A Thousand Stars - Pale Saints

[link] One of the original 4AD bands that kicked off Shoegaze.  All about the atmosphere.  90s college radio was full of this sound.  Possibly the last truly formative time for me, musically...

Cosplay

It's one of the coolest phenomena in the universe.  It just makes me happy, even thought I don't know half of the movies/comics/manga/anime/video games these people are dressing up as.
I'm bummed that there was no I-Con this year.  I've only been once but I like being on campus when it's going on.  I was once an avid D&Der.  These are my people.

The Last of the Famous International Playboys - Morrissey

[link] This is a great great song.  Reflects Morrisseys apparent fascination with 1960s London gangster/club owners Reggie and Ronnie Crayne.  A two chord hook with M's epic lilt over the top - perfect.

Don't Wanna Fall In Love - Jane Child

I really like this 1990 hit. Really all about the chorus hook.

Turn to You - the Go-Gos

[link] They were great. The 80s were great precisely because acts with this kind of freshness were all over the place.

Winning the War - Til Tuesday

[link] One of my favorites of theirs.  Just really fantastic pop song writing.

Red Ball 1, 2, 3 (Vintage Sesame Street)

[link] I loved this on Sesame Street, although I think it was a different version.  In the end there was no little girl eating a sundae with the ball as a cherry.  Instead, it became powder.  The synthesized soundtrack (which is like the Moog album I listed to a lot as a kid) seemed to really go with the film, providing a sort of atmosphere for this highly abstracted setting.  Cool stuff.

Hit - The Sugarcubes

[link] One of the freshest sounds of the early 90s era.  These guys did so many things right, starting with Bjork's look, attitude, and amazing vocal style.  And the rhythm tracks were always rock solid.  Songs like this will never grow old...

Kiss on My List - Hall & Oates

From 1980.  Heard it on the radio in the car today.  It's supreme pop.  Terrific keyboards, bass line, and vocal harmonies.  It's sing song happy pop, but a really sophisticated version.  These guys have just a ton of really great pop songs.  They are masters.

Answers to Nothing - Midge Ure

[link] I really like the rhythm track to this song. Up-tempo and with the keyboards sets a really nice atmosphere.  The lyrics and vocal track are just OK, but as a composition it works really well.  The song got some good airplay on alternative stations in 1988 when it came out.  Seems to have aged pretty well.

Pepper - Butthole Surfers

An alt-rock classic from the 90s.  The chorus is a pop-rock hook.  Yeah, it's sort of about heroin.  So are a lot of things in rock...

Kidney Bingos - Wire

I love this song, although I have to idea what it's about.  Great chord progression in the guitar and really good sounding bass runs.  This live in-studio version is interesting.

set

Starting to think about my set for Earthstock in a few weeks.  So far: Evangeline, Layla, Thousands are Sailing, Southern Cross, Girl Like Jesus, Folson Prison Blues, Ring of Fire, New Years Day, After the Gold Rush.  The last two I have to work on memorizing...

The Toadlickers - Thomas Dolby

[link] Hadn't seen this before.  Dolby arrives about 30 years late at a (hopefully) fascination with rural Americana. Not much here.

867-5309/Jenny - Tommy Tutone

There's a reason why this song was such a huge hit.  It's the hooky chord progression, predominantly.  Everything else in the song serves it.  The lyrics are clear and tell a story everybody gets.  The B part is pretty good too, ending in the break back into the intro/progression and then the instrumental.  It all works.  Seamless pop.

The Chauffeur - Duran Duran

[link]  Probably came across as a bit of an outlier amongst their huge pop hits of the time.  But songs like this grow on you and bear the test of time.  A simultaneously atmospheric and joyously bouncy (once the rhythm kicks in) song.

Laughing Man - Red Rider

Great song off their 1981 "As Far As Siam" album.  Hooky little verse makes it.  Nice integration of keyboard and guitar sounds.  They were much more of a band in those days than a vehicle for Tom Cochrane's vocals, although that component has always been a crucial component of the band's sound.

what to use

On my FaceBook page, there's a bit of a discussion between R users and Python users about which is better, but neither of these groups does what I want to do: population genetic simulations.  So for the moment I'm sticking with BASIC and studying sorting protocols and seeing how fast they are on various sized arrays.

Money's Too Tight to Mention - Simply Red

[link] A classic of the 80s. Hadn't seen the video before.  I guess the setting is meant to be realistic; rough. Vocally, you pretty can't be more sort of quietly powerful than Mick Hucknall.  The A part is a great simple chord progression groove. I wonder if the whole social class thing is why the Brits have always understood and had the chops for real blues and soul.

first success in R

R is pretty opaque, looking at the code and all the argument names, from what I'm used to.  But I successfully input a starting data matrix for population genetic simulations (1000 individuals with genotype/phenotype data at two loci).  Baby steps...

