Does anybody else get annoyed at the song "Hallelujah?" I mean I have NEVER been able to keep my mind on it all the way through, no matter who is singing it. I have absolutely no idea what it's about—nor do I want to know. And yet, whenever I hear some singer lugubriously plodding through it, it becomes an earworm I can't get rid of. Aargh. It's like being constantly rained on.
What annoys me about that song is the cheap veneer of soulfulness it gives mediocre singers. Leonard Cohen wrote it, and when he sings it, you'll feel what it's about. However, he (or his larcenous manager who sold a lot of his copyrights out from under him while he was undergoing religious training) released it to pretty much anyone and everyone, which leads to the sort of squeaky-voiced tormenting of the lyrics that is usually reserved for public-domain Christmas albums.
Additional: There are very, very few covers I'll tolerate. Some singers found something in the song that the songwriter him/herself didn't realize was there; listen to Sinead O'Connor's version of Nothing Compares 2 U and then Prince's original. The Purple One had no idea what he'd written. Covers of Bob Dylan songs don't count, the man can write but he can't really sing . But check out what Warren Zevon found in Steve Winwood's feel-good Back in the High Life Again: That's what George sang to Lenny before putting a bullet into the back of his head.
I hear ya. But I could never make it through his renditions of it either. Mind you, I'm not a Leonard Cohen fan. He seeme like a nice enough guy, and I was very upset on his behalf when I heard of how he was cheated out of his royalties. But I really don't like that song.
Yeah, it's not my favorite either, but I think that might be from overexposure to it. Even though the thing that got me into him was Everybody Knows from the Pump Up the Volume movie, I find myself gravitating more to the ends of his career; the stuff in the middle doesn't do it so much for me. His last album though? I've been listening to that once or twice a week since it came out two years ago and it's still not getting old on me. It's like those artists of legend who were condemned to death by the King, so that no one else could ever own one of their works, and their talents would never wither. I feel the same way about The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks, although that technically wasn't his last; The Quarry is down in the bottom of my pile of his books. Doesn't hurt that (no spoilers) THS was about Subliming, which was Mr. Banks' version of the non-religious Rapture.
That's one of Iain M Bank's books I've not yet read. He was mighty prolific! I see what you mean about the Warren Zevon song. (He's not an artist I am very familiar with, for some reason. He's good.)
It's not only the last SF book he wrote, it's chronologically the last Culture book, so it's probably a good idea to get caught up on the Culture before going into that one (although the heroine is from a non-Culture civ, several Culture Ships and citizens feature in it).
The number of people that confuse lose and loose is staggering. At work, almost everyone spells separation as seperation on the door placards even though it's clearly spelled for them on the batch record. I'd love to be an auditor visiting and seeing that people making injectable medicine can't spell simple words.
The thing that bothers me is that when I was growing up (70s-80s), you could fairly safely assume that if you saw something on a printed page it would be spelled correctly. Books, newspapers, advertisements and such generally had professional writers and proofreaders, so words got "loaded into" your brain correctly-spelled. I was the school spelling bee runner up twice in a row (and lost to the same dude both times), but now I find myself struggling, and I believe that it's because I've seen words spelled incorrectly so many times on the internet that my brain has lost track. And as the populace shifts from reading newspapers to watching or listening to their news online, the resultant budget cuts have led to plenty of typos in even major newspapers (such as the Washington Post, the NYT, and some of the British ones I read less regularly).
I'm actually disturbed about how much detail I know, or even have known, about that song - Hajafoofooya. @jannert's on the money with this one, thank you Writer Forum. ... My beef is with 1. book shops without books 2. the man in the shop, a fellow customer, dressed in a fashion to trigger my cull response: belly, trucker hat, check shirt, tattoos, woman-beard, estuary voice, aged about 35
It's disturbing, because it doesn't take too many generations before a skill is lost completely. Nobody alive who can teach it any more.
Hilarious. Saw them in a show once. Constantly making fun of themselves and the music world in general. Kept bringing out more guitarists during a double encore just to show how ridiculous it is. I think it got up to six or seven guitars by the end.
This cover makes me nostalgic for the 80s. It was shit then. I was still at school and the women's fashion then makes me want to vomit now. As does the dancing. But it was my 80s; Thatcher, Kinnock falling onto his arse at the beach, Madness, hand-held Donkey Kong, and being a loser because your mum and dad couldn't afford to buy you Nike trainers and a Sergio Tacchini t-shirt.
And just for Ian... Ievan polkka, a Finnish folk song cover by famous Austrian artist Adolf LoonyToons.
You know many would dismiss that as silly or futile, but that must have taken a lot of time and some serious talent.
The "new" Pennywise. Sure, he looks creepy, but he looks too creepy to lure people (kids) into letting their guard down. Old one looked the part of a regular clown - who look a tad weird on their own, but the malice he held behind that average clown look made him creepier. To me anyway. Bleh. I'm what, two years too late to bitch about that now, aren't I?
Oh man, and not even a spoiler alert? I didn't know the movie had a clown in it fer crissakes... No point in going now
My body. Brain: "Why the fuck are you moving so slow, legs? Move it, weaklings!" Also Brain: "But we're already power walking everywhere, what else can be done?" The Brains Brain: "No excuses, bitch! Walk. Faster. NOW." Brain: "Fuck off nutter. Any faster an we'll be jogging" Also Brain: "Bah"