Even at the best of times, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a politician trying to “communicate with the young”. But Ed Balls managed to take this one step further by engaging a bunch of manufactured gangsters to spearhead a ‘beat cyber-bullying’ campaign, as depicted in the artist’s impression opposite. The fake hoodlum standing alongside bully-boy Balls is Dappy, of N-Dubz, who shortly afterwards stole the mobile number of a Radio 1 listener who sent in a less than complimentary message about him, and used it to harass her, culminating in sending her a death threat. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Behind the farce though, lurk more serious problems. How did we reach this sorry state where, in order to try and convince school children to stop bullying each other, it seems like a good idea to enlist the help of dubious role models who make a living pretending to be (or in this case actually being) illiterate thugs?

Balls, in his role as Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, presides over the state machinery that’s entrusted by most (and imposed by force on others, if he gets his way) with the education of their children. This is carried out in institutions (that’s the schools part) that tend to breed a culture bullying and violence – hence the need for this kind of campaign, and for metal detectors. Children are sectioned off into groups, all the same age, and left to formulate their own social structure, culture and rules, Lord of the Flies style, while lone adults known as teachers attempt to impose order – a task made more difficult as Ed and co relentlessly continue to turn the teaching profession into a job of administering tests, ticking boxes and imparting snippets of politically correct knowledge meticulously detailed by Westminster bureaucrats. Any other adults are suspected paedophiles, only allowed within a mile of children if armed with a “CRB check” – proof they haven’t been caught yet, and a nice little money-spinner for various parties too.

In the meantime, ever-younger children are force-fed sex, violence and “gangsters are cool” by the media and the music industry, and while the government Ed is a prominent member of meets the demands of this industry by imposing ill-conceived legislation to prop up it’s failing 20th century business model, Ed himself acknowledges the failure of the whole system by standing there next to one of these self-styled gangsters in a desperate and doomed attempt to get a message across to the inmates of his failing schools.

So there’s the schools part. What about children and families? Hang on a minute, aren’t they the same thing – aren’t children part of families? You might think so, but Balls is very keen of late on positioning himself as an arbitrator between parents and their children, as if he knows best and has some kind of right to say so. Phrases like “striking a balance between the rights of parents and the rights of children” crop up frequently in the rhetoric of Ed and his cronies. What? But in Ed’s world, families are not to be trusted with their children – they need to be monitored and inspected to be sure they’re not beating and starving them, or worse still teaching them things not in keeping with the politically-motivated dumbed-down drivel proscribed by the DCSF. Do you think it’s an accident that Schools comes in between Children and Families in the department’s title? I’m not so sure.

The modus operandi is the same as what we’re seeing with the dubious spectre of terrorism that seems to have us cowering, snivelling and slipping further into a police state for our own protection. In the past, when there was a real threat in the form of the IRA, this kind of thing would have properly been seen as giving in to the terrorists, letting them win. But not when it suits the agenda of a government obsessed with controlling everything and everyone. Likewise with children, one-off incidents are whipped up into a media frenzy and used to justify all manner of state intrusion where it doesn’t belong, all in the name of protection.

I think the Dappygate fiasco perfectly sums up this government and the nasty culture they’ve nurtured – characterised by bullying and incompetence, and like the majority of people in this country I can’t wait to see the back of them.

For no particular reason, other than that we have lots of snow, I’ve decided to write an irritating ‘top ten’ style list of music vaguely related to snow. This might be annoying, but I couldn’t just say it was snowing and leave it at that, because I did that last year. Don’t despair though, because I think it’s actually quite an interesting list, and I’ll try and make it even more interesting by rambling on about things as I go along. So, without any further ado, on with the list:

1. Doves – Snowden: This would probably wind up in any kind of top ten I made, whether connected with snow or not. I don’t know what the song’s title actually refers to – maybe it’s someone’s surname? Obviously it’s not the mountain because that’s Snowdon. For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen any snow on any of the occasions I’ve been to Snowdon.

2. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Snow: As with the previous song, this band ought to appear in any top ten. Catch a fantastic performance of it here on YouTube from the Jools Holland show, the undisputed home of fantastic performances.

3. O.R.N. – Snow: Good luck getting your hands on this classic. You can make me an offer for the CD single, or the vinyl version, if you like. Otherwise you’ll probably just have to take my word for it being worth of being in the list.

