interrobang (‽)

Fans of Apple tend to be pretty, well, fanatical, hailing everything Apple Inc. do (at least with Steve Jobs at the helm) as the greatest thing since sliced white bread.  The Mac is better than the PC; the iPod is better than the Zune; apples are better than oranges; and so on, and so on, ad nauseam.  In some respects they’re right: certainly Apple’s designers have flair and their hardware products sure look good, but I’m not entirely convinced of their supremacy on the software side of things.  Specifically, iTunes (the software that ships with iPods) is just horrible.
I was […]

After seeing The Road to Psychedelia at the Black Angels gig, I felt compelled to dig into Janis Joplin a bit more.  So I ripped my wife’s 3-CD boxed set Janis onto my iPod, and dusted off my copy of Myra Friedman’s book Buried Alive.  I’d bought the book almost ten years ago during a spending spree at Tower Books (which also netted me Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, and U2: The Unforgettable Fire, both of which also remain unread) so it was probably a little overdue.
Friedman worked for Janis’s record company (Columbia Records) as Janis’s publicity agent.  She spent a […]

I just finished reading Danny Sugarman’s biography of Jim Morrisson, No-One Here Gets Out Alive.  It’s quite a few years old, but Jim’s been dead since before the book was written (even so, this is the second edition), so I reasoned that I probably wasn’t missing much.
I enjoy reading biographies and autobiographies of the artists I like - I find it gives me a better insight into their work, and I enjoy the music more as a result.  But with this book, although I still enjoyed reading it, I wish I hadn’t read it at all, because I came away […]

Ever since I got my iPod I’ve wanted to find a way to list my ‘recently played’ tracks on this Blogsite.  There are a few WordPress plugins and widgets that claim to do this, but they all seemed overly-complicated, requiring additional e-mail accounts, modified server permissions, and god knows what else.  So what with having a life to live and all, I never found the time to dig into them and get any of them working properly.
Then last week a buddy responded to a post of mine in the Music category, mentioning Last.fm which he said tracked people’s listening habits.  […]

This week another chart/list is published.  Television music channel VH1 has compiled a list of the  ‘Best-sold UK Albums of All Time’.   Compiling such lists seems to have become a major preoccupation with the music press over the last couple of years - something I can only attribute to lazy journalism (and the main reason I cancelled my subscription to Q after 10 years).  VH1 claims their new list has more credibility than most because it is compiled purely from actual sales figures for the past 50-some years. 
The full chart runs to 100 albums, but for brevity, the top 10 […]

Another month, another 10 free downloads from the iTunes Store courtesy of Belgacom.  Last month I went for building the perfect compilation from my youth.  This month I took a diffferent approach.
Regular readers will know that I listen to 3wk Internet Radio quite a lot.  Whenever I hear something I really like, I make a note of it on my handheld, and then whenever I’m next in a record store or on Amazon.com and stuck for something to spend my hard-earned moolah on, I’ll whip out the list and pick something from it. 
Sometimes I hear a couple of things from the […]

Although I’m an iPod owner, and an avid iTunes user, until this morning I’d never downloaded a song from the Apple Music Store (or anywhere else for that matter).  Call me old-school, but I like having the CDs.  I do have all of my CDs ripped to my iPod, and some I’ve never even heard straight off the plastic, but I still feel happier having the physical backup.
A couple of days ago I read a buddy’s ‘blog entry describing how he’d recreated a vinyl-only compilation from yesteryear by purchasing the individual tracks online.  Co-oncidentally, at the same time, my service provider […]

A few years back I heard a rash of tracks on 3WK.com that were unlike anything I’d come across before.  These included Montherfucker = Redeemer (Part 2) by Godspeed! You Black Emperor, My Father My King by Mogwai, Auberge Le Mouton Noir by Do Make Say Think, and Com (?) by Mono.  These tracks were long (some clocking in at 20+ minutes), all-instrumental, and generally intense and kind of epic-sounding.  I remember thinking that I couldn’t believe people were actually making the kind of music that I wanted to listen to.  I didn’t think it existed.
I didn’t know what to […]

The BBC have announced that Top Of The Pops is to be axed.  For the non-Brits, Top Of the Pops is (or at least was) the flagship ‘music’ programme produced by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).  It has been airing weekly since 1964, and was for many of those years the only ‘youth-oriented’ programme produced by the BBC.  That the programme is being cancelled is a crime.  Top Of The Pops (TOTP) is one of the staples of the BBC output - along with the Queen’s Speech at Christmas and the Nine O’Clock News - and as such should be […]

OK, now I know my iPod is screwing with me.  I have it on ’shuffle everything’ mode, and it just played All I Really Want To Do by Bob Dylan (from the 1968 album Another Side Of Bob Dylan), immediately followed by World Party’s version of the same song (from the 1986 album Private Revolution). [Out of interest, Dylan does it better…]
Now, I know there is a 1-in-7,807 chance of this happening - small but plausible - so I could accept it, but yesterday it played The Mission’s version of Like A Hurricane (from The First Chapter, 1987) followed Neil […]