BLOGTOPSY
#1:
Hipster Detritus (pitas incarnation). I am relatively young, optimistic about my potential to contribute pop-music-related discourse to the internet and do not hesitate to both loudly proclaim and back up my opinions, however questionable. I consider Calexico's
The Black Light one of my current favorite albums for some reason. Blog discontinued due to belated discovery of blogspot hosting, which makes posting ill-informed yet enthusiastic entries somewhat easier.
#2:
Hipster Detritus (blogspot incarnation). I have grown guarded and embittered after years of pointless pop-music messageboard feuds and tend to take on a somewhat complaint-happy format peppered with the occasional corpse of a daily list idea. I decide to close down shop after realizing that about 50-75% of the site's traffic comes from people googling for anti-hipster hate sites.
#3:
The Cool Out. Inexplicably-named (after a Clash dub) and dedicated, at least initially, to posting MP3s. Closed due to file hosting headaches, copyright concerns and the lingering feeling that running an MP3 blog made me look like a weird shill. Blog is, however, briefly glimpsed in a montage for an online MTV News report on MP3 blogs. During the course of this blog's brief existence, I experience a foreign but vaguely familiar feeling known as enthusiasm.
#4:
Rebel Machine. Long-belated moment of practicality (incorporate own name into blog's URL) offset by stroke of WTF (name blog after extremely obscure performance package for an American Motors muscle car). posting is extremely sporadic due to increasing freelance workload, dearth of ideas an unwillingness to weigh in on whatever ridiculous thing has everyone else with a blog all upset. ("Is indie rock black enough"? Where do I even start?) Blog remains open, but mostly because it'd leave a few dead links if it wasn't.
#5:
Nate Patrin @ Wordpress. New blog (titled, simply enough, after the author) created in the belief that a change of scenery will encourage posting more than once every other month. Also reachable through
natepatrin.com, a somewhat redundant but surprisingly affordable gimmick.
A BRIEF RETROSPECTIVE INTERLUDE ON THE FICKLE NATURE OF CRITICAL ENTHUSIASM
I was shirking some responsibility today and going through my Pitchfork reviewage out of nostalgic boredom. Guess what?
"The Way I Are", which sounds like "Push It" gone trance, [is a] straight-up jaw-dropper[.]" -4/2/07
"[T]he beat is a bad pseudo-trance version of "Push It"." -6/22/07
OK so I can lose a lot of love for something over the course of two and a half months, what'd'ya want from me, jeez
Labels: hip hop, oops
ACTUALLY, IT'S 366 (WHAT WITH IT BEING A LEAP YEAR AND ALL)
Do you want to know what day it is, yet simultaneously feel as though it would also help if you knew what to download from verified, legitimate internet music retailers?
The 2008 edition of the 365 Tunes Page-A-Day(tm) Calendar (which I wrote) is now available on Amazon. Guaranteed* to be the only desk calendar on the market to mention Guitar Wolf. You might as well pick up the
2007 edition, too, seeing as how it's less than three dollars.
*not a guarantee
Labels: shills
ALSO ON MY IPOD: LOTS OF SCUFFS
The inevitable has happened: other than allowing for about 750 MB of breathing room for podcasts and so forth, my 80GB iPod has been completely filled. This gave me a pretense to put together this set of somewhat incomplete but still mostly-representative stats.
TOTAL SONGS: 13,446
BY DECADE
1940s: 21*
1950s: 408
1960s: 1,700
1970s: 3,591**
1980s: 1,451
1990s: 1,970***
2000s: 4,305****
*the vast majority consists of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.
**this number is skewed somewhat by the fact that I spent a good deal of time over the last few years doing research on hip hop samples, downloading untold numbers of obscure soul comps and assembling 100-plus-song mixes of the best tracks from each year of the '70s. If only Mike Watt wrangled somebody more gripping than Eddie Vedder to sing
this, it could have all been averted.
***the decade I went to high school, and it squeaks past the '60s with maybe 20 albums' worth of material. Huh.
****see, I care about things happening in the present day, jeez, lay off
BY GENRE
Hip hop/rap (including crunk; grime; indie rap; instrumental hip hop/turntablism): 2,828
R&B (including disco and funk): 2,386
Rock (general non-punk/metal/indie stuff, including garage rock; rockabilly; surf rock): 2,348
Dance music (acid jazz; big beat; breakbeat; drum’n’bass; dubstep; electro; house; IDM; industrial; jungle; techno; trip hop; UK garage): 1,234 (!)
