Relevant History

Thought of the morning

Amy Winehouse has a genius for taking a simple, usually innocuously positive phrase like "do me good" and make it sound both dirty and promising.

[To the tune of Amy Winehouse, "Do Me Good," from the album Back to Black (I give it 4 stars).]

Unlikely covers

The Guardian music blog is asking readers for their favorite unlikely cover songs:

Now a lot of this will depend on your definition of "unlikely". Certainly, Celtic-funk covers of Leonard Cohen tunes would fit the criteria. As would acoustic versions of Napalm Death. However, I think the range can be more subjective than that (providing you can stand it up, of course). For me, Stevie Wonder's cover of We Can Work It Out would be a good example. He switched the genre, though not dramatically, but the way he reinterpreted the emotions that underpinned the track, from melancholy to near ecstacy, was what made it unlikely.

Here are the first songs that come to my mind:

• Feist, "Inside and Out"
• Stevie Wonder, "Light My Fire"
• Nina Simone, "I Shall Be Released"
• Sting, "Windmills of Your Mind," from The Thomas Crown Affair
• Oleta Adams, "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me"
• Bari Koral, "Midnight Train to Georgia"
• Charlotte Martin, "Wild Horses"
• Emerson Lake and Palmer, "Peter Gunn"
• Grateful Dead, "The Mighty Quinn"
• Stevie Ray Vaughan, "Superstition"

[To the tune of Stevie Wonder, "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours," from the album Natural Wonder (Disc 2) (I give it 4 stars).]

Rare Isotopte Rap

Alpinekat (of the Large Hadron Collider rap) is back, this time with a Rare Isotope Rap:

I'll be very disappointed if this doesn't evolve into a CD.

[h/t to Mask of Eris]

Chantal Kreviazuk, "Far Away"

A couple days ago at the library, I did my usual thing of checking out a couple CDs from familiar artists, and then one at random: Chantal Kreviazuk's "Colour Moving and Still." I still haven't popped in the Van Morrison or Joni Mitchell. I'm still listening to Chantal.

She's somewhat heavily under the influence of Alanis Morissette for much of the album, but even in this second release she's starting to break out on her own. You can especially hear that in this song, "Far Away," particularly in the soaring chorus, which really shows off her fabulous voice.

The video itself ... well, actually it isn't that good, if only because it's like a collision of indie / chanteuse / film school project / fashion model / road grrrl styles, and she never looks like she's really tearing into the song (and just close your eyes and listen-- she does tear into it). Still, I predict my daughter will sing this at the Peninsula rock concert next year, if she doesn't opt for Sarah McLachlan's "Worlds on Fire."

(And what's happening in Canada? Why do they turn out these amazing women singers? K. D. Lang, Tori Amos (I think), Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Kathleen Edwards, Feist, and Kreviazuk are all from Canada.)

Though so far as I know, she hasn't been on Sesame Street yet. Advantage Feist.

[To the tune of Chantal Kreviazuk, "Souls," from the album Colour Moving And Still (I give it 3 stars).]

Stop what you're doing, and listen to Feist's "Inside and Out"

Yesterday I was lamenting the fact that the Bee Gees' work is under-appreciated these days, that people are too distracted by the falsetto singing and the disco beats-- which have hardened like an amber around a lot of good music-- to recognize the great craft underneath.

I just discovered a brilliant exception to this rule: Feist's cover of their "Inside and Out."

Feist - Inside And Out
Uploaded by beautifulcynic - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

It may be even better than the original. Certainly it's one of those covers that is a really interesting mix of classic and very contemporary elements. Actually, it reminds me of the work of Japanese soul singer Misia, who for my money makes Celine Dion look (and sound) like Suzanne Vega:

Listening to ABBA

When someone who has really interesting taste tells me I'm wrong in an artistic judgment, I've found, it's smart to listen to them. So when a friend argued that ABBA's work is much better than I credited, I thought... well, actually I thought "That's nuts, but she was right about the whole Sagmeister thing, so let's give this a try anyway." So I loaded it only my iPhone, and switched it on while working on a report on technology use and distractibility (appropriately enough).

Once you kind of listen past the disco motifs-- which make it easy to dismiss what can be some great music, as I discovered a few years ago when I rediscovered the Bee Gees-- I started hearing some good stuff. This pretty much goes without saying, but if you wanted one really brilliant example of Europop, this would be it: the way they melded stylistic elements from across the Continent is actually pretty impressive. You might argue that this kind of mixing is inauthentic, but I'm hardly one to defend purity, cultural or otherwise: the world belongs to us hybrids, and perfect examples of cultural forms are only to be found in museums or under the microscope of dissertations. Vibrant culture doesn't work that way, and there's no reason balalaikas or pan pipes can't get along with Moog synthesizers and Stratocasters. (Though it's interesting that there's lots of Latin elements, but virtually nothing Celtic, which is now the great World Music Signifier Du Jour. I guess Ireland wasn't on the musical map in the 1970s the way it is now.)

