mucho ahora.

Evidence that my posts are time-shifted...

MAN Incorporated - a fairly unhappy guy with a kick drum, a bass guitar, and a large stash of four-letter words. He'll gladly tear anything and everything apart. The sound is as basic/simple as you can get and probably counts as "punk", but he does some entertaining vocal stuff while he's talkyellsinging about whatever is making him mad at the moment. You might have gathered by now that he's far away from fam-friendly.

Manu Chao - mostly non-English multi-genre music, stealthily about drugs most of the time. In one of the rare Eng-lang songs, their lead singer claims to be the king of the bongo?? I don't think any of their songs are truly serious, but, though I know it's mostly Spanish, their accents are thick enough that I rarely catch unas palabras.

Marcus Miller - another slap-n-pop bassmaster. He has been known to duet with Victor Wooten, combining to make way more bass noises than most can grasp.

Marilyn Manson - oh no, another sort-of-popular artist? I particularly like his crunchy guitar songs like "Wormboy" and "Irresponsible Hate Anthem" - in fact, I'm surprised at how much of his arsenal I truly do enjoy, and watching him live is thoroughly entertaining. However, it's still predominantly not that great. Further, it doesn't really matter what I say, because everyone dismisses him as some Satanic baby-eater anyway.

Marvin Gaye - my all-time favorite soul-based funk artist. Four words: "Let's Get It On".

Talk about a van classic!

Matheatre - so a guy with a master's in math ed and his pal create "Calculus: The Musical". The songs are all mathematical rewrites of famous numbers ;-) To name a few:

"Five Sizes of Number" (Beatles - "In My Life")
"Differentiabul" (most well-known is They Might Be Giants - "Istanbul")
"Without Riemann" (Eminem - "Without Me")

They're not the most in-tune singers out there, but the songs are great memorization tools and downright catchy. I didn't get to see the show; Tim and Steph caught it out west and got me the CD. Yessir, I am a nerd. Sing along with the main part of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)":

f of x plus h minus f of x
all over h as h drops to zero
is the formula to find the derivative
to find the slope at one point

you'll never forget.

Maynard Ferguson - trumpet machine! Maybe I'm a dork, but works like "Gospel John" were some of my favorites in high school pep band and jazz band. He also did some fantastic trumpetized versions of songs from all across the genre universe, such as "Spinning Wheel", "As Time Goes By", "Chameleon", and even "MacArthur Park" and a Star Wars medley. On the trumpet, there are average notes, there are high notes, there are ridiculous notes, and past all of those, there are Maynard notes.

MDFMK - as you might guess, this was a one-album side project from the people of KMFDM. I'm pretty sure this was my bro's favorite album in existence, and I hope you hate it so I don't have to share. I only ask, "do you know who owns and controls the station you're watching? Does the truth you know rely on something? Does it matter?"

Meat Beat Manifesto - very very VERY bass-heavy electronica. Strange and not dance-friendly. Thanks, Tim!

Medeski, Martin and Wood - low-pressure jam/funk/bluegrass. They gots da musical skilz. Have a listen, and find Nate for stories.

Melt-Banana - Japanese girl singing/rapping/yipping nonsense over cleverly bizarre and catchy noise guitar. She sounds like a little toy-dog barking, and I love it. The best "songs" weigh in between ten seconds and a minute thirty, named something random like "Chicken Headed Raccoon Dog" or "Flash Cube, Or Eyeball". Very huh?-inducing, which appears to me my kind of noise.

Men Without Hats - can spell "safety". Everyone look at your hands.

Metallica - surprisingly enough, I am not that familiar! I did listen to "the black album" on a daily basis way back when, but fans won't appreciate that. Stuff before that disc was/is comical to me because of Lars' attempt to be a drummer... Then again, everything after that album is Lars-humorous too.

The Meters - yet another funkdamental, though they're a bit less structured/more jam-bandy than Parliament. For bonus points, Primus covered their delicious mini-jam "Tippi-Toes" on the Miscellaneous Debris EP.

Michael Jackson - "the king of pop"... Whoop dee doo.

