My sister got this stuck in my head, so now I must deal with the pain in the only way I know how: by sharing it.
Apparently it’s a Russian crooner whose name translates to Edward Gil or Hill or Khil. I was going to do some research and try to learn more about it, but then I found that someone with even less of a life than I have already did that.
UPDATE: Via commenter Judd, they’ve actually interviewed the artist now.
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leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
I believe that the only appropriate response to this is
In Soviet Russia, Astley rolls you!
Wow, a Yakov Smirnov reference. I’m not sure which is sadder, that you’d stoop to it or that I caught it.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Sharing the Pain =-.
Dan:
Well played, sir.
T:
Well, T, I have to hand it to you. Here I thought I was going to make it my entire life without ever putting the words “Save us, Rick Astley!” together in that particular order. But I didn’t. And I have you to thank for it. I’m going to go put on Dark Side just to scrub that out of my ears.
“Dark side” — of the moon? Or something else where I’m not catching the reference. Anyway, I’ve never taken enough illicit drugs to appreciate Pink Floyd. Then again, you live in Hawai’i, so you probably have a permanent contact high.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Sharing the Pain =-.
Actually, disturbingly, I didn’t know about Yakov Smirnov. The line “In Soviet Russia, …” has become the same category of internet meme as Rickrolling itself.
I apologize for this, but look up “Rolcats”.
Dark Side of the Moon. I’m a monsterous Pink Floyd fan (no drugs needed) and while Wish You Were Here is a better album I wasn’t sure it was loud enough to wash that video from my mind. The guitar solo in “Time” did the job quite nicely though.
Though I’m not big on Floyd, “Time” is a great tune, I’ll give you that.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Sharing the Pain =-.
And the bit from 1:46 to 2:04 is now my ringtone. Now I can share with strangers!
I ask this only semi-rhetorically: How could Russia go from Tchaikovsky to that?
Same way that the US went from Dvorak to NSync.
All right, hold on. It’s actually a decent piece, although the video is kind of goofy. The bad lip-synching and bizarrely lobotomized facial expressions have nothing to do with the music.
The performance style is known as “vocalise” – a wordless melody carried by the voice without text. It’s a well-known, though not common, composing and performing style. (“Vocalise” can also mean a voice-training exercise for singers, but this is different.) Many composers have written them; some have become classical-repertoire standards.
The one you may be best familiar with is the famous vocal passage at the end of “Great Gig in the Sky”, off of, yes, “Dark Side of the Moon”. If you’ve heard that, as most of you obviously have, you at least know what is going on here, though clearly it’s not the same. (Clare Torry, the singer, improvised it, actually, and got paid a flat 30 Pounds, although she later got credit and a settlement.)
The best-known classical vocalise is Rachmaninoff’s Opus 34, # 14. It’s a common soprano recital piece:
If you like those two – and you’d damn well better – you ought to be able to appreciate Eduardo the Singing Robot. He’s at least in the same territory.
UPDATE: OK,the arrangement really sucks, too.
UPDATE: OK, it’s really not that good. But still . . .
If you like those two – and you’d damn well better
Uh oh, I’m in trouble.
As I was just telling Judd the other day, I’ve never taken enough illicit substances to develop an appreciation for Pink Floyd. And if Clare Torry was trying to emulate the sounds of a woman enduring a particularly painful childbirth, I’d say “mission accomplished.”
My general distaste for soprano vocals means that while I can appreciate the skill involved in the second one, it goes way too far to say I like it.
Looping back to the Russian clip, apart from the obviously dated look and the terrible lip-synching, I don’t think it’s egregiously bad. In fact, the fact that it’s a rather catchy tune is part of what’s so subversively evil about it.
Speaking of evil vocalizations, does the part that starts at 2:17 here count?
Getting back to skilled use of the voice as a musical instrument, there can be only one.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Sharing the Pain =-.
Also, apropos of not much, this is pretty cool, and shows what one can do with a knowledgeable audience.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Sharing the Pain =-.
T:
And as I alluded to at the time, illicit substances aren’t necessary to develop an appreciation for Pink Floyd. The fact many people have chosen to do so as a way to enhance their own appreciation is a matter of personal choice but far from necessary. I’ve had the great privilege to see all four members of the band in concert at one time or another and through all those shows I consumed a grand total of one drink while I smoked absolutely nothing.
