music — Nick Heer

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Don’t Wake the Dragon, But Maybe Strike Up a Licensing Deal With It

May

Since the rumour mill has all but confirmed an upcoming revamp/refresh/reinvigoration of the MobileMe service, apparently to be dubbed “iCloud”, it would be a good idea to explore the problems they might attempt to solve with it, specifically with music syncing.

In recent memory, Apple has been rather slow to introduce necessary (or “necessary”) features to iOS devices; copy and paste, and multitasking are two of the more notable examples. But, as it has been said time and time again, Apple tends to implement these features in a more logical, more intuitive and better way than the contemporary best version. In the last few weeks, Amazon has introduced a digital locker, and Google just announced Google Music Beta. Both are cloud-based music storage solutions (marketing speak be damned). And now Apple seems poised to jump into this field with a service of their own.

The current crop of cloud storage spaces work beautifully for documents, bookmark syncing and photos, all of which tend to be formats measured in kilobytes or just a few megabytes. Music and movies tend to reside in libraries measuring several gigabytes. While I would like to be enthused about Google Music Beta, it requires the user to upload their library. A 1,000-song library, using Apple’s estimations, is about 8 GB. Assuming a typical home user will have a 1 mbps upload, this will take over 18 hours of solid uploading to initially sync their entire music library. That’s simply far too long. Any time music is added to or removed from your library, Google’s tool will automatically make the necessary changes in the cloud. It’s good that it’s automatic, but it still takes time. It’s 2011. Why does online storage have the same (in)convenience it did back in 1995 with FTP?

Amazon does a way better job. Any time you purchase a song through Amazon MP3, that song gets added to your Digital Locker. This also goes for movies and TV shows purchased through those Amazon services. And yet neither solution helps me much, because I am Canadian.

In fact, anyone outside of the US cannot appreciate either of these solutions. Neither Amazon nor Google sought licensing from any record label to begin their cloud locker services. You can argue ad nauseum about whether or not they should be required to get this permission, but the fact remains that they’re treading on their (lawyers’) interpretation of American fair use laws.

In summary, then, the current state of cloud music storage relies on American fair use laws and individual users to manually upload their music files. Wouldn’t it be nice to change that?

Unlike Google or Amazon, Apple sells digital music in 26 countries. Apple has a much greater advantage in ensuring that the service they provide will be available in all of (or a majority of) the countries the iTunes Store is available in. Conversely, Apple has a major disadvantage if this service were to only be available in the US.

How will this service work, then? Will the user be required to upload all of the individual music files they own, à la Google Music? This is slow and cumbersome, as established. Will all tracks purchased from iTunes automatically be made available in the cloud? This has the potential to exclude large amounts of a user’s library if that user has ripped music from CDs or purchased it from other services such as Amazon MP3 and Beatport. As an example, while I have a substantial music library, only around 500 songs in it have been purchased from the iTunes Store, significantly less than the number of CDs I’ve ripped.

It would be in Apple’s best interest to allow access to all songs purchased through iTunes by default, but also allow users to add their own music to the bucket. The problem, as ever, comes back to the record labels and local laws. Since Apple cannot determine whether or not you actually own the songs you’re uploading, they might be granting you storage of your enormous library of pirated music. This would, to put it mildly, displease the record labels.

It’s a tricky and complex issue. Not providing users with the ability to upload their own files is grounds for user dissatisfaction, but allowing them this ability will piss off the record labels. And when record labels get pissed off, ordinary people tend to suffer most.

— May 19, 2011

Little by Little: Radiohead’s “King of Limbs”

Feb

Radiohead enjoys a certain amount of success as a band with a strong fanbase and limitless creativity. They were a pioneer of digital distribution, and a sculptor of the modern musical landscape. Their latest release, “The King of Limbs”, has cemented this reputation, with many critics bowled over by the distribution scheme; how, with little fanfare, they are able to release a new album and immediately have it go viral^[1]. Limitless creativity? We shall see.

The album begins with arguably the most difficult track of the eight (yes, only eight songs on this release, totalling 37 minutes), entitled “Bloom”. It’s a dizzying chaos of drums, strained vocals and textures, with no discernible time signature. I would argue this is a weak start. It’s dissimilar to the rest of the album, and isn’t particularly inviting. That said, it will appease those who wish to feel they conquered it.

