Category: Music

On an Island

A friend of mine recently asked for some suggestions of good music to add to his library. I gave him some of my current favorites, which are far from classics. But I got to thinking about my own music… My iTunes library has over 8,500 songs containing music from about 1934 to March 2007. If I were to hit “play” right now, it would keep playing for 31 days without stopping or playing the same song twice. I’m impulsive, so that’s why I carry an 80GB iPod on me so that I can listen to any of it on demand. Before such technology was available to me, I was just as impulsive, so I would take a huge 250-CD wallet with me on roadtrips.

But there’s no way that I’m listening to that much on a regular basis. I will bet that I listen to less than 5% of my music library in any given week. So I started thinking about how I could simplify my collection. I have a lot of stuff that’s just “so-so”, and I wouldn’t buy today were I given the choice. So what is the good stuff? What do I listen to all the time?

What would I do if the tables were turned and I didn’t have an 80GB iPod, 500GB external hard drive, or a 250-CD wallet?

What would I do if I were stranded on an island with only 12 CDs in a tiny case, and that music had to be so good that it wouldn’t make me go crazy or get bored of it? What is the most significant music created in the last 85 years that we’ve had recording technology?

Easy.

Kind of Blue
Kind of Blue– Miles Davis (1959)

A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme – John Coltrane (1964)

Highway 61 Revisited
Highway 61 Revisited – Bob Dylan (1965)

Tommy
Tommy – The Who (1969)

Abbey Road
Abbey Road – The Beatles (1969)

Dark Side of the Moon
Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd (1974)

One From the Vault
One From the Vault – Grateful Dead (Live show 8/13/1975)

Aja
Aja – Steely Dan (1977)

Metallica
Metallica (aka the Black Album) – Metallica (1991)

Crash
Crash – Dave Matthews Band (1996)

Californication
Californication – Red Hot Chili Peppers (1999)

Frances the Mute
Frances the Mute – The Mars Volta (2005)

Yes, I skipped the ’80s. Yes, I am biased towards classic and prog rock. And music between between 1964 and 1977. But it’s just my opinion, it’s not definitive, and had I stuck with it, I would have saved hundreds by not buying crappier music.

Dirty little secrets

So I would consider myself a music snob, what with the constant whining about DRM and shameless plugs to indie music from eMusic and all.

As a matter of fact, my music collection starts to thin out at about 1994. It’s pretty rare for me to get into a current group (and it’s not that I like that- nothing is more frustrating than getting really into yet another band that has already broken up).

And when I find that I like a current, mainstream group that has songs on the Top 40, I start to wonder if I’m getting enough sleep (in case you were curious, I’m not.)

If, by some freak collision of parallel universes that forms some kind of quantum anti-sonic-judgment irregularity restricted to the boundaries of my body, I like a current pop artist…

Well, you get the idea. It usually involves getting calls from Sheol about something being wrong with the heat.

So anyways, I haven’t admitted it on this blog in almost three years, but I have a dirty little music secret, and her name is Avril Lavigne (please hold your laugter until the end of the post.)

Yes, I know she can’t sing live. The computers that process her voice in the studio sing very well. Maybe I just like her producers. But anyways, back to the point: Avril Lavigne’s new CD, “The Best Damn Thing”, came out.
And it totally sucks. It feels like she took 4 years off of her age and started thinking that boys are all that matter. In other words, she betrayed whatever it was that I saw in her in the first place: a pop artist that showed potential to, in time, be tolerable. Nothing beats the chorus from her first single:

Hey hey, you you
I don’t like your girlfriend
No way, no way
I think you need a new one
Hey hey, you you
I could be your girlfriend

Hey hey, you you
I know that you like me
No way, no way
You know it’s not a secret
Hey hey, you you
I want to be your girlfriend

Or maybe the intro to her album’s title track:

I hate it when a guy doesn’t get the door,
even though I told him yesterday and the
day before…

I hate it when a guy doesn’t get the tab and I
have to pull my money out and that looks bad! (to fully appreciate these lines, you must sing them with the most bratty, preteen whine possible.)

So yeah. If this is a sign of things to come, I’m done with Avril.

But by complete coincidence, I happened to be downloading e-Sword,  an excellent free bible study tool. The project is handled by one guy named Rick Meyers. So I’m poking around his link page to see if there’s anything else worth downloading. And he drops this bomb:

OK, a shameless plug for my daughter 😉

Krystal’s debut album was released June 7th 2005 and had 4 top 10 hits including a #1! Her latest CD promises to do even better.

