Did you catch Monday night’s episode of Gossip Girl? If you did, chances are you heard Vitamin String Quartet’s lush string arrangement of INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” throughout the lavish wedding recpeption. You might have also heard VSQ’s arrangement of Pat Benetar’s “We Belong” as Blair and her prince headed out onto the dance floor for their first dance as husband and bride.

Whether you’re hearing it for the first time or reliving the moment, check out Vitamin String Quartet’s renditions Pat Benetar’s “We Belong” here and INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” here.

You know you love us.

XOXO

If you’ve been in a long supermarket line recently, you’ve probably seen the leather jacketed members of The Black Keys gracing the cover of this month’s issue of Rolling Stone. You may even be privy to the attention-grabbing lede:

“Rock & roll is dying because people became OK with Nickelback being the biggest band in the world. So they became OK with the idea that the biggest rock band in the world is always going to be shit – therefore you should never try to be the biggest rock band in the world.”

That was Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney’s quote, which the author used to start the profile piece. The article was about much more, but the easy, pot-stirring soundbite was the driving force behind the retweets, reblogs and shares, so let’s talk about it. Is the great rock & roll dying? However you feel about Nickelback, one of those bands that is simultaneously hugely popular and hugely dismissed, is irrelevant to the underlying idea Carney is getting at: rock & roll is the big time, and the big time is no longer cool.

The sub-culture and/or counter-culture has always been present in music, whether it was jazz or punk. But it seems the recent rise of the internet has made it a viable place to live; now, more than ever, you can stay off of the radio and refuse The Tonight Show and still make enough money to live. Indie has become a self-sustaining ecosystem and community. As a result, kids picking up guitars for the first time can aspire to get big – but not too big. Maybe big enough to get on the cover of Rolling Stone, at best.

But is that killing rock & roll? There’s an idea out there in the fandom that mainstream popularity and coolness are usually mutually exclusive. Just look at any misguided discussion about “selling out.” Carney seems concerned with making straight rock & roll, and the fame that comes with it, a positive thing to the rebellious youths turning away from rock & roll and toward alternative or indie. Because what kind of world would we live in if rock & roll was no longer hip?

What I think Carney is picking up on isn’t that rock & roll is dying, but it is definitely changing. It’s now an umbrella term for a wide variety of music – just look at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s definition of the genre. Rock & roll has always branched out from its point of origin, but with technology providing a low barrier to entry and easy distribution, it has splintered out even faster. So any of the big guitar acts, like indie chart toppers Arcade Fire, don’t really identify as simply “rock & roll,” leaving that territory for the Nickelbacks.

Despite this, it’s hard to imagine that Arcade Fire doesn’t fit in the big world of rock somewhere. If they identify as an indie band, or some kind of alternative, or some derivative of folk and chamber pop, all of that can still be traced backwards through time to a rock & roll tradition. It’s not that rock & roll is dying – it’s just that the term isn’t helpful in today’s mass music access, because it doesn’t describe the difference between Radiohead and Papa Roach.

It’s important to note that people have always claimed that rock & roll was dying. In 1968, the King of Rock & Roll himself, Elvis Presley, gave credit to these new bands like The Beatles and The Byrds, but felt that they were straying away from rock’s roots in gospel and R&B. Maybe it’s changing faster now than ever, but it’s always been changing, and that’s far from death. In a culture where there’s something for everyone, where every band – even Nickelback – has a niche and an audience, how can that be anything but survival?

Be sure to check out:

Vitamin String Quartet Performs Modern Rock Hits 2011 Vol. 2

Available now at iTunes and Amazon

and

Vitamin String Quartet Performs Breaking Dawn Part 1

Available now at iTunes and Amazon

Music criticism is difficult. It can be hard to have a solid, journalistic opinion on every piece of new music and feel out a rating based on that opinion. Then, they have to convince people that their feeling is more than just a relative, subjective opinion, but that it contains factual authority about the album’s failures and accomplishments. The worst case scenario for many critics is that their panning or praising of an album is looked at as not just an outlier, but illogically wrong-headed. It’s a risk with every review.

