Lady Gaga said the following about her making Hold My Hand at the 2023 Oscars:
I wrote this song with my friend Bloodpop for the film Top Gun: Maverick in my studio basement. It’s deeply personal and I think we all need each other. We need a lot of love to walk through this life. And we all need a hero sometimes. There are heroes all around us and assuming places. But you might find you can be your own hero even if you feel broken inside.
[Verse 1] Hold my hand, everything will be okay I heard from the heavens that clouds have been grey Pull me close, wrap me in your aching arms I see that you’re hurtin’, why’d you take so long
[Pre-Chorus] To tell me you need me? I see that you’re bleedin’ You don’t need to show me again But if you decide to, I’ll ride in this life with you I won’t let go ’til the end
[Chorus] So cry tonight But don’t you let go of my hand You can cry every last tear I won’t leave ’til I understand Promise me, just hold my hand
In April 2021, it was reported that Gaga would potentially be involved in the soundtrack for Top Gun: Maverick (2022), after Tom Cruise, the film’s star and producer, was seen among the audience at one of Lady Gaga’s concerts: Enigma 2.
The video clip for Hold My Hand was released on May 6, 2022 and was directed by Joseph Kosinski, who was also in charge of directing Top Gun: Maverick. The video shows Gaga singing at an airfield in the middle of the desert, while various scenes from Top Gun (1986) and Top Gun: Maverick are interspersed. Throughout the clip, the artist uses two costumes; first a military aviator jacket, the same one used by Cruise during Top Gun, and later a more modern version accompanied by a toga.
Leave (If You Want To) is the second song to appear here from My Friend the Chocolate Cake‘ (MFTCC)‘s fourth studio album – Curious. In the article of the previous song, It’s All in the Way from the same album I wrote:
‘A few weeks after seeing David Bridie and Archie Roach in a concert in Melbourne we received in the mail the CD ‘Curious‘ (see image inset) from Bridie and his band ‘My Friend the Chocolate Cake‘as a thank you gift for seeing him concert. Do you believe that? Well, it’s true. And I still have the CD. I played that thing to death. Do you know why? Not because it was a gift; as lovely as that was to receive, but because it contains some of the best eclectic music I have ever heard.’
Leave (If You Want To) encapsulates what I like so much about MFTCC. It’s subtle, unassuming but has this alluring depth of intimacy and transcendence. The breezy cocktail bar sound which the instrumentals conjure in the opening parts convert to something more atmospheric ‘Chamber – pop’ and with swagger as the song develops and then it repeats the process. I find it educates my ears in a way that few other songs do. The whole album is like that. I love it; like I do almost everything I’ve heard from them.
If you want to leave just walk away I’m tired of the uneasiness everyday We wouldn’t have it any other way We wouldn’t have it any other way
There are mostly lies in times of war our battle’s the same stupid one as before how bout we say we’ll take this crap no more Let’s take this crap no more
For I’m gone ba da de da da de da
So if you want to leave just walk away I fall for indecisiveness everyday I wouldn’t have it any other way i wouldn’t have it any other way
David Bridie who founded My Friend the Chocolate Cake has featured so much here. You can find so much more about him and his group in my previous articles. In 2000, My Friend the Chocolate Cake’s contract with Mushroom Records ended and they decided to represent themselves independently. Gathering in 2002 the group released their fourth studio album, Curious, in May of that year, via Capitol Records. It peaked at No. 14 on the ARIA Australasian Artists Albums chart.
Me Estoy Enloqueciendo Por Ti (‘I’m Going Crazy For You’) is one of the first Latin America Salsa songs that I adored instantly and listened to repeatedly over the years. If I was forced to choose my favourite salsa song then it would be today’s track although I’m hardly a connoisseur of the genre. I used this song as an emblematic track to a family holiday video we had in Giradot, in the state, Tolima Colombia. It is the second latino song from Jerry Rivera to presented after Amores como el Nuestro(Loves’ like Our One). This is pure ‘Salsa Rosa‘ which I described recently as:
‘Salsa Rosa‘ is a colloquial term which typifies Salsa music romantical which garnered notoriety in the mid-1980s. I imagine the Rose (flower) is used because it is delicate and in general these types of Salsa songs raise emotions of romance and sex and how men try to entice or capture women with Roses. So, it is a mix between ballads and orchestral music that is adorned with sensual, sexual, flirtatious and romantic lyrics.