More surprising to me is that some of the songs are better-written than I remembered. "One of Us" is very nice (I could imagine someone like Charlotte Martin doing a good cover of it, though of course she'd make it sound like Kate Bush had done it first), and "Dancing Queen," for all its apparent lightness, has a nice build to the chorus, and the lyrics are a bit more provocative than you might expect in a song whose chorus rhymes "seventeen" and "tambourine." None of it is music that I'd insist on turning off or forwarding through.

On the downside, I think the singing is not very strong at all: neither Agnetha Fältskog nor Anni-Frid Lyngstad had a great range, nor were they especially passionate performers, compared to, say, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks (to say nothing of the Dixie Chicks). Listening to "S.O.S." or "The Name of the Game," I don't really get a sense of them pouring much of themselves into the song. On the other hand, this may be a misunderstanding on my part: maybe they weren't ever trying to be Kate Bush or Tori Amos or Amy Winehouse (each of whom in their own way is absolutely distinctive, technically accomplished, and exudes a kind of take-no-prisoners attitude to their work), but succeeded brilliantly at being something else-- accessible and well-tuned to each other's sound. (It also turns out they didn't hate each other.) We can't all be Aretha Franklin. Maybe it was amazingly shrewd to not even try.

"Thank You for the Music" suggested something else to me: maybe I shouldn't listen to ABBA as disco or rock, but something more like theatre music. You'd have a hard time making a Broadway musical using Radiohead, but the way ABBA crafted its songs reminds me more of Les Miserables (or maybe some of the music in Cirque de Soleil, which I hold in pretty high regard) than anything. "Money, Money, Money" might as well have been written for the stage. (No wonder "Mamma Mia" is popular: for a song like "Dancing Queen," it's a very short distance from disco to stage-- where it always belonged in the first place.

The challenge is that this is music that's easy to dismiss today, but it doesn't deserve to be forgotten, any more than 19th century architecture deserved the fate it suffered at the hands of modern critics. In some ways, ABBA may be a bit like Mies van der Rohe's work or Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin:" well-done, but easy to copy very badly, and tarnished by time and poor imitation. (The distance from "Fernando" to those pan pipe guys whose work was advertised on UHF television stations is not great, but it's not necessarily ABBA's fault.) More generally, underneath the disco beats and big hair there was some serious music in that period, and particularly for those of us who grew up with it, it takes some effort to see what was good in it, rather than just what now seems ridiculous. For me, Duran Duran's best work is still irreplaceable: I defy anyone to listen to "Ordinary World" and not think it's sublime. The Bee Gees were brilliant songwriters, and their best songs-- I think of "Nights on Broadway," "Fanny Be Tender," "Run to Me"-- are beautifully crafted, passionate, and unforgettable. (The problem is that their sound was SO phenomenally distinctive, it made it hard for them to be copied: the whole falsetto thing was really easy to parody, and easier to ignore. If ABBA was the Mies of 1970s pop, the Bee Gees are Eero Saarinen.)

As someone said, you should never be too cool for your own past-- if only because your past, or pieces from it, may turn out to be cooler and more worthwhile than you remember. So the ABBA goes on the kids iPods. And it'll stay on mine.

Please rise for the national anthem

Singing Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" with the Bell Brothers.

via flickr

And man, do I need to replace that shirt, which is an artifact of my previous body. Maybe I should ignore the credit limit, take a weekend in San Francisco, and Just Do It. I currently have two pairs of jeans and a black jacket that actually fit; everything else ranges from oversized, to cavernous, to drapery.

Bell Brothers playing "Round Here"

At Cafe Zoë.

Introducing my daughter to chai latte

Just before the Bell Brothers concert. I ordered a small chai latte, and each of the kids wanted a taste. They ended up drinking about 2/3 of it.

So I bought myself another one, and they drank a lot of that, too.

Nonetheless, I figure that even with buying them dinner there, dessert, and drinks, it was less expensive than going to the movies or Great America or any other place we normally go that doesn't have a family membership.

Bell Brothers at Cafe Zoë

A local band appearing at my favorite cafe.

Great literal moments in music video

My friend Jess made this "Great Moments in Literal Video," but will probably be too modest to talk it up (even though she's The Onion Girl and one of the geniuses behind Sad Guys on Trading Floors).

I'm especially gratified to see lots of bands that I recognize from my youth-- Tears for Fears, Billy Idol, a-ha. It warms my heart.

Though I have to confess it was only with the end of the Creed video, and the line "I need Bruce Willis" that I began to suspect it was a joke. Once we got to the Beatles I was clear, but it just goes to show how little I've listened to rock on the radio in the last, oh, fifteen or so years.

