Category: Music - Page 27 - UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

There’s no accounting for taste

Earlier today I was brought to tears and gasping, wheezing laughter while listening to something billed as “the most unwanted music” — clearly it has a lot of the characteristics of music that just about everyone hates, especially when they’re put together. But the results are something that is wondrously absurd, and absolutely hilarious.

I’m glad I decided to dig a bit deeper to find the source though, not just because it’s nearly 12 years old, but because there is also a companion piece intended to be “the most wanted music.”

I’ve listened to both, and I have to say, I find the most “wanted” music to be incomparably more annoying than the most “unwanted” music. Both are comically hideous, to be sure. But what bothers me most is that there were some parts of the “wanted” song that I actually did kind of like just a little bit, despite myself. Well, OK, one thing. I liked the chord progression in the chorus. A little. And the gravelly-voiced dude singing about filling ketchup jars is pretty good too. And I just noticed that Vernon Reid (of Living Colour fame) played guitar on it.

Either way… the bottom line here, for me, is that this is concrete proof that good things are rarely designed by committee.

I wonder if the composer went on to work on Microsoft’s Songsmith project.

Here are some more links on the topic that you might be interested in. Or not. Are you an outlier?

The last word on concept albums… for now

The last thing I’ll say about concept albums, and I’ll try not to go on for 47 paragraphs this time, is that I think it’s easier (and maybe more necessary) to do a concept album when your music is more abstract and/or experimental.

I think my approach would be a lot different if:

a) I could sing
b) I could adhere to a recognizable song structure
c) I could write lyrics about something other than science and man-made disasters

In other words, if I were a better songwriter, I would probably focus on crafting songs. As it is, my music is more sprawling and chaotic, and the only way I can rein it in at all for the purpose of producing an album is by coming up with an overarching concept.

The art of the concept album

I love concept albums. They’re self-indulgent and pompous… two of the best traits a musician can have! (And anyone who thinks punk’s ascension in the late ’70s killed off pomposity in rock music is deluding themselves. Punk is as pompous as it can get!)

Anyway… the topic of concept albums came up in the RPM forums today, and I wrote such a self-indulgent and pompous post on the matter that I just felt I had to cross-post it here. To wit:

I don’t think I’m capable of making an album that’s not a concept album… although the nature of what constitutes a concept album can vary a lot. Let’s see… here’s a complete chronology of my solo albums and EPs since I really got into doing this in 2001.

THE DEWEY ‘JONE’ McNUKKLE STORY: SOUNDTRACK TO AN UNMADE FILM (September 2001)
Concept: All track titles are nicknames a particular friend of mine has had at some point in his life; music on each track corresponds to characteristics of the nickname.

TAI CHI AND CHAI TEA (October 2003)
Concept: Not so much, really, although I did structure the CD as if it were two sides, with a “Tai Chi” side and a “Chai Tea” side, and the track sequence was designed around that. Oh, and there’s a 13-minute, 5-“movement” suite about the Iraq war, to make up for the lack of an overall concept.

LIMITATIONS OF THE SYSTEM (EP, August 2004)
Concept: Atari. All of the tracks have Atari 2600 sounds incorporated in them.

INFLATIONARY COSMOLOGY (May 2005)
Concept: Can it get any more grandiose? The album represents the entire arc of the existence of the universe, from Big Bang to Heat Death. A suite in the middle also represents the entire arc of human existence from cavemen to the present day, in case it wasn’t pretentious enough already. I was so spent by the concept on this album that I went two years without recording anything after it was completed.

HIGHWAY 34 REVISITED (May 2007)
Concept: Probably the only thing I’ve ever done without a real concept, but I guess I was trying to capture the essence of all of my musical influences, right down to the second-hand nature of the album’s title.

DIVISION BY ZERO [VOL. I] (EP, August 2007)
Concept: The beginning of an extended autobiographical project. Each track has a year in the title and corresponds to some significant event in my life from that year. This 3-song EP features events from 1973 (my conception), 1976 (not sure, but it involves a new bed, vomit and hospitalization) and 1978 (pizza).

UNNATURAL DISASTERS (February 2008)
Concept: This was my RPM submission last year. The concept is strange places, or more accurately, places made strange by human activity. Each track is a sonic representation of some of my favorite made-weird-by-people places on earth.

TECHNETIUM (EP, February 2008)
Concept: A one-track, 38-minute “EP”; the characteristics of this minimalist techno track were determined based on properties of the technetium atom. Yeah… I forgot to mention “nerd alert.”

MELLOTRONIC (EP, July 2008)
Concept: The Mellotron. Oh, how I love it.