A crude English translation of the opening stanzas of Me Estoy Enloqueciendo Por Ti (‘I’m Going Crazy For You’) follows:
Your look has my heart tied in four parts and falling at your feet I get to the bottom of you and I dance alone in the air
Without knowing my name I no longer have a head and my legs are shaking to think of your love
I am I’m going crazy for you I’m sticking to your shadow to die completely losing control
Jerry Rivera like Eddie Santiago whose song I presented recently Lluvia is from Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is located on the continent of North America, in between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of the Virgin Islands. Puerto Rico has produced a plethora of influential Salsa artists whose music is adored in Latin America. Jerry Rivera was born in 1973 in the town of Humacao located on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. His entire family consists of musicians, including tropical recording artists Edwin Rivera and younger sister Saned.
‘Fabiolasanchez5003‘ wrote the following about Me Estoy Enloqueciendo Por Ti (‘I’m Going Crazy For You’) in the you tube comments below:
Those times… They fill me with nostalgia and sadness… it was an innocent time, with poetic and metaphorical lyrics, where childhood and youth were lived to the full. Valuing the small details as it should be, without the current coldness of technology and music without rhythm and without lyrics.
Jerry Rivera has performed in Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, Panama, the United States, Spain, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Sweden, France, and Japan.
May it Be is the third song of Enya presented in this music library. Enya presented a good performance of this at the Academy Awards in 2002 and she hardly does live performances. Her voice palpitates more (nerves? – don’t know) and resembles the sound of fellow Irish lass Sinead O’Connor. Enya and Roma Ryan composed May it Be for Peter Jackson’s 2001 film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin was anglicised as Enya Patricia Brennan; born 17 May 1961 and known as Enya. She is a best-selling Irish solo artist and the second-best-selling Irish musical act overall after the rock band U2.
[Verse 1] May it be, an evening star Shines down upon you May it be, when darkness falls Your heart will be true You walk a lonely road Oh, how far you are from home
[Chorus] Mornië utúlië Believe and you will find your way Mornië alantië A promise lives within you now
From Wikipedia: Enya was thrilled at the prospect of working on Peter Jackson’s movie. Enya worked on the song with Nicky Ryan, her producer, and Roma Ryan, her lyricist. Nicky produced Enya’s vocals and arranged the music while Roma wrote the lyrics. They recorded the song through Enya’s contract with Warner Music in the Ryans’ Dublin studio, Aigle Studio.
The vocals were recorded in “Aigle Studios”, Enya’s Studio near Dublin and the orchestration was recorded in London, directed by Howard Shore and performed by the London Voices and London Philharmonic Orchestra…. The lyrics of this theme song include English words, as well as words in the fictional Elvish language, Quenya, created by J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Mass in C minor is the 13th piece of music to be presented here so far by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I first heard this in the movie Amadeus (1984), which possesses the greatest musical soundtrack I have ever heard. There’s not even a close second in my estimation.
I have researched about his life and music here and what has struck me is how director Milos Forman and playwright Peter Shaffer depicted his life so accurately on film. Sure, they used Salieri as the mediocre ‘us’ (audience) portrayed as the villain, which I wrote about in the article Axur, re d’Ormus, but chronologically the movie seems a historically precise representation of his career and life.
Most of the following information is quoted from the Wikipedia article below:
The Great Mass in C minor (German: Große Messe in c-Moll), K. 427/417a, is the common name of the musical setting of the mass. He composed it in Vienna in 1782 and 1783, after his marriage, when he moved to Vienna from Salzburg. The large-scale work, a missa solemnis, is scored for two soprano soloists, a tenor and a bass, double chorus and large orchestra. It remained unfinished, missing large portions of the Credo and the complete Agnus Dei.
Mozart mentioned a vow he had made to write a mass when he would bring his then fiancée Constanze as his wife to Salzburg to meet his family for the first time after his father’s earlier opposition. Constanze then sang the “Et incarnatus est” at its premiere….The first performance took place in Salzburg on Sunday 26 October 1783 (the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost).
