Amber on Music

More music watching

2011-06-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

I have gotten hooked on reality-contest type shows. (These are not a new thing of course; think of Ted Mack's Amateur Hour.) I can't work up any interest in the Weight Loss Journey of Designers on Survivor Island. Yecch. Plenty of the shows, though, are the closest you can get to classic old variety programs anymore and a great way to discover new music. There are pages and pages to write about these shows, but today I just want to share one particular performance with you.

Streetcorner Symphony got second place in the past season of The Sing-Off, a contest of a capella groups. They were my favorite by far and I liked everything they did, but their version of "Fix You" is just magic. It sticks with me. (Members of the other groups join them at the end.)

And just because I love you all so much, here's another one:

Tangential note: If they ever completely don't need hand-held mikes anymore, will singers resort to holding wooden dummies? How will they ever learn what to do with their hands? I am so tired of watching hands and mikes instead of singers' faces. And you kids stay off my lawn!

Gaga for Go-Go

2011-06-22T20:17:00.001-07:00

I've been busy, which is no excuse for not writing about music, because I've been listening to a lot of it while I work. Bad me.

Truth is, I was listening to something I really love and wanted to write about it, but I made the mistake of trying to find the perfect video and get all the historic background to lay on you. Someday, I'll write the complete book of go-go, but today I'll just give the short version.

In the 1970s, a new style of music became popular in Washington, DC. (Chocolate City, baby.) Chuck Brown developed the style by mixing Latin rhythms, funk, and call and response rapping. This music is called go-go because Brown's band plays fewer longer songs, with no breaks in between. They start playing and go go to the end of the show. Even if you have never heard go-go yourself, there's a good chance that the musicians you do listen to have been influenced by it. Or sampled it.

Here's a sample from Chuck Brown. Sorry that you don't get to have the full live experience.

This is from EU (Experience Unlimited). It's a more locally-authentic version of the song that Spike Lee used in School Daze.

Get your butt in motion!

Link rot isn't new

2011-06-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

Link rot makes a blogger scream. (Maybe someday I'll record a link rot scream and post a link.) Just a few posts before this one, I've got a link to a video that's been reset to private. Videos disappear, even whole sites like imeem and Google Video disappear. Aieee!

Link rot isn't new, though.

Get a cinephile started on lost films; pack a lunch. It is estimated that more than half the silent films made have had all their copies lost. Some are just plain lost, some are known to have burnt in archive fires (early film stock was particularly flammable.) Likewise, a big chunk of the early talkies have been lost. Some films have been partly lost: some scenes, the soundtrack, the film stock but not the soundtrack, one eye of a 3D film, etc. Some films have been lost, but we have photographs taken during production. More recent films have had all the known copies deteriorate past use. Some films have even had all their copies just plain discarded because no one thought they were worth keeping. How would you feel if you were trying to write about a particular significant director whose early films had been lost? Aieee!

Television is even worse. Early productions were broadcast live, so there is no record unless someone made kinescopes (filmed the screen); the kinescopes are then subject to the same archiving problems as any other film. Many other early programs that were filmed or taped have had all their copies lost because no one thought of keeping them. The BBC is notorious for deliberately re-using tapes in the early 60s. Whovians (hardcore Doctor Who fans) are verklempt that so much of the early series has been lost and devote a lot of effort to recovering and assembling bits and pieces from soundtracks, fragments, and production photos that have survived. (Bless Australia, which kept copies of many tapes that the Beeb sent them for their local broadcasts.) Aieee!

No one much expects live performances from before sound recording and film were invented, but even relatively recent scripts and dance scripts have been lost, some from major and significant productions. Aieee!

Much of ancient literature and has been lost over time, of course, but historians are tormented by later works that refer to earlier works, even giving tantalizing extracts (true early links). The Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, the De Architectura by Vitruvius, and the Prose Edda of Snorre Sturlusson are well known examples of this kind of compilation. Libraries and collections burn up (down?). Fanatics burn books. Books are printed on paper that contains acid. Authors insist that their papers be destroyed when they die. One way or another, copy by copy, the work is lost. (And artworks only ever have one copy.) Even quite recent work has been completely lost except in the echoes of links. Aieee!

Online works are quite vulnerable to loss. Links to extant material become obsolete as service providers come and go, as content owners fail to pay their service bills, as sites are reorganized. Having many copies, easy in the virtual world, makes digital work more resilient against loss, but that is balance by the relative fragility of each copy compared to documents on paper or parchment. What will we all do when YouTube and Wikipedia go poof? Aieee!

I like to imagine (really fantasize) that some future historian will be interested in my blog, so I would end up being a minor Pliny the Elder of music. That's very unlikely, but my links will certainly rot. If I do make my own copies of the photo, video and audio recordings I use here, the links to those will rot and the copies themselves will get lost eventually. My own work is deservedly ephemeral, but consider how much of our current culture exists only online and how much is being lost month by month. Rotten links are the tantalizing fragments that will give future historians and fans so much to agonize over.

Dear hypothetical future readers: I'm sorry. I don't know what to do to overcome this; no one does. Remember us all kindly for what we do manage to preserve and forgive us for what we can't.

"Hiatus" sounds so much better than "collapse"

2011-06-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

Wow. Two years. Damn, where did the time go? My life got sucked into a whirlpool and I've just gotten my head back above the water, and that's enough about that.

Now I just have to think of something clever and important to write. Snort. Yeah, right, ok, whatever.

My music collection is a mess. My iTunes library is still on my old laptop, which got commandeered by the young'uns and is now giving the death-rattle of a dying fan. The music files are on my new small wonderful portable external HD, so that's safe. I hate to go through the hard labor of getting a new library set up and I'm using a shared computer anyway, so I've been stalling. That means no syncing and no proper last.fm scrobbling. I've been badly broke, but whatever newer music I've bought is on my work PC where I use winamp.

I have been using the Pandora/last.fm mashup Pandora.FM a lot, though. (Check out my Pandora profile!) Pandora still troubles me because it wants to play me more of the same music I already like. I wish it had a "play someone else's station at random" button. I can't be the only person who likes to be challenged or to find new music.

What's next for Amber, aside from untangling my music? I think I can find a thing or two to say about Youtube, so-called reality TV and the loss of good old variety shows, the demise of imeem, Pandora, Second Life, and earbuds. Maybe I'll even be able to work up some entertaining rants. We'll see.

Outsider Love

2009-07-27T21:51:00.000-07:00

I will now worship Jonathan Coulton. He writes smart wonderful songs AND he relases them with Creative Commons permission for anyone to create and publish videos of them. (And I think I still owe a blog on Creative Commons, don't I?) In his honor, I offer videos!

"I'm Your Moon"

A love song from Charon to Pluto
(CaptainValor, 2009)

"Chiron Beta Prime"

A Christmas letter from a family in unusual circumstances
(jocopro, 2006)

"Still Alive"

The end credits song of the game Portal. You do NOT want to do science with this computer.
(Gyoru, 2007)

"Baby Got Back"

Coulton covers a special love song
(Gl3nn, 2006)

Dispatch War Rocket Alpha to Bring Back Freddy

2009-07-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

As usual, while I was looking for one thing, I found something else altogether. Then got distracted. "Oh, shiny!" I blame YouTube's recommender. It suggested that I watch a particular a capella version of "Bohemian Rhapsody". That was meh, but that had a related video that had a related video that (lather rinse repeat) brought me to the Queen official YouTube channel. Shiny!

Let me share the shiniest with you. Queen did the song for Flash Gordon. I loved that song, but I haven't heard it in years. I have never seen the video at all, so I was delighted to find it. It is a camp fest, with footage from that movie and footage from earlier versions. Now I get to make you listen to it, too.

Not content with this one Art Nouveau effort, Queen later recorded "Radio Gaga" and set the video in a very Flashesque world, with a lot of footage from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Unfortunately, the official channel has disabled embedding. (Since that's the only one they've blocked, I'm going to assume it's a rights problem and not greed or stupidity. But still, boo.) I did find one clean version of this video elsewhere.

Queen - Radio Ga-Ga
Uploaded by hushhush112. - Explore more music videos.

This reminds me of how much I love Freddy Mercury's voice. It's easy to forget how technically amazing his voice was until you hear another great singer like Annie Lennox (e.g.) tackling one of his songs and not quite getting it. Here is a version of a big Queen song with two good singers. One gets it; one doesn't.

Not Art Nouveau, but maybe only Freddy could pull that off.

She's My Little Earworm

2009-07-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

Have fun with my earworm du jour:

Pocket Pandora

2009-07-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

Wow, yikes. I increased the dose of a medication and lost nearly a week to daze. I thought occasionally "I need to write a blog today", but then time would slip away again. Next time I change a dose, I'm going to get a week of stuff written ahead and enlist someone to drop them into the blog day by day for me.

There was one cool and music-relevant thing from the week to share. My old Blackberry, an 8703e business powerhouse, died. I was right at my "get a new phone if you renew your contract" date (picture my faithful steed collapsing inches from the finish line), so I was able to replace it with the latest coolest the very next day. I am so loving my Blackberry Tour. It's smaller, faster, and does all sorts of amazing things. It even has a camera! (There were places in my office that banned cameras, so I avoided getting a phone with a camera. Now they ban phones, iPods, flash sticks, and just about everything but pencils so there's no advantage to a cameraless phone.) My only complaints about it so far are that it doesn't have Wi-Fi and that it doesn't have a magic battery that never needs charging.

The most wonderful feature is that there is a Pandora client for this generation of Blackberry. I mean, "w00t!" doesn't even cover it. Of course, regular readers know that this leaves me with my old dilemma again. (Amber on Music: Tyranny of the Scrobble) If I stream Pandora on my phone, the music won't be scrobbled to my Last.fm profile. On the PC, I use PandoraFM, but that doesn't work on the Blackberry and Last.fm has no Blackberry client for their streaming music. Wah.

(Of course, my scrobbling is all gewhackity these days because my library is on the shared drive that keeps getting stuck on my roommate's computer. This resource PITA is balanced by his contribution of new music to the household, though, so I cope. I also expect to get some wordage out of his intermittent efforts in streaming his own music out. But I digress ... )

The Pandora client is pretty slick. It is easy to use and has all the Pandora features for just plain listening to music, including Thumb Up/Down and "why was this chosen?" You can listen to any of your Pandora stations or start a new one from a single artist or song seed. It shows the album artwork even bigger than it does on my PC, which is nice. It lets you select music quality level to balance performance and data consumption. I really like that it adds itself to the top of every application menu, so you can get into it to skip a horrible song or pause it with practically no navigation.

It omits some features that I use a lot, though. I can't edit any of my existing stations, or even see their seeds. It lets me select my Quick Mix station, but doesn't let me add anything to it. That kind of spoils the point of Quick Mix, seems to me. I can, however, delete any station. I'm not sure why I would feel the need to delete on the road more than mixing up something new to meet my on-the-road needs.

There are a few drawbacks that bother me. The earbuds that came with the phone suck utterly. They hurt my ears, have crappy sound, and fall out. Boo to you Blackberry. I can replace those with something better, of course. I can't fix the other glitch, which is only a problem for total geeks like me: the "why this song?" blurbs are often slow to load and too long for the Blackberry-sized window. I can cope with that. It drives me up the wall that the music pauses briefly for every alert, which leads to a string of hiccups as SMS and email land. You choose a Blackberry because you expect to get a lot of SMS and email, so this is not a small problem for the crackberry-addicted.

I do step back and put this in perspective. It will only let me listen to radio stations I developed myself in advance and not let me develop any while I'm on the subway? Poor me. I'm complaining about something that is head and shoulders above just plain old pocket radios. It won't replace regular-broadcast radio in cases of emergency or civil insurrection, but it totally demolishes it for music. If I whine about this again, take away my phone and make me get by with an AM transistor radio for a week.

Hand Jive

2009-07-12T20:42:00.000-07:00

The last few days, I've had migraine and couldn't write at all. I was too photosensitive and dopy to face a page of words. On top of that, sound hurt and my tinnitus was out of control. Often when my tinnitus is acting up badly, listening to music makes the buzzing, clanging, whistling, and squeaking more orderly. (The noise is still there, but more organized and less rackety. I think of it as combing messy hair out straight.) This week, though, there was no taming it.

My hearing loss and tinnitus always affect my ability to hear music. It particularly hits some singers whose voices happen to be in my most damaged frequencies. It really plays hob with nice stereo mixes, because my left ear is so much worse than my right. I wish the iPod would let me adjust the balance to compensate for that. No home sound system has a "adjust to missing frequencies" switch, though.

Because my loss is in the frequencies of speech, I often have trouble understanding all the lyrics of songs. I would love to have access to captioned videos. I once heard someone going off on how ridiculous the idea of music videos with captioning is. This is based on the simplistic ideas that "deaf" is an on/off switch. Hearing impairment is often partial, and people who can't hear at all can feel rhythms. Besides, lyrics are words that you don't necessarily have to hear any music to appreciate, and videos are all about imagery. That is all a long way to say "bunkum!".

Captioning isn't the only way that people with hearing impairments can get lyrics to songs. There are also American Sign Language (ASL) and Signed English translations. YouTube is replete with examples of popular songs with signing. There are different kinds of "signed songs". The best of them, in my opinion, are those which are performances in their own right.

Live Performance, "Fergalicious" (macboy17, 2007)

Live Interpretation, "I Had a Shoggoth" (filkertom, 2008)

Ordinarily the point of live interpretation is to just tell what the speaker is saying, but this one is fun because the interpreter part of the show. The interpreter had never heard this song at all before! If you think about it, there would have to be signs for "Cylon" and "Sith Lord", wouldn't there?

Music Video, "Pump It" (st0rmfx, 2008)

Bjorn Storm takes a completely different tack and made his own videos of the songs. I wish he could do more, but YouTube's new copyright wars are keeping him on the sideline for now. My son the Black Eyed Peas fan says this is his favorite BEP video.

Sucker Punch

2009-07-08T18:29:00.000-07:00

Today for a while I had my iPod shuffling. I pretty much never shuffle because even though I like a lot of different kinds of music, I'm hardly ever up for Lil Wayne as a follow up to Old Crow Medicine Show. I'm stodgy. I generally listen to albums right through in the official track order. I have to say that too many artists are not so good at arranging the songs on an album to be listened to straight through as a playlist, but what is an album now but a playlist? Mostly the cool people ignore those and make their own, but if you the artist and you are making that one playlist, shouldn't you try to make a good program out of it? And stay off my lawn you kids!

But anyway, today I did have a playlist of songwriters-who-sing going on shuffle: Michael Tolcher, Lee Mellor, Rodney Crowell, Tribute to Townes Van Zandt, Gordon Lightfoot, Tribute to Elliot Smith, Tim Acres, Lucinda Williams, ... thud. Once again, I got ambushed by that one song of hers, "Something About What Happens When We Talk". That song is so much a part of the soundtrack of a hard part of my life that I can't hear it without being pulled back into the emotions that made it hard.

It's clear from the words that she's telling a story of a voluntary parting. My story was a sudden falling-out. The first time I heard it was just at the peak of the crisis for me and it hit my feelings so exactly on the head. It was truer than the literal facts. (Does that make sense? I think so. Anyway...) Now I can't think of that bad time without the song playing in my head and I can't hear the song without feeling a little sick and sad.

I really like this song. I could avoid it, but I don't because it's such a splendid perfect song. I like the album it's on, too. When I do play it, I know it's coming and I can keep the feelings a bit detached, sort of at the level of strong nostalgia. When it hits me unexpectedly, though, it is a hard blow.

I need to put together a playlist of songs that remind me of happy times, don't I? I'm going to take that as an exercise.

(Tangential note: if you wonder why I use YouTube to embed songs when I'm not particuarly referring to the video, let me show you. I like Imeem and they have an "embed" feature. Here it is:

Something About What Happens When We Talk - Lucinda Williams

All those little ads and buttons (you should see the page of code), and you just get a 30-second sample. You can click through to hear the whole song, but you have to be a registered Imeem user for that. That is a PITA for you and spoils the whole point of including the example for me. So I'm sticking to YouTube and sorry about the bandwidth.)

Music Out of Time

2009-07-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

I was watching an episode of CSI:New York and was surprised to hear song I know instead of their usual house music. I posted a video of that, Robbie Robertson and the Red Road Ensemble "Ghost Dance", yesterday. I was thinking about why that song was a bad choice for the place they used it. That got me thinking onward to the Ghost Dance religion and the modern Pow Wows, and that made me turn to YouTube again. I wanted to see a modern version of the Ghost Dance if I could find one.

Then, of course, I had YouTube serendipity. In 1894, Edison brought some Sioux from Buffalo Bill's show troupe into his studio to film them doing some traditional dances! These are among the first movies ever shot. Now the Library of Congress has posted a mass of Edison's early flms on YouTube. It's so cool. 1894!

Here are the two relevant snips. Both of these are very short and have no sound.


Sioux Ghost Dance (Edison, 1894)


Buffalo Dance (Edison, 1894)


Hopi Buffalos/sumi'nangwa 2007 (nativemama, 2007) For comparison, here is a more modern version of a buffalo dance. It is Hopi, not Sioux, but it seems similar to my outsider's eye. (I can just about tell the difference between a Lady's Fancy Shawl dance and a Grass Dance.)

I am definitely going to look more into the Ghost Dance and Pow Wow movements, but these and the other Edison films completely distracted me today.

Song for a Monday

2009-07-06T20:33:00.001-07:00

Wow! The day completely slipped away from me. Here is a video of a song from Robbie Robertson that I've been thinking about. Enjoy it now; more about it tomorrow.

Roommate Radio

2009-07-05T20:47:00.000-07:00

I have a roommate now. This changes everything about my daily life, including music.

For one thing, hanging with him has taken time I would have used just listening to music. It's good to spend time with a real person instead of digital voices, but I miss the soundtrack anyway. I have always been in the habit of putting my headphones on whenever I sit down at the computer, because the next step has always been to start up some music, but he thinks that I do it to avoid listening to him, so I'm breaking the habit, or trying to. I'm not starting music as much anyway, because he is using some space on the external hard drive that I have my music on and so most of the time he's shifted it over to his computer when I wasn't home using mine; I don't always bother to get up and fetch it. I hardly ever blast out the speakers anymore, because we like such different music. This all makes it sound like a big drag, but it seems like normal adjustment to sharing space and time to me. I've spent so much time on my own that I notice every little change.

It's not all loss, either. Note the "we like such different music". Regular readers will recall me saying that I don't listen to much hip-hop. That's not true anymore! It's pretty much all he listens to, so I've gotten plenty of exposure in the last few months. It's still not my favorite, but I understand it better. In fact, I've heard enough to know that I like T.I. and Dr Dre a better than Roommate (henceforth "RM") does.

In honor of RM, I have created the Roommate Radio station on Pandora. Here is a sample to fill the time you are waiting for Pandora to load:

The very most coolest thing about this? It turns out that his favorite artist, Lil Wayne, is an excellent test artist for my Pandora project! Win with awesome sauce.

The moment music changed: my MJ tribute

2009-07-04T06:33:00.000-07:00

My first thought on the obligatory Michael Jackson Tribute article was to share some fascinatingly wrong covers of MJ songs. But then I started thinking about all the other reactions to his death that I've read. Everyone seems to have a "first memory of Michael" moment to share. I suppose my first memory was of him singing "ABC" or "One Bad Apple", but that is boring even to me. The one MJ moment that stands out for me is what I have always thought of as "the moment music changed," one instant in the Motown 25 Anniversary special. A lot of people point to MJ's performance in that show, particularly the moonwalk, as revolutionary, but the significant moment for me came before that.

To understand what and why, you will have to see a bigger chunk of the show. Clips below, with my thoughts as I watched it the first time next to the clip.

All the brothers together again for this special. They owe so much to Quincy Jones. Gah, what happened to his nose? Good performance. Oh, Randy, what are you wearing?

What is missing from the clips was a bridge when the brother and extra mics are whisked offstage; MJ gets the hat and then makes a comment about the old stuff being great, but new stuff is good too.

Looks like more dancing. [bass line starts] WHOA! WOW! Grownup. Intense. Damn. Wheee!

Everything about him and his performance was a new thing, right from the first bass notes. His facial expressions and body language we so deliberate, so intense, so non-Jacksonish, completely riveting. It was all done as a declaration of his independence from other people's vision of what he should do. It completely left his old music in the dust. And all in that one first moment. The moonwalk was gravy.