Astronaut and Red Carpet Massacre

Tonight at our local public library, while the kids were busy with their errands-- my daughter needed books on sea turtles, and my son is obsessed with the Bone graphic novels-- I wandered over to the grown-up music and movie section. The idea of being able to rent-- I mean, check out-- DVDs and CDs for free is kind of mind-boggling, and as someone who can spend hours trawling the Internet Archive for multiple versions of "Little Wing" or comparing the 87 Grateful Dead performances of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," it could be kind of a dangerous thing.

I started with two recent Duran Duran CDs, Astronaut and Red Carpet Massacre, largely on the principle that I would never, ever buy a Duran Duran CD, but recognize that mixed in with the glossy but pointless pop songs is the occasional masterpiece ("Skin Trade" still works as a 4-minute landscape of athletic decadence, and the aching, soaring "Ordinary World" blows me away every time I hear it).

Neither CD is brilliant, but each has its moments. Astronaut's production is smoother (it sounds to me like an entire CD meant to be played during the opening credits of a James Bond movie-- who says the concept album is dead?), and "Reach Up for the Sunrise" and "Point of No Return" are quite good; "Bedroom Toys" is also pleasantly naughty. "Falling Down" on Red Carpet Massacre is pleasantly upbeat.

It'll be interesting exploring this. Learning about three decent songs on two CDs, for free, is a pretty good deal.

Recent musical discoveries

Three music-related things that I've meant to blog about, and will just wrap up together.

More on Charlotte Martin. A couple weeks ago I discovered something I had downloaded from the Internet Archive but never listened to: a cover of "Wild Horses" by Charlotte Martin. Actually listening to it, and appreciating her amazing solo performance-- it takes guts to sing a song that well-known just with your piano, and to sing a good part of it a capella-- led me, in short order, to download a bunch of her other concerts, and finally two of her CDs, Stromata and On Your Shore.

She has a lot of great songs, but I keep coming back to three (in addition to "Wild Horses"). One is "Four Walls," which you can check out through the Internet Archive. The second is "Limits of Our Love." Everyone has influences, and it's clear that Martin's biggest is Kate Bush. What fascinates me about "Limits" is that opens with a rhythm track that's audaciously similar to the beginning of "Running Up That Hill." (In fact, she performs a version of "Limits" that segues into "Running.") If it takes one kind of guts to make "Wild Horses" your own, it takes another kind to write a song that so clearly references your hero's most famous song-- but then heads in a very different direction.

Finally there's "Just Before Dawn," ethereal and eerie song that sounds like something by Henryk Gorecki. it's a reminder that yes, Martin studied opera in college.

Steve Ross. A friend who chants with him (she's very Southern California) recommended Ross' work to me. I know nothing about this kind of music, but I find it surprisingly accessible: Ross is a studio musician of some note (he played with all four of the Beatles, as well as Fleetwood Mac and other household names) before turning to yoga and chanting. I expected something like Ravi Shankar, but this is more like a cross between chant and Christopher Cross-- in a good way. The live version of "Bolo Bolo" is especially outstanding.

Economist on music and evolution. The Economist has a long essay on the current thinking on evolution and music.

What appetite drives the proliferation of music to the point where the average American teenager spends 1½-2½ hours a day—an eighth of his waking life—listening to it?... The Shakespearean theory, that music is at least one of the foods of love, has a strong claim to be true. The more mellifluous the singer, the more dexterous the harpist, the more mates he attracts.

A second idea that is widely touted is that music binds groups of people together. The resulting solidarity, its supporters suggest, might have helped bands of early humans to thrive at the expense of those that were less musical.

Both of these ideas argue that musical ability evolved specifically—that it is, if you like, a virtual organ as precisely crafted to its purpose as the heart or the spleen. The third hypothesis, however, is that music is a cross between an accident and an invention. It is an accident because it is the consequence of abilities that evolved for other purposes. And it is an invention because, having thus come into existence, people have bent it to their will and made something they like from it.

Charlotte Martin

Whatever you're doing, stop it, and go listen to this Internet Archive concert by singer Charlotte Martin. Her version of the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" (mp3) is extraordinary.

Many of her other songs sound (in a good way) like Kate Bush or Tori Amos, but her straightforward delivery makes "Wild Horses" her own. As unexpected as Dar Williams' blow-off-the-doors version of "Comfortably Numb."

"Four Walls" is really terrific, too.

Future Sound of London

Very cool.

Forget Herman Kahn and scenarios. This is what futurists should aspire to create. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, the last generation of futurists told the future to you. The next generation will feel the future at you.

Fourteen versions of "Little Wing"

[Recently I came looked for this piece that I'd published on Future Now in 2005. Since Future Now has moved, I decided to repost it here.]

One of my all-time favorite songs is Sting's version of the classic Jimi Hendrix song "Little Wing," which he recorded on Nothing Like the Sun. (The solo by Hiram Bullock is one of the very best performances in the crowded rock pantheon of great guitar work.) It's also very different from the two best-known versions of the song, Hendrix's original and Derek and the Dominos' cover (each of which is very different from the other), much jazzier and quieter.

