Anghraine

Speaking of Todd in the Shadows, the bff and I were watching a different video in which he (Todd) casually mentions his respect for the music knowledge of Mic the Snare. I'd seen his videos come up for me in the algorithm and always ignored them as some corporate thing, but with Todd's recommendation, I figured I'd try some of the "Deep Discog Dives" I'd seen popping up.

They're quite good! The comedic elements in these aren't as sharp as in Todd's, but this guy seems considerably younger and the comedy is definitely a sideshow to the research and analysis of the music, so even when jokes don't quite land (and often they do), it's not a big deal.

Anyway! The concept of these turns out to be overviews of the entire discography of an artist or group—it's at once breezy and quite specific in his analysis of individual songs, so I've enjoyed the videos I've seen thus far. Naturally, I watched the Queen one, which I really enjoyed as a Queen fan. And it was cool to see someone give the Innuendo album the respect I feel it deserves! People often focus on the 70s albums and talk like the 80s (and 90s!) albums are mediocre sell-out letdowns, but Mic the Snare recommended Innuendo along with the big 70s albums everyone knows. And he didn't even mention "The Show Must Go On" when talking about how great it is. A rather weird omission, but it was cool to see someone talk about the rest of the album.

I was curious if there'd been some larger re-evaluation of Innuendo and read an article in Rolling Stone about it, which was a bit surreal given how persistently shitty Rolling Stone was about Queen in Freddie's lifetime. There was a bit about Freddie's stated determination to work until he dropped, which of course feels different in light of him doing exactly that while dying of AIDS, but idk, there's a weird tenor to the article IMO. I kept thinking "no thanks to you."

As I typed this, I was actually thinking about how much I love the later Queen material and was curious how many of my personal favorite songs are from the 80s or 90s. Naturally, I do have a Queen playlist of my personal ranking of Queen or Queen-adjacent songs—not as some claim to objective quality, just personal enjoyment and affection. I figured I'd listen to it again and see if my top faves actually do skew in any particular direction, so here's my personal Top 20!

1. Under Pressure | Queen and David Bowie (1981)
2. The Show Must Go On | Queen (1991)
3. Who Wants To Live Forever | Queen (1986)
4. Ensueño | Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé (1987)
5. Bohemian Rhapsody | Queen (1975)
6. Barcelona | Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé (1987)
7. Crazy Little Thing Called Love | Queen (1979)
8. Radio Ga Ga | Queen (1984)
9. Don't Stop Me Now | Queen (1979)
10. Princes of the Universe | Queen (1986)
11. Seven Seas of Rhye | Queen (1973)
12. '39 | Queen (1976)
13. I'm Going Slightly Mad | Queen (1991)
14. These Are The Days of Our Lives | Queen (1991)
15. Love of My Life | Queen (1975)
16. Somebody To Love | Queen (1976)
17. We Will Rock You & We Are The Champions | Queen (1977; I know they're separate songs technically but shhhhh)
18. Another One Bites the Dust | Queen (1980)
19. I Want to Break Free | Queen (1984)
20. The Millionaire Waltz | Queen (1976)

My best friend and I had an interesting, fairly wide-ranging conversation about the distinctions between adaptation, retellings, fanfiction, other forms of directly intertextual storytelling (à la Wide Sargasso Sea, Lavinia etc), covers (as in music), heavily illustrated editions of texts, collage, sampling, novelizations, ekphrasis generally, translation, and inspiration.

The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.

This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)

And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.

Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.

Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.

(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)

Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.

This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.

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elperian tagged me on Tumblr! For this meme, you show your top five songs on your current On Repeat Spotify list, if you use Spotify. I didn't bother snipping numbers 6&7, so they're included for no particular reason, but:



[A screenshot of a Spotify On Repeat list, with the top seven songs visible:

1 - Nevertheless, She Persisted | Audiomachine
2 - Pompeii MMXXIII | Bastille & Hans Zimmer
3 - Who Wants To Live Forever | Queen
4 - Luke and Leia | John Williams
5 - Dauntless | Audiomachine
6 - Mass Effect Theme | Jack Wall & Sam Hulick
7 - Radio Ga Ga | Queen]

No surprises here, lol.

Tagging anyone who sees this, uses Spotify, and wants to do it!

I reblogged an end of the year Spotify meme based in a site/app called "Judge My Spotify."

Tagged: #kjsj;afdk the epic score / two steps from hell/ queen fmk was extremely unexpected #lolololol

I reblogged a Spotify Wrapped meme for 2020: there had been lots of posts about the top five, but what about #6? I added:

#lol #'realm of power' by two steps from hell

I miss playing my piano :(

It's been out of tune for over a year and sounds terrible, and we're not really in a position to get it tuned. This is what it used to sound like, though.

(A Tumblr link, I know! I should figure out what to do with those ones...)

In response to this post, mirandatam at Tumblr said:

ooh I’d love to see a post that had a bunch of those on it so I could go through and give myself emotions too

I replied:

I made one back in 2014! I really should update it, though.

[ETA 10/23/2023: I did put together a cleaner version later on.]

I don’t know if I’m more attached to songs that I can fit to any ship or songs that are perfect for that one ship

In response to my tags on this post, an anon asked:

"All the ways of the City"? Is that like the Gondorian anthem?

I replied:

Mm, I don’t think so. I think singing in all the ways of the City = singing in the different styles of music used in Minas Tirith, or possibly, just in the different languages used there. Or both, which is what I’m actually inclined to think he meant (and now I’m imagining Sindarin rock!).

It’s LOTR, so different people bursting into different types of song is pretty much to be expected in emotional moments—what’s special here is a whole city doing it at once.