This last video is from AbejaMariposaJr; you should definitely click through and read his description of the history of the moonwalk dance step.

Artists (in alphabetical order): Fred Astaire, Bill Bailey, Buck and Bubbles, Cab Calloway, Clark Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr., Daniel L. Haynes, Rubberneck Holmes, Patterson and Jackson, Eleanor Powell, Bill Robinson, Three Chefs (only the feet), Tip Tap and Toe (feat. Ray Winfield), Earl Snakehips Tucker

Returning with Glee

2009-07-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't been around in a while, and I could write a whole long "my dog ate my homework and I had a bad hair day" entry, but why? I had a buncha stuff going on and my life got eaten up by it. I kept listening to music and making notes on cool things to share with you all, so here we go again.

I still haven't watched an episode of High School Musical and still don't feel like bothering. The bits I've seen make it look way past my annoying threshold, and that is from someone who loves musicals.

I have been bitten by the Glee bug though. Fox very cleverly ran the first episode and now is making us all wait until the fall to see more. Wah. I want it now. I'm not sure I'm going to love the story, but the music is great. If you can't watch the episode, all the musical parts are available on YouTube.

I ran across some covers of the choral version of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" from Glee. First I was amused (covering a cover? snicker) but this one put me straight.

The performance is stunningly good and the video is good. And clever, too.

I'm baaaaaack. Are you ready for more ukuleles?

"This singing together, this was our power."

2008-11-15T20:36:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I protested the lack of good modern protest songs that people can sing together at actual protests. I am pleased to report that I found them! Some of them. Sort of. These are not your grandfather's protest songs.

The Classics: We Shall Overcome

Here is a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., that explains and demonstrates how a song can strengthen a movement. "Know I join hands often with students and others behind jail bars singing it ... Sometimes we've had tears in our eyes when we joined together to sing it, but we still decided to sing it..."

Here is "We Shall Overcome" from a Jerusalem Gay & Lesbian Pride demonstration. ("The video was taken shortly before the crowd was dispersed by snap arrests of peace protesters.")

Old Warhorse Protest: Neil Young

Neil Young always has something to say about oppression, abuse of authority, and war, so it's no surprise that he has a few things to say about President Bush and Iraq. He has built a website on the subject, Living With War. Here is one of his songs urging action, "Let's Impeach the President for Lying".

It's not a song for mass singing, but the chorus works for that and makes a point. This site also has (as of today) nearly 3000 user-submitted songs about the war.

New Dudes: Rage Against the Machine

RATMs name pretty much tells you where they stand on oppression, abuse of authority, and war. They signed up for peace concerts at both the Democrat and Republican conventions in 2008. The concert at the DNC went off smoothly, but police proactively shut down the concert at the RNC. RATM didn't walk away quietly. Instead, they did a 2-song acapella concert with a bullhorn ("Bulls on Parade" and "Killing in the Name of").

Again, these don't really seem like folk songs, but people find powerful bits to sing along with. "Fuck you! I won't do what you tell me!" isn't quite the same as "This land is your land, this land is my land", but it works.

The Singing Revolution: Estonia

The power of folk music is to connect us to each other and to connect the present to the past. It talks about our common history, our common experiences, our common dreams. Estonia, a Baltic nation occupied first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets, used this power to save their nation and eventually to regain independence. Their culture is big on folk songs and they have an old national tradition of the laulupidu.

A laulupidu is a festival with choruses of 20 to 30,000 people singing folk songs. The Estonians were able to use these to save their culture and (as things progressed) spread the idea of revolution among the people, by careful choice of songs. (As I have observed, the power of music to galvanize a revolution comes from the establishment. The more they forbid it, the more energy it has.) There is a new documentary on this. You can see a trailer and get more information at The Singing Revolution website. "If 20,000 people start to sing one song, then you can't shut them up. It's impossible."

The laulupidu tradition didn't die with the departure of the Soviets. Recently, there was a Punk Laulupidu. It makes sense for 20,000 people to stand together to sing "I wanna be anarchy" if you remember that "This singing together, this was our power".

I Am Weary (Let Me Work)

2008-11-13T20:08:00.000-08:00

I've been sick. I've been very sick. There are weeks back there I don't remember, what with the fever and the lack of oxygen and all. (Tip: Do not get pneumonia when you live alone.) I can see from my Last.fm profile that I was listening to a lot of music I don't remember hearing. I can see a very fine new Pandora station that I seem to have tweaked pretty well (Smells Like Grunge Spirit) that I don't remember making. I see a stack of notes on Pandora and other things that don't make any sense at all. (Why do I have a page on the drummers of Pearl Jam?) I see three new albums from a band I never heard of (Kinski: like the first two, third not so much).

I'm still recovering slowly and it's going to take me a while to wade through the notes and figure out where I left off here. I will enjoy listening to "Smells Like Grunge Spirit" while I work. In the meantime, here are three versions of one of my favorite songs, "Wayfaring Stranger", that I found on Youtube while I was looking for something else. The first is in a traditional style, the second is a modern interpretation from England, and the third is timelessly sublime.

Bands with Split Personalities: Goo Goo Dolls & Spinal Tap

2008-10-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

I'm still sick and stupid, so I'm going to leave you with more homework. These are songs that I used to test Pandora's track selection and I'll be pointing back to them later.

Goo Goo Dolls

Early Goo: "Know My Name"

Late Goo: "Stay With You"

Spinal Tap

Early Tap: "Give Me Some Money" and "(Listen to the) Flower People"

Late Tap; "Hell Hole" and "Big Bottom"

Punt while coughing: Solomon Burke

2008-10-15T18:43:00.000-07:00

I have many fine notes on Pandora, but a fever stands between them and you. I now know I can't simplify multi-dimensional data analysis with a temp above 100F.

Don't be sad—I'll leave you with a special song to keep you company, "You're The Kind of Trouble" by Solomon Burke, from his album Nashville. This is one of the songs I've used in my Pandora-poking, so it's not completely a space filler.

Yet another fan video of yet another earworm, this time from Josh Turner

2008-10-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

I'm sick and not up to much thinking. Last night, I plain passed out before I had a chance to put a piece together for you.

I've been blackboxing Pandora, trying to figure out how they decide which artists are similar to the seeds for a station. That is going slowly, but I have been able to work out that their basic unit is a block of 4 songs. I'm still looking for a good band with two distinct and different personalities, but being sick and stupid has put that effort on the shelf for a few days. I'm having some fun now listening to the station seeded with "John C. Reilly" who has done only the Dewey Cox soundtrack. That was designed to have as many different genres as possible, so I am quite interested to see if the station hits all of them.

In the meantime, I am going to share my current earworm with you. A friend of mine has been listening to this Josh Turner song obsessively for the last couple of weeks and now it's stuck in my head. Here is yet another fan video.

The scenes are from Doctor Who and the video probably makes a lot more sense if you know that the two actors are both the Doctor. (Trust me, changing actors is a Doctor Who thing.) I like the official original video very well, but that has "Embedding disabled by request".

At least it's not "Hey There Delilah" again.

Another great television theme and two of its children

2008-10-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

A friend reminded me of three more great television theme/title songs that you can identify immediately from the next room. I still put Doctor Who first, but these are defintitely on a short list. And they are all related.

Peter Gunn

Original Version

Henry Mancini wrote an instant classic, that ended up branding a whole genre: crime and espionage drama. He did later themes for other series, and he did the Pink Panther theme, too, but that went from movies into TV, not the other way around.

Gratuitous Bettie Page Spanking Video Version

How can you skip a chance to put in Bettie, ropes, and spanking?

A Remarkable Cover

This song has been covered so many times, it's a career to look for the perfect example. This one will have to do.

Mission Impossible

Original Version

Lalo Schifrin original, and one of the many themes taking the cue from Mancini's Peter Gunn theme.

Mission Impossible movie

Remix of the original version by Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen Jr. This clip is a fanvid, something that I plan to talk about soon.

Mission Impossible 2

See how litle of the original is required for you to recognize it.

Law and Order

Original Series

Mike Post's instant classic, again in the Peter Gunn family tree.

L&O: Criminal Intent

His slightly different spin on the same theme.

L&O: SVU

I think that the branding is pretty well established by now.

The Best TV Theme of All Time (So Far)

2008-10-11T19:59:00.000-07:00

Today, I heard a bit of a snip of a piece of music coming from the next room and I new immediately what someone in there was watching. It is the song that has called kids of all ages in to the telly for 45 years and going strong.

1963

2008

45 years and still doing its magic. Just now as I was choosing which YouTube clips to embed, I had two young fans who are supposed to be asleep run in to see which episode I was watching.

Doctor Who
on BBC.co.uk

Pandora's DNA

2008-10-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

Pandora is an application that sits above yet another ginormous database of music information. (Are you noticing a pattern here?) It uses this database to generate lists of songs to play as stations for users.

So, what about this database? It is from the Music Genome Project, which brought together geeky music experts to find a way to describe music in numbers, in a way that would let have tracks that sound similar to each other have close-together numerical descriptions. (My non-Amber mathematician hat keeps trying to get technical, but I am beating it down. So far.)

To do this, they first developed lists of genes, things or qualities that a track might have to some degree. For example, in the category of genes "Strings", they have the genes Background String Section, Bowed Strings, Melodic String Accompaniment, Melodic String Section, Solo Strings, String Ensemble, String Section, String Section Beds, Subtle Use of Strings, Use of a String Ensemble, and Use of Strings. Human expert listeners give each track a score for each gene that applies to its genre. Rock and pop have 150 genes, rap has 350, jazz has 400, etc. That list of values, the score for each gene, is the track's genotype. That goes into the ginormous database with the usual track information like artist and title.

To give you an idea, here are some of those genotypes presented in words, just hitting the highlights. These are taken from the Pandora "Why was this song selected?" feature.

Features electric rock instrumentation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping, and major key tonality. (U2, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For")
Features hard rock roots, groove based composition, minor key tonality, dirty electric guitar riffs. (Tool, "Sober")
Features hard rock roots, folk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, repetitive melodic phrasing, and extensive vamping. (Jerry Cantrell, "Anger Rising")

Within the gene system, the distance between two tracks can be calculated mathematically. If they set their system up right, that would correspond almost exactly to how similar they would sound to a listener. (Or to a group of listeners, averaged out.) You can also use math to describe different subgenres or do all sorts of other cool fun stuff, for values of "cool" and "fun" that only really hardcore geeks would understand.

This certainly has my geek propeller hat spinning. I keep wondering things like which gene set did they apply to Linkin Park and Body Count? Does their system let you measure the distance between a rap track and a rock track? Have they explored the data for clusters that cross standard genre labels? How do different recordings of the same song compare? I would love to get my hands on their data and start playing with it.

I can't, directly. But I can play with Pandora. And I have been. Reports on the cool fun will follow.

Plug of the week: The Last Goodnight

2008-10-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

This is the song that's been playing in my head all day. It's a good thing I like it. Here is a nice live performance:

The official video of The Hit is available in all the usual places, but with embedding disabled.

I really like The Last Goodnight. They aren't bleeding edge at all. They are less funky than Maroon 5, less suicidal than Blue October, less quirky than New Radicals, but well within that corner of the musical landscape. They have their own voice, though, sentimental but realistic, biting self-observation but not self-hate.

The "Pictures of You" hook has probably just about gotten control of your brain.

I like their songwriting and execution very well. If I were writing a review, I would run down all the tracks and explain how they fit into the story of a destructive and addictive relationship, but I'm not, so I won't. I would like to give a shout to their keyboards. In a field of bands with strong keyboards well forward in the arrangements, theirs resonate with me the most. Maybe it's just that they have more of them. They credit a pianist and keyboardist and make good use of both.

Here's another example, "Poison Kiss":

I liked the music when I bought the album, but I'm listening to it a lot more than I expected. I definitely think they are worth checking out.

Pictures of you, pictures of me, pictures of me, hung up on your wall for all the world to see...

The Last Goodnight
on Amazon.com

I guess I can't make up my mind

2008-10-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Last May, I calculated my musical eclecticity using Anthony Liekens's How eclectic is your musical style? tool. I just ran it again, and I am proud to say that my tastes have broadened!

Eclectic Score

Take your top 20 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score. If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/eclectic.php

My eclectic score is currently

98/100

The 98 related artists for my profile are 3 Doors Down (2), Adema, Alex Chilton, Ari Hest, Aventura, Badfinger, Better Than Ezra, Black Light Burns, Boys Like Girls, Breaking Benjamin, Brian May, Chris Bell, Churchills, Circle of Dust, Coldplay, Creed, Criss Angel, Crossbreed, Crossfade, DLG, Deadsy, Deep Purple, Disturbed, Dope (2), Dwight Yoakam, Emergency Broadcast System, Emmylou Harris, Fireman Joe, Flowbots, Fountains of Wayne, Franz Ferdinand, Freddie Mercury, Fuel, Gavin DeGraw, Godhead, Godsmack, Graham Colton Band, Guy Clark, Halo33, Hawthorne Heights, Ill Niño, India, Jakalope, Jason Falkner, Jellyfish, Jerry Rivera, Jesse Malin, Josh Kelley, Josh Ritter, KMFDM, Kara's Flowers, Kasabian, Live, Lostprophets, Lyle Lovett, Marilyn Manson, Matchbox Twenty, Matt Nathanson, Matt Wertz, Ministry, Modwheelmood, Mushroomhead, Narc, Oleander, Placebo, Queen + Paul Rodgers, Radiohead, Rob Thomas, Roger Taylor, Rosanne Cash, Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, SOiL, SecondaryCell, Senses Fail, Shinedown, Slipknot, Sloan, Spineshank, Stabbing Westward, Static-X, Story of the Year, Submersed, Teenage Fanclub, The All-American Rejects, The Calling, The Fullerenes, The Love Machine, The Mayfield Four, The Posies, The Soft Disaster, Todd Rundgren, Tonic, Trapt, Victor Manuelle, Whiskeytown, Wilco, Zeromancer, edwardshor

Super-Eclectic Score

Take your top 50 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 20 similar artists (where the artist itself is the #1 most similar). The resulting number of unique artists is your super-eclectic score. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/supereclectic.php

My super-eclectic score is currently

781/1000

The most similar artists for my profile are Smile Empty Soul (4), Puddle of Mudd (4), Tantric (4), The All-American Rejects (4), Orgy (4), Deadstar Assembly (4), Stabbing Westward (4), Fuel (4), Theory of a Deadman (4), Toby Keith (3)

First you find the haystack

2008-10-06T20:57:00.000-07:00

I have talked a bit about recommender systems before. These are the subject of many mathematical models and you can get a lot of very dense articles about the subject if you want to know everything. I'm going to give a very high-level oversimplified version here.

There are two basic types of recommender systems, collaborative filtering ("This is what people like you prefer.") and content-based filtering ("If you like that, you should try this."). There is no pure recommender system, but generally Last.fm is a collaborative filtering system and Pandora is a content-based filtering system. Pandora relies on the large music genome database to identify music similar to music you tell it you like. Last.fm uses a large database of playing histories to identify people who listen to the same bands in similar ways as you, then recommends music from their play histories. On the gripping hand, Amazon.com mixes the Last.fm approach with a standard package of web shopping preference identification and recommendations, because they also track what you look at but don't listen to (and how long you look at each one, and how you follow a trail of links around, etc.)

In practice, any system in use is a hybrid. Pandora passes you individual tracks from bands that tend to have similar tracks to the ones you name, then refines that with your own feedback. They also offer you access to the stations other people have developed, so you can use a band name to find someone who has similar tastes to you, and then see what else they listen to. Last.fm will play you a station of recommendations based on similar users, but they also have user track tagging that you can use to get recommendations. That tagging is both content-based and collaborative. PayPlay.fm uses your Last.fm profile and their own content-based and collaborative data to make recommendations (and in my experience better than any of the others). And PandoraFM and similar bridge the Pandora and Last.fm systems, hybridizing the hybrids. Amazon is probably telling someone "You bought a dish drainer and gardening tools, so we recommend you try Hoobastank and Jack Johnson." I have no idea how the YouTube related videos feature works (matching substrings in titles, with some other content-based stuff on top of that. Hybridized with the user favorites and channels collaborative filtering, I'd guess), but it is busy doing something that leads you all around the videoverse.

That all looks like quite a tangle of possibilities, but there is a layer of preference/recommendation above all that. To use any of these systems, you have to choose to use it. Right at the start, you have made a big filter of who "people like me" are. SmartPunk users are probably not quite the same crowd as Soundflavor users. Youtube music hunters on safari are different from Pandora fanatic hackers. And how did you find out about the system you choose, anyway? Your face-to-face friends are involved in that filtering layer, as well.

What is sad, of course, is that I am such a geek that I have not only used all these recommender systems (and more), I have worried out how they work under the hood (at this high level). In the future, look for more on these systems and on music in social networking sites. I am also thinking about bellwethers, so you will probably be reading about them, too. And the nature and impact and money trail of the super ginormous databases that sit under all these systems.

Special tidbit

2008-10-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

Since I spent most of the day thrashing around fixing a computer problem, I'll leave you with a video with a performance I really like. I think I've mentioned how much I like Keith Urban's "Stupid Boy". This is a live performance by Sarah Buxton, who wrote the song.

I like this version a lot better than the prettified version on her MySpace. This one has bite. I hope her studio learns to let her be herself.

Let the coolness stream

2008-10-04T20:17:00.000-07:00

Hoooooray. I got Pandora working. It never would play in my Firefox, but I got it going in Chrome. Then I couldn't get it to stop, which is a problem. After I rebooted, I got Pandora working in Internet Explorer just fine.

I'm willing to blame my system and not Pandora, since I have started getting messages complaining that there is something wrong with msdmo.dll. That is a whole off-topic thing to solve.

What is even more cool is that I found a web utility that mashes Pandora and Last.fm. PandoraFM is great so far. It runs Pandora in a frame and passes the Pandora play data into the Last.fm scrobbling system. It also give you access to Last.fm tagging and similar functions for the tracks as they play. PLUS, it will take your Last.fm stations and feed them into Pandora to play. It probably does other things, too, but I've only been using it today.

As I've mentioned before, scrobbling is a hard addiction. Whenever I play music that isn't getting scrobbled, the data loss nags at me. I'm apparently not the only one, since there are plenty of other apps around that let you scrobble Panora.

Oooh, Paul Oakenfold just came up. How have I missed that?. Must go click approval.

Pandora FM

I'd love to open Pandora's Boxes

2008-10-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

I am feeling like the stupidest person on the planet.

This whole mad endeavor started with me declaring radio morbid and starting out to look for new ways to find new music. I keep finding new cool stuff and there's no end in sight.

I've read a lot recently about how the RIAA's greed is going to kill Pandora, or maybe not if negotiations go well. This will, apparently, destroy the single best place to find new music ever in the history of the galaxy. (I am going to write more about the money trail soon after I figure it out well enough to explain it.)

I thought I better try out Pandora while I still could, so I headed over. I had set up an account there a while ago, but never did anything else. For a miracle, the password was where it was supposed to be, so I logged in and waited for the great new music to start showing up.

Hah. Of course, I had to do something to make the music appear. I'm sure Pandora has wonderful documentation, but it seemed to me that there should be some obvious entry point and voila, I see a giant box that says "type in the name of your favorite artist, song, composer and we'll create a radio station featuring that music and more like it." That would be the jumping in point.

I decided to try Hoobastank. Type it in and "CLICK HERE TO PLAY", check. Explanation box that says we're going to play an example, click here to close this box, very nice. Many fine labels and control buttons, nice.

And then crickets. The play/pause button changed, but nothing else happened. There is no sound, no blinkenlight, no messages. Nothing.

I thrashed around a bit, but I have only succeeded in getting different songs not to play. Am I missing a button? Is Pandora down? Pandora doesn't play nice with Firefox? Is my computer screwed up? I'm at a loss and frustrated.

My report to date on Pandora: It has pretty boxes.

Pandora

Plug of the Week: Soundtrack of Shelter

2008-10-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

Shelter is a movie about a gay romance. I like it a lot. If you like romances and are not gay-smooch-phobic, rent it and watch it. It's good and the rental won't cost you much and why not?

I like the movie, but I love the soundtrack. I rented the movie more than once because I had the music playing in my head. When I realized that, I bought the soundtrack album, which went into heavy rotation on my iPod. I thought I was so over "guy with his guitar singing soulfully" music, but it turned out I was just over what I had been hearing.

