BBQ pork waffle == fail

BBQ pork waffle == fail (no truck!)

Occurs to me as i

Occurs to me as i pass the giant signs that the one good thing that could come out of the demise of citi is that they'd have to rename citifield.

This morning I realized that “Love Lockdown” by Kanye West is the best Depeche Mode song in years. It also makes for at least one good mashup.

in which i attempt a vaguely Schenkerian analysis of White Christmas and fail before the third measure

We start at the beginning: the song is in C major. And the first chord (of the sectional chorus, which is the part of the song everyone knows; for the purposes of this exercise, we're ignoring the first verse) is indeed C major (I) (“I'm…”). And yet, right there in that chord there's an A. There are no A's in a C major chord. If you had that chord on a first semester music theory exam and asked “What chord is this?” a student might very well answer Am7 in first inversion and you would have to mark him correct.

But it's not an Am7. No way no how. It just isn't. So the A, it's a non-chord tone. Is it a neighbor tone, or one of those other things whose names I forget? The next chord is a Dm7. There's totally an A in that, so maybe that's the purpose of the A: to lead us into the Dm. That sounds like a plausible theory, except for the fact that the C w/ the A in it repeats 4 times before we get a chord change. Four fucking times. A, A, A, A. None of which belong there.

So, after that first bar, the song moves to the aforementioned Dm7 (ii7) (“Dream-”). A little weird to be the first thing in a song like this, but whatever, it's a totally diatonic chord change. I understand that, let's move on with the analysis. The song moves back to C (I) (“-ing”) and then, on the word “of”, to… B major (VII)? “Okay,” I think, “Don't let it throw you. Berlin is just throwing in a little chromaticism. No big deal. This must be an applied chord or something. What's the next chord... oh crap.” Yes, it goes right back to C (“a”), and I am completely lost.

Now, granted, it's been a few years since I studied music theory in any serious way, and it's quite possible there's some obvious thing that I'm forgetting here, but damn. That's some serious songwriting right there. And the most amazing thing about it is that it sounds like the simplest song in the world.

greatest domain name idea ever

change.gov

wow. it's like the entire campaign in 10 characters.