I just listened for the first time, and yeah, it's well presented for a general audience, but I was completely unable to believe that they thought that the steps they took in their search made logical sense. It's like the reality TV version of a lost media search. You don't need experts to find a lost pop song, you just need the internet!
My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is this:
- Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge
- Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide
- The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits
- There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of volunteers
FWIW I had a horrible experience using Miraheze last year:
- September: I created my wiki
- November: Miraheze had an error with a drive and over 25% of their wikis were lost. It took them weeks to admit the extent of this error and that they had no plans to use a professional recovery service
- Early December: I recreated my wiki and rewrote it (250+ articles)
- Late December: Miraheze recovered the back-ups they thought they had lost and said they would merge the new and old versions of recreated wikis. Somehow, due to 'someone unplugging a hard drive', they lost all of the content I'd written since November.
I've since learned my lesson about making local back ups, but come on. It was clear there had been tons of technical and communication problems for a long time.
> earlier today Owen had assigned himself checkuser and suppressor rights for "auditing use of permissions" and left Raidarr a talk page message regarding an important email; sometime after that, Raidarr removed all advanced user rights from every wiki in which he held them before removing his local Steward group and making the log summary you're inquiring about. I assume it was the email or maybe a resulting conversation that caused Raidarr to resign; however, this is just speculation
in which the dissolution is discussed as an alternative to training volunteers on legal compliance with the UK Data Protection Act:
> OB clarified both proposals are mandatory under Information Commissioner’s Office advice – we need to ensure we train people appropriate and audit their access and usage of personal information inline with Data Protection Act 2018.
> TH raised a counter proposal of dissolution of the company.
My wiki also got affected by the harddrive. They send out a message with everything they knew pretty much immediately even to people not affected by the error and continued to update as they learned more. Not sure why you seem to think it took "weeks". For a volunteer-run service they've actually been quite on top of it and compassionate in my experience
You're right, it was 10 days, not quite weeks. It's not important but here are some of the miscommunications and apologies:
November 18: "The cloud server which hosts one of our database, db141, experienced a disk issue. As a result, a small number of wikis hosted on db141 are unavailable. [...] While cloud14 has been reinstalled, we will have to send the affected disks to professional data recovery. The earliest ETA for having wikis restored is potentially early next week. [...] Our number #1 goal is to restore the data on the disks affected so that wikis are restored versus using a backup which could be various days old"
November 24: An update to the situation was embedded in an unnecessary meeting on Discord: "Our Miraheze Meeting is starting now! Join us while we talk about everything Miraheze, such as recent policy proposals and we'll be providing an update on the db141 issue We'll answer any questions you have and will listen to any comments or concerns."
November 28: "I understand the frustration, and we have not yet given up hope on data recovery, so you can still wait if that is your choice. But I also don't want to give people any false hope. It is not looking super great for data recovery. I won't completely rule it out yet, and I can't say anything definitively. Venues will be opened shortly for requesting that wikis be recreated from scratch (with images at least still intact) if that is your wish [...] in the recent Miraheze Meeting it has been brought up that our communication has been less than ideal, and some feel some questions have been dodged and/or ignored. I have gone back and looked at our responses to some questions, and I can see how this could be assumed [...] I would like to clear one thing up now. Something that seems to keep being brought up is that we sent the drives to a data recovery service. This was not true [...] Owen currently has the drives and has for a few days. They are not at a data recovery service. This was due to some internal miscommunication within SRE, and is something that is being addressed [...] Once again we apologise for this miscommunication and we are working to resolve our internal communication problems [...] Indeed, over the last few days, it would appear that information was not properly being relayed within our own team which led to some breakdowns in communication. Clearly, different members had different insights and views on certain topics. This has led to a strain in communications and we are working to rectify that."
I don't think it was ever explained how the data was recovered.
My guess is that they used some of the XML dumps we of WikiTeam keep at https://archive.org/details/wikiteam , that not everyone at Miraheze was necessarily aware of.
It was your bog-standard disk crash as I understand it. Pros were (eventually) brought in for data recovery. But I also understand the backup for the wikis on that server (like mine, one of the dead ones) was on the same server, which doesn't sound like a very good plan. If a backup was stored elsewhere, the dead wikis would have been restored in a very short time. Lesson learned, I hope.
I got most all of my data restored, but there was a temporary problem of deleting and replacing files that the server programming thought still existed. That was fixed quickly.
I don't know. When OP describes their community of "furry queer hackers," I can't help but notice that the link to the autism spectrum goes overlooked. While it's very good to find one's people, it's dangerous to define yourself by these kinds of online personas. Autistic people tend to be drawn to and identify with cartoons, animals, and exaggerated displays of emotion — from deficits in the subtler forms of empathy or theory of mind, I don't know. Combine this sometimes highly visible trait with their (our) tendency to obsess and dominate online conversations and it's not hard to see why outsiders are uninterested in paying a visit to the deeper end of autistic-coded fandom where furries, anime fans, and children's media obsessives collect. I'm cishet autistic but I knew a lot of "furry queer hacker" types online when I was a teenager. I think that autistic people are uniquely vulnerable to over-identification with their online disguises; replacing human connections with pseudonymous communities that don't ask too much of them. I'm not telling OP to touch grass or whatever, because I don't know OP, but maybe this will resonate with someone.