Click on the CD to the left to visit her web site…

I think, um… #1? Top 10 hits? I might not listen to top 40 radio, but I recognize the names… And Krystal Meyers is not one of them. I decided to click out of pure curiosity. (The last time I saw a “Christian” site link to their daughter’s CD, it turned out to be some freaky Neo-Nazi thing with three blonde-hair, blue eyed girls singing about white supremacy – creepy.)

So enter Krystal Meyers:
Krystal Meyers
(I know. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. But this one has no known ties to the third reich. And she loves Jesus.)

So one thing led to another…. A few streams and myspace visits later, I downloaded her latest album.

It’s poppy. It’s not “high art” for music by any means. She probably doesn’t write most of her own lyrics, and I hear that she can’t sing live either. It’s another Christian album that thinks a “Christian album” is made up with The Magic Formula: 50% songs about dealing with typical teen temptations, 40% general, nonspecific songs about how God is her only reliable foundation, and 10% songs about just having fun.

But for some reason that defies all paths of logical reasoning available to me at 1:50 AM, I like it.

And then I see the fan reviews and press hype… Yep, she’s being marketed as the “Christian Avril Lavigne”.

Crap. I fell for it.

Please don’t tell Steve Kimock. Or Spearhead. Or Ozomatli.

Blast!

So my birthday present to myself was a brand-new Pearl PowerShifter double bass drum pedal. I’ve been holding off on this for about three years, because of the bad rap I’ve given double pedals (you see, they turned metal and prog rock into almost complete crap over the last 15 years). But some still know how to use a double bass appropriately, and they can make a fill burn in the right spot.

So I got one. It even works with my V-Drums and everything.

Now if only my left foot weren’t so darn retarded. It’s eight years behind my right foot, and I can’t play anything in sync. I’m sure that my neighbors are learning to hate me.

Awesome show – free download

A torrent of Saturday night’s ripping KVMW (Steve Kimock, Bobby Vega, John Molo, Ray White) show has been uploaded to COtapers.org – I paid for the soundboard tape from digitalsoundboard.net, but even the free audience tape should be good for anyone who likes good rock/blues/funk jam bands.

Get the torrent here while it’s hot and people are still seeding it. If you don’t know about bittorrent, you will need a program to download the show. I like µTorrent best.

This was a great run of shows… So check it out.

Spring Break

So I decided to stay in Colorado for spring break – partly for work, partly for laziness, partly for wanting to actually work on having a social life here instead of just missing the one I had in Arizona.

Then I realized that everyone leaves for spring break, and that the whole week was gonna totally suck.

Luckily, though, Cory was having the same prospects for his spring break in Arizona, so he decided to go on a spur-of-the-moment roadtrip and come visit me up here for a couple of days. Cory brought his friend John up, too, and he turned out to be a truly cooltacular person, as well. I won’t bore you with all the details, but Cory wrote up a good post summarizing their roadtrip from start to finish (photos included).

I really enjoyed having the both of them up. It was really nice having one of my closest friends around, since I’m still new to Colorado again. At the same time, it was really weird having people from the “Arizona world” sleep over in my dorm for a night. I guess I’ve always been used to having completely separate lives in different areas… I’m a child of divorce, I tell ya.

So I’m in Denver now for three nights of Steve Kimock concerts. Logical last night, he was sitting in with a different band, but logical tonight and actual tonight, he is having a reunion of sorts with some guys from one of his old bands. Tonight’s show really blew me away…. It was a very high-energy performance that I haven’t witnessed since at least the SKB shows for New Year’s Eve 2006. John Molo (Phil Lesh & Friends) is sitting in on drums. I hadn’t given him much credit before, but this guy is incredible – a rare example of high versatility in almost any music style. I want his chops, and his creativity. I want them badly.

I am definitely feeling the drumming bug right now. I really haven’t done anything in a year beyond playing along to albums on my electric drums. Nothing serious, nothing to actually practice, nothing to really challenge me or make me grow as a musician. I have definitely become aware that the thing I really need to work on this point is my creativity in a band setting – something where original tunes are being written, and the drum parts do not yet exist. Everything I’ve done so far has either a drum track or a pre-written part.

