A real sitter. Whose face has been blanked out?

Answer in comments.

Answer: The band in picture is the fusion band Roots, which was active from 1985-89, and consisted of John Anthony, Sivamani, Jojo and A R Rahman whose face has obviously been blanked out.

Quite surprisingly just one crack. The face of Sivamani would have acted as a hint I thought! In any case, Nirad‘s fallback plan worked.

Connect the four pics.

Answer in comments.

Answer: These are all species named after Frank Zappa. The four pics are respectively Zappa Confluentus, Pachygnatha Zappa, Amaurotoma Zappa and Phialella Zappai.

Correctly answered by Praneetha and Sharath. Nice crack!!

A few days back, Anirudh wrote about the Dire Straits hit Money For Nothing in this column. The ending phrase by Anirudh “Although good music still continued to be produced, how good MTV truly was for music will always remain a question” did make me think. What also made me think was the fact that “Knopfler was not very enthusiastic about making a video for the song as he believed it destroys the purity of the writers and performers”. And all those thoughts did hook me up with the song called Video Killed The Radio Star by the New Wave Band called The Buggles, the first video to be aired on MTV.

The Buggles was a band formed by the trio of Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley. The origin of the name Buggles has two stories. It is believed that it was intended to be a pun on The Beatles. Another thread is that Horn wanted the most disgusting name he could ever think of at that time and he narrowed down on The Buggles. The Buggles is a one-hit wonder, the hit being Video Killed The Radio Star.

The Buggles mainly consisted of the tandem of Geoffrey Downes on percussion/keyboards and Trevor Horn doing bass/guitar/percussion/vocals. Woolley left the band shortly, although he is credited for the song Video Killed the Radio Star. Woolley’s contribution was mostly musical, although he did come up with the words “put the blame on VTR”. As per Trever Horn the inspiration for the lyrics was mainly the short story The Sound-Sweep by J. G. Ballard, in which the title character, a mute boy vacuuming up stray music in a world without it, comes upon an opera singer hiding in a sewer.

Video Killed the Radio Star is an electronic pop marvel. The lyrics are quite intelligent. They tell the story of a singer whose career is cut short by the T.V. The synthesizers and computers used for the song never overpower Trevor Horn’s amazing vocals, and Geoffrey Downes’s musicianship. Debi Doss and Linda Jardim are the female backing vocalists.

The first version of the song was recorded by Woolley & the Camera Club. The Buggles released this song as a single. They also released it along with their first Album, The Age of Plastic where it has an additional piano coda. There have been about a dozen covers of the song, but most of them have been a low key affair. One prominent cover is the one by alternative rock band The Presidents of the United States of America for The Wedding Singer soundtrack. Less than a month ago Horn performed the song with Robbie Williams at the BBC Electric Proms.

There is another reason why Indian music lovers will instantly connect to this song. Just about a year after Video Killed.. made its famous appearance on MTV came the movie that established the cult status of Mithun Chakraborty, Disco Dancer. The movie was especially famous for its songs, composed by Mr. “Mobile Gold Souk” Bappi Lahiri, widely acclaimed as pioneer of disco music in India, but also one of the pioneers of large scale note-for-note plagiarism from the West. And in Disco Dancer he happened to compose a song called Koi Yahaan Naache sung by Usha Uthup and himself, which had its Auwa Auwa hook and most of the mukhda ripped straight off Video Killed.. Nevertheless he showed good taste in his lift, the song turning out a classic, one of the most remembered songs of Usha Uthup.

Video Killed.. was aired on MTV on Aug. 1, 1981. MTV once again honoured the song by making it the millionth song to be aired on MTV on February 27, 2000. Sadly, today MTV has evolved (!) from a music channel to a melee of reality shows and fictional programs. Let’s just assume (hope) that MTV will play this song again as their two millionth video. If the two millionth song happens that is. Looking at the way things are going, it looks to be a distant possibility.

Co-written by Easwar and Vipin.

Today we complete half-century of questions. Just a few notes:

1) Yesterday’s question stays up a bit longer since it was posted quite late

2) Do follow us on facebook/twitter/RSS to get daily updates on our quizzes and other articles.

3) Send in your guest questions to response at musicaloud dot com

Finally coming to today’s question

Connect (A slightly cheeky one today):

Answer in comments.

Answer: The members of Pink Floyd were part of various bands before they settled on the name. Meggadeaths, Sigma 6 and Tea Sets being a few of them.

Cracked by swaps and the flightless one.

The band in the picture takes its name from two other guys shown in the picture. Although not a very famous band otherwies, they are probably the most famous band in their genre which sounds quite geeky. Identify the band.

Answer: The band Don Caballero takes it name from the SCTV character Guy Caballero, who in one of the episodes, while spoofing the character of Don Vito Corleone was called Don Caballero.

The Genre I was referring to was Math Rock.

Cracked by the flightless one and Praneetha.

We are close to completing a half-century of quizzes and it has been a long time since we updated our leaderboard.
So Here are the current standings of all quizzers updated till yesterday. Congratulations to the leaders!

