Tag: music

My Corporate Anthem

From 1998 until 2000 I worked for a dot-com. kraq, lesboot, and amorpoeta did too; that’s where I met them. It was a pretty damn good job. I learned a lot there, met some people who are friends for life, got paid pretty well. It was unspeakably horrible right at the end but not until then.

Typical for places like this, it went from 25 to 500 people during my tenure there, and odd things happened as a result. Bizarre and incompetent people were hired, including a Business Communication Course Writer who couldn’t find the ampersand on a keyboard and applauded himself after he urinated. Salespeople went into the field to push products that did not and could not exist. One employee sent poems to everyone to encourage us, including a hymn to customer service called “May I Help You?”.

One day it came time to completely reorganize the technology department, which not only made the product but also supported all the other employees’ computer use. Everything was going to be turned upside down, new groups were formed, responsibilities shifted, and most important of all the whole procedure for tech support was to change. My boss prepared a presentation on all of this material.

At the meeting, though, we didn’t go right into that. After the CEO had told us how big and wonderful these changes were, another employee stepped up. This guy was a teacher with a master’s degree who wrote courses for us. He was also a model and actor, and a very …enthusiastic guy. He had with him a guitar. He was wearing a cowboy hat.

At this point a more sensible person would have made cramping motions and fled the room, but I was hypnotized. What the hell is Rob about to do? He introduced himself by saying that we were about to have a lot of changes in our workplace that would be hard to understand and probably annoying, so he was going to help us into it with a song. Strum, strum, grin. And off he went. It started something like:

Come gather around employees
Of this company we share
I’ve got a song to sing to you
Because I know you care

Mike wrote down a policy
Tom and Alec did approve
We’re gonna change Technology
‘Cause the company’s on the mooooove

I think I may have destroyed a ceiling tile with my mind at this point.

Tech support is different now
Everyone’s got to change
We’re going to move together
Together and forever
Just like you and me cowboy
Out.. on.. the.. RAAAAAAANGE

There was a silence that that of the grave when he finished. Then the CEO began clapping and laughing enthusiastically and most of the people in the room did also. I concentrated on keeping my vagus nerve from going into a spasm and stopping my heart.

I should have realized then that it was time to get out of that place. Later on we had horrible power struggles, the departure of the useful and crowning of the incompetent, and then finally a tragic dénouement involving an anti-semitic CFO, his crypto-nazi stooge, sexual and racial harassment, mass resignations, email break-ins, and fraud. The company changed it name and then spectacularly shit the bed a year or so after I left.

That guitar should have been enough, though.

Beware, posers, of the Necrowizard!

Impaled Northern Moonforest is an acoustic black metal band whose hit tunes include “Lustfully Worshipping The Inverted Moongoat While Skiing Down The Inverted Necromountain Of Necrodeathmortum”, “Awaiting The Blasphemous Abomination Of The Necroyeti While Sailing On The Northernmost Fjord Of Xzfgiiimtsath”, and “Masturbating On The Unholy Inverted Tracks Of The Grim And Frosbitten Necrobobsledders”.

Go sign their guestbook, already. Via The Null Device.

Straight, no cheaters.

I found my six-disc set of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and ripped the first three discs today. I hadn’t been listening to much jazz in the last three months and now I’ve dived back into it. This is exactly the kind of jazz I love.

When I listen to this music it does the same thing as the classical music I grew up with; it completely sucks me in. I don’t want to do anything but listen and follow the melodic line, the rhythm, everything, as closely as possible. I find myself smiling at little musical jokes and getting shivers when something unexpected happens.

Music geeks my age or younger are all about post-rock music. If they’re enthusing about an innovative artist, chances are it’s Four Middle Class Kids Making Somewhat Dissonant Noises to a Pop Beat. There are probably at least two electric guitars involved, and if they don’t exactly make rock and roll music, that’s their background. If they do a cover song, it’s likely to be a post-Beatles pop number.

And then I put on a CD like this and think: The most sophisticated and subtle music America produced is here. It’s from the late fifties and early sixties. And it was made by largely uneducated people from poor families, most of them from a mistreated and disadvantaged ethnic group, working under tremendous commercial pressure. The music these people made still feels new today. And there’s more innovation and exploration in one of these songs than a hundred faux naive indie pop albums can muster.

I still like pop music. I can’t be one of those “Well now that I’ve heard jazz I can’t be bothered with pop music” elitists. But the armies of college kids with guitars and Pavement CDs have some catching up to do.

News wrapup

  1. Kristen took a stand. South Orange County strippers disapprove of the London terror bombings, in case you wondered if they were straddling the issue. (via myspace chain letter).
  2. I think the time has come in pop music for tribute bands to have their own tribute bands. Some of these guys have more than passed the M*A*S*H threshold and outlasted their idols by decades. Pick your local tribute band and start giving them the due they’ve earned. Around here I suggest: “Two Doors Down, a Tribute to Wild Child” and “Drive Their Car, a tribute to Rain“. You probably have your own local meta-heroes to emulate. Come to think of it, I bet wossisname Cafferty already has tribute bands.
  3. Can’t seem to face up to the facts; tense and nervous, can’t relax.

At the shrink’s

The bipolar lady having a bad high, the worried mom, and her disgruntled and possibly insane 16 year old boy all just agreed that we preferred silence to KOST 103.5. “Soft Jams”, Faith Hill’s song from “Pearl Harbor”, and the Phil Collins version of “You Can’t Hurry Love” make psych patients something something.

I switched off the radio to general approval.

Me and the corp’ral out on a spree

Here’s two for the boys overseas, originally made for their compatriots from the last Empire.

“Banks of the Nile” – Richard Thompson

“Island of No Return” – Billy Bragg

“I get free medical care because we lost the war. I lost it real good for them, too. They look at my record and say ‘How much Demerol would you like today, Mr. Trout?'” —Bob Trout (UDT veteran, Vietnam)

“When the flag comes out, it’s only a matter of time before someone’s handing you a rifle.” —My great-uncle Richard Sears. (Army grunt, WWII, Sicily invasion)

We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;
While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, fall be’ind”,
But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind,
There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,
O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind.

—Kipling, “Tommy”