R

In my insomina hour overnight I read a tutorial on R (programing language implementation of S++ statistical software), which all the kool kidz in my field are using now.  Looks like I can use it for population genetic simulations. I have always used BASIC, and still "think in" that language, and I never learned a compilable language (I took a Pascal course in college and have read part of a book on object oriented C but neither of those stuck with me).  R speeds up and simplifies a lot of array/matrix stuff (like sorting), that are key to the way I write individual based simulations.  If I get some time, I'll try to write the Converse Antagonistic Pleiotropy model simulations in R; it will be a good excuse to learn the language.

King in a Catholic Style - China Crisis

[from 1985] Was a bit into these guys back in the early 90s.  They have a unique, light sound but with some deep lyrical topics.  At least in America, they were alternative.  But still very poppy.

Miss Gradenko - The Police

One of the gems on the Synchronicity album. Chant-like and abstract; a distillation of a situation that allows the song to expand as sort of a mood, able to be the background of other, somehow similar stories.  Just a short thing, but really fascinating...

Til Tuesday - You Know the Rest

The 1985 album Voices Carry was an American pop classic.  The pity is that most people only know it from the smash hit title song.  But just about every other song is even more amazing than that one.  This song is just one.  I really like Aimee Mann's voice coupled with the synth oriented pop/rock backing that the band provided.  It's probably a bit of production, but I prefer this sound to Mann's later, more singer songwriter stuff.
The best part of this song is the rally back into the chorus after the quiet verse toward the end of the song.  Luscious.

Think I'm in Love - Eddie Money

[link] Eddie Money has had his problems and is lately into self-parody.  But his 1982 "No Control" album is really good; hard hitting hooky rock.  Especially this song and "Shakin'", the other single.

Copperhead Road - Steve Earle

I've always liked this song. Colorful, sad, paints a picture about rural life and social class. Always more complex than any politics can capture.

If I get a chance

to actually write an individual based model for the converse pleiotropy idea, I'll be programming in BASIC like I always have.  I never really learned another language.  20 years ago, one would have needed to learn a compilable language to have any hope of running bulk simulations with realistic parameters (e.g. population sizes in the thousands or higher).  But in recent years with PCs getting faster and faster, this is much less of an issue.  I really love BASIC.  It's intuitive to me and the simple programming methods are all straightforward.  Except that I don't know a fast sorting algorithm, which would be really useful for population genetic models involving selection.

Our Song - Yes

A hidden gem on an iconic rock album of the 80s. Yes, probably moreso than Rush and Genesis (whose popular stuff was not as proggy), introduced progressive rock ideas into the mainstream of pop, at least briefly with this album.  I don't think this has been replicated since.

Nowhere Girl - B-Movie

From1980. An early and truly excellent specimen of synth pop. I didn't discover this until recent years, listening to Flashback Alternatives and, lately, Soma FM's station Underground 80s, which is also excellent.

On Our Own - Bobby Brown

This was the main theme for the 1989 movie Ghostbusters II. Watched (most of) this on cable this afternoon.  It's not a bad movie song.  It's hooky.  The movie didn't do as well as the first one, but there is no way it could have.  It relied on many of the gags that were used in the first movie.  But it hasn't aged too badly, mostly because all of the actors are there and we don't see them too much these days.

A model

I've been moving closer to being able to model the converse pleiotopy idea using an individual based simulation.  Since the question is interwoven with the evolution of parental care, I'll probably model that first, and then impose a phenotype of the offspring that "uses up" the investment by the parent.  I should be able to use a two gene model.  One gene will control parental care.  The other gene will control the offspring phenotype, which will be a twofold, pleiotropic phenotype, one will be adult fitness and the other will be the juvenile fitness cost of the parent to rear it.

Stone Cold - Rainbow

From 1982.  This was the end of the album rock radio era in Rochester, NY where I grew up.  Ritchie Blackmoor and Ronnie James Dio have and had top hard rock/heavy metal credentials but songs like this (which is in the same subgenre as Foreigner, who was king at this time) have huge pop instincts.  The hard rock elements are reined in and the pop formula is served.  The B part even has a funk feel (Chicago was also huge at this time).  The early 80s were a time of hybridization and overlap among genres in rock.  The chord progression in the chorus is really nice. There was certainly a lot of pursuit of the hit and subjugation of creativity, but I think the successes are still very listenable.  And the pop formulae are distilled and therefore easier to decipher.