The Shelter music is from several artists, Shane Mack has four songs on the album, and they set the tone for the whole work. Here's a sample. (The video is a nice picture of the movie, but doesn't illustrate the song very well. I didn't get to make it and they didn't ask my opinion.)

Not all the song are strictly guy with guitar, but they do stay toward that corner of the landscape. Matthew Popieluch has two tracks. I particularly like "Darkness Descends", which I also heard a snip of in a Best Buy commercial. (That drove me crazy because my brain insisted that I knew the song and yet refused to reveal which one it was.)

Darkness Descends - Matthew Popieluch

Dance Yourself to Death has the most-different track, "Teenage Romanticide", which I don't like as much as it seems like I ought to. I really like "No One's Home" from Brett Cookingham & Matt Pavolaitis, which I wouldn't have expected to. Funny old world.

There are two tracks that were written for the movie by J. Peter Robinson. One of them, "Zach Conflicted" blows me away every time I hear it.

Zach Conflicted - J. Peter Robinson

That one is by far my favorite on the album.

A lot of soundtrack albums really don't work standing along as albums, but if you had this one and didn't know it was from a movie you might not notice. It is a very good compilation. You can easily listen to it straight through, and I think it shows off the different artists very well. I like the Shane Mack songs, but when I sorted the album by artist and got his four in a row, it was too much of too similar. Those same four songs programmed with the others sound brilliant. Someone did some great working putting this music together.

The story of how the music got programmed must be interesting. The movie itself was taken from script to screen in an astonishingly short time, so I have to give major props to the Musical Supervisor Brian Goldman. It looks, from some online poking around, that a lot of the music was taken from stuff that had been coming into a new music division of the here! network. Still, to put together diverse music that supports the movie so well AND that works completely on its own terms as an album, in that short time window, is a stunning accomplishment (in my opinion). I hope that some day I can talk to him about how they did it. (If I do, you will be sure to read about it.)

Shelter Soundtrack
on Amazon.com

I mean it. No, this time I really do.

2008-10-01T17:59:00.001-07:00

I am a major introvert and my stint on the phone bank really burned me out. For a long time after that finished, I could hardly stand to listen to music, much less think about it. I am relieved to report that I am rested and ready to get spinning again. I've been listening to a lot of music the last couple of weeks, although I haven't gotten anything new. Now it's a new month and (exciting for government geeks) the start of a new fiscal year, and that has shook me loose and gotten me moving.

The reason that I have been listening again, but not writing again was because my exploration of ways to find new music dropped me into a massive time suck. I'll write that story later in the week after I clear out some things I've been holding on to. Look for ongoing excitement starting tomorrow!

For now, I will leave you with a video of a song that I don't like much. A friend of mine has played it so often that I now think of him whenever I hear it and so it makes me smile. In fact, it makes me feel something very much like happy. That's the power of music.

See ya tomorrow!

The next showcase for new music? YouTube

2008-09-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

Phone bank finished, recovering from introvert stress, back to music, and CNN stole my first new blog idea! Oh, well.

When Ludacris' manager wanted to create buzz for his client's upcoming CD, he went directly to YouTube.com. But instead of releasing a flashy video for Ludacris' song "Let's Stay Together," Chaka Zulu just uploaded the track directly to the site with a just picture of the rapper as accompaniment.

Still out fighting the good fight

2008-08-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

I'm still doing the volunteer work, and so I have no time to listen to music or write about it. Yes, this is the sacrifice I am making—doing work that keeps me from finding new music.

I have been sneaking in some classic stuff at work, though. Here is a sample of what I've been listening to.

Talk amongst yourselves

2008-08-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

I am very busy at working doing what-they-pay-me-for during the day. I am busy every night doing volunteer work on a phone bank. I am not busy writing for all of you. Please don't hate me. I will try to simulate content by sharing some of the music I've been listening to, from Stax / Volt.

Carla Thomas, "Gee Whiz"

Carla Thomas and Otis Redding, "Knock on Wood"

Does the music wonder what's become of me?

2008-08-19T20:49:00.000-07:00

As those who have been reading from the beginning on MySpace will probably have long forgotten, the Amber blog was born out of the ashes of my faithful old CD player. I got a new iPod, and when I started ripping my CDs and looking for new music to fill it up, I got carried away.

This week, I have had a chance to reflect on how the iPod has gotten embedded in my life. The short answer is "pretty damned thoroughly". I thread the earbud cord up under the back of my shirt everday so it won't get tangled up in stuff and since the player is on my belt pretty much all the time I'm not showering or going through a metal detector. I never thought about it much, though.

I carried my CD player every day and listened to it a lot, but having the music available all the time means I am listening to it all the time. Lately, I've been working on some soundtracks, so I've been listening even more densely, eking out every moment. I have started chatting with some other music enthusiasts online and we play music for each other. Music wall to wall in my life, 6 or more hours a day of active listening.

This week I've been doing volunteer work. I am a big geek and introverted, so usually I volunteer to do things like clean up databases or do data entry. This week, however, I got drafted to do work that requires actual contact with the public. Passing a petition and working on a phone bank means no music playing. No way, no how. No singing, no humming, no dancing my feet around in rhythm. I can't even sing to myself in my head because I have to pay attention to the calls.

Tonight, we were signing up for volunteer stints over the next week and I was actually thinking about how the shifts would take up music and blogging time. That's when I realized that I had been passing up opportunites to skate because I was afraid of damaging the iPod and the music won.

Is this a bad thing? I have to think about it. Not skating means not enough exercise, and I know I am spending more money on music than I should. Those are both negatives. I'm making new acquaintances to talk about music with and music actually got me to go out to a concert. Those are positives. I'm writing this blog, which is a big positive. Am I paying less attention to the people around me in actual FTF than I used to? I think I am probably just distracted differently, to be honest.

I think I do need to be mindful—once this volunteer project is done so I have a chance to ignore people again, that is.

Beautiful Pain

2008-08-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

I have a stabbing, slashing, blinding headache. That means more YouTube for you! This is a nice unofficial video of one of my favorite sad songs, "I'm Not Supposed to Care" by Gordon Lightfoot.

I protest the lack of protest songs!

2008-08-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

What ever happened to protest songs?

I was doing some community activist work today, standing on the street getting people to sign a petition. In between people, I was singing "Bread and Roses" to myself to keep motivated to stand on a sunny street bothering nice people who would rather have not been bothered.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray, Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"

That is a song left over from the early labor movement. There were a lot of those songs and also spirituals revived for the big civil rights actions in the 60s. But are there any protest songs today? I can think of outrage songs, and pissed off songs, and social conscience songs like Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On?". But are there any new-ish songs suitable for people to sing while marching for a cause?

If there aren't any, why? Have our demonstrations been ruined for singing by bullhorns? I have to investigate this. Meanwhile, for your viewing and listening pleasure, I give you Pete Seeger singing a Woody Guthrie classic. Sing along.

Plug of the Week: Tom Milsom

2008-08-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

Tom Milsom. Classic brilliant British eccentric who proves that the tradition is not dying. Here are two samples of his YouTube videos that will give you an idea what he is about.

Now I order you to go straight over to YouTube and watch the rest of his videos. Be sure to read all the descriptions. I mean it. Stop messing around here and go. Shoo!

Tom Milsom (Hexachordal) on YouTube Tom Milsom on eMusic Tom Milsom on his own site, which includes cartoons.

Show report: 8/11/2008 at the Ottobar in Baltimore

2008-08-12T20:12:00.000-07:00

Racing Kites, Lannen Fall, Go Crash Radio, Mercy Mercedes, and The Hint at the Ottobar in Baltimore

I made it to the show way early (under 3 hours door to door when I had allowed more for a transit delay), so I sat on bit of hill next to the area where the bands were unloading their gear and worked on Shelter From The Storm. I made some good progress on that and walked away with a solid draft, so that was the productive part of the night. I got some mildly puzzled looks from the people around, but no one said anything.

The band members all seemed very nice. They hugged people a lot, which is sweet. I made a few observations on band fashion. The headbands? No, please, just don't. Not working on any combination of head and hair. Lowslung pants? Just about at their limit of lowness unless they go to hanging them from suspenders or Prince Albert rings.

I bought T-shirts for the junior dudes. I got to transact with the lead singers of Mercy Mercedes and The Hint, and they were both very nice. (Nice was the theme of the evening.) I spent out my pocket on those, so I didn't get any CDs. The shirts were gelt for leaving the dudes out of the adventure, so that was the priority.

To me, the bands were in two tiers. This is not me saying anything bad about any of them--if I had just seen the Racing Kites, Lannen Fail, and Go Crash Radio, I would have walked away satisfied. They had a lot of energy and got a good response from the people who were there when they were on.

Mercy Mercedes and The Hint were a cut above, though. They had a much more pulled-together sound and more polished stage presentation. I have never heard MM before, so I don't know their songs. I am interested and will probably be getting their CDs when I can. The Hint did the songs I would have expected. I would be a crap reviewer, bcause all I can think to add is that they played well and gave a good show. They did some fun covers. The crowd was really up for them, so that helped.

And there was a lot of nice hugging when the band members were wandering around the club when they weren't playing.

I thought it was very interesting to see a show where everything was so unstructured and informal. There wasn't really any backstage or crews or security. (I felt like I ought to lend a hand unloading eqipment.) The bands were hanging around together all around the club. It made me think of how hard these guys are trying to go from the kind of band life with all the friends and wandering around and hugging to the kind of life that seems to eat people up.

I was also thinking about what made Mercy Mercedes and The Hint better than the others. It was an accumulation of things. My father used to say that good songs plus good playing plus good energy is like 2+2+2=6, but good arranging makes it into 2 x 2 x 2 = 8. That's part of it. I also think that the better bands had more variety from song to song and more complexity within songs, plus they could move the focus of the song around among the band members better. And a more solid rhythmic center and catchy hooks. Never underestimate the power of the hook!

After the show, I just walked back down to Penn Station and waited for the trains to start up again in the morning. That was a long night. Total time door-to-door: 8 hours.

Racing Kites on MySpace Lannen Fall on MySpace Go Crash Radio on MySpace Mercy Mercedes on MySpace The Hint on MySpace

Doing My Homework

2008-08-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

Deadlines looming, I have let myself get immersed in the two programs I'm working on this weekend instead of posting here. Bad me, but good me, too. I am pleased to say that the Smoochies playlist is pretty much done except for a final trimdown. A solid week of forcefeeding myself sweet love songs has left me yearning to climb a tower with a rifle. The work on Shelter From The Storm, which is nicely gloomy, should put me back to my usual self soon enough. That one is harder, because it has to tell a story and not just sound good, but I have a fine list of tracks to start the process with and a good sense of how I want to handle the story strands. I'm putting all that down tonight, though. Within a half-hour, I am on my way out the door for a transit odyssey on my way to The Hint's show in Baltimore tonight. The gap between the end of the show and the opening of the train station in the morning is still a bit hazy, but I will think of it as an adventure. I hope that the concert runs very late, though. Do you think it will help if I keep shouting "Free Bird!"? Tomorrow: concert report!

You can't tell me what to do

2008-08-09T20:41:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I wrote about my toedip into BitTorrent. There was one part of it that seemed minor or incidental to me until I thought about it more.

And then I wanted one single track from an album that is not available for download, from an album that is sold at a premium above the usual prices, from an artist I don't want except for that one track anyway. I was working against a deadline and I was irritated and a clicked up a "Take That Bwahaha" torrent download. ... (The greedy asshat who wanted to force me to pay double for his crappy album is still stiffed, though. Bwahaha.)

I think this might be very important. We used to have to swallow whatever we were fed by the music industry. Now we don't. We have more power and we like it. It's such a short and simple thing to say, and yet I think it has a big big impact on the way music distribution is changing. "You can't tell me what to do! You are not the boss of me! Bwahahaha!"

In practice, of course, it's not so clearcut. The functions of the music business machinery don't go away. They just get done in other ways. The freedom that we get with our Bwahaha is the freedom to choose who recommends or finds our music for us, because most people are just not going to sit for hours a day surveying what's out there and deciding what to buy based on that. We can buy and play music a track at a time, but someone has to decide what each track goes well with and how to program it when you play it.

The key is that given the chance to DIY or at least have your friends do it, people take it. They would rather go to the trouble to manage their music purchases themselves than to pay to have someone tell them what to listen to. At least for a while, until the balance starts shifting toward having someone else package music again because DIY is so much work. The puzzle is what form that will take.

This is going to bear some more thought.

Taking over the world, one uke at a time

2008-08-07T18:22:00.000-07:00

There is a whole crazy world of ukulele-crazy people out there. I keep running into them on YouTube. Since today's blog has to be a drive-by, I'll share a couple of interesting examples with you. (I will do a real write-up on it Real Soon Now.)

BitTorrent Blues

2008-08-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

I could compose a big song and dance about all the good reasons I got sucked into BitTorrent, but the truth is I was curious and impatient and frustrated and spiteful. I did it because I could scratch itches with it, even though I am concerned about how it affects artists, and that troubles me.

The first torrent was a long out of print and completely unavailable album, that the artist had told me to grab where I could get it. I managed to get a client and find a thing to click on and after a while I had the album.

Because I am me, I wanted to understand the mechanics of the filesharing system better, so I read a bit and poked around in my client to see what the settings did. And then, because night will follow day, I downloaded another torrent so I could watch the pieces assemble and all.

And then I wanted one single track from an album that is not available for download, from an album that is sold at a premium above the usual prices, from an artist I don't want except for that one track anyway. I was working against a deadline and I was irritated and a clicked up a "Take That Bwahaha" torrent download.

And then I wanted to get two albums right away before I got paid again. By then it was easy to do it, technically and morally, so I just did.

Of course, because I am still me, I was stewing about this all the time and knew I was falling below the standards I set for myself for reasons that were not worth the hit points. I bought proper copies of the three albums I had downloaded through P2P because it was cheap and easy. (The greedy asshat who wanted to force me to pay double for his crappy album is still stiffed, though. Bwahaha.)

There is a lesson in there about the market and the future of music, but that's another day's rant.

What pains me now is seeding. After the first download and my tardy homework on the torrent system, I realized that it is a pay-it-forward system. You get a torrent and then you serve as a new source for it, for the benefit of the others down the line who want the download. That's the deal. Plenty of people stiff this system, too, but I knew going in what the devil's deal is.

Now my client is sitting here night and day happily sending off bits and pieces of these albums. I could just cut it off. I've probably sent off enough to balance out what I got. Having it sitting here, though, reminds me to think about filesharing, which is the center of the questions that started me writing this blog in the first place.

How do people find new music now? How do they get it? How do the artists get it out to people? Who is paying for production and distribution now? What has gotten better with the changes and what has gotten worse? Better and worse for who? How is the new system going get the artists paid? What is a fair price for music now?

I still can't answer those questions well enough to satsify me, but I think I have some ideas on "Why do we see so many EPs these days?" The slightly harder question that I am still thinking about is "What is the optimal length of an EP so that it will satsify that requirement?" Stay tuned.

My Day Of Music

2008-08-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

I finally got my Enemymine The Ice In Me album. I had a horrible time finding a copy that was actually in stock. I'm glad that I really love it. I know I've mentioned them before, but for those who come in late, Enemymine is a trio with two basses and drums. Often one of the basses is tuned way up, but it never sounds like a guitar to me. Circa 2000. Hang on, there must be a clip somewhere ...

Discover EnemyMine!

Last night I logged on to the The Hint after-concert party. They set up a webcam and chat. It was a blast to chat up a running commentary on the party that we could see. They were playing some hip-hop that didn't suck, too. This was, of course, right after I posted the blog about not liking hip-hop. I didn't mind listening to it, but I wasn't moved to write down any of the artists to track down later either. I finally got to hear a bit of "I Kissed a Girl" which I have only heard about before. I suppose the follow-up could be a cover of Big Star's "I'm in Love with a Girl". A female singer would put a whole world of interesting into that one.

Wait, I need to write that one down for the Smoochies playlist of happy love songs. [ ... tick tock music ... ] Okay, got it.

There was one artist from the party music that I wanted to remember, but it slipped away before thought of writing it down. It was something like "binky spiral", but I couldn't pin it down. I ended up searching Amazon.com for every "B ... y" artist until I hit on Biffy Clyro. Definitely going on my list for next month's music budget. I haven't yet figured out which one I heard last night (this morning? It's a bit blurry.) Here is a sample:

Discover Biffy Clyro!

I love the mix of ravey stuff and smashing guitar. Time to get out the combat boots and lightsticks.

This afternoon, I've been watching Words and Music on Netflix. That is an excellent place to explore older music, by the way. They have a lot of concerts and documentaries there. Anyway, this is a fictionalized biography of Rodgers and Hart, done shortly after Hart died. I have to say that generally, if I want clever lyrics I go with Cole Porter and if I want to sing along I go with Oscar Hammerstein. I also observe again that a lot of stuff that was considered wonderful at the time it first appeared on Broadway sounds massively stinky now. But then they hit one of the good ones, and it's magic.

Discover Robbie Williams!

I am frustrated that a disk I ordered from the UK (from one of the Callums) seems to be trapped downstairs in our rental office. I have the slip from the postman, but the office is closed today. I would stamp my foot, but they wouldn't care. I ordered another UK EP (from a completely Callum-free band), because I am such a sucker for the big brown puppy eyes "We are in the studio far from home and it would help if you could buy an album" appeal. That only works if it is on my list anyway, though, so don't you all go crazy with the brown eyes unless you have the tunes to back them up. And in the ROTFLMAO department, Amazon suggests I buy an iPod.

The commission I'm doing now is for an hour of sweet and a few bittersweet love songs, mostly modern rock, new to the client, and no Latin. I realize that I don't buy a lot of happy songs. I could do an hour of "you broke me and I'm trying to live with the damage" songs. I could do an hour of "you left me and now you are having your turn to suffer" songs. I could do an hour of "I'm still thinking about you" songs. I could even do an hour of "I'm well shut of you" or of "you're well shut of me" songs. But sweet, hopeful, or happy? Not so much. It's kind of depressing to realize that my favorite albums in English are mostly breakup albums. I'll take this playlist as a stretching exercise.

And so off to work on that.

NOTE ADDED 13 SEPT 2011: I have no idea what happened with the Deezer links. Now they tell me that they don't cover my country. This is what I was ranting about!

It it all right for me not to like hip-hop?

2008-08-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

Is it all right for me not to like hip-hop? In theory, anyone can like or dislike any kind of music. There's no law about it. But there is a lot of social weight on music. What music you listen to, what music your social groups listens to, what music you mock, all that is usually based on a lot more than just what the music sounds like. And people who don't really know you will associate you with particular groups of people because of what you listen to or don't. I can intellectually know that people divide themselves up into groups and put a lot of effort into keeping straight what is In and what is Out, and yet still have the gut feeling that group divisions based on race are worse than any of the other possiblities. That leaves me trying to decide if I don't like hiphop because of what it sounds like, I don't like hiphop because I haven't listened to enough of it to get it, or because I am a bigot of some sort, or what. It's a liberal knee-jerk, I know. It's not as if I like everything. I don't like the Miles Davis style of modern jazz at all, but I listened to a lot of it before I ruled it out as a category. (It makes my brain want to run away from my body and hide--I think the tonal stuff clashes with some of my wiring in a fundamental way.) I listened to enough hardcore that it didn't all sound the same to me, found some that I liked, and let myself avoid the rest of it without any guilt. There are some artists I avoid because they are (as far as I can tell) loathsome or their lyrics are. I have no problem with that. Some music is inaccessible because you don't have the musical basis for it, like gamelan or Yoko Ono or something. I don't run into that much anymore because I have built up a big basis of personal musical experience. When I do, I try to listen with open ears and then follow up by listening to more of it or related music, until I can parse it better. So what about me and hip-hop? It can't be because it is musically foreign to me. I grew up on Motown and Memphis and Philadelphia. I have heard enough of urban music in general to know what's what. I don't think it is because the artists are mostly black. I listen stuff that is mostly associated with black artists, like old Stax/Volt stuff, reggaeton and zouk. It can't be because I worry about getting a bad reaction from people I know. I listen to enough different stuff and am so out about it that I am pretty sure I must already be bothering the people who police the Them and Us of music. Seeing the other iTunes libraries on our intranet at work keeps this question fresh for me. A lot of people have hiphop and similar urban stuff up there, people who are sensible adults that I know. I have listened to enough of it that I can tell the difference between Akon and Chris Brown. I still find myself clicking away to something else after a track or two. There is always something else I would rather be listening to, and it seems as stupid to me to contemplate taking up hip-hop to make a social statement as to avoid it for the same reason. Can I just admit that I like other stuff a lot better and leave it at that? Would that make me a bad person?

