Made It

I've written in the past that I don't critique music as harshly if it's attempting to express or investigate some concept. But sometimes, even when an artist is exploring a concept I will still call it fucking terrible because the concept is just so obviously retarded. Take, for example the new Kid Rock song (linked so you can listen to it for as long as you can stand, without having to endure video of aging Rap Rockers driving boats around with their shirts off). The concept was some sort of Summer of 69 retrospective opus which I initially thought was heavily influenced by Leonerd Skynnard, before quickly learning was completely ripping off Sweet Home Alabama and... I just can't understand how anyone justified this as a good idea during the production process.

That said, another terrible concept for a nonetheless publicly released song was Busta Rhymes teaming up Linkin Park for the track Together we made it. Now, Busta Rhymes has never claimed to be an intelligent MC but teaming up with mid-30s teen idol Chester Bennington to deliver rhymes over angsty rock didn't really work for Jay-Z, so why is he ripping that off? I don't even remember why I first got a copy of this song, other than for the lols. But a funny thing happened, on a day I was performing a particularly arduous software release after hours. Most releases usually take about 30 minutes to backup, run scripts, compile and finalise. But this one had come upon a few errors and was dragging out. I'd even turned my music off to focus on the problems. After I sorted everything I turned to my music inbox and for some reason felt it necessary to celebrate my success with:

And inevitably I became conditioned to rock out to this song everytime I overcame some large, but in hindsight melodramatic challenge. Like today when I had another release, also with it's problems. This time I was working with a client over the phone as we fixed their issues so I could finalise the release. It was taking time, outside it was dark and trains were leaving without me every 18 minutes. But eventually we succeeded, we overcame and finally I had someone to sing with! But he was clearly not as chirpy as I was following the success, and just grunted in satisfaction that the release was done. So I sung Together we made it!! but he'd hung up the phone. The cleaning guy looked up at me but I don't think he got the reference.