Little Things–Good Music

One of the weaknesses of “indie” music is sometimes a lack of good editing or perhaps a too narrow creative view. Of course, that can also be a strength if the artist can look at their own work both with a passion that allows for some creative fire and a dispassion that can allow serious criticism. As an example I’d like to offer perhaps my fav from Heather Alexander, March of Cambreath. It has really stirring lyrics, a great driving beat and… a weak melody and a wee weakness in prosody, which Alexander almost overcomes with a very, very strong performance:

[audio:March_of_Cambreadth.mp3]

By the last verse, she very nearly repairs the prosody problem by anticipating the beat with “How” in “How many of them can we make die,” but never quite makes it into a stronger line by placing the “how” directly on a pickup to “many”. And the melody itself is still very nearly boring, and would be absolutely boring without her strong performance of it (which is as I asserted above, very, very strong).

Still, as I said, it’s my fav of her work, and it is very good, even though I don’t view it as among her best musically. And it has a worthy place in the martial repertoire of modern soldier/warriors, IMO, especially since the boring melody probably wouldn’t get in the way at all, at all of any “hell runs” in PT. *heh*

Disgust Redux

I’ve said it before, but I’m giving into the temptation to reiterate what runs through my mind every time I hear or read the phrase, “It’s only semantics”.

Semantics is the single most important thing about language. Without it, spoken language becomes nothing but (tautology alert!) meaningless whistles and clicks and moans and grunts and written language becomes nothing but weird squiggles, signifying nothing.

Now there abide these three:

Phonemes (sounds and their and written phoneme analogs)
Syntax (structure) and
Semantics (MEANING), and the greatest of these is semantics.

“It’s only (or just) semantics” is an utterance by an idiot, full of sound (and whimpering), signifying nothing* (at least nothing useful, save for confirming that the one saying it has no argument or defensible position).

Insincere apologies to The Bard and all that…


* Aside: For something with much,much more sense than the “nothing (useful) conveyed by the idiotic “It’s just semantics” try this disquisition on Nothing. Not all that edifying, but it did keep me in stitches for days after I first read it. Imagine breaking out in laughter in the middle of a Greek class. The prof was understanding once I had explained and shared the article with him. Nice guy.