“Morning Mr. Magpie” and “Little By Little” are both considerably more listenable. The former has a noticeable trace of funk to the guitar work, and electronic beats that echo Thom Yorke’s “The Eraser” and prior Radiohead releases. The latter echos Pink Floyd’s “San Tropez”, combined with Radiohead’s more mellow work. Think “Nude”, but faster and with percussion galore.

As one of the three or four people on the planet that despises drum-and-bass, “Feral” falls on unwanting ears. Luckily it’s only three-and-a-quarter minutes long. Next.

The track that follows “Feral” is “Lotus Flower”, and is one of the highlights of the entire album. It’s decidedly more subtle, with exotic undertones (noticing a trend?) and really intriguing textures. Yorke’s trademark falsetto vocals are at their prime, brought to the forefront of the mix, leaving melodic “vapour trails” (echos, yes, but abstracted).

Piano? In my Radiohead? It’s more likely than you think, on “Codex”, with what sounds like a zither in the background (it’s probably just a guitar on the upstroke). If you thought the album was gloomy before this track, you’re in for a real shock. Miserable, drab, depressing, rainy, overcast: these are just a few terms that could be applied to this song. However, that doesn’t make it beige celery covered in mild cheddar: it’s fantastic. The horns are a nice touch, emphasizing the jazzy undertones. Insert a requisite 20 seconds of mostly dead air before…

…”Give Up the Ghost”. Twittering birds, acoustic guitar and golpes^[2] frame more beautiful vocal textures. Drones in the background help ground it as a Radiohead song, as do the myriad of layers.

The last track of the short album is “Separator”, and it brings back some of the percussion from the first half, melds it with the more lucid textures of the second half and blends it all together into a pleasant, if unsurprising amalgamation. Not that it’s disappointing to have the final song on any album be unsurprising: it’s the conclusion that helps tie everything together. “Separator” is fantastically downtempo, and brilliantly jazzy.

The album, then, is good. Not great, and not revolutionary, but good. It’s going to get multiple listens, even if I’ll be skipping “Bloom” and “Feral”.

Picks: “Lotus Flower”, “Codex”, “Separator”

Never mind that they aren’t the first to do so: Nine Inch Nails released both “Ghosts I-IV” and “The Slip” with no prior announcement – the former sold out all 2,500 $300 limited edition packages within 48 hours.
Golpe: tapping on the guitar for percussion. Usually used in flamenco playing.

— February 21, 2011

My Top Twelve Albums

Feb

I honestly have two posts waiting in the queue that are far more substantial than a simple list, I just haven’t edited them. I figured a fun little post would be good, in between social critiques. The following list of albums are ones which I can listen to in their entirety, where every song is good, and the albums are a cohesive body of work. They are my favourite albums. Without further ado, and in no particular order, number one:

album Dark Side of the Moon — Pink Floyd. The Wall is arguably a better album. It tells a story, it’s captivating and it’s Pink Floyd’s magnum opus. However, it’s long. Really long. It’s an extremely difficult album to listen to in a single sitting; one must listen to the first half, then take a break before plunging into part two. Dark Side is a perfect length. It’s less than fourty-five minutes long and every moment is crammed with perfect instrumentation, beautiful sonic textures and colourful imagery. Every square inch of ~~vinyl~~ glass and plastic is used, and no playing time is wasted. It’s one of the very best.

album The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place — Explosions in the Sky. Despite the novella of a title, Earth is a masterpiece. It’s arguably the band’s best album, and despite having merely five songs, it runs for slightly longer than the Pink Floyd album above. True to the band’s style, and indeed their genre, much of the album is spent in suspense, waiting for the perfect sonic climax in each song. Every song is a little gem. Every song is precious, and every song captures a certain subtlety, yet every song is breathtaking.