THE BEE LP! (October 2008)
Concept: Bees. All tracks represent something about bees and their behavior.

ANAGRAMMATIC PSEUDONYMS (February 2009)
Concept: This is going to be my RPM submission for this year. Each track title is an anagram of my name. The first letters of each of the 13 tracks, in order, spell out my name. How’s that for establishing some parameters for yourself.

Anyway… my reason for going on at such length here (besides extreme narcissism) is to perhaps give some ideas as to how broad the idea of a “concept album” can be — and how inspiring it can be to dive into a project like this with a specific concept in mind. I find I can be most creative when I have a set of parameters to work within. It gives me a starting point… and a destination.

What’s the big deal with this iTunes DRM-free thing?

OK, so I missed the keynote today — client meeting. Sounds like the client meeting (or just about anything else in the world) was preferable to the Jobs-less snoozefest of the Macworld keynote.

I’m still trying to make sense of the announcement about iTunes. Everything’s going iTunes Plus, DRM free, new pricing levels, and 3G (and, rumor has it, EDGE) downloads. I guess the new pricing levels are cool. At least the cheaper one — who would be excited about the opportunity to pay more? Besides Ned Flanders? And the 3G (and EDGE, if it’s true) downloads are also cool and overdue (you’ve been able to download apps under 10 MB over-the-air from day one of the App Store). But I don’t quite understand the hoopla over the DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks, or, more specifically, the criticisms over the “upgrade” charge.

Either the complainers, or I myself, don’t understand something. iTunes Plus has been DRM-free since it debuted. And upgrades, to music that is newly available as iTunes Plus, have always been 30 cents per song or 30% of the album price, again since the beginning. The only thing I can see that’s different is that Apple is now pushing to convert the remainder of the entire, expansive iTunes music offerings to all become available in the iTunes Plus format. But the nature of iTunes Plus itself has not changed at all. Am I wrong about this?

Ultimately, I suppose this might make me slightly more interested in buying music from the iTunes Store, which, a year or so ago was my #1 destination for music. But only if I absolutely can’t wait to buy a song from my computer. The availability of the song purchases directly from the iPhone is really the only thing iTunes has going for it now as far as I’m concerned, and it’s all about format. I went all Apple and re-ripped most of my music in AAC format back when I got my first iPod, because its quality is better at any given bitrate compared to MP3. But… it’s not MP3. Amazon MP3 is a great service, better prices and often a better selection than Apple’s, and because it uses MP3, you have a lot more options for how you use the music. In my case, it means I can burn MP3 CDs that will play in my XBOX 360 or my car stereo. Can’t do that with AAC, DRM’ed or not.

So, until Apple switches to MP3, which will… not… happen, I’ll stick with Amazon MP3 whenever possible.

My iTunes Plus upgrade options Update: I just went over to the iTunes Store to check out the status of my iTunes Plus upgrade opportunities. I’ve been upgrading my library as I went along since the feature debuted, so over time I’ve upgraded… I don’t know, maybe a total of a dozen albums. There are definitely more options available now (and I thought I read this wasn’t coming until April 1???). Not sure I want to bother upgrading all of these; some I’d be better off waiting, checking Amazon every day, and hoping they’ll eventually make them the $1.99 album of the day. Some, I’d prefer to deny ever having bought in the first place. (Steve Perry? Really?)

Of course, Apple only lets you upgrade all or nothing. Lame. (And yes, that’s how it’s been since the beginning… but the availability of “upgradeable” songs was an intermittent trickle and, probably, will continue to be over the next several months.

A few thoughts on this whole Zune fiasco

In case you didn’t know (and why would you, since I’m sure you don’t own a Zune), there was a big problem on New Year’s Eve for 30 GB Zune owners (dubbed Z2K9), all of which apparently suffered a simultaneous failure on that day.

Apparently, a bug in a driver for that model caused it to choke on the 366th day of the year. In other words, the 30 GB Zune cannot comprehend the concept of a “leap year.”

According to Gizmodo, Microsoft’s official “fix” was simply to wait it out until January 1, 2009. Nice one. But this begs the question, glaringly omitted from the FAQ on Gizmodo, of what will happen to these Zunes on December 31, 2012, since there’s no mention of Microsoft actually attempting to eliminate the bug from the software. I have to assume Microsoft just expects all of these Zunes to have arrived at their eternal home in a landfill by then.

Another question omitted from the page: Who actually owns a Zune anyway?

Oh… um… that is… what I meant to say was… uh… the Zune is… a… uh… a wonderful device and… um… I’m sure lots of people own them. (Can I go now?)