This evening, after a long meeting at my kids' school, I visited the Internet Archive's Live Music archive, and looked around for other versions of "Little Wing." The Internet Archive is a pretty remarkable resource: it has several thousand Grateful Dead concerts, for starters, and every song in the archive is free. Turns out there are about 50, recorded all around the U.S., spanning more than a decade, by a bunch of bands you've probably never heard of.

So I now have a playlist on my iPod that consists of nothing but different covers of "Little Wing:" acoustic folksy version, hard-edged blues versions, versions that were clearly derived from the Hendrix performance, versions that were clearly derived from the Derek and the Dominos (there are almost dueling interpretive schools devoted to this single song).... I could listen to the same song-- and yet not quite the same song-- for about three hours.

Oh, and I bought one version on iTunes, the Corrs' intimate, Celtic-inflected cover.

Strange? Slightly obsessed? Perhaps (and just the kind of behavior you want in a researcher). But I think the Internet Archive, and the relationship between its offerings and what's available on commercial services, tells us something about the future of user-created content and its relationship to more conventional media.

Blogs are not going to compete with newspapers; cell phone cameras aren't going to replace photojournalists; and the Internet Archive's music database isn't going to kill iTunes. Ultimately, they're going to occupy different niches, and play off each other, because user-created media is going to be best at capturing performances, events, conversations, and other things you might think of as valuable ephemera: things that can be quite worth preserving, but have an element of unpredictability about them.

For me, a great example is conference talks. There are lots of really mediocre conference talks, and some terrible ones; but there are some that are great, and a few that generate some terrific discussions afterwards. But what happens to that moment, or to those conversations? In the past, if you were lucky, the people who were in the room would remember what a great job you did, and how engaged and excited everyone was by your performance and the ideas that were generated. Now, though, thanks to the miracle of conference blogging, it's relatively easy to both record and retrieve such moments-- and to build on them later.

Likewise, 99.99% of cell phone camera pictures won't be newsworthy; even mobs of users aren't likely to put any photojournalists out of work. But they can have three virtues. One is immediacy-- the sense, reinforced by the very amateurishness of the production, that You Are There. Another is multiplicity-- having lots of cameras providing multiple perspectives on a single event. Third, and most important over the long run, is simple presence: just being at an event that a reporter isn't).

The same relationship will hold for music on sites like the Internet Archive. There are a million phenomenal concerts that live on in the memories of the people who were there, but are never heard by the rest of the world. To take one example more or less at random, one song I recently downloaded is a cover of "I Shall Be Released" by a performance by a folk/bluegrass/etc. band named Cornmeal, recorded at a memorial concert for a friend of theirs. I have no idea who the band is, and don't know if I'll go back and get more of their music, but this version of "I Shall Be Released," played in memory of a friend and fellow musician, is tremendous-- one of those small moments that deserves to be preserved. ABC will cover a presidential press conference, no matter how dull it is; on the other hand, Sony Music is never going to record a show in some small club in San Francisco (not to mention Asheville, Williamstown, Eugene, Biloxi, Austin, Lower Merion...), no matter how good it is. Likewise, Marcus Eaton's acoustic version of "Little Wing," or any of Zero's more free jazz/bluesy versions, aren't going to replace Derek and the Dominos: an individual performance may be terrific, and it's interesting to see how different artists reinterpret the same song, but Eaton and Zero need the classic recordings to, as it were, play off of.

All the talk of blogs replacing newspapers, or bottom-up media destroying top-down media, is wrong. Each can do things well that the other cannot; and ultimately they'll end up complementing each other more than they compete.

internet, memory, music

The tangled history of "Sweet Lullaby"

Michael Nielsen points to a really interesting 2004 post by Ethan Zuckerman at My Heart's in Accra about the song "Sweet Lullaby," its tangled origins and history, and the challenge that "field recordings" now present as both cultural and legal objects.

“[F]ield recordings” have gotten a great deal more troublesome in recent years. My friend Bernard Woma is one of West Africa’s leading balafon players.... In the mid-1990s, one of the best ways to hear Bernard play live was to visit him at Nandom House in the Mamobi neighborhood of Accra. After church on Sundays, Bernard and friends would drink pito (a homemade millet beer), eat bean cakes and play traditional Bewaa-style xylophone music. One Sunday in November 1996, Mark Seidenfeld approached Bernard and asked for permission to make a field recording of one of these [informal Sunday afternoon] sessions. Bernard, nice guy that he is, agreed.

On one of his subsequent trips to the US, Bernard’s friends told him how much they’d enjoyed his new CD, “Live at the Pito Bar”. Seidenfeld had gotten in touch with John Zorn’s Avant record label, who, fascinated by the polyrhythms of Bernard’s playing, agreed to release the album. The resulting CD credits Seidenfeld as the producer, Zorn as executive producer, assorted engineers and associate producers… but doesn’t list Bernard or any of the other performers. Oh, and Bernard didn’t get paid, either. Nor did he given permission for the recording to be released commercially.

