Great student project by Thomas Nilsson

The Loudness War Analyzed

The music industry makes records louder and louder and have pushed beyond reason in an effort to stand out amongst the rest of the radio. This drives me nuts. Every time I listen to a Lily Allen record, I can’t stand the fact that the drums are distorted to make a buck; and I particularly can’t stand the fact that the people who perpetuate this problem know about it, but deny that it’s a problem in the first place:

“Somebody told me about [people complaining that the Guitar Hero version of Death Magnetic sounds better]. Listen, what are you going to do?… …The Internet gives everybody a voice, and the Internet has a tendency to give the complainers a louder voice. Listen, I can’t keep up with this shit.” – Lars Ulrich

I don’t know how he can honestly mean that when they guy who mastered it is embarrassed to be associated with the album. Make sure to also check out the Wikipedia entry on this topic.

Fez

Ohhh! This looks fun…

LEBRON!

Lebron James may end up having the greatest basketball season in the history of the NBA this season. And the funny thing is, he’s still got flaws in his game: His post-up game; Spotty outside shot; Stands still and dribbles too much. I’m betting that he’s going to end up being the best player to ever play in the NBA. Case in point:

I guess Jimmy Kimmel is pretty good at it too…

Takeshi’s Challenge: The Meanest Video Game of All TIme

Back in 1986, actor/director Beat Takeshi, a man who doesn’t like video games, wanted to show people how foolish they were for liking video games by making the most annoying video game of all time for the Nintendo. For example: A level where you must sit in front of the TV and hold the select button for 60 minutes. Apparently it’s coming to the Japanese Virtual Console on the 31st of March.

In a similar vein, Penn & Teller created a video game for the SegaCD in which you must drive across the Nevada desert in real-time for 8 hours in order to get “1 point”. There’s a torrent available for the brave.

Concept for Energy Consumption Visualization on the iPhone

Dear Future, please make this for me. I just had a $600 energy bill and need your help.

Old Growth Media and the Future of News

After Clay Shirky’s great write-up on the death of the newspaper, Steven Berlin Johnson of outside.in wrote a nice peice on a posibility for the future of news. If only someone could figure out this investigative reporting and war correspondence problem…

Andrew Bird – Don’t Be Scared
Originally performed by the Handsome Family
Drastic reinterpretation. Don’t miss the reprise at the end. Love the 3 bar loop over 4.

Groove Collective – Martha My Dear
Originally performed by the Beatles
One of the most abstract covers I’ve heard, but still great.

Audrye Sessions – Waltz #2 (XO)
Originally performed by Elliott Smith
There have been lots of albums dedicated to covering Smith, but almost all tracks fall short. I think I got it bad for intimate reinterpretations.

Estradasphere – Super Buck 2
Originally performed by K?ji Kond?
Ah, nastalgia. Also check out this take on the classic song.

Toots & the Maytals – Louie Louie
Originally performed by Richard Berry
Ahh, so much more personality…

Jose González – Heartbeats
Originally performed by the Knife
Taken from an elctropop song, this is further proof that I love a good intimate music.

Jose Feliciano – Golden Lady
Originally performed by Stevie Wonder
Great take on an all-time classic with a samba twist.

Phantom Planet & Mark Ronson – Just
Originally performed by Radiohead
I think I have a tendency to like Radiohead covers more than the originals. I know, blasphemy to some…

Easy Star All Stars w/ Citizen Cope – Karma Police
Originally performed by Radiohead
All the songs on the Radiodread album are surprisingly good; you’d expect a reggae cover album to come out cheesy, but it works.

Wynton Marsalis – Thelonious
Originally performed by Thelonious Monk
One of my favorite tracks by my favorite jazzman covered with a little kick

Derrick Laro & Trinity – Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough
Originally performed by Michael Jackson
The falsetto isn’t as strong as MJ, but for some reason it makes me like it more.

Steve Martin & Bernadette Peters – Tonight You Belong To Me
Originally performed by Gene Austin
Special moment from the greatest comedy of all time.

