Frankie Big Face - "Air Traffic"

This is only going to be a brief post tonight as I have been spending too much time up late recently.

However, it has been ages since I was involved with Songfight. I submitted a few entries circa 2001 but I've never kept up my contributions, largely due to lack of time and lack of creativity.

Songfight is a creative community who write songs with a given song title in a short amount of turnaround time. As you'd expect, some of it is stellar, some of it less so. All of it is written and performed by unsigned and alternative musicians, and all of it is worthy of some attention.

Also, recently I've had to jettison most of my local copy of the Songfight archives due to hard drive problems and space saving (there's in excess of 50 gigabytes of free music available on the site that I will now have to download again. Boo hoo!)

One of the more prolific contributors (whom I hope to discuss more in future posts) to Songfight is Frankie Big Face. His pop sensibility is as sharp as a knife and he has managed to contribute some excellent tracks to the competition over the years. His first non-Songfight album "Smile if you Absolutely Have To" has some killer tunes on it, and this one is one of the most hardest rocking: "Air Traffic".

"Air Traffic" is the opening track on the LP and it contains a solid rock riff played in 3/4 time of all things, with a real Keith Moon-styled drum part played underneath it. You've never heard waltz time rock so hard.

Check it out, and if you like it, rock on over to the Frankie Big Face website, download the album for free and ENJOY!

Reality TV

image source: The Verve Life

One of my biggest pet hates has to be Reality TV.

I hate the vacuousness of it, both in the contestants, the largely pointless premise the shows are based around, and the fact that people swallow up the dreck they serve hook, line and sinker.

Winners of the contests are chewed up and spat out by the industry machine. Literally, people become celebrities here today, and then they're gone tomorrow. It's depressing.

Allan Wills, over at The Verve Life summed it up beautifully when he says:

"...it’s a scam being perpetrated right in front of me, and the victims are both the participants and the viewers."

"...It’s hoodwinking on a global scale."

Reality TV has been around for years to some degree. However we have seen a major proliferation of shows with all kinds of noble but poorly executed ideas proliferate in the 21st century.

At the turn of the century, Reality TV seemed to be revolving around the talk show circuit in the US, where the freaks and trailer trash of the world paraded their dirty laundry on air to millions of people. It's like watching a car crash - it's awful, but compelling enough that you can't look away. And Jerry Springer and Oprah Winfrey were/still are the king and queen of the format.

The song below, written by a great indie musician from Boston named Monty Smith, who goes by the name of Brick Pig, wrote this great slag-off to vacuous celebrity culture back in 2001 as part of a competition known as Songfight. The song is called "Secrets" and it is probably more relevant today than it ever was. In just under 90 seconds he articulates rather cleverly the hatred I feel for this type of television, and as it's such a great song, I wish to share it with you.

Enjoy.