Posted on March 16th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music.
Early in the year, Boston's Kevin Garnett had most of the media support for NBA Most Valuable Player. Then Boston faded a bit, and they started looking around for competition. Kobe Bryant's partisans started making noise, since he is (supposedly) the best player in the game yet has never won the MVP, and the Lakers were improved, despite Bryant's preseason wish to be traded. So the Lakers' General Manager, Mitch Kupchak, pulls off the trade of the year, stealing Paul Gasol from Memphis, and the Lakers promptly rose through the ranks of the incredibly tough West to the top team. As a result, MVP support solidified for Bryant. Now, in the past when players have switched teams they've received the lion's share of the credit if the team improves. Steve Nash's questionable first MVP award is an example. But I can't remember a candidate's MVP talk skyrocketing like this when someone else gets traded to his team and his team shoots to the top. If Kobe Bryant is the MVP, why did it take Paul Gasol to make it clear?
And now the Rockets have shot to the top, beating the Lakers today for their 22nd win in a row -- the second longest streak in league history -- despite losing star center Yao Ming ten games ago (and he's out for the year). Their other star, Tracy McGrady, is a game-dominating player like Bryant, and McGrady has led his team despite losing his best teammate. Yet no one talks about McGrady as an MVP candidate. Can someone explain this to me?
Posted on March 10th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Is "Time Has Come Today" by the Chambers Brothers (1966) the first dub song? I mean, obviously not in the historical sense, but in the sense that people will call the Stooges (or the Sonics, or the MC5, etc etc) the first punk band. Here's a one-minute example. Is there any earlier hit single fooling around with dub-type studio effects like this? (Probably.) Examples solicited.
Posted on March 7th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music.
In half an hour, I'll be running Name That Tune game number nine over at Popdose. Come on over.
Posted on March 2nd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music.
Well, not really. The single is all about iTunes downloads now. I knew that, but I didn't know how complete the transformation is. Idolator, as an aside in a piece analyzing the current charts, notes:
In a typical week, when there isn't a new CD single from an American Idol winner or a High School Musical star, the No. 1 single on Hot Singles Sales moves as little as 1,000 copies or less.
1,000 copies! (or less!) A single selling at that rate -- a number one single -- would take nearly ten years to go gold. 1,000 copies across the whole country! That's 20 copies per state.
I grew up buying singles; that's how I became obsessive about music: buying singles and listening to the Top 40 countdown every week (and writing down the chart, naturally). The death of the physical single.... I guess I feel like folks who grew up on 78s.
Posted on February 29th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Elsewhere.
Name That Tune #8 goes up in fifteen minutes at Popdose.
Posted on February 25th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Untruths, Cartoons.
Sent to me by Velma:
Posted on February 22nd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Elsewhere.
I keep forgetting to mention the new Name That Tune games on Fridays. Today, at 12:30 Eastern, I'll be running my Name That Tune game over at Popdose. Come over and play!
Posted on February 18th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, 70s Survival.
It's probably obvious by now, but the Seventies Survival Project is dead. I've just found too many missing songs to continue in the spirit I originally intended. It's too bad, because it was fun.
But in the spirit of Pointless Obsession, I've decided -- don't ask why -- to really, really know 1990. To that end I am putting all my 1990 albums on my mp3 player, and investigating all the important ones I don't know, and even ones I dismissed at the time. I am using RateYourMusic's top albums of 1990 and esoteric albums of 1990 as my main references. This is especially useful in two ways: there's a lot of hiphop I don't know, and RateYourMusic is over-represented with metalheads. Of all the areas I have been largely ignorant of in recent years, those are the two I have been most interested in recently. Prog and folky stuff are also pretty well represented.
On the other hand, country hardly shows up there, and the annual Village Voice critics poll is unlikely to be much help there either. Anyone know a reliable source of best country albums by year? Modern jazz doesn't fare too well, either (though jazz dominates the RateYourMusic charts well into the 1960s).
I'm also deliberately trying to know as little as possible about the albums before I listen to them. Album titles and covers are often a giveaway, of course, but I'm not reading about albums before I listen to them.
Very preliminary listening reports:
Megadeth's Rust in Peace, despite the stupid title, is a fantastic album. I keep listening to it in headphones three times in a row, and none of it has palled. That one's a purchase.