Plug of the Week: O-Hum (Iran) and Acrassicauda (Iraq)

2008-07-31T20:41:00.000-07:00

This starts with a stuffy section. You can skip the part between the lines if you want to cut to the chase scene.

It is traditional for new music to be scandalous. The waltz was shocking, flappers flapping without corsets was disturbing, and hot jazz was so disturbing that the German National Socialists were obliged to ban it. There has probably been no era without the kids thinking of ways to torment adults with their music, but I think that the all-time champion of getting the establishment up in arms has to be rock in its evolving forms.

There are many intertwingled reasons for this. It is supposed to be about sex, rebellion, and dark hidden things (as well as shiny happy people giving the best of their love to the most beautiful girls in the world, of course. Some things really are eternal.) It's not that Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard invented the idea of mixing music and sex. That goes back through Frank Sinatra into the dim past. Part of rock, though, is to put the sex right on the front of the stage, thrusting itself into your face. In turn, that is part of the larger ethos that says rock is rebellion. Obviously that goes in cycles and not everyone is cut out to be completely Rotten, but a big part of the appeal of rock is the appeal of the bad boy and of the teenager telling the world that he's not going to take it anymore.

So rock is rebellion and sex and music. Rock concerts bring together groups of young people just at the age when their brains are smart enough to think of ways to cause trouble, but not mature enough to give much thought to risk. (Really, it's science—that part of the brain doesn't mature until the early 20s.) Rock recruits, gathers, and indoctrinates rebels, so it's no wonder that establishments set on control of the population would see rock as a very bad thing and try to ban it.

Music is a sneaky thing, though. It's so easy to move around and surprisingly easy to hide considering how loud it is. It turns out that it is nearly impossible to keep the seeds of it out of a culture. The fans and musicians will keep the music alive underground and seize on the tiniest opportunity to burst out. Over the last 50 years, time and again we (in the larger sense, not us in particular of course) have seen that outburst give a shove to the forces that have broken authoritarian regimes.

The best example of this is the Plastic People of the Universe, who managed to bring Velvet-Underground style rock to Czechoslovakia through time that the Russians grabbed control of Czechoslovakia because the government was turning away from Communism. They went to extraordinary lengths to bring the music in to the country and to perform it. It is really worth hitting Wikipedia to get an idea of what they had to go through. It's not an accident that the Velvet Revolution was in Prague: when the Plastic People were arrested in 1977, Vaclav Havel and other activists kicked into high gear.

Governments who realize they can't keep the kids from listening to rock think they can control the problem by controlling the music: censoring lyrics, requiring reviews or permits to perform, record, or sell music, even maintaining government ownership of instruments so that only well-behaved musicians could get them. You can imagine how well this works in practice. Bands always find ways to code messages in ways that kids will understand and their parents won't. You can make gear out of scrounged parts and hold concerts in basements. The thing about rock is that the more you make rock against the rules, the more rebel energy you give it. If listening to Metallica makes you subject to arrest, then you might as well go all the way from youthful rebellion into active resistance or revolt. The power of rock to galvanize a revolution comes from the establishment itself. It's like a law of nature, and yet the Them never quite catch on to that and so we see the pattern repeating again and again.

Which brings us to now and the line I promised the people who wanted to skip the stuffy part.

Now it is the turn of authoritarian Muslim countries to deal with rock rebels.

There is an excellent documentary out on the only Iraqi metal band, Acrassicauda. They struggled with religious establishments's opposition to just about everything associated with metal, including headbanging (which is apparently Jewish) and singing (which is immoral). Then they struggled with the war. Now they are struggling with being refugees and rocking Iraqi expats. I'm not the best one to ask, but I think they are pretty good considering that they have had to go months or years without playing together because of the war separating them. And that lead guitar sounds to me like it has a lot of shreddy goodness. I read that they are now in Turkey and working on a full album and growing their hair. They have three demo tracks on their MySpace page and a link for donations to help them out.

Acrassicauda at their last concert in Iraq

Acrassicauda
on MySpace

Heavy Metal in Baghdad
documentary

The Iranian band O-Hum found a very modern way to subvert their religious authorities. O-Hum's label was denied a permit to produce O-Hum's first album. So O-Hum have released their whole catalog of music as MP3s on the internet, where their fans in Iran and anywhere in the world can get hold of them. This got people to their concerts, caused backlash and commotion, and has wound up with the band being a driving force in Iranian underground rock. They have developed an interesting Persian alt rock that uses elements of traditional Persian music and takes its lyrics from an esteemed early Persian poet. I'm not sure I love it, but I like it a lot. And every time one of those tracks is downloaded, a mullah gets a stomach cramp.

Babak Akhoondi of O-Hum

O-Hum
free downloads

It's hard to say where this will lead. I think that this is a lot harder rebellion than against communism in the Warsaw Pact satellites. A little encourgement could go a long way, though. Plus, you get to listen to the music.

A night made of win!

2008-07-30T20:53:00.000-07:00

My Amber time got eaten up by family stuff this evening, but it was cool music-related family stuff, so I win!

Older son has the MP3 player. As you might recall, he was mindlessly listening to flavor-of-the-month hiphop that he got from his friend until I put my foot down and installed some free tracks from PayPlay.fm as samplers. I told him he had to listen to all of it before I changed his music; then I would buy him two albums.

Tonight, he told me he likes zouk and reggaeton and could I please put more of those on. Goal! At least he thought about it and actually chose instead of just taking in whatever came along. We spent some time working on which two albums to buy and he went off very happy.

Younger son wanted his turn and demanded to dance something "old fashioned" (compared to reggaeton, I suppose). So I played a guitar transcription of Bach's Violin Concerto #2 and we did pavannes and the twist and some Bob Fosse and whatever made us laugh. It's probably a good thing that I am never in situations that call for social dancing, since I would have no idea what would be normal. We all just jump around and have a good time.

All that and popcorn. Like I said, made of win.

Choice of Weapons

2008-07-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

Today, my coworker Mary started ranting about how much she hates musicals. I just started singing Oklahoma! until she stopped.

I told her that if she doesn't behave, I'll do South Pacific.

I suppose that now all the readers who didn't run from Keith Urban are now vanishing into the distance. Tomorrow, it will be Iranian metal, I promise. I'll save the real showtunes post for a day when I have the time to do it right.

Shoot me, I beg you. Please.

2008-07-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

Shoot me, I beg you. Please. The earworm is back and it's eating my brain. Everywhere I go, everything I do, ...

I thought I could ignore it and let it go away. Eventually, all earworms die. Right?

Maybe I could blow it out of my brain with something else!

I tried saturating myself.

Oh, so that's what that guy meant when he said I had "emo hair". I don't anymore, now that I've gone from "I need a haircut" to "I'll tell people I'm going for a ponytail". I wonder what it's like to be in a band and know that your Big Hit was recorded on a day you weren't even invited to the studio.

These earworms can infest anyone. I saw an interview with Adam Levine in which he said that he catches himself humming "This Love", because is has a fucking catchy hook.

NO! NO! Eat hook and die, earworm!

Time for the big guns:

Hah! Take that!

eeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Rock on, Keith ... Urban

2008-07-27T20:48:00.000-07:00

I read a comment from a young music fan on a forum over there somewhere who wondered why rock music just has the same instruments over and over. My brain played that back for me while I was thinking about "What is 'country'?".

I think that in part, "rock" is defined by the standard instruments. Certainly the music we call rock was shaped by the instruments it started with:

Maybe the reason that rock & roll caught on was because of the sound of the instruments. Maybe the reason we like the sound of the instruments so well is that we are used to them because of rock & roll. It doesn't seem like it matters anymore.

It's not a simple equation, that "Rock" = electric guitars, electric bass, & drum kits.

Bob Wills caused a commotion when he added those to his nominally-country Texas Playboys in the 30s and 40s. (When they played at the Opry, the drummer was hidden behind a curtain. Snrk.) (A surprising amount of the music you all listen to today comes out of stuff that Bob Wills did back in the day, by the way. He also introduced the guitar + steel guitar pairing that signals "country" for a lot of people.) Those instruments show up in jazz, blues, soul, gospel, country, all over the place.

Other instruments appear all over rock, too. Keyboard instruments are common. In the last week, I've heard accordion, violin, autoharp (although I confess I did search for "autoharp punk"), ukulele, didgeridoo, and mandolin:

You can all probably spin out your own list.

I think that the differences between the genres we hear so much about is as much social as it is in the music. If you listen to a lot of different music, you realize that those boundaries don't mean much to musicians. Brad Paisley plays on a Snoop Dogg track, Solomon Burke does a country album, Dylan goes electric! It is so common for them to work together in unexpected combinations, take influences from all over the place, and generally do what they think sounds good. That's how we ended up with rock in the first place: rockabilly and blues and all those strands coming together in Sun Studios. That process has never stopped.

This afternoon, I listened to Keith Urban's Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing and something struck me. On most of the songs, you could swap out the instruments (banjo and fiddle out, synth in e.g.) and otherwise leave the songs and arrangements note for note, and it would have been an awesome rock album instead of an awesome country album. The only traces of country left would be Urban's singing style. But were the instruments all that made it "country"?

That makes me think about all the stink about Shania Twain's apostasy. She recorded pop! She was produced by Mutt Lange! She wore the wrong kind of clothes and hair! Instead of being judged as a pop artist, she was judged as a country artist who behaved badly. How did she get stuck with the label "country", then? If nothing about her music and performance was "country", why was she?

These questions are what make me think that a lot of the differences are social. "Country" and "rock" as categories are about marketing. The people who identify themselves as the people who buy country shape what the country labels deliver to them. Artists that get tagged "country" because of the label they came into the system under have pressure to make music that the people who buy country will want to buy. Keith Urban is in the country pipeline, so the people who are likely to hear his music expect steel guitars and all the other standard markers (like topics and standard phrases and all). I believe that Urban probably likes his music the way it sounds and isn't forced to make it that way, but Twain's experiences shows what can happen when the artist's vision strays too much from the genre expectations. Most of the time, an artist has to declare Crossover to try to get away from that, but it's a risky path. You can easily lose your old listeners without attracting new ones. And the music biz establishment only loves you as much as your last album sold, right?

Maybe it all comes down to habit and group identity. We have habits as listeners. Musicians have habits of work. Kane (a group that keeps itself on the edge of country and rock) has a line: "Everybody's got their own definition of 'just their kind'." We all need to have a way to distinguish Them from Us, so those steel guitars end up mattering so darn much. Country is a state of mind. and "country" is the music that marks out that kind of "just my kind".

This brings me around again to the changes in music coming from the changes in distribution. We don't have the big labels exerting as much influence on what is produced. A relatively small and widely-distributed group of listeners who like "surf punk bluegrass"

can form itself into a market through YouTube and social networking services. This is what has always happened along the boundaries, but now the border is bigger and busier. It's making music a lot more fun for me, that's for sure.

Future related rants: How this has brought us uke-mania and so many EPs

Plug of the Week: Fluid Lines

2008-07-25T19:21:00.000-07:00

Fluid Lines could be just another earnest punk-pop band of appealing youths, the next interchangeable unit off the current production line. They have all the standard checkoffs for a local band to make the maidens swoon: four not-bad-looking young guys, lyrics about finding yourself and love and the problems of growing up, just naughty enough to be attractive but safe enough for a beginner's crush, the whole kit. There are a nice basketful of similar bands in their local area that all seem to be percolating a lot of the same ideas (and I should write about that sometimes, because I think some of those ideas are interesting. Anyway...) . In any one attribute, I could name one of those other bands that was a bit better. Looking at their specs on paper, Fluid Lines could be completely generic.

And yet they are the ones I listen to most often. They manage to package up all their not-quite-the-best attributes with some extra something that makes their music gel. Other young bands in their area which might look better on paper and which are nice to listen to don't click the same way for me. Fluid Lines have a harder and punkier sound than their peers, I think, and they do interesting things with rhythms that I like a lot. Even though in their Youtube videos they seem like pretty ordinarily goofy boys, they bring more gravitas to their music than a lot of their peers do. They are not just playing to the girls in the front row—they seem to have their eyes on a farther horizon.

Fluid Lines is still a young band and they don't bring all the power and polish of more mature bands, but I think they are in a good position to burst out of the minor league with just a little more experience and a bit of luck. I am looking forward to their next album a lot. I am already enjoying the sample tracks they put on their MySpace.

I would not insist that everyone should like this band, but I do recommend that if you like punk pop at all you give them a chance to win you over.

Fluid Lines on MySpace

Fluid Lines on Amazon.com

I will be at this show if I have to walk

2008-07-23T09:16:00.000-07:00

I never go out to hear live music.

I run into it sometimes around the city, of course. I wish I had walked into the Joshua Bell performance that the Washington (DC) Post set up in a subway station to see how much money he would get in the hat. That would have been sweet.

But I don't go out. When I started writing this blog, I resolved to go to some shows so I could write about them. It seems like every time I see one I want to go to, I can't for all sorts of stupid practical reasons, or because I forget to write it down, or I get sick, or something else annoying. There is also the problem of being a world-class gold medal introvert and geek. It's just so hard to contemplate going out and dealing with people sometimes.

Just recently, I saw an announcement for a local show of a somewhat local band I like. Unfortunately, it was just far enough away from the urb that I could barely get there on a bus and couldn't figure out how to get home without spending 8 hours killing time waiting for first bus of the morning. I threw in the towel.

Now I have just seen an announcement for the same band playing a similar local gig in August. It's within the urban area of the next city over, so I have put my foot down with myself. I will be at that show. I am not allowing myself to hermit up again. This is me giving myself a stern look.

Ordinarily, I would just grab my pack and head out. I am a public transportation Old Hand and I already know roughly how to get to the club. (I used to go to school in that neighborhood.) Boo-yah!

I am getting all twitchy about this show, though. I have already started making notes on bus and train schedules. I have no idea what time a show that is supposed to start at 8 pm is likely to end (or start), but it looks like I will have 4 hours to kill before the morning train. I already know that the bus service at that time is very sparse and that neighborhood between the club and the station is rough (think HBO's The Wire), but I have also just found out that apparently the train station is closed from 1:30 am to 3 am. (WTF's up with that? Why would you close the train station?) I actually started googling to find an all-night diner in walking distance of the club.

This is getting out of hand and I have until 11 August for anxious trip planning. I haven't even gotten to weebling about how ridiculous it is for me to go to a concert full of teenypunkers. (I should like more age-appropriate music, if I could figure what that is supposed to be.)

Gah, I need to book a day off from work, too. There is no way I am taking the train straight to my office after an all-nighter. ::making a note::

This is me giving myself a dope slap.

Dipping my toe into the shallow end of Country

2008-07-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

I have been too busy today to think any deep thoughts about music. I finished off the other program I was developing, just a simple mix. I listened to ACRES, Screaming Trees, The Hint, and Shostakovich's String Quartet #8 again (still brutal).

I did do some shallow thinking about music. Both of the people who commissioned the programs (through the auction I posted about) specified "No metal and no country". What is it about country music that makes people twitch so? I am starting to think it is like eating horse meat—we don't do it because we don't do it. "Country" is so diverse that I can't imagine someone who listens with an open mind not finding anything at all to like. I always struggle with labels, but anyone should be able to tell that Brad Paisley and Keith Urban are doing different kinds of stuff. Now my mind is starting to spin off toward deep stuff about tropes and subculture markers and all, so it's time to set it aside to marinate for a while. First I have to think about what "Country" is.

That does remind me to point you all to something good. A friend of mine suggested I get some Keith Urban albums, so I did and I have been enjoying them a lot. If you like rock and the sound of a steel guitar doesn't give you hives, you should listen to some of his songs with an open mind. There is one song on the most recent album that just tore me up because it hit so many notes from my own life. I mean, gut-ripping fall down shattered me. I hope none of you have cause for that strong a reaction. It's brilliant though:

The songwriter, Sarah Buxton, has a version on her MySpace that is okay, but it seems a little sweetened up. I found a much rawer and better live performance on YouTube.

And in unrelated news: my next-door neighbors have moved out and the apartment is still empty, so I can play my accordion whenever I want to! That crosses one thing off the list of excuses, anyway. Summer is hard, because it's not like you can take an accordion to the beach or pool or skating. Or you could, but it would be hard on the accordion because the wax holding the reeds would soften, plus the reeds don't like moisture. And my cat ate my sheet music. Against all good sense (considering the kinds of music I like best), I love to play my squeezebox, though.

And so, off to play some exercises. Kids, see—adults don't just tell you to practice to make you suffer. We do it, too, so we can play better.

Superhero Crisis

2008-07-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

I have been developing a commissioned playlist that has been giving me fits. It is a writing soundtrack for someone who is working on a story about a superhero struggling with being a superhero.

A writing soundtrack is different from a TV or film soundtrack. It is designed for the writer to listen to in pieces while working on the corresponding parts of a story. That means the pieces don't have to flow together, but it also means that you can't have the pieces commenting on or reinforcing each other much.

I was determined to track the inner life of the protagonist rather than the external action and I was also determined to not just recycle Big Metal Guitars battles. I settled on using acoustic strings to signal when the protag is in a good emotional state and electric when she is very agitated, with lyrics only on pieces that touch her love life. I also wanted the various strands of the story (love life, relationship with the Heroic Superhero Team, battles, etc.) to have connecting threads.

This became a problem when I realized that had lost access to the ex-partner's classical and jazz collection in the Big Breakup. I listen to classical music online, but I never remember the names of the composers or the pieces. I was searching online, but I wasn't getting anywhere and it was giving me a bit of stress.

But yesterday, Eureka! I ended up working a BBQ grill with a conservatory-trained musician who remembers everything. He pointed me at Shostakovich's String Quartet 8, which is "brutal". Bing! It was a winner and made everything else click right into place.

My last problem was the first piece, to show what the hero was like before she got her powers. What does an ordinary USAn schoolgirl with a happy attitude listen to these days? Beats me. That is way outside my range. I figured it had to be cute guys in their 20s, as is traditional, but other than that ... blank. Then I had another Eureka! That annoying earworm "Hey There Delilah" just fit the spot. Of course, now I have the earworm again, but it's worth it.

I'm going to let it sit a few days to make sure, but I really feel this is it. Of course, the client will probably insist on the Big Metal Guitars battles, but this is the director's cut and you know which one history will get behind.

I so totally rock my awesome super self that my hat hardly fits any more.

DIY Music

2008-07-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, I had an unexpected opportunity to hear a conservatory-trained musician messing around on a piano, playing Bach, Chopin, and his own compositions. It made my day. What touched me the most is that he makes his living doing something else entirely. He plays and composes for himself, because he likes to. What a simple reason.

When I watched the Collective Soul concert with the Altanta Youth Symphony Orchestra, I wondered how many of those kids would keep playing their instruments after they aged out of the orchestra, or after they graduated from college. When was the last time someone pulled out an oboe or violin to mess around with at a cookout? Is the guitar the instrument that has eaten all the others? Has home-made music been replaced by professional musicians and iPods?

Far from it. I've been poking around on YouTube lately and keep running into videos of people playing just about anything you can think of that makes noise, sometimes well and sometimes badly, but just for fun. We live in a world that lets us peer into someone's room and share this moment:

(for better or worse, judge for yourself)

This is nice, and I particularly like the encouraging comments on the site:

And this is what I got for "punk autoharp":

It also appears there is a great upsurge of ukulele:

This all encourages me to keep enjoying my recorders and accordion, just for me, just to enjoy the process. (Do not, however, expect to see or hear me on YouTube anytime soon.)

The Future of the Musical is Horrible

2008-07-19T05:01:00.000-07:00

You know I love musicals. Not so much the ironic ones that turn to the audience and say "we are doing music to lampoon musicals, aren't we clever", but wholehearted ones. Joss Whedon gets this, which is odd because he is all about irony and in-jokes for the audience and all. So you really all simply must click over to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, complete in three episodes. You will recognize some of the performers. 'Scuse me now. I am going to go watch it again.

Plug of the Week: Free Music

2008-07-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of money, but I listen to a lot of music. I pull the budget end of the rope toward the music end of the rope, but I can never quite get them to touch. I fill the gap with free music. Free is good. I like free.

