Dum-Diddly-DUMB

February 22, 2016January 26, 2016 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

I came across an article from May of 2015 (there are many on the subject) that mourned the dumbing down of American music based on the reading grade-level of the lyrics. The average ability one needs to read modern lyrics is a whopping second grade reading level. Hip hop scored worst, with short little repetitive words that needed only a first-grader’s ability to read. Country music was the Big Brain, with a reading level of third grade and a few months. I found that a bit shocking.

You can find one of those informative studies here http://seatsmart.com/blog/lyric-intelligence/
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There are many criticisms of such a study. One is that they only covered music in the last ten years. Was music really all that smarter 20, 30, 50 years ago? Another is that repetition dumbs down the word level:

(Ke$ha, TiK ToK, Billboard #1 January 2010) (NUMBER 1 SONG IN AMERICA)
I’m talkin’ bout – everybody getting crunk, crunk
Boys tryna touch my junk, junk
Gonna smack him if he getting too drunk, drunk
Now, now – we goin’ ’til they kick us out, out
Or the police shut us down, down
Police shut us down, down
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I’m not sure it’s the repetition that’s dumbing that down.
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The other major complaint is how reading scores are measured: most have a mathematical formula that juggles word length, sentence length, or syllable length, and messes them around until an average is found. This is not always accurate, especially with poetry or lyrics, which may have 100 words before coming to the actual end of a sentence.

I had to find this out for myself. After all, we survived songs like “Doo Wah Diddy” and “Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb.” I took a variety of older songs and plugged them through https://readability-score.com/, which uses fiv Child in school distracted_0 e different reading assessment tools to come to an average score. The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease was developed by the Navy, so that technical manuals wouldn’t get too difficult to understand. A score of 90 or better is good for a 6th-grade student, 60 or higher is good for high school students, and 30 or less is best left to college students (i.e., higher score is easier to read). Because the formula isn’t perfect it is possible, on the grade-level equivalent, to score well above a “grade” (as in, grade level 62). That’s the number of years of schooling you may need to understand it. Ideally, if it’s for the average Joe or Jane on the street, you want a grade level of 8. Don’t take it literally; just understand that the higher above 8 you go, the more complex it is to read.

Here was what I found when I ran nine popular songs through the analyzer:

Francis Scott Key, The Star Spangled Banner (1814) Everyone knows this one! Reading Ease: 87.6 (grade 7 or so). Average reading level – grade 7.3
Woody Guthrie, This Land is Your Land (1940) Come on! Okey folky here. Woody Guthrie was by far not an educated man. Reading ease: 33.8 (that’s in the college range). Average grade level: 37 (Blame no punctuation.)
Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock (1957) We’re talking Elvis. Hound dogs. Blue suede shoes. Reading ease: 77. 2 (high school). Average reading level: Grade 6.2
Frank Sinatra, A Very Good Year (1961) Thoughtful, but not Shakespeare, right? Average grade level: 11.6
The Supremes, Baby Love (1964) Oooh, Baby Love, the reading ease is 54, with a grade level of 14, which, again, is almost guaranteed to be a result of no punctuation.
Bob Dylan, The Hurricane (1975) Ok, folk music by nature is going to score higher, because it tells a whole story. I only did the first four stanzas. Reading ease? 16.3. Grade level? 24.7 Big long sentences with grammar!
Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) Let’s face it. Scaramouche isn’t in a Ginn Reader, or even a Lippincott or Scott Foresman. Reading ease? 43. Grade level: 16.3. That’s a senior in college. Thunderbolt and lightning.
The Police, De Do Do Do (1980) (Talk about repetition!) reading ease: 63. Grade level: 47.
REM, Drive (1992) Reading ease: 101.9 (that’s grade 5ish). Average reading level: 2.2 Ah! So music DID die off at the end of the 80’s!

And just for kicks (because it came up on my iTunes): Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Substitutiary Locomotion (1971) (remember, this is a Disney kid’s movie): Reading Ease: 4.1 (that’s PhD level), and a grade level of 18. A catchy kid’s tune.

