Living in future’s past.
Written by: Kurt Torster
My two sons now have iPods. For their birthdays this year they each got one, a Nano for the older boy and a Shuffle for the younger. But, neither have purchased or downloaded any music for themselves and honestly, I’m not even sure if they would know how to. It’s not that I’m controlling their music, but it seems neither wants to be bothered…they just want to listen. So each is stocked with what’s been chart popular the past few years and I leave it at that.
It got me thinking about when I was their ages, 11 and 9 respectively, and how I listened to music. I’m pretty sure at that age I was still listening to the AM Radio (WABC most likely when it was top 40 and not talk) but I also had already purchased a fair amount of music.
I remember trips to department stores like Two Guys, Caldor and Woolworths, where I would go to the music department and spent what little money I had on 45s. Back in the day, stores usually had a spot where the top 100 singles usually resided and I would grab whatever I could afford. Just recently I found a box of these singles and had to laugh at some of what I bought at the time: “Undercover Angel,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” “Laughter In The Rain.” It’s probably not as funny that I have all of those guilty pleasures in my MP3 collection. I actually was starting to sweat thinking that I would come across “Afternoon Delight” or “Muskrat Love.”
I wanted to hear some songs so badly that I would sit and wait next to the radio with a cassette recorder, ready to pounce and when all was done, listen to this gloriously lo-fi copy. I wish I still had those tapes of the times when I was recording “Come Sail Away” and the dog would bark or “Sweet Talking Woman” and my Mother would come into my room and start yapping away about homework. I eventually learned to start recording songs when Casey Kasem would count down the hits every week, where at least finding songs were a little more predictable. Now, perfect copies of just about any song are a simple Google search away.
I did own a few albums too, most likely K-Tel compilations but I’m pretty sure the first actual slab of vinyl I bought for myself was either “Bat Out Of Hell” or “Kiss Alive.” “Frampton Comes Alive” might have figured in there too. I distinctly remember owning the Beatles “Red” and “Blue” collections on 8-Track. For the time, 45s were still it for me.
As I got older, 45 buying pretty much stopped other than imports I would buy at a place called Sound Exchange in Wayne, NJ. I was always fascinated by the non-album B-sides that were on singles from the UK and Japan. Even then, it wasn’t so much the 7” 45 single I was buying but the 12” Maxi-singles.
Now singles exist in the weird vacuum of i-Tunes, where discovery is made virally by YouTube or the bedded music of video games. My kids could care less about radio or even video channels. Most of their music knowledge comes from Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel (or from myself and what’s played in the car). At no time does either specifically seek something out and I just find that so odd.
I guess thanks to Slacker and XM, I don’t really seek much out myself these days either and have become quite content in living retro-actively. I wonder what my kids then will listen to in 30 years. The mind reels…
View CommentsDeath by shuffle mode
Written by: Kurt Torster
This past week I read an interesting article about "the death of the album." It gave me pause and I suddenly realized that lately, to me, yeah the album has been pretty dead.
I used to have quite a voracious appetite for new music. Even when I was younger I can remember trips into New York City where my friends and I would hit the shops down in St. Mark's Place, which was nothing more than a dumping ground for music company employees to rid themselves of all those promos they had sitting around their offices. A $20 bill would net you 15-20 vinyl albums on any given trip and somehow I always seemed to find the time to listen to it all. Not only would most of them find their way to TDK C-90 cassettes to listen to in the car (always seems like THE place to test out new tunes), but I would also cherry pick the best tunes for a constant revolving mix tape. It's funny how even now I remember a lot of these songs, no matter how obscure they are today. Bands like i-Ten, Aviator and Far Corporation were household names to me.
As the years progressed, CD's moved in and, while I may not have been purchasing as much music as I had been, the procedure was still the same, with cassettes eventually being replaced by spindles of blank CD's.
Then came the MP3 and suddenly things really changed for me. With Napster and Kazaa, it seemed any song was in grasp and it was probably at this point I stopped listening to albums in full most of the time. It was like I reverted to my 70's youth and became all about the single again. I would make mix CDs or just listen at random off the computer. And when the iPod came into my life, it's probably where the album began it's death spiral for me personally.
I went from listening to albums in full, whether I was in the car or work, to just hitting SHUFFLE and letting fate choose my ever evolving and quite random playlist. The iPod also made it a lot easier to make quick and dirty mixes and live inside of those rather than just plowing through new albums and listening to them they way they were meant to. I turned my weekly "new stuff" mix tape/CD into a playlist that became my primary listen, yet I have close to 200 albums on the device where 75% of the songs are now an afterthought. It seems like an almost unlimited capacity for storage has dictated my listening habits where as a smaller way of thinking used to force me to sit, take in and ultimately enjoy the ride.
It's a shame too because when I think back, a lot of times my favorite songs were album tracks that may never have received any sort of air play. Whether it's "Without Love" from Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" or the title track from Journey's "Escape," I realized that I'm probably missing out on a lot of great music lately. Hell, I even have a few albums I bought this year on iTunes that I have yet to listen to a single track. $30 well spent I'd say.