Perhaps the folks at Avant/Disk Union assumed that, as a “field recording” of “traditional” music, they had no obligations to the performer. But... Bernard’s got a website, a hotmail address and a teaching position at SUNY Fredonia. And while Bernard plays in a traditional style, many of the pieces he plays are original compositions.... And the liner notes imply that the unique sound of Dagara xylophone is the product of pito-fueled drunken frenzy, rather than the product of a sophisticated musical culture.

music, anthropology

Possibly the most dangerout thing on the Internet

Massive Music Quiz. Be very afraid.

Recovering my digital life

Sunday night, as I was putting my son to bed, my hard drive died. We were listening to Dobie Gray's classic "Drift Away" (my children are strangely familiar with classic rock) when my computer suddenly froze. When I tried to restart, instead of the happy Mac face, the screen displayed a folder with a question mark.

Not good.

The next day at work, our IT guy confirmed the problem: there had a been a hardware failure in my hard drive, and it was now toast. He could put back some of the lost data, but I was going to be on the hook for whatever software I'd put on the machine, as well as my music.

So I've spent a fair amount of this week reconstructing my life, and making sure that the next time this happens, I'm better prepared. Hours downloading software, trying to remember passwords to countless Web 2.0 accounts, configuring things so they look familiar. Some things weren't hard, but I still haven't gotten some things worked out. Didn't Ecto have a button that showed what music you were listening? If it's in the new version of Ecto, I can't find it.

Reconstructing my music collection has been hardest. Part of the problem is that it's just so big: 6000+ songs, over 30 GB of material, and of course many of the songs I listen to most are things I bought on the iTunes store. I've been pretty good at backing things up, but it had been a month or so since I'd last saved my purchases, so there was that gap to deal with.

The iTunes music import process is okay, but not great. Most important, when I reimported music from my backup drive, my ratings and play count were stripped out. This may sound trivial, but most of my smart playlists sort music based either on my ratings or the popularity of songs; so losing this information was a big thing.

Tonight, though, I discovered a program that seems able to restore that missing information: something called Senuti. It lets you copy music from your iPod to your computer, and it handles metadata much better than anything else I've tried (even Apple's own process).

This may be the first case where losing my ability to do data-mining on myself really hurt. Normally we think of the data we've created, or the programs we use, as the most valuable parts of out digital archive; but for my music, having information about what and how I've listened really matters.

itunes, music, software

Awesomest song ever

I don't wanna tell you how to do your job, but... could you make the logo bigger?

[thanks to Jess and Mike]

[To the tune of Steve Bassett, "No Good for Her," from the album "Unreleased".]

Technorati Tags: advertising, music

Italian Steely Dan cover band

While doing... actually, I don't remember what I was doing... I came across a slightly mind-blowing Italian Steely Dan cover band, Lucrezio de Seta and his Scurvy Brothers. Their cover of "Kid Charlemagne" is pretty interesting.

[To the tune of Steely Dan, "Kid Charlemagne (Live)," from the album "Alive in America".]

Look out Amy Winehouse

This Japanese McDonalds commercial, featuring what looks like a Japanese girls' do-wop group that watched Memoirs of a Geisha once too many times, seems weird in so many ways....

This kind of thing is pretty much all my brain is good for tonight.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Shhh / Peaceful," from the album "The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: Japan

Lady Blue

This evening, while browsing the iTunes store, I rediscovered a song I once loved and probably haven't heard in about 30 years: Leon Russell's "Lady Blue."

There are some songs from that period that I've pretty much had access to constantly, either because they've never gone out of circulation or fashion (you can always find Elton John, the Beatles, Doobie Brothers, Yes, Billy Joel, and David Bowie), or because for some strange reason I always managed to have their albums (Sea Level's "Cats on the Coast" isn't exactly a household name, nor is the 3-disc ELP live album, but I don't think I've ever been without either of them since I was 13). But the long tail of my musical adolescence, the songs that I never owned and which didn't become fixtures on the radio, eventually disappeared.

Forgetting these songs is tough because the most powerful memories of my childhood aren't of places or people: they're of music. I can only vaguely recall  several of the houses (or apartments or trailers) I lived in, and only a few more of the people I went to school with. But I can vividly recall a lot of the music from my adolescent years, and I find that I listen to those songs with the same intensity that I did when I was a kid. So rediscovering a song that I haven't heard is like getting back a little bit of memory.

For me, that's been the brilliant thing about iTunes: the catalog and pricing scheme (and the search functionality) have let me reconnect with a lot of those songs, in a way that would have been otherwise inconceivable.

And Leon Russell's work in the 1970s was pretty amazing, by the way.

[To the tune of Leon Russell, "Lady Blue," from the album "Will o' the Wisp".]

Technorati Tags: itunes, memory, music

Mouse with iPod

Another ho a long line of my daughter's iPod creations.

