After sharing my blog entries in the group Sound and Shadows on Facebook, I was approached to do a music review of an upcoming album. The band is Ink Project, and their new album Blind Rhythm releases today, February 26th. I’m not a professional music reviewer, I just kinda state my opinion. When I go to read professional music reviews I wonder how they come up with so many creative terms. But I will do my best to describe this very unique album. I don’t tend to review music I don’t like, because that would just be mean, so that alone should tell you I liked this album.
The music itself is very relaxing, almost intoxicating, good to put on if you’re in a mellow mood. It is electronic down-tempo music, that kind of defies genre labels in my opinion. Its smooth electronic beats are accompanied by clean and pure vocals. I especially enjoyed the vocals by Fifi Rong, a Chinese-British singer who has also collaborated with Yello (you may remember their song “Oh Yeah”). She sings on their lead single “The End”, which is the music video above. This being the first track on the album, I do have to wonder why it was first and not at the end of the album, but perhaps there is deeper meaning behind that. The songs flow into one another, making the album a singular entity that is best listened from beginning to end.
From a philosophical standpoint, I really liked the title track “Rhythm Spirit Part 2”, an outro to Part 1 which is really more of a speech than a song, but goes into how human existence is based on rhythm. The moon cycles, the seasons, the tides, etc. There’s a certain rhythm to the universe, which music itself is derived from. Humans find rhythm comforting, perhaps due to the predictability of it. It provides the album with a thesis, making it not just a random collection of songs but an album with a concept. That’s something you don’t see enough of these days.
The album consists mainly of nine original tracks , and then a series of remixes of “The End” and “Feeding the Fire”, bringing the total of songs up to 17.
I have been lurking around in the Fire Emblem community for a couple months now; despite being a fan of the games for many years, for some reason it never occurred to me to seek out its fandom until recently. This may have to do with the fact that before the most recent game, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, became a hit, the fandom was significantly smaller. In any case, I started seeing character charts being shared around such as this:
This one is for Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, a title for the Nintendo Wii. Having played the game, the chart is mostly accurate. Although, that bald overweight guy under Chaotic Angry ought to be under Chaotic Horny if you ask me, as he is quite lecherous. He is a slave trader who has Reyson, a member of the angel-like Serenes species who you see under Angry Angry (his anger comes from being one of three survivors of a genocide against his species, so it’s very understandable), kidnapped, and then proceeds to fawn over him in a suggestive manner. You get the feeling he has a fetish for the Serenes. Why they gave this gross character the coolest theme in the game I don’t know. This all happens in the prequel to this game, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, by the way. In Radiant Dawn, despite him pretty clearly dying in the previous game, they bring him back with no explanation and he becomes a good guy. That game seems like it was written by completely different people as it ruins the characterizations of a lot of characters from the previous one. I don’t forgive Oliver for being a disgusting, perverted slave-holder, but the game expects you to.
These have been made for basically all of the Fire Emblem games. But I decided to make one myself, not for Fire Emblem, but for the Oz series. With forty books, the series contains hundreds of characters. Certainly making such a chart would be no problem, right? So I got the template first:
Have fun with this.
I grabbed an already done chart and erased the Fire Emblem characters in the Comic Draw program I use for my webcomic (follow the shameless plug). Next, I needed to compile a list. This was difficult, especially since there aren’t many “horny” characters in the Oz books. But I managed, by digging up some more obscure ones. Finding corresponding illustrations was usually quite easy thanks to the Oz Fandom Wiki and Project Gutenberg, but challenging at times if they weren’t from one of the public domain books. All are by John R. Neill save for the Wicked Witch of the West, by W.W. Denslow. Here’s the chart, and a list of characters with explanations.
Pure Pure: Dorothy - Plenty of characters would fit in this category; Ozma, Glinda, Betsy, Ojo, etc. I went with Dorothy due to her prominence in the earlier and more famous Oz books.
Pure Angry: Queen Ann - Angry at her status as queen of an irrelevant kingdom in Oz, but harmless overall.
Pure Horny: Tin Woodman - He was horny when he was Nick Chopper, before he became tin. And he’s pure-hearted.
Pure Stupid: The Scarecrow - He does get smarter over the course of the books, but that brain the Wizard gave him was a total placebo. It gave him confidence, not intelligence. But his lack of intelligence in the early books may just stem from the fact that he was inexperienced, having come to life not long before Dorothy discovered him. He was never as stupid as he thought he was in the first book, but never as smart as he thought he was in the other books.
Pure Chaotic: Scraps - Scraps is unpredictable, but pure-hearted. Her innocence can lead her to be unknowingly mean occasionally, but that’s the chaos.
Angry Pure: Woozy - He gets inexplicably furious when you say the words krizzle-kroo. But otherwise is calm-tempered and benevolent.
Angry Angry: Ruggedo - This is the former Nome King’s defining character trait. He never gets over losing his Magic Belt, and later his throne, thanks to the meddling of Ozma and her friends.
Angry Horny: Googly-Goo - A noble from the kingdom of Jinxland who tries to force Princess Gloria to marry him, when she has eyes for the gardener Pon.
Angry Stupid: Jinjur - Angry over Oz’s patriarchy, she managed to take over Oz with an army of women wielding sewing needles, but had no plan for what to do after taking the throne. Leading to her quick defeat.
Angry Chaotic: Wicked Witch of the West - The most well-known villain of the series. She has all sorts of tricks up her sleeves, so you don’t know what she will do next. She’s also very angry.
