Music Discussion

[Mike Bentley]

Discuss the movies from this tournament in this thread.

[Demonic Leftovers]

One thing I thought that this tournament could have done better on was writing tossups on individual songs. An example of this is the tossup on "Glory Days." Bruce Springsteen is my favorite musician and I've heard "Glory Days" dozens of times at least. Yet despite this the early clues were almost impossible. The musical clue is impossible and not really related to the song. Then the next clue is about one individual performance of the song from nearly 20 years ago which is a somewhat notable performance but still really hard. The tour clue allowed me to figure out that it was a Springsteen song from before the release of Tunnel of Love but it's not a uniquely identifying clue. The outtake clue is actually a good, if really challenging clue, but one I think would work better as a leadin or second clue. I doubt many people have listened to Bruce Springsteen outtakes, and even less that particular one, and even less would remember single lyrics from it. Finally there is a clue about the actual song from lyrics. This is where I got it and the first that actually relates to listening to the actual song. This seems like far too late a point to ask about things related to actually hearing the song. I think song tossups would have been better had lyrics clues appeared earlier on and relied less on clues related to appearances in other media or similar clues. Other than that I thought the music was fine. Album and artist clues generally seemed to be pretty good and as with the rest of the tournament I though answer choice was excellent.

[Mike Bentley]

One of the challenges with writing tosusps on actual songs is that there are a limited number of clues to choose from. The most obvious choice of clues are in the lyrics to the songs themselves. However, most pop songs are pretty short, guaranteeing that almost any line used from the song is going to be pretty recognizable. Other clue sources for songs include asking about the music video, covers of songs (which I'm not convinced make the world's best clues), what albums they appear on, people who performed on them and sometimes a few other misc. tidbits of information.

Glory Days was a bit challenging since I don't believe there was a video produced for this song, which eliminates a lot of clues. It also originally appeared on a very famous album (Born in the USA) so using album clues was challenging. In retrospect I probably could have mined the lyrics for some of the less recognizable sections (e.g. "The singer of this song encounters one person walking out while he was walking in") and gotten rid of some of the really hard clues. However, I think there's always going to be a problem asking about certain songs in a pyramidal way, especially if anything like a trash canon actually develops (meaning that it becomes even harder to rely on stuff like "Ed Sullivan didn't shake the group's hand" clues in the "Light My Fire" tossup).

[adosreme]

I believe that Glory Days does have a video as I vaguely seem to recall seeing it on Pop Up Video once.

[AKKOLADE]

Video's right here.

[Mike Bentley]

Hrmm, well, I'm not entirely sure why I didn't use clues from that video in the tossup. I think there's certainly some danger in an over-reliance on music video clues in song tossups, since for many songs the song is a lot more important than the video and you don't want to reward people for just reading music video plot summaries or something. However, I'm pretty sure that wasn't what was running through my mind when I was writing that question, although I think it's been about a year since I've written it at this point.

Anyway, I agree that question (and probably a few of the other song-related questions) could have had a better pyramid to them and will look into ways to do this better in the future.

On an unrelated note, I'd like to here people's thoughts on the rap/hip-hop distribution. I'd have to check what it worked out to in the end, but I think there ended up being maybe 0.75/0.75 questions in the rap/hip-hop-R&B category in each packet. I think this might have been a little much, but maybe those are just my personal preferences.

I also think this set could have had a bit more indie rock, but I'm not entirely sure how to go about this. I think it's hard to deny that indie-rock is a very important musical genre, but most of these bands (and especially their songs and albums) remain very difficult. A band like Animal Collective topped a bunch of best-album lists last year (I think they were #1 on Pitchfork's list, for instance), and yet I think a large number of teams wouldn't convert them if I tossed them up as a tossup.

[sobek27]

If you had written in the "Glory Days" tossup: "in the video for this song, the artist pitches to a wooden backstop and then to a kid, with the conversation 'how'd you do today? Nettles got me'", I would have romped on that question like I did with "Money for Nothing" by knowing the name of the "video within the video". Debatable as to whether that is a good thing though. ("Money for Nothing", however, is far more important in the history of music videos than "Glory Days" is.)

This is a tough one. I understand your point that the song is often more important than the video, but at the same time, you can reward players for having seen the video. (Does anyone actually read music video plot summaries btw? Music videos are pretty short; I usually just hop on to Youtube to see a video I haven't seen before).

Mike, I do think music was well-distributed as a whole in your set, across time periods and genres.

[stevebahnaman]

There was not much country if I recall correctly. I am not personally sad about that, but it's really popular or something.

I think rap/hip-hop is culturally important and well-represented in radio airplay and easily merits being 20% of the asked-about music, which it appears to have been.

[Jamnman23]

One thing I thought that this tournament could have done better on was writing tossups on individual songs.

This was something that I noticed throughout the tournament as well. In general, I was really pleased with the answer selections, but I don't think that many of the early and middle clues on song questions and some artist questions really distinguished between different levels of knowledge about the answer. Without the full questions in front of me it is difficult to cite specific examples, but there seemed to be a lot of clues on nebulous and not uniquely-identifying background information on songs. I remember clues that talked about the responses of different groups to the particular song and a lot of other information that someone need not know even if it was a song they knew really well. I think this was certainly one area that suffered from "too many" clues or maybe just not enough buzzable clues. I would have personally liked it if the song tossups had focused more on the actual content of the songs, but overall, I think the music was pretty well done. I thought that there was an ample and appropriate amount of rap and hip-hop. It is always tricky when writing music for a trash tournament to decide how much, what kinds, and what answers to include from areas outside pop, rock, and rap, but I thought the indie, techno, emo etc. in this tournament was in good taste and for the most part was not too obscure. Questions on Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, Vampire Weekend, and Daft Punk are certainly appropriate. I thought that subjects were generally distributed well within music.