Now that we understand that good music criticism is a difficult job, let’s take a look at its most delicious failures. These are reviews on albums that went against the grain in the worst way, likely causing some palms to meet foreheads in hindsight. Unfortunateley, there’s no sweeping under rugs, because the internet is forever.

Weezer’s album Pinkerton is rightly considered a ’90s alternative classic. While it wasn’t a financial success right out of the gate, it had the right critical reception from most outlets at the time. Except Rolling Stone, who gave it a middling 3 out of 5 stars, which is as useful as Rolling Stone saying “This sure is music.” The text of the review cites aimless songwriting and a juvenile point of view as faults in the overall mixed evaluation. What makes this a gaffe is the attempt to correct things in hindsight. In 2004, the album was re-reviewed with a perfect 5 stars, and the 2009 deluxe reissue was awarded 4 ½ stars.

Then there’s Daft Punk’s Discovery and Pitchfork’s 6.4 review. Kanye’s use of Daft Punk on “Stronger” just kicked into high gear what was already happening: a lateral shift of pop music towards club-centric house beats, which Daft Punk demonstrated to be their strong suit. So if something had such an impact, how do you give it 64 points out of a possible 100? First, by complaining about the lyrics. In hindsight, reviewer and Pitchfork owner Ryan Schreiber admitted to being wrong and falling in love with the album later on in the summer. These days, it’s frequently listed as one of the best albums of its decade.

While those two focus on classics being downplayed, there’s also something to say about loving a universally reviled album. This was the case with Chris Cornell’s Scream, a Timbaland-produced pop album from the Soundgarden frontman. It was so thoroughly disliked that even his friend Trent Reznor had to say something. Over at Entertainment Weekly, they loved it enough to give it an astounding B+ grade. That wouldn’t be so bad, as having enthusiasm for something that no one else likes is admirable for its positivity. But the language of the praise – saying Cornell almost succeeds at creating his own Thriller – is a little bit out there. It’s hard to imagine the connections one has to make in order to listen to Scream and think, “This is almost as good as Michael Jackson’s best work.”

Vitamin String Quartet Performs Weezer’s Pinkerton

Available at iTunes and Amazon

AND

Beaucoup de VSQ

Available now at iTunes and Amazon

I once had an intense late-night discussion with friends concerning who’d survive the impending zombie apocalypse (hiya, 2012!): Keith Richards, Ozzy Osbourne, Willie Nelson, or Snoop Dogg.

Keith Richards was quickly nixed because he’s practically undead as is.

“Well, so is Ozzy!” The Stones contender contested.

“Not true! He’s the Prince of Darkness — that’s different!” I asserted.

And it went on like this for hours — seriously — ending in a stalemate between Snoop and Ozzy (Willie fell asleep). But I was right. Ozzy would outlive them all, napping through the absolute destruction and waking afterwards with a befuddled look on his face, then: “Sharon!”

Ozzy’s career was by no means over when he received a career resurgence thanks to the crazy train success of The Osbournes. But it cast the once-feared, controversy-baiting legend in a new light: as the sitcom dad. He joined the ranks of postmodern papas alongside greats Al Bundy and Homer Simpson. Neither of the aforementioned had a First Act quite like the Ozzman, however.

Or, should I say, First and Second Act? Through bandmates’ deaths, public outrage, band and record label woes, and lots and lots of illicit substances, Ozzy still stands (or stoops) as the “Godfather of Heavy Metal.” That inimitable voice and proclivity to shock make Ozzy the ultimate showman of any century; his bio reads like a case study for Behind the Music.

After Ozzy was kicked out of Black Sabbath for excessive drug use, he embarked on a solo career that few could have predicted would reach such heights. Behind all the hoopla, though, Ozzy has an ear for melody unmatched by his metal peers.

In November it was announced at the Whiskey a Go Go that Ozzy would reunite with the original Black Sabbath lineup for a world tour and new album, which would be produced by Rick Rubin. Let’s hope old foes Tony Iommi and Ozzy have buried the hatchet – it’s time for them to show the younger generation how to properly rawk.