Quote of the day

Imagine a world in which most of the intelligent and well-educated people are unable to read. When it comes to music, that's the world we live in. (Andrew Ford, writing on Beethoven's late quartets, in the Sydney Morning Herald)

[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "Strykkwartet no.14 op.131 in cis kl.t., ," from the album "Quartet No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, Opus 131".]

iTunes pricing strangeness

I was listening to "Not Now John" from Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, and wondered how much the rest of the album cost. So I clicked on the album name, and the CD came up on iTunes: $7.99.

Wow! Pretty good, even though I already bought one of the songs.

A few minutes later, I went back and looked at it again, only this time I did a search for "pink floyd final cut." This time, it was $11.99. Same album.

Naturally, I retraced my steps that first led me to the $7.99 version. There it was again. I haven't listened to the whole thing in years-- I bought a copy in Japan in the summer of 1983, and haven't had a turntable since 1994 at the latest-- but I bought it.

Technorati Tags: itunes

Dance of the 19th-century American baked goods/health fads

Today in the car, we were listening to Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. About a minute into it, my son said, "Hey! I recognize this! It's from the Graham Cracker!"

My daughter, who's been an angel, gingerbread, and soldier in the ballet in question, corrected him. "No! It's the Nutcracker."

"Well, I knew it was something with crackers," my son said.

Christgau goes to Graceland

The other night I came across a phenomenal review that Robert Christgau wrote of Paul Simon's classic album Graceland in 1986.

Though it's giving in to the album's most suspect tendencies to begin this way, I'm here to tell you that Paul Simon's Graceland is a tremendously engaging and inspired piece of work. If you like him thorny it's his best record since Paul Simon in 1972, if you like him smooth you can go back to There Goes Rhymin' Simon in 1973, and either way you may end up preferring the new one. Simon-haters won't be won over--his singing has lost none of its studied wimpiness, and he still writes like an English major. But at least Graceland gets you past these usages, because it boasts (Artie will never believe this) a bottom.  For Simon, this is unprecedented. Graceland is the first album he's ever recorded rhythm tracks first, and it gives up a groove so buoyant it could float a loan to Zimbabwe.

Alas, that last line is still all too timely....

Amy Winehouse

I've recently been listening a lot to Amy Winehouse. I heard one of her songs-- the unapologetically ribald "You Know I'm No Good"-- on the flight to Singapore, and recently found a note about the song in the margins of my notebook. Some of her songs are just okay, but the best ones are jaw-dropping: like Oleta Adams or Jessica Andrews, she has a capacity to deliver astonishing performances, embedded in a sonic mix of soul, reggae, mbaqanga, and electronic (a combination that reminds me, of all unexpected things, of some of Bruce Cockburn's work). Really something.

[To the tune of Amy Winehouse, "You Sent Me Flying," from the album "Frank".]

As the father of a Star Wars fanatic, I appreciate this

U2 singer Bono was knighted yesterday. He told reporters that his youngest son "was disappointed that his dad was not presented with a Star Wars light saber."

"He thought I was becoming a Jedi," Bono said.

[To the tune of Hermeto Pascoal, "Intocável," from the album "Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer".]

Technorati Tags: music

Weird musical space

The last couple days I've added some really outstanding music to my collection, but it's a strange combination of stuff.

First, two albums by The Band, Music from Big Pink and The Band. I can't believe I didn't grow up with these, and have them memorized by the time I was in high school. I've long had The Band's greatest hits, but somehow their most popular songs manage to not quite be as amazing as songs like "Whispering Pines" and "Tears of Rage." The apparent looseness of the music is very misleading: while it sounds like they treated the beat as an optional thing to be followed now and then, they were very thoughtful in their choices of instruments and arrangements. It's the very definition of genius: music that doesn't call attention to its own complexity, but instead offers you a space to fall into.

Second, just by chance I stumbled upon Sound Tribe Sector 9, an electronic/ambient group that completely blows me away. I discovered Mono and Mogwai not that long ago, and STS9 reminds me partly of those two, but jazzier: some of their work also has overtones of the great Southern jazz group Sea Level (whose Cats on the Coast is tremendous). Their 2004 New Year's Eve show is very, very good. Go check it out.

[To the tune of Sound Tribe Sector 9, "Open E," from the album "2004-12-31 - Tabernacle".]

Aretha

I bought Aretha Franklin's 30 Greatest Hits late last week, and have been listening to it nonstop since. (A sign of how good it is: my seven year-old daughter lingers around the computer whenever I had Aretha on, and even asked to borrow the CDs.) Of course, I've heard Aretha Franklin my whole life, and songs like "Respect" and "Natural Woman" are so familiar as to be almost banal (how many wedding DJs don't play those two songs?).

The remarkable thing about this collection, though, is that it manages to make even those familiar tunes into revelations, by juxtaposing them with great but less well-known songs. Listening to the spine-tingling "Ain't No Way" (this and following links go to iTunes), the exuberant "Wholly Holy," or the eye-opening reworkings of "The Weight" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" puts you in a position to actually hear Franklin's marvelous vocals on "Think" and "I Never Loved a Man." Having a better sense of her work as soul and gospel singer even makes me hear "Who's Zoomin' Who?," which I always regarded as fun in a vampy sort of way, but not a terribly substantial song, as-- underneath the disco arrangement and Donna Summer-like polish-- a worthy successor to "Think."