album Sing the Sorrow — AFI. AFI’s signing to a major label was met with an amount of disdain by longtime fans, who were certain they were about to lose the precious punk stylings that made their mark. But with larger production budgets and a different studio, AFI cranked every knob to “11.” Fast became faster, hard became harder, quiet became eerier. The style that the band perfected on their previous two full-length albums reached its peak on Sorrow, before they turned a bit screamo (and now alt-rock). This album, though, is magnificent.

album The Downward Spiral — Nine Inch Nails. If ever there were a true Nails concept album, this is it. Over the course of its one-hour runtime, we experience the slow self-destruction of the protagonist, introduced with the perfectly sadistic Piggy: “nothing can stop me now, ’cause I don’t care anymore.” The album was recorded at Sharon Tate’s former home, and listeners can almost experience the effect it must have had on Reznor. The album is often violent, occasionally sinister and even distressing, with the melancholic A Warm Place and the classic Hurt. 1999′s The Fragile may be a more musically mature album, but for pure, unadulterated listening pleasure, nothing beats Spiral.

album Beggars — Thrice. Every so often, an album comes along that truly moves me, with both the passion infused into the songs and the sheer technical and musical abilities of the band members. I’ve loved Thrice for a long time, and I’m still a massive fan of The Artist in the Ambulance. But no other band I can think of has matured to the same level Thrice has. Music reviewers go mental for Radiohead, but I’d argue that Thrice is better, and not just by a little bit, either. Beggars proves that. Every song ties together, and each are crafted not to technical perfection, but to emotional brilliance.

album The Beatles — The Beatles. Earlier, I argued against two prominent double-disc albums (The Wall and The Fragile), instead opting for their single-disc counterparts in the pantheon of great albums. It may seem weird, then, that my favourite Beatles album is the White Album. Like the others, though, I have a very good reason: every song is good. That’s not to say Revolver had a bunch of bad tracks, but White has always seemed to me to be the most cohesive body of work they ever recorded. From “Back in the USSR” all the way to “Good Night”, it’s thirty songs of sheer wonder. Well, twenty-nine — I’ll excuse the existence of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” because of the huge influence “Helter Skelter” has had in the last 40 years.

album Kind of Blue — Miles Davis. Kind of Blue is Davis’ definitive work, and his best-selling record. In fact, it’s possibly the best-selling jazz record of all time. It is possibly one of the most influential albums ever, and is widely regarded to be Davis’ best work. Based exclusively on modality, it was recorded in just two days, and has remained regarded as a pinnacle of jazz for the five decades since.

album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — Wilco. This album is part of a genre I like to call “cozy fireplace music”, which sounds exactly like you’d expect. It’s comforting, it’s relaxing, it’s lyrical and it’s interesting. Notably, this also includes the American Analog Set album below. Wilco’s version of this genre is compelling and intriguing. There’s liberal use of acoustic guitars and warm-toned vocals, interspersed with distorted drum beats and glitches. It’s not an album for everyone, but it’s an album for me.

album Know by Heart — The American Analog Set. The album opens with a song called “Punk as Fuck.” If you were unfamiliar with AmAnSet, you might expect some roaring guitars or wild drums. As it turns out, the listener is greeted with a soft drum beat, plucked guitar and a buzzy organ. It’s more “Jazzy as Fuck”, but all the same, it’s impeccable. The album continues in a similar vein, each song burying deep into the warmths of your heart, nurturing you on perhaps a cold, miserable day, or a hot summer’s day. Who cares? It’s warm, interesting and beautiful any way you care to cut it.

album Electric Ladyland — The Jimi Hendrix Experience. If you play in any rock band, of any particular strain, if you have a guitar, perhaps distorted, you were at least partly inspired by Jimi Hendrix. It’s a simple, unavoidable fact. On Ladyland, Hendrix flexes his substantial guitar muscles, in all his glory. He reaches new highs on this album, climaxing with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”, arguably some of the best electric guitar the world has ever heard. Joe Satriani describes it as “the greatest piece of electric guitar work ever recorded. In fact, the whole song could be considered the holy grail of guitar expression and technique. It is a beacon of humanity.” It’s a breathtaking song, on a breathtaking album.

album Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death — Dead Kennedys. As usual for the Kennedys, the songs on Convenience are a biting, razor-sharp commentary on contemporary society, sprinkled with wit, improv and Biafra’s unique brand of humour. Every song is loaded to the teeth with no-holds-barred opinion and comment, in a way only the Kennedys can conjure. Some prefer Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables — I like that album, but there’s something about Convenience that keeps me coming back. It might be the slightly eclectic, collective nature of the album, as it’s a b-sides and rarities compilation. Whatever it is, the gung-ho attitude of it works for me.

album In Utero — Nirvana. Before departing from this world, Kurt Cobain managed to finish two of the best albums of his career. The MTV Unplugged performance is one example, but the other is the final studio album: In Utero. Steve Albini brought the band back to a more low-fi sound, as opposed to the multilayered, cleaner sound featured on Nevermind, and the dedication to a less polished product worked for the music. The songs sound raw, pure and untouched, as if Cobain’s mouth were just inches from the listener’s ear. It’s a beautiful, touching album, worthy of only the highest praise.

— February 23, 2010

The Irony of Counterculture

Nov

Allow me to start this entry with an apology: I should keep this updated more often. Two-and-a-half months is far too long. Without making too many excuses, I’ve been studying hard and writing papers, and after writing 1,500 words on the Byzantine aesthetic, the final thing on my mind is writing an opinion piece for my blog. For that, I’m sorry.

Thank you for the comments on the previous entry. There are some wonderfully insightful issues that were brought up with regards to wireless power. However, time is precious, so I’ll move on.

Have you ever set foot into an art college? No? Pardon my wit, sharpening by the day, and let me paint you a picture of the culture within. The students are able to be classified in just a few distinct groups: punks, hipsters, miscellaneous hippie-type counterculture folks and normal people. The first are an established subculture that have been a core independent offshoot since the 1970s, and the penultimate group in that list is too easy to pick on. The final set of normal students is a rarity at art college, and almost all of them are typically found in the design studies and not fine arts. That leaves hipsters, arguably as easy to mock as hippie-types, but more fun in the process.

The hipster subculture was born from the roots of punk, hip-hop and indie musical followers and put in a sort of counterculture smoothie with a sprinkling of a disheveled, deliberately uncool dweeb factor. Hipsters will carry a carefully decorated notebook, rife with poetry painstakingly plucked from a thesaurus, in a canvas bag made from an old potato sack and sold at Urban Outfitters for $38.50 in a measured aesthetic of uniqueness. The hipster will point out irony like Alanis Morisette, which is the true irony they fail to see – their counterculture of individuality results in a ubiquitous landscape of bad hair and ill-fitting shirts. When presented with the reality of a song called “Isn’t It Ironic” not containing a single instance of it, Morisette went on the defensive and claimed that it was her intention all along. An obvious defense, and one which not a single person believed, yet one which your average hipster will be quick to use.

Of course, this being an art school, I must point out a design irony: the mecca of hipsterdom that is American Apparel. Yes, a store with a cult large enough to invade Spain with its vertical integration and semi-pornographic ads (which I am not offended by in any way, but that’s another blog entry for another two-and-a-half months away). American Apparel appealing to scenesters (a synonym, finally!) because it sells individuality, markets the atypical and dyes its v-neck-to-your-stomach shirts a variety of neon colours. For a store so focused on uniqueness, they have ironically, deliberately or not, selected Helvetica, the omnipresent sans-serif for their brand identity.

The word “hipster” carries with it some negative clout. It could be that it’s just a scene of ugly glasses and ’80’s clothing, or that, owing to its general mediocrity, they are the only consumers of Pabst Blue Ribbon. As such, a hipster won’t identify themselves as such. For a group who isn’t ashamed to pay $29.05 for an ironic t-shirt, the very mention of “hipster” is oddly embarrassing. Maybe it’s the way it rolls off the tongue, with a kind of venomous spitting, or the group’s aversion to labels.

After reading the last 600 words or so, you may be asking yourself why I have such a problem with them. Oddly enough, the fact of the matter is that I don’t. Why would I spend 600 words on something I plainly couldn’t give a damn about? That’s a very good question. I think I’m just trying to make an argument for how juvenile subculture can be. Of course, I don’t think society should be a simple wave of suits and overcoats. However, by creating a countermovement there is an odd phenomenon of conformity in a calculated collective counterculture of anti-conformists.

