sounds genuine. I get really tired of voices that sound “put on”. Like, I can sound exactly like Macy Gray and Erin Martin if I try. By forcing myself to sing with a baby voice while purposely mispronouncing letters.
It’s the same thing with Duffy, Eddie Vedder (although I think I like Pearl Jam because they got to me at an age when I was still an innocent non-hater), and basically every single person who auditioned for “American Idol” this year after of the success of vocal-weirdos Haley Reinhart and Megan Joy Corkrey.
I know different people have different tastes and that Erin Martin will probably do well on “The Voice”, but I wish the judges would just call a baby-voiced spade a spade.
I’m not the sort of person you’d look at and think, “Now there’s someone who can probably cut a rug.” I’m fairly awkward, certainly clumsy, and not exactly, um, built like someone with a lot of rhythm and grace. (Although I want to cut the judges on “So You Think You Can Dance” when they scoff at a good dancer just because she doesn’t look good in a belly shirt and cameltoe shorts.) But I really love to dance. I don’t need to pound four amaretto sours to feel comfortable doing it, and I don’t care if other people are gawking at me.
So I was overjoyed when my best friend, Tracey, bought me Just Dance 3 for the Wii for Christmas. Having basically no experience with pop music, I was worried that not knowing LMO from LMFAO would make it less fun for me, but the makers of this game somehow managed to find only tracks that would wedge wildly into my brain for days at a time.
My immediate favourite was Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous”, because I’d actually heard it before and also used to love Nelly back when she wasn’t a slutty sell-out (nothing against slutty sell-outs):
My next earworm came from Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite”. I had no idea who Taio Cruz is, but I was so pleased that his song talked about Galileo:
I throw my hands up in the air sometimes
Saying ayo
Galileo
“Now there’s a man who doesn’t care about alienating his uneducated fans,” I thought. And then I learned that he actually says, “Gotta let go.” But it was close enough for me.
My other favourite song is now “Boom” by Reggaeton Storm, which is literally the last genre I would ever expect to get stuck in my head. And since it’s in Spanish, I sing ridiculous nonsensical lyrics to myself all day. Like:
Boom
Bop bop
Can I get a b’rito?
That’s right. I leave letters out of burrito in my head to make it fit.
Kamran’s leaving for California at the end of this week to take the bar exam out there, so he’s been waking up with me in the mornings and studying while I play the game. And since he has a one-room apartment, it’s meant a lot of him sitting around and critiquing/mocking my performances as he lounges on his bed mere steps from me. But he gets the songs stuck in his head just as hard as I do, and I feel like that’s revenge enough.
The funny thing is that the earworms only make me want to play the game more. I play in the mornings before work and then spend all day thinking about how I can’t wait to get home and play again. I can’t motivate myself to go to the gym unless Kamran’s threatening to put me in one of those 1950s-style vibrating belt machines that jiggles your fat off, but this game is so fun I actually look forward to it and want to keep playing long after my knickers are soaked with sweat and I need to go shower for work.
I was concerned it was going to be too easy after playing the Xbox Kinect version, Dance Central, where the creepy Kinect camera watches your full body with its beady robot eyes. I figured I’d just move the one arm with the Wiimote in it and let the rest of my body hang limply if the Wiimote couldn’t sense it and judge me accordingly; I thought about playing the game sitting down. But it turns out that Just Dance is harder than Dance Central. Where Dance Central is repetitious, Just Dance throws an intricate move at you once and then goes right on to something else. Just Dance doesn’t have any differing difficulty levels, but you’ll find yourself making your own as you start dancing first with just the arm holding the Wiimote, then with both arms after you’ve played a song 150 times, then finally with your legs. All while looking like an octopus with epilepsy.
Now I’m dying to try Just Dance 1 and 2 and am envisioning a future version where I get to choose my own songs from a list of a hundred and then receive my personalized game in eight to ten business days. The only thing I’m wishing for is a glove that I can strap the Wiimote into so I don’t have to hold onto it while I’m dancing; I’ve actually thought about buying Wii boxing gloves but wonder if that’s even weirder than holding on to the thing myself.
But hey, if my biggest complaint about the game is that I want to get more into it, they’re doing something right. If this is the thing that gets me fit, it’s going to be sooooo hilarious.
The only sad part about Steve Jobs being dead is that now I’ll never get to tell him personally how awful the iPod earbuds are.
Seriously, is there anyone out there who regularly uses his or her iPod or iPhone and hasn’t bought separate in-ear earbuds for it? And if you haven’t, is it only because you’re cheap and don’t believe that you should have to purchase new ones when you already paid for the sucky ones that come with every Apple purchase?
Kamran bought me some of the in-ear ones a couple of years ago, and the moment I put them in, I was like, “HOW HAVE I SPENT THE LAST THREE YEARS IN MISERY WHEN THESE EXIST?” Because the Apple earbuds are miserable. When my earbuds from Kamran started only half-functioning last week, I pulled the crappy Apple ones out of my old Nano box–I had clearly hung onto them because I anticipated wanting to punish myself for something later in life (maybe this post?)–and was immediately reminded that they almost seem engineered to suck.
