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No, this isn't a twitter tag.

It is, however, a brief summary of things, as twitter forces one to do.

Anyway, the numbers.
Number of things since I've been at college:

CD's obtained....................................5
Times I've done laundry......................2
Songs I've made................................1.5 (or so)
Posts (this one included).....................6
Roommates I have.............................5
Exams taken......................................1 (second on Monday, third on Wednesday, fourth on Friday.  Ugh)
People annoyed by.............................∞

No, not really.  I'm not that dumb.   But some people are!
Anyway, college is being mean.  I was going to the testing center today to take my second exam for Music Civilizations and the line was incredi-long.  So that was bad.  Then, five minutes later, I realize I didn't bring my wallet.  Which means I didn't have my Student ID.  Which means I couldn't take the test.  So now I get to go after class on Monday and pay a $5 late fee.  Boo.

That's about it.

Smash The Single: "Moves Like Jagger"

Good news, people!  Rock is dead!  Smash the Single isn’t (quite)!

So, Maroon 5 is this crappy pop-rock band from the ‘90s.  “Wait, Paul, you better check your facts, Maroon 5 wasn’t around until 2002.”  Sure, but they were around as Kara’s Flowers for long before them.  Yeah.  Wikipedia.

Anyhow, this song is dreadful.  Dreadfully boring.  It goes nowhere, never develops, and has all been done before.  Sort of.  There’s one thing I’ve never heard before that goes on in this song, but I would sooner be drawn and quartered and be forced to blind myself before I’d call it a virtue.

This whole idea of whistling in songs has gotten to be pretty popular recently.  So, Aqua-Marine 9 decided to take it to the logical next step: make it digital and heinous.

It’s not quite reached the point of auto-tune, but that can’t be far away.  Anyway, this abomination of all things decent is backed by a tasteless yet unsatisfying backdrop of processed two-chord guitar.  It’s boring.  Boring.  Boring.  Boring.  Soon, boring won’t even resemble a word anymore if this goes on.  Let’s grab some lyrics, that’s always promising:

Just shoot for the stars
If it feels right
Then aim for my heart
If you feel like
And take me away, make it okay
I swear I'll behave

You wanted control
So we waited
I put on a show
Now I make it
You say I'm a kid
My ego is big
I don't give a sh*t
And it goes like this

Hold on, what is going on here?  Someone was relying waaaay to heavily on this stream-of-consciousness style of writing.  This isn’t even coherent.  It’s just a bunch of random phrases.  What’s going on with the second verse?  That doesn’t make sense at all.  There’s only two lines in the first two verses that naturally seem to go together. “If you feel like and take me away, make it okay.”  That totally works.  Great job, Forest-Green 7.

Somewhere along the run we get this stagnant and ever so trashy dub bass going on.  Here’s the catch, though: it’s so distorted, you’ll never be able to tell if it’s actually playing notes.  It’s all crunch! 

Moving on to the chorus, which is actually just the verse with an extra-bland drum loop:

Take me by the tongue
And I'll know you
Kiss me till you're drunk
And I'll show you

You want the moves like Jagger
I've got the moves like Jagger
I've got the mooooooves... like Jagger

Is it just me, or is Great Expectations making a comeback? 

But honestly, what is the deal with this Jagger fellow?  He’s been around for a long time, why are people so obsessed with him all of the sudden?  Apparently, “Jagger” is super attractive, dances incredibly well, and is known for getting involved where he’s not wanted. 

Bland, bland, bland.  It’s boring.  The song, like my writing career, is headed nowhere.  Pathetic attempt, Cyan 2.

Single = Smashed

Double Header

Woo!  2 posts, 1 day.  Shut up.

Stressful day today.  Start things off, I find out I have the wrong edition of a textbook.  So that's nice that the bookstore sells the out of date version.  Anyway, I buy the new one, go back home, get the old one with receipt to scrounge back a measly 65%.  Then, I get told I should have exchanged them to get a full refund on the first one.  Thanks, people, for making your policies clear.  So, that sucked.