Here are all the songs for you to download: Covers.zip

We would slowly branch out to discover music through them. I became a lifelong Fishbone fan and my first concert was Firehose, both bands mentioned in RHCP songs. We knew that George Clinton produced the RHCP album “Freaky Styley” and found out that Kaley’s dad had Funkadelic’s “Standing On The Verge of Getting It On” on vinyl. Kaley would turn the RPM to 45 and yell, “IT SOUNDS JUST LIKE THE PEPPERS!”

One late night around this time, I turned the channel to PBS and caught this:

I was blown away and I called Kaley the next day to tell him about what I saw. At the time, I wasn’t resourceful enough to be able to find out who they even were. That added to their intrigue, but I soon discovered that it was Sly and the Family Stone and I was an instant fan. I wanted to know as much as I could about the man and his group.

Strange thing is, for Sly Stone (who led the group) being such an interesting story – stealing the show at what may be the most legendary concert of all time to hitting rock bottom while being on the run from the FBI – only little bits of info has come out about him in the last 35 years.² In 2007, Vanity Fair did a seven-page article regarding his sabbatical and potential emergence; This last September was the first complete biography³, “I Want To Take You Higher“, of the man and the band was released. The book reveals a little, but upon my reading felt incomplete. UPDATE: I just learned of another bio that came out in Feb. of ’08 that I haven’t yet read.

BUT, what I’ve discovered after reading Higher is that the Dutch are NUTS for the man. I found that in 1992, two Dutch film students set out to document their search for Sly in “Let Me Have It All” (their results are below); Another Dutch documentary about Sly, “Dance To The Music” just finished completion and was aired on Dutch television. AND, another biography written by two Dutch twins that has been in the works since 2002 is set to be released in early 2010.

Back in ’97, when the web was still in its infancy, a Sly and the Fam fan-site webmaster⁴ was flown to LA by Sly specifically to teach him how to browse the web on a computer. During this time, he was allowed to hear Sly’s 15-year backlog of unreleased material. Since hearing this account⁵, I’ve fantasized of Sly coming back and releasing a huge backlog of unheard material.

These days, Sly is slowly making more public appearances; if only a few over the course of the last three years. While I’m sure that it’ll be tough to reach the level of his heyday, I feel that if I just am able to catch a glimpse of the man, however satisfactory, it’ll feel like I’ve completed something; regardless of whether it has any actual merit or not.

PS: The only site that I’ve found that publishes Sly & the Fam news is this one, but they don’t have an RSS feed. I used Feed43 to scrape the news off of this page into this feed: Sly & the Fam News Feed

Let Me Have It All (1994, 48 min)

Preview for the just released Dance To The Music (2008, 2 min)

The Skin I’m In (2000, 60 min)

Books

Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
I think this is the largest graphic novel I’ve ever read, coming in at 720 pages. I kinda imagined that this was a book by Noah Baumbach in which Noah was able to grow beyond the rut he got in with Margot at the Wedding.

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
I grabbed this because I was particularly interested in Dane Cook’s parallels to Steve’s stand-up career (not really). And I’m a sucker for any tidbits I can find on the Jerk.

A Practical Guide To Racism by C. H. Dalton
The perfect book to keep by your side when you need to inflame the racial hatred that you’ve worked so hard to hide away.

Runners Up: Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle, More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman, Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story by Frederik Peeters

Music

The Way I See It by Raphael Saadiq
Not as innovative as his first release, but still is probably tied for the best album out of the recent Motown revival along with…

JIM by Jamie Lidell
The first guy I know about to do the whole modern Motown sound came out with a close to perfect album. Every track is solid.

Metropolis: The Case Suite by Janelle Monáe
I have a strong feeling after hearing this album that she’s going to be huge, with crossover appeal to a number of audiences. She’s supposed to release another EP in Q1 of ’09.

Oracular Spectacular by MGMT
More rock like this, please.

Runners Up: Droppin’ Science Fiction by the Mighty Underdogs, Shine by Estelle, Doomtree by Doomtree, New Amerykah, Pt. 1 by Erykah Badu

Movies

Bigger Stronger Faster by the Chris Bell
I went into watching this movie against steroids in competition to now not knowing what to think. Might not be as superbly told as Man On Wire for a documentary, but it had more of an impact on me.

Let The Right One In by Tomas Alfredson
I thought about this movie for a couple days after watching it. The two 12-year-olds in this do just as good of a job as most of this years nominees.