#What it means:
Okay, even I was surprised. I expected lyrics to have come down, but I didn’t realize it was by that much. Don’t bother with “scores,” just read the lyrics. I did The Police as a joke, because that much repetition was certain to skew things down, but no: the rest of the lyrics have words like jamming transmissions, not baby words. I thought for sure Woody Guthrie would prove a point, but his lyrics, too, are full of long words and long sentences and imagery. Elvis? Really? Spider Murphy played the tenor saxophone, Little Joe was blowin’ on the slide trombone. It’s not junk, junk. The Hurricane I knew would score high – it’s about as close to an entire novel as you can sing without going back into Child Ballads.
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While the measuring tool isn’t precise – measuring sentence length in a lyric that doesn’t use punctuation gives false positives as to complexity – the word lengths counter some of it (we know it obviously does not take a PhD to understand Police lyrics). All in all, I have to agree: many modern music lyrics are about as intelligent as dirty dishwater, and the content is worthless. All you need to succeed is some gibberish, a loud driving beat, a fast groove of the hips, and a really good publicity team to get you air time. The music industry is about money; artists are about the art and the message. Hence we’re here discussing Sinatra and Elvis and Queen, who haven’t been around in decades, and no one remembers who had the number one hit four years ago.

Front Row Seating

February 9, 2016February 5, 2016 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

“The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” – Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2

Back in the 80’s, when we still had a Shakespeare Theater down in Stratford, CT, there was a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that was put on for all the high schools to come and see. Of all the plays, Macbeth seemed like it would be the most interesting, with witches and murder and blood, and big velvety Elizabethan costumes. I was excited – anything for a field trip and a day out of class. Until we got there. Some idiot had decided the best way for 1,500 rowdy high school kids to understand Shakespeare was to imagine it, with a play that had no scenery and no costumes – the entire set was draped in billowing soft blue nylon fabric, like the green-screens of modern movie-making, and the actors all wore tight-fitting outfits of the same blue, as if they’d just escaped from some monochromatic ballet. That was it. It was a total disaster. The audience was so bored and riled you couldn’t hear the dialogue for the catcalls. That is NOT the way to introduce children to Shakespeare.

The good thing is, you don’t have to be a Shakespeare scholar to enjoy a good play. Whether you’ve had to suffer through drudging high school productions of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or been dazzled on Broadway by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan performing Waiting for Godot, a play is not a bad thing. Perhaps your only exposure to waiting-for-godot-ian-mckellen-patrick-stewart theater has been dragging yourself through Oedipus or Antigone in school, not caring a flying duck about the role of the Chorus in Greek tragedy, just glad you scraped by and passed the test. The real tragedy of teaching plays as literature is that they are meant to be performed, not just read in a monotone like a stumbling seventh-grader who has no idea how to pronounce 15th century British comedies, let alone understand them. When performed, they come alive, like listening to a good movie on the television from the next room over. Even my five year old, with occasional explanations, could follow the movie version of Romeo and Juliet.

So if you’re a theater lover, or just a student struggling to understand Ibsen, Cheshire Library is ready to help! Our newest precious addition is a 25-volume audiobook collection of 250 plays and dramatic adaptions by L.A. Theaterworks. You won’t just hear the play, you’ll feel it, as you were meant to. The plays aren’t just read to you, but fully performed by an all-star cast of more than 1,000 actors you are probably familiar with – George Clooney, Calista Flockhart, Dan Castellaneta, Mark Ruffalo, Richard Dreyfus, Jean Stapleton, John de Lancie (who also wrote one of the Doyle adaptions), and so many, many more. Leonard Nimoy performing War of the Worlds with fellow Star Trek actors? Yeah, that’s in there too. Neil Simon, Chekhov, O’Neill, Miller, Shakespeare, Sophocles – they’re all here, ready to keep you entertained for a solid year of performances. Listen to one or listen to them all – you’ll be glad you did.

