i’m not *good* at reading music, but i understand how it works, so a bunch of years ago when a friend took me to a shape note singing group, i simply could not participate because it made no sense to me. it just made my head explode.
now, many years later, i find myself in a similar situation, though still a bit different, where i am suddenly trying to learn an entirely different music vocabulary.
bars in a piece of music are basically a specific number of beats. so what the fuck does “he’s got bars” mean? of course he has bars. it’s a song. songs are made of bars… wait, what? ok, then what does it specifically mean? he said something clever? she said something hard-hitting?
and they’re talking about “this beat” but they don’t mean… the beat… they mean everything except the actual rapping? so, like, all the music then? not just… the beat?
i mean…. i’m hitting google at least twice a day…
rap, hip hop, y’all are killing me here.
(it’s okay. i’ll get it eventually. i’m making progress. but i don’t think i’ll ever be able to shape note sing. i did better with bobby mcferrin holding his hand at different heights, really.)
When you gesture as if you were using a phone, what shape does your hand make?
No real reason, I’m just genuinely curious. I’m not putting this in a fic, honest.
Giving this website full of autistics obsessed with ranking and categorising stuff a poll option is like giving rats one of those buttons that makes cocaine
Turns out the button actually makes vanilla extract
Honest to god I deserve at least a thank you from our building management for the number of times I’ve saved this place from truly catastrophic damage just by calling something in that nobody else, apparently, was going to.
I was gonna look up and insert all the citations I need for this one blog post while I had to work online all day today, anyway. Did I?
No.
Did I instead call in a frozen pipe and then spend the next several hours endlessly answering the door about it over and over and over again?
Yes.
i swear they should have you on payroll.
i also had a frozen pipe today, but since i stayed home because of the ridiculous cold, i caught it early enough that i was able to just thaw it out.
such is my life now, so far down this rabbit hole, that here i am on a friday night in my Cloak of Sloth, watching a reaction video made by some german guy who is not entirely unlike hans jensen.
… somewhat unlike, but not entirely. and now that i’ve seen it, i can’t unsee it.
