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Adam Lambert stole the show last night according to everyone I read online.  The mean speed of the performance was 73 1/2 beats per minute.  The song was an exercise, Frank Sinatra style, of crooning with ease through the 70-76 range, as my old- (very) school graphics today show.  The tempo is very much like Frank’s It Was A Very Good Year.

Songs are of similar mean speed

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:

CITY OF NEW ORLEANS, ARLO GUTHRIE, 73.2 BEATS PER MINUTE (BPM)

HOTEL CALIFORNIA – EAGLES- 73.2 BPM

YOU WERE ALWAYS ON MY MIND – WILLIE NELSON – 73.4 BPM

I GOT YOU BABE – SONNY AND CHER – 73.6

SAN JACINTO/LIVE , PLAYS LIVE – PETER GABRIEL – 73.7 BPM

NADIA’S THEME – BARRY DEVORZON  and PERRY BOTKIN, JR – 73.7 BPM

What good is knowing the tempo of a song to a fairly exact or agreeably rubatic *un*agreed speed?  Many musicians shun the metronome in the same way a basketball player might shun suicides-til-ya-puke workouts.

What about a musician, though, you ask, that is just thinking SPEED< TEMPO< SPEED< ONE THREE SEVEN?  Are they not going to lost in tempo? IN fact, if you are a musician, and take a few weeks and befriend your outer metronome guess the outer metronome becomes internalized and then – get this – you needn’t worry about it so much!.  When Paula Abdul and randy Jackson were cutting DANCE LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW, they did not have to worry about the unwavering 118.000 beats per minute drum track, or sounding stiff on same.  Why not?  Because they KNOW tempo, they don’t have to think about it.  If a center fielder has to say, ok, ball to my left, I must now turn my glove to the left, turn my body 30 degrees from the fence, and the assure myself that the flight of the ball…stop there.  Already “think long, think wrong” (thanks for that Tim McCarver).  Read the Japanese (it’s better than the Chinese) Art of War, people!  “BECOME A MASTER OF TEMPO IN ORDER THAT YOUR MIND IS NOT CONSUMED BY TEMPO WHEN YOU ARE IN BATTLE.”  That is one of Lambert’s huge advantages.  Of course tempo is not the most important element of music!  However:
1) any performer who doesn’t master it will not know its effects, which are huge, and you will never hear their music or name;
2) poor awareness of tempo can make someone with Sarah Lachlan or Eddie Vedder’s voice sound like Anne Murray or Jackson Browne;
3) having a tempo awareness in your belt, like knowing how to build a bookshelf or change a tire or cooking turkey for 300 guests make s the ordinary person extraordinary.
In this years Idol, the Professional Lambert has “faced” the metronome plenty of times in his life.  What’s that?  When the rest of the band, or company or orchestra stopped, the leader points to you (not that I would know – just joking.  How did I learn this stuff?  Getting called out!  And the LEARNING TO PLAY IN TIME.

Other songs that I have personally measured digitally and whose tempi (the bombastic plural of the bombastic Italian obsolete tempo terms, which I still use, because, well, the theory is different enough.  Musicians that learn speed like, on the job, like, sex before porn ubiquity de-sexualized the sexual and sexualized hand holding, are not going to do well.  Plus – it’s Idol.  They are sucker for the songs around 72 BPM.  Taylor Hicks with a song at that speed.  As did David Cook – both songs were static, relentless in their 71 bpms.  So what?  “Bad Day” is 70 BPM, all the way through, no tempo change.  Rhythm change? Oh, 100s.  Speed change: none.  Guess what?  95% of music since 1980 has little or no tempo change.  Underlying tempo change, unless it’s a two-part double speed thing, as McCartney’s A Day In The Life section pasted on to John;s slow section, one speed double the other, as Pink Floyd’s On The Turning Away doubling from 50 BPM to 100.  There is a once a decade multi-tempo sing: the 1960s’ American Pie by Don McLean, Richard Harris’ MacArthur Park, the 1970s Bohemian Rhapsody, the 1980s I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) or the nineties – really, those songs went as savagely out of style as the waltz – some are HUGE hits which are the exceptions that prove meanspeed® music theory.are .

The graph software I’ve always used has died.  Oh no.  Next thing ya know, Katie Couric will have 4 more Podcast to add to the 10 she already has, and, as you know, those one minute “opinion” pieces of Katie’s?  Mind boggling!   Excel 5.0has served me well – but after downgrading and having the loins to call Excel 2008 an “upgrade” – well, I just don’t know, Microsoft® – the “not enough memory” messages lead me to believe your company is dying for a *reason*.  See, the Peter Principle.  Do people say “see” anymore or is it just “Google”?  Whichever.  Microsoft had perfected the software – I know because I’d been using from its 1995 version with the 97 update (excellent) and the 04 update (also – amazing, great).  So for the microsoft ® “corporation did it the good old american way – started stealing from people, and this is continuing.  Know this: if you have .xls files the upgraded Excel 2008 will take them and until you get the hang of it, spit on them and give you 2 thick pages of how to make the into .xlsx pages.  Wow, you’d think.  Another x.  Must be an even sexier program.  Anyway the reason the graph looks, well drawn freehand, and the numbers are old-school freehand is because that powerful team that superstar who just gives, gives, and gives more (to himself), and then starts to fork over some money after squirming in a deposition like the 3rd grade kid that EVERYONE hated – I mean, like way more than I was hated – I think.