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Rocking Rock Opera

January 5, 2016December 30, 2015 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

Even in High Society, there aren’t many faster ways to clear a room politely than bring up the subject of Opera. Everyone gives a nod, a panicked smile, and then slowly backs out, unable to name a single one. If we took a poll, most people would probably say their exposure to opera consists of what they learned from Bugs Bunny http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mjbrz, or perhaps Animaniacs. Don’t worry, I’m not going to change your mind. You won’t get me to sit through an entire one, either, except maybe Aida. Any play with live elephants and camels is awesome.

So, what IS opera? Opera is a play, usually in acts, where all the dialogue is sung in an operatic style (and you know what that sounds like). The music is big, heavy, foreign, and so are the singers. Operetta is still an opera but usually much shorter, and they are often comedies. A musical is just a play where people burst into songs, or songs and dance now and then.

So where does Les Miserables fall? I liked that movie, and I hate opera! Les Mis is a bone of contention. It is not an opera, because the songs are not sung in the operatic style. It’s more than a musical, because all the dialogue is sung and there’s certainly nothing to dance about, like Oliver! dreaming of a real meal. So at best, for lack of a better term, the experts call Les Mis a sung-through, meaning there is some non-song dialogue, but the lines are sung without being part of a song (think of Javert and Jean Valjean’s confrontation in singsong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8WSysB5vKM). Some call Les Mis a “popera,” or pop-opera, but those aren’t exactly songs that will climb record charts, and others try to call it a rock-opera, which it is also definitely not.

So what then IS rock opera? At some point in your life, on some radio station, you’ve heard a version of “Pinball Wizard,” or “We Don’t Need No Education” (the technical title is “Another Brick in the Wall part 2”). Those songs come from the two most well-known Rock Operas, Tommy, and The Wall. A rock opera consists of a full-length story in which the story is told through song, but the music is entirely modern and popular.

Tommy, by The Who, was the first work known as Rock Opera (1969). Purists will say it is not opera because it is not sung in opera fashion; the fact remains, it is a full story told entirely in song. In short, as a child, Tommy witnesses his father kill his mother’s boyfriend, retreats into an autistic-like trance, and endures much abuse as his parents look for ways to break him free. They discover that, even though it doesn’t appear he can hear, speak, or see, he is a master at pinball, which they use to draw him out and return him to society. Yes, there are differences between the album, the play, and the movie version, but the flow of the story remains the same. The movie includes Tina Turner, Elton John, and Peter Frampton. ‘Nuff said.

Fastforward ten years. The Brits hit again, with the release of Pink Floyd’s The Wall in 1979. The Wall is a masterpiece of modern music, the story of a rock singer (Pinkerton Floyd) who builds a mental wall to insulate himself from the outside world, which he feels has abandoned him. The death of his father in WWII, his overbearing mother, his abusive teachers, his unfaithful wife are all bricks in his wall, until, isolated and alone, he festers until the court of his peers orders the wall be torn down and he be returned to the world. It’s a masterpiece of suffering, death, and rebirth, without a word of dialogue. The movie had mixed reviews, but remains faithful to the vision. Check out the concert version here.

A third, more modern piece (2004) that can be considered Rock Opera is Green Day’s American Idiot, which chronicles the “disillusionment and dissent experienced by (Jesus of Suburbia) a generation which came of age during various turmoil including the Iraq War.” What is it with wars creating Opera? Admittedly heavily influenced by The Who, the only real difference I see with American Idiot from its predecessors is it seems to be a LOT LOUDER. Songs like “Wake Me Up When September Comes” are just as worthy and beautiful.

Sure, some people try to lump Ziggy Stardust in here, and Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, but there is a difference between a “concept” album and a rock opera. Think of a concept album as a book of short stories around a theme, whereas a rock opera is an entire novel.

So if ladies in Viking horns screeching for the high notes aren’t your style, try a rock opera. Drama, intrigue, murder, drug addiction, infidelity, and rebirth, all set to some pretty catchy music – and sometimes a pretty good movie, too. What more can you ask for?

