I am bored. I also just remembered seeing some stupid thing that Chris Berman did on SportsCenter about six years ago, where he took a different body part from a bunch of NFL players and built a new one- it was honestly pretty awful (on giving the player Ricky Williams's hair, he said "How's that for tough football follicles?"), but it gave me the idea to do the same sort of thing with my favorite drummers. I'm going to take bass drum, snare drum, toms, hi-hats, and cymbals from five different people, based on technical skill with that particular piece of the kit as well as creativity/style.
Bass Drum: John Bonham
Bonzo was also awesome on the snare and toms- and, well, pretty much everything- but his right foot was legendary. He briefly experimented with a double-bass set up but he was so fast with one it didn't really change anything. He played so many hand-hand-foot high speed triplets that I would guess he probably wore through at least a few hundred bass heads in his decade or so with Zeppelin. He also had an incredible little throbbing bass-only triplet (most notable on "Good Times, Bad Times") that sounded like the heartbeat of a coke addict. He was loud but musical with the thing, keeping time and also building on it for truly amazing fills. Unfortunately, due to the fact that heavy metal (and worse kinds of metal) bands extrapolated on many of the worst elements of Led Zeppelin, he also inadvertantly inspired a bunch of drummers to use a double-bass kit as a metronome, something I can't stand. Still, I can't deduct for an accidental legacy.
Snare Drum: Patrick Carney
Pat Carney is the drummer for the Black Keys and probably the most creative drummer (in a fairly-mainstream band) I have ever heard. He is completely self-taught, tends to play a maximum of one fill per song, and has a three-piece kit that almost looks childish. But he really rocks it, and he definitely makes the most of what he has. His snare drum is always doing something interesting- generally syncopated, always powerful, and sometimes spectacular- for instance, the second recurring measure of the beat to "10 A.M. Automatic." It's strange, because he also manages to give it a more musical quality than I thought a snare could ever have: until I saw the "10 A.M." music video, I could have sworn that some of what he was doing involved toms. Nope. Just snare.
Toms: Mitch Mitchell
With a great jazz background, Mitchell really knew how to use the whole kit to great effect. Playing from under the shadows of Jimi Hendrix's sprawling riffs, he filled what would have been radio-silence with these little six-second fills, musical, technical, and exciting. He had a particularly vital sound with the toms. It's a bit difficult to describe, but it probably goes back to tuning- like many drummers of the '60s and '70s (Bonham, John Densmore, and Ginger Baker come to mind) he used high jazz tuning on the toms along with pretty big, open drums- but he also played really cool rudiment-based fills on the snare and toms that enhanced each other. He was also a pioneer of lead-style drumming in rock music, something that had previously been restricted to jazz. He provided a guide for a lot of later rock musicians to break free from the backing-band types who had come before.
Hi-hats: Stewart Copeland
While with The Police, Copeland really changed the way the hi-hat was used, at least for a lot of new groups. His use of sixteenth notes on the hats, along with his strange, gliding, stuttering eastern-inspired rhythms, changed the concept of the hi-hat for the post-punk and new wave crew. It's more or less due to his influence that songs like "Everlong" exist- use of the hi-hat as a racing, fast-paced pulse rather than a stately, 1-2-3-4 metronomic place holder largely comes from him. His style is not my favorite, but he was very impressive and very technically gifted, especially with the hats.
Cymbals: Keith Moon
I am not the biggest Keith Moon fan- I like his playing, but I don't love it the way so many people seem to. However, I always find his use of cymbals sort of enigmatic. In stark contrast to his wild, whirlwind style on the drums themselves, he played the cymbals with a certain stateliness, almost restraint. He often used slight crashes to hold his place during the middle of epic, stretched-out fills and he almost always used the cymbals as the pulse instead of the hi-hats. It's interesting and it lends timbre and nuance to an otherwise wholly bombastic attack. His toms, despite his heavy reliance on them, often seem only haphazardly tuned (especially on the non-remastered albums, there is an audible double-sound to his drums, suggesting unequal tuning on the top and bottom heads), but the cymbals are oddly melodic and almost dulcet.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Farewell to a Fighter
I try to follow boxing as much as I can- which isn't a whole lot, since I recently stopped getting HBO. So, since I couldn't see it on TV, I just watched the Joe Calzaghe-Mikkel Kessler fight on YouTube. Calzaghe was my favorite active fighter: I liked the fact that he steadfastly insisted on fighting in Wales, I liked the fact that he was an undefeated champion in the days of champs with 25-12 records, I liked the fact that he fought up-and-comers like Peter Manfredo (whom he annihilated) and Kessler. I liked the guy. But I had only seen bits and pieces of his fights. After seeing this fight, I thought three things:
1. You would have sworn that Kessler was the older man. The big Dane fought like an aged George Foreman. He waited very carefully until he could deliver right hands with precision, not daring to leave his very orthodox stance and let fly. He was careful, he was guarded. Calzaghe was 35 at the time of the fight, Kessler, 28. This was a role reversal. Calzaghe let his hands go. He was fast, he was bouncing on his feet. He often did not sit down between rounds. He danced and stuck, winging punches at Kessler, who was moving leadenly. Even the comparative heights added to the effect: Kessler has at least three or four inches on Calzaghe- it made the whole fight look like a particularly annoying younger brother attacking the firstborn.
