Olga's Amazing Things

Mongolian Throat Singing Is A Gateway Genre

As an avid world music enthusiast, I treasure the moment where you’ve listened to a new genre so much that it stops sounding like world music and starts just sounding like music.

This moment comes quickly with genres that share traits with western music, like Southern African music (since it has profoundly influenced the contemporary western style) or Mariachi (a spanish-influenced version of a traditional central American genre) while others are more difficult.

For me, one of the most difficult regions to acclimatize to has been traditional Asian music. The piercing timbres, slow rhythms and subtle melodic phrasing of styles like Gamelan are much more alien to my ears than something with an obvious 4-chord structure. Faced with my aural stubbornness, I could give up on Asian music and go listen to the Black Album for like the gazillionth time. Or I could find a gateway genre.

A gateway genre is a style of music with elements of the one you want to acclimatize to but also some elements that are familiar. For example, a lot of people find that Country/Western is the gateway to (slightly superior) Bluegrass, jazz is a gateway to Klezmer and Snow Patrol is the gateway to having no taste or friends. My gateway to Asian trads has surprisingly turned out to be: Mongolian Throat Singing.

Mongolian Throat Singers use vocal harmonies, meaning they can sing multiple notes at the same time ( :o ). Even though this concept is soooo non-western and it gives the voice a harsh tone, a lot of the scales and chords progressions used are similar to the ones we’re used to, giving MTS (of course it deserves a hip abbreviation) gateway status.

For those of you who are not in a position to immediately rush out to the library and get all their MTS compilation CDs to illegally rip, here is a Youtube summary of the genre:

• A classic example of a dude throat singing. As far as I know, this song is to MTS what all LMFAO singles are to club music. (Ignore the video intro; the real song starts at 0:26)
• A chick throat singing like a boss.
• Female folk singing, without harmonics (just one note at once). This is the highlight of mongolian music for me - I think all these women sound beautiful yet badass, and I can’t comprehend how they trill over such wide intervals.
• And again. Round Two.
• A version of this style with a westernized backing instrumentation that comes of sounding a bit Disney.
• A folk instrumental. I have it on good authority that the ‘doinggg’ sound first heard at 1:17 is made using the lips. I encourage you all to see if you can do it. (I couldn’t).

MTS Rating: 3.9 Western Influences out of 5

EDIT: Just realized I reviewed ukuleles because they are a gateway, too. Now I have to review all the gateway things. Pot coming up next.

Review-kulele: It’s Not A Toy

Ukulele Advantages

1. Easy. The ukulele is one of those wonderful instruments that you can get to sound pretty cool pretty quickly, giving it an advantage over most contemporary and all orchestral instruments.
2. Cheap! Ukes require just a small amount of material and no expensive metals like drums/basses/electric guitars do.
3. Portable. If you are in a gigging band (especially if you don’t have a car) you can have some nice daydreams now about skipping to the venue with a ukulele instead of schlepping your drum kit. Oh my god such an asset.
4. Awesome, apparently. Ukuleles are riding indie folk’s coattails (the genre, not the people. Although indie folk may well be wearing coattails) back into fashion, from this to this to this. It may be relatively easy to get a uke to sound cool, but the upper end of ukulele skill has exploded recently and put technically able ukulele players back in demand for a huge range of genres.

At the moment, ukuleles are a gimmicky instrument in the music industry, which won’t change any time soon. But this isn’t a call for people to start taking ukes seriously. Rather, I think the best thing ukuleles can offer to the world is a ‘gateway’ instrument, i.e. one that a previously unmusical person can learn and become a musical person without having to suck for ages (example of an instrument that is NOT a gateway instrument: oboe). Ukes are convenient (advantages one, two and three) and now that they’re not just for freaky hippies (advantage four) they are inspiring a wave of potential music nerds to take up their first instrument.

Ukulele Rating: 4 Strings (GCEA) Out Of 5

Waking Up To Nice Texts Friends Have Sent In The Night

There is nothing bad about this. It is only amazing.

Rating: 5 Awwwwwws out of 5

Meta Humor

Photo credit

The humour in this sentence is from its self-reference. What about two self-references, is this still funny or just annoying? Surely you’re sick of it by three. No? Four?

