200 Words of Potential Lyrics for a Song Called “Unnatural Disaster”

No more sunlight. Only smoke. No more ocean. Just a desert of black sand. The dry wind carries a dry heat. The planet shakes under our feet. Killed by volcano dust. A face carved into a mountain of rust. There is no face on mars.

No cool rains to calm you down. No spirits, only ghosts. No roar from a rushing river, only a long, low moan. A heartbeat in the mountain. The coughing of the sea. The city was swallowed whole. The glow on the horizon is not the hand of nature. The planet spins faster but the day gets longer. Feeling the pull of gravity. Hearing screams from the clouds. A lightning strike.

Heard your voice and not a moment too soon. Found you crushed under the wreckage of the Moon. Coughing rubble. The burning sand.

The waters rose above our heads for a hundred days and then evaporated. The trees lost shape and turned to ash. The grass flaked away like skin, leaving only the bones of the earth, cracking under the weight of monsters. The dying and bleeding planet, whispering. The crush of sadness. The stab of regret. The pain of damage done. No more moonlight.

214 Words about 2 Unlimited

Info taken from the Wikipedia:

“Get Ready for This” is a song by 2 Unlimited, a Dutch duo that was manufactured by two Belgian producers, Jean-Paul DeCoster and Phil Wilde. DeCoster and Wilde first made music together under the name Bizz Nizz (a far superior name, in my opinion). They created the instrumental track for “Get Ready for This” and thought it should have vocals. So they brought in Ray Slijngaard to rap and Anita Doth to sing.

The song became a humongous hit, but only after a UK producer removed all the vocals from the track except for the signature “Y’all ready for this?”, which had been sampled from another song. So 2 Unlimited’s ubiquitous superhit doesn’t even feature either of them.

Eventually, 2 Unlimited released three albums were vary popular most everywhere except for in the US, where their music (ok, just the one song) is relegated to sporting events and cheesy movie trailers. On both of the first second albums, their UK label continued to remove Ray’s raps from the songs. Finally, on the third album, Real Things, the raps were left intact.

Nowadays, Anita Doth tours around performing 2 Unlimited hits by herself, and she has a son named Destyno. Ray Slijngaard also has a son. His name is Rayvano.

334 Words about the Lyrics of Ok Computer

The foundation of my lyrical style came from Ok Computer. In fact, there was a time when I was still figuring out how to write a passable song that I would look to that album for “approval” on any musical – but especially lyrical – idea I had. It got to be creatively crippling because of how I saw Ok Computer and the topics it addresses and the way it addresses those topics. To my mind then – and I still see it like this, I think – Ok Computer doesn’t address its primary subject matter directly.

The theme of the album is this unnamed dread that takes shape through allusions and not through descriptions. There are specific references. “Exit Music” is about Romeo & Juliet (it helps to know that going in, but I think it’s clear within the song as well), “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is about aliens, and “Electioneering” is about … electioneering. But these topics seem to be symptoms of a more central issue, and addressing them in songs is merely an oblique avenue to something bigger. This is most clear in “Subterranean…”, in which the protagonist speculates about aliens, but serves mostly to illustrate his own loneliness. Why is he so lonely? It’s not obvious.

It’s even less obvious what’s bugging the narrator of “Karma Police”. His list of the grievances others have caused him: talking in maths, buzzing like a fridge, having a Hitler hairdo, and crashing a party. In the last verse, he makes clear his real problem is that he’s “given all [he] can” but “it’s not enough”. Enough to do what?

The impressive thing to me about the lyrics of Ok Computer is that despite all the vaguery going on, the feelings elicited by the songs are still very immediate. It may go unnamed, but it is still very definitely dread. So when it came to writing my own songs, that’s where I started: trying to evoke strong emotions without getting too caught up in what was causing those emotions.

250 Words about Writing Song Lyrics

The hardest part of writing a song is easily writing the words. Anybody who half-knows how to strum a chord on a guitar can come up with a workable riff. For me, the most frustrating thing is when I sit down to finally write some words for a guitar part I have worked out but end up working out a new guitar part for a new song. It leaves me even further behind.

Like any writer’s block, you can always force the words along. Sometimes if I’m stuck, I’ll just go to some random word generator on the Web and try to work whatever word it gives me into the next line of my song. Productivity-wise, this is a brilliant strategy, but I’m not always happy with the final product. It turns the song into a sort of random affair.

The best lyrics solution I’ve come up with so far is keeping a notebook of interesting phrases that you can turn to when you need an idea. Lyrics resulting from this process end up with a lot more intention behind them because they resulted from a conscious decision about their quality. Which improves even on sitting down and plowing through the words because phrases get into the mix not because they happen to be a good fit rhythm-wise or because they rhyme with some other lyric but because you actually like them. The only issue here is all the extra time you have to put into keeping your notebook full.

202 Words about Sleepwalking

Info from Wikipedia and Medicine.net:

18% of the world is prone to sleepwalking, and children are more likely to do it than adults. Males are more likely to sleepwalk than females.

Sleepwalking usually happens early in the sleep cycle, before REM sleep, which means that sleepwalkers are probably not dreaming about the actions they’re performing. However, sleepwalkers will open their eyes so they can see what they’re doing, and they don’t hold their hands out in front of them. Sometimes an incidence of sleepwalking is as simple as a sleeping person just sitting up and then lying back down.

It’s ok to wake up sleepwalkers. Of course, they’ll be confused at first, but it’s not dangerous. I mean, I guess if they’re sleep-tightrope-walking, you wouldn’t want to wake them. But the chances of that are pretty slim.

When someone is sleepwalking, he can respond to other people and is very open to suggestion. Often the sleepwalker will be trying to accomplish a task, and he might go back to bed if he thinks he’s finished. On encountering a sleepwalker, you might tell them something like, “I guess you’re all finished then”. That might prompt them to get down off of the tightrope.

