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How do you solve a problem like Major/Minor?

6 May 2014, 12:27 pm

Now we’re getting into some deep cuts off e’rebody. Long Island Prime Cuts. The B-sides and the skippers. But how do you skip a song like Maria’s?

The eighth cut off the new album is “Major Minor Minor Major”—a shape-shifting song that announces the chord degrees of the E Major Scale, and features solfege from Sound of Music done in Yankovician parody. The song cycles through the chord degrees using numbers and English names. Shao Kahn, the boss announcer from Mortal Kombat II, makes an appearance, as does the “Continue Sound” from Sonic the Hedgehog. Y’know, just your typical song.

The inspiration for “Major Minor Minor Major” came from our late high school music teacher who used the same mnemonic in band class, though non-melodically, and at high tempi so that it sounded (as it does at the end of the song) like “maj’a min’a min’a maj’a.”

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Black Out!

5 May 2014, 10:42 am

Side-B of e’rebody starts with the punk-wop industrial song “Black Out!”—a song constructed from American choruses and the rhythms of the railroad, describing a post-collapse world where “rolling blackouts” are “rolling home” and the reactionary power-down militia has no recourse but to “get an acoustic.” A rolling blackout is an intentional blackout, a partial shutdown of the electric grid to prevent a total blackout, also known as a Black Out!

Like Jazz Music, “Black Out!” is inspired by the rail. The segues between different sections of the song are literal musical interpretations of a locomotive departing and arriving; the popular 1-2 punch of the train chord punctuates this movement (see below).

 

 

 

How to Train: For realistic railroad rhythms, rev the wheels up with multiple drags over the tracks. When the crescendos crisscross, drag onto the noteheads and let the cursor settle momentarily, then drag it off onto the staves or notationless Byss for a short rest. Finally, let the cursor settle on the noteheads till the doppler shifts.

The train chord is very influential on the American soundscape. The Car Horn is a lot like the Train horn; they both have a Major horny sound. Driver’s unconsciously reproduce the Train Operator’s cadence when they honk once for an 1/8th note, and then again for a quarter beat or more. Click on the score below to listen.

 

 

“Black Out!” begins and ends with a bouncy framing device (that sounds like the opening bar to “Sesame Street”) with a punk anthem smashed in between. The structure of the song shares some similarities with “Happiness is a Warm Gun” by the Beatles (which inspired Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”)—when a you have two separate songs that are kinda related, it’s best to just smash them together, and the critics will call it “progressively bold” and “smashingly original.” The main body section of “Black Out!” also features an Hendrix chord.

 

Not gonna do it. Would it be prudent?

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The Sigil of Google

1 May 2014, 1:27 pm

The Google Play logo looks suspiciously like the Sigil of Lucifer when turned on its side. That’s because it is the Sigil of Lucifer—the Sigil of Google, that colorful megacorporation with a household name like baby’s babble, logo like baby’s blocks, and the ironic corporate motto “Don’t be evil.”

Evil? I’m happy you said so. Yes, let’s do be evil.

In an Occult Entertainment Complex that is openly Luciferean, the Universal Barcode contains the Mark of the Beast 666, and Google Play is a rotated Satan’s Seal. Mere coincidences of course, like the all-seeing eye that watches us from the almighty dollar to the Time Warner pyramid to Jay Z’s devout Luciferean hands.

It takes blood magic to make it in this biz. Just ask Faul McCartney.

Listen to Los Doggies on Google Play

Unlike your favorite bands, Los Doggies does not worship Satan or Lucifer or Baphomet or the State or anything!

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Pari Passu

30 April 2014, 5:58 pm

“Pari Passu” is the song that other songs off of e’rebody make fun of. They say he’s too poppy. He has a lame Latin name, like that kid Romulus that everyone makes fun of at school, but not like at an inner city school where that name would actually be cool.

“Pari Passu” is the 3-minute song that is satirized earlier on the album in “Black Unstemmed Noteheads” (at the 3:00 mark), but there’s no shame in a short simple fluffy song self-edited for radio and mass consumption composed to taste as dictated from above by “the kings and popes”—as Frank Zappa would say.

Like most other songs, it’s all about love and boy-girl relations, or rather squid courtship (gif related). Using the Second Person narration, the lyrics seems to speak directly to the listener, as if you, and you alone, are the object of the melody’s affection, like those porn parody book series Finish Your Own Adventure by Danny Steel.

Or is it? There’s a psychosexual twist lurking in each verse. Much like “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell, a lickety-quick turn of phrase evades the profane chorus in favor of a profound refrain.

