I was listening to Radio Paradise tonight, to take the sting out of the five to nil drubbing that the Sharks received at the hands of the Ducks, and they played Pretty Persuasion. That’s the first time I’d heard the song in years, and it reconfirmed Reckoning as my favorite R.E.M. album. I looked up [...]
bbum on Universal Music Group chieftain Doug Morris calling iPod users thieves: Must be great being in a business where you can so viscerally hate your customers and still make a buck. [ via Michael Rawdon ]
I recently turned my Civic into an iPod case. Navigating an iPod interface while driving isn’t a good idea, and neither is pressing skip over and over, so I need better playlists. Jason Kottke’s discovery rule for things you haven’t heard in a long time (but haven’t skipped.) Andy Budd’s rules for bubbling up newer [...]
I’m a couple of weekends behind on this, so here’s a quick one: Samba vocalist Sawa Kobayashi, covering Guns ‘n’ Rose’s Patience, animated by Scott Bateman.
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society is the house band at 3 Quarks Daily (hey, I need a house band over here at More Like This.) Last month, the band played at a formal ball thrown by the editors of 3 Quarks at Flux Factory in NYC. The Society’s provided MP3′s of the set. If you [...]
Amy Rigby’s one of the best musicians you haven’t heard, and she has a recent compilation out that’s a great introduction to her music. Rigby writes about what it’s like to be single, middle aged, and raising a kid. Her song The Good Girls is a thumping lament about the women who work two full-time [...]
Sasha Frere-Jones: I am guessing, unscientifically, that the internets is a much less terrifying place for people to shop—you don’t have to apologize for wanting a Ralph Towner record, or for missing one of the Sub Pop 7-inches, or for not understanding why Papoose is such a big deal. [ via Lori Selke ]
Cyn picked up a copy of Charlie Does Surf, an album of Clash covers, at the surf show at the Hotel Utah last weekend. I loved RNA’s version of Spanish Bombs. Today’s Salon Audiofile linked an Arabic cover of Rock the Casbah by Rachid Taha. And there’s a project to record covers of every track [...]
Cyn and I went up to the City today to see a “battle of the surf bands show” at the Hotel Utah. We brought back a stack of CDs from the selection the bands were selling. One of them, Pollo Del Mar’s Year of the Rooster, had a cover of Frank Zappa’s jazz-rock anthem Peaches [...]
A joyful version of The Internationale, by Soul Flower Mononoke Summit.
[ via Darcy James Argue ] Neko Case on auto-tune and other dirty secrets of pop music.
We were singing karaoke at a friend’s party last night, making our way through Crocodile Rock when we realize the song has no bridge. Are there other Top 40 pop songs that broke rules about song structure? Also, half of the people singing with us had not heard of Cheap Trick’s Surrender. Disturbing.
I’ve been playing with WolframTones tonight, after finding out about them from Kathryn Cramer. These are little musical compositions created by running a one-dimensional cellular automata, then taking a slice, rotating the slice, and mapping a musical scale to the result. You tweak the result by playing with the generator’s initial conditions, changing the instruments, [...]
[ via Scott Reynen ] A short history of the Amen Break: six seconds of drumming from 1969 now heard everywhere.
[ via Lee Iverson ] Georgia Tech study of iTunes sharing in workplaces: people used their sharing to project an identity. However, when the boss looked in on the sharing, people ‘clammed up.’