The work embodies pomp and solemnity associated with the Salzburg traditions of the time, but it also anticipates the symphonic masses of Joseph Haydn in its solo-choral sharing. The mass shows the influence of Bach and Handel, whose music Mozart was studying at this time.
I saw the above presentation last night by Yuval Noah Harari that was part of the Frontiers Forum Live event held in April 2023. He said the following points at this event, but I’ll also add below what I wrote in my March – Chat GPT 4.0 article which correlate with his:
Harari – Even the developers of these tools don’t know the full capabilities of what they have created, and they are themselves often surprised by emergent abilities and emergent qualities of these tools.
My article – …most strikingly it appears now that experts of this AI can’t ascertain how it could realize its deductive reasoning to achieve such extraordinary output.
To put this into perspective, according to Bret’s comments and reflections about the findings of the paper Bubeck et al 2023. Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 this is a first in Artificial Intelligence advancement; specifically, how experts, or even the AI creators don’t know how this Intelligence deducted its reasoning to outperform humans.
Harari – But there are many additional capabilities that are emerging, like deep faking people’s voices and images, like drafting bills, finding weaknesses both in computer code and also in legal contracts and in legal agreements, but perhaps most importantly, the new AI tools are gaining the ability to develop deep and intimate relationships with human beings.
My article – AI has got so advanced that it may be impossible for humans to discern whether or not videos / pictures are real as seen already in many tic-toc and facebook snippets ..I recently wrote an article called Joe Biden AI Voice Speech where Bruce my New Zealand amigo chimed ‘I don’t believe it was edited at all‘ (a bit tongue in cheek). From here on it will get worse. We might never be able to trust our own senses about what is real, as alluded to by Joe Rogan in that article. Also, I point y’all to my article on the movie: Ex Machina for more stimuli on this topic.
Harari – Already today in games like chess no human can hope to beat a computer. What if the same thing happened in art, in politics, economics and even in religion?
My article – I remember watching the documentary Game Over (2003) when World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov played a chess match against IBM’s computer Deep Blue in 1997. He lost the match. Now it’s a given that even the best Chess players in the world including Magnus Carlsen can’t hold a candle to Artificial Intelligence game – play.
Harari – When people think about Chat GPT and the other other new AI tools they are often drawn to examples like kids using chat GPT to write those school essays. What will happen to the school system? But this kind of question misses the big picture.
My article – On an individual level, Meritocracy could be dead in little time. The average C plus student with a bent on such technology could subtly acquire the skills to allow the technology to write their answers for them, but not in a way that makes him or her a plagiarist, but a student advancing. And in their subsequent correspondence appear a struggling but agreeable student worthy of support.
Harari – Forget about school essays, think for example about the next US presidential race in 2024. And try to imagine the impact of the new AI tools that can mass produce political manifestos, fake news stories….
My article – Even on a collectivist level; a Regime or Government could learn to harness such technology to implement the policies as advocated by the program (the part of the Overton window in policy range) to win more votes in the subsequent election. On a local level instead of having ‘focus groups‘, this AI could do the focusing for them and arrive at outcomes better than they intended, because, to put it frankly, the AI knows what is assured to succeed.
I recommend you watch the rest of the presentation since Yuval Noah Harari explores areas about AI which I hadn’t considered. This Israeli public intellectual, historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem knows his stuff!
Previously most people have feared the physical threat that intelligent machines pose. The Terminator..The Matrix assumed to gain total control of human society, AI would first need to get physical control of our brains and directly connect our brains to the computer network. But this is wrong. Simply by gaining mastery of human language which AI has – all it needs in order to cocoon us is a Matrix like world of illusions.
Do you remember as a youngster getting or even seeing a ‘sticker’ and wanting to peel off the back of it, and stick it to anything even it was to your hand as a circular ‘smiley sticker’ reminding you of what a conscientious student you were? That was cool. Anyhow’s after about 2 years of buying little ‘jet’ chocolates which contain sweet images of stuff associated with the natural habitat and even a description on the flipside, I put all of them on the TV room table which read better than my saying ‘I don’t a have a centrepiece table’. Here, they are just under the TV:
There are a lot there although it doesn’t look like so many in the photo. I wanted them there to attract my kids attention when they came to visit. When I was there age, I would have been amazed to unpeel a sticker and reveal – ‘yes this is a sticker that I can do anything with it…. I’m going to make my parents life hell and stick it here…. That kind of thing. I was holding out for those moments as a parent. The love / hate relationship of the sticker I wanted to recapture.