4. Sister Sledge – He’s The Greatest Dancer: I was torn between this and Lost In Music, but I chose this. It’s so good that Will Smith took a small sample and made a hit record from it, with that sample being the only redeeming feature. As usual.

5. Andy McKee – Drifting: Everyone on the internet has seen this video at least four times, according to the stats, but forget the video and buy the album, it’s worth it. If you haven’t seen the video, see it. Be warned though, if you play guitar, you’ll probably do nothing else until you’ve learned to play this.

6. Kings of Leon – Velvet Snow: What’s not to like about Kings of Leon? Doesn’t everyone like them? You decide.

7. Emily Remler – Snowfall: Not really my favourite Emily Remler track, by any stretch of the imagination, but I sneaked it in here because it has the word snow in the title, and because of the brilliant album it’s from, East to Wes. That’s not a typo, Wes refers to Wes Montgomery, another favourite guitarist of mine. Foolishly though, he never recorded anything snow-related so he can’t be in the list.

8. µ-ziq – Iced Jem: The most tenuous snow connection in the whole list. Almost everything by Mike Paradinas is good though. If you don’t know that already (and the odds are very much against it) then educate yourself.

9. Snow Patrol – Chasing Cars: I feel like I ought to be a teenage girl to like this, but I like it anyway, although if challenged I’ll just claim I was running out of snow music.

10. Faithless – Drifting Away: I know I did the drifting thing already, but this is a classy track from a classic album, Reverence. It’s every bit as good as the other nine – I wasn’t running out at all, and these aren’t in order anyway.

11. (Bonus Track) Underworld – Blueski: On it’s own, probably not likely to end up in anyone’s top ten eleven of anything. Not that it doesn’t deserve it, mind you. But it doesn’t exist on it’s own, it’s part of Second Toughest In The Infants, a truly magnificent album.

Ok, end of list. I’m going to make a bet that nobody on the planet but me is familiar with all eleven of those. But what would be in your list that I missed? Answers below…

My copy cost £5.55, which seems pretty cheap for an album to me. The best part, however, is that exactly £5.55 goes to Radiohead, with no stinking record labels or pointless middlemen in between. (For the sticklers amongst you, I actually paid £6.00, with £0.45 being the credit card processing fee). I don’t know how much they would have received if the album had been released in the usual way, but I would guess around about a pound. I know we used to see, at best, about £1.50 from the sale of a £30 game.

I’m certainly not complaining about the album itself, but that was very unlikely to happen given that I love everything Radiohead do. The true test of that will be Mia though, who although also a big fan is too young at two years old to be as set in her ways as me. What am I moaning about then, with the “almost right”?

Hoops.

I had to jump through hoops, starting with navigating the bizzare web site, enabling javascript for two different domains, and finishing up with filling in my address, email address and even ‘my’ (hah) mobile number. It’s little wonder that despite that fact you can ‘buy it for free’, there are reports of substantial downloads via other channels. Frankly, there are very few bands I would have put up with that amount of messing about for, and I doubt I will do it again, so I would make the following suggestions for anyone (and let’s hope it’s everyone) following in Radiohead’s footsteps:

• Make the download available directly, with no messing about. You don’t need my email address or mobile number. If I want to give you them though, let me do that seperately.
• Get web developers with a clue. Nothing about navigating from page to page or filling in a form means you need to run Javascript on my machine.
• Make it easy to pay, either before the download or after. I might feel guilty about my measly £5.55 this time next month and want to cough up some more, but I’m not keen on going through all that again. Make it easy – consider PayPal, consider a bank account I can just transfer into.
• Bear in mind that I can undoubtedly download it quicker from somewhere else (e.g. a torrent) than I can from you. Maybe I can just copy the files from a friend. If I’ve done one of those things, I still want to pay you, so just let me do that. At the same time, you save the money on the bandwidth.

Other than the above, which are really minor quibbles, this is surely the way all music will be bought in future. Everybody’s happy except the middlemen who’ve been so determinedly destroying the music ‘industry’ for so long.

Oh, and a sidenote for Amazon because I’m still annoyed by this – by some accounts over a million people have managed to buy this album so far, without needing to install some software and agree to a draconian and offensive software license agreement.

At this stage it’s USA only, but on the plus side the pricing looks reasonable and Amazon have always impressed me with their service, and also their ability to build a web site that gets straight to the point and doesn’t try and mess you about with flashing thingumajigs.