Horny Pure: Jo Files - A member of Queen Ann’s army who falls in love with a Rose Princess named Ozga. The romance is rushed and undeveloped, but writing love stories in the Oz series wasn’t Baum’s strong suit. Maybe he had better love stories in his adult novels, I’m not sure. I need to read them.
Horny Angry: Nimmie Amee - Her anger is understandable when both her boyfriends were gradually dismembered and replaced with tin parts, and eventually abandoned her. The Tin Woodman in particular could have sought her out a lot sooner than he did. Her anger is justified.
Horny Horny: Captain Fyter - Nimmie’s other ex-boyfriend. There’s not much more to his character than this, making horny his only real trait.
Horny Stupid: Chopfyt - Nimmie’s current boyfriend, a Frankenstein monster made up of Nick Chopper and Captain Fyter’s discarded body parts. Not much going on in his brain.
Horny Chaotic: Mogodore the Mighty - From Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, this villainous baron first tries to force Princess Shirley Sunshine to marry him, but after he conquers the Emerald City in an embarrassingly low moment for Ozma’s rule (he conquered it while everyone was playing Blind Man’s Bluff and was blindfolded), he decides to force Ozma to marry him instead. Took some serious digging to get that illustration by the way, since his book is still under copyright. You’re welcome.
Stupid Pure: Jack Pumpkinhead - He often admits to being dim-witted, but that comes with having a pumpkin for a head. He did defeat Mogodore, though.
Stupid Angry: The Mangaboos - Pictured is Gwig, their sorcerer, but the subterranean Mangaboos are plant people that are hostile to outsiders, and not too bright. This could also apply to any number of Oz’s small kingdoms visited in filler chapters.
Stupid Horny: Princess Gloria - She’s in love with a gardener named Pon, but is just a damsel in distress.
Stupid Stupid: Button-Bright - Particularly in his first appearance, where all he ever says is “Don’t know”. Dorothy calls him stupid at one point. He gets wiser in later books.
Stupid Chaotic: Notta Bit More - A bungling clown from The Cowardly Lion of Oz who refuses to change his strategy in dealing with threats no matter how many times his strategy fails. He’s chaotic in the same way Scraps is. You would have to be chaotic to accidentally stumble upon a nonsense spell that sends one to Oz.
Chaotic Pure: Handy Mandy - A seven-armed goat herder who doesn’t take smack from anyone. Her temper can provoke Oz’s stupid-angry filler kingdoms, but she’s got a heart of gold and ends up saving Oz.
Chaotic Angry: Mombi - Another wicked witch. Her bitterness may stem from the fact that she never got to become the Wicked Witch of the North.
Chaotic Horny: Glegg - A creeper from Kabumpo in Oz who wouldn’t take no for an answer when Princess Peg Amy rejected him, so he turned her into a tree. Another victim of Ruth Plumly Thompson’s bloodthirsty version of Ozma, he was actually executed by being made to drink one of his own potions. That illustration of him is hilarious, by the way.
Chaotic Stupid: The Whimsies - A malicious race of beings with tiny heads that leave little room for brains. The Nome King recruited them to help invade Oz one time.
Chaotic Chaotic: The First and Foremost - He is actually the most powerful and feared villain in the Oz series, as the most powerful of the Phanfasms, another malicious race that the Nome King recruited for his invasion of Oz. They agreed to join because they like to make people suffer.
Anyway, that’s the list. Since most Oz books have no romance, the Horny section includes basically any character who ever showed interest in romance at any point. Baum avoided romance most of the time, while Thompson basically told the same love story over and over, and the characters tended to fall under Pure Horny in every case. Notably I couldn’t find anyplace to put The Wizard or the Cowardly Lion. They just don’t seem to fall under any of these categories. There needed to be a cowardly and a shady column for them.
When it comes to radio stations, in America you have your classic rock stations, your “80s, 90s and Today” stations, your hip hop stations, a Spanish station, a generic Top 40 pop station, a news station, and then it repeats. It’s the same from town to town. By about 2002, with Nu Metal overtaking alternative rock and the Emo craze right around the corner, I disavowed FM radio and listened exclusively to European metal on CDs for the next few years. The radio, with its mainstream music looped over and over, and ads between every two songs, had nothing more to offer me, so it seemed. But, that is because I only had access to local stations.
These days, I get most of my new music from gothic music podcasts and YouTube uploads. Listening to the radio for new music is something I haven’t done consistently for almost twenty years. But then, I found out about a website. Radio Garden. This website lets you navigate an interactive Google Earth map (without borders, because radio signals don’t adhere to borders) and listen to radio stations from all over the world. I have searched the world for worthy radio stations in my preferred genres, and found quite a few. Even some goth ones! Several of those, in fact. Maybe it is time to return to the radio. How was I to know I could be listening to Hungarian goth radio stations all this time?Why is this type of music so completely absent from the American airwaves? I keep asking myself this every time I find another of these stations. I think I’m culturally more European than American, despite having been born here. As I searched the world I was still surprised by how similar to America’s a lot of their radio stations all are. You’ve got Top 40, 80s, 90s, oldies, etc. in nearly every country. Seems the majority of the human race listens to the exact same music, sadly, because that’s all the corporations shove down our throats. But there are a few unique stations here and there, like hidden gems. Especially in Europe. I only wish I had a way to record from these stations onto a blank tape. Sure I could use an auxiliary cord, but those seem to kill the sound quality.
