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Vanilla Video

We’ve finally caught up with the times and turned overwrought bloggies into easily digestible videos. Here’s the latest on the age-old Vanilla Ice vs. Queen controversy. We, of course, side with the former.

Tyson Video

Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo

Yodeling was inspired by donkeys. Bored shepherds in the alps needed a way to pass the time and found inspiration in their asses. They sang to the mountains with donkey voices and the mountains sang back, or another yodeler, or a donkey.

Yodeling is one of the manliest forms of singing. You start with your chest voice and then move up to your head voice and back down to your chest voice. It is very sexy.

The classic yodel starts on the 5th, goes up to the major 3rd, and then down to the 1, like a doorbell. The vowel sounds ah, oh, and oo are usually sung with the chest voice, while ay and ee are in falsetto.

The classic donkey bray also involves a jump from chest to head voice. Beginning high on the “hee,” down to the “haw” and back up again. This donkey brays in a perfect octave of Cs as if bred for pedagogy.

Yodeling is well-suited to every kind of music, especially progressive rock. My favorite band Focus features yodeling in their 1971 hit “Hocus Pocus.” Focus is the greatest band ever and “Hocus Pocus” is the national anthem of the Netherlands. Donkeys should be proud of the music they’ve inspired. Horses can’t compete.

Dun Dun Duuun

There are three notes for when shit gets real. The popular “Dun Dun Duuun” has been around for centuries and pops up in every piece of media. You know what notes I’m talking about when I say “Dun Dun Duuun.” There’s even a Wikipedia entry for “Dun Dun Duuun!”

A dun on the Eb, another dun on the C, and a final duuun on the F#. This music interval is the infamous diabolus in musica, a tritone between the C and F#. This interval is so evil that medieval churches banned it. The final duuun is a type of diminished chord. At least that’s how it sounds to my tinnitus-y ears. I’m not a blind autistic guy, so I can’t perfectly break down a 10-note chord.

Technically, the chord is a F#6(#11) or a Gb6(#11). I know some music nerd is going to get mad at me for being so enharmonically disgusting. But if you think of the above example in G minor with a latent IV V cadence, it makes sense to mix and match sharps and flats.

These notes have been widely used as a shorthand for suspense—in Victorian melodramas, radio, and cartoons—so you know they’re the right notes.

“Dun Dun Duuun” might have inspired (or been inspired) by the dino-brawl from Fantasia with The Rite of Spring providing the score. Three similar notes play over the death of the stegosaurus (not my favorite dinosaur).

Dick Walter recorded the popular sting known as Shock Horror (A), but he says he probably got it from his mom’s old melodramas. It must be nice to have composed a piece of music that people know phonetically. The sting is timeless owing to its orchestral sound, but it’s a little long for today’s audiences.

There is a new suspense sting in town that is gaining popularity—the alert sound from the game Metal Gear Solid. In keeping with refinement culture, the alert sound is even more economical than dun dun duuun. This is a single dun, or rather a ree! with strong feline energy.

This is the suspense sting that zoomers are familiar with because they play videogames rather than listen to Victorian melodramas on a restored 19th-century Victrola gramophone. Or wait maybe they do do that.

The alert sound is a diminished seventh chord, a very goofy chord indeed. It’s a close relative of the major sixth sharp eleventh (dun dun duuun chord) with a one note difference. Instead of a major third, this chord has a minor third. In fact, it’s all minor thirds, which is why it’s so clownish.

When I was a young’un, I used the diminished seventh chord exclusively with no regard for my audience or my own ears. I was trying to be Stravinsky Jr. Now that I’m older I’m more into the maturity of the major sixth sharp eleventh chord, even if I can’t get my enharmonic spellings correct.

FEMA Emergency Alert Tones

FEMA attacked everyone’s phones this week with a couple dissonant tones. No one in America could escape them. It’s nice to know we’re all connected by something so horrible. Sometimes I forget there’s a society out there, stuck as I am in my solipsistic bubble-boy existence.

I actually turned my phone off on Wednesday afternoon, because I’m a schizo conspiracist. Most people don’t know how to turn their phones off, or they choose not to know, so they were forced to hear the FEMA music, a 5G MK-Ultra torture session to excite their spiked blood.

Since nothing ever happens on time anymore, this was an exciting event, like live television. One by one, the phones of the masses sounded off with the dreadful tones.

The emergency alert is a high-pitched whole-tone interval of half-flat A’s and B’s blaring in 11/8 time. The government uses odd-time signatures to scare you, man.

The same tones are used for Amber Alerts and the Emergency Broadcast System, so they must be some official tones that the government likes to torture people with. Most likely the CIA developed these tones by experimenting on prisoners and orphans.

This comfy message used to come on late-night TV in the old days:

I guess if the government is giving you and your unvaxxed friends a heads up that they’re about to throw you into the FEMA camps, you want it to sound as annoying as possible.

The mild hysteria surrounding this event harkens back to the halcyon days of the cozy Cold War that warms the cockles of my boomer heart. It makes me nostalgic for my childhood spent ducking and covering under my school desk, playing with my nuclear shadow, and watching 80s action movies that I substituted for having a real personality.

Nice Chords

I’ve been obsessed with these two chords lately. The first is a Bb major with a C root, and the second is a C major with a Bb root. C/Bb and Bb/C. The bass moves up from Bb to C, while the top moves down from C to Bb. It has an up yet down feeling.

Halfway between the Lydian and Mixolydian modes, the two chords seem to be of two minds. Lydian in the bass. Mixolydian up top.

Here’s how to play it on guitar.

I would like to see hundreds of songs written with these chords because they’re so damn nice. If you were thinking of write a Mixolydian song with a simple I to VII chord progression, or if you were writing a Lydian song with a I to II, consider combining them both at once to create a mix of Mixolydian and Lydian. Maybe call it: Mix-Of-Lydian.

Lost Sound

Lost was peak Hollywood television. Long before the bulimic formula of consuming entire seasons in a sitting, viewers would have to wait an entire week in between cliffhangers, discussing single episodes around the watercooler like rats. The average TV-goer would’ve thought about an episode the next day and possibly envision in their mind’s eye what would happen on the next episode.

People in those days were quasi-conscious beings with a rich internal life made up of movie and television scenes. There was no streaming on-demand, no infinite feed, or phantasmagorial reel. This was boomer TV. Now everything happens at the same time, everywhere all at once, so nothing really matters.

Lost was notable for its musicless opening. Sure it was an electronic Kubrick ripoff, but it did its job in timely fashion. The in-show music was of the orchestral tugging-on-the-heartstrings variety, but the intro and outro were noise-based. And based they were!

Every Lost-appreciater knows well the ending thud. In the first few episodes, it was more of a timpani, but they eventually settled on this little beauty.

Like the sound of J.J. Abrams blowing on his glasses to clean them. Or the sound of J.J. Abrams blowing hot smoke up your ass. Or the soft fart of a smoke monster?

Lying under all that noise, there is a low C2. This is the same ominous note that Mike Tyson composed his entrance music out of. Perhaps the Lost sound-designers were inspired by Tyson’s leitmotif.

I think this sound starts with a “P.” How would you write it phonetically? Let me know in the comments.

J.J. Abrahams is known for his “mystery box” formula of TV writing, a means of dragging viewers along on a wild goose chase, because we all know it’s not about the goose so much as the wild chase that leads to nothing.

This was before J.J. killed Star Trek and Star Wars. Who knows what franchises he’ll kill in the future? The Wings reboot? Regarding Henry the Second? Somehow this guy keeps getting work in Hollywood and it’s nigh impossible to say why.