Those moments never came to bear. Not one sticker has been unpeeled. All of them remain intact. My kids have no interest in my stickers which I paid good money for to eat the chocolates inside. I always thought that kids believed the stickers were as good as the little, teeny chocolates, but it appears not. They couldn’t give two ‘F&/ks’ about the stickers which explains why they haven’t unpeeled any to cover my apartment with them. And that bothers me.
If I was them (in my dreams), I would have noted the amazing image of the natural environment on the front and then read the back description, like I wanted more school time. But they don’t do that. They still haven’t read a single one, (Mind you I’ve never read one) or seemed excited by this latest technology in chocolates called the sticker. After all the money I have expended eating chocolates to try to educate them, it hasn’t worked. It’s as though they think: Dad’s eaten all those chocolates and left us sh/tty stickers.
If you enjoy the Bee Gees early period, then look no further than Massachusetts. The concert in Las Vegas in 1997 we watched frequently as a family on DVD. It’s ‘Mainstream Pop’ delivered at the highest level. They initially hit the big time in Brisbane, Australia (1963) as kids. There is a great video ‘Melody‘ of one of their earliest performances in Brisbane. For that reason, we like to say the Bee Gees are really Aussies.
There is no disputing their talent and dedication. One of the greatest (if not the best) mainstream pop bands of all time. I was tossing up between adding their performance of Massachusetts from the Johnny Carson show or the performance from the Las Vegas show. The performance on the Carson show demonstrates their magnificent harmony and even their Beatles ‘like’ whimsical demeanour (see Maurice).
[Verse 1] Feel I’m going back To Massachusetts Something’s telling me I must go home
[Chorus] And the lights all went out down in Massachusetts The day I left Her standing on her own
[Verse 2] Tried to hitch a ride To San Francisco Gotta do the things I wanna do
This is the second song to be presented here from Bee Gees. The first was Islands in the Stream. Sharon commented in response to that post:
I grew up in the Bee Gees era. Love them and their music. Great songwriters and performers. Only Barry left, very sadly. If I could write half the songs for the stars they wrote for, I would be a happy camper!
(The Lights Went Out In) Massachusetts was written by Barry, Robin & Maurice Gibb and released in 1967. Robin Gibb sang lead vocals on this song and it would become one of his staple songs to perform during both Bee Gees concerts and his solo appearances. It later appeared on their 1968 album, Horizontal.
The song became the first of the group’s five No. 1 hits in the UK Singles Chart, reached No. 1 in twelve other countries, peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and eventually sold over five million copies worldwide. When the brothers wrote the song, they had never been to Massachusetts.
The song was written in the Regis Hotel, New York City during a tour of the United States. The song was intended as an antithesis to flower power anthems of the time such as “Let’s Go to San Francisco” and “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” in that the protagonist had been to San Francisco to join the hippies but was now homesick. The idea of the lights having gone out in Massachusetts was to suggest that everyone had gone to San Francisco.
Here I am, grieving, I’m crying, because of this sunset My colours across the afternoon sky, Garrumara Baŋgarrari, Galaŋgarri Galathi My clouds are rising, Wuḻpunduganawirra Gumbaḻkarra, shapes like people Reflections on the calm water for me, shimmering on the water With this sunset The wind caresses me, the arms of the northern winds An my grandmother country, Bangulŋa Randulkuŋa Wuḏutjana Gimiyala O.h I am, oh I am Loli O.h I am Galparra, Gurrumulŋa My mind has gone back, to Bekuḻ, Galupayu, dhärrin and Mayaŋ-ŋaraka Those two Gumatj women are crying Dela Daylulu Dhuwanydjika grieving O.h I am, oh I am Loli O.h I am Galparra, Gurrumulŋa
Observation Blogger 