Sadly there are still ads, and they’re always local to where you are no matter where in the world the radio station is. I don’t want my German polka music interrupted by a commercial for Publix in Florida, dammit. At least it would be interesting listening to ads from other countries, but no. Must be how Radio Garden pays the bills. You can just switch stations when an ad comes on, just like with regular radio. If a station is ad-free anyway then you don’t need to bother. A word of caution, though. Radio Garden will try to convince you to download the app. I did, and I lost all my favorites on the website version, which did not transfer over to the app either. If I hadn’t already been writing this blog and saving the links I may not have been able to find some of these stations again. I think it periodically forgets your favorites eventually anyway even when you’re not messing around with the app though. Maybe the app is better at remembering, but I haven’t really used it enough to be sure because you get popup ads on the app, which you don’t get on the website. Everything else on the app was exactly the same as using the website. So I don’t recommend the app. Unless they update it to be better somehow after this writing.
Below I have linked to some of my favorite radio stations from around the world here, sorted by genres I am into (Goth, Metal, Alternative Rock, Armenian music, folk, and other random genres) in roughly the order I discovered each one in. This is more so that I can have them saved somewhere, but also to share them. I just discovered this website last week so this list is by no means exhaustive.
This was the first station I found that played music from under the “Goth” music genre umbrella, which I will be using in this blog entry as a convenient shorthand. I am pretty sure stations like this do not exist in America. Granted, this station focuses mostly on dark electro, like what the dance clubs play. That’s what most of the gothic music stations I found have in common. As the name suggests, very synth-heavy. I like that though. Expect to hear VNV Nation and the like.
Much like the previous station, this one plays dance club goth music. It’s not actual “Synthwave”, another term for Retrowave, which is a revival of 80s New Wave and pop, but maybe Synthwave means something else in Hungary.
This is obviously related to the previous station, but the focus is darkwave and post-punk. Guitar-based goth music. They play The Cure fairly often. There must be a big goth scene in Miskolc, Hungary. Who’d have thought?
A Peruvian radio station that’s a little more my style, playing electronic music. It’s not really dark synth, but it’s up my alley enough, and is one of my favorites. Music you still wouldn’t really find in the United States so much. I actually heard them play And One though. And songs other than just “Military Fashion Show” and “Panzermensch” too, which are the only ones most club DJs ever play. So they will play EBM from time to time. It’s funny how they interrupt the song to say “Rrrradio synthpop perrrrfecto!” every now and then. This is a charming little radio station to put on.
Leave it to Germany to have a Gothic music station. It’s got darkwave, post-punk, industrial, industrial metal. I even heard them play Rammstein, appropriately enough. There are so many great bands from Germany they have to get airplay somewhere.
I thought I had found all the goth stations, but then I decided to search under the term “dark”, and got some more. This one from Scotland was playing Ministry when I first tuned in, so I knew I’d found a good one. From what I’ve heard, this station seems to specialize in Industrial music and dark electro. A lot of the time it feels just like listening to the Communion After Dark podcast. I have heard them play VNV Nation, [:SITD:], Das Ich, Project Pitchfork, And One, and even Kraftwerk. They’re after me own heart, they are. They blend the songs together like a DJ does at a club; you start to hear hints of the next song at the end of the current song, and it transitions. It’s like listening to an endless DJ live stream. This might be my favorite radio station in the world. Followed closely by Radio Synthpop. Unless there are more that I haven’t discovered yet.
The “dark” search also turned up this station, another dark electronic music station. So Italy has enough cool people to warrant a goth station as well. How lucky for them.
Yet another dark electro goth station! Found this one while searching “synth” trying to get back to Lima’s Radio Synthpop. It truly is a synthetic experience. They even snuck some Kraftwerk in there as I listened, which made me excited. I’ve also heard Laibach and Diary of Dreams. This is one of my favorites.
I knew there had to be a metal station in Norway somewhere, since that’s where all the best metal comes from. And there is one! There’s another genre missing from American radio.
I expected this to be another goth station, but it seems to be more of a metal station. Still a cool find. So far I’ve mainly heard melodic power metal, not sure if they ever play black metal or other genres. I feel so cheated as an American. Why do our radio stations all suck?
There’s a very similar station in Cologne, Germany called Ultra Dark Radio, which seems to be the same kind of music and may be affiliated with Dark Radio.
This is just a good place to go for the 80s and 90s alternative rock I grew up listening to. I could probably find a station like this in the US since it is pretty mainstream, or was when it was new. Except it’s all the way in Moscow. That just makes things more interesting.
I have a history with this alternative rock station, and I’ve told that story on the blog before. I grew up listening to this radio station. I recorded my first mixtape off this radio station. It’s a student-run radio station at a high school, where they train DJs. It’s been around since 1969, good to know it’s still going. I’ve moved on from this type of music, but it’s still kind of nice to go back and listen to this station again. It’s sentimental.
Yeraz is Armenian for “dream”, and this is an Armenian radio station for the diaspora living in Syria. The fact that this station is up and running leads me to believe maybe Aleppo is more intact than the western media would have us believe. No, Syria isn’t just a big rubble pile. This station plays Armenian traditional folk and modern Armenian pop. Diasporan Armenian radio stations are more dedicated to playing Armenian music than the actual radio stations in Armenia, oddly enough. I guess when you’re surrounded by it constantly you want to hear something different. It’s interesting to contrast attitudes in Armenia versus in the Armenian diaspora by looking at their radio stations. Maybe it’s similar when you compare a Spanish radio station in California versus a typical radio station in Mexico, which would be under no obligation to play only Spanish-language music. So anyway, if you’re in the mood for Armenian music you’re actually better off finding one of these stations than finding one from Yerevan, where they mix in Russian and American music a lot of the time. I found a couple more Armenian stations in Lebanon and one in America which I will cover.
