Maybe the difference between speech and music isn’t all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone’s voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir.
David Byrne, How Music Works

“Money for Nothing” was a much bigger hit than anything that Dire Straits had done before; that is, Knopfler made himself into a successful rock star by way of a song about people resenting rock stars’ success. He also abandoned his own opposition to making music videos, so the song was marketed with an MTV video in which computer-animated characters disparaged MTV videos—expressing what had previously been Knopfler’s actual point of view—which won Video of the Year and helped make the song No. 1. And then, yes, alongside Knopfler’s grumbling, working-man’s-persona anti-MTV, anti-rock-star lyrics, there was another voice singing the video network’s actual marketing slogan, and that voice belonged to, of all people, Sting. So. If you’re looking for some moment when art and commerce, integrity and “selling out,” class solidarity and class envy, performer and spectator, content and advertisement, and assorted other tensions all collapsed into a lucrative and critic-proof singularity, you could do worse.

(via The Awl)

Source: Slate

This song is from David Byrne’s The Knee Plays, the soundtrack to part of Robert Wilson’s unrealised epic the CIVIL warS, which was intended for the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival.  What are ‘knee plays’?  They are the ‘joints’ that hold together the larger scenes of a theatre production.  Knee plays are often performed in front of the curtain, allowing the actors to change and the sets to be shifted.  They might be little skits.  Or they might comment on the larger drama of the play.

The lyrics to this song are in the form of a list.  In the song, David Byrne predicts the future, but his visions often contradict each other.  Some are hilarious, some are thought-provoking and some turned out to be true.  He concludes that, ‘in the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it.’

In the Future

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes.
In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet..
In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat..
In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed.
In the future men will be “super-masculine” and women will be “ultra-feminine.”
In the future half of us will be “mentally ill.”
In the future there will be no religion or spiritualism of any sort.
In the future the “psychic arts” will be put to practical use.
In the future we will not think that “nature” is beautiful.
In the future the weather will always be the same.
In the future no one will fight with anyone else.
In the future there will be an atomic war.
In the future water will be expensive.
In the future all material items will be free.
In the future everyone’s house will be like a little fortress.
In the future everyone’s house will be a total entertainment center.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very happy.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very filthy.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very healthy.
In the future TV will be so good that the printed word will function as an art form only.
In the future people with boring jobs will take pills to relieve the boredom.
In the future no one will live in cities
In the future there will be mini-wars going on everywhere.
In the future everyone will think about love all the time.
In the future political and other decisions will be based completely on opinion polls.
In the future there will be machines which will produce a religious experience in the user.
In the future there will be groups of wild people, living in the wilderness.
In the future there will be only paper money, which will be personalized.
In the future there will be a classless society.
In the future everyone will only get to go home once a year.
In the future everyone will stay home all the time.
In the future we will not have time for leisure activities.
In the future we will only “work” one day a week.
In the future our bodies will be shriveled up but our brains will be bigger.
In the future there will be starving people everywhere.
In the future people will live in space.
In the future no one will be able to afford TV.
In the future the helpless will be killed.
In the future everyone will have their own style of way-out clothes.
In the future we will make love to anything anytime anywhere.
In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it.

F    Dm     Bb           F
Moon River, wider than a mile, 
Bb              F          Gm6  A7  
I'm crossing you in style some day. 
Dm    F7         Bb    Eb7     
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker,
Dm7         Dm6 E7    Am7 D7     Gm7 C7 
wherever you're going I'm going your way.
F   Dm       Bb             F
Two drifters off to see the world. 
Bb            F     Gm6
There's such a lot of world to see. 
Dm F7     Bb7  Gm6       F
We're after the same rainbow's end-- 
Bb                 F
waiting 'round the bend,  
Bb          F
my huckleberry friend,
Dm   Gm7  C7   F
Moon River and me.



P.S. Tony Millionaire’s 5 panel illustration of ‘Moon River’ in his comic strip Maakies will make you cry.  Unfortunately not available on the web, it’s in the book ‘Premillennial Maakies’.

Beach Boys Dating Tips

1. Walk up to her

2. Ask her if she wants to dance

3. Hold her tight

4. Walk her home that night

5. Kiss her

6. Don’t wait to see her again

7. Let her know she’s more than a friend

8. Whisper I love you

9. Kiss her in a way that you’ve never kissed a girl before *

10. Give her all the love that you have

11. Meet her mom and her dad

12. Ask her to be your bride

13. Feel so happy you almost cry

14. Kiss her (repeat to fade out…)

* In a way she’ll like for evermore

Wonderful use of text and video in ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ by Talking Heads

Update: switched to a Metacafe upload of the video.  EMI had disabled embedding on the Youtube version and removed the statistics about deforestation, political fraud, inequality etc from the ‘you’ve got it’ parts.