Oddly enough, it's three new releases that may be swinging me back in the other direction. The new ones from Brad Paisley and Rob Thomas have already gotten more album play than normal from me and I anticipate the same from Daughtry's impending release. With those I may be able to break my Slacker addiction, even if for just enough to find all that deeper music that I know is out there, just awaiting discovery.
So with that, I say goodbye to Shuffle...or at least until I can start to appreciate the journey as much as the destination.
View CommentsSlacking…
Written by: Kurt Torster
Just this past week I considered something I never, ever thought I would: eliminating the iPod from my life. Well, maybe not entirely, as I do use it a lot for games and watching videos. I’m talking more as my primary music player.
I’ve come to realize in my life that I just don’t have the time or even the interest to keep on top of it all anymore. I have about 20 gig of music on my Mac Book, which is duplicated on my 80 gig iPod Classic and kept in an ever rotating selection on my iPod Touch. But, it’s just gotten to the point I don’t want to be bothered anymore.
Sometimes I think I spend more time grabbing, organizing and copying tunes than actually spent listening. What was once a quite enjoyable hobby has turned into something that feels like work. And, the mere thought of trying to keep up with new music makes it feel that much more like a job.
Get a load of what I go through now.
I have one iPod filled with nothing but hits and better known tracks from the 50’s on. I call this the "Whitburn iPod," named after famed Billboard authoritarian Joel Whitburn. My other iPod, a 16GB Touch, is filled with more current full albums.
Trying to keep on top of these two beasts takes sometimes up to an hour a night, scouring Usenet (shhhhh!) or iTunes for new music. Then, of course, the process of making sure the tags or the artwork is correct (OCD is a bitch!). Oh, and playlists, gotta have playlists! It’s quite jarring to hear Taylor Swift followed by Metallica.
Honestly, I’m tiring of it. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I’m becoming lazy. Maybe I just want to be passively entertained.
So what are my options?
Radio is out. Nope, can’t do it. Never minding how badly radio just sucks here in the New York City area, the advertising drives me up the wall. It wouldn’t be too bad if it were 30 seconds every few songs, but I’ve been stuck in the car while my wife plays one of “her” stations where they’ll play two or three songs and then 4 minutes of mind numbing ads and horrendously over-processed DJ chatter.
Satellite radio is certainly tempting, and as an Opie & Anthony fan I can easily justify that cost, but somehow it feels like I lose the portability that is so important. And from what I understand, the stations aren’t programmed nearly as well as they were before the merger making them more like terrestrial radio that ever. Thanks Mel.
Just the other day though I found what might be the alternative I’ve been looking for: Slacker Radio.
I started streaming some of the various stations off the Slacker site and was impressed with the variety and song depth. The 80’s Rock channel, which I spent quite a bit of time with over the weekend played a lot of what I was in the mood for with nary a bum track.
I figured I would look for just the right channel to stream at a BBQ and came across Party Hits. It started out promising enough, with songs from Nickelback and Katy Perry. Here’s where the best part of Slacker kicks in: eliminating songs or even entire artists from your stations. The second I heard some over-tuned hip-hop shit, I clicked Ban Artist from the toolbar and T-Pain, you are history. Kayne? See ya. Amy Winehouse? Well, I dig “Rehab” so she’ll get a pass for now.
Even better, I started to discover artists I simply overlooked or just never had time for, bringing some of that passion for music back into my life. White Tie Affair? Check. Kings Of Leon? Very nice.
There’s also the option of creating your own stations by entering an artist’s name into the search engine and letting it make a playlist for you, which can be fine tuned to any degree you’re willing to get involved with.
Ah, but where’s that portability I mentioned a few paragraphs back? Don’t I need to be tethered to a computer? Not at all. I’ve discovered two options that let me listen wherever I am:
-My Blackberry Curve, with an SD card, lets you “save” up to 12 stations to play back at any time, with or without a data connection. The quality, surprisingly, is not bad at all. I do miss the ability to tweak the sound, but when the cost is free it’s hard to complain. A simple once a week hook up to my computer fills me with new music.
-My iPod Touch, as long as I have a Wi-Fi connection, can stream any station. Perfect for around the house. If Slacker somehow incorporates the ability to cache a station like the Blackberry, I’m not sure if you’d ever need to buy music again (and this is a feature I would gladly pay a monthly fee for).
Slacker also offers their own portable music player, the G2, which is supposed to combine the best features of both. With a Wi-Fi connection, you can stream your music while at the same time saving up to 25 stations to bring with you wherever you go. After hearing “iPod Killer” attached to every new gizmo that hits Best Buy, this may truly be the first one that can slay the mighty dragon of Cupertino.
Time will tell what the limit of the playlists are, or really how customizable one can get (I threw things like Jellyfish or SR-71 at the search engine and created quite the playlists) but right now it’s all I listen to.
Oh, by the way, and I’m now taking donations to buy me that G2 unit!