I think the best way I’ve ever heard The Great Gig in the Sky described was as “Clare Torry’s attempt to seduce God”. I don’t know if that’s exactly right but I think that’s a better statement than what you came up with to describe it. Or maybe you’ve just attended some strange childbirths.
KTK:
I’ll second T’s take on the Soviet singer. As I discovered the first time someone called me yesterday, it’s the video that makes it jaw-dropping. The arrangement sucks and the song itself isn’t exactly good but I feel it’s really done in by the bad lip-synch, the (and I steal your word because I don’t believe there’s a better one) lobotomized facial expressions and the haircut that escapes scorn only because there’s so much else to heap it on. Yes, that video and TGGITS are both the same performance style but the 1967 fastback and the 1974 II are both Mustangs. There is, however, an ocean of difference between them.
As the old saying goes, there’s no accounting for taste. Pink Floyd always struck me as music for people who are (A) baked out of their ever-living minds; (B) manically depressed; or (C) all of the above. Though I will say that I actually do like most of Dark Side of the Moon. On the opposite end of the spectrum is The Wall, a pretentious piece of shit if ever there was one.
Then again, I can’t say too much, because I really got into early Rush, which was mainly just a bunch of Neil Peart’s love letters to Ayn Rand (and to himself).
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Sharing the Pain =-.
The Wall is vastly overrated thanks to that meh anti-education anthem. Comfortably Numb contains fantastic guitar work and Run Like Hell sounds great everywhere except the album though outside of those tracks and maybe one or two more the album is stunningly average. Animals is far superior but no one knows anything about it because the shortest of the three main tracks clocks in at just over ten minutes and god forbid a radio station want to play one good twelve minute song instead of four crap three minutes ones and…….. *continues muttering ad infinitum about the damn kids nowadays, their lack of taste and their half-second attention spans*
My phone also freaks me out now. For years my ringtone has been the theme from Boston Legal (coincidentally another piece that’s largely vocalization but not a lot of actual words) and I’ve become so used to it that now when I hear “Trololo” there’s a moment of “Jesus god, what in the hell is that?” before I remember “Oh yeah. It’s me.”
Pink Floyd always struck me as music for people who are (A) baked out of their ever-living minds; (B) manically depressed; or (C) all of the above.
My friends and I were too square to get high in high school, but we were into trippy music. (And on that score, try some of the early Floyd, from the Syd Barett years. “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict” is particularly recommended. And yet another example of mouth music without text!) So we borrowed a couple of oscilloscopes from the high school physics lab and hooked them across the speaker posts on my stereo, and would sit in my basement in the dark listening to Pink Floyd albums and watching the scope traces in stereo.
Yes, we were dweebs. Lame dweebs.
[ReCaptch: "lo methanol" - yes, that would explain it]
KTK:
I love “Several Species…” — it’s one of the few Floyd tunes I really dig.
And if you didn’t have parties where you sat around and watched The Wall or did the Wizard of Floyd thing, then you weren’t THAT big of a dweeb.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Sharing the Pain =-.
None of us would have been caught dead with a “Wizard of Oz” tape (though one of us did later turn out to be a Friend of Dorothy). We did go see “The Wall” together. Never had a chance to do both at once.
I’m a little past my generation here, but wasn’t the Wizard of Floyd thing specifically a stoner activity. Yes, it’s kinda lame. But, it’s one of the lamer things dudes who did drugs did, which, de facto, makes it cooler than even the cooler things the squares did.
Hm, my fraternity (in college, obviously) did Wizard of Floyd a couple times. All being geeks (not to be confused with dweebs, which arguably some subset of us also were), the most common reaction was “Wow, isn’t it neat that the brain tries so hard to convince you that there’s something interesting going on here, when really most of the ‘synchronicity’ has a varying ~50-200ms offset, and even that only because you’ve been pre-suggested to connect whatever fits best?”
And that’s even before you get back into our previous topic of discourse schemata and the fact that any narrative arc is going to have salient features match up.
