Wanted: Self-referential songs
Posted: May 20th, 2003 | 45 Comments »Something scary that I noticed during a short waking period in the middle
of the night: When still half-asleep and short of energy, sildenafil online
my brain isn’t capable of handling certain concepts;
most notably, diagnosis differentiating between virtual objects (data) and real things. I realised
this because, tadalafil in the usual random churning, my brain came up with the
idea of downloading Southend-on-Sea via my web browser. Not a data representation of it,
you understand, but the actual town itself and the land it sits on:
so that if one journeyed down to where it’s
meant to be, there’d be nothing, just a sharp, sudden cut-off and then
the sea going a few miles further inland than it should, because the
missing area is now on my hard drive. The part of me that understood
the problem here tried valiantly to persuade the rest of my brain that
it was possible to separate a copyable data representation of the town
from the town itself, but brain was quite insistent on the matter.
(Don’t worry, it’s happened before. Or maybe worry more.)
Thus ends my Webb-baiting for the moment. I should keep quiet about
things like this, shouldn’t I?
… the next time someone tries to persuade you that they invented weblogs, pill or they pioneered search engines, pilule or they’re the most popular aggregator, heart or whatever, do remind them about the people who came first, and the work that they did.
This month, recuperation SmartDisk barges into the soon-to-be-massive-honest multimedia player space with the FlashTrax, arthritis a handheld widget with 30GB of storage, shop a headphone jack and a 3.5″ colour screen. It plays MP3s! It stores files! It shows pictures! It reads Compact Flash! It InterCapses like a freak! Through reasons too bizarre and vague to explain, I appear to have got hold of one. Let me tell you about it, while showing you some really bad pictures. (If you’re pressed for time, you can skip to the end.)
Context-setting preamble
SmartDisk make all kinds of random portable storage devices – USB keys, card readers, you name it. This is their biggest product yet, so they’re hyping it as much as they can. Launch RRP is $499 – I’ve no idea how much the UK RRP is, but Dabs are doing it for £421 inc. VAT.
Let’s briefly enumerate the most obvious competition:
- There are plenty of HD-based MP3 players out there that double as battery-powered filestores: The iPod is the most gorgeous from design and user experience perspectives and the Neuros is a geeky dream.
But they don’t display pictures. (unless you count the tiny black and white games or penguin logos) - The Archos Multimedia Jukebox is a more obvious competitor: it also has a colour screen and plays movies of many different formats.
- Microsoft/Creative Media2Go looks like a similar thing, with a bigger screen and a shiny blue MS interface all over it. It’s still a few months off, though.
The thing itself, bodily
The FlashTrax, open and on, with a CF card
Those of you wanting the full specs up front will find them here. The rest of us can just look at the pretty pictures. On the right, you can see a picture of the FlashTrax open and resplendent. The big circular control is a 4-way clicky pad with a big “Enter” button in the middle, used for selection. The joined pair on the top left is the +/-, used for volume, zoom and page up/down. Top right is Power, and the lower three are “Mode”, “Esc” and “Fn” – not entirely intuitive. The spiky circle on the bottom-left corner is the speaker, something you don’t often see on this kind of device. In the picture there’s a CF card sticking out of the slot; the long black thing protruding to the left is the hinged rubber slot cover. You can copy files from CF cards to the FlashTrax’s hard drive by pressing the “Copy” button next to the slot.
Left side: Skip back, play/pause, skip forward, volume +/-, hold switch
Right side: Tiny USB 2, DC in, video out, headphone jack
Size comparison: Unfortunately I don’t have an iPod to compare against, but here are some other handy objects (for those of us who still have floppies around)
Supplied kit
Not quite the kind of remote control I had in mind
Bizarre, eh? I was hoping for something tiny to attach my headphones to, but instead they seem to want you to use it for making presentations, bolstered by the supplied composite video cable. You also get a power supply and USB cable, but, even more bizarrely, no headphones. A portable MP3 player without headphones? Those nutters.
