Monday, September 2, 2013

Sunday (Monday?) Songs: Nightcore - Welcome to the Club


Predictably, I didn't quite have the energy or time to pull out a Sunday Songs post during PAX. Now PAX is done though, so here it is!

So I gave Nightcore another shot a couple days before PAX and I've been listening to a lot of it! If you don't know, Nightcore is a genre/music phenomenon spawned almost entirely from Youtube. The idea is basically a spin-off of techno, specifically trance, and related to happy hardcore, though fans like to think it's its own thing. I don't really think so because if it's a form of music comprised almost entirely of remixes homogenizing the style of songs into one form, and there exist pretty much 0 original nightcore songs, it doesn't really stand as its own thing. Anyway, the idea is to take a song (from pretty much any genre, save rap and metal usually), amp up the speed, put some pounding beats under it, and pitch-shift the vocalist like a million percent up.
You can identify a Nightcore song by the video just being a single still picture of some anime girl posted on places like Konachan and placed on the video without credit for the artist, listing the name of the song but not the original artist that was remixed. So they're pretty much devoidof attribution, which is awful. Thankfully they don't usually change the title, so you can track down the original.

This particular one is awesome. It's a remix of Manian's "Welcome to the Club" (not that the description would tell you, though the commenters did), though I definitely prefer this one over the real thing. Manian seems to be quite popular with the Nightcore crowd - Ravers in the UK is ubiquitous in compilations, and Raver's Fantasy is common too.

It's hard to describe why this appeals to me. By all rights, I should hate it. It's unoriginal, theft (usually), homogenizing, and repetitive, but for some reason it's been really good to me lately. It's great for background music.

An interesting thing is, for an awful lot of them, the pitch-shifting makes gender totally ambiguous. It's kinda interesting. Sometimes it's pretty obvious from the lyrics, but it's just an interesting change.

Links:
Me Against The World (a remix of something that's NOT Tupac's song of the same name)
My favorite 1-hour mix
A second 1-hour mix I listen a lot
And a third one
Okay, that should be good for now.

End Recording,
Ego.

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