And so the “diaphragm” mentioned in the 1st verse, isn’t like a Planned Parenthood kind of diaphragm, but rather a “soggy, mucous membrane” used for breath, and suddenly, what was supposed to be a simple love song becomes a complicated and awkward sex-magick ritual.

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Wesminster Quarters

29 April 2014, 12:02 pm

The clock tower bell song that peals from the belfry 12 times a day is called “Westminster Quarters” and was composed by William Crotch in 1793. It was first heard on Big Ben—the great bell in London—but now every clock tower wants to be like Big Ben, because he the Best Ben.

In the old days, the townsfolk struck real bells fashioned from real bell metal to chime the quarters of the hour, but nowadays all the bells in the clock towers have been replaced by digital clariion delivery systems. The Chimes that sound at the center of town, from the schools and churches, are nothing more than an extremely loud ringtone.

“Wesminster Quarters” is one of the most influential pieces of music in the modern soundscape and responsible for the ‘Majorification of America’. The first 2 notes of the 3rd measure produces a Major Third and inspired the door bell, the telephone dial tone, the convenience store ding, the car horn, and much more. This Majorification appears to be a natural phenomenon—after all, human babies prefer perfect intervals and consonant harmonies, but perhaps the ubiquity of the Major Third interval was intentional by the powers that be, as a way of placating the masses like babies with a cozy musical environment that closely approximates the lullaby of the womb with its 120bpm pop beats and harmonious mommyesque melodies—a kind of sonic fluoridation if you will, but you won’t have to.

Like an atom can be anything or a fresh spirit can choose whatever incarnation, “Westminster Quarters” is made up of 4 notes (C, D, E, G) permutated into 4 different phrases. On the top of the hour, the entire sequence plays. Drag over the black stemmed noteheads to listen. One can see the fearful symmetry in the 4 bars of the Chimes ending in the final strike to denote the hour.


On the new Los Doggies album, there is an Indie Rock cover of the bellsong “Westminster Quarters”. The original lyrics are sung intact, as well as some new verses depicting the Majorification of America. As in the original “Quarters”, the 4 notes of the chimes are milked for all they’re worth—playing them, singing them, reappropriating them into several different tonalities, proving that you don’t even need Three Chords to write a song anymore. Chords? Where we’re going, we don’t need chords.

Actually, we will need a lot of chords, and all the notes.



Stop Majorifying my city, Obama!

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Lyric Video for Spring Hill

28 April 2014, 9:56 pm

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Farted On

28 April 2014, 12:42 pm

“Farted On” is a song about being figuratively farted on. I can still hear the kids chanting. You, got,

On the playground, there is a kind of song that plays out from handball wall to suicide court, along the broken glass blacktops to the grass fields of discarded condoms, in the lonely outfields of dirty baseball diamonds and the lawn-chair sidelines of the omnipresent PTA, and somewhere down the road of the track-meet of the Fun Day of life, you’re going to get pfffff-farted on, spoken in your face with onomatopoeia. Or in this case: a progressive rock song.



Composers and componists aren’t always as high-brow as the modern day live classical show scene would have you believe, with its stuffed shirts and wedgied slacks, ringtone faux pas, and general bourgey attitude. Mozart wrote a song called “Leck mich im Arsch”, and he meant it. During Lisztomania, bras and panties were draped from the orchestra pit; it was like a brothel with better music, and I ain’t talking about no Phoenix concert. The Beatles made a whole album of novelty joke songs called The White Album. All of Prince’s (Ƭ̵̬̊) best songs contain the word “pussy” in the title. And Frank Zappa celebrates his scatology in more than sixty albums of music.

In the grand tradition, the oldest recorded joke from Ancient Sumeria is nothing more than a farted on joke.

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.


Los Doggies’ “Farted On” reconnects with this ancient sensibility—the proverbial farted on. There are also “specifics”, as we say in the biz. In the fashion of program music, the song follows a group of kids of nondescript race in the midst of their after-school activities, which includes a game of Freeze Tag, choosing who is “It” and as fate would have it, who is to be “farted on.” The entire class seems to join in the mocking, former friends and even Lunch aides, all chant along with a na-na and a poo-poo. I can still hear them now—voices reproduced with the highest fidelity possible, higher fi than Neil Young, higher than the fi in the sky.

Oh Idaho, how they did count in Mississipis without any breaths in between, just like a Math Rock band would do, as if Bill and Ted were there with us, making gestures in the air while Steve Vai shreds in the bushes. When our children’s children ask us what it was like in the past, and how hard did we play, and what color were our knees—just play them this song, sit back rockingly and smile, mumbling “It was like this; it was metal.”

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