2. This was clearly a mainland European fighting against someone from west of the continent. Ever since Drago-Balboa on Christmas Day, there has been a clear contrast between the mainlanders and Britons and New Worlders. Non-English Brits especially, plus Americans and Latin Americans, tend to fight with some fire (well, not so much for Americans anymore, but still). Those guys come at you. They wade into punches. They fight dumb, they fight hard. They impose their wills. It's like fighting an ox: it's stupid, it's taking punches, but it's still coming at you. You cannot drive it back. That's the way the best west-of-continent boxers are. The continental Europeans are much different: ponderous, calculating, picking their spots, clinching and blocking and waiting. That was Kessler. I think one of the announcers inadvertently summed it up: "There's a big right from the Dane, and the Welshman keeps coming." The Dane throws hard punches at opportune times. He looks to derail you, to make you pay for a mistake. The Welshman wants to make that mistake, because that way he can get close and unload whatever guns he carries. Mainlanders are heavy on the "science," light on the "sweet," vice versa for the others.
3. Watching Mikkel Kessler fight Joe Calzaghe was like watching a man fight an angry animal. Kessler was steady, he counter-punched, he played defense. Calzaghe barely did any of those things: he was erratic, he was unpredictable, he came in flurries, he feinted and twirled and got mean. He smelled blood: in one of the later rounds, he had very clearly hurt Kessler. The referee chose that time to pull them apart and warn Calzaghe about holding the head. I truly believe this would otherwise have been a knockout or a stoppage. Calzaghe fought, Kessler just boxed.
If anything, watching this made me even less okay with Calzaghe retiring. He's gone, Pacquiao has few legitimate challengers, Mayweather is gone (or going) and was passionless in any case, ditto for De La Hoya, Roy Jones is dead on his feet, Holyfield is an embarrassment at this age, and Nikolay Valuev will not stop ducking Wladimir Klitschko. Who am I going to cheer for now?
1. You would have sworn that Kessler was the older man. The big Dane fought like an aged George Foreman. He waited very carefully until he could deliver right hands with precision, not daring to leave his very orthodox stance and let fly. He was careful, he was guarded. Calzaghe was 35 at the time of the fight, Kessler, 28. This was a role reversal. Calzaghe let his hands go. He was fast, he was bouncing on his feet. He often did not sit down between rounds. He danced and stuck, winging punches at Kessler, who was moving leadenly. Even the comparative heights added to the effect: Kessler has at least three or four inches on Calzaghe- it made the whole fight look like a particularly annoying younger brother attacking the firstborn.
2. This was clearly a mainland European fighting against someone from west of the continent. Ever since Drago-Balboa on Christmas Day, there has been a clear contrast between the mainlanders and Britons and New Worlders. Non-English Brits especially, plus Americans and Latin Americans, tend to fight with some fire (well, not so much for Americans anymore, but still). Those guys come at you. They wade into punches. They fight dumb, they fight hard. They impose their wills. It's like fighting an ox: it's stupid, it's taking punches, but it's still coming at you. You cannot drive it back. That's the way the best west-of-continent boxers are. The continental Europeans are much different: ponderous, calculating, picking their spots, clinching and blocking and waiting. That was Kessler. I think one of the announcers inadvertently summed it up: "There's a big right from the Dane, and the Welshman keeps coming." The Dane throws hard punches at opportune times. He looks to derail you, to make you pay for a mistake. The Welshman wants to make that mistake, because that way he can get close and unload whatever guns he carries. Mainlanders are heavy on the "science," light on the "sweet," vice versa for the others.
3. Watching Mikkel Kessler fight Joe Calzaghe was like watching a man fight an angry animal. Kessler was steady, he counter-punched, he played defense. Calzaghe barely did any of those things: he was erratic, he was unpredictable, he came in flurries, he feinted and twirled and got mean. He smelled blood: in one of the later rounds, he had very clearly hurt Kessler. The referee chose that time to pull them apart and warn Calzaghe about holding the head. I truly believe this would otherwise have been a knockout or a stoppage. Calzaghe fought, Kessler just boxed.
