Now that the Large Hadron Collider is chugging along and Greek hackers decided not to ruin the party, it's time to celebrate like it's a Fermilab pajama party!
A reader who goes by the moniker neminem has produced the first remix (as far as I know) of Alpinekat's LHC Rap, brilliantly laid over Muse's Supermassive Black Hole. Clever, eh? The bar is certainly set high for future LHC remixes. The a capella vocal track comes directly from Alpinekat's own site, so definitely head over there if you've got your own remixing itch.
I don't have the know-how to do my own remixes, but might I suggest a potential sample:
KCPK - We Will Rock You [originally by Queen] This is probably my favourite Queen cover, which I first heard in an Evian ad at a "World's Best Commercials" screening several years ago. Apparently it was a huge thing in Europe at the time with radio play and remixes. Now imagine it mashed with the LHC Rap. Yes, I can already hear it: "...the things that it discovers will rock you in the head-- rock you.... rock you... rock you"
Well, the Large Hadron Collider started up today without a hitch. Everyone still here? Good. I love this headline from National Geographic: Large Hadron Collider "Actually Worked". 14 years and $8 billion later, I would hope so. Today was the first attempt to send a beam of protons around the 27 kilometer tunnel. I'm told it takes one ten-thousandth of a second for a the proton beam to circle the ring, so I can only imagine how anticlimactic it was to push the "on" button. In any event, scientists were ecstatic. Apparently Stephen Hawking bet $100 that the elusive Higgs boson will not be found, but it may be a few months before we find out who's right.
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So I'm back from the big T.O. and I'm extremely thrilled to report that indeed I was able to attend the world premiere of the rock doc It Might Get Loud at the Toronto Film Fest last Friday night. Yes, it got loud... as it should, considering the film's subjects JIMMY PAGE, JACK WHITE, and THE EDGE were all in attendance! They received a rousing ovation from the audience as they entered, shuffling down the rows to their reserved seats-- not far behind me! Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) was there to introduce the film, thanking the guitar virtuosos, the film's producers, and his wife Elizabeth Shue(?!). Utterly surreal watching a movie alongside these guitar greats.
The film kicks off with a shot of a cow. At a farmhouse in Tennessee (if I recall), Jack White hammers together a homemade instrument out of some blocks of wood, a coke bottle, and wire. Plugging it into an amp, he rips through some invented riffs. "Who says you need to buy a guitar?" he quips, as the opening credits roll. Central to the film is an epic Summit meeting of the three guitarists at an L.A. soundstage, which is interspersed with the subjects telling their own stories through individual interviews, revisiting locations of personal significance, and messing around in their own studios including the recording of unreleased new songs.
Some highlights include Jimmy Page playing a record of Link Wray's Rumble from his extensive home collection and goofily air strumming along with a huge grin on his face; The Edge revisiting his old school in Dublin where he once answered a leaflet posted by Larry Mullen Jr. advertising for bandmates, which would eventually become U2 (he ponders if he hadn't seen that ad and says maybe today he'd be a bank manager); and Jack White teaching a 9-year-old incarnation of himself the folk-blues standard Sittin' On Top of the World. At The Summit, all three swap tales and ideas about the electric guitar... of course, we're all eagerly anticipating their jamming together. They take turns leading the others through their own songs: The Edge on I Will Follow, Jack White on Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, and Jimmy Page on Whole Lotta Love, though on the latter Jack and the Edge merely watch with big grins as Jimmy plays. One of my favourite parts of the film is the three of them trading solos on In My Time of Dying in their distinct styles. AWESOME. It's curious to watch the Edge here because a completely different thought process seems to apply to his guitar solos while Jimmy and Jack clearly have their roots in the blues. If you're a fan of any of these bands, this film is pure gold.
After the film, all three guitarists, the producers, and the director went up on stage for a brief Q&A. I recorded the last couple questions:
For the cover lovers, it must be noted that their Summit ends with them getting together to play The Band's The Weight with Jack and the Edge swapping verses. Jack agrees to take the high notes on the chorus while Jimmy mumbles something about not being able to sing at all. Man, they have got to release an official soundtrack to this film.
My top three covers of The Weight:
Tok Tok Tok - The Weight [originally by The Band]
Aretha Franklin with Duane Allman - The Weight [originally by The Band]
The Moog Machine - The Weight [originally by The Band]
Led Zeppelin, U2, and the The White Stripes as you've never heard them:
Nuspirit Helsinki - No Quarter [originally by Led Zeppelin]
Nossa Alma Canta - Desire [originally by U2]
Nostalgia 77 featuring Alice Russell - Seven Nation Army (Grant Phabao Remix) [originally by The White Stripes]
I had hoped to have an amazing postscript to this night after I was by some stroke of luck able to score a ticket to the fabled It Might Get Loud after party as a media guest (don't ask). But the party was a total bust. Clearly there was an exclusive party within the party for special people only, so I was out in a jammed room with the other schmucks and party fillers. Pure Hell. Utter shallowness on display in full force and free drinks! I held on for 2 hours in hope of a rumoured jam session, though obviously this wasn't going to happen or at least not for us peons to hear/see. The only person of interest I saw was Richard Branson (or a look-alike) cutting through the lobby to the hotel elevators. The next day I read a small blurb in the paper that 2 of the 3 guitarists played (doesn't even say who) and those in attendance included Michael J. Fox, Bryan Adams, Geoffrey Rush, ex-Leaf Tie Domi, probable ex-Leaf Mats Sundin, and some Blue Jays. Yep, completely different party.
