March 05, 2018

Minor secrets of "Cinthya (with a Y)" revealed!

I used to be a pretty scrupulously youtube-only guy, but, well, there's been some trouble in the relationship (long story, faults on both sides, etc.) and while we're not breaking up, I'm not getting any younger and in the absence of any signal of reciprocal loyalty from them, I've decided to start seeing other platforms, on a trial basis. Youtube is still the best, most reliable and solid way to post and share video, and I will always love it dearly, but the incentives that used to be in place that encouraged exclusivity no longer exist. It's sad, but these things happen.

Facebook, on the other hand, as we all know, is basically a dumpster fire. But just to see what would happen I uploaded a video there recently (the "You You You" one). I just did another one (if it works -- they don't make it easy... -- "Cinthya (with a Y)", just to try to make the MTX Facebook page look a little less ugly and awkward. And so, I suppose, (assuming it actually manages to upload and turns out to be visible) it's as good an occasion as any to add another "minor secrets of" write-up. So here it is, a bonus minor secrets post, as it were.

The bare bones of this song had been kicking around for quite some years before I decided tack them together and incorporate them into King Dork Approximately, the novel. We may even have tried to play some rudimentary version of it at some point back in the 90s -- if so, though, it was never more than a quarter-baked and couldn't have come together anywhere near as well as it did here. Of all the songs we've recorded, this recording and arrangement probably comes closest to the thing I heard in my head before being humblingly brought crashing to earth by the force of reality.

The idea of doing a song about teenage girls' "creative" re-spellings of their own names had been kicking around for many years, and I wrote the character Cinthya into the book King Dork Approximately mainly so I would be spurred finally to finish the song. It's got some good lines, and great rhymes, if I say it myself ("double M" / "trouble them" "double u" / "trouble you") but what really makes it work is the trick of casting it not as lazy ridicule of this cultural phenomenon as it might have been, but rather as a celebration of and apologia for it. That wasn't a feature of the original song, but once I started thinking of it that way everything kind of slid into place. I love it when that happens. Alizabeth or fight!

The punknews.org review of KDATA referred to this material as "somewhere halfway between the Ramones and AC/DC" and built for Madison Square Garden sized crowds, a context in which it would never be played, which is certainly the case. But we sure do have fun playing it anyway.

I don't do a whole lot of actual guitar solos these days, but it's probably the one I'm most pleased with of the ones I have done.

Anyway, despite what I said at the beginning, my youtube channel is the best place to post and view all this stuff and I'm going to keep building it brick by excavated archival brick, and it would still help me out if you go there and subscribe, share, like, comment, etc.

Posted by Dr. Frank at March 5, 2018 06:25 PM