If anything, watching this made me even less okay with Calzaghe retiring. He's gone, Pacquiao has few legitimate challengers, Mayweather is gone (or going) and was passionless in any case, ditto for De La Hoya, Roy Jones is dead on his feet, Holyfield is an embarrassment at this age, and Nikolay Valuev will not stop ducking Wladimir Klitschko. Who am I going to cheer for now?
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
NFL Schedules
The "strength of schedule" metric might be the worst possible way for trying to determine the actual difficulty a team will face in the next season. The Steelers earned a bye last year with the "toughest" schedule in the league- true, a number of the teams they played really were very good, but the issue is much more complex than just the winning percentage of the opponents from last year.
For example, the Steelers' schedule was considered so brutal in part because they played the Patriots, who had a winning percentage of 1.000. But the Patriots were largely toothless without Tom Brady, staggering to a 10-6 record and missing the playoffs (which, by the way, was dumb, and they should have gotten in over the Chargers). But injuries aren't the total package, either.
To a certain extent, the performance of a team in the previous season is also a function of their schedule. A team that really wasn't very good but got 10 or 11 wins due to a cupcake schedule will artificially inflate the strength of schedule of another team. This is unavoidable, at least in terms of standard statistical evaluation.
I think there is a more promising way to deal with things like this: certain statheads, the football equivalent of sabermetricians, swear by a metric called "Pythagorean wins." Baseball also uses this formula. I know exactly what the baseball formula is, I'm not sure if football tweaks it, but it basically goes like this (for baseball): first, you square the number of runs scored by a team. Then you subtract the number of runs allowed, squared. Then, you take the square root of the difference. It looks very similar to the Pythagorean theorem of geometry (A squared plus B squared equals C squared), only you subtract, you don't add. Apparently, for reasons well beyond my own comprehension, this is considered a more accurate evaluation of a team's performance than simple wins and losses. It's similar in a way to the way that people have calculated the best and worst NBA champions on the basis of their plus-minus number. I think a Lakers team was the worst, with a plus minus of about -4.5. But I digress.
In any case, don't believe the hype. Just because the Steelers have one of the easiest schedules according to winning percentages does not mean they're a shoo-in for the playoffs. I especially think it's worth remembering that the Ravens lost two very, very, very close regular season games to the Steelers (plus, obviously, the AFC Championship Game), which probably causes a faulty read on their actual quality. But they did lose their defensive coordinator, strong safety, inside linebacker, and- uh- I actually can't remember the other position and am too lazy to look it up.
But, if you take anything from this, it ought to be this: in the immortal words of that master of the spoken word, Flava Flav, "Don't believe the hype." And, yes, Chuck D also said that, but Flava Flav was funnier for my purposes, and I'm willing to slightly distort the picture for the sake of comedy.
For example, the Steelers' schedule was considered so brutal in part because they played the Patriots, who had a winning percentage of 1.000. But the Patriots were largely toothless without Tom Brady, staggering to a 10-6 record and missing the playoffs (which, by the way, was dumb, and they should have gotten in over the Chargers). But injuries aren't the total package, either.
To a certain extent, the performance of a team in the previous season is also a function of their schedule. A team that really wasn't very good but got 10 or 11 wins due to a cupcake schedule will artificially inflate the strength of schedule of another team. This is unavoidable, at least in terms of standard statistical evaluation.
I think there is a more promising way to deal with things like this: certain statheads, the football equivalent of sabermetricians, swear by a metric called "Pythagorean wins." Baseball also uses this formula. I know exactly what the baseball formula is, I'm not sure if football tweaks it, but it basically goes like this (for baseball): first, you square the number of runs scored by a team. Then you subtract the number of runs allowed, squared. Then, you take the square root of the difference. It looks very similar to the Pythagorean theorem of geometry (A squared plus B squared equals C squared), only you subtract, you don't add. Apparently, for reasons well beyond my own comprehension, this is considered a more accurate evaluation of a team's performance than simple wins and losses. It's similar in a way to the way that people have calculated the best and worst NBA champions on the basis of their plus-minus number. I think a Lakers team was the worst, with a plus minus of about -4.5. But I digress.
In any case, don't believe the hype. Just because the Steelers have one of the easiest schedules according to winning percentages does not mean they're a shoo-in for the playoffs. I especially think it's worth remembering that the Ravens lost two very, very, very close regular season games to the Steelers (plus, obviously, the AFC Championship Game), which probably causes a faulty read on their actual quality. But they did lose their defensive coordinator, strong safety, inside linebacker, and- uh- I actually can't remember the other position and am too lazy to look it up.
But, if you take anything from this, it ought to be this: in the immortal words of that master of the spoken word, Flava Flav, "Don't believe the hype." And, yes, Chuck D also said that, but Flava Flav was funnier for my purposes, and I'm willing to slightly distort the picture for the sake of comedy.
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