Then, I studied for a while.  Come back home and realize I forgot my keys and am locked out.  I felt like this:

All credit goes to XKCD.  Link: 

http://xkcd.com/36/  Also, read the mouseover text.

Anyway, yeah.  Then, I had a short (read: meager) lunch and went to Book of Mormon class.  Nothing to complain about there.  Except for the people with incredible amounts of knowledge that they are morally obligated to share with the rest of us.  As many times as they could.

So then I went straight to the testing center.  I was there for an hour and forty-five minutes and wrote eight and a half pages of essay.  It was awful.  Couple that with a cello lesson right after (that the room got changed for last minute) and I was pretty stressed.

So, again, no break, straight to evening class of Audio: Basic Principles.  Too bad everything we discussed in there I had learned previously in my Physics class THAT'S A PREREQUISITE FOR THE CLASS.  I only bring it up because no one seemed to understand the concepts.  It was annoying.  And I was exhausted.

Then, no dinner (it's 7 PM now, mind you), I head to an Audio Engineering Society meeting.  It was okay.  It was fine.  There wasn't a lot of food there.  That's about all.

So now it's approaching 10 and I'm blogging.  Great.  What am I doing, I have homework and lots of it.  Crap.  This is awful.

Internet: you are an awful, nasty, horrible place.

Secret

I'll let you in on a secret:  I hate blogging.  It's true.

Secret 2: I love being heard.  Weird, right?

So, I guess the whole  blogging thing is about being heard, but no one really gets that heard.  I mean, no big deal, I'm not out to change the world or anything, but I hate shouting into the expanse, which is really all blogging is.  Also, I am aware that I'm getting annoying, especially since for the first part of my blogs I complain about blogs and then talk about music.

So Blind Pilot's new album came out today (you see what I did there?).  I listened to about half of it via .wav download.  It's no 3 Rounds and a Sound.  That album is a masterpiece.  The problem with this album is that they're trying too hard.  Also, it's poppy.  Very poppy.  Don't love how it's mixed at all.  Tonally, all the elements are there that were in the first album, I feel like.  But aesthetically, it's an entirely different color and texture than I expected.

The whole exposure thing may have ruined them as a band.  Now they feel obligated to be mixed a certain way and have kind of given away their original sound.  They still have their harmonies, but they're dumbed down by the mixing, it seems.  There's just too much of a pervading relaxed feel and not enough raw emotion, especially in the title track.  Also, they added electric stuff.  I'm not opposed to that, but it feels out of place.  It feels like everything wasn't arranged as well.  With their last album, all the songs felt really organic and natural, but this one is really bland, comparatively.  I don't know.  Whatever.  I'll wait for my vinyl.

Obligatory picture.  P.S. I love this comic.

Update: Good news, the second half of the album is TONZO better.

Blag

So, this whole bloggy thing is weird.  I mean think about it:
you post stuff that is potentially incredibly adverbially personal, with the expectation that anyone can and will read it.  But the dark truth is absolutely no different than before the blog era—no one cares.
That's right people.  No one cares what I post.  No one really wants to read what a freshman has to say.
Poop.  Cat urine.  Pillowcases filled with human hair.
So what I'm saying is this: ducks.

Okay.  So NPR is pretty great.  They're streaming a minimum of three (3) (!) wonderful albums right now.  First up, we have Blind Pilot's follow up to their masterful 2009 debut, 3 Rounds and a Sound, titled We Are the Tide.  Now, hardcore fans will notice that Blind Pilot has already played, in some form, three of the nine songs on the album.  That's 1/3 of the album!  (it's good to test your math skills once in a while).

Next up is Neon Indian's second album, titled Era Extraña.  I don't know what it means (without using Google translate) either.  But I do know that Neon Indian makes some great lo-fi electronic glitch music.  So that's cool.

And NPR is also streaming the next release from A. A. Bondy, Believers.  So yeah.  NPR iz kewl.
Update: Apparently, NPR is also streaming the new St. Vincent album as well.