Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The Majestic Depths of Pop Star Justin Beiber

It's not usually the role of this Slog to offer the nth pointer to the latest whacky Internet amusement. But I need to make an exception on this one.

Justin Bieber (for those of you over age sixteen) Is an empty bit of pop fluff, and his hit, "U Smile" is as coyly saccharine as its title. Play thirty seconds of the video to get the idea:
Yesterday some evil genius with way too much time on his hands tried slowing the tune down 800% (using technology that speeds up or slows down music without raising or dropping the pitch), and found that the result sounds amazing. You can hear it here:



Again, you'll find this all over the Internet this morning. But I just wanted to step in and say: wait, no, you've really got to hear this. You'll giggle with astonishment at the majesty, the richness, the aching beauty of it all. It's akin to discovering that Paris Hilton's tome, "Confessions of an Heiress", (available secondhand on Amazon for just one penny, by the way...who could resist?), when read backwards, is as profound as Shakespeare.

Don't believe warnings that this is a hoax, by the way. It's easy enough to fast forward the track to verify that this is, indeed, Bieber's hackwork.

4 comments:

Dave said...

That IS gorgeous. So maybe tweens are catching something at 800 X speed that we can't "get."

Jim Leff said...

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maybe tweens are catching something at 800 X speed that we can't "get."
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Brilliant!!

ABEL Central said...

Jim,

I improvised to this the other day. It's quite long, so I started using it as a high long tones trainer. Mostly A-flat, but some surprisingly beautiful moments. Who knew!

Jim Leff said...

I'd have loved to have heard your improv on this!

(For those who don't know, John Manning is a fantastic and versatile tuba player, and proprietor of the great Tubahead blog.).)

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