“Lav” is Armenian for “good”. This is one of the better stations to get Armenian music from the actual country, although it’s pretty much just pop music. There are two Lav Radio stations. The other one is Lav Radio Mix. This station plays electronic music and pop, not necessarily from Armenia alone, and they throw in some Russian and English-language songs too. It’s not always my type of music, though. Like I mentioned in the previous post, it’s a bit of a mix.
I will go ahead and mention Nor Radio here as well (“nor” means “new”), a very similar radio station also from Yerevan. That station also mixes music from other countries, and is essentially just like Lav Radio. All of the stations in Armenia come out of Yerevan, although I could have sworn Vanadzor had one when I was living there for two months. Maybe Radio Garden doesn’t have them all. I do have to be careful when using the map not to accidentally switch to a station in Turkey or Nakhichevan. For historical reasons.
“Hayazgi Dzayn” or “Armenian Voice” in English. Another Armenian radio station, this time from Lebanon. It’s not the only one there either, such as this one. There’s a very large Armenian diaspora community in Beirut. Again, it’s mainly traditional folk or pop-folk. But you know what you’re getting, no random pop music from other countries.
Oh alright, one more Armenian station. Gotta catch ‘em all, I guess. And this one is from the United States! I should have grown up in Glendale. It’s a small town near Los Angeles and a well-known Armenian colony. I checked Glendale specifically just to see if there were any Armenian radio stations there, and there was this one. The Armenians in Glendale are very committed to preserving their identity, so this is a good radio station for that reason.
Now here’s something completely different. You like pan pipes? Well here’s the station for you. Peruvian folk music is very relaxing. My wife is half-Peruvian which was what led me to search Peru for radio stations. I like this one.
Germany is home to a few German folk music stations, mostly in the south of the country. Nearby Munich also has Volksmusikwelle, and Radio Heimatmelodie. These three stations alone should cover your yodeling and accordion fix. But there are most certainly others.
This one is too weird not to include. It’s a radio station from Greece that plays music from Japanese anime shows. Really. I have no idea how this happened. I’m just amused that it exists.
An actual dedicated New Wave station is hard to find, but Dublin, Ireland has one. There are 80s stations all over the world, but at least this one doesn’t mix in the boring love ballads and pop music.
Radio stations with music this old are a rarity. I do like me some classic jazz, swing and big band music every now and then. This station plays music you’d expect to hear in old black and white movies and Betty Boop cartoons.
Electro Swing is a modern swing revival with electronic music infused with it. It is such a niche genre, it’s really cool to see that there’s a radio station that plays it somewhere. I didn’t think it was really very well known outside of YouTube. There’s so much more variety on the radio in Germany.
Anyway, I probably still haven’t discovered all the radio stations I would like. If you know of any you think I would be into, go ahead and let me know here or on Facebook.
Valentine’s Day is soon upon us, tis the season of love! What better time to listen to a playlist of hate songs? Hatred
has been something I’ve long striven to overcome. I’ve written about this struggle before. But every now and then, in a
fit of anger, I might regress. It’s only human. I try not to make it permanent. There will always be things I hate. I made a
playlist of songs for a mix CD some months ago; a collection of hate songs.
More for fun than anything else, and something to listen to when I’m angry as a way to vent. Part of an old habit. It’s another in my series of mixes which focus on one word or concept. Others I have talked about on the blog before are Cold, the Moon, the Sun. I have more coming up too, one about the Heart, and one about Time. But, it is interesting to listen to it and ponder the
concept of hatred, and the many different ways the songwriters use it in their
songs. The purpose of the mix is to first allow me to vent, then stew for a little bit, begin to calm down, and then lift me out of my bad mood, leaving me in a better mood than I was at the beginning of the mix. This just works for me. It’s like music therapy.
Here is the track listing. I will briefly discuss each song that I feel warrants discussion. I remade 5e mix in Spotify for those who want to listen along, but Spotify doesn’t have every song.
This is the first song I think
of when I think of a “hate” song. Often it would come to my mind when dealing
with difficult customers while I was working at the call centers. A song for someone you are just so sick and tired of being around. We all have someone we could dedicate this song to.
Korn
– Right Now
Right now, I can’t control myself I fucking hate you!
What originally drew me to this song was the music video, an animation of someone mutilating themselves in horrifically twisted ways. If you read my comics, you know I get that kind of humor. The song is also great to listen to when you’re angry. Sing along, rock out. Try it sometime, it’s really cathartic.
Twiztid
– Kill Somebody
This song builds off the energy of the previous. A song for those times when you’re so livid, when you’re seeing red, and your anger isn’t so much directed at one person but at everything. We all have those times. Some more often than others. Myself, more when I was in my teens, but still every so often.
Alice
in Chains – Love, Hate, Love
This is kind of a cool-down song after the last two. This song transitions us from the really angry songs to the dark and seething symphonic black metal songs to come. It is more contemplative, contrasting the concepts of love and hate.
Covenant
– The Dark Conquest
Don’t we all, at one time or another, at some point in our lives, wish we had ultimate power? The power to act on our hate without any consequences? This song taps into dark fantasy. Off one of my favorite albums of all time In Times Before the Light. I decided to go with the original version over the 2002 industrial metal version after the band changed their name to The Kovenant. It’s more raw, more pure. The remixed one is also longer, and I needed this mix to fit on an 80 minute CD. But both versions are good.
Dimmu
Borgir – The Serpentine Offering
I am hatred, darkness and despair.
Similar energy to the previous song. Dimmu Borgir is great at adding a symphonic element to their black metal, creating powerful dark music that could be the soundtrack to a supervillain. It really gets your adrenaline rushing, especially if you’re angry.
