I miss trips to the used CD parlor. I love Reno, but the used CD scene here is beyond dismal. Beyond. So what do I do for music these days? eMusic, Amazon MP3s, and Amazon Used CD’s in that order. My eMusic account nets me 50 credits a month. Not even a year ago almost any album on the site could be had for something between 9 and 12 credits. So thats something like 5 or 6 albums a month for less than $20. Some of the bigger labels have fucked with this ratio, but it’s still a great deal. The tracks are in MP3 format, legal, and have no DRM on board. The MP3s are usually in the 256 range. So…just short of CD quality. eMusic has a steady stream of new music and now and then adds some major label stuff…but if you are only in the market for Top 40, it’s probably not going to be your thing. Instead, it’s got a pretty dang good search engine and good ways to find artists that are similar to the stuff you like already.
Ok…so here is a list of stuff I’ve found that I totally dig.
The blues gods: Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, etc.
Black Mountain – heavy psychedelic stuff
Cracker – It’s Cracker. Not everything they’ve done…but a fine collection. Countrysides is amazing
Dave Alvin – Dave was the Blaster’s guitarist way back when but has gone on to a great career as purveyor of Americana
Heartless Bastards – Just go buy these albums. Seriously. One of my fave new female voices
Steve Earle – the ultimate Nashville Outlaw has carved out a late career of speaking the truth, no matter how ugly it is
Led Zeppelin – I added Presence and In Through the Out Door to my already hefty Zep list
King Khan (and the BBQ Show, and the Shrines, etc) – The best garage rock around
Patrick Sweaney – No idea how I stumbled on this…but damn…I LOVE his record
R.L. Burnside – the dirtiest gruffest blues on the planet
Roky Erickson – The new album with Okkervil River is devastating
And…the Warlocks, The Weepies, Slaid Cleaves, The Ponys, The Dirtbombs, Richmond Fontaine, Phosphorescent, and on and on. Seriously. Check it out.
I was trying to talk music with one of my student workers the other day. He is a pretty well informed music fan, even if he is only 21. The place we differed was on listening to whole albums. He is, like alot of folks these days, what I call a single listener. He only listens to songs he has purchased off of iTunes or Emusic, and he never buys an entire album, just the song he likes. I tried to talk to him about the “album” experience. He was resistant.
Keep in mind that I grew up listening to the apex of AOR radio. AOR was, rather pointedly, not about singles, but about the whole piece of music. I’ve always listened to entire albums. Always. I know what track is supposed to come next. I can get a feel for what the artist/producer/engineer/etc was trying to say with sequence. Shoot to Trill comes after Hells Bells, it just does. Three Days (the Stairway to Heaven of my generation) is a perfect follow up to Been Caught Stealing, it just is. When the Levee Breaks is a great album closer. Seriously. At work I listen to a ton of music. It’s always on in the background. And it’s almost always whole albums. Start to finish. I feel like I’d be missing something if I just listened to singles.
Songs I’d have never heard otherwise: Tattooed Love Boys (the Pretenders), Darling Nikki (Prince), Midnight Rambler (the Stones), The Great Curve (Talking Heads), Eurotrash Girl (Cracker). None of these songs were the hit single off their album. But they are all better in my opinion. I’m not saying that listening to singles is bad. I’m just suggesting that their is something more to the experience of consuming an entire album.
I don’t always get M.I.A. to be honest. She rips stuff wholecloth from punk artists and calls it new. But I have to say that this song (dig the nod to punk godfather Suicide) and video are amazing. Rough. Brilliant. Satiric. Timely.
It seems hard now, at times, to remember how full of menace the Stones were. Starting even as early as ’64 and culminating in the dark dark days of the ’70s, they were the band your mother warned you about. Could this song be any more sexually menacing? Really?
This past long weekend was one steeped in the arts for bin and I. Thursday we saw Up, Friday evening we saw Dick Dale, and Sunday we took in the NadaDada Motel art show. Amazing.
Dick Dale put on a pretty damn good show. He is 72, just recovered from cancer (a 2nd time) without the use of painkillers, and still capable of kicking out the jams. I’ve seen Dick a number of times and he was very much chattier Friday night than ever. He seemed to be having a complete ball playing older tunes (Miserlou of course), some of his tunes from his time in South America (Esperanza and Belo Horizante), oddball classics (The Hully Gully!), and even Hava Nagila (Hey!). I can’t believe he did trotted out The Hully Gully. Hilarious. Over the years he seems to have gotten over the fact that he really can’t sing and embraced it. Now, well…he is who he is. At those moment he locks into a groove and really plays, he is hard to beat. I’d go again in a heartbeat. Sharing that with bin was really something special.
I’m a huge fan of mashups, the fascinating musical technique of putting vocals from one artist over the instrument track of another. It’s much, much more complicated than that, of course. Danger Mouse is an artist who first came to be known as the creator of the Grey Album: a mix of the Beatles and Jay-Z that was astonishing in it’s gravity. His new project sounds pretty damn fascinating. It’s also a project that may or may not ever be released legally. Currently, you can buy the book of photographs (by David Lynch no less) and a CD. But as the article below states:
But the CD is blank and recordable, and a sticker on the shrink wrap explains cryptically: “For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.”
The music industry and it’s huge appetite for it’s own destruction fascinates me.
I gave up on the whole DJ as a line of work thing in ’89. Perhaps ’90. I saw behind the curtain. I saw where it was headed. And now, here we are, with Clear Channel cutting one “djs” voice up into little generic bits to be used in a dozen different stations. It’s been years since a DJ picked the music. Years since they actually touched a turntable or CD player, or cart machine. It disgusts me.
And yet, oddly, the following article gives me a jolt of joy. La Hora Mixteca is a show out of a tiny station in Fresno. It’s run bilingually in Spanish and several Mixtec languages. The DJ is a DJ. He plays music that his listeners want to hear. He broadcasts advice, community news, and is a sign of life for the lowest rung of the Immigrant Laborer pool in California: the Mixtec Indians. The article and the work being done make me want to cry. In the best of all possible ways.
I can still remember the first time I heard the Blasters. I had borrowed a couple of cassettes from a friend at church who said they’d be “too country” for me. They weren’t. I love those early Blasters albums for the emerging song writing of Dave Alvin, the piano playing of Gene Taylor, and the blistering yodels of Phil Alvin. I suppose I was already prepped for something “too country” in a way. My parents had handed down a good hunk of Gordon Lightfoot to me in LP format. Now ol’ Gord is not “too country” but he does employ quite a few of the genre conventions in the service of his stately folk tunes.
So, from the time I got hooked on the Blasters I’ve had something of a conflicted relationship with the new country music. Or as it’s come to be called Alt-Country. Being the fucking horrible snob I am, I toss most country (but not western) music in three categories: old country (Johnny Cash, Hank the 1st, Merle), new country (the mind numbing wasteland of Travis Tritt, Kenny Chesney, and all of their tawdry 80′s pop rock compatriots), and alt-country (Justin Townes Earle, Hayes Carll, the Volebeats). I hold a special place in my heart for Lyle Lovett, who could have been the great great songwriter of our generation and can still make me cry. But looking at my collection the other day I did see quite a bit of country music, from Dwight to The Knitters to Hank III to Big Sandy. A younger version of myself would have been shocked and appalled. But, here we are. And as I listen to the Drive-By Truckers sing about the Church of Christ we come full circle.
Sometimes something with a twang is what I need. Sometimes I need the prophetic voice of thunder from John Cash, sometimes I need the savagery of the original Hank, and sometimes I need the comfort of Willie Nelson. I’m not embarrassed.
