Category: Music

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Highway 2006 Revisited

This week at Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore finally gets around to releasing his best-of-year list… for 2006.

I can’t complain about multiple poll winner LCD Soundsystem, the brainy dance band that tossed off the best rip I’ve heard on New York’s Michael Bloomberg (“your mild billionaire mayor’s now convinced he’s a king”). I’m also thrilled at the top-ten consensus for M.I.A.’s Kala, which gave a trans-global boom-boom-boom to those of us who have, like the National, spent too long feeling half-awake in a fake empire. Still, there’s a problem in treating lists like these as canons of coolness. They call to mind my favorite 2007 music review, which was so fake it’s real. The Onion reported that Pitchfork gave a rating of 6.8 to “music”—not any one recording or genre, but its entire history. It seems music, while brilliant at times, is weighed down with too many “mid-tempo ballads,” and worse, “the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement.”

Music: Esther Lamneck :: Tarogato
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Osmond Brother’s Mother’s Cookbook

Osmonds Playing a round of Scrabble (no, not that kind) with the wife tonight, needed some good thinkin’ music to get in the groove. What better choice than a far-from-pristine LP copy of Donny Osmond’s 1973 opus, A Time For Us? But lo, what should greet my hungry eyes when sliding the record out of its sleeve but this tantalizing grid of original Osmond product offers, each one better than the last.

I’ve always wondered what would happen if you actually tried to order something you found in a 30-year-old comic book or, in this case, record sleeve (assuming you had the balls to actually cut up the sleeve to get to the order form, leaving your prize records defenseless against the cardboard outer sleeve). Would your money go into a black hole? Or would some sweet old lady sitting bored at a desk in front of a warehouse full of long-unsold merch cheerfully put your order together and send it on its way? It’d definitely be the purple tank top for me. The order form is on the reverse, and emphasizes the Osmond’s Mormon roots: “Utah residents add 4.375% sales tax.”

Music: James Brown :: Say It Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud, Pt .1
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Songza

Songza: Dang near any song you can think of, at your fingertips. Amazing, in many ways (not so in others – almost everything is low-fi, and you can’t download anything). But amazing that it exists. Get obscure as you want – it’s probably there. Where is all this audio coming from? Watching the status bar, seems like a lot of is being hoovered out of YouTube videos, but there must be many other sources as well. What a time we live in.

Music: Kid Koala :: Roboshuffle
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Real Good for Free

This week at Stuck Between Stations:

Me, on violinist Joshua Bell’s recent experiment playing in a D.C. subway:

Violinist Joshua Bell’s virtuosity is so renowned that Interview magazine once said that his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.” A few months ago, Bell walked into a D.C. subway station, flipped open his violin case, and played his heart out for spare change — on a $3.5 million 1713 Stradivarius.

… Of course almost no one paid any attention. Context is everything, and we only hear what we’re prepared to hear. More on context, presentation, perception in the piece.

Music: Billy Bragg & Wilco :: The Unwelcome Guest
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Want a Danish?

This week at Stuck Between Stations:

– Me, on Van Morrison’s 1967 contractual obligation, in which he “mails it in” like no one has ever mailed it in before:

I can see by the look on your face
that you’ve got ringworm.
I’m very sorry to have to tell you, but you’ve got ringworm.
It’s a very common disease.
You’re very lucky to have … ringworm
because you may have had … something else.

Audio at the site.

– Roger, on the unlikely roots of Jamaican reggae and soul in Canada.

Canadian reggae and soul, eh? If you expect that combination to go down as easily as curried goat with a side of Canadian bacon, you may be surprised.

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Soundtrack to Bad Urban Planning

This week at Stuck Between Stations, Roger surveys the history of bad urban planning… with a playlist. Each dutifully dissected example of urban planning gone horribly wrong is accompanied by its own soundtrack. The video of a pair of Norwegian youths lip-sync’ing The Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone” (the same song that “unintentionally made Rush Limbaugh an animal rights activist”) is worth the price of admission alone.

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Suite Matthew

The Red Hot Chachkas are an eclectic Bay Area klezmer group who, once upon a time, played at Matthew and Stacia’s wedding (Matthew is our dearly departed friend whose life was cut short by an inattentive driver in 2003). Soon after the wedding, Matthew joined the Chachkas as a basisst, and played with the group until his death. The Chachkas have written a song for Matthew: Suite Matthew.