I (Finally) Read “It”

December 14, 2015December 9, 2015 / Susan O. / 1 Comment

I am not a fan of horror. I would not shut the shower door for ten years because Kolchak: The Night Stalker scared the daylights out of me. My father’s description of the movie Killdozer made me terrified of construction equipment – as if I wasn’t already, from a preschool nightmare involving dump trucks. I watched the original 1931 Dracula and got a bloody nose in sympathy. I won’t sleep in a room with a vacuum cleaner thanks to Zenna Henderson. I like sleeping at night, and I don’t need any more anxiety in my life. I have kids for that.

It was my mother who got me reading Stephen King. I was about twelve, sick in bed, and Night Shift, his book of short stories, came out. Wouldn’t you know it, the light from the bathroom at night struck every knob on the dresser at just the right angle so each one looked like an eye staring at me, just like the cover story. I only dared read half of them, and never enjoyed going to the dry cleaners again. But I read The Shining (I will NOT go into a hotel bathroom without a light on), read The Stand (his best, I think), Cujo, The Dead Zone (more my style), Firestarter (I needed a book for the train back from Canada) and Christine (Like I didn’t suspect that already). One thing you can say about King without ever reading his books: he doesn’t write short volumes.

But by Christine, I was Kinged out. The books were were getting to be too similar, and I moved on. That was how I missed reading It, the book everyone seems afraid of. I avoided it for the longest time, but it popped up in a series of references this year, and I decided the time had come to tackle it. I’d re-read The Stand, and The Shining, but nothing new of King’s in 30 years.

“It” tells the story of an evil presence that takes over the town of Derry, Maine, until a ragtag band of seven misfit children decide to take it on. Although the entity takes the shape of what scares a person most (werewolves, mummies, giant birds, etc), it often lures children to their deaths by taking the shape of a clown, Pennywise. I’ve never been afraid of clowns, though I understand the psychology behind it (like Daleks, you can’t read a clown’s frozen face, and it makes some people uneasy). I’m still not afraid of clowns; but I’m now nervous about balloons. Calling the evil “It” is a brilliant stroke of semantics – think of all the times you use the pronoun It: It was calling me. I tripped over It. It snuck up on me. I’m scared of it. You can’t help it; you can’t escape it. You talk about it all the time. Because you know it’s there. “It” can be anything, and you know it to be true.

But for everything anyone told me about the book, I think this is his worst that I’ve read. He’s written 55 novels, 200 short stories, comic books, films, has awards oozing out his ears – he knows what he’s doing. I don’t mind the back and forth nature of the story, bouncing between 1958 and 1985. The characters and style are classic King, but it is soooo long (1100+ pages), it really, really could have had sections of character description cut. It drags in places. It’s not the length: Game of Thrones is 1200 pages, but I read it with more gusto. King’s name-dropping of characters from his other works grated on me. One is cool, but not several. Don’t stick Dick Hallorann in your book, a man with a strong sense of Shining (or, if you’re a Simpsons fan, Shinnin’), and have a catastrophe or a presence about that he doesn’t get ESP on. You laid Hallorann out in detail in The Shining; you let him drift in It. Sometimes the action is too cartoonish: having a victim’s head pop out of a box on a spring and go boing ruins my tension. I understand it might be appropriate to scare a child, but I’m not a child. Dolores Claiborne smashing my ankles with a sledgehammer makes me lie awake in a sweat all night. Cartoon boings don’t. I won’t tell the ending, but after fighting tooth and nail to wade through 1100 pages, I wanted more of a bang for my effort. The original Stand was 800 pages or so, and that ended with a nuclear explosion.

Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t criticize King because he’s one of the most successful novelists of our time, and I don’t disagree with his talent. But perhaps he set his own bar too high. No one – not even Shakespeare – hits the nail of perfection every time. From the man who brought you Stand By Me, The Green Mile, Under the Dome, and so many, many wonderful tales, I just don’t think it’s his best.

What do you think is King’s best work – book or film?

