Archive for the Music category
July 3rd, 2009
Time-lapse footage of big city traffic is a bit of a cliché, but this isn’t time-lapse: it’s stop-motion. Edwin Lee has managed to capture Hong Kong’s evening energy with this animation made from more than 10,000 still images of the city. It’s meant to serve as a music video for an instrumental piece by the local band A Roller Control, whose song “TV Dream” serves as an excellent companion to the images. The video is also a finalist in I Shot Hong Kong‘s MV category. (I attended ISHK’s premiere the other night, incidentally, and the festival’s program includes some excellent short films — but also some that are entirely cringe-worthy.)
Another video by Lee, “The Way Home,” is much more conventional, but pretty enjoyable nonetheless. It reminds me why I always make a point of sitting in the top deck’s front seat whenever I ride the bus.
October 29th, 2008
Since I now live in Hong Kong, I might as well get to know the local music scene. My Little Airport, an indie band that does slight and amusing twee-pop ditties, is one of my favourite local acts. The simplicity of their music and lyrics belies a wry and irreverent take on life in Hong Kong.
“Romance in Kowloon Tong” (浪漫九龍塘) is a song off their most recent album. Kowloon Tong is one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest areas, but tucked in between the expensive international schools and luxurious villas are secretive hotels, where people with money take their other significant others for a bit of love-by-the-hour. “I want to sing you a song / about me and you went to Kowloon Tong / we have to be very strong / if we want to do something very wrong,” goes the song’s English chorus. Its music video is especially adorable.
I took a walk through Kowloon Tong not too long ago. It’s a bit of a strange experience to suddenly leave the noise of Mongkok, pass under the KCR tracks and emerge into a suburban enclave of pastel-coloured walls and broad vistas. The love hotels make it even more bizarre: as posh as they are, they very concept is kind of hilarious, especially after you walk past a few and notice all of the luxury cars parked in front, their licence plates concealed by special little signs or curtains.
May 9th, 2008
“Les peaux de lièvres” is quintessential Tricot Machine. Deliberately innocent but twinged with melancholy, it revels in the simple pleasures of life, like wandering through a snowy, nighttime Montreal. I have to be honest when I say that I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if it weren’t for this music video, which is probably the first stop-motion animation I have seen that uses knitwear as its medium. It also features a nice visual narrative that takes us past Mount Royal and the downtown skyline and up the side of the Olympic Stadium, weaving between the intimacy of personal life and the greater experience of the city.
February 4th, 2008
When you mention the name Liverpool to a non-Brit, they are likely to think of one of two things: Liverpool Football Club, whose worldwide brand power is second only to their Premiership rivals Manchester United, or The Beatles (indeed, mention the city’s name to a typical North American and they will likely only make a connection with the latter).
Liverpool, the perennial underdog of British cities and the butt of many jokes from Londoners, is this year’s European Capital of Culture — far from being just a city of football and youth gangs. Large-scale redevelopment projects carrying designs by such ‘Starchitects’ as Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli are flowering up all along its UNESCO World Heritage Site-designated waterfront. Liverpool is hoping that its cultural coronation by the EU will shake the image that many hold of the city — that of a rough-and-tumble, crumbling port town where the locals speak a perplexing dialect, Scouse, which can be best described as a cross between Gaelic and Swedish.
Today’s Liverpool is more akin to the boomtown of the 19th century, when the steamship lines and related merchant industries held great sway in the city. However, despite the attention that Liverpool has recently been receiving for its cultural and economic revitalization, the city will perhaps always be umbilically tied to the fab name of its most famous export.
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November 25th, 2007
I’ve written about music here before, and I’ve even posted a couple of music videos that have absolutely nothing to do with cities aside from the fact that they were shot in them. It feels kind of silly, but still, it’s a nice distraction from the dreary November weather.
So here’s another video, this one by the New York-by-way-of-New Zealand comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. Last year, they landed their own show on HBO. It’s about a pair of New Zealand comedy singers who are trying to make it big on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As with any type of comedy, it doesn’t appeal to everyone, and I have no doubt that some of you will find this song utterly annoying — but I love it.