I’ve spent the past few nights converting Matthew’s memorial site from Movable Type to WordPress, getting comments going again, fixing old links, re-embedding media, and just sprucing up the place in general. Working on it has made me miss Matthew all over again. He used to send the most hilarious links by day, then make the most intense music by night. He used to give the best hugs. He used to cook the best chicken. I miss you, Matthew.

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Kissthisguy… Moving On

ktg.png Twelve years ago, at a party in Boston, I found myself in a friendly argument about how to complete the lyric “Blinded by the light…” Seemed like everyone at the party had a different idea about what the real lyrics were. When I got home that night, I posted the list of responses I had written down to an early version of Birdhouse and invited people to send theirs. Amazingly, responses started to roll in via email faster than I could post them (manually). I opened it up to mishearances of other songs, and before long I was experimenting with publishing HTML out of databases.

I registered the domain kissthisguy.com and, over the course of a decade, went through a bunch of homebrew Filemaker and MS Access solutions before finally learning PHP/MySQL. The site’s been a great platform for learning about and experimenting with database and templating systems, and has always been good for a chuckle (though weeding through the volume of crappy submissions has always been a chore, mitigated only in the past couple of years by the current public voting system). The site’s been tremendously popular for something I work on only in spurts separated by long periods of inactivity, and I even lived off its ad revenue while writing the BeOS Bible. But the volume of submissions – up to 200 per day at points – eventually became a Sisyphysian task I knew I’d never get out from under. And I’ve known for a long time that without a lot more TLC, the site wasn’t maximizing its potential.

Half a year ago, I was contacted by an entrepreneur / investor / music fan who had been following the site for years, who was interested in buying it. The decision was tough – it had always been my baby, and I was proud to have done a lot with a little. But I’m also increasingly realizing that my life is like death by a thousand paper cuts – a zillion small involvements keep me permanently spread too thin, and I’ve been feeling like I want to clear more time for living. So we negotiated for a while and came up with a fair deal that would leave me as partial owner, but without further maintenance responsibilities. A few months ago, I sold kissthisguy.com and began the long process of cleaning up code, converting ad spaces, documenting the back-end, and getting the site ready for its next incarnation. A new company has been created to back the site, and some really solid backing is appearing to push the site in all kinds of directions I never foresaw.

I’m really proud to have created kissthisguy, and it’s been a great ride. But I’m also happy to let it move on in this way – I know that with my schedule, the site would just have lingered in the “lightly maintained” way it had been for years. Now it’s got new life and an inspired new owner. We haven’t said anything about this on the site yet, but check back in the coming months to see where it’s all going.

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Hooked on a Feeling, Vol. 1

Ktel This week, Stuck Between Stations combed through a Denny’s shortstack of YouTube bookmarks to find videos that simply will not escape the brain, no matter how many times you call the sheriff to force their eviction. The visual equivalent of ear-worms, these A/V train wrecks take up residence in the corpus callosum, either because of or despite their badness, and lodge there for keeps, like grains of sand in your Juicyfruit. There are elements of awe and sadomasochism at work here. It’s not just that these videos are “so bad they’re good” (though there’s plenty of campy indulgence); we’ve come to genuinely love these “bad” music videos, and offer no apologies. In Vol. 1, Roger and Scot subject themselves to South Indian breakdancing music, the bizarre-but-relevant soul stylings of Tay Zonday, a troupe of angry geriatrics covering The Who, an airborne David Hasselhoff, the worst Star Wars theme song cover ever taped, and Leonard Nimoy’s foray into Hobbiton.

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Sweet Sunny South

Recently at Stuck Between Stations:

New Stuck writer Zoe Krylova on “freak folk” standard bearer Devendra Banhart: This is the Soft Voice of the Evening.

We’ve been gifted with a gorgeous, strong, shining cabinet of drawers to open and marvel at. It is made of recycled wood. It has been refinished. There is mother of pearl inlay. And each compartment holds some news.

Also: Roger Moore on guitar guru Henry Kaiser’s musical expedition to the South Pole: Henry Kaiser in the Sweet Sunny South. The video of Kaiser using the steel marker that is the exact south pole as a guitar slide is required viewing.