272 Words about the “Free Katie Holmes” Shirt

I went to the Coachella music festival this year. I was there to work in the Neighborhoodies booth, making and selling humorous shirts. My friend’s brother owns the company, and courtesy of him, I got a lot of free meals and free hotel rooms as well as a free pass into the festival. I saw a lot of excellent music, including the Breeders, Hot Chip, and Stephen Malkmus. I also got a new shirt: It’s a picture of Barack Obama wearing a renaissance-style wig next to the words “Barack Me Amadeus”. I like it. I also liked the alternative: “Barack to the Future” done like the “Back to the Future” logo. A lot of people walking by the booth seemed to think that was pretty funny.

But by far the most comments (like “That’s hilarious!” and “I need that shirt”) were made about the shirt that said “Free Katie Holmes”. I don’t think five minutes went by without somebody making a comment about it. Judging from this response alone, you’d think we had the hottest piece of merchandise at the whole festival. Unfortunately, people’s reactions didn’t translate into sales, and we sold very few “Free Katie Holmes” shirts. In fact, I proposed a rule that for the first two days seemed iron-clad: that nobody who made a comment about the Katie Holmes shirt would buy any shirts at all from us.

The Katie Holmes fans eventually did buy shirts – even a few bought Katie Holmes shirts. But I think there’s definitely something to be learned from a joke that everybody thinks is funny but almost nobody wants to commit twenty dollars to.

237 Words about Alexander Volkov’s Magic Land

Info from the Wikipedia and the Oz Project:

In 1939, The Wizard of Oz came to Russia as The Wizard of the Emerald City, a translation by Alexander Volkov. Eventually, Volkov began writing his own original sequels to The Wizard of the Emerald City, creating a fully separate vision of Oz (which he called simply the Magic Land) from L. Frank Baum’s.

Urfin Jus is the villain of the first sequel, wherein Urfin discovers the secret of the powder of life and uses it to create an army of wooden men. The book is called, appropriately, Urfin Jus and His Wooden Soldiers. Urfin returns as the title character of a later book, The Fiery God of the Marrans. In that story, he uses a lighter to fool a race called the Marrans that he is a god so that they’ll help him invade the Emerald City.

Volkov’s Oz stories involve more political and ethical material than Baum’s. With the Urfin Jus character, he carried on The Wizard of Oz’s theme of an ordinary man who uses trickery to become an illegitimate ruler. The politics are even more obvious in the story that came between the two Urfin Jus books – The Seven Underground Kings. At the end of this book, Dorothy (or Ellie, as Volkov called her) uses water from a magic spring to make seven kings forget that they aren’t just ordinary citizens, and then country over which the kings ruled becomes a republic.

207 Words about “Who Let the Dogs Out”

Info mined from the Wikipedia…

“Who Let the Dogs Out” is the one hit by one-hit wonders, the Baha Men (who are so named because they are Bahaman). The song is super-infectious and thoroughly grating and guess what? It’s not an original Baha Men composition. It was written and first recorded by Anslem Douglas, a musician from Trinidad and Tobago. But then it turns out that Douglas actually took the chorus from another song by two guys named Patrick Stephenson and Leroy Williams. They wrote the chorus for a radio jingle. Douglas lost a suit in 2001 over authorship for the song.

It’s appropriate then that the song is now mostly heard in commercials and sports events, and the chorus is the only part that’s played. Personally, I don’t even know how the rest of the song goes. Of course, it’s also a staple of shitty movies like Miss Congeniality, Rat Race, and Garfield. For their part, the Baha Men have become staple artists in Disney’s Disneymania series of music collections, appearing on volumes 1, 2, and 4.

The Baha Men made a movie appearance six years before their big moment. In 1994, they made an appearance as themselves in My Father the Hero with Gerard Depardieu.

200 Words about Chinese Paper

All of this information (and a lot of the phrasing) is from the Wikipedia:

Joseph Needham was a British biochemist who wrote about the history of Chinese science. His Chinese name is Li Yuese. According to Needham, the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China are paper, the compass, gunpowder, and printing.

By some accounts, a Han Dynasty court official named Cai Lun created the first papermaking process early in the second century, but there is also evidence that the ancient Chinese military was using paper a hundred years earlier. The main purpose for paper in the second century seemed to be for packing.

Writing on paper became widespread by the third century, and toilet paper was around by the sixth century. During the Tang Dynasty, which lasted from the seventh to the tenth century, paper was used to make tea bags. At the same time, tea was sometimes served in paper cups with paper napkins. In the Song Dynasty that shortly followed, the government produced the first paper money, which was often wrapped in paper envelopes.

The first printing press was invented China, and the first printed newspaper was available in Beijing in 700AD. It was printed with wood blocks.

203 Words about Godzilla

Whenever Godzilla attacks the city, it reminds me of the beginning of the Atomic Age. Oh those carefree days. I was a professional bowler back then. I was mostly know for a bit of shtick I had where I would get really worked up and then rip one of my competitors’ heads off and roll a spare with it. Not sure how I came up with that. I just did it one day, and the people went pretty crazy for it. You just do what you need to do to stand out, you know?

So there was this one day that I was just taking a walk — just totally minding my own business. And guess who shows his scaly green face? Right.

So I’m like: “Hey, atomic breath! What the hell?”

And Godzilla says: “Look buddy, I’m just chilling.”

“No. I’m the one chilling. You’re the one destroying the city.”

“Inadvertently.”

“Granted. But still.”

And then he got this really sad look on his face. He hunched over, and he looked right at me with these puppy dog eyes.

“I’m just so big,” he said. And the more I thought about it, the more I knew that he was right.

He was big.