I get around!

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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!