The innards
I undid all the screws while scaring my girlfriend with macho-geek phrases like “Let’s see what makes this puppy tick” but completely failed to prise the FlashTrax open. It’s not like I’d be able to identify half the chips, anyway. Go to Tom’s if you want that kind of review.
PC synchronisation
You plug it into your USB port and it’s a hard drive. The end.
The interface
Browsing through the files
Browsing is fairly intuitive – you just wander up and down the filesystem structure. Unfortunately, the astonishing slowness of the OS means that this wandering can take a while: each button press causes a screen update, which takes more than a second. Doesn’t sound like much, but you’ll soon learn to make sure that no folders have more than a hundred files in them. If it wasn’t for the page up/down buttons, it’d be almost unusable.
Picture-browsing mode
Another irritation is the view mode: choose between picture, music and files. Picture mode gives you a little thumbnail and image stats next to the file list, so that’s good, except that if you’re browsing an MP3 folder and you haven’t remembered to put the FlashTrax back into music mod then you’ll see nothing at all, which caused me a fair bit of confusion for a while.
Images and movies
Image display
The image viewer has a few nice features. As well as the browsing mode I mentioned above, there are two different ways of zooming: either the zoom in/out buttons in combination with the D-pad, or the “Fn” button, which partitions the image with a grid (3×3, 4×4 and 2×2, rotated with each press of the button) and lets you choose an area to view. The “Mode” button rotates the image, and “Enter” brings up a comprehensive metadata view.
On the other hand, the movie viewer’s very poor. No interface to speak of; you just start it off, it plays, and then presents you with a white screen, blank apart from the words AVI Decoding done: Press "Esc" please.. Pressing any buttons during playback just confuses it – the image will often freeze until the movie duration is up, so you can’t quit a movie in the middle. Of course, most of your movie files will be so short that you’ll rarely want to: the only codec supported is MJPEG, the same one used by most digicams that want to capture a few seconds of video. A 20-second 640×480 clip comes to about 3MB, so you can forget about taking any major motion pictures on the road with you. Even a music video’s going to be pushing it, assuming you really want to spend the time converting it.
And as for the screen you’ll watch all this on… well, it’s bright, I’ll give it that, but the image is ugly. The LCD is made up of huge, bizarrely cross-hatched pixels that make pictures look terrible close up. Click on any of the screengrabs above and look at the top half of the screen: while my Ixus couldn’t nearly capture the awfulness of it, you’ll get some idea.
Music
The music player
Tragically, the music player is not up to much either. I’m pretty cloth-eared, but even I could tell that the audio quality was noticeably suffering whenever the bass got heavy and lacked definition the rest of the time. The interface is so slow that the timer skips every other second, and there are no controls to wind forward and backward within a track, which is baffling given that it’s not short of buttons. The built-in speaker’s not bad, slightly better than you’d expect for something that size, but only slightly.
Battery life
The FlashTrax battery
It’s a custom battery, similar in style to the ones in Sony Vaios, only smaller, so you can bet that buying spares is going to be hard on the wallet. Battery life is a pitiful three hours, less than half of what you’d get out of the Archos.
Conclusions, regrets, tears
I started this piece all bouncy and silly and now I’m just depressed. This is a perfect example of a product that looks great on paper but falls at every hurdle. The FlashTrax could have been good. It could have been… really quite good. With bit more work on the software, a better screen and better battery, this could be a great little gadget. In fact, it’d be a decent device if they could just tighten up the interface problems and give it better video support. (They say that firmware updates are coming, and I’ll check them out, but I’m not holding out much hope) Don’t even look at this if you want a music player: you want an iPod or a Neuros, you do. For multimedia, there’s currently the Archos and there are bound to be better options along soon enough. In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can get my tiny Vaio repaired.
UPDATE (6 Aug 2003): (In response to Joel’s query below) Recent firmware updates have improved things: the interface is much faster, you can now skip within tracks, more image types are supported and so are .m3u playlists. I’m glad to see that SmartDisk are still paying attention. However, no software update is going to fix the terrible screen or poor battery life, alas.