The Dark Knight by Christopher Nowlan
A little bit of an obvious choice, but that doesn’t stop it from being hella good.

Runners Up: Slumdog Millionaire, Role Models, The Wackness

Little Bit Of Feel Good – Jim:

In May, I saw that he was coming stateside and made sure that I caught him. The show was good, but not great. I feel a kinship to a dorky white guy who can’t help but express his honest love for soul music. What I didn’t like is that his backup band was a little thin to get the full effect I’d like for the sound: A single guy alternating between playing guitar and bass and a single sax player in the place of a horn section.

Good news/Bad news: He’s back for a second US tour. I was hoping that he’d grew in stature from his first “Jim” tour and now had a larger band, but it doesn’t appear so.

BUT, I just found out that his opening act is the *new* artist that I’m geeking out over: Janelle Monae. She’s part Outkast, part P-Funk, part electro-funk-punk, part Erykah Badu. Her recently re-released Fritz Lang inspired EP has been on HEAVY rotation anywhere I can play it.

Sincerely, Jane – Metropolis:

As much as Jamie is representing the past with a little bit of future, she’s representing the future with a little bit of past. They’ll be performing together October 3rd at the Showbox.

4 Elements – Redheaded Stepfather:

Turned out it was a leaked bootleg released by Thes One to throw overambitious fans from grabbing the album on the internet before it’s release date. The whole album is a recital of of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 long-form poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“, under track titles such as “Sucka Emceez” and “Smokin’ Blunts”.

Grab the bootleg for yourself: Redheaded Stepfather Torrent

I’d heard a little bit by them in the past, but after listening to this, I needed to dig closer and bought the “real” Stepfather. The album holds up to it’s redheaded counterpart.

Step In – Stepfather:

Sadly, antics such as these aren’t getting them noticed as much as the quality of their material (and pranks) should dictate. They’re playing in Seattle on the 28th of September, but aren’t playing in the caliber of venue I’d expect from a 10 year act with their catalog and history.

But I thank them for inspiring me with a new goal in my life: Get famous enough that people anticipate my albums and I can trick them with fake bootlegs. Now I’m off to write my first album: “Let’s Get Ready To Brummel!!!”

Last weekend, I decided to do something about the reality of the situation and design a more practical page than the Xanadoo that I originally envisioned. Post our dates, a few samples, post the necessary stuff for the press, and let MySpace handle the rest.

We’re going to spend the next few months in the studio working on an entire new set of material to pull out for the summer.

Trinkas – Remember Me:

The intro to this song was used in Jurassic 5′s “Quality Control” in an interlude, but the rest of the song is even better.

Serge Gainsbourg – La Horse:

Harpsichord detective funk, with a touch of banjo. He’s more than just a father of a hot girl who can’t write her own material.

Bob James – Take Me To The Mardi Gras:

Sampled over 40 times, most notably in Run DMC’s “Peter Piper“. Miles Davis even sampled it in the song “Work It”.

Soul Brothers – Free Soul:

Recently caught this one through Lily Allen’s “Smile“. Her producers have good taste…

Toots & the Maytals – Pressure Drop:

I can’t believe these guys are still playing. Their version of Radiohead’s “Let Down” is every bit as good as the original.

Hugh Masekela – Grazin’ in the Grass:

Just played last Sunday in Seattle. Sold 4 million in ’68 as a jazz instrumental.

Gunther Kallmann Choir – Daydream:

This song is showing up a lot these days with Lupe Fiasco and Jill Scott.

Professor Longhair – Big Chief:

Another Lily Allen sample from the song “Knock ‘Em Out“. Their use of this one is more blatant than some of their others.

Jean Jacques Perrey – E.V.A.:

Mostly this guy does quirky show-tunes with crazy bing-bong noises, but this was his hit. Grabbed by Tribe, Dr. Octagon, Gang Starr, etc.

Collie Stuff – Chosen Few:

Covered a few years later by Kool & the Gang and re-branded as “Funky Stuff“.

Vincent Geminiani – Ophis Le Serpentaire:

Heavy French soundtrack mood music.

Bobby Hebb – Sunny:

One of my favorite songs. Not necessarily obscure, as BMI calls it the 25th best song of the last century, but I rarely run into someone who knows it.

Here is the entire set in a .zip file.