“Inner City Pressure” is not only a parody of Pet Shop Boys, it pokes fun at the great hipster/artist/creatively-under-employed social substratum that has engulfed large swaths of urban North America. There might even be a bit of a satirical take on Wong Kar Wai in the slow-motion shots of nighttime streets under the elevated rail, which are nothing if not reminiscent of the scenes in the first part of Chungking Express.
July 18th, 2007
Music videos and urban issues are not a likely combination. Most videos are daft things intended merely to promote a pop single of dubious musical value. Some are works of art in their own right. Rare, however, is the videoclip — as they are called in Quebec — that has a unique or interesting perspective on public or urban space.
One of these is the video for indie songstress Arianne Moffatt‘s song Montréal. The video takes a fairly literal approach to the song’s content — it’s about returning to Montreal from Paris — but what makes it fascinating is the way it plays with the relationship between maps, signs and public transportation. One of the best sequences is when the headlights of an RER train morph into stops on a map of an RER line; the camera follows the line, pulling back to reveal the train’s interior. Also memorable are the scenes from Charles-de-Gaulle airport, the landing in Montreal and the closing shots taken along the Ville-Marie Expressway heading into Montreal, the concrete overpasses of the doomed Turcot Interchange looming overhead.
Another video I like comes courtesy of Lily Allen. It’s an alternate MV for her hit LDN. Although the mise-en-scène is completely straightforward — it’s just Allen riding around London on her bike — it is more effective than the more heavy-handed original. The cheery, colourful visuals are the perfect accompaniment to Allen’s sarcasm… and who doesn’t like looking at some street-level footage of London?
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December 24th, 2006
“Ain’t no streetcar, ain’t no subway car, it’s the Spadina bus!”
It occurred to me the other day that when I made my first City Music post last month, I never bothered to define what I hoped to achieve with the series. So here goes: “City music” is pop music with a distinct sense of place. While the literary and cinematic landscapes of our cities have been well-charted — think of the Montreal of Mordecai Richler and Michel Tremblay, or the New York of Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee — the musical landscapes remain, for the most part, terra incognita. So think of me as a navigator (half-blind, perhaps, but with a good sense of direction) who will seek out and record the places found in music.
With that in mind, I present to you two songs, one from Toronto, the other from Calgary, one from 1986, the other from 2002. Both are about bus lines: Toronto’s fabled Spadina bus and Calgary’s less-hyped but no less interesting number 2 bus.
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November 2nd, 2006
This is the first in a series of posts on city-related pop songs.
Photo by Chiron Bramberger on Flickr
Owen Pallett doesn’t like condos. This is abundantly clear in “This Lamb Sells Condos,” a song on his most recent Final Fantasy record, He Poos Clouds, winner of this year’s Polaris Music Prize for best new Canadian album. The Lamb in question is Brad Lamb, a Toronto condo broker whose billboards, including one with Lamb’s face photoshopped onto the body of a sheep, are found throughout the city. “The lyrics of Pallett’s song are a scathing psychoanalysis of Lamb and his colleagues in the loft and condominium development business, as well as a critical look at the costs — emotional and communal — of urban growth,” Torontoist informs us. Pallet himself elaborates, explaining that “these condos make me wickedly mad. It is turning Toronto into the architectural equivalent of a Glade Plug-In.”
But don’t expect a polemic in “This Lamb Sells Condos.” Instead, its lyrics are decidedly off-kilter and tongue-in-cheek, set to a gorgeous piano composition. The song isn’t so much a personal attack on Lamb as a poke at condo promoters in general, big-ego characters who have gleefully reduced urban life to a kitschy brand. “There’s a merchant in our midst and with a barrel fist / He’s coloured every surface, he’s slapped up a portrait / And yes, it is his own! He’s gonna take your home!” sings Pallett. “Look! Over the treetops! / Newly conjured erections are making him a killing / And Richmond St. is illing, so the graduates are willing / To buy in to the pillage, now there is no hope for the village.”
Click here to download “This Lamb Sells Condos.” The lyrics are after the jump.
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