Free is not the same as stolen. I believe in paying people for their work, because it is right and because it encourages them to keep doing it. I am not peer-to-peer pure anymore--I finally tried BitTorrent to see how it works and get something that is out of print--but it is just not comfortable for me. There is a lot of music that is offered for free, though.

The first stops are artist sites and their pages on MySpace and Purevolume (and probably others I haven't gotten to yet). Most everyone has a widget that lets you play some of their tracks. If you have the patience and a tether to a web connection, you can play those over and over. I'm not sure whether the artists mostly put these up to bring traffic to the pages or to directly increase sales with free samples; either way, it has become expected. (I think a lot of newer indie bands put them up just so people will hear them.)

You can also listen to music on web radio of various flavors (including Last.fm, Pandora and Batanga), but mostly that is tethered, too.

If you aren't happy being tethered like that, you can get utilities that will let you grab whatever is being sent to Line Out (the speakers) on your computer. I use Audacity (free program!) for that and can recommend it for this. (I don't know how well the more advanced features work.

I have mixed feelings about grabbing these, but I have come down on the side of taking them as free samples. MySpace and Purevolume both let the artists choose to enable direct downloading and mostly they don't, so I am not sure how much they object. I balance that against the way I use them. I do playlists for people and that means I have to listen to a lot of stuff to choose what to program. So far, that is turning into track sales, so I am hoping that my Karma balance comes out right.

PayPlay.fm understands Karma. They have a system of Karma points that you can use to download tracks that the artists have identified as Karma tracks, for free. You get points for signing up. logging in, buying tracks, and writing album reviews. This really is an excellent way to explore indies and to get free stuff. In theory, your downloads are limited by how many Karma tracks you accumulate, but I buy enough there that I have never come close to bottoming out.

Last.fm has a different approach. They also have tracks that artists have made available for free download, but there is no limit to how many of them you can get. They have pages with top downloads listed and also pages with downloads they recommend based on your listening history. You can even subscribe to a feed that will ship you one of your recommended tracks every day. They have more stuff from label-based, big-name type acts, too. It looks like Soundflavor.com has a similar setup, but I haven't had a chance to play around with that yet.

There are other approaches out there. TrueAnthem.com has sponsored tracks. You can download whole albums, but the tracks have the artists speaking little "sponsored by" blurbs at the beginning. This is not a problem for the work part of my listening, but it is a little irksome for pleasure listening. Radiohead released its most recent album as shareware. You could download it and pay whatever seemed right to you. That would have let you get the album for a penny-equivalent. I don't know of any other bands that have done this, but I'd be surprised not to see it again soon.

There is another outlet for free music that I haven't explored yet at all, but which looks like a big playground with cool toys: Creative Commons Audio.

"Creative Commons" defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.

Their page points out to a variety of CC applications, including artists who make material for remixing available, a service that matches you up with music licensed for P2P distribution, a try-before-you-buy music label, and a service that helps artists take advantage of CC licensing to make money off their music. I think I am going to have some serious fun with Creative Commons.

Musicians that other musicians listen to

2008-07-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

I have always been interested in musicians who are overlooked by the public at large but who influence other musicians. I always feel richer when I find such a hidden treasure. Today I realized that I had been listening to four of these this week. Since I am too sick to think of anything else, I will share. When you're done, turn out the lights and let yourself out, k'thx.

Robin Sylar

(Interesting side note: the bassist in the band is Mike Judge, as in Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill, and Office Space. I think that pretty much this whole show is up on YouTube in assorted clips and it is awesome.)

Elliott Smith

Big Star

Townes Van Zandt

Bonus clip: Elliott Smith covers Big Star

Not acting my age

2008-07-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

I was telling someone at work about some of the new British bands I have been listening to lately and he made a comment that got me thinking. "That's kids music, isn't it?"

Is it? If it is, does that mean I'm not supposed to like it? Or admit I like it? Or what? Life is full of memos that I never got, it seems.

The Right Place At the Night Time - Fluid Lines

The Last Dance - Through And Throughout

Where Are Your Friends? (Demo) - Lights and Sounds

I mentioned this to someone else at work and he told me that most people listen to music that was popular when they were seniors in high school (17 or 18 for the non-USAn readers). I dug out the charts for my year and looked it over. I remembered everything on it and most of it is okay, some of it better, some worse.

That got me thinking about what I did listen to in high school besides that stuff in the air. Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Peter, Paul, and Mary. Gershwin—the clarinet at the beginning of "Rhapsody In Blue" is sublime. The Beach Boys. Squaredancing and roundancing records produced by my grandfather ("A corner swing in Indiana, circle right and walk the lady home. The moon is shining bright, left allemand tonight, ... "). ELO and George Harrison. The Monkees. I love the Monkees and I am not ashamed to admit it. My father practicing the cornet, banjo, accordion, and whatever else he was teaching himself that month.

As I let my mind wander back through my musical history, I was suddenly transported back to one of the most perfect musical moments in my life. When I was a senior in high school, as it happened.

I can close my eyes and be there again. I was at some party, kids and parents. The father of the house was a good two kilometers past "audiophile"—he had a room in which nothing was to be moved so the acoustics wouldn't change. For some reason he took pity on me, allergic to the sun, being stuck at a pool party. He set me up in his listening chair, with his special headphones and a stack of vinyl. He had good stuff and I occupied myself well. Everyone else was off somewhere doing whatever social people who get all the memos do.

I was sitting in a dim room, headphones on, leaning back in the perfect listening chair. I was relaxed and probably doing some interesting brain wave stuff (from the music, of course. No substances were involved. Of course not. And stay in school, too.) And then I hit the opening of Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" and could feel my brain being altered. It felt like the music was inside me, making my mind bigger (and buzzed). That song somehow made a chord I was part of.

I had always listened to music, but that changed the way I listened. After that, I understood what music could be and started paying attention to what made it work like that. And that led to paying more attention in general. That moment with that song was a turning point. And still, whenever I hear that song it takes me back to that perfect moment. I've got that album and just listened to it again a couple of days ago and lost myself in it again.

I started this somewhere. Right, "kid's music". Fuck that shit. If you think that, I bite my thumb at you. If I like it, I listen to it—no matter who made it or when. And if there's a memo that says this is not properly acting my age, you can take that memo and file it.

Here is what I listened to. These two are really one piece, so listen to them back to back. I have no idea why it was cut into two tracks.

Space Intro - Steve Miller Band

Fly Like an Eagle - Steve Miller Band

Here is a nice recent version from Seal.

Here is a very interesting early version of the song I found while looking for something to embed. It's a live performance of the song around 3 years before the studio version was released. It is more bluesy, the lyrics are more explicit (in the literal sense, not "dirty"), and he plays the spacy bit at the beginning on his guitar. That may be a ho-hum for guitar experts, but to me that is made of awesome. It is interesting that he had not yet hit on the rhythm that made it really work. (Geek? Me?)

The whole Fly Like an Eagle album is worthing listening to, by the way.

More ranting about earbuds

2008-07-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

Are there any human ears that the iPod earbuds fit into? Mine give me pain in one ear and just shoot out of the other one. Do these fit Steve Jobs and no one else? The ones that came with the little Coby player are better in a way—they are so big that there is no way to find out if they hurt, because I can't get them into my ear at all.

Apparently, thieves in the Washington, DC Metro system are grabbing MP3 players out of people's hands. The police say they are going after iPods by looking for white earbud cords. They advise commuters to get another color of earbud. Have these guys ever been in an ordinary store to shop for earbuds? The catalogs all show many interesting colors of buds, but your cord choices are typically an expensive black set, a cheap nasty-sounding black set, and 43 white sets.

The earbuds I like the best by far are the Skullcandy Ink'd. I think they have great sound and you can get them for $15 a pair. They have good treble and bass, plus excellent passive noise reduction. I am hard on them, so I keep a few extra pairs stuck here and there to avoid downtime when a pair dies. Their catalog shows a very serious black on black option, but the stores around here only carry an assortment of nano-colored buds with white cords. I have read that the sound of their Skullcandy Smokin' Buds isn't as good, but maybe I will give these a try next. This clever camouflage will surely convince the thieves not to steal the iPod classic in my hand while I am dozing on the subway.

The reason that I choose the canal-type earbuds is that I have significant hearing damage and I can't hear the music if there is too much background noise. I tried some expensive active noise reduction headphones, but they didn't work that well and were too bulky for commuting. The Ink'd reduce the noise almost as well and can go in my pocket.

Another consequence of my hearing damage is that I have to turn it up to 11 to hear at all in my left ear. (I jump in to add that this damage is from a mishap with a locomotive and not from loud music.) I would just like to say, FYI to every busybody out there: YES I KNOW THAT LISTENING TO LOUD MUSIC CAN DAMAGE YOUR HEARING. But I think my hearing is none of your feltercarbing business, thankyouverymuch. At least with the canal buds, I can push the left one in tighter than the right so I can even out the effective volume.

I will save cords that are designed to enhance tangling and knotting and the dorky Zune earbud cords look for a future rant.

Staley in Chains

2008-07-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

Recently, I rented the Alice in Chains episode of Unplugged. This 1996 concert was their first performance as a group in nearly 3 years. It was, in a sense, the end of the third movement of Layne Staley's symphony of self-destruction. (The fourth movement started when his girlfrield died and ended, of course, with his own death.) This is a remarkable performance. The music is good, but it is the other layers of the performance that really gripped me.

Staley himself is obviously in desperately bad shape. He is thin, pale, stoned or just plain out of it, missing teeth. He has trouble sitting upright at times and at times forgets the words to the songs. There are moments, though, when he loses himself inside one of the songs and goes to a place away from his present pains. It's a sad comment on his life that immersing himself in songs about drug abuse, depression, and suicide could make him feel better. It was sad to see, but it also made me think about the effort it had taken him to get onto that stage and how much the music meant to him.

A few feet to Staley's left is Jerry Cantrell, who had been Layne Staley's friend and musical partner for a long time. It is obvious that he is very happy to be on the stage with his friend playing their music together again. He seems to be so proud of Staley. There is clearly a lot of love between them. That makes it heartbreaking to see Cantrell pull out of the music time and again to watch Staley as if he is afraid to see him fall off the stool or as if he thinks it might be the last time they play together.

I have been the person watching a beloved friend destroy himself slowly. I know what it is like to see one of the good days after you have learned that they are only bright interludes in a dark slide. I don't think I have ever seen this complex bundle of feelings captured on film so well.

School of Punk

2008-07-12T21:55:00.000-07:00

Once I get going on something, I will inevitably start making notes and trying to reduce data to patterns and whatnot, because that is the way I think. This means that when I watched School of Rock, my attention homed in on the "History of Rock" blackboard that was only visible for a blink. I grabbed a copy of that later.

I spent a lot of time looking at an enlarged version of this that I made my desktop wallpaper to decipher it. There are plenty of things about this version of rock history that bother me, but the main one is the way punk is plugged in. It just seems wrong to me. I know that (for example), grunge did not evolve parallel to punk. Punk was one of the inputs to grunge. This history cuts off a couple of decades ago, so it doesn't get to the subsequent influences of punk, either. Thinking about this means notes and patterns, of course. Here is a sample page from my pocket notebook:

This is total crap, of course, because I still haven't worked it out, but it gives you an idea of what is happening between Amber's headphones.

Music that is weird in a traditional way

2008-07-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite bands is one that I'd bet none of you have heard of. (I wouldn't bet a lot, mind, but maybe 25 cents.) I love Hedningarna, a Swedish band that plays music based in traditional Scandinavian folk music, played on traditional instruments mostly, with twists and updates from other music traditions including rock. I am also into Wimme, a joiker. (Joiking is hard to explain, but there are samples below.)

I first ran into their music because one of their albums has a picture of a log with big nails sticking out of it and I was buying a gift for a spiky-log kind of guy. This track was the first of theirs I heard. It has a pair of Finnish women singing in a traditional pair-of-women style. I wish I could embed the whole track instead of just a clip, because the way the song builds slowly at the beginning is amazing.

This song has Wimme as a guest artist joiking.

This is more traditional than the other two, based more directly on folk music of Karelia (a region of Finland that ended up in the USSR and had been cut off from contact for a long time)

Wimme joiks very conventionally on this track.

And this one has a modern instrumental setting for the joiking.

If you want more information on these two or on similar artists, check out North Side Records. I like Gjallarhorn and Garmarna, too.

Plug of the Week: Bid on me! Win music!

2008-07-10T17:56:00.000-07:00

I have posted an item in the LiveJournal community livelongnmarry auction to raise money for the fight against the California initiative which will legally destroy existing same-sex marriages and ban any further ones. If the initiative passes, it will write discrimination into the state constitution, annul existing marriages, and make Mr. Sulu cry. You can specify that your bid will go to a group from their list or suggest one of your own. I am offering a custom 1-hour playlist to your spec. This will include tracks purchased for you, a playlist, and complete album artwork. This is a good cause and a good offer. There are many other even better offers posted in the community, so go have a look. (The auction closes at 00:01 Pacific time on 15 July.)

This blog is about me

2008-07-10T06:45:00.001-07:00

Just a moment to remind myself and all of you what I think of as the charter of Amber.

I listen to music. I think about music. I think of my life as having a soundtrack and as a journey through a musical landscape. This MySpace and blog is about that journey. It is about my own personal musical experience: what I listen to and why, what I think about while I am listening to music, how I find new music, etc.

If this makes me a critic or a pundit, okay. I decided at the start not to be a reviewer. I don't go after new albums particularly. I don't try to be comprehensive. I don't feel any obligation to be fair or put things in historical context or cover things that are supposed to be important if I don't feel like it. I just write what I think on the day I write it.

I also resolved not to post anything like a negative review. If I am writing about something and I see something as a minus, I'll mention it. I won't write about an album or an artist just to say I think it is bad. I reserve the right to deviate from that if I see a good reason to, but I don't want this to be about funny insults. I think I could describe my approach as developing a playlist: If I like it or think it's interesting, it's in. If I don't, it's not.

And so this is not all just blah-blah, here is a sample of what I'm listening to today:

Rainin in Paradize - Manu Chao

I don’t like Nirvana

2008-07-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

I don't like Nirvana. This is not the same as disliking Nirvana. I just don't like them.

I don't mind listening to them. I can appreciate their significance in the history of rock. I like their songs fine, performed by them or by others. Everything positive that anyone has said about them, I have no argument with at all.

But I don't like them. Listening to their music doesn't do anything for me. If one of their songs is playing and gets interrupted--doesn't bother me at all. I bought a chunk of grunge and yet never even lingered over a Nirvana album deciding. Intellectually, I get them, but emotionally just crickets.

Add them to the list of my musical heresies next to Led Zeppelin. The more I explore, the longer that list grows, too. Don't hate them, can't be bothered.

I have been looking at the local-network iTunes libraries and I am the only one who doesn't have Alanis Morissette. There is one person who is hiphop, hiphop, trance, hiphop, classical--and Alanis. Eh. If I had money for albums burning holes in my pockets, I'd buy Enemymine or Trevor Lissauer & the Glass Plastiks or Driving East years before I ever got down the list to Morissette. Or Madonna. Or Morrissey. Or Metallica.

I do like Backstreet Boys, though.

Genre-bending only goes so far

2008-07-08T11:05:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I read this in the Washington Post:

Madonna is one of the most successful rock stars of all time, with global album sales estimated at more than 200 million copies. A multi-Grammy award winner, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March.

The Hall has no argument from me about including Madonna. She has earned the recognition and I think it is great that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has taken a big-tent charter. There is so much back and forth and blending that there would be practically impossible to draw lines between pop and rock or between blues and rock, it would be a giant politcal bloodbath, and there would be no benefit to it anyway. You go, RnR HoF!

This does mean, though, that induction into the Hall doesn't certify someone as "rock". Are there any criteria by which you could call Madonna a "rock star"? Has Madonna ever recorded a single track that could be called "rock"? Has she ever recorded anything anywhere near the border of what she does and "rock"?

I found an article online (CLICK HERE.) that points out that she drummed and sang in rock bands for three years before she went over to dance music and that she uses some vocal inflection techniques from rock. I'm not convinced. That argument would not get any of the many classical and jazz performers who dabbled in rock as kids called "rock stars". Lots of rock singers started out singing in church, but that doesn't get them called "gospel stars" in the Post.

I am not going to write a letter to the editor or anything. The Post can call her anything they want. That doesn't mean it makes any sense, though. Can anyone think of anything she did that is anything at all like rock?

I am going to kill this computer

2008-07-07T10:36:00.000-07:00

Because the hard drive on my new work computer is bigger (although still smaller than Ratatask's), I decide I would install iTunes (or rather not uninstall it when it came in with Quicktime) and maybe look into podcasts. And then I discovered the delights of shared iTunes libraries in a big Intranet. This is very cool and a way to sample free.

Or it would be if I could stand to listen to music on this thing.

The sound on the new PC is two floors below "Suck". I have the most current driver for the sound card (SoundMax integrated HD Audio). I have it set for "headphones". I have tweaked the equalizer every possible way. It still sounds nasty and tinny, even with the bass cranked up and the treble down. How hard does it have to work to make Enemymine (punk power trio with two basses and drums) sound tinny? This is with the same excellent Skullcandy Ink'd earbuds I was using very happily the in the morning on the old system before I plugged them into the new system in the afternoon.

Help? Please? Any ideas?

(And you have no idea how hard I had to work to do this without a single F-bomb.)

Maroon 5, hiding in plain sight

2008-07-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

I got sucked into the "if everyone is talking about them, they must suck" trap again. I kept hearing "Maroon 5" and "Adam Levine" all over the place. They are the current Big Thing, he is hot and cool dating some starlet or other, blah blah blah.

Then I was watching Saturday Night Live digital clips on Hulu and the supporting singer in one of them sounded familiar. "He's the guy in that song I liked." So I looked up his name: Adam Levine of Maroon 5. That led me to their web site, which led me to a online tracks. It turns out I have been liking a lot of their stuff without the penny dropping that it was them.

It's not poppy flavor-of-the-month drivel at all. It's razor sharp, funky rock with very very dark story lines. I love that kind of stuff! Why didn't someone tell me? Why why why don't they say the names of the bands and songs on the radio anymore?

Of course, then I had to put more albums on the list. At least I only have two to catch up on.

And I suppose this means I need to check out Coldplay and Radiohead and all. I wonder if I have been hearing and liking their stuff all along?

Plug of the Week: Yacht Rock

2008-07-05T16:25:00.000-07:00

In reality, songwriting is mostly pretty dull to watch. But what if every song had a dramatic story behind it?

The creators of Yacht Rock noticed that there was a lot of similar music in the 70s/80s: smooth sound, tended to have pictures of boats on the cover, made by various collaborations of the same artists. They named this movement "Yacht Rock" and decided to show us the stories behind these oh-so-smooth songs in a short series of online programs.

Snrk.

Through these programs, we learn that Michael McDonald was the leader of a close-knit group of smooth-music devotees that included Steely Dan, Toto, and the rebellious Kenny Loggins. They loved, they fought, they drank, they grew beards, they wrote songs.

Here is a sample, Episode 3, in which Steve Perry seduces Kenny Loggins to the hard-rockin' dark side:

Other episodes show the gang-bangers Hall and Oates, the womanizing Michael Jackson, and the violent feud between the Eagles and Steely Dan at the center of the oh-so-smooth theme to FM.

FM - Steely Dan

Please, do yourself a favor. Just set an hour aside and watch this stuff.

Yacht Rock
on Channel 101

My Exciting Geek Holiday

2008-07-04T17:39:00.000-07:00

I am not much for wild celebrations. Today, I celebrated Independence Day by sleeping late, going to see Wanted (a big disappointment for me), streaming Eden's Curve, and fiddling with my iTunes library.

I guess I have to admit that I spent three hours cleaning up MP3 tags and finding missing album artwork. Normal people do that, right? I also spent a good chunk of time making my own thumbnails for the ones I couldn't track down. I rather like the generic one I made for assorted Nine Inch Nails tracks.

I had to do that because, having noticed that I was just 48 tracks or so short of 17.0 days of music, I downloaded a bunch of free tracks from Last.fm to make that up. So far, it's sounding like an interesting grab bag. I now have 6385 tracks, 17 days, 34 gB of music. I suppose that's a lot, but I keep thinking about what I don't have that I used to or that I want to.

I had a nice bit of serendipity. IMO, the best part of Eden's Curve was the soundtrack, so I spent some time looking for that. No joy, but searching on the names of the credited composers brought me to Trevor Lissauer and The Glass Plastiks. Their new album goes on the list of albums I will buy as budget allows. I observe that the list is growing faster than the money, though.