Rosh	22
Flightless One	20
easwar	18
Nirad	14
Vivek N D	12
Arun A S	9
Praneetha	7
Dante	5
unni	4
Jayesh	4
Vasanth	3
Anurag	3
Abhishek	3
Emmanuel	3
Manjith	2
Nitish	2
Atul	2
Rajib	2
MS	2
swaps	2
Sriganesh	1
Patthrakkaran Sunny	1
Wasi Manazir	1
drjam	1
Sumantra	1
Ravi Ananthan	1
Kevin	1
Debashish	1
Venkata	1
Anshuman	1
Abhishek Chakraborty	1
Sridhar	1
dushyant	1

Apologies for not posting a question yesterday. So today we give you an opportunity to earn 2 easy points.

Q1: Logo of what?

Q2: Connect

Answer in comments.

Answer:

Q1: SPICMACAY

Only swaps managed to get this one.

Q2: Shankar Mahadevan -

1) Shrinivas Khale was amongst his first teachers

2) Worked as a software engineer for Oracle

3) The song “School Chale Hum” for “Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan” was composed by him

Nobody cracked this one.

Coming Tuesday, Norah Jones will release her fourth studio album, The Fall. I got to hear a couple of songs from the NPR radio.
The songs are slightly different from what Norah Jones has offered so far. This change in direction might have been deliberate as she has collaborated with Jaquire King, the producer/engineer who has Kings of Leon and Modest Mouse among his clients. King  has also roped in Joey Waronker REM’s drummer and guitarists like Marc Ribot (Tom Waits and Elvis Costello) to name few session musicians. The net result is a very indie sounding album, but still like her older works Jones’ voice remain the most prominent sound you can hear. This is a carefully done set of songs, not departing far from her roots as a jazz singer and yet charting a new course in musical style.
A single from this album was released last month , “Chasing Pirates” and it has video too. It shows a cute Jones commandeering a building with sails and a Jolly Roger atop, through the Manhattan streets. Watch Norah performing the number at the Late Show with David Letterman.

In the year 2000, Volkswagen aired an advertisement on TV having a song called Pink Moon as its background score. Within a month after this ad was aired, the artist of the album sold more records than he had in the previous thirty years. The artist was Nick Drake and sadly he did not live long enough to enjoy this success.

Nick Drake was one of those obscure artists who hardly enjoyed any success during his lifetime but became quite a respectable figure posthumously. In his short career of around five years he released three albums none of which sold more than 5000 copies. Pink Moon was his third and last album and the entire album was recorded in 2 sessions of 2 hours each. All songs in the album Pink Moon are unembellished unlike his previous album. The entire album runs for only 28 minutes with 11 songs on it. Throughout his life Drake had suffered with depression and insomnia and the music and the effects of these can be very clearly seen in his last album. By 1972, he had retreated so much into his own world that it is difficult to interpret what the lyrics mean and sadly now there is no way to find out. Most of the songs had lyrics more than a verse or two. However, his depression and aloofness strikes though every word of the songs.

The title song of the album just like all others was recorded with just an acoustic guitar and Drake dubbed some piano on it later on. The lyrics of the song composed of just two verses of speak about a Pink Moon that is coming to get us all indicating a sense of pessimism and helplessness of Drake. However, this album which is probably his best work sold fewer copies than any of other works.

It is quite strange that for an artist who despised commercialism, success came in the form of a Volkswagen ad. Nevertheless, we can only hope that such artists whose music was probably far ahead of his time will be appreciated at least now.

Mudhi Mudhi is delightfully Raja-ish in its arrangement, Shilpa Rao doing an equally wonderful job rendering the buoyant number. Though fleetingly reminiscent of his compositions like Ninnu Kori from Agni Nakshatram and Three In One, the song charms in all three of its variants, the other two being an almost similary orchestrated Udhi Udhi again rendered by Shilpa, and a mellowed down Gali Mudhi by Shaan. But after that treat, things take a sober turn. Gumm Summ Gumm is a reproduction of Raja’s classic Malayalam composition Thumbee Vaa from Olangal, coming in the voice of his daughter Bavatharini. The 1982 track has found its reproduction in various forms in various languages, but none have so far managed to capture the magic of the original. Neither does Gumm Summ..,  in spite of the clever improvisations like the jazz sequence in the second interlude.
The southie feel continues with the Muslim-styled Hichki Hichki rendered by Sunidhi. And the way it sounds it doesn’t seem to be of the type that will hold your interest for more than a couple of listens. Halke Se Bole sees yet another poor reproduction of an Ilayaraja classic of yore, this time Putham Pudhu Kaalai from Alaigal Olivathillai, the chorus idea turning rather unsavory. Mere Paa is not as enjoyable for the song part as for the novelty in Amitabh Bachchan‘s childish rendition. And the interludes by Ilayaraja. This song should turn much more entertaining with the visuals. The Theme song which closes the proceedings is a nice appealing tune, the same that appears in Mere Paa. The chorus version could have been replaced with a pure instrumental one though.

With just one truly exceptional tune in Mudhi Mudhi, Ilayaraja produces a just-about-average soundtrack for Paa, at least for his calibre. And looks like my dream to hear a totally non-recycled Raja album in Hindi will remain a dream forever!

Music Aloud Rating – 6.5/10

Recommended Tracks – Mudhi Mudhi, Theme Song, Gumm Summ Gumm

You can listen to Paa songs online here.