Hurt Gorillaz

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In the sixties, cars only lasted a few years. Assuming your automobile did not need repairs when it rolled off the truck, like the Chevy Lance's father purchased that had no reverse pin, or the Chrysler my father bought that caught fire on the way home from the dealership, it was only a matter of time before you ended up at the gas station, where there was a mechanic to change belts and perform other surgeries required to keep your motor running. And although we occasionally hear of cars overheating on the Grapevine, the needle on most cars' temperature gauge barely moves. Despite Toyota's recent woes, cars, if not quite bulletproof, are expected not to break. You can drive Hondas for 200,000 miles trouble-free. Automobiles may be expensive, but you can keep the same machine for a decade, quite happily.

But those days of the lame Vista-Cruisers were half a century ago.

Let me put that in perspective. When my family owed lame cars in the sixties, they'd only been making cars for sixty years. Now, they've been making them for fifty years more! Those cars of yore were only halfway through the life cycle. Those pieces of shit were a long time ago!

Just like classic rock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like classic rock as much as the next guy. I saw the Who perform "Tommy" at the Fillmore East. Did you?

But that was back in '69.

And that was forty years ago.

And now it's 2010.

Yup, TWENTY Ten. So many years have gone by that we now know how to pronounce the year, we're in the teens in case you weren't paying attention. Hell, no one could come up with a name for the first decade of the twenty first century until it was over, and if you call them the "aughts" now, you'll still get mostly blank stares.

In other words, it's time for new music.

Let's be clear. Kids know nothing. They listen to the hit parade before their pubic hair grows in. If you're that young, or a parent subjected to Radio Disney, you know a lot of current material. Most of which will curdle the milk of an oldster. But oldsters want new music. Something more than the bland Susan Boyle, who proved that we're willing to lay our money down, if you just tell us what to listen to.

And that's the big problem. Not so much the lack of good music, but the inability to find it, to connect with it.

Which brings us to the Gorillaz.

Not a big fan of Damon, not a bit fan of the band. But searching for something new on the satellite yesterday, I heard "Stylo".

Have you heard this track?

Dial it up here:

http://www.bu2z.com/video/gorillaz-stylo.html

It sounds like Kraftwerk is playing in a roller disco while a hip-hop deejay is spinning vinyl in the background, all the while an MC toasting above.

This is great. Not phenomenal. Not Gnarls Barkley "Crazy" stupendous, but extremely fulfilling. Because it just FEELS GOOD!

Great music is like pornography. To paraphrase that Supreme Court justice, YOU KNOW IT WHEN YOU HEAR IT!

We can argue over the disco roots, can decipher and analyze the lyrics, but the key point is you feel so fucking good listening to this song.

Which was leaked a month ago.

Yes, I'm going to be inundated with e-mail from hipsters, telling me I'm late to the party. I could make excuses, say that I knew the song had leaked, I just hadn't listened to it, but that's not the point. The point is hipsterdom is irrelevant. Now we're all hipsters. Deep into our own niches. And don't tell me your niche is better than mine. That's so twentieth century. But how am I going to find out what's good in your niche when I don't even have enough time to explore my own?

Quite a headscratcher. But when I discover something as good as "Stylo", I'm hungry like the wolf for more good new music. I started pushing all the satellite buttons. Which is how I discovered Hurt's "Fighting Tao".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGlhTotwaeM

It's a funny thing about heavy music. You're drawn in, you dial it up because you're alienated and angry, but when you listen to it all your problems fall away, you feel happy and powerful.

Tell me "Fighting Tao" is derivative. Tell me it's akin to Tool. Even go deep and say Hurt changed its sound after the band lost their major label deal. All I'll say is as an angry fuck, music like "Fighting Tao" is the aural rabbit hole I like to dive down into not only to recharge my batteries, but energize me. Anthemic rock, beholden to few restrictions, long-haired guys exploring in their basements with their amps turned up to 11.

But, ironically, it's the soft passages that make "Fighting Tao" so good, juxtaposed against the full force screaming.

Somewhere in my memory bank, I'm aware of Hurt. But if I've ever heard any of their music prior to last night, I couldn't pick it out of a lineup. But when I heard it long after dark on Octane, I couldn't change the channel. I was waiting for it to get bad, but it never did, it only got better.

You get to a point where you can't live in the past.

Then again, when the present becomes too confusing, that's where you retreat. That's what the NFL did. And nostalgia can be comforting. But it's not as exciting as discovering something new that touches your soul, that shines like an exquisite diamond in between your ears.

Can Classical Music Make Your Kids Smarter?

Philip Glass via last.fm

CLASSICAL SPICECan Classical Music Make Your Kids Smarter?

The buzzword, "Mozart Effect", has renewed the interest in classical music and caused educators to take renewed interest in music education. How does classical music affect the brain? Some sources say it has quite an effect. In fact, so much of an effect as to make former Georgia Governor Zell Miller give a free compact disc or cassette tape of classical music to the parents of all babies born in his state's 100 hospitals in 1998. Miller, an avowed country-music lover, is convinced that music can stimulate brain development in young children. "Listening to music at a very early age affects the spatial, temporal reasoning that underlies math, engineering, and even chess," he says. "And having an infant listen to soothing music helps trillions of brain connections to develop."

So, does listening to Mozart Affect Spatial IQ? In a previous well publicized experiment published in 1993, Rauscher and colleagues, of the University of California Irvine, reported that listening to Mozart (compared to relaxation instructions or silence) produced a brief but significant increase in performance of a spatial IQ task. More recently, Rauscher et al have replicated and extended their findings (Neurosci. Letters, 1995, 185, 44-47). In this study, they used the same task as in their first experiment but extended the types of listening experienced. Seventy-nine college students were divided into three groups: silence, Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos, K448, (the same piece that produced the positive results in the 1993 study) and a group that heard a minimalist work by Phillip Glass. Only the Mozart group showed a significant increased spatial IQ score. Rauscher stressed that all classical music that is highly structured and complex has the same effect. "What we think music is doing is stabilizing the neural connections necessary for this kind of spatial-temporal ability," says Ms. Rauscher, who is now an assistant professor of cognitive development at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

In fact, it is now theorized that listening to classical music stimulates the entire brain; the left hemisphere processes information in more sequential, analytical ways the the right hemisphere in more visual, non-linear, and imaginative ways. Anecdotal evidence supports the thesis that the greatest scientists are those who have had extensive exposure to music. It is believed that Einstein, a devoted amateur violinist, was able to understand the deepest implications of his theory of relativity by imagining himself riding a light beam.

Exposure to classical music is an important element of a well-rounded education. Having it in the home is just as important as having it in the schools. And exposing children and adults at any age can be beneficial, as well as enjoyable. Classical music is timeless and reaches across generations with some of the greatest melodies ever written.