Bathory's Hammerheart is not bad, but kinda silly. I mean, even for metal. Viking concept metal is just hard to take seriously, and much of it drags. Hugely influential, apparently.
Brand Nubian's One for All is very very groovy. I don't know why I'd never listened to it before, since I've known for a long time that I like most of the Native Tongues-related stuff. Another definite purchase.
Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, despite the dumb title and the standard tiresome braggadocio, has monstrous beats. Probable purchase.
Mike Oldfield's Amarok sounds like a meandering mess.
Posted on February 12th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words.
We forgive the things we liked as children, and maybe even still enjoy them, because we didn't know any better and there's an innocent joy in returning to that total open-mindedness. But we often can't forgive the things we enjoyed as adolescents, because we were beginning to try to be adults, often self-importantly, and it can be excruciatingly embarrassing to be reminded of what we thought was deep and mature then.
Posted on February 12th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
The chord progressions for
"25 or 6 to 4" by Chicago,
and
"Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" by Led Zeppelin.
Posted on February 1st, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music.
Jane Dark has a brief but pointed piece about country, the genre critics don't see.
Posted on January 24th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Badness, Quotes.
Quoted from Idolator:
The Spice Girls are walking away with "£50 million between them" for their sold-out 17-night stand at London's 02 Arena. "The truth of the matter is, to put on this tour has cost £18.6 million," Ginger sez. "This is not a money-making expedition...Hopefully we will break even but it has never been about that."
I'm soliciting theories on what the Spice Girls reunions shows were really about, since they were never about making money (or breaking even), as pretty much everyone on the planet who isn't a Spice Girl might naturally assume.
Posted on January 15th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words, Badness.
"The announcement was a surprise (if not an unexpected one)"
--John Bush at Allmusic, reviewing Orbital's Blue Album
Posted on January 14th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.
M.I.A.'s Kala sounds amazing. Great beats, great sonic textures, big clear production. I'm still getting my head around the songs, but it's consistently engaging, with a large number of arresting passages, and I'm confident this is going to end up in my top ten.
I wouldn't have heard of this album were it not for those awful hipsters (specifically, Pitchfork's best-of-the-year lists solicited from indie musicians). Thank you, hipsters!
Posted on January 10th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, 70s Survival.
Two more songs missing from these Billboard Hot 100 sets that should certainly be there: The Spinners' "I'll Be Around" (peaked at #3, 1972) and "Games People Play" (peaked at 5, 1975).
Posted on January 4th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I'm doing a new Name That Tune game, the first of what is planned to be a weekly series, over at Jeff Giles and Jason Hare's new website Popdose. I've added a puzzle to this one.
I'll be reviving and moving the Song Project over there as well, again as a weekly item. (I'm going to continue writing here also.)
A lot of writers are doing interesting columns for Popdose, and Jason and Jeff are continuing the terrific series they'd been doing on their own sites. Check it out.
Posted on January 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I'd never noticed this till today, but the main theme of "Brazil" -- at least as played by Antonio Carlos Jobim on Stone Flower -- seems to me reminiscent of "Caravan".
Posted on December 31st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
two more short clips:
"Spooky" by the Classics IV, and "I'm Her Daddy" by Bill Withers.
Posted on December 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Quotes.
As unfathomable as it seems from the distance of over 30 years, for a few months, Gerry and the Pacemakers were the Beatles' nearest competitors in Britain. --Richie Unterberger, Allmusic
For a very brief time in 1964, it seemed that the biggest challenger to the Beatles' phenomenon was the Dave Clark Five. --Rick Clark and Richie Unterberger, Allmusic
Posted on December 13th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.
I enjoy Radiohead, but they've never been a special favorite. I like some of their albums more than others, but I don't know their stuff inside and out. I admire their adventurousness, and I find it interesting that a large fanbase has so far followed them where they wanted to go. I think of them as a great band, more objectively than subjectively. I didn't like Hail to the Thief at all, and while I didn't give up on them -- almost everyone has an occasional bad album in them -- they slipped lower on my priority list, and while everything I heard about In Rainbows made it sound interesting, I hadn't got round to it and didn't really intend to anytime soon -- didn't even have it on my shortlist of potential Best of 2007 albums I needed to track down.
Which is a longwinded way of saying, I heard it in a bar last week and was blown away.