Punk (hardcore; new wave; post-punk): 1,194
Jazz (big band; free jazz; fusion; Latin jazz; soul jazz; vocal jazz): 803
Indie rock: 492
Reggae (dancehall; dub; rocksteady; ska): 445
Pop (an indistinct and nebulous catchall; includes French pop, indie pop and non-jazz "vocal" music i.e. Sinatra): 347
Progressive/acid/experimental rock (Krautrock; noise; post-rock; prog; psych): 280
Metal (sloppily demarcated between "heavy metal" [pre-'80s] and just "metal" ['80s-onward]): 256
Soundtracks (film scores; library music; video game music): 256
Blues: 242
Various non-Western/sub-equatorial music (afrobeat; Brazilian pop; Middle Eastern pop; etc.): 58
Mash-ups: 48
Country (alt- and otherwise): 46
Latin pop (salsa;... actually, just salsa): 26
Lounge: 23
Folk: 14 (one of them is Peter Stampfel’s cover of "Goldfinger")
Comedy: 1 (a rejected Ween Pizza Hut jingle with gratuitous cursing; may be deleted)
Leftovers, statistical anomalies and other screw-ups: 119
ARTISTS WITH 40+ SONGS
(note: I chose 40 as a cutoff point because I don't want anyone to know I have 38 songs by Night Ranger*)
A Tribe Called Quest (45); The Beatles (49); Beck (79); Bob Dylan (72); Captain Beefheart (52); The Chemical Brothers (58); The Clash (56); Clinic (40); De La Soul (49); Ghostface Killah (74); Guitar Wolf (40); Husker Du (43); J Dilla/Jay Dee (59); James Brown (84); Jay-Z (60); Led Zeppelin (68); The Meters (54); MF DOOM (41)**; Miles Davis (78); Minutemen (73); Missy Elliott (56); Ornette Coleman (50); Otis Redding (66); OutKast (42); Pavement (95)***; Prince (60); Public Enemy (46); Quasimoto (47); Queens of the Stone Age (48); Rahsaan Roland Kirk (60); Ray Charles (52); The Replacements (56); The Rolling Stones (130); Sonic Youth (81); Steely Dan (52); Stereolab (56); Stevie Wonder (42); Sun Ra (54); T.I. (50); Talking Heads (52); Thelonious Monk (59); Thin Lizzy (60); The White Stripes (68); The Who (68); Wire (42); Wu-Tang Clan (63)
*not really, just "Sister Christian"
**not counting his half-dozen aliases or
Madvillainy***includes lots of extra bonus outtake crap from
L.A.’s Desert Origins and
Sordid Sentinels that I will probably eventually delete unless it's as good as/better than "All My Friends"
At some point while organizing my MP3s I decided to stop poring through each and every track in my library to see which of them were iPod-worthy and just dumped everything on there that could fit. This has resulted in a serious glut of stuff, which will eventually be trimmed down (I am not counting on having 50 T.I. MP3s on this thing three months from now) to make room for other, more essential stuff ("
only 84 James Brown songs?") -- the usual process. Though if you'd told me ten years ago that carrying around a portable computerized device containing a dozen thousand songs and occasionally swapping out about ten albums or so here and there would gradually become a "usual process," I'd wonder what kind of William Gibson fan fiction you were writing.
Don't worry, there'll be a point to all this lookit-my-collection business soon. Hopefully some questions will be answered. (Sample question: "Really, you like Beck that much?")
Labels: lists, music collecting
3,000 GUITARS, THEY SEEM TO CRY
I woke up this morning with Blue Öyster Cult's "Cities on Flame With Rock & Roll" running through my head. This is an alarmingly frequent occurrence, but today it actually means something: Dirk, the proprietor of
a substantial psych/heavy MP3 blog named after the first great song from Long Island's finest rock band, passed away earlier this week after a long battle with cancer. Unfortunately I didn't know about the blog until a messageboard acquaintance posted a reference to his passing, but there's a lot of material there to search through, especially for fans of Japanese psych and '60s pop (Jacks, Flower Travellin Band, the Spiders, etc).
What with my renewed interest in posting here, I was going to start on a schedule of posting assorted musical debris and pop-culture etcetera, along with a long-overdue links update and some other tidy-up business -- but being in the Twin Cities right now, I'm still feeling pretty shook after the
35W bridge collapse. The process of realizing what was going on was disorienting: at first I thought it was the 94 bridge, which I take to and from work four days a week; learning which one it actually was didn't make things any better when I recalled how many times I've gone under it down River Road on some sort of family outing. And flipping from a channel which just had a static, empty horizon-line shot of where the bridge used to be to a channel that had a helicopter's-eye view of the wreckage felt completely unreal; it felt stranger still watching the choppy, 1-frame-a-second video footage of the actual collapse on the CNN website. It's the kind of disaster scenario that you don't really think about until it actually happens, a strange combination of the horrifying and the improbable -- this kind of thing almost never happens without some sort of ship collision or natural disaster causing it. Unlikelier still, though, is the fact that (though nearly two dozen missing people need to be accounted for) the death toll is still in the single digits, considering this all happened during rush hour/Twins game traffic. (I still have a hard time believing that
everyone on this school bus survived.) It could have been
far worse, and whether you believe in some sort of higher power or not, there's somebody somewhere out there to thank for the fact that it wasn't.
