Category: Music

I’ve been musing on and off about this topic for years, but now there’s some research to back it up:

“Internet downloading and MP3 players are creating a generation of people who do not seriously appreciate songs or musical performances, British researchers said.” Music downloading creates listener apathy. A combination of forces is at work here, but there are three I’d put at the top of the list:

1) Quantity. Once upon a time, you’d save up your $7.99, buy the LP you had been wanting for weeks, and listen to it dozens of times over. This saturation fostered a personal relationship with a piece of music that I just don’t think people are experiencing today — or at least not as much. When people possess way more music than they can possibly listen to, there’s a tendency to wade through it all in a random fashion (guilty!), and the music has a resulting tendency to become background. This is one of the reasons I’m now trying to put more emphasis on pruning my MP3 collection than on growing it (though I have only been mildly successful, and am in fact currently planning a multi-jigabyte RAID storage solution just for my music; collecting is far easier than pruning).

2) Cost. The bulk of most people’s MP3 collections has come to them for free. When you can download 40 albums overnight rather than purchase one or two or even five a month, the personal investment in the music is further devalued, and you never get around to fully digesting all the new music before yet more arrives.

3) Aesthetics. The visual involvement of the LP cover gave way to the lesser involvement of the CD sleeve. But at least we still had something. When you go all digital, you give up the visual aesthetic accompanying the music altogether (with the possible exception of the tiny album cover thumbnails stored in ID3 tags, which are no replacement). Not to mention all of the extra information you get about an artist by reading liner notes and lyrics, which was always a big part of developing a relationship with an album.

Quantity and flexibility are so seductive. It’s so easy to not notice how much we give up.

Just back from 21 Grand to hear Dos (Watt, ex-Minutemen and Kira, ex-Black Flag) jamming bass duets. They’ve been at this for 20+ years, through thick and thin, and play like it. Kind of humorous to watch Kira scamper and pogo as if drummer were present, and she’s a very good bass player, but stoic Watt is the amazing, fluid virtuoso. Not quite like anything you’ve heard before (if you’re thinking punk rock, stop). Watt:

dos (spanish for two, as in uno, dos, tres…) is kira … on bass/singing and watt on bass. that’s it – just two basses and her voice. sometimes watt’s voice too but not much. we’ve been together since the fall of 1985, this is my longest running band. I really dig playing w/dos. it started as an experiment w/making what’s commonly believed a backup instrument up front and paired off w/a twin, using pingpong-like arrangements to create a special space which is pretty much close to the deck but not smothered by competition. what we try to do is develop converstations between our two basses and create a landscape of low-end dynamic. in dos there is no hiding. this is both the challenge and the reward.

Standing room only, short show. Someone called nina put up a Flickr set of the evening.

For The Huffington Post, David Rees, author of the Rolling Stone comic Get Your War On, posts an over-the-top tribute to the Minutemen’s D. Boon on the 20th anniversary of his death. “… my career as a political cartoonist literally began the night I asked myself “What would D. Boon do?” before clumsily trying to make the comic-strip equivalent of a Minutemen song.”

The tribute is way hyperbolic, but all true. The Minutemen changed lives, mine included. Happy birthday Boon. Let the products sell themselves!

No response from iTMS affiliates program on the POST problem. Total brick wall trying to contact a human there, but I’m not ready to give up on being an iTMS partner while iPod is king. Finally solved it with a workaround (which I hate): If user voted on the previous lyric, the vote is processed, then, rather than displaying the rest of the output immediately, the browser is invisibly directed to the next page through a location header rather than POST. User still gets the same page she would otherwise, but links to iTMS now work without throwing a confusing “Re-POST?” dialog in the browser.

Also signed up as a Rhapsody affiliate, so non-iTunes peeps are not locked out. Most lyrics now have dual iTunes/Rhapsody artist links. Thanks to mneptok for kicking my butt on that.

Love how trivial it is to create links to artists in Rhapsody, e.g.: http://www.rhapsody.com/PatsyCline — which means I can auto-generate the URLs. So what was a 10-hour database population job for iTMS was a 5-minute job with Rhapsody. Hey Apple: Cluetrain!

To the Masonic Auditorium last night to see the great Ornette Coleman. Playing with his son Denardo on drums (who appeared for the first time on a Coleman record at age 8!), plus two virtuoso bassists. Generally regarded as the originator of free jazz, Ornette is now 75.

He’s never been a powerful player — Ornette’s sensibility is finer, more abstract than that. More of an idea guy. Through the first few songs, worried that he sounded 75 — less vital than he once did, less harmolodic. But then something clicked, the energy came together, the compositions started to fulfill themselves. The (very unusual) two-bass configuration added something wonderfully rich and grounded, a smooth tangle of wood in the marsh, something to stand on. As the evening progressed, Ornette started to sound younger and younger, his inventions fresher, more tangible. The music was happening in so many dimensions at once, but never once sounded chaotic, only becoming more focused as the evening wove its way forward. Afraid to try and put more into words.

The Dancing In Our Heads continued for hours afterwards; it took dry martinis and a belly full of olive bread to come down.