Perhaps that’s the real irony.

Addendum: I’ve posted a hipster-centric blog post prior to this. However, that was copied from (and attributed to) an anonymous Last.fm user. I chose to write a more considered piece.

— November 26, 2009

Ghosts 19

Aug

— August 23, 2009

Pop, Revisited

Aug

I should make it absolutely clear, before I begin to tear modern pop music apart, that I am not one of those indie hipsters, who can’t stand to listen to anything in the Billboard Top 200 for fear of appearing uncool, for lack of a better term. Nor do I object to pop music in general. I posted a short, actually fairly poorly written entry professing my love of decent pop music. But, I’m afraid, I fear that my brief fling with pop has been ruined by three things. Just three.

The first culprit are Disney’s pop princes and princesses. I am, of course, talking about Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers and the High School Musical series. And I don’t want to sound like I’m beating a dead horse here, but it isn’t that they’re bad, per se. I can find you truly terrible music, if that’s what you’re into, but at least bad music has something curiously charming about it. Disney pop somehow manages to out-do this with music that is as interesting as listening to Ben Stein explaining the Austrian business cycle theory. It’s almost as if they’ve made a list of everything a successful pop song should be and passed it around to their pop acts. The Jonas Brothers got this list, scribbled some clichéd lyrics on a napkin, learned a few power chords and got to work. This is what they came up with:

Next time I see you I’m giving you a high five Cuz hugs are overrated just FYI

I wish I could say I’m making that up, but those lyrics are so uninspired and dull that it’s embarrassing (I should point out that those are actual lyrics from their song “S.O.S”). I also wish I could say that I went and clicked on several songs to try to find the worst lyrics. Surprisingly, I didn’t do that. I merely searched for “Jonas Brothers lyrics” and went to the first link that came up. I then clicked on a random song title on that page. Simple. It isn’t just the lyrics though, it’s the delivery. The Jonas Brothers are a soulless pop machine. They are a mass-produced, family-friendly, Tupperware brand of pop. Perhaps it’s just those three brothers though; perhaps another Disney act has had more luck. How about one that’s also the descendant of a musician? This should be a walk in the park:

There’s always gonna be another mountain I’m always gonna wanna make it move Always gonna be a uphill battle Sometimes I’m gonna have to lose

Oh dear. It’s almost as if I’ve never heard that metaphor before. Interestingly, Miley Cyrus didn’t actually write these lyrics, so I suppose I can’t actually blame her. I can, though, for the mundane recitation of them.

The next cancer that is killing pop music is an unheard-of level of anonymity. It’s partially the fault of the artists (and their labels and producers), and also the radio stations that end up playing their music. Artists tend to fall into trends and gimmicks such as auto-tune, growly, post-grunge singing, and Timbaland’s Blazing House of Beats, rendering most radio-ready music a blur of similarity. Turn on a modern rock station and all you’ll hear is a Nickelback sound-alike (or maybe it is Nickelback, I can never tell). A constipated man singing about his woman, backed by detuned, overdriven guitars, lots of bass and a loud drummer. Flip to the top-40 station, and you’ll hear some nonspecific hip-hop and dance tracks, with the occasional pop-punk song thrown in for — and this is a stretch — variety. This is made worse by a downright refusal to mention the artists on just about any station. What you’re left with is a sea of music that sounds similar, without a lick of an indication of who played any of it.

The final miscreant are the Black Eyed Peas, and Boom Boom Pow.

— August 11, 2009

The Problem With Indie Hipsters

Mar

I’d hate to be one of those bloggers that just re-posts what others write, but this is a damn good rant.

There has never been a form of musical elitism as contrived as that of the indie hipsters.

In the past year, Napster’s full potential was finally reached as the entire MTV generation made the transition from radio rock/rap over to the current triarchy of hipsterism: emo, indie, and hardcore. The underground has become the mainstream. Just years ago you’d get funny looks for listening to unpopular bands; these days, everyone under 25 is competing to know the most unpopular bands, and the more obscure they are, the better. Nowhere, of course, is there a shred of genuine passion for music, as the kids are as blinded by fashion as they ever were. Your average Joanna Newsom fan would undoubtedly be listening to Limp Bizkit today, if that was still were the fashionable thing to do.