Cradle
of Filth – Thank God for the Suffering
This song is on here if for no other reason than for the chant of “Hate! Hate! Hate!” at the end of the song. This rounds off the black metal section of the mix, as by the end of this song my adrenaline will be spent.
[:SITD:]
– Brother Death
I hate you, you hate me, Brother Death is calling me.
This track kind of tones things down compared to the last song, but not too much. That “I hate you, you hate me” line reminds me a bit too much of the anti-Barney songs we used to sing in Elementary School though. “I hate you, you hate me. Let’s get together and kill Barney. With a great big axe and a loaded .44, no more purple dinosaur.” We all had such an irrational hatred for that purple dinosaur back in the 1990s. To this day I still do. I can’t explain why. I mean to be fair, Elmo from Sesame Street is probably even more irritating. My two year old has never watched an episode of Barney though, and it will stay that way.
Insane
Clown Posse – Hate Her to Death
This track may seem out of place with the others if you go by the band name, but it’s not exactly. It’s a song about hating someone for not loving you back. It is the kind of feeling you would only get as a teenager or something. But perhaps it is something I remember.
Orange
Sector – I Hate You
This is an essential hate song, for obvious reasons. Orange Sector has at least a couple good hate songs, this being one of them. The singer reminds me of Ren from Ren & Stimpy.
Gwar
– Hate Love Songs
I hate love songs! I hate lovers! I hate, everything that I can’t have, so I hate love!
A great song for those poor souls who are single on Valentine’s Day. I ought to know, I have still spent the majority of my Valentine’s Days single.
Ayria
– Friends and Enemies
It’s okay to hate your enemies, it’s either them or me, just want to break their things.
The word “hate” doesn’t appear in this song much. Instead the main word is “bitch”, pronounced “beetch” in a Russian accent. I love the insult in here “your dick is under six inches”. What a burn.
Orange
Sector – I Spit on You
I spit on you, I spit in your face! I spit on you, I spit on your grave!
This song compliments the previous one by Orange Sector. “I spit on your grave” is an insult we don’t hear often enough.
This is a cool-down song, which Spotify does not have unfortunately. So you can find it on YouTube. I was obsessed with this band for many years. Not sure what they’re up to these days. But this song is quite catchy. Not as angry as the last several.
Buzz
Kull – Ode to Hate
Once again, this track is more catchy than angry. I like the lyric “The world I’m living in makes no sense”, because it doesn’t. Hate itself makes very little sense sometimes. Particularly when based on race or nationality.
Voltaire
– God Thinks
I hate people who blame the devil for their own shortcomings, and I hate people who thank God when things go right.
A very poignant song about how people in power twist the word of God to suit their own often hateful agendas. More of a rant set to music, really.
Diary
of Dreams – Play God
Why don’t you compensate all of my pain and hate?
Hate really isn’t the central subject of this song, but it is yet another calm down song. I needed a few of those after screaming along to Korn.
And
One – Save the Hate
Save, the hate, it’s another day. Don’t bring me down it’s far too late.
To me this song is about not giving into the hate, not letting the people who want you to be upset win. Just go on with your day, and save your hate for someone who has really earned it, at least. Don’t waste it on petty internet trolls the like. And it’s a great song to end the mix on for that lesson.
Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed the mix if you decide to put it together yourself. What songs would you add? You can go ahead and let me know over on Facebook if you will (you can comment on Blogger, but it never lets me know when I get new comments). If I end up liking the suggestions maybe I can include them on a longer 90 minute cassette version of the mix. Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!
We’ve made it to late Winter. Coming out of Winter, I find that my mood has been up, having had time to process certain world events beyond my control. But I’m still on a Slavic post-punk kick, and have been since about September. I’ve been discovering a lot of new music courtesy of the YouTube channel Krzysztof Utbult, which consistently gives me a few new, mostly Russian songs to check out each day. I’ve finally done it this month, none of the bands are from the United States. They’re from Poland, Russia, England, Greece and Austria. Goth is truly global. I’ve heard South American and Australian goth bands, maybe I need to find some Asian and African ones to round it out. I’m sure they exist.
I have forgotten to do it for a few months, but I used to give forecasts of my blog for the coming month on these posts, so I suppose I will do it now. I am currently working on a few blog entries; I have another mix to share, this time comprised of hate songs just in time for Valentine’s Day. If I have time I may also share a mix I made of songs that mention the Heart. I also am about halfway done writing a review of Violent J’s The Wizard of the Hood for an out-of-genre experience. And on that note, I might review some more Oz books, since I’ve been reading more Ruth Plumly Thompson. And it’s going to be very time consuming, but I wanted to do a blog that catalogs my Top 3 Songs of the Month going back to when I first started keeping records in October 2000, even though some of the early entries make me cringe now and will cost me goth points. I have kept written records since then, but I don’t know how legible they are so I’ve been typing them out. I’ve gotten to 2013 so far. But, I have a feeling thanks to the weird formatting issues Blogger is giving me I’m going to need to finish it in a Word document on a laptop rather than my handy tablet that I am using right now.
Anyway, let’s get into my top five songs this month.
Schröttersburg - Keter
My top pick this month comes from Poland, and is another of those bands that forces me to copy and paste their name thanks to the umlaut (the next band is another). Their new album “Melancholia” releases on the 21st of this month, and I like what I’ve heard thus far. This track has these stirring emotionally-charged guitar riffs that I always love in a post-punk song, and although I don’t understand the lyrics, I can feel the energy of the song. I just recently found out about this band, but they have a few albums out which you can find on Bandcamp, many of them being name your price. From what I’ve heard of their earlier music, it seems to me like they’ve recently changed their sound a bit, and I like their newest music best. Hope there’s more where that came from.