Which means that I need to find people in Fort Collins to play with. So far, I have had little luck, but you can’t really spend most of your time hanging around the College of Business and expect quality musicians to just drop from the sky. I need to find people who are proficient with improvisation, especially playing melody. Unfortunately, a lot of kids my age prefer pop riffs and technical licks over actual creativity. But that isn’t to say that there is a complete lack, I just need to start looking in the right places.

Bonnaroo

So Andy brought this up… and I think it’s a totally great idea. My spring break is shaping up to be totally lame, but a couple things from the last few days have made summer look very fun…

Would anybody in the Colorado/Arizona area be interested in going to Bonnaroo 2007 from June 14-17? I myself am very interested, so if I can find people to go, I would be ecstatic.

(For those who are still scratching their heads and saying “Bonna-what?,” it’s a four-day music and arts festival that takes place on a 700-acre farm in Tennessee. This year has a killer lineup, and I think it would be a blast.

So anyways. I don’t know if I would go via plane or roadtrip, but either way, it will be moderately expensive. There is a way to volunteer either before or during the festival, which gets you in free, so this could be an option.

So is anyone interested? If we got a sizable enough group, it would be awesome.

Biting the hand that feeds you, part II: Mixtapes

There’s a great article in today’s New York Times Magazine:

Hip-Hop Outlaw (Industry Version)

The big music labels hired DJ Drama to make mixtapes. Then they helped the police arrest him. His crime? Making mixtapes.

Hip-hop has always thrived on mixtapes. They exist in a legal grey area, as mixtape DJs rarely acquire permission or pay royalties on the beats they sample. But at the same time, labels virtually outsource their A&R operations to mixtape shops, which generate street hype for an up-and-coming artist’s album release. According to one major label promoter, “the best D.J.’s have a better brand than the average label does.”

Indeed, despite the less-than-legal method of mixtape distribution, labels take advantage of this method of marketing and cost reduction:

Labels began aiding and abetting mixtape D.J.’s, sending them separate digital tracks of vocals and beats from songs so they could be easily remixed. They also started sending copies of an artist’s mixtape out to journalists and reviewers along with the official label release.

Basically, the mixtape economy is a little model of something vastly different than today’s music industry: content is produced at a very low price, due to the lack of licensing and royalties. CDs and electronic downloads are low-cost, and usually generate high profits. These profits don’t go to a large parent label- they go to independent music stores, and to the people who produced the album. Since there isn’t a huge distribution infrastructure to support, it generates support and exposure for local and emerging artists. And probably best of all, the low overhead allows content to be sold at a low price to the customer. Right now, even the big labels are profiting from this model, since mixtapes generate a lot of publicity for new releases.

Basically, everyone benefits in such an economy: the artists, producers, vendors, and customers. Most of all, this nurtures the music itself, and allows artists to focus on creating quality, original music without worrying about contracts, royalties, and the gigantic companies breathing down their necks.

Overall, this is yet another example of a fear-based reaction from the major labels: their antiquated method of generating profit by allowing artists to take advantage of their distribution network is dying in the face of technology, which has the capacity to completely eliminate the middleman. I’m not talking about illegal piracy; I’m talking about artists being able to sell and distribute their material at much lower cost, while gaining much more freedom than is granted under a major label contract.

In short, big music labels are slowly going the way of the dinosaur. It can be compared to how common people no longer needed to rely on their Latin-speaking priest after the Bible was translated into the vulgate, or to the availablility of free, open source alternatives to expensive proprietary software.

Skinned

Look at my new toy:

Dell Skin

Beautiful, isn’t it?  It’s a pretty popular “Skeleton and Roses” design from the Grateful Dead quadrant of the Universe.

I got it through SkinIt, a company that sells decals for stuff like laptops, cell phones, video game consoles, and iPods. They have a fairly large collection of designs to choose from. I obviously ordered one for my Dell E1405, and it came custom cut to the exact size and lines of my model. If you look closely, you’ll see that it is actually four decals that bleed across the different sections of the lid.

It’s pretty well-constructed… Not a cheap sticker, either. *rummages around to get the backing* It’s “3M Scotchcal High Performance Film: Automotive Grade, with Comply(tm) Adhesive Performance.”
Meaning I gots me some auto decals for my screamin’ dual core system.

Then again, it’s a completely cosmetic upgrade, and usually when I spend money, I want my system to do something with that money, but this one is pretty sweet. Maybe I’ll bring it in to class more, see if it gets any looks from the uptight business majors that I have class with.