Jump to content
Wrestlevania

The Dancing Thumb (aka: music recommendations)

Recommended Posts

At its root the thing is: if you feel the song is aimed at people who are not able to language good, it's offensive and denigrating. If you feel it's aimed at people who are not willing to typ wel, it's a justifiable put-down.

 

And 10-15 years ago, I would have been willing to draw the line between those two camps.  Back then, I'd have loved this song!  But the experiences with my family has convinced me that those two camps don't exist, or even if they do, an outside observer is unable to differentiate between them.  So any belittling humor at either camp's expense is de facto humor at both camps.  And, again, that doesn't even get into the class/race issues that prescriptive grammar humor has baked into it. 

 

And again, I think you can make grammar jokes!  I think there's a lot of grammar humor that does not put down people who struggle with proper English. 

 

Around 1 in 5 people (60+ million people) in the US have a learning disability of some sort, the most common of which is dyslexia.  20+ million people live in deep poverty, and we know how that affects education.  I'm no longer comfortable saying that all the people who write poorly online do so because they are lazy or not willing to improve their writing skills. 

 

 

I don't see what you're seeing but also I regret making my post because at its root this fucking argument - is it okay to make jokes?! - is my least favorite argument to ever have. So I'm bailing out. Feel free to be angry with him. I think the song is hilarious.

 

 

You can leave the discussion if you want, that's always your prerogative.  But I'll try to point out what's wrong with a couple of parts:

 

If you can't write in the proper way

If you don't know how to conjugate

Maybe you flunked that class

And maybe now you find

That people mock you online

 

That's not making fun of people who write "u r 2 kewl".  That's making fun of kids who struggled in school.  Those lines are accurate representations of the lives of both my wife and daughter.   They failed tests and classes because of their dyslexia and they limit their written online activities because they don't want to be made fun of.

 

I hate these word crimes

You really need a

Full time proofreader

You dumb mouth-breather

Well, you should hire

Some cunning linguist

To help you distinguish

What is proper English

 

I am my wife's proofreader.  Anytime she needs to send a long email or post anything online that's more than a few sentences long, she asks me to read over it.  Because there will be spelling errors.  There will be grammar errors.  In college, she had to have friends or the English lab read over everything she turned in, just to clean up the routine spelling and grammar errors in her writing.  Not because she's dumb, not because she's uneducated.  Because her brain does not link sound to symbol in the same way as other people.  She was just going into high school when she was finally diagnosed with dyslexia, at a time when schools were still resistant to recognizing dyslexics as just as intelligent as everyone else, they just learned differently.  Multiple times they tried to remove her from regular classrooms, "for her own good", which would have resulted in her having a fraction of the education she has now.  She went on to earn two degrees from universities, but still remembers a junior high teacher telling her she was dumb and didn't belong in that class because she struggled to read.  Her mastery of the written language as an adult would be much better if she hadn't have had teachers and administrators actively sabotaging her education as a kid, because they didn't understand how she learned.

 

The things in that song are accurate representations of what dyslexics deal with, and Weird Al's response to them is that they are dumb, moronic mouthbreathers.  The kinds of insults they grew up with, so it's still part of the literal reality of their life (I keep using that word since he made sure the had to get that in there as well). 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I tried to listen to the Weird Al album, but to me it is obnoxious -- the music, it's just not my taste, enough outside of my range to not be able to judge the quality even.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

And 10-15 years ago, I would have been willing to draw the line between those two camps.  Back then, I'd have loved this song!  But the experiences with my family has convinced me that those two camps don't exist, or even if they do, an outside observer is unable to differentiate between them.

This is what makes me lean to your side of the argument to be honest.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I tried to listen to the Weird Al album, but to me it is obnoxious -- the music, it's just not my taste, enough outside of my range to not be able to judge the quality even.

I've gotta say, save for Jackson Park Express, I'm not big on it at all. I don't mind songs being parodies, but the writing in most of these seemed a bit weak. For as much as he makes fun of buzzwords and cheap namedropping, he does an awful lot of it on this record. Way too much referential humor this time around. :'(

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

A few posts back, I said I really liked Word Crimes. It flows well, the video specifically was well put together, he made some points about grammar which I think some people do intentionally slip up on and which bother me, so I agreed with that. But, yeah, absolutely it could have been done with a lot less venom, and I really don't think it only makes fun of people who deliberately misuse and abuse grammar.

Thankfully, I'm pretty good when it comes to writing and my grammar is reasonable, but if I was hearing that song and I wasn't so confident, I would have felt degraded and that any problems I had were all my own fault. I didn't consider that at the time but it's an important perspective to be mindful of.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I was worried the new RX Bandits album was going to be bad because I thought they had broken up and then I saw the album art and thought it looked really bad so I was pessimistic.  So far I'm digging it though.  I still miss when they had horns, but I liked their last album.

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

against sensibility, i'm digging this new ICEAGE:

 

 

they also hold the honor of the band i've seen tune the longest but never actually winding up in tune. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

A colleague put this on while we were playing Mansions of Madness this week: http://mynoise.net/ It's pretty cool, generator for all kinds of ambient sounds.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I just learned there's a new Kimbra album coming out next month and I'm in excite mode.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not massively keen on Hideaway as a track (though I do prefer it to quite a lot of recent chart stuff) but that video is fantastic. Just loads of excellent dancing!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Agreed. Fantastic stuff!

 

Reminds me of the Michel Gondry's Kylie Minogue video (which was discussed in the podcast some time ago actually) in that it must have been quite stressful to set up and film.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Continuing the "Camera follows a walking and singing lady" trend - one of the greats:

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not massively keen on Hideaway as a track (though I do prefer it to quite a lot of recent chart stuff) but that video is fantastic. Just loads of excellent dancing!

 

Yeah, I didn't even know this song was getting radio play, had someone show me the video, which is awesome, but i also totally dig that the production sounds like a throwback to 90s pop house. Anyways, here's a Mitch Murder remix of it

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I hope Mirel Wagner's (Finnish singer born in Ethiopia) upcoming album will be a success:

 

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Agreed. Fantastic stuff!

 Reminds me of the Michel Gondry's Kylie Minogue video (which was discussed in the podcast some time ago actually) in that it must have been quite stressful to set up and film.

 

1/n Kylies does not pick up all her dry cleaning. I feel sorry for a Kylie.

 

 

Continuing the "Camera follows a walking and singing lady" trend - one of the greats:

 

 

This is the British version of that:

 

 

I was actually going to post something completely different, which was OK GO's new video, which is flippin sweet. I'm constantly amazed that they can think up crazy new things to do.

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You might like this:

 

 

They only have one or two good albums, though. And those are older ones that are not on Spotify or Deezer.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×