Same Old Tune

December 4, 2015October 26, 2015 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

I am a semi-hard-core Pink Floyd fan. I’ve likely spent more hours listening to them than any other musical group, and I think I know the entire Wall album from memory – lyrics and orchestration. So when David Gilmour, who, along with Roger Waters wrote many of their greatest hits, came out with a new album, Rattle that Lock, of course I had to listen to it.

The album, I must admit, left me with mixed feelings. It’s a varied album, with some pieces (The Girl in the Yellow Dress) being almost classical jazz, and others being such classic Floyd in tone you can almost recognize lines from Learning to Fly (Echoes), and riffs straight from The Wall. Parts of it are cranking rock, and other parts are very ethereal and New-Agey in feel – not unlike inventive Floyd tracks from Dark Side of the Moon. There are even two instrumental tracks. It was good, it was fresh, but I’m still not sure if I liked it. I’m not a jazz person, no matter how hard I try, and though I love my Floyd, it’s 2015, not 1979, and I want to say, “Yes, it’s good, but what are you doing now?”

Which got me to thinking: Why is it often so easy to pick out a band/singer on the radio? Because they are often stuck in the same style that made them famous. Their songs are caught in a groove of sound – it’s a good sound, but it doesn’t change. Sometimes they try but the fans turn away, because it’s not “their” sound. Sometimes they do and it works beautifully (how many heavy metal bands have one or two incredible slow ballads, like Kiss’s Beth, or the Scorpions’ Still Loving You?). Listen to The Police’s Every Breath You Take – the first four songs are almost identical in format, all hits, but identical. I love R.E.M., but they get monotonous if you listen to six albums in a row. As George Thorogood said, “I only know four chords on the guitar, so of course all my songs sound alike.”

According to the internet, some of today’s popular bands are guilty of unoriginality and being one-trick ponies. Not even getting into Boy Bands, or Brittney, or other manufactured stars (it’s fair to place The Monkees here, too), too many artists sound – well, too much like themselves. Pete Townshend’s last albums drifted song to song like a dream; you couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began, and he’s a music legend. Ed Sheeran, Oasis, Ke$ha, Flo Rida, and the often-unfairly picked on Nickelback are among the worst offenders, by internet polls. Having a trademark “sound” is good, but a truly talented musician masters versatility.

So who, then, has successfully changed their tunes and embraced versatility over the years? Both Paul McCartney and Billy Joel have attempted branching out into classical music, but classical music doesn’t rake in money on radio ads. One I would consider would be Cindy Lauper – she’s older than you think. Before she was a shock-haired icon of the 80’s, she fronted a rockabilly band called Blue Angel. They put out one album, Blue Angel (duh), which did well in the Netherlands, but you could see the genius. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36MgP5Hg6KU. To go from Money Changes Everything to Above the Clouds on her Body Acoustic album – she has an impressive range. What a Broadway career she could have had! Oh wait – she wrote all the music for Kinky Boots, winner of 6 Tony awards, including Best Musical and Best Score! She’s not as ditzy as she looks.

Another would be Robert Plant – the former lead singer for hard-rocking Led Zeppelin. Post-Zeppelin he formed the R&B group The Honeydrippers in 1981, and they shot up the charts with their # 3 slow-dance hit Sea of Love. If that wasn’t different enough, he’s recorded several folksy albums with Allison Krauss – my personal favorite being “Trampled Rose” from the album Raising Sand. Truly, no one would guess this soulful folk singer is one of heavy rock’s legends.

A third I would nominate would be David Bowie (yes, I’ve chosen all older musicians, because 40-50 year careers are living, breathing entities). Ziggy Stardust is a far cry from his later success with Suffragette City, and another layer removed from 2013’s The Next Day album, let alone his (in)famous duet with Bing Crosby on The Little Drummer Boy – and the soundtrack to Labyrinth.

So now we know David Gilmour can write and play good jazz, even if it feels like the jazz is being played in the dance hall of a Pink Floyd dream. Is it progress or stagnation? You have to decide that for yourself.