And this post would be remiss without one quick Ozzy anecdote: Once freed from his contract with Jet Records after the death of best friend and guitarist Randy Rhoads in a freak plane accident, he showed up drunk to an Epic Records meeting with two doves, one of which he freed and the other of which he killed in the same manner as the infamous bat incident; Osbourne was signed on the spot.

Give that a try at your next job interview, will you? ALL ABOARD!!!

Blizzard of Strings: VSQ Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne

Available now at iTunes

What was the first album you ever bought for yourself? If you can’t answer without feeling a pang of embarrassment, you understand that the evolution of your personal music taste can take many twists and turns. What was once close to your heart in your adolescence may have you selling records in your teenage years.

What if we were able to chart the way people grow to develop their musical taste? What if we could identify the different stages and when to expect them? Well, that ship has come in. I present to you the greatest cartographic accomplishment since the mapping of the human genome: The map of developing music tastes. This is science.

Childhood: Kids Music & Your Parents’ Music
Until about the age of 8, the only music you can conceivably like is kids music, like the songs Sesame Street teaches you. Otherwise, you’ll grow a tiny affinity for whatever your parents listen to, whether it’s their intent or not. That means that you can grow up listening to anything from AC/DC to Boyz II Men. This is important to note for your current/future babies.

Pre-Teens: Whatever’s Popular With Teenagers
Kids always get their hooks into pop music earlier than people think they’re supposed to. For some generations, that means 4th graders that are super into Nirvana. For people of my generation, that meant a bunch of 9 year olds rapping along to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

Middle School: Whatever Makes You Cool
Middle School, typically ages 11 through 14, is sometimes called The Great In-Between Darkness. It’s a time when kids retain the cruelty of small children, but are beginning to manifest the need to fit in. This intersection of selfish apathy and desire produces some strange years, and no, I don’t know what projection is. In music taste, this is where most kids conform to whatever makes them cool in their circle: if they’re on the fast track to being cool outsiders, they’ll hear their first punk song. If they’re going to be the top of the social ladder, they’ll get into the top pop act of the day, whether that’s Michael Jackson or Lady Gaga.

High School: The Divergence
At long last, people begin to really define their music tastes (and themselves), and the results can be wildly different. What’s new is that teenagers begin to realize that music has existed for a while – even before they were born! It’s when people start to learn music backwards, as we all do, finding the influences of our favorites and the kings of the genres we love. It’s when kids start wearing The Doors t-shirts and memorize Beatles lyrics, things they couldn’t pull off before.

College and Post-Grad: Eclecticism
You know those weirdos that say they like everything except rap? Or those oddballs that hate all country music without having given its rich history a listen? This is when they start listening to a little bit of rap and country. For the rest of us, this is where we get in-depth with our tastes, which, depending on the branching path you took, can mean a Miles Davis phase or brand new genres with names like “Witch house.”

And that’s where I’m at so far. In the interest of space and saving the rest for medical journals, I’m going to have to cut it off here. Hopefully, with further research and, of course, a ton of grant money, we’ll be able to further unlock the secrets of why we like what we like, and perhaps prevent some unfortunate choices before they happen.

Yesterday’s kings of soundtracks were the composers of iconic themes for cash cow franchises. These were people whose work drew just as much attention as the films they scored, like John Williams on Star Wars or Danny Elfman on Batman. While they’re still around today, composing for films every year, it seems that the most acclaimed, attention-grabbing scores go to a different set of composer and producer. Not necessarily younger, but the mass media eye has shifted to people whose work we’ll look back on the way we look at the Jaws theme.

Hans Zimmer
You Know Him From: The Lion King, The Thin Red Line, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight, Inception
Hans Zimmer is one of the most prolific and award-winning composers working today, whose place as an icon in the film scoring industry has been cemented for a few years now. Despite this, his impact and accolades aren’t slowing. Because of Inception, he has been single-handedly responsible for the current trend of dramatic tuba hits that is currently sweeping movie trailers. It showed that an iconic theme doesn’t always have to be a rousing, beautiful climax. Sometimes you just need a repeated, harrowing bass note.

