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Computer Love / Guillotine

Hey you guys!
Back once again with the third instalment
Bubblin’ away, we been lying dormant
Took a bit of time off
We didn’t wanna force it
TZU still feelin’ awesome…

TZU‘’s third album, Computer Love, dropped (look at me and my hip-hop lingo) on the weekend, much to my delight. They have kept true to their form and there is no aggressive guff, it’s all fun while still saying something serious. It’s like… a party for the intelligentsia.

I don’t like the lyrics as much as the previous two albums. The album has a very electro vibe, which has impact on the rapping style, and it seems that Seed MC has been replaced in the band by Count Bounce. I dunno much about Count Bounce, but he sounds okay. Not as good as Seed MC though. I am a bit confused as to why this has happened - Seed MC has writing credits on all the tracks, but doesn’t rap on any. Shame, that.

Joelistics, who takes over most of the vocals, has a track called Everythings Alright available for download on his MySpazz. It’s a down-tempo song about a car accident, and he paints the picture and captures the feeling really well.

I also got British India’s first, Guillotine. It’s just plain old rock, but it’s full of energy and I really like it. I heard them first when triple j offered a free mp3 of Tie Up My Hands. On first listen I was caught by the line “The underground is mainstream and the mainstream is a lie”. I never though too much about what that meant, because most of their lyrics are fairly nonsensical and seem to be just a bunch of abstract lines tacked together, and soon afterwards I had “Looked up from the taxi cab swear that I’d seen her / The rain and the spotlight was as if I’d dreamed her!” running through my head non-stop all day. If you wanted to have a listen I’d recommend Tie Up My Hands, and Run the Red Light.

It’s good to have easy access to a record store again.

To My Dear Future Children

Welcome to twenty-first century living, with its utterly bewildering array of nearly limitless choice in knowledge, information, entertainment, commodities, interests, lifestyles, and so on; that has the psychological effect of fragmenting our lives, and destroying any illusion that there might be one over-arching truth or ‘big story’. There is no fixed truth, no unifying story, no galvanizing purpose. There is nothing that explains you, or locates you in the world as part of a fixed tradition or community. Everything is difference, diversity, plasticity, fluidity. It is up to the individual to try to fashion some satisfactory ’self’ – some thing that is uniquely and authentically ‘you’ – by selecting from the Google-sized cultural menu.

When I was your age, we had shopping. I was bought up loving stuff: an almost limitless and ever-expanding range of options through which I can distract myself from the meaninglessness of life and the abyss of death, and with which, perhaps, I can make a little statement about who I really am. I am a Threadless-wearing, Oakley-sporting, Australian hip-hop-listening, summer-loving, literature-reading, football and cricket-watching, Firefox user. Who are you going to be?

But even your options are optional. You have facebook. Each person on facebook crafts and builds their own facebook identity, which consists of your status, your photos, your music, your friends, your travels, your cat, your movies, your books, your virtual aquarium, and your virtual garden, and all the other minutiae of you. This is what life is about: each of the individual millions seeking to create an identity in an anonymous, meaningless world by attaching enough genitives to themselves. By choosing all the things that are yours, perhaps you might have substance in the world. You might be special.

It’s like the Matrix, darling, but without the machines. As far as we’re concerned, the spoon is all there is.

(Paraphrased from an article in the Briefing magazine, issue #350.)

Ella ella eh eh eh eh eh eh

Last year, a few months after the event as I am prone to do, I heard Rihanna’s Umbrella. I like pop music when it’s not afraid to just be bubblegum pop, when it’s really well produced, when it’s super-catchy, and when it’s not full of innuendo. That cuts out most pop music I guess. Umbrella was certainly catchy, as I heard people singing it all the time. I had a listen to it, and was dismayed that such a great song was spoiled by Jay-Z rapping at the start, and predictable production. But I was impressed enough with the song to try and find a version that didn’t have Jay-Z in it. Turned out there were quite a few people who felt the same way about the song.

