Category: Music

From my old stomping grounds: Marsalis Music opens its doors. What’s interesting is that Branford explicitly bitchslaps the record labels in the press release:

“The consolidation of the record industry into major conglomerates has turned the business into a mega-hit pop music machine with a very short term focus. Artists who want to be musicians, not marketing creations, have very few places to record anymore,” Branford notes. “We formed Marsalis music to provide a real alternative. This is a very exciting time and I am thrilled to be doing this.”

This probably explains why “Footsteps of Our Fathers” was in pre-release so long…
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Latest radio asinine moment: Country DJ fired for sounding too Southern — in Atlanta! Greg nails this one:

Like much of the rest of the industry country music has taken a nosedive — but that has nothing to do, so we’re told, with playlists programmed by committee, managers so out of touch that a quintuple-platinum Grammy-winning sleeper hit still can’t get airplay, or artists that aim to sound less like Johnny Cash than Rick Dees. Nope, the problem is that the DJ — on a country station — in Dixie! — sounds too Southern.

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Currently playing song: “Ted, just admit it…” by Jane’s Addiction on Nothing’s Shocking.

Currently playing song: “Steve I Always Knew” by Mark Eitzel on The Invisible Man.

Doc: More on what’s fucked about radio. Doc lays the blame for the sorry state of commercial radio at the feet of radio’s business model, which treats the listener as secondary to pleasing the advertiser.

This is another reason I grew to dislike Ziff Davis magazines. After a while, I realized that the stuff in between the ads felt like an ad too, for things I couldn’t afford to buy.
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Jenny Levine: “Doesn’t the RIAA have something better to do than pay legislators to pass laws that will ultimately harm its members?”
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Craig Pfeifer gives away the secret—the secret site that is supposedly only accessible if you buy the new Counting Crows cd, that is. Man, it’s good to know developers, even if they are straying into Sklyarov territory. 🙂

He’s wrong about the content, though. On Monday they posted a link to a song from a show they did in Irving Plaza, NY, and they claim they’ll update every week…
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…but John Vanderslice won’t be if you go to his concerts. There’s one in Seattle at the Crocodile Cafe on Saturday. Highly recommended. I’ve only heard one track off his newest, Life and Death of an American Fourtracker, and am looking forward to hearing more. (His last album, Time Travel is Lonely, was amazing–I still can’t get the title track out of my head.)
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Currently playing song: “Glass Enclosure” by Bud Powell on The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings (Disc 2).

I never cease to be amazed at how quickly a song can take you back. I loaded the changer this morning with a mix of new CDs and ones that had been in storage for two years. The first song to come up? REM’s “World Leader Pretend” from 1989’s Green. Instantly it’s fall in Newport News, September 1989. I’m a senior in high school, newly confident about my place in the world and arguing about REM with my friends Rob and Matt at Patrick Henry Mall.

Incidentally, it appears that Chris Heschong is World Leader Pretend, according to Google.
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Currently playing song: “I’m Waiting For The Man” by Velvet Underground on The Velvet Underground and Nico.

Anyone know what’s up with this web site: http://www.jamminz90.com? They’re calling for a boycott of Clear Channel stations. They seem to have found my old pointer to the Washington Post article on Clear Channel and cite it as support. Yay, I’m a support point for a boycott.

Doc Searls sez that the iRock should let you select any channel on the FM band. I have one of those. It cost about $20 at Best Buy, and is called the SoundFeeder.

As always, though there’s a trade off between features and ease of use. This thing has a four position switch, to let you select between four ranges of FM frequencies, and a dial to let you tune precisely within that range. Or sort of precisely—it’s not really precision engineered or anything, and sometimes the signal drifts a little.

Driving on a long trip can be an exercise in patience. As you drive in and out of range of different stations, the frequency you chose on the SoundFeeder will inevitably get interference. Then you have to find an empty spot on your tuner and fiddle with the SoundFeeder again until the signal comes in—using the two controls without taking your eyes off the road is pretty tricky.
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Currently playing song: “I’m Waiting For The Man” by Velvet Underground on The Velvet Underground and Nico.