Monday 5 March 2007
Cooking with beats
This here video rocks on so many levels. (There’s a better quality version on The Fame Game site, but I’ve embedded the YouTube version here because it politely waits for you to click on it before starting to download the whole damn thing.)
Without further ado, star beatboxer Beardyman shows you how to prepare the Electro Funk Daddy Superstar break:
(Thanks to my SO at Craphammer for pointing this one out to me.)
Why is this kind of thing so damn satisfying? My guess is that it takes electronic music - virtual and abstracted, but the product of a long process of stylistic and technological evolution in its own right - and adds another layer of depth by grounding it back in the physical world again, using honest-to-goodness real-time physical virtuosity. And to top it off, it’s funny and spontaneous. In a word, it’s masterful.
Really, it’s the human equivalent of the song of the Australian lyrebird (as introduced here by Sir David Attenborough):
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Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, I clicked on the Lyrebird clip…and I’m in complete awe. At first I thought it had to be a joke, but the Lyrebird’s skill is well documented. Wikipedia has a tale of lyrebirds reproducing flute solos originally played by a musician in bush during the 1930s.
This makes me wonder how these birds choose their sources. Do they pick sounds that are more “bird-like” than others?
Whenever I watch birds doing this stuff I think of some guy with a new haircut, sitting on a bar-stool, talking really loudly about his new car so that all the women around can hear him.
And—oh yeah—the breaks were spectacular too. :)