Oh, and the next most common reaction was “Shut up and stop preventing me from pretending this works.”
So, um, not really that impressive.
I’ll third Dan and digg. If you start it at the exact right moment then the wicked witch rides on on her bike as the clocks go off in “Time” and the munchkins kind of dance in time with the bass line in “Money” but other than that it’s pretty much something you have to cook up in your head. DSotM and Wizard of Oz is the most famous pairing but it’s said you can do the same thing to “Wish You Were Here” with “It’s a Wonderful Life” and also to “Animals” with “Casablanca”. The song “Echoes” at the end of “Meddle” is also said to match the tail end of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. That means its all pretty much BS.
Which is to say, to bring this back to the the OP, that not quite lip syncing is not lip syncing at all.
Though Pink Floyd plus It’s a Wonderful Life does sound pretty funny, even without synchronicity. The surreal quasi-political counter-culture of Pink Floyd against the staid orthodoxy of Jimmy Stewart and Christmas fairy tales sounds much more interesting than Pink Floyd plus the surreal quasi-political counter-culture of Oz, no offense to the individual pieces.
Hey, I never suggested that the Wizard of Floyd thing worked, only that it was a dweeby thing to do.
…But, that’s the thing – all of you guys represent the control group. So, maybe it does work, but only if you’re high. And, I’m not talking about being so completely out of it that you can’t really process anything or that you are halucinating completely, seeing connections that absolutely do not exist. I’m just talking about being in a state where you perception is simply altered to the point at which you connect things a bit differently than you normally do.
I mean, after all, how are we to determine whether it actually works? Either you see it, or you don’t, right? I mean, we can confirm that Pink Floyd did not intend for this to be the case, but beyond that, it’s a lot more subjective than we might think.
Digg, point, but…
As a (low-confidence) statistical fact, we can say that “it” doesn’t work, if “it” is “Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz line up closely, as if they were planned to”.
If “it” is “Normal human perception is willing to impose such a match up, which is interesting even if it only sort of works”, that’s true for sufficiently large values of “sort of”.
If “it” is “Appropriate drugs can change normal perception to make (2) work well.”, that’s seems to be true, but (a) that’s not all that interesting, and (b) it’s obnoxious that the rumor about playing them together “works” (at least when I was in college) lacked the rather important marker that it’s a claim about the effects of drugs, not a claim about the movie and music.
Great point in B, Dan. Can’t contest that at all. See, now it becomes a social theory, a sort of Gladwell-ian essay waiting to be written. If drugs simply enable a user to see a real gestalt among entitites that are (“objectively’) only vaguely and sparsely related, then how did DSotM and WoO become the posterchild for such a phenomenon.
This is apparently one of many anecdotes detailing this phenomenon, and somehow due the the blend of the popularity of DSotM, WoO, the sheer bizarre nature of the combination thereof, and the storytellers themselves, this connection took off. Of course, once the idea is popularized, scores of follwerers wanted to check it out (it was told to them by somebody cooler) and confirmation bias set in. Then, these people – who really believed it – told the next generation, and so the legend grew.
Frankly, my (baked) friends and I used to always get a kick out of turning the TV to C-Span and the CD player to hardcore rap, dancehall reggae, or death metal and pretending the guy on TV was performing the song. Right at teh outset, it almost always seemed out of place, but after about 30 seconds or so, sometimes it started to work, and sometimes it didn’t. Wizard of Floyd isn’t really much different, it’s just the definitive example of something many stoners find to amuse themselves on their own.
If I may say so, you two are putting WAYYYY too much thought into this. And coming from me, that’s saying something!
I think “thought” is not really the right word here.
Apparently 2,000,000 Youtube views is enough to make an American newspaper put in some phone calls to Russia.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0312/YouTube-drags-reluctant-Soviet-star-Mr.-Trololo-back-into-spotlight
Having had my phone ring a couple times now (1:46 to 2:04 is my new ringtone. Thank you, T.) I’ve come to realize he’s actually got a decent voice. I hope he does find some way to make himself a little something off all this.
T:
I, too, opted to share the pain and forward this to a few people. By far the best thing I got back was: “In Soviet Russia, song sings you!”
oh, that is better than mine. *pout*