I had the hardest time figuring out what the triangles were supposed to represent in this band’s name. Was it Aivia? No, according to their Bandcamp page, it is Divid, out of Moscow, Russia. They released their first album last September, and this track was released just last month as a single. The title of the song translates to “It Would Be Good to Die”. When I searched it on YouTube I got links to suicide hotlines, so I translated it to find out why and that’s what I got; maybe I shouldn’t find that funny, but I do. This is one of those songs that sounds upbeat and fun until you listen to the lyrics, or translate them. It’s just so catchy and danceable, and has that “Aaaaahhh” chorus which feels very Russian, I had no idea what it was about until I translated the lyrics.
Oof. YouTube is worried about me because of the music I like. Probably only because they don’t want to lose a customer. Don’t worry about me, I’m all right. Kind of makes me stop and think about the music I listen to though, and why I listen to it. Am I depressed because I listen to goth music, or do I listen to goth music because I’m depressed? I’m leaning towards the latter, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also just the music I like. I’ll never be into modern pop music no matter how successful of an antidepressant I find. I wouldn’t be me anymore at that point. And anyway, this song actually does lift my spirits despite its lyrics.
Last month I was really into Claustraphobia’s track “Broken”, and I mentioned this was the other track I was really into. It eventually overtook that track. The perfect winter song, this track got me through the various cold snaps of the past month. Yes, I live in Florida, don’t laugh. It was 37 degrees at one point! The song is about when you think it won’t get any colder, yet it gets colder still. I see it in a more metaphorical sense as well. I have mostly been listening to the “Morbid Mix” version, but the original is good too. The original is more haunting and raw, like a night on a frozen tundra. Maybe it captures the true essence of the song better than the remix does, but the remix has its own merits. It has more of a beat to it, while still remaining true to the song. Some remixes will just forget the basics of the original song in an effort to make it a dance club hit, but not this one. It still has that cold feel. Maybe the remix is like the cold in Florida when it actually gets kind of cold, like in the 40s and 30s Fahrenheit, and the original is like Siberia. If that makes any sense.
Tango Mangalore is an interesting one-man band from Greece. The singer is a sailor, and all of his songs have to do with the sea. I recognize the Greek fisherman’s cap he wears, I have a similar hat myself. His songs are basically Goth sea shanties. How cool is that? “Mort Marin” is a song sung by someone who died at sea and is haunting the shores, forlorn and unable to Rest In Peace. The singer’s voice sounds like the moans of a forlorn ghost. He’s speaking English but it’s so slurred you can barely make it out. And it doesn’t seem like they have the best grasp on English either, such as in the line “Your grievance is no way to are.” I don’t think that was a typo in the lyrics posted in the description of the music video, because that’s what it sounds like he says too. But that just adds to the charm of the song. The album this song was on, “Dear Shore”, released on Halloween 2017, is a concept album where the central theme is hatred for the shore and a love of the sea. Sea shanties are making a comeback this year in memes, so I heard, so maybes it’s time this band capitalized on that.
Скубут is a Russian band from Vienna, Austria. I suppose they must have moved there from Russia, I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that. The album this track is off of, Меланхоличен (Meloncholia), was just released last month. And will you look at that! The first and last bands on my list both have an album called Melancholia released this year! I didn’t plan this. What are the odds? Maybe higher than you think when you listen to Eastern European post-punk. Anyway, this track has a blend of guitars and synths, and serves as a nice introduction to the album. Another case of translations revealing that the singer is not a happy camper, though, since Акт самоубийства translates to “suicide”, or at least that’s what Google Translate is telling me, as trustworthy as that is. I just really like this type of music, okay? I promise I’m not suicidal! Anyway, I am liking the other songs off this album too, perhaps this is a band I should keep an eye on. They’ve had six releases in less than a year, giving me a robust discography to work through.
TV Tropes, for those who don’t know, is a wiki website dedicated to recognizing and cataloguing trends and patterns in fiction known as tropes. A good place to waste time, perhaps, but I’m of the opinion that nothing is a waste of time if you’re enjoying yourself. It’s probably helped my writing a lot, at least on the theory side of things. If I am thinking of using an idea in a story I can look up how other works used it. You could think of a trope kind of like a cliche or a stereotype, but it isn’t exactly the same thing, since it isn’t necessarily overused or negative. It is simply a tool of storytelling. An underlying assumption or an accepted premise which may or may not reflect reality. I discovered TV Tropes in 2009, and have been a member for going on 12 years. It’s amazing to think it’s been that long. It was still the days of MySpace when I started on there. TV Tropes was a very different place back then, and had a very free, laissez-faire approach to what they allowed on the site, allowing users to inject personality and opinion into their posts, as well as apply tropes to real life, bragging “we are not Wikipedia”. They’ve since had to become more strict and sanitized the site, in an attempt to be taken more seriously and be more friendly towards the advertisers. In fact I blame the corporate advertisers for most of the tone changes to the site over the years, which seems to happen to every website that lasts long enough. To be fair, things also changed thanks to people abusing their privileges and posting weird, creepy or offensive stuff, creating the need for regulation. As always, the worst part about wikis are all the other people on them, of course. But, slight feelings of They Changed It Now It Sucks aside, I’ve stuck with the site.