View CommentsRadio Ga Ga Saved My Life Tonight
Written by: Kurt Torster
When I was a kid, up until about the age of eleven, we moved around a lot. My father’s engineering job took us to such exotic locales as Port Huron, Michigan and Norcross, Georgia. It also dumped us in Wiesbaden, Germany for about 8 months in 1976/1977. Seeing as how I didn’t really speak the native tongue, an AM radio became my best friend.
I didn’t listen to any of the German stations, maybe short of spinning the dial to see what was on. No, I fixated on the Armed Forces Radio, and more specifically, Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 weekly countdown. This is probably where my chart obsession began. I would write down the countdown weekly and create my own personal charts, ranking my favorites to see how they would compare to the real thing. This also may have been where I picked up my uncanny knack for calling out a hit long before sometimes it’s even released as a single. [I’m calling it now: Shinedown’s “If You Only Knew” is going to be a MONSTER.]
Bands like Electric Light Orchestra, Pilot, Jigsaw and even Abba felt like best friends. To this day their songs still bring a reminiscent smile to my face and have become sort of a musical comfort food for when I’m moody. Seriously, you try being in a bad mood jamming to something like “Sky High” or “S. O. S.” I’m sure this also has a lot to do with my undying love of 70’s AM Gold and how every time the Time/Life infomercial comes on for any number of their collections, I’m hooked for a good half hour. Can any one go wrong with Redbone?
When we returned to the US, I started to buy my own music. I still have some of those early 45’s that I used to buy at a local store in NJ for .79 cents (though warped from sitting in a hot attic for many years). Oddly enough, the B-sides grabbed my attention as much as the single itself and as I grew older, albums and those deeper tracks became a weird sort of journey of discovery. For every “Photograph” I was as equally a fan of “Stagefright” (both from Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” in case I lost you). And, when I discovered import singles from the UK and their non-album track B-sides, I was in musical nirvana.
Those album cuts became even more important in my high school days as I discovered the art of the mix tape. There was always something very therapeutic about putting one together, making sure you get it JUST right, then taking it out for a cruise. Sometimes you wouldn’t know if a mix even worked or not until you listened to it a few times.
I was also a geek enough musically that I used mix tapes to make friends, both of the platonic and romantic kinds. Sometimes I wonder if those extra-special tapes that escaped my “studio” are still out there somewhere, waiting to rear their embarrassing heads.
While I still follow the charts, radio is now such a morass of overplayed tunes, over processed DJs and so much advertising clatter than I cannot imagine a life without my iPods. Yep, plural. I own two actually. A 16gb iPod Touch that holds all my recent music and an 80gb iPod Classic that holds everything else (actually, decades of chart tunes organized with the help of books from Joel Whitburn). When you throw the iTunes Genius feature in, it’s like someone is personally programming a radio station just for you.
About the only time I ever listen to radio anymore is when it’s out of my control. This is about all the confirmation I need that radio is as bad as I remember it. Just this past weekend I was subjected to the same Lady Gaga song six times in the span of six hours. That’s a lot of “P-p-p-p-p-p-p-poker Faces.”
It’s unfortunate that something that used to mean so much to me has became so irrelevant to my life.
View CommentsI’m a naughty naughty guy….
Written by: Matt Wardlaw
I'm having one of those periodic moments in life where I get a song in my head that I've heard a billion times, and I can't think of what it is.
Tonight's entry features the following lyric:
I've got my radio on..... (big stacked background vocals - raaaadio oooooon)
It's a male singer - song is from the 80s and was a huge hit. Slight chance that it might be from the 90s...but I'm pretty sure it was the 80s. And I'm pretty sure it's on my Ipod. Only 14,151 songs until I find out which one it is. Dammit.
Several of my Facebook friends suggested "Roadrunner" as made famous by Joan Jett, Jonathan Richman, and um.....the Sex Pistols version. Good thought, but that's not it.
The voice in my head kind of reminds me of John Parr...but it's not John Parr. And I'm not even thinking of "St. Elmo's Fire," I'm thinking more along the lines of the John Parr song that everyone really should know - "Naughty Naughty."
"Naughty Naughty" was one of the many songs that I heard for the first time on my beloved favorite radio station growing up in Odessa, TX: KWES-FM, "The Hot 102 FM."
I went hunting for the audio on Youtube and was shocked to find that there is a video for "Naughty Naughty!"
"Naughty, Naughty" was one of those songs that I wanted for years on CD. I finally got a copy in the early 90s on the 18 Screamers From The 80s compilation. I finally had my tune, but the problem was that the audio started sounding crummy midway through the song. I read later that allegedly there might be a problem with the master recording of the song, because all of the circulating CD versions sounded that way.
Not sure if that is the case or not, but I eventually got a good copy of the song from somewhere...perhaps even a 45 dub - I dunno, it's one of those 14,151 songs on the Ipod, and after a while, you start to lose track....
Side note - I forgot how misleading that 18 Screamers compilation was. From the title, you expect a certain kind of thing, and instead get "Don't Let Him Go" by REO Speedwagon. Not that that's a bad thing, but the title was a tad off, I think...
So where was I? Where am I? Still trying to figure out that dang song.....leave a comment if you can help!
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