[To the tune of Aretha Franklin, "Ain't No Way," from the album "30 Greatest Hits [Disc 1]".]

Hey hey my my rock and roll will never die

Yesterday I was in the car with my kids, and I decided to forgo the usual children's music for some Rolling Stones. They've listened to the Stones before-- my son often calls them the Rocking Stones-- but this time they seemed to make a connection to the music that they hadn't before.

Part of it, I think, is that you can sing along to it immediately, since you can't really understand what Mick is saying most of the time. So my son was able to do a credible job singing along to "Gimme Shelter" right out of the gate.

Then when the opening chords of "Sway" (an underrated song from Sticky Fingers) came on, my daughter perked up. "Hey, I love this song!" she said. "This is the Best Song Ever!"

Tonight, they saw a few minutes of the Super Bowl halftime show, and were fairly captivated by Prince. In the car on the way home, my daughter asked, "Do you have any Prince on your iPod?" So we listened to "Purple Rain" and "Pop Life" on the way home.

"What's Prince's real name?" she asked as we were pulling into our driveway.

"I have no idea," I said.

"You could Google it and find out," she suggested.

[To the tune of Peter Frampton, "Do You Feel Like We Do (Live)," from the album "Frampton Comes Alive!".]

Technorati Tags: children, music

My son's first YouTube experience

Last night, as he was going to bed, my son was trying to remember the names of the Beatles. (He's a big Beatles fan.)

So I fired up YouTube, and found their performance of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Sometimes I love the Internet.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Whole Lotta Love," from the album "Box Set (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: beatles

I hate when that happens

The Man can't bust our music, but he can-- actually, I won't ruin the punch line.

Technorati Tags: humor

My evening, my iPod

I spent a good part of this evening working on restoring my iPod, which mysteriously freaked out earlier today. After about twenty restarts, three attempts at restoring the software on it, and three different attempts to reload my music on it, it finally is back to the state it was supposed to be in at 3:30 this afternoon, when I started all this mess.

Presumably there was some random disk partition problem, or something got corrupted. I just hope it's not a hardware problem. Much as I love the idea of the new iPods, I'm more in love with the idea of not being $400 poorer.

[To the tune of Elton John, "Bennie and the Jets," from the album "Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: ipod

I knew I should have taken that right turn at Albuquerque

I fired up iTunes this evening, clicked on the "iTunes Store" icon... and am now connected to the Japanese store.

Unfortunately, I can't buy anything (I am still in the States), which is too bad, because I'd happily buy the entire Misia catalog (link goes to Japanese iTunes store-- it may not work for you).

Hey... there's a group called Bump of Chicken.

Okay, that was worth it.

[To the tune of Bump of Chicken, "Bench to Coffee," from the album "Jupiter".]

Technorati Tags: itunes, Japan, music

It's nice to have a steady gig

The Mercury News has an article on the 5th anniversary of the debut of the iPod. It starts with a quote from Creative Strategies' Tim Bajarian, and includes the following:

"The iPod is the first glimmer of a future in which we will have very small devices that let us carry around tons and tons of information,'' said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director for the non-profit Institute for the Future. "That will have an affect on the way people relate to their pasts, and the way media serves as a source for shaping their identifies.''

The number of times Tim and I have been quoted in the same article is scary. Actually, he gets quoted all the time. I should say, the odds that I'll get quoted in an article-- especially an article about anything Apple-related-- and he won't are very, very small.

I really thought another line I tossed out-- "People carry the Walkman, but they wear the iPod; there's all the difference in the world"-- would make it into the article. But hey.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "This Boy," from the album "Anthology 1 (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: ipod, ubicomp

A punch-up at a carbon trading market

From the Guardian:

The boredom caused by endless hours on the tour bus and a succession of anonymous hotel rooms are well known problems, but rock stars on tour now have something else to grumble about: the environmental impact.

Thom Yorke, singer with Radiohead, yesterday hit out at the "ridiculous" use of energy by such events, and threatened to stop playing far-flung destinations if steps were not taken to reduce carbon emissions.

He said: "The way that tours are structured now and the way it works is a ridiculous consumption of energy ... I would consider refusing to tour on environmental grounds, if nothing started happening to change the way the touring operates."

Unlike bands such as the Rolling Stones and Coldplay, Radiohead do not offset the carbon emissions caused by their tours, because they are not convinced of the environmental benefits of such schemes, which claim to make activities carbon-neutral by planting trees or investing in renewable energy projects.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "A Punch Up At A Wedding (No No No No No No No No)," from the album "Hail To The Thief".]