Clint Mansell
You Know Him From: Requiem for a Dream, Moon, The Fountain
Like the aforementioned tuba trend, a mark of a popular composer is when others borrow from him. In the case of Clint Mansell, people decided it would be easiest to just buy out the use of his theme from Requiem for a Dream and use it over and over again. The epic Lux Aeterna has been reused, remixed and redone for everything from Lord of the Rings to soccer games. While Mansell isn’t as prolific as the others on his list, his work has built a fan base. He’s been working on challenging himself as he works on his first video game soundtrack for Mass Effect 3, which requires him to compose pieces that can react and change on the fly.

Jon Brion
You Know Him From: Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I Heart Huckabees, Step Brothers
Brion is more of a jack of all trades, who functions as a musician, songwriter and producer of songs by the likes of Fiona Apple, Of Montreal and Aimee Mann. But the majority of his work, and some of his best, comes from the quirky, pop film scores he creates for quirky, pop films. While many composers will go to big, epic orchestras, Brion works well on smaller and more intimiate scales. His work has been so admired that he even has soundtrack commentary on the Step Brothers DVD, and his score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been sampled by rapper Jay Electronica and dream-pop duo Memoryhouse.

There’s something about the experience of listening to film scores that brings you back to not just the scene it complemented, but the emotion the story evokes. For VSQ renditions of some of the most famous and evocative soundtrack work, see the compilations below:

Vitamin String Quartet Tribute to Star Wars

Available at iTunes and Amazon

Blood-Curdling Strings! VSQ Pays Tribute To Horror Classics

Available at iTunes and Amazon

“The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.” – Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Therein lies the rub. Why do so many of us actively seek out the “comfort” of a sad song when we’re down? If we were people that made sense, we wouldn’t use music to make our melancholy deeper. Somehow, our instincts overpower that basic logical equation. Sadness, one of the central, eternal wellsprings of music, fulfills a strange function in our listening habits. We don’t desire unhappiness, but when it’s thrust upon us, we desire the intensification that a sad song brings.

The range of explanations is vast. On the spiritual side, musician Nick Cave believes it to be in tune with an innate longing for divine wholeness in all people. If you’re looking at science, Ohio State University Professor David Huron theorizes that coaxing out a rush of the hormone prolactin is pleasurable without real consequence. There doesn’t have to be only one answer, but in any case, it can be hard to articulate just why feeding the fire of your terrible, endless heartache feels simultaneously good and bad.

There’s the idea of playing with a tooth that hurts. Despite the pain receptors telling us “Ouch, ouch. Please stop,” we can’t resist poking at it with our tongue. But consider that when your mouth is free of pain, you’re rarely even aware of your teeth. Is it possible then that emotional pain is a way of feeling more alive and aware of our existence? Because there’s nothing like the stir of musical drama, from Bach’s Chaconne to Death Cab for Cutie, to imbue your day-to-day with a little meaning.

But maybe that’s a little on the masochistic side. Maybe instead, songs of constant sorrow have a social function. It is, after all, a singular experience. Both rage and love require a target, and happiness is a content feeling that doesn’t have the urgency of burden. But sadness, well, you can be sad all by yourself. That’s tough in a society where your emotional trouble isn’t something you can acceptably share (at least until the invention of social media). If you answer the basic question of “how are you?” with a brutally honest “miserable,” expect an awkward moment. Most people aren’t looking to hear that.

The melancholy song, then, is a helping hand in the absence of real people. It can help us decode the vagaries of our sorrow, and when that happens, it’s as if someone finally understands – even better than we do ourselves. The old saying “misery loves company” is supposed to refer to your bummer of a friend bringing everyone down with him. When it comes to the sad song, even though it can be hard to tell sometimes, it means that you are not alone.

Available now at iTunes

December 1980 must’ve felt especially cold with the death of John Lennon fresh in the news. But every year around this time, Lennon is brought back to life with new articles about his life – as well as “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” on repeat at shopping malls across America.