Michael Manring - bends minds with his bass guitars. I can't tell a whole lot just from listening, but it's obvious that he likes alternate tunings and hates common chords. Beyond that, go listen!

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - ska legends with a sound closer to rock than the Reel Big Fish brand thereof. Horns sadly take a back seat to guitar-bass-drums most of the time, though there is the occasional brass 'n' sax job. The lead singer's signature voice is deep and raspy - again, much different (and easier to fake) than the way-tenor vocals coming out of pretty much everyone in RBF. They have quite the collection, but the only one Average Joe might recognize is "The Impression That I Get", aka the one about knocking on wood.

Those guys from Six Ways covered a pile of Bosstones ditties, from the aforementioned "Impression" to "The Rascal King" to "You Gotta Go"... Merrily mutilating lyrics as necessary.

Ming & FS - on their own, or as friends of DJ Soul Slinger. They find some of the best samples in the real world: "is there honey in that box?", asks Winnie the Pooh over and over. Riiight.

Ministry - maybe industrial? Mostly just really fast guitar with truly creepy samples and occasionally comprehensible vocals. "...There was only one thing that I could do [...] was dinga ding dang my dangalong ling long." That's as clean as it gets.

The Misfits - punk punk punk! Real punk, though, from some of the originals. Dig it.

The Monkees - "hey hey, we're" catchy, but not quite up to par with The Beatles, and Neil Diamond wrote most of our songs...

Morphine - grungelicious, but not the same grunge as Nirvana. To start, they were a bari sax, drummer, and magical bassist Mark Sandman; note the lack of guitar. Then the music was very much groove-oriented, with wonderfully gritty/honky sax, tight drums, and Mark's unique slide bass and baritone vocals.

Mark played some tantalizing bass riffs. He used a normal bass guitar, but with just two strings, usually tuned to the same note. He also used a slide on his fretting hand, bending from note to note to make music with mandatory foot-tapping. To top it all off, he sang through an old-school bullet mic, combining with his deep voice to make an amazing timbre. It's just plain gorgeous.

Mr. Sandman died of a heart attack on stage at a concert in Italy.

Whose fault is it that I've been so addicted to Morphine (pun intended)? Is it Jo's, because she is related to Mr. Sandman? Is it Nate's, for first playing their music for me? Or could it be Les Claypool's, as he uses a bullet mic for effect, explicitly as a tribute to the Sandman? The world may never know.

Mothers of Invention - coming early in the chronological encyclopedia of weird. They were skilled, though, which doesn't always go along with weird. I can't really explain; just dream up a co-op between Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, then call a vegetable. Any vegetable!

Mötley Crüe - worth mentioning twice, for two umlauts! And by that I mean worth not mentioning at all. They are/were indeed megafamous glam rockers, but I think Tommy Lee wins for trumping his Crüe fame by doing something else - precisely, "something", ali! He's the one they call Dr. Feelgood.

Motörhead - by the umlaut metric, only half as good as the Mötley ones, and on par with Björk. Hmmmm, maybe I need a different scale of band quality.

I don't have much to say about Motörhead, but I do have something to say about accented characters. Since I write these posts in HTML in a text editor (PSPad in Windows, Kate in Linux, FYI) and then paste into the online Blogger interface, I have to use code to make accents. It makes words with accents impossible to read - forex, Björk is spelled "B j & o u m l ; r k" (without the spaces). What's sad is that I've memorized all of the useful ones. Nerrrrrrd! Anyway, back to music stuff.

Mr. Bungle - pure oddity, with ska-like instrumentation. They're really talented musicians; however, what comes out is mind-boggling. The lyrics are mostly gibberish, but at the show my bro saw, they did the whole thing - including covers of pop songs - in Italian. Nuts.

Mr. Oizo - irritating, crunchy, lo-fi electronica. Few enjoy these gritty "beats". That's about it.

Muddy Waters - big name jazzster, whom I mention just to clarify that there is also a bar/restaurant in the STL area with the same name, and that my shirt is sadly from the bar, not the musician. (Rather, the shirt is from a thrift store, but once upon a time came from the restaurant.)

You're not having as much fun as I am right now.