Back to the
routine. Off to drop off my daughter,
early this morning. Roy Eldridge blowing
away on the return ride. “Wham! (Be-Bop-Boom-Bam)” from 1940. Mildred Bailey sings away about how folks who
say that Swing is dying out just don’t know what they’re talking about. She calls herself a “killer-diller” in the
song and I tried to look up what it meant.
There was an all black film from 1948 with that title, that suggests a hocus
pocus magic of some sort. The only other
time I can think of the usage (other than some more recent movie with the
title, that I saw referenced) is from The Beatles “Polythene Pam” where John
says of Pam, that she is “killer-diller” to emphasize how hot she looks. That, to my ears, is more like what Mildred must
have had in mind.
Bailey was born Mildred Rinker in 1900, in the Washington State
farming town of Tekoa, near the Idaho border.
She was Coeur d'Alene Native American on her mother’s side and
Swiss-Irish on her father’s. Known as
the queen of swing she must have made quite a migration from frontier Tekoa to
al the way back east to sing with the greatest jazz bands of the time. It brings to mind that other great musician
of partial Native American descent who hailed from Washington State and went on
to change the way everyone else would play, Jimi Hendrix. Mildred had this interesting quote about her
the influence of Native American music on her own style:
"I don't know whether this
(Indian) music compares with jazz or the classics, but I do know that it offers
a young singer a remarkable training and background."
Swing eventually did die out. Bailey alas, died penniless of heart failure
due to complications from diabetes there in Poughkeepsie, New York, where my
maternal family hails from. I wonder
which of the two hospitals there in town she passed in back when my mom would
have been eleven or so. Did any of the
people who had bought her records among the hospital staff care much or even
knew who this large woman was. Frank
Sinatra apparently paid for her medical bills.
He, Bing Crosby and others all acknowledged her contribution to their vocal
styles. There wasn’t much on old Mildred
on Wiki but this AP article was more substantive:
I’ve got to head down town today, over to the CCTV tower,
the remarkable Rem Koolhass building with the unfortunate association of a pair
of boys underpants. Apparently the great
architect actually had to come and explain why it was not in fact meant to
symbolize foreign might urinating on China, to the relevant authorities. It must have been an interesting
meeting. I wonder what they’ll think of the new Phoenix
TV building, the Un-Forbidden-Office (UFO) featured in today’s photos. This, at least, is a Chinese design by Shao
Weiping, the chief architect on team from the Beijing Institute of
Architectural Design (BIAD). It isn’t
open yet but it is remarkable to consider, walking around the perimeter.
It’s the day after Christmas and I’d much rather putter
around the house. Hang up a new picture,
put away some of these piles of things.
But in this world where China and Asia work right through this holiday
and the U.S. works right through Chinese New Year, there is little pure rest to
be had. Certainly hard to defend for
more than a day or two.
I spent more time than I should this morning uncovering the
brouhaha around the company Rap Genius getting slammed by Google for employing
a Search Engine Optimization (SOE) spam technique to boost ratings for
searches. I was fairly neutral heading
into this examination. It isn’t always
clear to me what is fair and what is foul if you have the chops to make Google
searches rank you higher than the next site.
Google has its guidelines but in this case they haven’t commented on
whether or not anyone violated anything.
But rather they have merely acted.
And now, if you search for the term “rap genius” the url is six pages
in, behind all the negative news about the company.
The folks from Rap Genius have confirmed that by their own
estimation they were operating outside of Google’s guidelines. The quote was that the guys at Google were
being “very helpful” about clarifying how rap genius could fix the
problem. It all sounded quite reasonable
until I saw a video of the gents, which Tech Crunch provided. Oh dear.
Please have a look:
The leadership lay on the wanna be nonsense way too thick,
strutting on to stage in shades and pimping clothes. They are no doubt familiar with the old adage
of “don’t-fake-the-funk.” While you’re
at it, please don’t fake the punk, either. Trying to talk about their investors
as their homies, and talking about what their law professors taught them in the
same breath suggests the street cred of Wilshire Blvd. Reduction: straight up bozos. Real cool doesn’t have to work it. Sitting up there fingering a bowl of fish
eyes, 鱼目混珠[1], and talking pearls.
You can fake the punk if you’re Ali G and want to highlight
things for comedic purposes. But if
you’re a business that just raised $15M from top-shelf VC, Andreessen and
Harrowitz you’re only gonna create so much sustainable buzz swinging around as
purple-vein-dicks. Looking back at
someone like Jonny Rotten, he wasn’t faking the punk. He was frustrated, frustrating troublemaker whose
band, the Sex Pistols almost needed to flame out under its own weight after the
brilliance of their first releases. A web
site for talking about Rap lyrics that raises millions, isn’t a band and it isn’t
even cool. It’s a business. And its one you needed other people’s
millions to ramp. Sorry guys.
Founders plastic tough and wanna be cool when it was all
sizzle and now when gravity hits, they are in fact merely frightened business
people scrambling to protect their valuation. And it’s Google that looks staid and
mature.
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