Technorati Tags: carbon trading, environment, music, Radiohead

New iTunes

Downloaded the new version of iTunes today. The icons are a bit different, but the cool new thing is the ability to have iTunes download artwork for music you upload, not just songs you get from iTunes.

It seems to have a little trouble with older jazz CDs, which isn't that surprising; and for some reason there's nothing for Paul McCartney's All the Best, which is mystifying.

[To the tune of Paul McCartney, "No More Lonely Nights," from the album "All the Best".]

Technorati Tags: itunes

Showtime?

Just tried to visit the iTunes store. There's a page that says, "It's Showtime," and the service is being updated. Fascinating.

[To the tune of 2Pac, "Secretz Of War (Featuring Outlawz)," from the album "Resurrection".]

Technorati Tags: ipod, itunes

Give me that old time rock and roll

A few weeks ago I made a Beatles CD for my son. I included an alternate take of "A Hard Day's Night" from the Anthology 2 CD, a rehearsal that has a nice, hard edge to it (and Paul forgets the lyrics at one point).

He loved it, and also the couple live tracks I wedged on the disc. They've now replaced Princess and the Pauper and various Sesame Street CDs as his favorite nighttime music. Believe me, it's a step forward.

But after listening to the live version of "Ticket to Ride" fifty times in a week, I decided it was time for something new. So I ordered the Live at the BBC discs. They're quite fascinating. They're like the Beatles giving a guided tour of the early history of rock and roll. And it's really fascinating to hear how far the Beatles evolve between 1962 and 1970: early on, you'd think they were a talented rock and roll band, but you wouldn't peg them for Most Creative Group of the Decade.

Of course, now my son is humming along to covers of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the occasional show tune. Still, it beats yet "C is for Cookie."

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Sweet Little Sixteen," from the album "Live at the BBC (Disc 2)".]

The hive mind stops making suggestions to Steven Hawking, goes back to YouTube*

Via Wonkette, the Ted Stevens video mashup:

Really good.

[*Decode the reference!]

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "Truckin'," from the album "1973-12-19 - Curtis Hixon Convention Hall, Tampa FL".]

Technorati Tags: humor, internet, music, policy

Ted Stevens remixed

Sen. Ted Stevens' "the Internet is tubes" remark last week have been remixed by Boldhead. It's pretty great.

[via Alternet and Firedoglake]

[To the tune of Paul Holcomb, "DJ Ted's Techno Tubes," from the album "The Bold Headed Broadcast".]

Technorati Tags: humor, internet, music, policy, politics

WolframTones

WolframTones is unquestionably one of the stranger, cooler things I've run across recently.

WolframTones is an experiment in applying Wolfram's discoveries [described in his 2002 book A New Kind of Science] to the creation of music.

At the core of A New Kind of Science is the idea of exploring a new abstract universe: a "computational universe" of simple programs. In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram shows how remarkably simple programs in his "computational universe" capture the essence of the complexity--and beauty--of many systems in nature.

WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram's computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story--and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.

Some of the music is pretty weird-- like Steve Reich or John Cage on a bad day-- but you can play around a lot with it, adding instruments, changing the tempo, etc.. Lots of fun.

Technorati Tags: emergence, music

Let the Eagle Soar

What the Internet was made for: video of John Ashcroft's "Let the Eagle Soar."

Technorati Tags: humor

Django Reinhardt

In Kepler's Books, while buying a Valentine's Day gift for my wife, I got a Django Reinhardt CD. Reinhardt makes regular, if brief, appearances in Alan Furst's books-- people put him on the Victrola while having a drink before dinner, or he's playing in the background in some smoke-filled brasserie whose walls are stained amber from years of patrons' cigarettes.

So far, I'm not sure what's special about him, or what sets him apart from countless other jazz guitarists of the 1930s. He's good, not question; but why is he timeless? Not clear yet. Must keep listening, I guess.

iPod is back

We seem to be back to normal down. I did a sync, and all is well.

Thank heavens.

[To the tune of The Blue Nile, "Tinseltown In The Rain," from the album "A Walk Across the Rooftops".]

Technorati Tags: ipod, London

iPod problem

UAL 954, over Canada. Just tried to play one of my playlists, and my iPod is refusing to play any of the songs from the iTunes store. It seems to play everything else just fine, and I can still play them on my Powerbook.

Subtracting those songs only leaves me with about 4200 songs to listen to, but needless to say, this is a Troubling Development. They include some of my absolute favorite songs, and of course I paid good money for them.

Not the sort of thing you want to have happen, especially on the road.

The one unusual thing I've done to the iPod recently is update the OS. I wonder if that wiped out the permissions? That would be a bug, not a feature.

Technorati Tags: ipod, itunes, travel

More crazy deliciousness

Two 11 year-olds do their own version of the insta-classic "Lazy Sunday" video.

A great example of how tools like iMovie lower the bar for media creation.

[To the tune of Billy Joel, "Captain Jack," from the album "Greatest Hits Vol. 1 (Disc 1)".]