SOUNDTRACK: ALYSON GREENFIELD-“Mama Said Knock You Out” (2011).
I found this song about 4 years ago and meant to post about it but never did. I just saw it in my notes and decided to check it out again.
Alyson Greenfield is a pianist. She sings (and plays) a bit like earlier Tori Amos. And, like Tori, she takes an unlikley song to make an interesting cover.
The basis of this song is a wonderfully busy and complicated piano. She doesn’t rap the verses exactly, but she does recite them quite quickly.
She is verbally dexterous, all while she’s playing a complex and beautiful arrangement on the piano.
The second chorus quiets down completely with a gentle piano melody and her singing softly but not un-menacingly.
It’s a fairly radical reinterpretation of the song. There is no music in the original–just a sample of a simple musical motif), so everything that she plays is rather interesting and inspired.
I honestly don’t remember how I found this song. But I have just looked her up and I see that it comes from an EP of covers of this ilk. The other songs include “Bad Boys” (a song I never had to hear again, even in her version). “All That She Wants” which aside from being on piano instead of dance doesn’t sound all that different. “Milkshake,” which I ‘d never heard of and “Gangsta’s Paradise” played on glockenspiel.
None of these covers is especially interesting because they lack the awesome musicality of “Mama.”
Since putting out that EP she released a one-off goof song called ‘Michael Cera C*ckblocked Me at SXSW,” and a song called “Uncharted Places,” which is kind of interesting–dancey but with toy instruments. Her voice certainly sounds good in a poppy way.
But that was four years ago. I’ve no idea what she’s up to.
[READ: January 5, 2018] “Blueprint for St. Louis”
I printed out this story from the web. But apparently I missed the first page. I was delighted that the story started with no introduction. I thought it was really cool that the first line was just:
What consumed them both right now was the situation in St. Louis.
What a wild opening.
It was said that in St. Louis there were thirty dead souls, but everyone knew that that number was low. By a couple of decimal points. There had been a bombing and it was big. It emerged that the explosives had been buried in the foundation of the building when it was being built two years earlier.
Terrorism wasn’t really the term anymore. “Tax” seemed more like it. This time it was levied on St Louis. It was New Orleans the previous year. Tuscon three years ago. A tax on comfort and safety. You learned not to be surprised.
It was Roy and Ida’s job to honor the site, honor the dead. They designed large public graves where people could gather and maybe cool food trucks would park.
The problem for Ida was that they also did regular work and every regular building just felt like a future gravestone.
Ida had to think grandly about a project before she could get to the core of the design. She said aloud that the sky was basically a gravestone for all of us. Roy mocked her for this.
She and Roy had met in grad school. She adored and then admired him. But now she more or less loathed him. He is dismissive of her ideas, almost mocking and now, after giving presentations on their project for years, he seriously used terms like “big artistic win.”
After arguing that her idea would be just a New Age wank space with wind chimes, Roy revealed his own design–practical, familiar, effective but nothing special. It would work.
They just had to tinker about with the chemical aspect–a gentle mist to assure the emotional response of visitors and drug them into a torpor of sympathy.
After they had secured the job she was still tinkering–she imagined a memorial made of polymer with smoke piped into it–something cloudlike. Roy of course mocked this. He was in St Louis schmoozing with people. And, Ida assumed, someone in his hotel bed with him.
The next section of the story takes place much later. Roy and Ida are no longer together, and I thought that was a wonderfully daring ending to have this couple with no formal strife fall apart like that.
Then I found out that there were several opening paragraphs that I had missed!
And I was so disappointed to see that the real opening of the story was
It was winter which meant that pelvic frost has fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Ida’s apartment.
So, indeed, everything that I thought was great about the story–the subtlety the mysteriousness the slow eroding of their relationship was actually spelled out pretty cleanly in the beginning. Roy is pummeling himself to porn and Ida is using her shower head. The opening seemed so heavy-handed: “Maybe old age and the cold blue death of the groin would solve that.”
It’s a shame that the story was actually about a failed marriage rather than a story about architecture that suggested a failed marriage.
I Just Read About That... 
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