I wasted some time cleaning earbud cords. Why do they all have to make the cords white? Isn't there a market for ones that don't show grime? I also gave some thought to shockproofing Ratatask, the iPod. I have to leave it home when I'm skating, because my stomach twists when I think of falling on it. It's hard-drive based, so even protecting and cushioning the case might not be enough to keep it from shock damage inside the case. Until I solve these, I will have to keep cleaning cords and humming, I guess.

Tomorrow will be even more exciting: watching grass grow and a vigorous nap!

Clean kids and dirty music

2008-07-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

I got my oldest son a little MP3 player. I've been loading it up with stuff from my library. Once a week or so, we talk over what he likes and doesn't like, and then I adjust what's on there.

This has been working pretty well. He is a big big big fan of Five Star Iris and Queen, which I can supply in volume. He is a big fan of hiphop, though, which I don't have much of. I have been thinking about how to address that. I didn't think fast enough. Last week, his player had some tracks a friend of his had put on for him that I spotted when I plugged it in for updating.

I have some serious issues with the malware-loaded booby traps she copied over that I sprang when I tried to listen to them on my computer. But that is a concern for a different forum.

What worries me is that he has been listening to some pretty raunchy and sexist stuff without any adult being aware of it. He has fallen in love with "Smack That" by Akon, for example. The chorus of that includes

... bend you over. Look back and watch me Smack that, all on the floor, Smack that, give me some more, Smack that, 'till you get sore Smack that, oooh. ... Up front style. Ready to attack now.

Oh, dear. He is 10. He says he knows the words are bad and just likes the way the music sounds, but the other day he was walking around singing it.

So what am I supposed to do about this? I can talk to him about it, even make rules, but I can't even tell him what in particular I think is repulsive about this without going into more anatomical detail than he is ready for. His friends are all going to be listening to it and are being shaped by it. I can't think of any magic wand at all.

He knows I am going to be keeping my eye on his library now, which doesn't mean much because he could buy a cheap one for contraband tracks out of his lunch money. I talked to him about it. I bought him the TLC greatest hits album and downloaded a mass of clean(er) hip hop and urban Karma tracks from PayPlay.fm. Mostly, I suppose I have to keep on top of it and trust that I am rearing a good kid.

This parenting gig is hard.

Late to the Party, again

2008-07-02T06:54:00.000-07:00

As none of you will recall, what got me started on MySpace was replacing my faithful old CD player with an iPod. That let me get out the door without my 48-disk carrier, encouraged me to replace many fine albums lost in bad breakups (bastards, spit), and got me immersed in new music. I am now catching up on the punk and heavier stuff that I missed during my country and western period. (Not Country-and-Western.) Expensive, but all good.

I am not supposed to install music on my system at work, and I have been a good little bee about that. A bit of stuff accumulates here anyway. When I download music I buy at Amazon during the day (at lunch time, of course. Why are you looking at me that way?), that ends up on the hard drive and I don't delete it right away. I also had somehow gotten the Windows Media Player ripping whatever CDs I played here and didn't realize that until I ran out of space on the hard drive. When you don't have a page file, that gets your attention pronto. And not in a good way.

With no music on the hard drive to play (once I got all those WMAs cleared out), I have never wasted space on iTunes. The routine was update Quicktime, curse because of the time wasted installing iTunes with it, uninstall iTunes. This week, they dropped a new PC on my desk and so I had to go through that drill again. This system has a bigger hard drive, so I decided to let iTunes ride. I thought it might be an opportunity to subscribe to some podcasts.

Well, damn, I have been missing a very cool thing. This is the first time I have run iTunes on a network that wasn't just my home system. Why didn't someone tell me about the whole shared library thing? This is so squealworthily cool. I can listen to music in other people's iTunes libraries! Free! Wheeeee! And what a great way to check out some different stuff I wouldn't find on my own! This! deserves! many! exclamation! points!

I just listened to Curtis's copy of a Godsmack album I have somehow missed and I predict many fine hours enjoying Curtis's musical choices. Tony and K are living in the 70s, but that is not all bad. You can do worse than Aerosmith and Beethoven. Chicken Billy has a lot of prog rock and the complete Cypress Hill. Jen is slave to iTunes and doesn't have anything that isn't wearing a DRM chastity belt, but Brian is completely unlocked and has the Franz Ferdinand I have been meaning to check out. And am I the only person in the world who doesn't have Alanis Morisette? Or who does have hot jazz?

I feel bound to reciprocate, of course. I am going to have to install TouchCopy here and copy some interesting non-DRM stuff over from Ratatask so that Curtis, Tony, K, Jen, Chicken Billy, Brian, and all the others can check out my stuff. That is going to be fun, too.

And free! I pay for my music (with a couple of exceptions I think I will write about soon), so this is a $expletively expensive hobby. Free music is my friend.

Off to explore Nick and Jim.

EARGH! I have an earworm!

2008-07-01T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have a song stuck in my head, playing over and over and over and over ... . I have caught myself humming it several times and I want ... it ... to ... stop.

Hey There Delilah - Plain White Ts

I don't have anything against "Hey There Delilah". It's a nice little song. But I would never voluntarily listen to it a hundred times in a day.

Hey There Delilah - Plain White Ts

Please, make it stop.

Hey There Delilah - Plain White Ts

It was supposed to be a quick trip to buy shoelaces

2008-06-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of ways to say it, but the truth is that I am easily distracted.

This evening, I was herding junior shoppers through a mall and heard a song somewhere. I liked the sound of it and had the idea that I ought to know what it was. Since most of the hip mall shops can tell you what they are playing, I raced to track it down and ask. Big mistake.

It turns out that the Hollister Company (some kind of dreadful theme-park clothing chain with dim lights and a maze of twisty rooms all alike that pretends it is about surfing or something) has a touch-screen jukebox of all the latest "We are SO not emo! Punk, I swear, punk!" cool bands. So there I am, standing hip deep in camisoles and being sniffed at by young ubertrends, playing with the new toy and writing down band names. (They have a limited version of this player on their web site, but it's not much.) I think I was the only person in there who could have voted in the last election.

Eventually, I surfaced and hunted down the little kahunas so we could continue down the mall looking for skull shoelaces. That brought us to Hot Topic, which is a remarkable collection of stuff. I have never been in one before. There is an excellent chance that no one in that store besides me will be voting in this upcoming election, either. While my mini punks were going crazy over big skull beltbuckles and skull shoelaces and skull fingerless mittens and I don't know what all, I was leaning on the counter talking to the "I'm too cool to get excited about anything" clerk about the band they were playing, Allison (Mexico, power punk pop). Turns out she is not too cool to get excited about them.

Finally got the skull boys home and hit MySpace to look up a few of the bands. I was trying to figure out why Luna Halo's MySpace page shows four members and doesn't list a keyboard player, but the official bio on their official web page describes finding a keyboard player, so I pulled up their Wikipedia entry to see if it clears that up. In fact, it doesn't list a keyboard player as either current or former, even though at least one of the pictures on their site shows someone playing a keyboard.

I don't know if I will ever figure that out, and the puzzle doesn't make me not like their music. I will probably get their current album. And maybe Crash Romeo's, too.

Anyway, then I spotted a link at the bottom of their Wikipedia article, one of the ones to a category that the entry belongs to. "American pop rock music groups", okay. "Music groups established in 1999", questionable given the history of the band, but okay. "Former Christian musical groups", wurru? They have a category for this? Is it so common? Former Christians or former groups or what?

I clicked over to see, of course. They list 5 groups, including Luna Halo, that

... were at one time considered a Christian artist or band, but are either no longer associated with the Christian Music industry or do not wish to be known as a Christian band, despite a large Christian fan base. Some of these artists may be on a Christian label or have an overtly Christian release, but have since stated publicly that they do not wish to be known as a Christian artist. An artist's inclusion on this page does not necessarily mean the artist has abandoned their faith.

This makes my brain go all asplodey. What kind of alternative musical reality I was I getting a peek into?

And of course, my brain won't stop working on things like why there are only five such groups listed. Surely there must be more acts that have left a "Christian label". What is a "Christian band", anyway? Are there rules against Christians listening to bands without this tag? Are there certifying authorities like there is for "Kosher"? Is there an equivalent for any other religion? Oh, what about black metal? Does Luna Halo count as a 1999 band, when all the members from then except one left and they got a new label and stopped being Christian and all? Or should they get their timer reset to 2002? And so on.

I got so distracted that I nearly forgot to blog about it. I think that many brain cycles are going to be wasted on these questions. And on that missing keyboard player.

Fluid Lines Dope Slaps Roger Waters

2008-06-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

Really, this is me dope-slapping Roger Waters with Fluid Lines, but that doesn't make the same kind of headline.

Recently, I watched the documentary Pink Floyd: We Talk About How Great We Are. (Officially, Pink Floyd: Shine On.) It was very annoying and I don't recommend it unless you go in agreeing with them. It included big chunks of interviews with Roger Waters, apparently from the early 80s.

In this interview, he said something about punk that sat me back. Unfortunately, I didn't write down his exact words, but the paraphrase is that "There is nothing there. No one listens to it." And then he added the afterthought "Except the kids that go to the shows". He might have revised his opinion before he performed with Patti Smith at a big charity concert this month, but I keep thinking about how utterly stupid his original statement was even at the time.

To paraphrase something Muse said during an interview: "The bands of the future are in the audience today." (I think that was Bellamy, but again I didn't have a pencil handy.) Has this ever not been true? If a lot of young people are listening to one kind of music, how can it not have an influence? Even music that it is cool to despise have influences, if nothing else in backlash and revival.

What Waters said is so obviously wrong about punk in particular. Punk has tendrils flowering in music all over the landscape just because so many of the kids in the audience that Waters dismissed were inspired to "Do it yourself. Do it now." You can hardly play any modern music without running in to its influence. Green Day is easy to point to, but modern glamprog Muse themselves started out as punkers.

Lately, I have been listening a lot to some young bands like Fluid Lines that call themselves "punk pop". These guys were born nearly a generation after the Waters interview and yet there is punk popping out flowers again in their music. Fluid Lines and their musical kin are the living and growing demonstration of how far out of it Roger Waters was then.

(Plus, they are doing some interesting stuff, even though it doesn't sound quite ripe yet.)

New Music I Push: short lists are hard to do

2008-06-28T14:29:00.000-07:00

Someone asked for a list of new and new-to-me music from the last 5 years or so that I could recommend for him to check out. My brain is now like the straw dispenser jammed by too many straws trying to get out at once—I spend a lot of time looking for new music. I managed to cut it down somewhat by listing only stuff I listen to regularly and/or actively tell people they should listen to.

Not-Short List of Newish Music I Listen to & Recommend

Shorter List

ACRES
Dewey Cox
Drowning Pool
Five Star Iris
Lee Mellor
Lights and Sounds
Maroon 5
Michael Tolcher
The Mooney Suzuki
Muse
The Phlegmatics

More

Arcade Fire
Celldweller
Deadbeat Poets
Deadstar Assembly
Fluid Lines
Jake Newton
Manu Chao
Neurosonic
Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

Bonus List

Audiology
Blonde Redhead
Confliction
Conjunto Colores
Fanoe
Karsh Kale
Mudvayne
Pecker
Plusminus X
Stereoside
Thanks for Nothing
Through and Throughout
Tremoloco
Urbansnake
Wipers
Zeromancer

Plug of the Week: Love Songs ("Les Chansons d’Amour", a movie by Honoré)

2008-06-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

"Love Songs" is a recent French film that is supposedly a modern version of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", which I somehow missed (like punk) and which I obviously need to catch up on (as I am doing with punk). Since I haven't seen UofC, I have nothing to add to any comparison there.

"Love Songs" is set in Paris, about three young adults who are in a menage à trois that has just about run its course, the parents of one of the women, and another young man. It is all about these characters trying to figure out their various relationships and what love means, while smoking and speaking in extended metaphors. In other words, pretty standard French drama with some modern flavor. Despite that, the movie has its own weird wonderful personality. It is definitely not made in a movie factory.

The film is in three parts (signaled by big words on the screen saying "Part 1", etc.). At the end of Part 1, there is a surprising tragedy (saying that doesn't spoil because every blurb and review says as much), which puts everything on the boil.

What brings this movie to this blog is that it is a musical. You don't get a lot of those these days. It is not a "Hey, let's put on a show!" musical or a "Let's stop and do a Big Number!" musical. (For a good, lowkey recent example of the latter, I point you again to "Colma: the Musical", which I have already plugged.) This is a French movie about relationships—the characters talk a lot and have a lot of inner dialogs. Those dialogs are often in song.

The film is matter-of-fact about the music. The characters simply start singing as if it is a quite ordinary way to have a conversation. The songs are nice lightweight ballads which work very well in the contexts of the conversations and in the film as a whole. The songs are not wildly different from each other, but that makes sense in this film because individual people do tend to have a consistent way of speaking and the songs are extensions of their speech.

The instrumentation is used nicely behind the melodies to amplify what is being said. For example, there is one noteworthy scene in which two characters are singing sweetly about different kinds of love being like different kinds of apples and whether or not getting a worm between your teeth is a bug or a feature, while making very tender clothed love (and smoking, of course), while the music behind them gets more and more intense. The climax of the scene is pretty much the instruments having an orgasm while the characters stop singing and roll off screen (presumably to finish undressing and have their own orgasms). It is beautiful, affecting, and effective exposition.

The actors do their own singing, which they do reasonably well. They are better than J. Random Actor, but ordinary enough to make their performances easy to relate to. I wouldn't buy a soundtrack album, but I found the singing pleasant and very natural to the characters. (As a nice bonus, there is much pleasant non-cookiecutter actor and actress hotness, in a variety of flavors.)

What is particularly handy is that this film is available in the Netflix Watch Now program, which means it is free if you have Internet Explorer and a Netflix subscription. Free is good.

One note: There is same-sex snogging / macking. Whether this turns you on, turns you off, or you don't care—now you know.

Love Songs
on IMDB

Love Songs
on Netflix

Go Matt Go!

2008-06-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
[CLICK HERE FOR BEAUTIFUL HD VERSION]

Plug of the Week: Muse

2008-06-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

I am hooked on Muse. I know they are big in Europe, which makes them radioactive in the US, but I like them. It's hard to describe them. Think of how Queen had its roots in ballads, music hall, rock, and classical and then pushed toward glam, and prog rock. Muse did sort of the same thing but starting from punk, new romantics, classical, and prog rock. And then discovered there is no top they won't go over. (I am not making any comparison of musical or performance quality.) Sort of like the Wipers and the Cure get in a spaceship together and head out for Planet Glam. In any one song, they can switch from noodly space synths to banging rock on a dime, throwing in a bit of flamenco or surf guitar or ballad just for fun. Sometimes the lead drifts over onto the bass while the lead singer/guitar are wandering completely off in outer space. They lay beautiful liquid flowing backing harmonies over and through it all. Plus, "Supermassive Black Hole" is one of the best dance songs ever recorded (IMO, of course). It sounds as weird in practice as the description, but it works.

I think that their live performances are tighter than their studio recordings (leaner arrangements). They have a good chunk of one of the concerts available for free (hard to beat that) if you'd like to sample. CLICK HERE FOR FREE STUFF. You can get one song and video clip on the front page; register to get a handful more of each. If you buy the CD of that performance, they throw in the concert DVD for free. Plus, the bass player says that they don't make much money off the records anyway, look at them as promotions for the concerts, and don't care a lick if people download them. (I mean, not that anyone would do that anyway.)

Muse
on Amazon.com

The only thing better than an overwrought ballad is EMBEDDING an overwrought ballad

2008-06-19T19:38:00.000-07:00

IMEEM is turning out to be a lot of fun. It has video and audio players for material from artists and users, which is all cool. It doesn't play nice with Last.fm scrobbling, alas. Here is one I listen to often that I should be embarassed to admit I really really like:
Muy Dentro de Mi - Marc Anthony I think this gives only a 30-second clip here, but you can hear the complete track if you click through. I think -- I'm still figuring out the details.

A Little Post is Better than Nada

2008-06-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

Check out the twin-accordion action! Doug Sahm & Freddy Fender are on my short list of best vocal combinations in a rock-like group. Two of my other pairs are Micky Dolenz & Mike Nesmith and Layne Staley & Jerry Cantrell.

Why I am hiding in my sandbox like Brian Wilson

2008-06-18T19:22:00.001-07:00

It doesn't seem like the modern world has a place for ordinary grief left to take its own course. We are supposed to manage it somehow, I think. There are routines, ritual ways of talking about it, limits on leave and the expectation that after a few weeks or months it will just be over. And it's just not like that. My friend died 3 months ago. I am past thinking of him everyday, but I still haven't been able to delete his number from my phone. I am handling the day to day stuff pretty well, but I can't get a handle on anything much more. Whole weeks of routine laundry and grocery and going to work slip by without leaving any sense that time has passed. It's getting better, bit by bit, but there are bad moments like spotting his birthday in the calendar ahead that still break me down. (I was so proud to put that in there. All these years and I was never able to keep his birthday straight, and lost the note every time I wrote it down.) I'm listening to a lot of music and thinking about it. I have things I want to write about, some written notes even. I just can't get my thoughts on anything abstract to line up coherently. Time for small steps. One useful thing I've learned: all those things they tell you about how to feel better really do work. Sleep more, drink more water, get outside and walk around, all that stuff that seems like such a drag--it works, not overnight but gradually. The big three for happiness: sleep, water, and sunscreen.

I get around!

2008-05-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

Take the top 20 artists in your Last.fm profile. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score. If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/eclectic.php

My eclectic score is currently

94 / 100

The 94 related artists for my profile are (hed) Planet Earth, 3 Doors Down, 7 sharp 9, Acres, Anat Cohen & The Anzic Orchestra, Arctic Monkeys, Beach Mercer, Beck, Bench Grinder, Big Star, Black Light Burns, Boys Like Girls, Breaking Benjamin, Buster Bailey, Calling All Monsters, Cardinal Trait, Chris Cornell, Coal Chamber, Coldplay, Cracker, Creed, Cute Is What We Aim For, Dakona, David Binney, Desole, Dishwalla, Donny McCaslin, Earshot, Emmylou Harris, Five Finger Death Punch, Flaw, Foreign Oren (2), Franz Ferdinand, Fuel, Gin Blossoms, Guy Clark, Hawthorne Heights, Honestly, Hot Action Cop, Ill Niño, Jack White, Joe Ely, Josh Kelley, Josh Ritter, Ken Dawson (2), Kid Rock, Live, Local H, Lostprophets, Lyle Lovett, Marc Broussard, Matchbox Twenty, Matt Nathanson, Matt Wertz, Mushroomhead (2), Nine Days, No Second Troy (2), Northmont, On the Speakers, Pearl Jam, Placebo, Radiohead, Reporter, Rob Thomas, Ron Blake, Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, Scott Stapp, Sevendust, Shinedown, Shock Stars (2), Silverstein, Slipknot, Sloan, Son Volt, Soundgarden, Stabbing Westward, Static-X, Steve Earle, Stone Temple Pilots, Submersed, Taproot (2), Temple of the Dog, The Raconteurs, The Strokes, The Used, Three Days Grace, Tonic, Trapt, Tyler Hilton, Uncle Tupelo, Velvet Crush, Whiskeytown, Wilco, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Take the top 50 artists in your Last.fm profile. For each of these artists, collect the top 20 similar artists (where the artist itself is the #1 most similar). The resulting number of unique artists is your super-eclectic score. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/supereclectic.php

My super-eclectic score is currently

717 / 1000

The most similar artists for my profile are Filter (5), Saliva (5), Orgy (4), Fuel (4), Spineshank (4), Stone Temple Pilots (4), Sevendust (4), Blue Öyster Cult (4), Drowning Pool (3), Mushroomhead (3)

Any way you slice it, it’s only rock and roll

2008-04-13T16:45:00.001-07:00

I just saw Shine A Light. I'm glad I did—it's a engrossing look at a band on stage, more so because the Rolling Stones have been playing together for so long.

There are plenty of things that I could write about the Stones, their body of work, their history, the songs that they chose for the concert, the musicians they have on stage with them. But all those things have been written elsewhere, and probably a lot better than I could. I have never been a particular fan and I don't know much of their history or songs that were not big hits. There are a couple of things that I took away from the film, however.

Mick Jagger is a pro. He gives a great performance. But he does it like someone doing a job of work. Music is what he does. Keith Richards, on the other hand, seems to live in the music. It's what he is.