What could go wrong? Apparently nothing, if you want to buy a single track. Try to buy an album though, you MUST install their “download software”. That instantly rules it out if you’re not using Windows/Mac, but regardless of that I don’t like it. No doubt it’s all very innocent, but on reading the terms I would have to agree to, they’re going to great lengths to make sure I’m not allowed to find out what the software does if I allow it onto my machine (section 3.3) and they seem to be saying that they can remotely modify they software to disable it if they like (section 3.2).

I’m sure this will be no barrier to those who happily install “1000 smiley faces for your emailz” and “super hot toolbar 2.0″ without a care in the world, but personally I don’t need some top-secret proprietary software to download a simple file, no attempt has been made to explain why I would, and even if there was an explanation I’m still not agreeing to those terms. Next please.

“The Artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores”

Quite right there Mr Quirk. Record stores are a thing of the past, hasn’t anybody told you? We don’t need to come and queue up for a bit of plastic any more. And then…

“It is an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career.”

I’m pretty certain that record stores have made their money off the backs of the artists, not the other way around. Record store don’t ‘support’ artists, they stock only those they are certain will sell – not that there’s anything wrong with that, they have limited space and overheads to cover.

Apparently “this covermount culture is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.” In fact (ok, in my opinion) the value of recorded music in itself is rapidly heading towards zero for a variety of reasons. The value to an artist of distributing it as widely as possible, however, is as high as ever. The BBC article ends by mentions the 21 concerts Prince will play in London this summer. The only things missing are the word(s?) “sell-out” and a comparison of the price of a ticket with the paltry amount gained from a CD sale once the retailers and distributors have had their cut.

I think I will finish by quoting someone rather more sensible, who made my various points better than I can:

“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left.”

David Bowie, perhaps shedding some light on why the record stores are Under Pressure.

*I’ve never come across a co-chairman before – could they not resolve the bickering over who got to be leader of the pack? That’s certainly a scenario that springs to mind after reading the quotes from what sounds like a petulant schoolboy taking his bat home.

E F# Gm B E

At first glance then, it’s not unreasonable to assume the song is in E, making the progression I II iii V I. The only spanner in the works there is the II, which from a basic harmonisation of the major scale you would expect to be a ii, i.e. F#m and not F#. Why? Because the F# chord contains the notes F#, A# and C#, whereas F#m has an A instead of an A#. The A# is not part of the E major scale.

In itself, this isn’t enough evidence to decide the song isn’t in E. There are a couple of reasons I can think of to explain the ‘out of key’ chord. Firstly, it’s not unusual to ‘borrow’ a chord from the parallel minor scale, i.e. E minor. I ruled that one out because on the second of the scale it would be a diminished chord. The other option to my limited knowledge was a secondary dominant, which in this case would make the F# V/V, i.e. it’s the fifth of the fifth of the original scale. I can think of a lot of examples where that’s used, but on the simplest level you would expect it to resolve to the V itself, i.e. the next chord would be the fifth, a B, which it isn’t.

Another thing to look at would be the melody, but I don’t think off the top of my head that he ever sings either an A or an A#, so there’s not going to be anything conclusive there.

Other evidence then – the descending line that leads to the bridge goes E D# C# B A# G# F#. All notes from B major, with the A# again being not a note from E major. In fact, with the exception of the initial E they’re all also notes from F# major, which suggests we might be modulating to that key for the bridge, but I’ll leave that for another day and just note that the evidence is still pointing towards B major.

One of my favourite songs of the moment is When You Were Young by The Killers. There are lots of good things about it, but one is that it’s what I call a repeater (same short chord progression throughout, verse and chorus) and yet you don’t tend to notice. By contrast, you don’t have to listen to Champagne Supernova by Oasis many times before that hits you, not that I’m knocking it particularly. Maybe it’s partly because CS uses a tired old progression anyway, whereas When We Were Young has a fine one. It’s this:

E F# Gm B E

The reason it works so well is because the song is in B Major, which means the above translates to:

IV V vi I IV

The progression rarely goes to the I chord and doesn’t hang about there long when it does, so on the one hand you’re hearing a sound that’s mostly based around the IV, but you know it’s really rooted in the I. Now whether you know what the hell I’m talking about or not (and you may argue I don’t either), your ears/brain do know it, and that’s why it sounds good.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with good old Bryan Adams. Well, the only other place I can think of hearing this progression, off the top of my head, is the chorus of his ‘classic’ Heaven. Whether you like the song or not it’s hard to argue with the catchyness of it, which pretty much all comes from that progression in the chorus. If you’re insane enough to have both songs, listen and you’ll see what I mean.