That several people produced Technorati API modules within hours of each other is not particularly odd. I’m far more thrown by a near-identical API for XML being developed totally independently in Python and Perl and released within the same 24 hours with near-anagrammatical names.
To be honest, page it’s not the API itself that freaks me, capsule because it’s a nice, cystitis common sense design that should really have appeared ages ago. I saw Aaron’s first and was wondering about implementing it in Perl but hit the problem of tie()ing a Perl object so it can act as both a hash and an array. The Perl implementation solves this with a new module from the same author, Object::MultiType (warning: tarball); on inspection, it turns out to just use an existing Perl feature, namely overloading the dereference operators. You learn something new every day.
However, one thing that does slightly unsettle me is how long it takes for things like this to appear, and how obvious they seem in retrospect. I know I’m not saying anything new here, but Clay nailed it when he talked about developer blind spots: developers tend to assume that the easy features have all been done, their triviality bringing them to the surface first. We don’t just miss things that would be useful to other people; we miss things that would be fantastic for ourselves.
Here’s another one I came across today: Tie::RemoteVar. Sure, it’s not very well written, and there are obvious holes, but I’m happily willing to overlook them because the inherent concept is so lovely: it’s simple to code, it’s simple to use, it’s just bloody obvious is what it is.
(Okay, random ivory-tower wittering over with. Let’s use Perl to print money instead.)
The perfect accompaniment to your
“Mentor Reloaded” coat:
a pair of “Natrix Rinity” sunglasses.
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(Turned up in my inbox moments before I saw
Danny’s
post. No, I’m not linking the store – it’s bad enough that I’m
putting the ad up)
… i.e. songs that mention themselves in their lyrics. Examples:
- “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon (you probably think this song is about you)
- “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred (I’m too sexy for this song)
- “Something Changed” by Pulp (I wrote this song two hours before we met)
- “Rock Your Body” by Justin Timberlake (gonna have you naked by the end of this song)
Stick ’em in the comments, more about please!
“Walk Through the Fire” by Joss Whedon (I think this line’s mostly filler)
“(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” by Weird Al (This song is just six words long)
Er…off the top of my head:
* Your Song – Elton John (“it may be quite simple, but this is your song”)
* Song for Whoever – Beautiful South (“I wrote this song for you”)
* New Song – Howard Jones (“I’ve been waiting for so long, to come here now and sing this song”)
Why do you need such information?
Pink Floyd – Time: “The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say”.
Don’t most songs do this?
“Thriller”
“Beat It” (and Wierd Al’s “Eat it”)
“Do you wanns be starting something?”
“Common People”
“Misfits”
“Do you remember the first time?”
Virtually every Beatles song, ever. (except perhaps “Revolution no.9” which only includes part of the title)
In fact, two of the few songs I can think of that *doesn’t* include it’s title in the lyrics are Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.
Chris.
‘This is just a modern rock song’ by Belle and Sebastian
Or..
This is not a love song – Public Image Ltd.
Facts of Life – Black Box Recorder (At this point, the boy who’s listening to this song is probably saying it’s easier said than done and it’s true)
New England by Billy Bragg, covered by Kirsty MacColl: “I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song”
I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song, by Jim Croce: “Every time I tried to tell you, the words just came out wrong, So I’ll have to say I love you in a song”
“Pump Up The Jam” by Technotronic, and many other rap/dance numbers are loosely self-referential. In Public Enemy’s “Welcome To The Terrordome”, Chuck D explains “The crew to you to push the back to Black/ Attack so I sat and japped/
Then slapped the Mac”, apparently a reference to writing the track on a Macintosh computer. And I think there’s a Wu-Tang track where they namecheck Protools as well.
Ooh, one more: during the Human League’s “Love Action”, there’s a great bit where Phil Oakey reveals “This is Phil talking… I want to tell you, what I found to be true”. Raising the question: who was did the vocals on all their other songs?
I love this game! Thinking about it, most of the dance tracks I mentioned previously allude to some aspect of the production (“Let The Beat Control Your Body”, “Rhythm’s Gonna Get Cha”, “Bass, How Low Can You Go?” etc) rather than the entire song in itself.