Other tidbits:
A clip I had seen previously on YouTube of a teenage Jimmy Page playing skiffle guitar on a TV show in 1957 appears in the film and the crowd erupted in laughter when they heard young Jimmy's career aspirations. Check the full segment here.
With Jack in T.O. for this and Alicia Keys also promoting her own film The Secret Life of Bees, producers took advantage of the opportunity to film the music video for their James Bond theme duet Another Way to Die somewhere in Toronto on Saturday. By the way, did you see the new Quantum of Solace trailer released a day or two ago? Check it out. And a surprising Bond tidbit from It Might Get Loud itself... The Edge asks Jimmy Page if there are any recordings they'd recognize from Jimmy's stint in the 60's as a session guitarist on numerous recordings. His answer: Goldfinger. Wow, news to me!
The other film at TIFF I saw was a midnight screening of JCVD, a new film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as himself. A meta look at Jean Claude Van Damme's life surreally crossed with Dog Day Afternoon. A surreal, funny film and Van Damme shockingly delivers a riveting confessional monologue. Again: Van Damme and riveting in the same sentence. And I just have to mention that the JCVD end credits also roll with a cover song-- Bowie! Marie Mazziotti - Modern Love [originally by David Bowie]
We're fans of synchronicity here at Fong Songs. Following that most recent post tenuously tying together the Large Hadron Collider, Ben Folds, and Vanilla Ice, LHC rap producer Will Barras passed along his own Vanilla Ice mash-up that he did last year. Word to your mother.
Next, someone more talented than me has to combine Vanilla Ice, Hot Chocolate, and Strawberry Alarm Clock for some Neapolitan mash-up goodness. I've already got a title: You Sexy Incense Baby.
Alpinekat - The Large Hadron Rap A couple weeks ago, a friend passed along a link to this awesome rap about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) built under the France-Switzerland border by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The world's largest particle accelerator has been under construction for over 10 years with a cost in the billions of dollars. It's designed to accelerate protons at energies of 7 trillion electron volts along a 27km underground circular tunnel in order to produce high speed particle collisions, the results of which will produce new unseen particles including (possibly) the Higgs boson which is uh... um... ok, I don't really know. This catchy rap puts it all in layman's terms and it's still sails quite a bit over my head, but it definitely helped me understand the hows and whys of the LHC a little more.
The Large Hadron Rap was written and performed by Kate McAlpine (AKA Alpinekat), a science writer who works at CERN. Her MSU site has the full lyrics and an mp3 of the isolated vocals for potential remixers. The beats were provided by Will Barras, who Kate describes as her "Ben Folds 'producer with computers'"... a Rockin' the Suburbs reference if there was any doubt as to Ben's appeal within the nerd community. Speaking of Ben and whiter-than-white rapping, I stumbled upon this oddity on eMusic last week:
Former Fat Boys - Ice Ice Baby (Ben Folds Remix) ["originally" by Vanilla Ice] It's a cover of Ice Ice Baby rapped over a looped sample of Ben Folds Five's Brick. Of course, the original rap used an unauthorized sample of Queen & David Bowie's Under Pressure, settled out of court by the copyright holders. It took years of vigorous mental training, but I can now listen to Under Pressure without a even a moment's thought of Vanilla Ice.
Ben Kweller - BK Baby [originally by Vanilla Ice] Ben Kweller, one-third of The Bens alongside Ben Folds and Ben Lee, also covered Ice Ice Baby with this awesome acoustic take, one of my favourite all-time covers. This is literally my 5th most played song in iTunes.
Vanilla Ice - Play That Funky Music This is from the same album as Ice Ice Baby, which I'm sad to admit I did own on cassette. I was 7 when To the Extreme came out...I surely didn't buy it, I don't remember asking for it, but I had it nonetheless. Vanilla Ice ripped off another artist with more unauthorized sampling of Wild Cherry's Play That Funky Music, which led to a lawsuit and $500,000 in damages. Tsk, tsk, Vanilla!
Majosha - Play That Funky Music [originally by Wild Cherry] Pre-Ben Folds Five, Ben Folds played bass in a band called Majosha who released one EP and one album before breaking up in the late 80's. Some of the tracks such as Video, Emaline, and Kalamazoo would later be re-recorded by Ben Folds Five or solo Ben.
Ben Folds Five - Amelia Bright (live) One of my favourite Ben Folds Five songs was actually never released on any of their albums, fortuitously saved from obscurity by a wonderful bootlegger at a 2000 concert in Scranton, Pennsylvania (insert your own Office reference here). I like to think that a studio recorded version exists, locked up in the Sony vault to be released someday... now I finally get my wish. Kind of. Darren Jessee, former drummer of Ben Folds Five and co-writer of a few songs including their break-out hit Brick, fronts his own band Hotel Lights whose self-titled debut came out in 2006. One week ago their follow-up Firecracker People was released, which includes a newly recorded Amelia Bright. Can't wait to hear it!
"It's Krusteriffic, Johnny Unitas. But is my upper lip supposed to bleed like this?" "Probably!"
The microscopic black holes that might possibly be produced would, if they appear at all, only exist for a nano-nano-nanosecond, so says some Important Physicist. Yes, very re-assuring. Coincidentally, this Friday is the 11th anniversary of the Judgment Day that didn't happen. Let's hope the LHC doesn't become self-aware and destroy humanity.
Great Big Sea - It's the End of the World As We Know (And I Feel Fine) [originally by REM]
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