What I’m saying then I suppose, is that The Killers’ song is a finely distilled and concentrated version of a Bryan Adams classic. Sorry guys. I didn’t set out to say that. Since that awful film/song/video, whenever I heard Bryan Adams I see his denim clad figure standing in Sherwood Forest with an arrow flying towards his head. From now I’ll know who fired it.

P.S. Neither of the songs I claimed were ‘repeaters’ actually are, since they both make a very brief excursion elsewhere (in the case of When You Were Young, it’s a “ii vi I V” bridge). However, since I made the term up, I can do what I like.

It’s often said that newborns like music they’ve heard while in the womb, which in Mia’s case would have been a combination of (a) me twanging away repeatedly at various solo arrangements of jazz standards on the guitar, (b) Nibby’s MP3 player in the van belting out various stuff, probably heavily featuring The Killers’ first album, and (c) our usual mix of random stuff around the house. The saying turned out to be true, since she enjoyed all these things straight away. Beyond that, I can remember the following as being particular favourites during the first few months: Stan Getz, Miles Davis, John Coltrane – in particular, Stan Getz and Charlie Bird playing Desafinado was a guaranteed way to put her in a good mood when all else failed.

Later on, Blur’s Parklife became the record of choice, and then at some point she moved on to a sudden obsession with Groove Armada and Bassment Jaxx, along with Odyssey’s Native New Yorker. Since about six months old, Blue Bossa as played by Joe Pass & JJ Johnson will raise a massive smile each and every time she hears the first couple of notes. On the other hand, she’s also, since learning to walk (so 3 or 4 months ago), independently invented the art of headbanging, particularly in response to The Foo Fighters (Everlong & All My Life are her highlights).

Current favourites are easy to list, because they’re current, and although pretty much all the above are still popular the following have to be played many times a day, otherwise (and this is the best translation of her toddlerese rantings I can manage) she is going to call social services and get herself taken elsewhere:

• The Arctic Monkeys – A Certain Romance, Mardy Bum and When The Sun Goes Down
• Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven
• The Kooks – She Moves In Her Own Way

Though I like all the above, today I’ve started to get sick of hearing them, but repeating them over and over was the only chance I had of getting dinner cooked.

She’s always been keen on ‘live’ music, which in our house has to come from either guitars, keyboards, clarinet, recorder or penny whistle. As for playing herself, she’s always been fascinated by the recorder, but doesn’t understand how to blow down it. For as long as I can remember, she’s been an expert at giving you a good crack around the head with the penny whistle, but again, no blowing. The clarinet, she’s not really allowed to touch – nor am I. She’s pretty much mastered both plucking and strumming at the acoustic guitar (though obviously nothing remotely musical emerges), but her forte is a little old Yamaha keyboard, which she mostly prefers to play by standing on the keyboard, leaving her hands free to select different instruments and drumbeats. When she does deign to use her hands, her chosen style is palm face down, with thumb extended downwards to prod the keys. Tonight was a milestone, where having demonstrated Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to her for the 1000th time, she responded by repeating the final descent from F to C perfectly. Most likely just a fluke though, and I’ll be surprised if it happens again for a long while.

]]> http://ciarang.com/posts/mias-music/feed 0 http://ciarang.com/posts/the-rise-and-fall-of-microsoft-development-tools-part-15 http://ciarang.com/posts/the-rise-and-fall-of-microsoft-development-tools-part-15#comments Wed, 01 Nov 2006 10:15:00 +0000 CiaranG http://blog.ciarang.com/index.php/archives/28 It’s been nearly a month since I promised to write part 2 of this epic. As such, it’s possible I might get around to it sooner or later. Needless to say, I haven’t received a deluge of requests to do so, and thus I have to remind myself.

As I said, part 1 was mostly a personal history, while part 2 is likely to deteriorate into a rant. In the meantime, bartosz is doing a great job of highlighting many of my current irritations in his relisoft journal.

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