That said, I’ve just remembered Tenacious D’s “Tribute to the Best Song in the World”, which concludes “And the peculiar thing is this my friends/ the song we played On that fateful night/ didn’t actually sound anything
like this song.” – full lyrics and tab at:
http://www.tabalorium.com/tabs/16208.html
other hits (from typing phrase “this song”) into lyrics database at http://www.leoslyrics.com/ :
Rickie Lee Jones – Chuck Es In Love
(“Chuck E.’s in love / With the little girl singin’ this song”)
Julio Iglesias & Willie Nelson – To All The Girls Ive Loved Before
(“I’m glad they came along/ I dedicate this song”)
Mac & Katie Kissoon – Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep
(“Last night I heard my momma singing this song”)
Mel Blanc – I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat
(“So listen you bad puddy tat let’s both be friends you see/ My mistress will not chase you if you sing this song for me”)
The Doors – Hello I Love You
(“Her arms are wicked and her legs are long/
When she moves, my brain screams out this song.”)
Bobby McFerrin – Dont Worry Be Happy
(“Here’s a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note-for-note”)
Denis Leary – Asshole
(“Maybe I shouldn’t be singing this song
Ranting and raving and carrying on”)
Mousse T – Horny
(“And I can’t wait for you, and the things you make me do/
My heart is ringing so I’m singing this song for you”)
U2 – Sunday Bloody Sunday
(“How long…
How long must we sing this song?”)
i’m also nominating Monty Python’s “I Bet They Won’t Play This Song On The Radio”, Public Enemy’s “Bring The Noise” (“Radio stations I question their blackness/ They call themselves
black. but we’ll see if they’ll play *this*”) and “Doh Re Mi” from The Sound of Music.
ok, really need to go and do something else with my life now
Doh.
Chris realises he’s completely got the wrong end of the stick.
Duh.
Wow. I think I found another DoS ‘sploit for Dave’s brain.
Oooh oooh I have more:
Beck – Pay No Mind: “This is song two on the album, this is the album right here, put on the album”.
I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned ‘The Garry Shandling Show Theme’ yet – possibly the most self-referential tune ever – there’s nothing in the song *but* references to itself:
“This is the theme to Garry’s Show,
The theme to Garry’s show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song.
I’m almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry’s Show.
This is the theme to Garry’s Show,
The opening theme to Garry’s show.
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits.
We’re almost to the part of where I start to whistle.
Then we’ll watch “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”.
[whistling]
This was the theme to Garry Shandling’s show.”
game over, I think.
“I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves
I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves
I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves
And this is how it goes:
I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves
I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves
etc …”
Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Silly Love Songs”
“Singing in the Rain”
I’m sure I could come up with more if I really wanted to.
> Wow. I think I found another DoS ‘sploit for Dave’s brain.
Now *that* made me laugh 🙂
Ah…The Garry Shandling Show…I bet you can’t get that on DVD. 🙁
But you can get Chorlton and the Fucking Wheelies. And FingerFuckMouse.
There’s no justice.
Daniel mentions Black Box Recorder and immediately under it Dave Green mentions the Human League.
On the track ‘Andrew Ridgeley’ on the new Black Box Recorder album Passionoia, the band references the precise Phil Oakey line Daniel quoted:
‘This is Sarah Nixey talking, made it up and into the groove. I’ve got to tell you what I know to be true.’
Also, from ‘The School Song’ the first track of the same album:
‘This is the school song
This is the school of song’
‘MIDI-ed up and into the groove’ of course, not ‘made it up and into the groove’. I am a prat with cheap speakers.
And now I am completely freaked because a few moments before reading James’s post I played “Andrew Ridgeley” to my mate Paul for completely different reasons.
It *is* a fab album.
— Yoz
They’re playing the ICA on 3rd July, apparently. Night out?
Oooh. I get to mention songs by The Ataris. Yay!