We end up with a really sad situation where even though kids have the entire world of music at their fingertips, the only thing they’re looking for in their quest for new music is another band that will compliment their carefully calculated image of a young, in-the-know hipster. Never has such a mass effort been put into finding new music that you don’t even like.

As fashion wins out over music, all hipsters look for specific aesthetics in their bands. At the bottom of the hipster hierarchy reside emo and its fellow -cores. While the emotion in these genres may be contrived, -core is at least honest about its obsession with scenesterism. -Core does not claim to be anything other than self-absorbed, shallow, and fashionable.

Indie rock, however, is not nearly as honest about the confines of its genre. Indeed, perhaps because indie rock is at the top of the hipster hierarchy, indie is obsessed with proving its worldliness, and is obsessed with proving that its perceived superiority to -core is indeed justified. As such, Indie rockers are not content to be merely labeled scenesters (as -cores are happy to be); indies want to be seen music lovers first and foremost. In their strained and unconvincing to attempt to prove that they truly, really do love music, indie rockers feel the obligation to listen to genres other than indie even if they have no ear for them.

Unfortunately, however, this attempt at musical diversity suffers from an inherent flaw: having diverse taste in music is about being able to appreciate multiple aesthetics in music, and indie kids are only able to appreciate a single aesthetic – that is, the indie aesthetic, the aesthetic of fashion. This is abundantly clear in examing the indie kid’s awkwardly pathetic attempts to branch out of indie and appreciate non-indie rock; if you look closely, the indie kid’s non-indie listening is limited to meaningless subgenres of subgenres that happen to comply to the indie aesthetic.Indie kids need special ‘indified’ versions of other genres in order to render them listenable, as they simply can’t handle those same genres in their raw, pure, (and unfashionable) forms.

Indie kids can’t take trance, so they listen to electroclash. They can’t take gangster rap, so they listen to abstract hip hop. They can’t take doom metal, so they listen to drone metal. They can’t take neofolk, so they listen to freak folk. Etc etc.

In brief, the indie rocker can only explore music in the context of fashion; for supposed ‘music lovers’, indie rockers are without a doubt the most limited music fans in existence. Unfortunately, however, the sheer number of hipsters is so massive in 2007 that their influence has left its deteriorating mark on virtually every genre. As unpleasant as the situation is, in a way I feel for these kids: what must it be like to automatically reject all music with genuine passion and sincerity in favor of self-concious detachment?

Grabbed from an unknown author at this Last.fm group.

— March 29, 2009

On Pop Music

Feb

I have a good many friends who scoff at pop music, or anything resembling it, purely on the basis that it’s popular. They refuse to listen to the university radio station here because the music they play is “too mainstream” (you can forget about them listening to the top-40 station – that’s just out of the question). And, to be perfectly honest, I think they’re just being dramatic.

Pop music has always existed. It’s right there in the name – popular music. That’s not to say that everything that’s popular is good. But I hardly think that one can dismiss a song or an artist so rapidly because they’re popular. Surely nobody can ignore the artistry of Beck, the riotous Rolling Stones and the rapping elite that is Jay-Z. I don’t know how to talk about this, so let me interject a brief interlude about food.

This is a clip from Gordon Ramsay’s show “The F Word” in which Top Gear’s James May is a special guest. In the recipe challenge, they make fish pies. Ramsay makes his complex, layered and swank version, and May makes his rather simple version. The video should automatically start at the correct time, but if it doesn’t, it’s 3 minutes, 27 seconds in.

As you can see (or will now see, if you couldn’t be arsed to watch the video), May won that challenge, and I think this challenge draws a comparison with music. May’s dish is representative of pop music. It’s simple, straightforward and, since it’s food, it’s packed with flavour. In the case of music, it would be packed with pleasing sounds. Ramsay’s is representative of other kinds of music, for which I can’t think of an appropriate name. “Unpop” is the closest I can think of. It’s complex and it’s layered. Some might say it’s the more intelligent, the more sophisticated of the two. However, there’s no reason pop cannot be intelligent. Truthfully, most of it isn’t, but that’s OK too. Do we always want to sit down and read Othello or The Satanic Verses? Most of us do like the occasional comic strip. Some of us like comic strips more than occasionally. And that’s alright.

