Daily Archives: January 6, 2009

MACY’S, Television Jingles & Mind Control – “WORLD” – Five For Fighting – WIKIPEDIA calls tempo of WORLD “wistfully upbeat.” Huh?

Posted on by
Reply



This holiday season, again I was taken with a song by Five for Fighting. As with their Disney “100 Years” use and my attention thereto on the commercial first, then the recording.

This Christmas season I did not have much money. The MACY’S use of the song world, a song a an absolutely static, as per the slope of the linear trend of the song, as The five fighters played *right on* the invisible click track. At home, I continued to hear the Fighters’ song day after day, and truthfully, I found it a bummer. I thought: this is either a song at 76 beats per minute and it is showing me that I am whining, or this is a whining song at ~80 beats per minute and I was being graceful in analyzing it. I have nothing near ‘perfect tempo’ and I kept this game going – I continued to ask people, “Do you hear this song as miserable or graceful? Is it realistically confident or spaced out and alone?” Turns out to be a song right inside the territory of loneliness, solitude and melancholy, which was a relief to me. I mean, it’s ok if *you* do not have enough money for all the gifts you want as long as that melancholy is confined to you. That is what I think about Ondrasik and Five for Fighting here: they are expressing miserable solitude warning us to “be careful what you wish for” is recorded at the speed making me feel inferior, until I realized that the song was a whining song. The elements of the MACY’S commercial had an effect on me, I learned the speed of the song and now I am mentally back in control. Life is much easier when you learn this truth. I spent no time wasting, “Is it John’s piano playing?/Is it the vocal delivery/Is it the cheesy theme” making me uncomfortable. As soon as I saw 79 beats per minute, it was: IT’S SPEED. DUH.

Wikipedia.org had a hard time classifying the tempo of the MACY’S song of consumerism:
“World” is the second single from the album Two Lights, written by Five for Fighting and released in 2006.

“World” is a wistfully upbeat, piano-driven melody that, like his other singles, paints vivid pictures of human life driven with deep emotion. The song’s lyrics are notably more cryptic than in previous singles, but are driven by the chorus hooks, “What kind of world do you want?” and “Be careful what you wish for, history starts now.”

Music video

The music video for “World” features aspects of the bright side of life including children, marriage and fireworks. There are also references that go with the lyrics including a brief image of a mushroom cloud in a cup of tea, with a newspaper’s headline featuring North Korea‘s nuclear program.

A separate music video for the song was made by the U.S. television network CBS to promote their Wednesday night, post-apocalyptic drama Jericho. The video consisted of scenes from the first half of the season edited together.

The song has also been used on The History Channel in a promotional montage for the network. PBS also used the song during the first episode of the documentary series Carrier. Most recently, this song has appeared in a commercial for Sears, featuring rapper LL Cool J, actress/singer Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical, and Ty Pennington of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

World has also been used by Autism Speaks, and several other group supporters, as a theme to promote awareness for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The song has been featured in the organization’s video’s as well as several fan made video’s promoting the cause.

Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
song title=WORLD
performer=Five for Fighting
composer=John Ondrasick
beats per trial=280
trials calibrated=10
beats measured=2,800
average beat=759 milliseconds
mean speed/average tempo/median velocity=79.0 beats per minute
total time elapsed=2,552.98 seconds
emotional concept according to the meanspeed music conjecture=Solitude
hardware=MacBook
software=Microsoft Excel
file kind=AAC protected audio
Bit Rate=128 kbps
Sample Rate=44.100 kHz
Size=3.8 MB
Volume=-7.8 dB
Profile=Low Complexity
Channels=Stereo
FairPlay Version=2
audio file type=m4p

/Ian Andrew Schneider/
December 26, 2008

There are no legal lyrics given, as is the case 98% of the time. The music sites you see as of this writing, December 26. 2008, who show the words: illegal. The video is legal, the words are not. “Law is an ass” said Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes.

The Speed of Renewal exposed by timing: "Holding Back The Years" – Simply Red – graphs, video and Bill Clinton Speed Graphic

Posted on by
Reply


Holding Back The Years by Simply Red is about a renewed self. Ravages of time and lost love and feeling old, felt while one is taking stock of life, finally, after contemplation of the battles of life, deciding to redouble your efforts and try to re-energize—become, quite literally, Renewed.

The video features the vocalist on a European train in a state of sublime contemplation, wearing a tipped cap and singing. Are we to know that he is being filmed or not? That is up to us. The lyrical expression of the song shows Simply Red taking an account of his life, taking a pause in life is a stressed theme here. The singer is pleading: he has made mistakes, he has had wishes die; he has also, in his estimation squandered the chance to be “good.” At the same time, he reminds us, with the powerfully subtle chorus that he will “keep holding on.” We are reminded of this fantastic singer in with an amazing coif of Red beneath a cap “escaping from all he’s known,” and like other songs in the Renewal category, we hear a plea for a new lease on life.
When first I saw this video, like many or all of you do, “out of the blue,” I had never heard of the band “Simply Red.”

Holding Back The Years was recorded with the aid of a drum machine. As with most drum machine-based songs, from start to end, there is no acceleration or deceleration in slope of the song, except within the measure.

from WIKIPEDIA.ORG, THE WORLD’S FREE AND MOST INTERESTING CYBERENCYCLOPEDIA: “Holding Back the Years” is the 7th track of Simply Red’s debut studio album Picture Book. The song was a smash success for the group and quickly rose to the top of charts across the world. It remains their most successful single. The single is one of two Simply Red songs (the other being their cover of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”) to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, for the week ending July 12, 1986. It also reached #2 in the UK and was a worldwide hit. Contents Frontman of the group, Mick Hucknall, wrote the song when he was seventeen, while living at his father’s house. The chorus did not come to him until many years later. His mother left him when he was three; the upheaval caused by this event inspired him to write the song. He recorded a version of the song with his first group “The Frantic Elevators” in 1982 but the real success came when the Simply Red version was released in 1985. In 2005, a brand-new stripped down acoustic version of the song was released on the album Simplified, and this version received heavy airplay on smooth jazz radio stations. The video for this song was filmed in the English coastal town of Whitby and the famous scene where Hucknall watches the coastal view from his window can be seen on the cover of the single, in its music video and, for a brief time, in the music video of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”. The other band members play the role of the local cricket team who see Hucknall off on his journey. Eastenders & Shameless actress Maggie O’Neill made her acting debut as the schoolteacher in the video. The song was covered by Another Level in 1999.It was also covered by Umphrey’s McGee on their New Years Run on 29 December 2007. “Holding Back the Years” was used as the soundtrack to a party political broadcast for the Labour Party in the 2005 general election campaign.‘

Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
The mean-speed, or the speed of the song expressed as beats per minute on this live recording= 86.0 beats per minute.
The mean-space, or time between each beat= 698 milliseconds.
The mean-beat on the recording = 1.433 beats per second.
The mean-frequency, or the speed of the song expressed as cycles per second= 1.433 Hertz .
The mean-tone= 366.93 Hertz, located 16 cents below F#4/Gb4=369.994 Hertz , and 84 cents above F4=349.228 Hertz.