Quite Random

It wasn’t always iPods and dull vocalists, son…

There’s been a lot about Adele in the paper and how she is an up-and-coming star, so I downloaded her debut album, and discovered it was as about as fulfilling as chewing pith while watching ITV. After you get past the fact that she’s got a good voice, there’s nothing much there, nothing to make the hairs on your neck stand up or make you think you’ll listen to the album again. She was being interviewed on Richard and Judy the other day and said she had in fact had her heart broken once, as if that gave her some points towards her NVQ in songwriting. I’m buggered if I know what everyone’s got so excited about – maybe a lot of music journalists and daytime TV producers think everyone is clamouring to hear yet another catatonic coffee-shop soundtrack from yet another young solo songstress with all the spark of a warm bottle of Fanta. Bugger. That.

I remember a time when I was thirteen or fourteen and I went from listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, Pet Shop Boys’ Actually and Michael Jackson’s Bad to discovering album after album after album that actually gave me a physical reaction – prickles, an involuntary grin, the urge to shout very loud and jump off beds. It is rare nowadays that I get the same reaction I did the first time I heard Appetite for Destruction, The Bends, Angel Dust, Maxinquaye, Blood Sugar Sex Magik or Disintegration.

If you’re feeling jaded, it’s easy to imagine that genuinely exciting new music is near-impossible to find. You have to wade through tonnes of detritus. Mika (oh, holy damp Christ in a rusty bucket I hate Mika), soporific Katie Melhua clones, and a recent spate of guitar bands that appear to be completely interchangeable are so thick on the ground it’s like running through wet cornflour. I sometimes wonder if music is going to get more and more boring until it completely flatlines, each song becoming more derivative and less exciting than the last. A lot of music is already there. I could listen to Radio 1, but only Mika irritates me more. One of the best ways of finding new music was Pandora, but that has been shut down outside the US now, leaving a few services like Jango.com or Last.fm for exploring new music, or just downloading something you never heard of before for the hell of it.

Maybe new music is just less exciting when you’re all grown up. Maybe swirling hormones are the key to getting worked up.  In the early 90’s I used to shout and jump off beds to some songs I’d rather forget, and I’ll never forget that in school discos, when James sang Sit Down, we actually used to sit down in the middle of the dance floor. This was the time when Dolby noise reduction on your tape deck was cutting edge, iPods were an insane dream, text messages were written in biro on a torn-off piece of A4 and Twin Peaks scared the shit out of us on Tuesday nights.

So I have found myself diversifying, and looking backwards. When I used to think my tastes in music were catholic, they really weren’t. A copy of the 1812 Overture and the African music from the baked beans advert did not make for an eclectic selection. Now I’m enjoying French-Algerian pop, Californian-Khmer psychedelic rock, Irish folk music, prog rock, much more classical music, and some oldies that had been off the playlist for long enough to feel new again. Despite Adele and the like, music isn’t getting boring any time soon. Even if I am jumping off beds less.

Summertime

The clocks have gone forward, it’s British Summer Time. The last few months have been a real mixed bag – crap, crap, and some more crap – for a whole bunch of people. You get comments like “What is going on this year?!”.

Roll on summertime. I’m not even talking about the weather, rather that version of summertime that doesn’t even exist, but where everyone’s really happy, like the one the Fresh Prince sang about. The tune below isn’t the Fresh Prince, but for a mood-lifter, it was a toss up between that, the one below, or Here Comes The Sun by the Beatles.

Star Trek - the White Rabbit Years

Beatbox cookup

I meant to blog about my holiday then I got distracted by this.

Doomed DRM

Microsoft technology that protects digital files from copyright infringement has been breached, according to reports.

A program called Fairuse4wm has been posted on the net and is apparently capable of breaching Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) system.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Music download security ‘cracked’

A program pops up which allows people to remove Digital Rights Management from the music on their computers. Just watch as Microsoft’s developers and lawyers swing in to action, to close down the ‘offending’ site that offers the software, and update DRM to close whatever loophole the software opened in the first place. The boy who plugged a hole in a dyke with his thumb comes to mind.