With the Beatles’ music being so big, it is the small, humanizing tidbits on their daily lives that keep fans interested in figuring out who these British boys in tight trousers really were. A lot of clues led fans to conclude that these celebrities were in fact just like us.

In a Rolling Stone interview three days before his death, John spoke about the importance of being human over being a rock star: “Real success is…the success of my personality, the success of my relation with [Yoko] and the child, my relationship with the world…and to be happy when I wake up. It has nothing to do with rock machinery or not rock machinery.”

Yet it is John’s rock star image that makes his personal life intriguing – so intriguing that someone paid $16,696 for his 1980 handwritten to-do list on Gotta Have Rock And Roll. From the famous scrawl, it looks like a day in John’s life wasn’t that different from ours (except for the fact that it was written for a personal assistant to do): Filling up the gas tank, returning that book, fixing that hook on the bathroom door, asking Steve for some herbs (“for the cat”) and waiting for the HBO guy.

Up-and-coming rock stars (and their interns): Start saving those shopping lists. You never know when a rich fan will want to feel closer to their idol and dish out a college-tuition’s worth to frame your daily scribbles over the dinner table. For those of us with smaller paychecks, there is still the best part of Beatles – their music. Check out the Vitamin String Quartet’s second take on some number one hits.

Vitamin String Quartet Performs The Beatles Vol. 2

Available at iTunes

Some lyrics are like poetry. But when songwriters tire of writing songs, they often turn to genuine poetry, novels, plays and other more concrete forms of literature to express what they cannot with a backing band. Stripping away all the fabric of music, audiences are left with simple yet intimate black and white musings on life, death and everything in between. From erotica to children’s books, here are some singers who have put down the mic and picked up the pen.

John Lennon

Lennon was indeed a “Paperback Writer.” He wrote a collection of poems and short stories called In His Own Write. The book is illustrated with Lennon’s original art from the height of Beatlemania in 1964 and contains clever puns and turns of phrases filled with sarcasm and wit expected from the British Beatle, including an “About the Awful” section in place of “About the Author.”

Jim Morrison

The Lizard King’s extreme, erotic and enigmatic persona oozes out of his poetry and prose just as it does in his lyrics. His writings offer a brighter spotlight and deeper exploration of themes merely grazed in The Doors’ popular songs: sex, drugs, fame and the beautiful tragedies that come with them. While the books are more surrealist than Shakespeare, The Lords and the New Creatures, The American Night and Wilderness still explore society’s dark side with sensual yet seething images and ideas. While they might not make very much sense at first, Morrison explains in Wilderness that they don’t need to: “Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.”

Billy Corgan

The lead singer and lyricist of Smashing Pumpkins puts the same bold, frantic passion of his songs into his poetry in Blinking with Fists. No stranger to spoken-word performances, Corgan’s intense yet sincere energy comes through in poems like “The Sun of Flowers”: “The way/ You look/ At me/ Makes me/ Lonely/ Grinding tears/ Behind a mask/ Made of/ Abalone.” The absence of music invites the reader to concentrate on the words themselves, bringing the meaning and message of them to the forefront of his work.

Colin Meloy

The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy has joined the list of musicians who have written children’s books (including Jimmy Buffett, Paul McCartney and Madonna, with the latter publishing a coffee table book called Sex). Illustrated by his wife (and Decemberists album artist) Carson Ellis Meloy, Wildwood was released last summer. The same darkly dangerous yet excitingly adventurous spirit in many of Meloy’s songs is reshaped into a child-sized story about a girl who must rescue her brother from a murder of magical crows in the “Impassable Wilderness,” an enchanted park in Portland. Laika Films, the Portland animation studio that produced “Coraline,” will transform the book into a stop-motion feature.

Be sure to check out:

String Quartet Tribute to John Lennon

Available at iTunes and Amazon

String Quartet Tribute to The Doors

Available at iTunes and Amazon

String Quartet Tribute to The Smashing Pumpkins

Available at iTunes and Amazon

Vitamin String Quartet Performs The Decemberists

Available at iTunes and Amazon