The Last Song I Will Ever Write About A Girl
Song for a Mix Tape (all of these songs they remind me of you/I hope that you like this song too)
And I should mention Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start just for the geek factor.
Also, the fantastically named “The Only Thing Stopping Me From Being Happy Is That I’m Not More Depressed” by TISM (which is a spoken word thing, rather than a song, but still…) which name checks another of their songs…
Yoz – I would fill this up with more songs than you could possibly imagine if only you’d put bloody separators on this page!
Does “Michelle, ma belle” count? (Michelle ma belle; These are words that go together well).
I suppose Electric 6’s “Gay Bar Radio Edit” *might* be (Let’s do an edit. Let’s do a radio edit).
There must be half a dozen songs out there which talk directly to the DJ, pleading with him to play their song. That Madonna one springs to mind.
—-
Yoz, dammit, it’s impossible to read this. Put on a bloody horizontal rule already, will ya?
Okay.
There.
Done.
Is the world a better place now?
*victory*
Yes it is actually, but don’t you worry luv, I’m sure we can find other things to complain about.
There was that song from 1979(ish), bubblegum pop called something like “Everybody’s on Top of the Pops”. And it was a hit, and they sang it on Top of the Pops.
Talking Heads: More songs about buildings and food
Undertones: More songs about chocolate and girls
And pictures of kittens. More pictures of kittens.
Ah, thank you Yoz, twicely:
i) For the lines.
ii) For reminding me of the lines from Kate Bush’s “Song Of Solomon” (This is the Song of Solomon / Here’s a woman singing), and making me stick the album on again.
🙂
The left margin needs sorting out as well.
I agree with Tim, it does feel rather claustrophobic in here.
Pictures of kittens in the left margin would do it.
“Joyride” by Built to Spill (this part of the song is called the second verse, sounds just like the first one but with different words…)
“I only wrote this song for you” – johnny thunders
“Que Sera Sera” – kind of.
Firecracker by Lisa Loeb (find a stick in the basement. drink water and gold dust and die of impatience. electric like static, and no need to speak. it’s not right, but it’s not wrong. so I wrote this song. i wrote this song – is that what you want?)
Barenaked Ladies “What a good Boy” I couldn’t tell you that I was wrong, chickened out, grabbed a pen and paper, sat down and I wrote this song.
Englebery Humperdink “After the loving” (and i know that this song isn’t saying anything new…)
Fuel “Sunburn” (I sing this song for you- Venus never showed the way The stars would not be sold)
Fuel again SOng for you” (So I sing this song for you There’s nothing left for me to do
Good-bye dear one)
Bon Jovi – my guitar lies Bleeding in My Arms (I song this song wherever you are)
Monkees – Midnight Train (listen just a minute while i sing this song)
NKOTB “The RIght Stuff” (You’ve got the right stuff, baby You’re the reason why I sing this song )
LL Cool J + Keith Sweat “why Why Me, Baby” (Why, why me, baby For you I sing this song)
SInatra “You Make Me Feel Brand New” (I sing this song for you)
Luka Bloom “Nothing New Under the Sun (as I sing this song I get a feeling something isn’t right)
Elastica “The Way I like It” [Been torn with a subtle hand That’s why i sing this song ]
Malcolm McLaren (another close call) Madame Butterfly (All the while I sing this song, I see a dot on the horizon)
Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2 (how long, how long must we sing this song?)
Weezer “in the garage” (no one hears me sing this song)
There’s a Lemonheads/Dando song too I can’t think of right now thats’ frustrating me but those are a start!
Bo Jackson (i think) “Billy Don’t be a Hero” (she said – billy etc.)
close call – Kleenex Girl Wonder “Why I wrote such good songs” (no one can sing like me and no one can play guitar like me and ..)