As anyone who has a brain knows, the 2008 version blows.  There is literally nothing that has not been dumbed down that was a great feature, many of the best features, are, like, *poof* – gone!  Gee, ya remember when apple® used to encode WAV files?  Kinda like that.  Desperate executives making programs WORSE so that you would be forced to buy an old version on eBay or wait for Excel 2011.  Thievery – as Castro said, Americans are mostly thieves, liars and whores.  I know my law stuff is mental whore-itude at its most raw.  But you don’t wanted go to jail for blowing a J, doi ya?  No, me either.  Not that I’d ever *consider* inhaling.  Me?  I’m a President William Jefferson Clinton man: I have smoked, but never have inhaled.  So what!  I have a vegetable knife and I cannot remember ever cooking a vegetable.  So there it is.

Until I replace Microsoft, well, there is simply no program more by the almost-talented-for-the-moron the “apple® numbers.”  My Lord.  That program makes Google Docs look like Sully Sullenbergers control panel plus that board game John Nash invented.  Really – apple has some products that are so amazing – my iPhone just took out my laundry, which, granted, isn’t much as I dress as that of a Simon Cowell – I never saw any use in wearing anything more complicated or less comfortable than Dr. Dentons or jeans and t-shirts. Come on – the photos of men in box suits 300 years from now will have those suits as silly as the Englishmen who drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence in proper English clothes, apparently not knowing that Philadelphia in the summer can easily 90+ degrees for weeks.  In England, the summers are 50-75 degrees – every day.  It’s like L.A. compared to us.  Why do you think our documents of import are so short?  Again, google it.
When Microsoft released their “updated” version of 2004 in 2007 called 2008, they had a huge problem.  Burdened with their own success, as 2004 was, as far as I was concerned, a perfect program.  All 2008 does is force people who cannot afford to upgrade their computer’s short-term memory – what you computer people call that.  This mac has 161 gigs of memory in general on it though.  Microsoft would probably reply: “Oh, you apple idiot who thought a virus could never affect the almighty Leopard or Tiger or whatever inane association apple tries to make between animals that walk around naked and hungry and do nothing but kill, have sex and sleep.  they’re so fast, those leopards – heck, they don’t even need work-outs to catch their food.  amazing.  and that is what apple is: a tiger.  ok.  ok steve, we get it dude.

yup – those 1950s suns-of-guns.  Did they make out a little too well?  Of course.  But they were lucky.  Their luck is running out – you see it all around you.  The severe hypocrites called out.  Robert “Anus” Madoff, Elliot “Knee-Socks” Hypocrite man Spitzer, Martha Stewart (though Martha doesn’t know that she’s Polish.  The WASP woman?  Is Winona Ryder a Jew?  is Bill Cosby and Africa-American? How did mark Furman get involved with both OJ’s glove and Monica’s dress?  Randomness (NASSIM – Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness).  Someone has to win the lottery – but you know it ain’t gonna be you.  Well, heck, *someone* wins these lotteries.  I knew someone who won 3.75 mill – and just like they say, winning such a sum makes you miserable. Not.  She didn’t quit her job, but an after street, neighborhood, city, county, state and federal taxes 150 clear a year for life is enough to not worry.  It’s the government promising the money – and as I’m writing this, I see so many bank runs that the U.S  and Anus Madoff are probably the only two entities that have or in the government’s case print and *then* have, the double move there creating millions of jobs for Americans.

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I hope if you’ve had the bravery to read this far that the government cannot “create” a job.  They can only hope that people will adapt to digitization (this ain’t no depression – it’s a re-shuffle.  Digitization is not easy to adjust to.  Don’t worry – when we’re on our death beds we’ll be called “The Shocked Generation” after one of the many prophetic books about these times.  If 1984 and Atlas Shrugged are prophecy in fiction, in nonfiction Alvin Toffler’s FUTURE SHOCK is still the king of all the books about what is happening now.  We all knew the re-arrangement was coming – so take it easy on yourself.  The economy is no one’s fault but – well, really smart people and technology.  Complaining about it is like complaining about the use of air conditioning in Puerto Rico: they could be Cuba too, but once you’ve had a taste of the air conditioning, it’s hard to be a communist.  As for Newsweek and its We’re All Socialists Now cover?  Where were all the WTF’s then?  The socialist nations, with her 1.5 babies per two adults (except Britain), have about 20 years to live (Steyn, Chicago Tribune, AMERICA ALONE.)

/Ian Andrew Schneider/

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/Ian Andrew Schneider/
Neil Winters, filling in for James St. James Neumann who is on assignment.
April 29, 2009
–
“Nothing is free in Waterworld.”
-Kevin “Bring It On” Costner