The first one I found was the Lil’ Mama Remix. It took me a while to warm to, as Jay-Z’s rapping is cut out and replaced by not one but two verses of rapping by Lil’ Mama, who I am not exactly a fan of. But after a while I got into it. Lil’ Mama, not exactly known for her clean mouth, keeps the raps pretty spot on. “What Happened To Him?” / “What Happened To Me?” / We / He Aint Stand Under My Um-ba-ba-rella…

Then I found The Lindbergh Palace Dub, The Lindbergh Palace Radio Edit, and The Lindbergh Palace Remix. The remix ups the production, ups the tempo, and chops and changes the chorus around to make it even catchier. The radio edit is the same as the remix, but a more radio-friendly four minutes long. The dub loses the vocals altogether and is just a catchy beat, with the odd “ella ella” chucked in.

Then there was the Steve Angello Remix, a purely instrumental reworking.

That was all last year. This week I noticed that The Manic Street Preachers had done a cover of the song. Slightly sceptical, I checked it out. And what an awesome job they did! Without losing anything, they transformed it into a great rock song. I just can’t stop listening to it, and have probably had it on repeat for the entire weekend.

While discovering The Manic Street Preachers’ version, I happened on another cover, by Scott Simons. Whoever this Scott kid is, he’s made his electronic version all soft and fluffy. Really cool.

Then there’s Mandy Moore’s, and Marié Digby’s acoustic versions. Digby’s is fun, Moore has gone for the ballad style, and it’s okay.

In each cover version the bridge / second verse, about three quarters of the way through, is interpreted differently. I never really even noticed the verse in the original, or the remixes, but they stand out in the covers. And I really like them for some reason.

Basically, there’s a version of this song for every mood. It’s rad.

You know where to check ‘em. YouTube, or The Hype Machine. I highly recommend the Lil’ Mama Remix, and The Manic’s cover.

DorkTalk

Open source software is mostly great.

I have been using Open Office for a few months. It’s a Java application, which sucks, it uses too much memory, it looks ugly, and it has some serious problems with its language tools. Other than that it’s a Microsoft Office rip-off. But for a lazy/poor person like me, it beats paying for office software.

Some open source software is actually good though.

Firefox three is good.

Sunbird is cool. But I really wanna be able to store my calendar online so that it can be accessed anywhere. I can use GoogleCalendar, and Sunbird can display my online calendar, but Google provides no ability to edit it. I could install an application in my own web space that I could publish to, but I could draw a calendar on paper and carry it in my pocket with much less bother. So I’m just using GoogleCalendar for now.

Flickr Uploadr is really handy.

Splashtop looks pretty cool. It enables you to get on the ‘net just a few seconds after turning on your computer. But I am scared to use it, if it did something bad it might make a real mess of the system. And that’s the type of problem I’m not clever enough to fix.

I tried out Songbird. iTunes has been accused of chewing up memory, but when I installed Songbird it immediately grabbed over a hundred megabytes. And also, who wants a black interface? Yuck.

Digsby is cool. It integrates instant messengers, social networks, and email. If only it integrated Skype - but that’s a tough ask. I hope it grows to include more social networks (rather than just MyBook and FaceSpace, which I don’t use). It has rad notification control. It uses a little too much memory, but they say that’s being fixed soon.

All this rad new software made me run out of hard disk space. Or maybe that was downloading episodes of The Gruen Transfer. Both are good.

Greatfully Burning Bridges

The Grates have new music, and it sounds just like their old music, and this makes me happy.

Happy music makes me happy, and it can make you happy too, if you let it. It takes some guts, to admit you like The Grates, especially if you’re cool. Fortunately that’s not a big problem for me. Happiness ahoy.

I’ll Activity You

I deactivated my facebook account. I tried to think of all the useful or interesting things I had done on facebook, and I couldn’t think of any. I mean, aside from making up status messages that were so witty I was generally the only one who could understand them. That part was certainly rad.

Phlickr

There’s photos. ‘Cause I’ve been away for the best part of a year. But there isn’t many, and they’re not very good. So I dunno. I’m not really happy with Flickr. But I guess unless I get a decent camera and learn how to take photos properly - not likely to happen any time soon - it doesn’t matter much.

So Bulk Ace

New TZU. Brave the stupid, listen on MySpace.

I may be slightly happy right now.