The other thing the film makes me think about is Petey's chicken. Petey was a neighbor of my grandparents, an old bachelor who had always lived alone. Whenever he cooked a chicken, he cut it up any old way. We would hold up an odd-shaped piece and ask him what the name of it was; he would make up funny names until we had run out of chicken.

Watching the concert, I noticed something that I had never picked up from hearing recordings. Ron Wood and Keith Richards cut up the guitar work like Petey cut up chicken: any way they feel like it. Most bands have the lead guitar guy and the rhythm guitar guy. These two don't slice it that way. Sometimes it seemed like they were taking turns from song to song, or from one end of the song to the other. What fascinated me most were the songs on which neither one of them seemed to be playing lead or rhythm. They would each play something cool and the effect of the two parts overlaid was lead and rhythm. I suppose there's a name for that and I bet they teach it in music school, but I don't think there is much of it in your run of the mill rock band.

It makes me want to listen to their work again with new ears.

While my accordion gently weeps

2008-04-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

Mike’s death really knocked me down. He has been in bad health for a while, but the news was still stunning. Until this week, I pretty much only came out of my cave to go to work. I spent a lot of time listening to music.

At first, I listened to stuff that Mike liked. He was a concert organist, so he listened to a lot of classical music. He was also a dancing fool, so he loved anything that you would hear in a club. I don’t have much house music or disco, so I listened to a lot of Bach, Beethoven, and Handel.

After a few days of that, I thought I was wallowing, so resolved not to listen to any more Mike music. I tried a little plumb-pitiful "My wife left me. My dog died. Sure am gonna miss that dog" music, but that didn’t help with the wallowing. I switched over to music I knew Mike would hate: country, salsa, metal, reggaeton. But that made me think of all the times we talked about why he didn’t like that crap and I did.

All this time, I was completely paralyzed as a performer. Every time I thought of the accordion, I thought of Mike giving me gas about playing such a lame organ. (Of course, I was able to point out to him the advantages of having an organ that doesn’t use a whole building as a bass resonator.) I cancelled out of all my lessons because I just couldn’t go.

In short, it was a rough time.

Finally, I was listening to salsa and then clicked over to some folky stuff. That started with a rather mumbling vocal and I was straining to figure out the words. I finally realized that the problem was that the words were in English and I was trying to parse it as Spanish. Instead of thinking that I needed to tell Mike about that, I thought of what a laugh he would have gotten out of it and then a good rant about non-English speakers. I knew I had turned a corner when thinking of this didn’t make my brain go blank with pain.

So I hauled myself out to my next scheduled accordion lesson and noticed that the sun still shines. I’m not sure I’d say I’m back, exactly, but I’m not gone anymore, either.

NOW LISTENING

Crashlight from Thanks for Nothing.

Gothic Bellydancing

2008-03-09T20:21:00.000-07:00

First of all, I'd like to make a protest. As a person who studies Goths as in the tribe that was in the middle of Europe before it split into the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, I have long been burdened by getting hits on sites for people who wear deathlike makeup and gloomy clothes when I search for "Goths" and on sites about gloomy cathedrals and gloomy novels when I search for "Gothic". Having the term "Gothic" taken up by yet another non-Goth-the-tribe group is not going to help. (And what is up with all the gloom anyway? The tribal Goths were as cheerful as anyone.)

The confusion did let me stumble across Gothic bellydancing. There appear to be technical definitions of this art form. (See GothicBellydance.com, for example.) My short description is that it is Goth-the-modern-movement women wearing Theda Bara bellydancer costumes dancing to Goth-type music.

I have to confess. I am not a Goth. I don't think there is anything wrong with the movement or the styles--they are just so not for me. I did, however, expect the Gothic bellydancing to be silly or pretentious. It's not. It's actually pretty interesting for me. (I am not qualified to say if it is sexy or not.)

I was doing web searches on "Gothing Bellydancing" trying to come up with more to say than "it exists" and "it doesn't suck". I got engrossed in trying to figure out the difference between tribal fusion gothic bellydancing and industrial, so I decided I better surface and give a preliminary report.

Youtube has plenty of examples, but here are two I like as illustrations. Here is Sashi with a tribal fusion gothic bellydance:

And here is BellyCraft with industrial bellydance:

Generic Music from Generic Bands

2008-03-04T21:35:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was letting iTunes run through couple of new albums I had bought. I didn't realize until afterward that I had gotten "shuffle" set. The songs from the two bands were indistinguishable. Then I thought about it and realized that I could take a track from either of these bands and drop it into the middle of a number of other albums I have--and no one coming to the music cold would notice. These bands make generic music.

What am I calling "generic music"? It's the musical eqivalent of water in world of soup. It's music that has no distinguishing features, no particular voice or style or viewpoint or anything. It's just there. It observes all the conventions of it genre, hits all the standard marks ... and nothing else.

I can understand how manufactured bands (like the run of hair metal bands or the run of boy groups) could end up being generic. I'd rather have something more interesting, with a viewpoint and a voice, have the rack space, but I can see where they come from and what they are about. They have minders who work hard to rub out all their distinguishing features so they can control the product (and the group members) better. I see the market niche of these bands. I get how they are good business. They are like Dennys or McDonalds: safe, predictable, easy to market. Product.

But the two bands that started me thinking about this were independent bands who (apparently) invented themselves. Could anyone be so vacant, so blank? But how could anyone set out be a musician and say "OK, great, I'm going to record music that no one will remember for a minute after it finishes. I'm going to be a can of peas on a shelf of peas."? Can they imagine that, as a small producer, they can afford to be invisible against the background? And don't they have anything they want to say?

I can't help thinking about two albums with meat and vegetables that I didn't buy because my money went to bottles of tap water with pretty labels. (And I am on to the people who recommended these to me. Hah. They won't fool me again.)

I will continue to do what I can to get people to listen to more and better music, music that has something to say and some distinctive way of saying it. It's spitting into the wind, but I'm stubborn that way. I would appreciate it, however, if so many musicians weren't working so hard to sell water.

I’m back. Sort of. PLUS: Buddy Miles

2008-03-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

Oy. I was sick. Then I was trying to catch up on what didn't get done while I was sick. I promised myself that I wouldn't waste any time on this blog until I caught up. And then I said when I was almost caught up. And then I said the last week of February, even if I still wasn't caught up. Then we were overtaken by a series of family crises that kept me too busy and stressed to write.

So, now what? Well, I'm back! I am organizing my thoughts and will get back to regular business tomorrow.

In the meantime, I will leave you with this video of a live performance of the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Fillmore East (way back before it was a franchise--they are going to open A Fillmore down the block from me. What is that about? A Fillmore? But I digress...) These guys are so completely locked in, I doubt another live performance has ever been better. So here, in memory of Buddy Miles, enjoy:

My dog ate my brain

2008-01-29T06:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Blog Readers, I'm not dead. I still love you. I am just too sick to think with a bug that won't go away. Watch this space!

My Roy Orbison Shame

2008-01-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, before I got the tedious but interesting job doing breadboard layout and wire-wrapping at a chip design company, I had a tedious and dirty job as a dogsbody in a ceramics craft shop. This was a shop where you could buy slip-cast (low-fire) ceramic shapes, clean them up, paint and glaze them, get them fired, etc. My main job was cleaning unfired ceramic dust from surfaces. Lots of dust, lots of surfaces, shelves and shelves of easily-destroyed unfired ceramics.

The guy who owned the shop believed that in a place where people would be working, there must be music. He didn't trust people to choose their own music, of course. He had a beat-up tape player and a stack of tapes, and one of his important jobs was to change the tapes. No one else was allowed to touch his precious player or tapes.

What he played was 80% Roy Orbison and 20% miscellaneous psychedelic leftovers. Unless he was having a day of getting grief from his wife for being a bad shop manager or for wandering over to the lounge next door or for going down to the laundromat to flirt with the slut (yes, really, I knew her, she'd do anything with a knob) who ran that. Then he played all Orbison for a long as he was grounded.

This was the worst music I had ever heard up to that time. Oh great gods above and below, it was torment day after day. I could never describe to anyone how dreadful it was, because the music was so bad in so many ways. I put Roy Orbison down in my book under "To Be Avoided At All Costs".

Years later, the Traveling Wilburys appeared on the scene. Of course, I loved their music and of course, me being me, I read up on who they were and all. Well, damn--Lefty Wilbury, Roy Orbison, wow.

So then I found someone who had some Orbison albums and listened to them. Hey, that was him? Damn, wow. And what a songwriter. So did he get better or did I get smarter?

It only occurred to me a couple of years after that--that stupid tape player and the tapes were the only surfaces that didn't get dusted. They all must have been full of that stuff. It's no wonder that the music was wobbling, screeching, and gargling. ::headdesk::

So, Roy, whereve you are--I'm sorry I thought that you sucked a mighty suck. I am ashamed I blamed you instead of that idiot Odie.

My Day Of Music

2008-01-21T19:02:00.000-08:00

This morning, I listened to Collective Soul's Collective Soul.

Then I went to Chick-Fil-A for lunch. They always have a fairly loud corporate soundtrack playing. Mostly, nothing jumped to my attention. They did play "Mmm Bop" (I actually had to look up the spelling of that), which I now know I still like.

I walked around doing errands to Disciplined Breakdown.

In Plaza Art Supplies, I had to turn Ratatask off to transact. They had a very nice cover of "I Ain't Missing You At All" playing. The people behind the counter and I had a nice talk about how much we liked it and who might have done it and covers in general and all. I popped out my Blackberry to look it up and was dismayed to see how many of the top Google hits credited it to Tyler Hilton without any reference to John Waite or even Tina Turner. Damn kids, mutter mutter.

When I got home, I decided to watch some streaming movies from Netflix.

The first was a documentary about Tom Dowd, who has been a very important recording engineer. (Could I be any more understated?) He got the second 8-track recording setup ever made for Atlantic. (The first was in Les Paul's kitchen or basement or something.) He was the one who thought of using sliders instead of knobs. He had Atlantic recording in stereo before it was possible to use it, just because it seemed like a good idea. He has worked with pretty much everyone, it looked like. (I mean, think of the Atlantic catalog.) Very cool story about a cool guy. There was one amazing bit with him messing around with the tracks of "Layla" that he hadn't had his hands on since it was released. (He introduced Clapton and Allman.) You really have to hear the guitar parts isolated to fully appreciate that.

The second was an old feature called Orchestra Wives, from 1942. It is about a sweet thing who marries a trumpeter and goes on the road with the band. The band is played by Glenn Miller and his orchestra, mostly. The music was interesting because it was not the usual Miller greatest hits. Oh, and it had two versions of "I Got a Gal In Kalamazoo", one done straight by the orchestra and one by the Nicholas Brothers. The whole movie is yet another reminder that music "videos" go way back, but the Nicholas Brothers number might as well have had a paleolithic MTV logo in the corner. I was amused to see a scene at the beginning with the orchestra cutting a record that illustrated some of the stuff about the early tech in the Dowd documentary. The movie is also a reminder that the trials of life on the road were not invented in the rock era. All it was missing from the modern template were drugs and breasts. In this movie, the band was even broken up by a wife!

I am about to watch Rock My World, which promises to be a romp with Alicia Silverstone as a bass player who just happens to be at a British mansion when a big famous important band that needs a bass player shows up. With some mischievious British aristocrats running around as well. Hijinks ensue.

Music to be snowed in with

2008-01-20T17:32:00.000-08:00

I'm not dead! I finally gave in to the series of viruses and collapsed into the arms of a binge-athon of the first five seasons of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Vincent D'Onofrio's character is interesting, but what I kept thinking about was how seriously I'd be screwed if I were ever interrogated that way. So many of the things they assume are just alternate-reality to me.

Although I wasn't doing much blogging, I was also thinking about music. I was propped up in bed with my laptop with WiFi and my iPod with my whole music library and a stack of books next to me, and I started laughing about the whole idea of Desert Island Music, or Movies, or Books, or whatever. You know, the old standard interview question: If you were going to be stranded on a desert island, what album/movie/book/whatever would you take with you?"

I would like to say that if I were going to be dumped in the middle of anywhere remote and dangerous, I would be thinking about Bowie knife, metal buckets, rope, cord, wire, heavy contractor-grade garbage bags, sharpening stone, big hat, warm socks, and whatever else seemed likely to help me stay alive. I would be worried about my Leatherman and not a solar charger for the iPod. So I would reframe this as "If you were going to be snowed in a nice comfortable place with power and supplies and all for a couple of months, what albums would you take?"

I would also like to say that I have actually done this. I mean, the "what music would you take?" and not being dropped into the Gobi desert in my sneakers. I had to run away from home to escape from an abusive relationship, with just what I could fit into my car with two kids. I thought I would probably be able to get most of my stuff later, but I knew I couldn't count on it. So I had to give a lot of though to what books, clothes, etc. I would grab on my way out the door.

Here is the sad truth: I was so concerned about getting my essential reference books and out of print books and papers for projects I was working on and a working set of kitchen gear and toys and figuring out how to get the kids out without a scene and realizing I had no place to go and all, that I completely forgot to think about music. So what I had when I drove away and for the next 5 months was just the discs I happened to have in my car leftover from a recent long drive.

This stack of albums was not what I would have made my canonical Snowed-In Music list. I was pretty low, and so I was overstocked on "I am blue but I reckon I will survive somehow" songs. There was also albums that I just like to listen to for the particular mood I was in when I was picking the music for the trip. I wasn't in the mood for anything loud or hard at all that day, so I put in a lot of twangy ballads. And I smacked myself on the back of the wrist and made myself drop the Queen and Collective Soul, so that was completely missing, because I always listen to them over and over and wanted to give them a rest for a few days.

When I started thinking about it this week, I realized how remarkable that I still like the music in that stack at all. I listened to it all over and over, because it was all I had. And yet I still listen to it and enjoy it without having flashbacks to those difficult days. It passed the field test for repeat listening.

So, here is my official field-tested list of 48 Albums to Take to a Snowing In--the ones I actually took, other essentials that I listen to frequently, and some new ones I think are worth a try. To make the game more interesting, I made myself choose just one album from each artist, and only albums I actually own right now. (Why 48? That's how many disks my biggest carrier holds.)

Maura O'Connell, Blue is the Colour of Hope
Rodney Crowell, Houston Kid
Paul Thorn, Mission Temple Fireworks Stand
Hedningarna, Kaksi
Gordon Lightfoot, Summertime Dream
Deep Forest, Boheme
Santana, Best of Santana
Audioslave, Audioslave (the one harder ringer in the stack)
Buckwheat Zydeco, Buckwheat Zydeco Story
Flaco Jimenez, Partners
Birmingham Symphony, Beethoven's Seventh
O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack
Cold Mountain soundtrack
Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody
Collective Soul, Disciplined Breakdown
Soundgarden, Superunknown
k.d. lang, Shadowland
Songcatcher soundtrack
Mark Knopfler, Cal soundtrack
Beethoven's Ninth
Michael Tolcher, I Am
ACRES, 3 Minute Movies
Alice in Chains, Dirt
Booker T. and the MGs, Soul Men
Concrete Blonde, Bloodletting
Daniel Lanois, Acadie
Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker
The White Stripes, Elephant
Drowning Pool, Full Circle
Hoobastank, The Reason
Don Williams, Twentieth Century Masters
Mr. Whirly, Mr. Whirly
Various Artists, Essential Gershwin
Various Artists, De Lovely soundtrack
John Hiatt, Perfectly Good Guitar
Lee Mellor, Ghost Town Heart
Texas Tornados, A Zone of our Own
Foo Fighters, In Your Honor
Matthew Sweet, Altered Beast
Muse, Black Holes and Revelations
Robbie Robertson, Storyville
Screaming Trees, Sweet Oblivion
Mudvayne, Lost and Found
Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience
Broken Sunday, Identity
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Time - The Revelator
Plusminus X, State of Mind
Sly & The Family Stone, Anthology

It hurt to be cut down to a dozen or so albums as I was. It even hurts to cut down to 48. The best part about the 160 gig iPod is that I am a few years away from needing to choose like this. I can always just take it ALL.

Knocked down by a song

2008-01-15T10:25:00.000-08:00

Last night, I set the mighty iPod Ratatask to playing random tracks from a "not played in iTunes yet" playlist. That was interesting. I still have to figure out how to avoid having it play one movement of a symphony, but that is a gnat.

I'm not sure I'm up to Random anymore, though. When it hit Lucinda Williams's "Something About What Happens When We Talk" without warning, I was overcome. I just buckled right down to the floor sobbing.

In my gut, that song is tied tightly into a bad end to an intense relationship. I thought I had gone through all the stages of grief on that, have done my period of listening to the song over and over while moping, all the usual pity party stuff. I was completely unprepared to be hit so hard by it after all this time. Then I thought about how many songs in there could blindside me the same way.

Some songs are like old shoes that you have worn out and don't fit anymore. (Or that period with the flattop and shiny shirts that you wish no one had pictures of.) But some music is part of your fiber down to the bone.

It's no wonder people get so obsessed with musicians. Until we develop smell artists, they are the artists whose work touches our feelings and memories most directly. Is there anyone who can hear that doesn't have a gooshy-in-love song and a plumb-pitiful-breakup song woven into his emotions?

And it's not all just timing, what happened to be playing when something important happened. Is there anyone who hasn't felt that some musician is singing a story from your life?

This is where my thoughts wander off to Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy and Blake's "all the world in a grain of sand." How can musicians so often come up with music that is more emotionally true than mere truth? Most music is not at that peak, but there is always plenty of the True stuff coming out.

What is the cost to musicians themselves to channel that kind of emotional truth? How can they keep giving that part of themselves under the pressure of producing music that will bring a living? That makes my thoughts wander on to Achilles's choice to take fame over a long happy life and Emily Dickinson's candle, burning at both ends.

What a strange relationship we have with the people who make our music.

TOP SECRET! Google Music Search

2008-01-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

So, I was mucking about trying to get information about the band Confidence Man without getting a lot of hits on the movie Confidence Man or the Steinman soundtrack album Confidence Man or the Elliott Smith song" Confidence Man" and any of its covers. This required a considerable string of Google parameters:

"confidence man" album -steinman -soundtrack -"elliott smith"

but I finally got lucky. In fact, I got double lucky.

If you go to the RESULTS PAGE you will see something a bit different from the usual Google results. On the top of the screen is a special result marked by a couple of lovely blue notes that gives the band's name with a link, the name of the album that I couldn't remember, some track names, and a link to get more music results from that search string. "What's this?" I thought, so of course I started clicking.

This transported me into a whole alternate Googleverse of music searches. The page for Confidence Man shows information about their album and the tracks on it and offers to fling me over to some shopping partners to buy it. The cool part is a little column on the left that offers to fling me over to searches on the artist name in the main Google, Google Images, Google News, and Google Groups--all restricted to their music database. (That feature is broken this week, however.)

Think about the implications for searching on band names like "Queen" or "ACRES".

"Damn!" I thought, "Why didn't I see this search engine before?" That turns out to be a very simple question with an answer that seems simple on the surface, but which turns out to be complex. The simple answer is that the Google Music search does not appear in their official list of search engines off their main page. It was not there to notice and for some reason no previous music-based search of mine had activated the hidden search engine.

This made me wonder what was up with Google Music. A couple of simple Google searches later, I had learned that Google Music search had been released in December 2005, with a limited number of sales partners and a limited set of identified music acts. Around 6 months later, Google took the link down, prompting speculation that they were about to launch GoogleTunes or whatever they would call it. Now 2 years later, we have no GoogleTunes and Google Music search is still not open for business--except when it pops up from one of your regular searches.

I tried typing in "music" or "musicsearch" in the usual places that kick over to the specialized engines--no joy. I hack at web site parameters to make them do what I want better all the time. "Surely," I thought, "I can chop up that results page string to figure out which part of it is turning on the music search." After some trial and error on that I have learned that

http://www.google.com/musicsearch?q

will get you into the top page of the music search engine. If you are bold, you can plug in a search string after the "q" to go to that results page directly, but I'll leave that to the propeller-hats who already know how to type in Google search parameters directly into a URL.

I have to wonder what the status is of the underlying database at Google. When I tested this last week, the linked-in restricted image and news searches worked, but today they don't. It looks like many musical acts have been added since 2006, but far from all. I noticed that the album cover images are hosted at the Google Products site, so I did parallel searches over there and found a lot of musical acts that haven't found their way into the Music database. That means that there is no automatic updating from the active Products database into the semi-dormant Music database.

