Vex Appeal

Godspeed You! Black President (The Making Of)

I made this Godspeed You! Black President streaming ambient apocalyptic audio thing. Here are a few notes on it.

Back during the 2008 U.S. election, which I followed obsessively, there was a fellow user of the Something Awful politics forum called “Godspeed You! Black President.” I thought this was a good pun (basically all my ideas are just puns) and put it in my ever-expanding list of “things that could be things.”

This is “The Dead Flag Blues” - the opening track of F♯ A♯ ∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor:

With such rich, apocalyptic vocals (“I opened up my wallet / and it was full of blood” - mmm, financial-crisisy!) it was instantly obvious what sort-of-thing the pun should be made into.

Then I promptly forgot about it for two years or so, until You Are Listening To Los Angeles came along, mashing up ambient music with radio chatter. And I was like “right, I should probably get on with making this thing.” Actually I had this other item in my bucket list:

So I became seized with terror that every single idea I’d ever written down but failed to make was about to created by other people. A motivating thought! (Actually I’d never really thought about police radio scanners, and thought I’d have to write and record all these crackly radio reports; and then the conspiracy/ARG fan in me thought they might subtly imply this unfolding mystery and you’d sort of have to wait around to hear another clue through the static and so on and so forth and so obviously it was never gonna get done.) Also Leila Johnston had been writing a lot about making things really quickly, which helped things along.

Anyway about 7pm I sat down to do it, this is how I did it:

The current beta version of Audacity (3.1.3) lets you batch process MP3 files. I used the first 14-odd MP3s from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father’s audio book. Just set up a “chain” (I did “slow down” + “pitch down” + “save as MP3”, easy) and drag in the files. It spits out a folder of transformed MP3s. Nice!

In Garageband I cut out a few bits from the GY!BE album: the bits with vocals, the noisy train-station stuff, the long bits of silence between tracks, the happy-sounding bit at the end of Dead Flag Blues. Saved everything that was left to a different folder.

Then I had to make them play in a browser. I used JWplayer - you just put some files in your home directory and then you can use a plain old <embed> tag. To get the player to play a playlist of MP3s, you need a playlist file. I made one by dragging all the related files into VLC, then doing “Save Playlist…” which lets you create an XSPF file. Then I edited the XSPF files in TextEdit to change the file location of each MP3 from a local one (e.g: Users/Guy Parsons/Desktop/GYBP/BO/1.mp3) to their future internet location. (e.g: http://www.vexappeal.com/godspeedyoublackpresident/BO/1.mp3)

I got so frustrated trying to make a <div> appear in the bottom-right-hand corner of the page I gave up, kicked it old-skool, and used a <table>. (That’s just a little trick I picked up back in 2002, ain’t no thang.)

And that’s about all there was to it - 7am the next morning, I hit publish. (The night time is really the only time to work, isn’t it?)