And so is pop music.

— February 21, 2009

Of Genres and Tags

Jan

I have a completely tagged iTunes library. After several hours split between the previous two days, I have looked at every song in my library, every single one of the 12,332 songs that I have, and ensured that the song title, artist, album and genre are all correct. And in doing so, I have discovered that the current method of classifying albums and songs is, at best, woefully outdated. More realistically, it’s an empty and meaningless endeavor.

The idea of placing albums, and indeed artists into categories came naturally with the invention of the record store. You could walk to the jazz section and find The Rat Pack, the classical section would hold timeless Beethoven and Schubert records, and the rock section would have the “raucous” sounds of Elvis Presley (in the ’50′s) and The Beatles (in the ’60′s). It was a simple solution for rather simple music, and I do mean simple. At the time there were standards to uphold. There were no mashup albums, and the difference in perceived loudness between different rock and roll artists would be scoffed at in modern times.

The genre method has continued right up to this day. There’s still a genre column in iTunes, and just about every music store still has everything categorized in this fashion. But music has changed in the last 50-60 years. New genres have appeared seemingly overnight. There are a variety of electronic genres, for starters – everything from chill, ambient music to hard core trance. While Dashboard Confessional and Metallica are both rock, you’d be hard-pressed to find a tonal or stylistic similarity between the two. And don’t even get started on mashup artists like Girl Talk and Audiobytes for Autobots, who both blur genres until there’s nothing left but a sea of sound. With GarageBand, a microphone and a MySpace page, one can create a niche genre for themselves before they can think of a name for it. Times have changed. So should the method by which we sort our music.

Genres are much too vague. There are far too many catch-all genres (electronic, rock, jazz, pop, et. al.), and lines are being crossed all the time. For some artists, a simple “rock” tag will suffice. However, that artist then becomes the basis for what defines “rock” as a genre in your library. You may tag Bon Jovi’s collection as “rock”, but then later, stumble upon David Usher. And it is at this point where you will start to question the definition of “rock”, as relative to Bon Jovi. Is David Usher’s music hard enough? Is the tone right? Is it too hard to be “rock”, and more of a “metal” album? (no, it is not). Quite simply, it becomes difficult to tag such a wide variety of music with so few tags.

This is why I would like a new field in iTunes. I mean, we can keep the genre field, because it’s great for getting a broad overview of an artist or album. But there should be a new field, called “Tags.” In this field, you could write a list of tags, similar to how you would tag a blog entry, a photo on Flickr or a video on YouTube. You could write whatever you want in the tag field – everything from “indie”, “jazzy” and “rockin’” to “upbeat”, “gibson les paul” and “recorded in New York”. In this way, you can search your library based on the keywords you choose. Your music library is freed from the constraints of genres and moved into a more accurate, more correct way of categorization.

I think I should send an email to Apple now…

— January 18, 2009

Weird Experimental Indie Music

Nov

I should define some terms here, specifically “experimental.” Just because you added a xylophone to an otherwise rock song does not make you an experimental artist. Frankly, I’m sick of the bands that think it’s something revolutionary. The worst part is that what they’re producing doesn’t sound musical. Now, I understand that we all have different tastes in music, so some of you wouldn’t consider what I’m listening to to be music. However, at least it has a beat, a discernible and pleasing melody, and some understandable lyrics. But then there’s this band who fulfill just one of the above requirements (having a beat), and only just barely. The melody is confused, and the vocals sound like Bob Dylan with a cold. I respect that they’re doing music and that they’ve gotten past the garage band stage. But it’s just irritating.

Even more irritating is when an indie band starts to get mainstream followers, and all the indie kids get pissed off about it. Because, it’s apparently uncool for an indie kid to like mainstream music, even if it is something they’ve been listening to since before it was a Top 40-er.

— November 14, 2008