Category: Multiemedia Monday

“Hi, have you ever wondered what it would be like to listen to some music?” These words open the Gym Class Heroes album The Papercut Chronicles. The album is an aural treat to anyone who enjoys vivid imagery. Petrified Life and the Twice Told Joke (Decrepit Bricks) is a track early on the album that includes beautiful lines: “I walk down / dead end streets like I didn’t see the sign / just to turn around and walk back / that’s fine and dandy but / what’s whack is the fact / I’m still walkin’ / like thank God for Walkmans.” The lyrics are put forth by the lead singer, who goes by many names, but is probably best known as Travie-Trav McCoy.

The album features it songs like Make Out Club, about having brief relationships with lots of women, then Cupid’s Chokehold, which made them a mainstream success, and seems to be more about finding the one. But then there are tracks like Taxi Driver which is an industry-referential track that names literally dozens of other bands. It is tracks like this that come out and remind you that Gym Class Heroes is a band, and not just a rapper. They go on tour with indie-rock festivals more than performing at rap or R&B concerts.

Other songs get a little darker, such as So Long Friend. I haven’t done any research to be sure if this was a track he genuinely recorded in his apartment, but it gives the sound that it was an impromptu freestyle recording after hearing the news of the death of a friend. Pillmatic deals with prescription drug addiction. Faces in the Hall is another serious song, which literally turns out to be about extreme consequences of homophobia.

Simple Livin’ is great song that picks the tempo back up and includes in the chorus “Simple livin’ is a bitch / but then / I do it well / some are fortunate to make it / and some of’em fail” – a song about working multiple jobs and making ends meet, all while he works on his musical career. Apollo 3-1-5 beautifully remixes radio transmissions from the NASA Apollo missions and puts a little music over top of them.

This is another one of those albums I can listen to again and again, beginning to end. You need to do yourself a favor and ignore genres you might not typically listen to. Trust me, sit back and enjoy The Papercut Chronicles.

I normally talk about movies or albums, but today I just want to talk about a few songs. There are artists and bands who most people probably wouldn’t even consider as one-hit-wonders because they don’t even know one of their songs. But there were a few of those songs that started to get radio play, I really liked them, but they just never took off. For some reason, almost all of those songs had some kind of melancholy to them. It must have been a phase. I won’t even talk about them, I just encourage you to click the link and listen to the sample song. Tell me if you remember it, or if you had the same “oh, man, I haven’t heard this in years” moment that I did when I was thinking about this article. So, in no particular order, here are a few songs I think you should hear.

Josh Joplin – Camera One

Amanda Ghost – Idol

Moby – The Sky is Broken

New Radicals – You Only Get what you Give

Chill Pill Dancers – Zoot Suit Riot (I still don’t know HOW this song came in to my life, rather than the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies version, but I still love this version, to this day!)

Shawn Mullins – Lullaby

Swirl 360 – Hey Now Now (I also loved the other song off of their first single, called Don’t Shake My World)

At the end of a long work day, I began my first listen through of an album sent to me. This, sirs, is not an April Fool’s joke. It starts out with a track titled WHAT KIND OF DAY HAS IT BEEN. Well, thanks for asking. And thanks for greeting me at the door like this, because I feel quite rejuvenated. The album is Electronic Music by Nick Maynard.

Sure, most of you are asking who? But I’ve mentioned him before, at least another band he is in. Continue reading “2013 – Nick Maynard – Electronic Music”

During my freshman year of college, I stumbled on to a show that was about life… in college. Undergrads only lasted for a season, after originally airing on MTV. It was MTV’s era of trying several new animated shows, but because nobody ever knew what time something was going to be aired on MTV, every single show flopped after just a season. But many of them, like this one, gained cult followings.

Undergrads‘ protagonist is Nitz – we’re never given his real name… even Nitz forgets what his real time is from time to time, never spitting it out. Nitz is the prototypical un-cool kid. He has his clique of friends, likes things the way they are, doesn’t really want to go out and do the things that college kids do. He’s content.

The rest of the ensemble includes Cal, the lady-killer, Rocko, the jock, and Gimpy, the geek. Nitz meets a few new friends at college, and repeatedly bumps in to his high-school crush, Kimmy. As we take the Undergrads crew through their freshman year of college, you can see it laying out plans for at least a 4-year series as the youngsters grow up, learning about life in college, before life on their own.

The show actually does a decent job of portraying life on campus – you can see Nitz struggle with finding a club or organization he wants to belong to, the trouble with the dreaded “freshman 15” weight gain, student loan problems, deciding whether or not to drink alcohol, and the infamous “walk of shame.” And with a great cast of characters, you get to see nearly every side of every argument and make up your mind what works best for you!

Overall, Undergrads isn’t the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, but it has so many great moments I still love to go back and watch an episode every now and then. If you find every ounce of the show completely unrelatable, then you are probably too cool to be watching cartoons at your age!