The irony is that this software is aimed at the people who have already paid for the music they are listening to, and wish to continue to do so after they stop paying a monthly fee to MSN Music, Napster and the like. The software makes absolutely no difference to the people who already share files illegally, or download from sites such as allofmp3.com – they are sharing unrestricted MP3 format files, and pay little or nothing for them in the first place.

The record industry and software providers (well, Microsoft and Apple) are going to continue to fight against people’s desire to own the music they have paid for, to preserve revenues – all under the guise of a battle to protect artist’s rights, when the artists themselves are held hostage to high prices by the record companies they work for. It’s all arse about face.

Development of some of the core features of the Internet that we now take for granted has arguably always been led by people on the wrong side of the law – Napster started as an illegal file-sharing program, Bittorrent technology is set for ever wider use in legal applications though currently it is mainly used to share pirated content, and the development of e-commerce, marketing and video compression on the Internet has been led in no small part by pornographers. The MSN Musics and iTunes of this world aren’t the innovators – they’re doing their best just to keep up in the only truly laissez-faire free market left in the world, where millions in revenue can be threatened by a Russian teenager in his bedroom, and if people don’t want to pay for music they can’t easily share, burn to CD or put on their portable player, they don’t have to.

And By The Books I Buy Shall Ye Know Me / Music

So you’re wandering around a book shop before work, as you do, and you fancy buying a new book for the weekend, because it’s a bank holiday and you’re less than bothered about getting into a murderous rage wandering around Ikea, or driving somewhere to sit in a traffic jam. Which do you buy?

• Who Moved My Blackberry?
• Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano-Player in a Whorehouse

Mmm. It seems that the title of a book can make it or break it… I bought the latter on the strength of the title alone, the former put me right off. So much for ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’.

Finally, some recommendations for people who like music, even though I’ve recommended them before…

• Emusic, now available in a UK version, has legal MP3s available for download, from an ever-increasing range of groups. Pay a monthly subscription and get an allowance to download a number of tracks each month. As you pay to download a set number of tracks regardless of the length of the track, much of the classical music with longer track times represents brilliant value. Emusic is also well set up to provide recommendations on related music, and is generally much nicer to use than MSN Music and the like. On top of everything else, as the tracks you download are in MP3 format, they’re playable pretty much anywhere on anything and not locked down by money-grabbing-bastard DRM.
• Jamendo has a whole catalogue of free albums from new and upcoming groups from all over the world (mainly France), available for download via Bittorrent. Some gems are hidden away amongst a fair amount of mediocrity.
• Pandora is the best Internet radio station in the world. As it’s only supposed to be available in the US you need to register using a US Zip Code, but it plays music based on a band or song you have chosen, giving you a personalised radio station that only gets better as you vote for or against the tracks it plays. It plays some absolute gems, in near-CD quality, and needs no software, as it works through your web browser. Pandora is fantastic, a simple idea, simply executed, a little bit of genius.

Soundtracks

A nerdy confession this may be, but I think a lot of people do it.

Sat on the train this morning, the commuters stood with hangdog expressions, maybe dreading the inevitable crush to get on the tube at Victoria. No-one was talking and everyone looked sort of lonely, or at least in their own world. How appropriate then that Queen’s ‘Somebody to Love’ came up on my MP3 player – all of a sudden a mundane train journey became a tragi-comic music video, and the expression in the face of the girl sat across from me became yearning, not gormlessness.

Crawling up a hill in Peru at three thousand meters, I was beginning to flag quite seriously, my pace slowing, my knees sore. Santana’s ‘Migra’ came on, and I practically sprinted the rest of the way, the tribal drums and chanting lyrics propelling me along as if I had all the wind in the valley blowing right up behind me.

Driving through deep troughs of sand on Fraser Island, winding through the inland forest, without much of an idea where we were going, Talking Heads’ ‘Road to Nowhere’ came on, again randomly, and a slightly bewildering meander became a devil-may-care adventure into the unknown.

Music’s good like that. I can see why commuters always have headphones on – a good song can put a gloss over the mundane. When the crescendo of a song breaking out coincides perfectly with the sun hitting your face as you walk off the train, it allows you to feel, just for a moment, that you could be in a film of your life.