Not only are they way too huge for my delicate, feminine ears, but because they don’t actually fill my ear canal, I now have to actually, like, hear children talking about the nonsense they always do to their parents on the bus. I had to listen to a kid complaining about wanting her hair brushed for TEN ENTIRE MINUTES the other day. Why are you not brushing your kid’s hair, mothers? And why are you letting them audibly complain about it during my morning rush hour commute? AND WHY DID YOU THINK THE WORLD NEEDED YOUR SPAWN IN IT IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Anyway.
Apple earbuds are the very worst, and here are ten much better alternatives I found in five minutes of Googling:
It’s funny, growing up. When I was a wee lass of 18 at college in Columbus, freshly released from my dad’s worries about my venturing into strange neighborhoods in the big city, I’d buy show tickets months in advance. I’d skip classes to be one of the first in line. I’d be happy leaning against the stage for hours waiting for my band to appear. I didn’t mind suffering through three or four terrible local openers, and I didn’t mind waiting around in the rain and the stink of a back alley to talk to the band afterward. If I couldn’t find someone who wanted to do these things with me, I’d go alone. I saw my favourite band more than 50 times between 2000 and 2005, but that number doesn’t even begin to elucidate the sheer amount of shows I saw as a whole.
I know that I’m old because none of that interests me anymore. I don’t want to sit in a car for fourteen hours straight just to see one of my bands open for someone else in places like Georgia and South Carolina. I don’t want to stand around and listen to a band for three hours anymore, let alone the three hours before the show starts when everyone’s pushing to get to the front and I can’t drink anything lest I have to pee and the club’s playing some unknown crap over the speaker system that’s not even in the same genre of the band I’m there to see.
So last night was perfect. I went home after work, watched my “Criminal Minds”, and then took the bus down to the Mercury Lounge in the Lower East Side to see one of my long-time favourites, Damien Jurado.
Kamran met me there at 9:15, and we pushed ourselves against the wall the best we could for the 15 minutes until the doors opened. The bar area is basically just a long hallway, so everyone was touching everyone else, and there was nowhere to escape and nothing to do, and all I could think about was how miserable I would’ve been had I been there alone. The show started soon after, and we were right in front, and we hadn’t been waiting around for three hours, and we were happy.
Damien is just sort of an amazing guy. He sings these incredibly sad songs, and he comes off as so thoughtful, but there are these moments where he’ll say something so bashfully joyful that it kind of makes you wonder if his whole songwriter persona is a put-on. Last night, he told us about sitting next to a girl on a plane who was listening to music; at first, it was David Bowie, but then suddenly something even more familiar came on, and he realized it was his own song. She sat there listening to his entire album and had no idea she was sitting beside him. I just love thinking about how that must have felt.
He was wearing his Seattle uniform of flannel shirt, lumberjack jeans, and moccasins. The woman doing his backing vocals, Melodie Knight from Campfire OK, was wearing black leggings, a black tunic, a black shawl, black strappy wedges, and a black bowler hat. I said, “I think she’s dressed the way she thought New Yorkers would be dressed.” Kamran said, “I think that’s how they dress in Seattle.” I said, “That’s how they dressed in New York in the 80s.” Kamran said, “That’s how they dressed in Seattle in the 90s.” So then it made sense.
I know I won’t be able to explain how good Damien is with dynamics, the way he can have an audience straining to hear him one moment and how he can fill an entire room with just an acoustic guitar the next, and how something as simple as a foot tap can change an entire song, so I’ll just link you to some songs instead.
Here’s my favourite recent song of his:
Here’s my favourite song of his of all time:
And here’s the song that made me cry last night, because it’s so clearly written about me:
I would wonder why a man from Seattle has multiple songs about Ohio, but it just seems so obvious why.
The other night, Kamran came home with a package for me that included an iPod Nano and all the fixin’s. I’ve been walking part of the way to his apartment from work every night and have been trying to listen to my Pandora stations on my phone but keep finding myself with a dead battery after one or two songs because I’m too irresponsible to be trusted with charging the thing. So now I get to be one of those people with my iPod snuggled into an armband, pumping my arms as I march down the street in time to whatever mid-90s alt-rock I happen to be craving at the moment.
What really struck me is how tiny the new Nano is. When I first starting dating Kamran, he was using the 1st generation iPod Shuffle, which you’ll recall looks like this:
A big stick with absolutely no screen whatsoever. Fun if you like always being surprised by how much terrible music you have in your collection. Not fun if you like actually being able to choose what you’re listening to.
But the 6th generation Nano? Tiny! A one-point-five-inch square with a touchscreen! And radio! And photos! And a pedometer! Can you believe how far we’ve come?
So far, I have it loaded with every album from 2010 that I downloaded but never listened to. We’re talking bands I totally love–Sufjan Stevens, Tokyo Police Club, Crystal Castles–and didn’t even care enough to check out their new albums because I was too busy wallowing in 2007. This is what it’s like to get old, huh?
I'm Katie, a farmgirl originally from Ohio who moved to NYC in 2005 for no apparent reason. I like vintage-looking things that are actually new, filagree everything, people who don't make me feel awkward, meaning it when I say "no sleep till Brooklyn", and not trying too hard.
