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Showing posts from February, 2022

Blog Post #6

  The song I chose for this week is "Good Vibrations" by The Beach Boys, released in 1966. I remember my parent's listening to some of their songs when I was younger like "Surfin' USA", "I Get Around" and a few others so their singing is a pretty nostalgic sound. The original 5 member's of the beach boy's included Brain Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardin. "Good Vibrations" was written specifically by Brian Wilson and Mike Love and some articles I read said Brian worked especially hard on the lyrics and sounds for the song.     "Good Vibrations" has a pretty unique sound to it paired with positive lyrics. Some of the prominent instruments in the song are the string bass, cello, jaw harp, an electro-theremin (which is that weird instrument that uses antennae to create sounds from moving your hands around in the air) and some others, all used to make the interesting sounds. The song is relatively sl...

Blog Post #5

 The song I chose for this week is "La Bamba" by Richie Valens. I chose this song because I remember my Dad (who speaks Spanish) listening to it a lot when I was growing up. It was one of his songs in Spanish that he would either turn on really loud in the car, play while working out in our basement, or just start singing parts of while walking around the house. I never understood what the lyrics were saying as a kid but the chorus of it definitely got stuck in my head a lot because of my Dad. Looking into it a little, the lyrics translated to English from Spanish don't seem to make too much sense either. I asked my older brother to translate some of the lyrics to English and he told me they say, "You gotta be pretty good to dance the Bamba / Both of us / But if you can I can / I am not a shiphand I'm a captain." Some articles I found talked about how the song was originally a Mexican Folk song and Richie Valens learned lyrics phonetically, combined it with ...

Blog Post #4

 The song I chose for this week is "Mambo No. 5" written by Perez Prado, a Cuban composer, in 1949 (linked below). I originally chose this song because the tune of it sounded familiar for some reason. After looking into it, I found out there is a different song by Lou Bega called "Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of...)" Bega's song seems to have sample's from Perez Prado's original soundtrack and I had heard Bega's version sometime when I was younger I think (I don't remember exactly when, but I've heard it somewhere haha.)  "Mambo No. 5" doesn't have many lyric's besides a few repeated Spanish lines towards the end that translates to "Yes, yes, yes I want to mambo." From listening to it, the song uses a lot of trumpets and drums to create the the catchy melodies. The song sometimes presents more than one layer of trumpets or brass instruments playing two different beats at the same time. Other times it has short, quick ...