Since 2009 I’ve launched my fair share of tropes, as well as works pages for the site. It’s usually a very shocking experience when I can think of a trope that’s not already on the website somewhere, but it’s happened at least eleven times. And I suppose I should feel proud, or at the very least feel lucky, that none of them have ever been deleted as of yet. They’re solid tropes. I watch a lot of old films and cartoons that I would wager most people under a certain age don’t watch these days, which probably explains why many of these tropes hadn’t been launched yet before I did it. Most TV Tropes users are on the younger side, and are too busy watching anime I guess (to be fair I watch and enjoy anime too, but if you knew nothing about culture except what was on TV Tropes you could be forgiven for thinking that Naruto has far more cultural significance and literary merit than the writings of Shakespeare; but I think the lack of literary snobbery is one of the greatest things about TV Tropes, so don’t get me wrong). They’re mostly comedy or animation tropes of the early to mid-20th century, because yes, I’m a grown man who watches cartoons. Disgraceful, isn’t it? Well, societal norms are mostly bullocks anyway. Except maybe the taboos against murder and cannibalism, those are alright. But I will watch and enjoy whatever I want. So there.
When you edit a wiki you don’t really get to take credit for anything. It becomes part of the public domain, in a way. But I felt like writing about the pages I started and what inspired them, just so that there was record of it somewhere. Click on the trope titles to be take to the page. This will be roughly in the order they were launched.
This is when a character just keeps falling and falling, maybe into a bottomless pit, usually but not always for comedic effect. You know it’s in play when the character has to take a breath mid-scream, or otherwise starts to wonder when they’ll finally hit the ground. It’s a classical trope that has examples dating back to Greek mythology, but likely emerged in its modern form with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, although this example still predates it being used for comedy. That may have started sometime in the Golden Age of Animation. It lends itself to animation because it is something that should be physically impossible; not that there are no live action examples, of course. There are quite a few literary examples as well. This was my first trope, launched when the Super Mario World cartoon was at the apex of its memetic popularity. The most popular episode to parody and meme was “Mama Luigi”. Videos like this one for example were all the rage on YouTube. During the episode, Luigi falls into a chasm, and narrating the story, he says that he “fell for hours”. If I were to do it today I might have come up with a different name, like Overly Long Fall, but it is what it is now. The trope has been up for more than ten years at this point. I just find the concept of falling for that amount of time funny, for some reason. While brainstorming the trope I thought of a lot of different examples of characters falling “for hours”, such as scenes in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, the Bugs Bunny short The Heckling Hare, and more. The other users came up with even more examples, and a trope was born.
This was a phrase I heard a lot in the old media I watch a lot of from the 1930s-50s. When someone is injured or faints, inevitably someone shouts for a doctor. This originated in theater, when “house” referred to the theater itself. It’s usually played for comedy; its turn toward being a comedic trope happened with the advent of film, because it was funny to see someone on film address the audience when we all know it’s a recording and not live. The phrase can be altered, with the words “doctor” or “house” replaced by something more plot-relevant. Examples from The Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, along with others, were what prompted me to start it. You barely ever hear this phrase uttered today, but the most recent examples I thought of were from the 1990s, so it was still in the public consciousness in my lifetime. The trope luckily survived the website’s purge of stock phrases that weren’t true tropes. It was tropey enough for them, I guess.
Someone speaks in an accent but is oblivious to it, leading to hilarious misunderstandings. Gussie Mausheimer from An American Tail was my initial example, as well as Antoine from the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, among others. The other users found the bulk of the other examples. There’s really not too much to say about it, but I do find it funny when it turns up.
This trope probably would have been launched eventually with or without my involvement, but it didn’t exist yet when I joined the site, so I got the ball rolling. People with gold teeth in fiction are usually shady and villainous, for some reason. Obviously in real life having a gold tooth doesn’t make you a bad person, but if someone in a story has a gold tooth you can bet they’re evil. That’s what this trope is about. Warren T. Rat, again from An American Tail, as well as one of the robbers from Home Alone, were my initial examples.
This was a pet-peeve trope for me in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when every animated movie had to have a stupid one-word title, often a verb in the past perfect tense. Tangled, Frozen, Hoodwinked, Enchanted. Ugh. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. It was a big thing in television show titles too for around that same period. It advertises to people with short attention spans. It seems to have gradually died off now though. For the most part anyway; it’s probably not going to completely go away, as it does also predate that glut of movies I mentioned, and isn’t exclusive to animated movies either. Scrooged, for example. An awful example of taking a word that isn’t even a verb and putting it in past perfect tense; and not the only example like that. Ooh I can’t stand it, as a Creative Writing major. I started this trope out of spite, I admit.
This trope used to be very widespread, but it’s not used much these days. As the description says, it’s where every sleep walker or escaped baby wanders into. The protagonist will always either be chasing someone through the construction zone (or is the one being chased), or less commonly have gotten a job working at one and still have to go through all the slapstick comedy hijinks. You have to dodge swinging steel beams, deal with malfunctioning elevators, almost fall off the tall steel skeleton of the skyscraper multiple times, all that fun stuff. Every classic cartoon series had a construction zone episode, sometimes more than one. But it wasn’t exclusively an animation trope. The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy did it too, as you see above. In fact Harold Lloyd was the likely inventor of this trope, in the silent film Never Weaken. No one has come up with an older example yet. So it was a live action film trope first. But the trope died out in live action long before it died out in animation, which kept it alive for decades longer. It didn’t really survive the fall of the Hollywood studio system in the 1960s when cartoons went to television. Every once in a while someone brings it back in a modern work, but only in reference to the classic uses of it. It’s weird that it died out, since it’s not like there aren’t still tall buildings being constructed. I guess that style of slapstick humor is no longer in fashion, really. Or maybe you just can’t really do anything new with it, since it was so overused from the 1920s to the 1960s.