There is a limit to the number of levels of meta that people can stand, which is why I have now stopped self-referencing. But the mindfuck-style humor is creeping into pop culture like a meme ninja, causing more and more of my friends to enthusiastically call Meta on self-references in conversation. Paving the way for this Russian Doll hilariousness are authors like Jasper Fforde, websites like TV Tropes, the NBC sitcom Community and the ongoing quest of hipster culture to sit the lap of originality on the highest part of the bean bag of life.

Meta Humor Rating: 4.5 Ratings out of 5

Twilight Is Girl Porn

People of the internet, ask yourselves: What is porn?

I propose that porn is media that capitalizes on the ultimate evolutionary goal of any relationship, i.e. sex. Porn provides the sex without having any of the precursors that are necessary in the real world like love, compatible personalities or not being strangers. Just the good bit, without the work and meaning. 

“But Olga,” you might say because you are super inquisitive, “Why do you think that the ultimate goal of any relationship is sex? What the hell?”

While I find your tone needlessly critical, I will answer because I like to encourage people to say what they feel. A small minority seek only sex from relationships, but it’s pretty common to feel the evolutionarily selected drive to do people and continue your genetic line, and this drive is satisfied efficiently with porn. This is my explanation for intelligent people who choose to sacrifice watching a realistic, complex relationship unfold in favor of something with a moan to dialog ratio greater than one. However, males make up an overwhelming majority of the porn audience demographic.

So, is there an equivalent evolutionary drive for females? I think it would be love. Women are more likely to indulge in fantasies not of sex, but of inseparable soulmates consumed by their timeless bond of passion omg etc. This is what Twilight provides so infuriatingly - the main characters fall into codependent love without actually having compatible personalities or getting to know each other first. Stephanie Meyer skipped the subtle initial stage and went straight to the meaningful eye contact, giving a justification no better than the one that gets the pizza delivery person into everyone’s pants in porn. 

I realize that I am making some genderalizations. However, it is true that men are a little more likely to have sexual fantasies and women are a little more likely to have fantasies of love. The difference is big enough to produce a predominantly male porn audience and predominantly female twilight fans. Of course there gajillions of exceptions. But Meyer’s recognition of an equivalent porn-like drive for women and capitalization of that is a smart move. If she knows what she’s doing.

Twilight: 0.5 Vampires out of 5
Meyer’s Shrewd Creation Of A Niche Market: 3.5 Bloodsuckers out of 5 

Review Number Two: Rostam Batmanglij

With a name that already contains the word ‘Batman’ I would imagine that it is hard to go wrong in life. So you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re not producing music with the complexity and originality that Rostam is. If you are, send me links.

If you haven’t heard of Rostam yet, you’ve probably still heard of his band Vampire Weekend. If you haven’t heard of Vampire Weekend, you’ve probably still heard their single A-Punk which got a whole bunch of radio play even though it’s not my favorite (you’re right, it IS weird that I wasn’t consulted). So if you, too, find A-Punk slightly irritating I would recommend you move on to the band’s second album, Contra, starting here.

Vampire Weekend grew their sound massively in Contra. The simple and sweetly raucous vocal melodies present in both albums were intensified in Contra by more complex instrumental backing. Faster, unpredictable percussion underneath a varied landscape of instruments from digital to orchestral makes the vocals a welcome unifier, gracefully avoiding the excessive repetition often present in catchy indie music.

The tracks Rostam has released solo (Wood and Don’t Let It Get To You) are a natural continuation of the Contra sound. The instrumentals are just as interesting, just as joyful and still feature a whole lot of scales played really fast, thank goodness (LOVE IT).

One of the main changes from Contra is the pace and song structure. Most of the tracks on Contra are under four minutes and consist of short verse/chorus sections; Wood begins with a 1:27 sitar-led instrumental that could have stood on its own as a track. Instead, this is followed with a 1:30ish gentle love song, breaking into an improvisational section that builds for the remaining three minutes. Where songs like Contra’s ‘Cousins’ drive a wild and precarious pace, the way Wood unfolds makes you feel like it could go on forever - and like that could be pretty wonderful.

Rostam Batmanglij Rating: 5 Sick Beats out of 5