Rants of a nerd
Posts tagged music
Music I’ve Been Listening To
1The Good:
Bond – Classified
This is another great album from the string quartet Bond. For a long time Habanera fan (from Carmen), a song like Señorita is just a joy to stumble upon. The entire album is like that. Just familiar enough and just contemporary enough.
Cheryl Cole – 3 Words
This has grown on me over time and there are a few songs that I really liked. Not great, but good.
The Saturdays – Chasing Lights & Wordshaker
Chasing Lights is my favourite of the two. Up alone is worth it. A worthy Girls Aloud replacement now that GA are not making music.
Coeur de Pirate – Coeur de Pirate
Fantastic chansons françaises. Lovely voice, nice for listening to while driving.
The Bad:
Rihanna – Rated R
I have tried, really tried. But I cannot like this album.
Owl City – Ocean Eyes
Fireflies sounded good enough to get the album. But loaded as it is with songs like Dental Care, whose lyrics were probably composed when under the influence of some mind numbing painkillers, it is very hard to listen to this without fear of losing one’s sanity.
The Ugly:
Kesha – The Animal
I wish I could get back the minutes I spent listening to this stuff.
10 billion itunes songs
0So apparently Apple has sold 10 billion songs on itunes. The store has been up for a few years now and is currently one of the biggest music retailers in the world. Ergo it is reasonable to expect that the best sellers during this time would reflect the best music of the decade. Maybe the top seller would be an all-time classic? The top three songs are:
3. The Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow
2. Lady GaGa – Poker Face
1. The Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling
This site has a listing of the top 10. All of the top 10 are very recent hit songs. Even Kesha made it on the list!
How does that happen? Perhaps the growth rate of itunes is so rapid that the newest hits are automatically the best selling ever. Perhaps the buying public are teenagers and they listen to these songs the most. Perhaps in ten or twenty years we will hear Tik Tok on the radio and think back to the good old days when music was good!
A fallout of the digital age is the shrinkage of time between fads. A decade or so back, movies used to run for several weeks. 100-day runs were reasonably common. These days the movie has gone to TV and DVD within 100 days. The rare blockbuster like Avatar plays for a couple of months. Part of the reason for this is the explosion in available media for consumption. The Economist has got the data deluge on its cover this week (have not read it yet). So there is utter fragmentation of the viewing public. Niches have become easier to fill. For example, smaller movie theaters don’t mind showing offbeat movies that appeal to smaller audiences as compared to the larger auditoria. Equally it is rare for a “cross-cultural” movie (or album or book or …). Perhaps the Black Eyed Peas and Avatar are examples of these breakout cultural examples?
Music: Year in Review
0A little after everyone else has finished publishing their favourite music of the past year, here is my sampling of what got a lot of airplay with me.
Girls Aloud must have been my most listened-to band of the year. The girl band from the UK somehow has continued to deliver good music album after album and the most recent ones (Tangled Up and Out of Control) both lived up to high expectations. It is enough to get me to try a couple of other British girl groups: The Saturdays and Girls Can’t Catch in the coming year. Staying with the Brits, Lily Allen’s sophomore outing “It’s Not Me, It’s You” was a brilliant effort. Also delivering a solid album of ear-friendly material was Pixie Lott’s Turn It Up. Rounding up this solid British year is Paloma Faith. You may not have heard of her, but the album Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful really grows on you.
From across the channel came the hugely successful and foot-tappingly good One Love by David Guetta. The anthem song, When Love Takes Over, introduced us to it during our summer holiday in Europe. Guetta’s other great hit for the year was the collaboration with the Black Eyed Peas on I Gotta Feeling, a crappy song if there was ever one, but how catchy! A trademark BEP outing. Another francophone singer that impressed me this year was the Quebecois Coeur de Pirate.
Staying on this side of the pond for another moment, it would be remiss to not mention Something Sally, a northern European band whose album Familiar Strangers had songs like The Taste and Tip Of My Tongue – the latter a collaboration with Joss Stone. Joss Stone herself had a good year out with Colour Me Free! The other European artiste for me was Lenka, who I found on aurgasm a while ago & whose song The Show is a definite highlight of the recent past in music.
Jumping across the Atlantic, rock music was underrepresented in my playlist. The only band that I played consistently was Cobra Starship after I caught their lovely single Good Girl Go Bad from the album Hot Mess. The single featuring Leighton Meester is itself well made and includes an XOXO text, for those with a keen eye. Also check out Leighton’s single Somebody to Love (featuring Robin Thicke).
Norah Jones’ The Fall is interesting as it is so different from her normally piano focussed songs. These songs are very rock-ish with a much greater guitar emphasis.
That about rounds up my favourite music of the last year (or so). I wanted to mention a couple of albums, Rihanna’s Rated-R and Shakira’s She Wolf, that somehow failed to get me. Both have some good material and I think one resolution for me should be to listen to these two a bit more.
A 13-year old tries the Walkman for a week
0When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman
I owned a few “other” brand Walkmen during the 90′s and it really is so easy to forget what life was like without MP3s. Now, the real portable music player award goes to my dad’s “portable” record player. That could play 16 to 78 RPM records through its in-built speaker. And it would fold up into a suitcase for portability!!
