The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Welcome to the fourth round of the eleventh edition of the Nur Ein

Title: Million Watts
Challenge: Song must feature an obvious flaw. Flaw cannot be lyrical.
Songs are Due on: Monday, May 16th @ 12:01 AM Eastern
Send your MP3 to nurein.sidefight@gmail.com

NUR EIN!!!!

Aren't we all meeting this challenge every week already ... ?

Merriam Webster wrote:an imperfection or weakness and especially one that detracts from the whole or hinders effectiveness

So you want us to make our songs worse on purpose. Does that mean that it's like opposite round and the worst, most flawed song wins this time...?

Nope.

Lunkhead, April 22, in the Coverfight thread wrote:Tiny Robots are still working on their cover. We'll have it done either this Sunday or the following weekend.

j$

We just want you to make a song with a prominant flaw and work around that flaw to make a good song. Easy way to think of this challenge: BTO's "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet". The stutter would be the obvious flaw. Here's another one: remember that episode of the Brady Bunch where Peter hits puberty and his voice starts to change and they rewrite their song so work around the voice cracking. Those are both vocal flaws but I'm sure you all can figure out some other ones.

Are you sure that BTO is a good example? The stuttering in the Who's My Generation is intentional. I don't think of it as a flaw.

A flaw that comes to mind is where Lauryn Hill's vocal just drops out in Doo Wop (That Thing) at the end of the 2nd stanza which I don't really understand at all.

I would hope we can avoid the 'hey, I'm not great, therefore any song I write has an obvious inherent flaw' approach. That won't score highly with me. Also a flaw can be intentional; such as signing up for a coverfight and then stiffing your assigned artist... (tee hee)

j$

Our knee jerk reaction as guitarists is feedback. But once you intentionally seek feedback, is it a flaw anymore? Wrong notes seem obvious, but then again once it's intentional it no longer seems to be a flaw.
I like this challenge a lot. This will be fun to think about.

Raisin' my lonely dental flaws.....

I'm a fan of lo-fi music (if coupled with a good chord sequence and melody), which to me would count as a "flaw" of sorts (like heavy background noise or whatever). Also, you can suck really bad at playing in time and still make a good song (the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack?" comes to my mind). Deliberately singing off key, too, or playing on detuned instruments (Animal Collective did that). If your voice is mixed really low or with far too much reverb so you can't make out a word, that's an obvious flaw, too.
I scolded some participants over the last few weeks for digital clipping; and, though I absolutely hate it, I guess it would count as well.

As for feedback, the first song that intentionally used it AFAIK was the Beatles' "I Feel Fine" (the intro), and it was dubbed a "recording error" or whatever at the time. Not sure whether melodic feedback would count.

In my opinion feedback is too prominent in modern music to be considered a flaw. Lenny Kravitz's Sittin' on Top of the World is a good example of an obvious flaw in an otherwise flawless song which adds color. Or GBV's Ex-Supermodel which has some dude loudly snoring throughout an otherwise beautiful pop gem. Take something shitty, and make it work. Listen to almost anything by Daniel Johnston whose songs all have lots of obvious flaws (timing, tape hiss, tape recorder chunking sounds, uneven dynamics etc) but are still well crafted and poignant songs.

One of my favourite songs of all time is Part Company by the Go-Betweens - which has an (at first) slightly annoying buzz through most of it. I thought is was my cassette player playing up when I first heard it. But now I'd miss it if it wasn't there.

Chumpy wrote:Listen to almost anything by Daniel Johnston whose songs all have lots of obvious flaws (timing, tape hiss, tape recorder chunking sounds, uneven dynamics etc) but are still well crafted and poignant songs.

Daniel Johnston might actually be the best example for this. Some of Syd Barrett's songs (solo stuff mostly) share such traits as well.

j$ wrote:I would hope we can avoid the 'hey, I'm not great, therefore any song I write has an obvious inherent flaw' approach. That won't score highly with me. Also a flaw can be intentional; such as signing up for a coverfight and then stiffing your assigned artist... (tee hee)

j$

Here I was gonna say something about how I'm nailing this consistently already but alas I may have scored in 'Alan from Q.i.' fashion with minus points :-s and don't worry I won't put in an ACROSTIC.
Glennny's right, how tricky it is to rock around

Here's the old style chart view of the contest. I'll make it more integrated later: http://nurein.songlander.com/contests/E ... D36056087B

I just heard Creep in the car. You know Johnny tried to sabatoge the track, and that ended up being the hook. I wouldn't call that a flaw.
I did consider the deliberate clipping concept, it seems like a bad idea to torture the judges and all future listenings.

Manhattan Glutton wrote:Here's the old style chart view of the contest. I'll make it more integrated later: http://nurein.songlander.com/contests/E ... D36056087B

Shouldn't BSS be listed as winner for Boilermaker?

Sweet, I love chart view! And yes.

EDIT: Chart view for NEI seems a bit fubared. There was no round zero that time, maybe that's the issue?

http://nurein.songlander.com/contests/5 ... 1A482EFA2E

EDIT: Same issue with NEII: http://nurein.songlander.com/contests/0 ... 2E21FF3E38

glennny wrote:I just heard Creep in the car. You know Johnny tried to sabatoge the track, and that ended up being the hook. I wouldn't call that a flaw.
I did consider the deliberate clipping concept, it seems like a bad idea to torture the judges and all future listenings.

It's close. For example, if you do a delicate piano ballad with heavily distorted vocals, in a way that makes it sound really weird just because of the unusual combination, that would count as "obvious flaw" for me. The rock guitar on Creep, on the other hand, does not seem out of place on the final product, plus loud-quiet-loud was used by Pixies and Nirvana all the time, so it wouldn't count IMO.

I'm not a huge Minutemen fan, but I hope someone is taking that angle with the title.

In. Big roll of the dice this week. NUR EIN!

Paco Del Stinko wrote:In. Big roll of the dice this week. NUR EIN!

Yikes guess I better get on it.
Great song last week, btw.

I'm not a huge Minutemen fan, but I hope someone is taking that angle with the title.

We considered it, I prefer Firehose however. Chemical Wire was the assigned homework. We went another direction.