THERE ONCE WAS A MAN FROM GARAGELAND
I took the
Carl Wilson rock-lyric limerick challenge -- and while I started off with a bit of the Sabbif, I eventually got the deranged idea in my head to do an entire album. Hence:
London Calling in limerick form.
I.
A nuke fell on fair London town
I'd like it if you could come down
Fake Fab Fours have vanished
The grain is all famished
And I really don't want to drown.
II.
My girl procured an El Dorado
And cussed me out with much bravado
Where did she acquire it?
I'd like to admire it
Shame she's incommunicado.
III.
A rasta named James was once fearless
'Til he was found headless and earless
I was quizzed by a copper
'Bout a suspect be-bopper
But I've no idea where that heel is.
IV.
A cohort of mine's a supplier
And I am his number-one buyer
The others all croaked
They OD'd and choked
I'd feel bad, but my memory's dire.
V.
I wake up and I have a Red Stripe
And listen to all of my friends gripe
But the goods at the store
Just don't help me no more
That's life when you're sort of a dread type.
VI.
It seems the fascists are resurgent
And Civil War's now re-emergent
The poets had rifles
But they were all stifled
The bombs blew up all the insurgents.
VII.
There once was an actor named Clift
Whose car and downfall were both swift
A crash wrecked his phiz
And he failed in the biz
Where's my pills, arrrghhhgorra buh bhuh do arrrrgggghhhhnnnn
VIII.
Ennui strikes in the middle of Tesco
I don't fit in where all of the rest go
My life is the pits
But at least
Salsoul HitsAnd some lager will make it feel less so.
IX.
Here's how to turn youth into drones:
Just work them 'til it breaks their bones
Let them channel their rage
Wearing navy and beige
And hate those of swarthier tones.
X.
When policemen knock in the night
It's your choice, surrender or fight
Lambeth youth in estates
Carry Jimmy Cliff weight
But can they survive? Well, they might.
XI.
There once was a man named Lloyd Price
Wrote a song about murder and vice
Some guys made it rocksteady
So it's covered already
But I believe this'll suffice.
XII.
You may think you're striking a chord
That the sellout's an option ignored
But my time in the lab says
If you bone an abbess
You'll soon become men of the Lord.
XIII.
A portfolio based around pop
May push your career to the top
But Madison Ave
Will degrade what you have
51 floors are quite a drop.
XIV.
A gambler whose heart had been hurt
Kept a King up the sleeve of his shirt
But nobody was tricked
A gun's hammer clicked
Now he's six feet under the dirt.
XV.
You may treat your lady fantastical
But here's some advice that is practical
While you're getting your thrill
She may be off the pill
So please keep your sex prophylactical.
XVI.
There's a certain morbid quartet
That heralds an unpleasant debt
And if you complain
How your life's full of pain
They'll school you and not break a sweat.
XVII.
I've been clobbered right on the melon
And treated like some sort of felon
Don't give me some spiel
'Bout your macho appeal
I really won't find it compellin'.
XVIII.
We've devised a new type of combo
That plays rock and reggae and mambo
Roots rebels we are
Because we play guitar
And organ and trumpet and trombo.
XIX.
I know this is kind of last-minute
But the lurch? Seems that you left me in it
You never came back
So we added this track
And maybe club DJs will spin it.
I SUPPOSE YOU COULD LEAVE "ACTION JACKSON" AS-IS
Inspired by a messageboard thread with various contributors to
The High Hat (who did this with famous books, something I admit to needing a bit more knowledge of): famous movies renamed for the lowest common denominator, or at least for people who won't see a film if they don't know the plot from the title.
Martin Scorsese's
The Loneliest CabbieFrancis Ford Coppola's
Beach Party VietnamRidley Scott's
RobofugitivesAndrei Tarkovsky's
Ghost Wife in SpaceFrancois Truffaut's
I Was a Teenage Street HoodChan Wook-Park's
Payback Is a HammerAkira Kurosawa's
Samurai Double-CrossLabels: cinema