So this is still an unresolved mystery. While I am waiting for the ultimate answer, I can play with that sekrit Google Music search, though. It's a cool toy and I love new toys.

Defending Against The Barbarian Invasion

2008-01-11T10:22:00.001-08:00

In the part of my life when I'm not Amber, I hang a lot with other writers. They talk a lot about the problem of getting published. You can't get an agent unless you have an offer. You can't get an MS taken seriously if you don't have an agent. There are so many companies that pretend to be publishers and agents that are really scammers set up to take advantage of people who are desperate to be Published and have no idea how the industry works. And the time to get a response (almost always a rejection) is measured in years.

On the other hand, the publishers talk about the mountains of slush (unsolicited MSs) that they have to deal with. Slush that is so bad it is painful to read. Slush that is not even intelligible. I mean, unimaginably bad. You have to take my word for this--I was the fiction editor at a small literary magazine--as bad as you can imagine, and then raise it to the whole next circle of Badness Hell.

And every single one of those really dreadful submissions was sent by someone whose friends and family tell him how great his work is, who has labored for years on the piece, who has a great emotional investment in it, who wants to be taken seriously. A surprising number of whom will send an "I reject your rejection!" note back. (Yeah, that will make the editors move your next MS to the top of the stack.) These people believe that the publishers are just bad obstacles blocking the recognition they deserve, that they need so much.

The exact hoops are different for music, but they are there. The big obstacle there is the record company, who seems to exist just to keep the same old crap streaming out while blocking your music from getting to the people. And when they do sign you, they make you take contracts that confiscate all your money! Rip off!

Yeah, right. Okay, now I know musicians as well as writers. I feel your pain. But ...

The new world of music distribution has given us a chance to see what happens when the record label is removed as intermediary. Online track sales from indy outlets like CDBaby and PayPlay has made the music industry's slush available to the public. And that has also prompted the record labels to let established artists go when their contracts are up.

Now we can see for ourselves what record labels are good for.

What do they bring the artist? Well, capital for a start. Making a well-produced record can be expensive: studio time, producer, side men, snacks, everything. It adds up. Touring is killah expensive, too. Video production can bankrupt small countries. That money all has to be spent before you have any income. You could finance it yourself, but who has the big bank account already? And how do you get lined up for the good producers and good tour venues? You can do it yourself with effort that makes your eyes bleed, but who has the magic Rolodex that makes it easy? Think about it: Natalie Merchant has no contract and so not enough money to tour outside of the immediate NYC area or to publish an album, according to a recent NYTimes article. (Please note, I'm not saying that record companies are not evil. That is another question.) On top of that, they have people who know how to promote albums well: artwork, press releases, photo ops, everything.

And what do the record companies bring to me, the consumer? First of all, they relieve me of the burden of screening the slush for myself if I don't want to. I spend a lot of time combing through PayPlay.fm, and I can tell you that there is some truly, deeply, horrible stuff there. Bad songs, performed badly, recorded badly, with promotional blurbs that keep tempting me to put together a "mock them with me" blog entry. Cranked up to 11 bad. Second of all, they distribute the music into outlets that are easy to use, like Amazon/Target and iTunes. I know that if I hear a band's name, I will probably be able to get their music from iTunes. It makes getting music easy and predictable and relatively stress-free.

I know I would give up a lot of possible great material by sticking with Name Brand Label product. Any feasible filter against the vast flowing stream of crap is going to be throwing out a lot of false negatives. The taste of the record labels could not match up with mine exactly. The price of music includes a markup to cover their services. I personally choose to don waders and jump in for myself, into an assortment of polluted streams. But PayPlay.com has 1,731,000 tracks today--who has the time and stomach to go through all of it?

I have no big conclusions here. I just want people to think about this. Middlemen persist because they do add some value to the product as delivered. More music is getting out where it could be heard, but is it completely a victory? Is it working? Or will the market bring a return to some kind of mediation? Because I'm me, I also wonder what the social effects of new ways of screening and distributing music will be.

Meanwhile, I am standing next to one of the many new holes in the old wall against the music horde, trying to decide who gets to come in and who gets the pointy end of my pike.

It is inconceivable that Sony BMG’s new marketing scheme won’t work.

2008-01-09T11:12:00.000-08:00

Just when I was ready to post a fascinating rant about filing Iggy Pop under "P", Sony BMG has come up with a cunning plan that I can't overlook. Music Pass!

Let me summarize this system as I understand it:

You decide you need a music fix, because you are jonesin' for some DRM-free MP3s.
You get up from your computer, gear up, and leave the house.
You go to a Fred's, FYE, Winn-Dixie, Target, or Best Buy.
You buy a lovely Music Pass card for one of the 39-ish available albums (including Barry Manilow, Celine Dion, and JLo!), with the picture of the artist right there on that card. For only $12.99!
You return home to your computer.
You scratch to reveal a code.
You navigate to the Music Pass web site.
You enter your code.
You download the album.

Yeah, that's going to take the music world by storm. It's so much easier and cheaper than using Amazon or burning and re-ripping iTunes tracks. ::eyeroll::

As-yet-unanswered questions: Do these expire? When do the artists get paid: at card sale or at music download? What would happen if they had to withdraw an album from the program? How long will it take before they discover that people who want to download MP3s don't want to go the store to do it? When people run run run from this program, will Sony BMG declare that they have proved that people don't want DRM-free MP3s?

Here's my proposal for Fred's, FYE, Winn-Dixie, Target, and Best Buy: Put some music kiosks right next to your "stick your flash card in here and get pictures printed out" kiosks. It would be simple enough to burn a CD or CD-MP3 on the spot, scribe a label, and spit out a little cover-art sheet, envelopes in a dispenser. With empty jewel cases available for a small price on a nearby shelf. Browsing, sampling, logging on to your "Target partners with CBS/Last.fm" account to get your recommendations on the spot, whatever. They could even integrate with Sony BMG gift cards! Stick the card in and presto-spitto, the album appears.

Cleaning out my music attic

2008-01-08T17:05:00.000-08:00

Oysh, it's been a hell of a week in Amberland. We had a bad hacking gurgly cold running through the household while I was in a migraine cluster. Some fun here, I can tell you.

I resolved to use my days in bed (hacking and gurgling) to listen to music that I haven't played in iTunes yet. The plan was to listen to things I haven't heard in a long time. In practice, I was feeling sorry for myself and mostly listened to things that I have listened to a lot recently, but just not since I started using the iPod and iTunes. Comfort music.

So today, I went down the list of things that have a big blank in the iTunes play count field to see what exactly is in there that I really haven't listened to in a long time. It's a real mixed bag.

Some of it really has me scratching my head. Wynonna Judd? I like country. And western. But full-on Nashville big-hair CW? That is so not my taste. I have a vague memory of getting this, but I can't dig up the dust of a shadow of a memory of why.

I do remember that someone gave me Arrested Development. And then, in a flash of brilliance, concluded that since I had Arrested Development, that meant I would like Dionne Farris. I must have listened to them at least once each, but I can't remember anything on them. That means at least I didn't outright hate them, but I'm not even clear exactly what kind of music they are. Or why I have carried them with me through so many moves.

I do remember the Clannad / Enya phase. I still like the music, but I can't sit through a whole album of it straight through anymore. I also remember buying Andy Summer albums, although the ones I like the best are the ones that I lost in my bad breakup.

I remember buying Johnny Clegg & Savuka. I even remember the store I bought it in. I listened to it again a few months ago and I can't imagine that I was ever moved to buy it. I don't hate it. There is nothing wrong with it. I just does not speak to me at all. It's the same with Live. I have several of their albums, because I knew I ought to like them and kept trying, but they never clicked for me.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band was the victim of my irk at someone else who told me that I would love it but completely mischaracterized the music. I actually special-ordered this one and then put it away in a fit of pique. I should probably listen to it again with fresh ears.

Buggles was a gift. So was Stone Temple Pilots and Soul Asylum. I like them all okay, but I probably wouldn't have bought the albums for myself. I know I have listened to them each more than once, but I can't remember the last times

Some of the albums are particular old favorites that somehow fell off my radar: Bonnie Raitt, David Allen Coe, Robbie Robertson, Lou Reed, Jerry Harrison. I definitely have to put those back into my soundtrack. Maybe Michael Penn, too.

I simply have no idea where the Murmurs or Zap Mama came from. Likewise the Texana Dames and King's X. Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians. I guess it's better to find strange CDs in your rack than to wake up with a stranger, but it's harder to explain. Dropped into my place by sylvan elves who had to clear space in their bowers for all I could say.

Perhaps I should have a yard sale.

Tyranny of the Scrobble

2008-01-02T20:18:00.001-08:00

I spent too much of my holiday weekend thrashing around trying to find a hack to get KPIG playlist extracts into my Last.fm scrobble data. Because I have been avoiding listening to KPIG, because streaming radio doesn't scrobble. And not-scrobbling is bad bad bad ... . headdesk

[Scrobbling is a proprietary technology owned by Last.fm that sucks up your iTunes, WMPLayer, and Last.fm playlists in real time and matches them up with track metadata, and stores everything permanently in your listening profile on their server. Uh, it's a big list of everything you listen to. Except it's not really everything ... ]

In a spasm of clarity, I asked myself just why this was so important.

Last.fm presents itself as a music-specialized social-networking site, and it has those features, but that is not what it brings to the table. The heart of the system is a music-recommending system tied to artist and music info. It looks at your playlist, matches you up with "neighbors" (people who have generally similar listening habits), then recommends artists who are similar to artists you like or who are liked by your neighbors. It also lets you play "radio stations" with tracks from artists similar to one you name, or from your historic playlist, or from your recommendations, or from the playlist of one of your neighbors, and so on. And then it scrobbles those tracks into your profile. (And all this is free--we get back to that point later.)

The quality of music recommendations depends on a lot of things. They have to have useful and accurate information about all the artists. They have to have a good system for matching up similar artists and similar listeners. They have to have a way to distinguish an artist who is played by a few people constantly from an artist who is played by a lot of different people. To work well in general, it has to have a VERY BIG database of scrobbled play data. The more data they have, the better they can build neighborhoods, make recommendations, etc. (Also, the more users they have scrobbling, the more they can persuade artists to give permission for them to stream out their tracks.)

I have no control over any of that. I can only vote with my feet based on how good their recommendations are. But my recommendations also depend a lot on my own play history: more play data, accurately spread across my music preferences will get me better recommendations.

And that is what has been bothering me. Usually at work I listen to RealRadio for hard stuff; KPIG for country, western, and other old-timey stuff; and Batanga.com for Latin stuff. I also do a lot of clicking around to other streaming stations to see what is around. I have been so satisfied with that, I haven't been buying music in those categories, mostly. But if I stream that way, the playlists don't scrobble.

I have found the Last.fm "stations" too narrowly and mechanically programmed for me so far (although I may yet find the magic entry point that will lead to a broader range of artists in one "station"). It is missing the personality and serendipity you get with even corporate radio programming that can lead you into new threads of music. It is good for helping you focus in on one kind of music, but not so much for broadening.

I don't own nearly the range of music that I listen to, so I can't play that range in iTunes, so I can't scrobble that way. And if I stop listening to music from a variety of sources, how will I find the new stuff to scrobble in to my Last.fm profile so I can get good recommendations there so I can find good new stuff? Last.fm will only recommend music of the same general kind(s) as music it has in my profile, so if whole genres never get in there, Last.fm will never recommend any of it.

This is most important for the country, western, old-timey patch of the musical landscape, because it has been a lot harder for me to find new stuff there than in other flavors of music. KPIG has been a godsend for that, so that is how I came to spend the weekend trying to figure out how to trick Last.fm into scrobbling KPIG playlists that I had listened to. No joy, of course.

This is a place where open standards would save us. If there was a standard format for sending and capturing playlist data, then Last.fm could scrobble off of anything. Radio streaming services could deliver play data to my local client, and Last.fm could scrobble away merrily.

There are a lot of reasons why this doesn't happen, and what would get us from here to there is interesting to think about.

But what I was thinking about today was business relationships. Apple has pretty much committed to open iTunes standards, as far as I can tell. Real has pretty much committed to being poopyheads about datasharing, again as far as I can see from my chair. PayPlay.fm apparently has some kind of business relationship with Last.fm, because their recommender can read your Last.fm profile.

It's in the interest of any company like Last.fm to keep the important data flowing only inward, because because all that data is extremely valuable. Their service is not ad-free, but it looks pretty ad-lite, so how are they compensating the artists whose music they stream? What incentives can they give artists to sign on? That has to come out of the value of the data, somehow. How exactly, I don't know, although I could make some good guesses what record labels could mine out of that data. (There is also the specter of shilling--tilting the recommendations to favor artists or labels who pay for that.)

This is not just idle speculation. CBS just bought Last.fm for $280 million. Although the autoscrobbling system is pretty slick and they could well set up their CBS streaming radio stations to support scrobbling, it's not worth that much. CBS was pretty frank that they bought it for the reasons that indusry watchers figured--to get their hands on that mountain of play data.

Music isn't the only kind of data. Think of Google Maps. That's a ginormous database with an nice open interface that Google maintains for free so that they can have the intelligence to put the little ads on the side of my screen. Any one can lay their own application on top of the Google Maps database--Google makes it as easy as possible. Google Maps on my handheld will use real-time GPS data to let me track myself and anyone can make and share Google Earth overlays using GPS data. People are willing to keep putting data into the various ginormous Google databases because Google gives good value back without a lot of arm-twisting. Google can serve up the raw data and sweet clients generously, because they have smart ways behind the scenes of grabbing and using METAdata on how people use that subject data.

So will CBS try to be the Google of music data? Or will they try to make a quick obvious buck and drive everyone away? I am really interested to see how it goes.

In the meantime, I will keep pumping in data and using the Last.fm service as well as I can. If anyone knows how to import a table of play data from a delimited text file into a Last.fm profile, please let me know.

Seeing music on the small screen

2007-12-29T21:10:00.000-08:00

There is something that has bothered me for a good while, a puzzle that I will probably never be able to solve completely. How did I hear so much Motown when I was growing up? And, even more so, how did I hear so much of the Stax and Volt catalogs?

I never thought about it until a few years ago when I was talking to someone about Booker T and the MGs and got off on a sidetrack about Otis Redding. He wanted to know how I had gotten onto that music, since I am thoroughly from the Wonder Bread people. I couldn't answer him. I realized at that moment that I had no idea.

Thinking about it more hasn't gotten me far. Until I was grown up, I never had access to a radio station that played much of that material beyond the biggest Motown hits. I didn't go to concerts outside of the gruesome kind they have on holidays at school. I did hear a lot of Mexican music growing up (because of where I lived), but Stax?

Over the last month or two, I have been thinking more generally about how the ways I find and get music are different now than they were before my enforced hiatus from my usual immersion.

(Side comment: if you are ever in a relationship with someone who will reach across in front of you to turn off your music, even though you listen patiently to his oompah-disco album (and I'm not kidding on that--check out the Dolomiten Sextet if you are brave), that is a BIG RED FLAG that you should run away, because it only goes downhill from that.)

To get a handle on what changed, I have been thinking again about how I did before. I know I have mentioned having a radio all the time, but for a long time, that was a cheap AM radio that didn't pick up much beyond the hit-du-jour pop stations. My parents didn't believe in pocket money, so I wasn't buying a lot of albums. So how did I soak up music before I moved into FM and record stores?

I find myself thinking I must have been MTV generation before MTV. I remember watching every single show with or about music that I could on television: variety shows, award shows, tributes, New Year's Eve shows, specials, everything. I snuck down at night to watch all sorts of late-night small-local-station television (which is where I got my taste for old movies).

I also listened to a lot of movies and figured out who did the music that they played, but I that would have been more of a factor after I hit the age of FM. I also went through the albums of anyone we visited, but that would have been other Wonder Bread people and more reading the album covers than listening to the albums.

And this brings me to the same place I usually finish: how could I have found the music that I know I listened to? Was there really so much cool stuff scattered around on television before MTV brought it together?

This time around, I started doing some aggressive Googling and started to remind myself about things like Otis Redding on American Bandstand, Simon and Garfunkel on Dick Cavett, The Who on The Smothers Brothers. Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin. Flip Wilson. Even Shindig, for crying out loud. And then I started to wonder if MTV (and its kin) really made the availability of music on television worse, killing off competing forms and then getting bored with actual, you know, music.

People talk a lot about variety television coming back, but that doesn't seem ever to go much past the obligatory musical guests on late-night TV.

I have noticed over the last few years that there is music coming back all over television again, but in a different way: turning scenes in programs like extreme sports shows, The OC, CSI:Wherever into de facto music videos. It's good exposure for the music and there are web sites dedicated to listing the songs used in the various episodes. Hear it, like it, talk about it with your friends, buy it. Helps the shows establish their coolness and style, packages the style for the audience.

It almost makes modern episodic television into a low-density version of the old heyday of FM radio, come to think of it. One particularly interesting change from earlier televised music (variety or video) is that the artist is invisible, just like on radio. (The visual style is from the palette of the show, not from the artist.) It is very significant, I think, that this musical programming is appearing on over the air broadcast television. Those channels are available to more people than cable, and since there are fewer such channels, the audience much more heterogeneous than for a cable program. There isn't much music available that way, and the gatekeepers are national corporate functionaries, so there is a lot less chance for diversity and serendipity, but it is an interesting new step in an old direction.

Track-downloading services are also a new step in an old direction (even though I bet no one reading this ever had any old real albums, with individual singles collected into paper sleeves in notebooks), and I have been messing around with those for a while now so I could write about them. I think first I will need to write about what gatekeepers are good for, though. So, more to come.

Now, I'm feeling like some urban grit house music. Time to spin some CSI:NY. (Oh, that reminds me that you should hear what they did to extend "Baba O'Riley" for the opening credits this year--a latin-urban-percussion remix. I'm not sure it works, but it fails in an interesting way.)

Amber on Music

More music watching

Gaga for Go-Go

Link rot isn't new

"Hiatus" sounds so much better than "collapse"

Outsider Love

"I'm Your Moon"

"Chiron Beta Prime"

"Still Alive"

"Baby Got Back"

Dispatch War Rocket Alpha to Bring Back Freddy

She's My Little Earworm

Pocket Pandora

Hand Jive

Sucker Punch

Music Out of Time

Sioux Ghost Dance (Edison, 1894)

Buffalo Dance (Edison, 1894)

Hopi Buffalos/sumi'nangwa 2007 (nativemama, 2007)

Song for a Monday

Roommate Radio

The moment music changed: my MJ tribute

Returning with Glee

"This singing together, this was our power."

The Classics: We Shall Overcome

Old Warhorse Protest: Neil Young

New Dudes: Rage Against the Machine

The Singing Revolution: Estonia

I Am Weary (Let Me Work)

Bands with Split Personalities: Goo Goo Dolls & Spinal Tap

Goo Goo Dolls

Early Goo: "Know My Name"

Late Goo: "Stay With You"

Spinal Tap

Early Tap: "Give Me Some Money" and "(Listen to the) Flower People"

Late Tap; "Hell Hole" and "Big Bottom"

Punt while coughing: Solomon Burke

Yet another fan video of yet another earworm, this time from Josh Turner

Another great television theme and two of its children

Peter Gunn

Original Version

Gratuitous Bettie Page Spanking Video Version

A Remarkable Cover

Mission Impossible

Original Version

Mission Impossible movie

Mission Impossible 2

Law and Order

Original Series

L&O: Criminal Intent

L&O: SVU

The Best TV Theme of All Time (So Far)

1963

2008

Pandora's DNA

Plug of the week: The Last Goodnight

I guess I can't make up my mind

Eclectic Score

Super-Eclectic Score

First you find the haystack

Special tidbit

Let the coolness stream

I'd love to open Pandora's Boxes

Plug of the Week: Soundtrack of Shelter

I mean it. No, this time I really do.

The next showcase for new music? YouTube

Still out fighting the good fight

Talk amongst yourselves

Carla Thomas, "Gee Whiz"

Carla Thomas and Otis Redding, "Knock on Wood"

Does the music wonder what's become of me?

Beautiful Pain

I protest the lack of protest songs!

Plug of the Week: Tom Milsom

Show report: 8/11/2008 at the Ottobar in Baltimore

Doing My Homework

You can't tell me what to do

Taking over the world, one uke at a time

BitTorrent Blues

My Day Of Music