This was just something I noticed they didn’t have yet one day, so I decided to start it myself. I never really got the whole “dogs love fire hydrants” thing. Never seen it happen in real life. Dogs will pee on anything, not just fire hydrants. But I’ve seen it a lot in cartoons. The oldest examples found were from the 1930s, and the oldest example on the page is a Disney cartoon starring Pluto. However it must be older than that since it was already something they could rely on the audience assuming. The examples I grew up knowing were in Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life.
This is another widespread classic cartoon gag, where a cartoon character’s fur is removable and they have little boxers underneath, or alternatively their fur has pockets built in. The Tex Avery short Lonesome Lenny (pictured above) as well as a number of uses in Ren and Stimpy were my initial examples. Others came to me later. The trope still shows up sometimes in modern works, but was more prevalent back when cartoon characters were getting blown up by sticks of dynamite on a regular basis.
They had a trope for Black Bead Eyes, but not this, so I started it. It’s the eye-style from 1920s and 30s cartoons, where the pupils are shaped like Pac-Man. Think Betty Boop, early Mickey Mouse, all those old black-and-white cartoons. The name “pie-eyed” is the actual term for these eyes among animators. I researched that prior to starting the trope. The modern examples are interesting too. Most are trying to capture the aesthetic of classic cartoons, but a couple, like the 1980s Super Mario Bros. cartoon, seem to have it for no special reason. The Pac-Man cartoon really missed an opportunity by not using this trope.
This is one of my favorite tropes I launched. This is when a show or some other work of fiction does a crossover episode where the characters meet their previous selves, either how they were at the beginning of the series, or the versions of themselves from a previous unrelated series. Early Installment Weirdness was already a trope on its own, so this trope kind of builds off that. I don’t know how old the trope is or who was the first to use it, but it seems relatively recent. I don’t think anyone has brought up a true example from before the 1980s. Except maybe one; The Road to Oz, published in 1909, actually has kind of an example, but it’s more of a nod to a previous illustrator than a full-fledged crossover episode, so it’s only barely this trope. What they call an Ur Example. Meet Your Early Installment Weirdness is a very meta, post-modern kind of trope. And post-modernism was rare if not nonexistent before the mid-20th century.
Turtles Forever was the example that inspired me to launch this trope; a 2009 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles special where the latest incarnation of the Turtles at the time met their 1980s counterparts from another dimension and they had to join forces. I ranted about this briefly on the blog before (it came up in my An American Tail reviews), but let me do a more in-depth rant, because it relates to this trope and how it gets handled sometimes.I hated how they portrayed the 1980s Ninja Turtles, making both them and the villains Shredder and Krang look far stupider and more incompetent than they were in the original show, mere caricatures of their original selves. The 1980s cartoon was mainly humorous while the 2000s cartoon was more serious, but they didn’t have to exaggerate the characters that badly. They tried their hardest to make the 2000s Ninja Turtles look cooler because the special was created by the people who did the 2000s cartoon, obviously. They must have been sick of having their cartoon compared to the original cartoon, and it shows. It smacks of insecurity, and is what happens when someone is forced to homage something they not-so-secretly despise. But I quickly thought of other examples of this trope. The video game Sonic Generations is a more level-headed example, where the modern Sonic teamed up with the classic Sonic and they remade some of the old levels in 3D. Sega has no real reason to despise the 1990s Sonic the Hedgehog (at least the Japanese version, they seem to hate the American incarnations of Sonic like the cartoons), so they treated both versions fairly. Someone else brought up the Garfield example, which provides the perfect image to illustrate the trope in action. Not every example ends up bashing the earlier versions of the characters, but a good many do. I prefer the ones that don’t.
My most recent trope, launched a couple years ago now. I started to notice a lot of the music videos I watched from goth and synthwave bands were either filmed on VHS or used a VHS filter, in an effort to capture a nostalgic 1980s aesthetic. Someone familiar with VHS can discern the difference between a filter and the real thing quite easily. It’s a relatively new trope, having only emerged after the advent of the DVD, making it exclusively a 21st century trope. It’s hard to say exactly where and when it started, but I started noticing it around the mid-2010s. They often make it look like the worst, most warped and degraded VHS tape you could ever find (especially some of the filters do this), which is a bit unfair to the medium, but that’s the reputation VHS has these days. The examples quickly piled up, and I had enough material to launch a trope. I’ve almost single-handedly written the whole page, although of course not all of it. My love of collecting VHS tapes was what led me to notice a trend not many people were talking about.
Conclusion
I guess it’s been a little while since I launched a new trope, but that’s because by now there are so few that haven’t been catalogued on the site yet. The majority of the ones I launched were within my first year or two on the site, back when there weren’t as many trope pages and launching them was much easier to do. You have to go through a lot more red tape to start a trope than you used to, thanks to people abusing the privilege. Even when I tried to start an index for Armenian Media on the site they made me launch it like a trope through the same process, having to gain approval of enough users and prove it was something the site needed. But who knows. Maybe I will discover another trope soon. In the meantime, I often start new works pages. That is still easy to do, for now, and I’ve done dozens of those. Of late, I’ve been doing the Oz books; before I got to it TV Tropes only had pages for the first three. I did the rest of L. Frank Baum’s books and a few of Thompson’s, and even a couple modern pastiches. In the near future I will start one for my own webcomic too, and in fact I’ve done a page for everything I published, from Odinochka to my fan fiction (and the fact that they still allow fan fiction to be catalogued on their site shows me that they haven’t completely lost their way, not many other wikis would allow that). The site is forever one of my homes on the internet.