I agree... But also the online 'hacker community' (whatever that means) IME tended to be filled with people supposedly 'outside' social norms. Even the 'straight white males' are of the slightly socially awkward video gaming variety. Not your erm generic ones. And they are all obsessive over stuff.
Almost put me off when I was considering careers but people in real life are much more diverse with a variety of interest.
And they don't live/breathe/eat code.
I'm an autistic woman with ADHD but because my interests are typically girly people don't believe it...
Also to add nothing wrong with video games, I can't do woess very well but what I mean is they tend to have some 'identifier' that they're proud to not be like all the 'normal peoplw'
I don't have any quirky interests. I like trash TV and doing my nails. Somehow that's not acceptable
The article asks two different questions, one about the decline of the instrumental hit and one about the decline of the instrumentalist, and doesn't go far to answer either.
I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the instrumental hits throughout the decades. Is the decline simply due to classical and jazz going out of fashion? How many are soundtracks? Surely most modern instrumental hits are EDM, yes? This data-driven history could use some more data.
As for the other question, the article's examples of popular instrumentalists were much more famous as bandleaders than as clarinetists or trombonists. Cheap recorded music and digital music production has pushed both the band and the virtuoso performer out of popular culture, replaced by the solo artist and their multi-instrumentalist producer (sometimes the same person). This is true even outside of hip hop. I bet a non trivial amount of pop fans would be able to name Jack Antonoff from his work with Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Lana del Rey.
I guess those artists technically don't often make "hits" that top the pop charts. But I agree - here in the UK, rave music literally defines a whole generation of people born in the 70's and 80's.
But even in popular music, when I was a teenager we had acts like Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, and Moby producing tonnes of tunes that are not primarily vocally led. More recently you have Avici and David Guetta and the likes.
I find it hilarious that he concludes the Sergio Mendes recording is "the most complex pop song ever" rather than the obvious takeaway that when a song is simple enough, most of the specific notes being played aren't important. You could easily rearrange the song to be easier to play on guitar without losing "the song" (unless you're a music theorist and the ornamentation is "the song")
I don’t think that’s the obvious takeaway. The specific chord voicings are complicated, sure, but the complexity he’s talking about are the key changes and unexpected tonal choices. You can’t remove those without fundamentally changing the feeling of the song.
When I was learning the guitar, I frequently would skip passing chords and simplify voicings I didn’t know how to play. As a result, my covers were pretty boring and lacking the impact of the originals. That’s fine for beginners, but a pro musician is going to take pride in either faithfully recreating a cover or intentionally putting their own stylistic spin on it, not just skipping over stuff that’s hard.
How complex is a song that can be played on entirely different instruments without re-interpretation?
When I think of complexity I think of unreconcilable elements that force the transposer to make tough decisions ("intentionally putting their own stylistic spin on it").
I don’t really understand that idea of complexity, but Rick Beato is addressing this song from a music theory perspective, and I think this song would meet anyone’s definition of complex when it comes to theory.
There's no one 'music theory perspective'. Why not analyze it on more axes?
- Rhythmic patterns and variation
- Interplay between instruments
- Instrumentation and arrangement
- Structure
- Vocal style
- Lyrics
- Recording and mixing
By these metrics (and the ears of 99% of its listeners) it's a more or less generic 80s adult contemporary song. Yes it has a weird chord progression. Would it be more complex if it couldn't be boiled down to a series of chords?
By these metrics (and the ears of 99% of its listeners) it's a more or less generic 80s adult contemporary song.
That’s what the word “pop” is being used for in “the most complex pop song ever”. Rick Beato is giving an example of a literally popular song, one that somebody suggested they perform an impromptu concert because it was in the charts at the time, and which sounds totally mainstream, and yet has a very unusual chord progression.
And I think “music theory” in this context is basically jazz theory, where a song is boiled down to what you’d see in the Real Book - melody line, chords, and a description of the tempo and groove. Unless you’re doing big band, instrumentation is one of the standard small combos, or just whatever musicians you have to hand. Which again is reasonable in the context of “here’s a song we tried to busk in a scratch group, and it turned out to be crazily complicated”.
I agree it's a good anecdote. It clearly still resonates with professional instrumentalists. But popular music has progressed so much since then that 'jazz theory' is unequip to grasp the complexities of modern recorded music. Beato in the video says modern pop music is getting simpler, but he's just using the wrong tools.
I guess he really means "less complex harmonically". You're definitely right that a lot of modern music has features that would be unimaginable or impossible to achieve 40 years ago when this song was written, both through new tech and stylistic innovations. But I think his view is still very defensible if you focus on pop songs, singable vocal-led pieces that you might attempt in karaoke.
There was a long period where jazz influences were very big in popular music -- jazz itself was actually popular! -- so there were a lot of very harmonically interesting pop songs. I agree with him that that seems generally less true nowadays (thinking of big mainstream singer-songwriters like Adele and Ed Sheeran). But I'd be interested to hear of good counterexamples.