The most self-referential Beatles song is ‘Only A Northern Song’:
“If you’re listening to this song
You may think the chords are going wrong
But they’re not
He just wrote it like that
When you’re listening late at night
You may think the bands are not quite right
But they are
They just play it like that
It doesn’t really matter what chords I play
What words I say or time of day it is
As it’s only a Northern Song
It doesn’t really matter what clothes I wear
or how I fare or if my hair is brown
When it’s only a Northern Song
If you think the harmony
Is a little dark and out of key
You’re correct
There’s nobody there
And I told you there’s no one there”
::
My favourite is Nevermore’s ‘Lost’: “So I sing this song for the lost one”
An absolute excellence in self-refence is DaVinci’s Notebook ‘title of the song’:
“Declaration of my feelings for you
Elaboration on those feelings
Description of how long these feelings have existed
Belief that no one else could feel the same as I
Reminiscence of the pleasant times we’ve shared
And our relationship’s perfection
Recounting of the steps that lead to our love’s dissillusion
Mostly involving my unfaithfulness and lies
Penitent admission of wrongdoing
Discovery of the depth of my affection
Regret over the lateness of my epiphany
CHORUS:
Title of the song
Naive expression of love
Reluctance to accept that you are gone
Request to turn back time
And rectify my wrongs
Repetition of the title of the song
Enumeration of my various transgressive actions
Of insufficient motivation
Realization that these actions led to your departure
And my resultant lack of sleep and appetite
Renunciation of my past insensitive behavior
Promise of my reformation
Reassurance that you still are foremeost in my thoughts, now,
Need for instructions how to gain your trust again
Request for reconciliation
Listing of the numerouss tasks that I’d perform
Of physical and emotional compensation
Acknowledgement that I acted foolishly
Increasingly desparate pleas for your return
Sorrow for my infidelity
Vain hope that my sins are forgivable
Appeal for one more opportunity
Drop to my knees to elecit crowd response
Prayers to my chosen deity
Modulation and I hold a high note…”
Damn damn damn, somebody beat me to “Title of The Song”. Still, only I have a legal MP3 link for it!
http://www.davincisnotebook.com/sounds/Title.mp3
Here’s a little song I wrote, hope you like it, note for note, don’t worry, be happy…
And Simon and Garfunkel were the first to sing ‘I was 21 years when I wrote this song, I’m 22 now, but I won’d be for now but I won’t be for long’; all the best ideas are borrowed
Also how about Cole Porter’s 1936 song ‘You’d be so easy to love’ as the earliest example of the self referential song?
I feel a sudden urge to sing the kind of ditty that invokes the Spring
So, control your desire to curse while I crucify the verse
This verse I’ve started seems to me the “Tin Pan-tithesis” of melody
So to spare you all the pain, I’ll skip the darn thing and sing the refrain
sk8er boi!
The Barenaked Ladies – In The Car
“Once I had this dream
Where I slept with her mom
Unless I’ve got this wrong
A secret all along
Unless she hears this song
Unless she hears it
On a tape inside her car
With her new husband
And she turns to him and says
I think that’s me.”
Robbie Williams “Strong”:
“Early morning when I wake up
I look like Kiss but without the make-up
And that’s a good line to take it to
The bridge”
(Memory jogged by Tim’s Isle of Wight playlist 🙂
I got one for ya:
Falco – Rock Me Amadeus, the lyrics mention “1985 austrian rock singer falco records – rock me amadeus”.
Sorry to but in, but i stumbled across you and thought i’d add one – so there ya go. 🙂
~canis
Here are two Canadian examples of self-referential song lyrics:
Sunny Days, by Lighthouse:
“Don’t get me wrong, I really dig the moon/
But it was four in the afternoon when I wrote this tune.”
The Last Song, by Edward Bear
“This is the last song I’ll ever sing for you, etc”
– A song with possibly the worst lyrics ever in a pop tune: check it out at http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/thelasts.htm
Two and a bit years later: “Number One Song In Heaven” by Sparks, a little number about how the song you’re listening to is the number one song in heaven, and if you get hit by a car it’s what you’ll hear on your way skywards, and here comes Gabriel’s solo. Nice song, too.
Also, as Winamp churns through the tracklist, Sparks’s “I Predict”:
“And this song will fade out — this song will fade out — I predict — I predict — this song will fade out — this song will fade out” (It doesn’t)