24 posts tagged “music”

Audio: Share the most embarrassing song on your mp3 player.

Perhaps a lot of my music would be embarrassing to other people, but I don't consider it as such.

anyway, a quick shufti through the songs puts this as the most likely suspect, although I have to say it is a rather great track to sing along to!

Do you own all the albums of any particular musical artist or group? Who?
Submitted by dutterman.

I suppose a true completist is the one who buys all the live recordings and singles with unreleased tracks on them. I've never gone that far for any artist, but I do own all four albums by Tom McRae, who I think is great and very underrated (except by Tree).

I think I'm one short for REM, but it's one of the recent ones, which have all been pretty mediocre, and I think my other half might have all Madonna's albums.

Here's my favourite Tom McRae track from his debut album - perfect for slitting your wrists to! ;o)

Audio: Show us your favorite compilation album. 

I've had to choose two, because one was far too difficult...

Don't let the title of this put you off - it has some killer tracks from artists such as James Brown, Bobby Womack, Sly & Family Stone and is just guaranteed to make you get up and wanna move. In fact, I thought I'd share one with you...

This is far more nostalgic and takes me back to heady days dancing round my bedroom, singing into a biro. Matthew Wilder, Matt Bianco, Cyndi Lauper... they're all on it. Fantastic

Bon viveur and jazz legend, George Melly has died aged 80. He was still performing although more recently had been battling dementia and lung cancer.

Always entertaining, I love this quote from him, talking about the benefits of impotence: “It’s like being unchained from a lunatic.”

As a tribute, check out this rip-roaring track from his recent release The Ultimate Melly

I've been a bit quiet on the posting front recently, limiting things to a video or two, and I'm not sure why.

In fact, I started writing this post and have just scrubbed out a load of stuff. I think I've lost my "writing mojo" to quote my nearest and dearest last night.

Instead, I think I'll give you a song to make you feel better about the fact that it's a dreary Sunday morning. It's an Aretha song, but one that you don't hear very often.

...sang Gary Bartz some years ago. Perhaps that's a slight exaggeration, but I do listen to a lot of tunes over the course of a month.

Inevitably, given that I spend quite a lot of time at work in front of a computer, this is where I listen to a lot of it and the Internet is providing lots of different ways of recommending new music to the average fan.

Top of the pile is still Last.fm - recently acquired for a large amount of money ($280m) by CBS. It's my personal favourite and I love the simplicity of the site, supplemented by the genius that lies underneath. It remembers every song you play and recommends new music to you, based on what you've listened to far.

But there are pretenders out there, trying as hard as they might to nab your internet time and eyeballs. Currently a favourite of the Facebook crowd is iLike, which adds an exceptionally annoying sidebar to your iTunes and also records all the music you play. The site just doesn't do it for me in quite the same way, although it does have the most addictive music game I've come across.

I've also started using Mog, which is another music recommendation site that does pretty much exactly the same as the rest. You download some software and it then uploads all your music to its site and records all the music you listen to, in the same way as the previous two. You can personalise your profile, which is good, but it seems to offer not much else in the way of differentiators. Plus, I can't get it work on my Mac at home, which is very irritating!

And there are more...
I've also checked out Virb a couple of times. This is an intriguing cross between MySpace and Last.fm, in that you can add bands to your friends list and add certain tracks of theirs to your profile.  The selection of groups on there is limited at the moment, but as with the other sites, it tracks your music habits and allows you to meet like-minded people.

The final one in the space that I've come across is Lala. I'd love to tell you lots about it, but I couldn't get the software to work on my Mac at home (too old and OS), or my PC at work, so if you want to find out more about it, then you'll have to check it out yourself.

One thing I do think is great is that there is finally a way to discover new music without resorting to talking to mates you have totally different music tastes to you, or finding the one good radio show that plays new music that you might like.

In fact, radio knows that it's facing a big challenge with the likes of these sites. The commercial stations are becoming ever more homogenised with the the differentiating factors between some of them being almost unnoticeable. New music (whether modern or classic) is becoming easier to discover online and radio will have to adapt to cope.

What are your top 10 most-played songs currently?

So I've changed this question slightly to most played artists, because it would be one complete album, otherwise!

In the past 3 months, according to my Last.Fm profile, I've listened mostly to the following artists:

1) Cat Power - love the Greatest album
2) Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left is probably my favourite album of all-time
3) Candie Payne - I've talked about her before, and this proves how much I'm enjoying her new album
4) Regina Spektor - I'm really pleased last year's Begin To Hope is getting another push. It's great.
5) Kate Bush - since Aerial came out I've updated my CD collection with her stuff
6) Depeche Mode - you either love 'em or hate 'em. I love 'em!
7) REM - I own so many of their albums that I inevitably end up listening to a lot of their stuff
8) Rufus Wainwright - Release The Stars is a cracking album
9) Carole King - say no more
10=) Elton John - guilty pop pleasure. Tell me you don't feel better after listening to Philadelphia Freedom
10=) Feist - really getting into her recently. Not the most accessible of artists, but definitely worth a listen to

This was the conversation that made me realise that I am officially no longer part of today's youth:

Me: "Do you want to watch or record Big Brother?"
C: "Nah, not bothered either way"
Me: "Me neither... that means I can record that programme on BBC4 instead"

BBC4? The art-y channel? What is my world coming to?

I used to consider myself well-versed in anything that was popular culture. Ten, even five years ago, if you'd ask me what was hot in music, film or TV, I'd have been able to reel off a list of artists, directors or programmes as long as your arm, half of which you might not even have heard of. OK, I admit I've never been one to go clubbing every weekend, but I used to enjoy going to the cinema two, maybe three times a week. I could spend all day in front of umpteen TV shows and could spot a rising star at fifteen paces.

Lately, though, I've started to tire of being at the "cutting edge" of everything. My daughters are infinitely more important to me and, although I still watch TV, I use the wonders of SkyPlus to programme my viewing, so I basically watch a couple of hours of what I want to watch and not what schedulers dictate to me.

I listen to the music I want to listen to and haven't been to the cinema since November and that was with my eldest daughter to see The Wild as part of Saturday morning Kid's club at Brixton Ritzy. As for a gig? I saw PJ Harvey about two years ago - wow!

The proliferation of TV channels, countless film and music releases every week mean that it's no longer possible to be omniscient. I'm not going to stop being interested and will still amass a mountain of useless information, but, as a general rule, I concede defeat. I am no longer part of zeitgeist, merely a zeitguest.

It should be a sad day, but strangely, I feel as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.