iTunes

When automated iTunes Store censors attack.

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Show MythBusters
Episode Sinking Titanic

Yeah, nothing like a sinking ship to t*tillate you as it goes under, s**king its p***engers down to their deaths.

On Boing Boing today:

It’s too bad that all those musicians can’t release their music in a listener-friendly license. Oh wait — they can.

It’s too bad you can’t convert Apple’s DRM’d files to a different format. Oh wait — you can.

This is a good example of what I call “snorting the Whuffie”, where the pundit loses all sense of proportion and scale, mistaking these electrons and photons moving around the globe as being on the same level of importance as, say, air.

As much as I like the “wonderful things” the Boing Boing crew uncover in the intarwebtubes, occasionally I have to shake my head in bewilderment at the hyper-hyperbole.

Don’t like Apple’s music-killing DRM scheme? Don’t buy music from them.

But I guess that would be too easy, too reasonable, and not seeking publicity enough.

When you’re subscribed to a number of music blogs, as well as coming across cool new indy songs accidentally or buying stuff via iTunes, it can be somewhat daunting to keep up with what you’ve been into lately. Rating songs helps, of course, but I’m usually too buried in code to bother with it. (With Quicksilver, however…)

Pondering this, I created a new playlist in iTunes called Lately Awesome. Choose “Match all”. The rules are:

• Date Added is in the last 2 weeks
• Play Count is greater than 2

Naturally, you’ll want to tailor this to your own needs. Expanding it to 1 month results in sixteen songs for me. YMMV.

Anyhow, Lately Awesome produced three songs:

1. “Flathead” by The Fratellis
2. “Rockin’ Date” by The Micragirls
3. “Start Swimming” by Summer Hymns

Coincidentally, all three songs were added on 1/30, and all are from this year or last, which makes sense.

“Flathead” is the song from the new iPod adverts. They do seem to err on the side of catchy. ;)

“Rockin’ Date” has the female rock vibe of the 5-6-7-8’s, but more raw and distorted. A good combination of elements.

“Start Swimming” I heard of from 3hive (which has become a great source for new music for me), and their description of “textured, mellow pop songs that seem to fit the band’s name” is apt. This would go well on a seasonal playlist you listen to in the depths of winter to thaw your soul a little. Straight-ahead song, no surprises, but good vibes — like America with less of a box-of-wine aura.

Like Trolley Dodger for baseball and End Pavement for the outdoors, I had set up SongSungBlue to be the repository for my music-related writing. As of 2008, however, and in the spirit of simplifying, I’m subsuming the SSB posts back into Celsius1414.

Here’s the original “What’s this site about?” post from SSB. Same stuff still goes despite it being on this site.

Welcome to SongSungBlue! I’ve been working on migrating certain prolific topics from my primary website Celsius1414 into their own unique domains. Trolley Dodger, the first of these, is for baseball and the Dodgers in particular. End Pavement is for the outdoors, cycling, and hiking.

SongSungBlue is for music, which is something I’ve not written that much about, especially compared to the other topics. However, it’s a constant in my life, a sort of ever-changing soundtrack accompaniment to everything else.

After creating the domain and getting WordPress set up, I sat back and contemplated what sort of music blog I wanted to create. There are plenty of MP3 blogs exposing new music out there (some of my favorites are in the sidebar under Blogs), and it felt like that particular approach has been covered well enough by others.

What exactly SSB is to become will have to be revealed over time, but some general themes I can anticipate (knowing myself well enough) include history and genre-busting artists, as well as posts like “Last Song of 2006” with the story behind a song, and “The Black Parade” - My Chemical Romance” with my story behind a song.

You’ll also find as time goes by here that I am a fan of music, not of particular genres to the exclusion of anything else. To limit yourself, to refuse to listen to an artist simply because their album is in a certain corporate-induced bin, is just stupid.

This doesn’t mean I think all music is awesome — far from it — but that all music must be considered, if only briefly. (Sort of what I’m trying to do with food at “The Grown Diaries”).

Since I’m doing this for free, and am looking to offset a bit of the cost of creating and hosting SSB, some outgoing links are of the affiliate type — mostly iTunes and Amazon. You might also find Google adverts here and there. I’ll try not to make it too distracting, and of course there are ways to hide those things if you so desire. Thanks for your understanding.

Comments are very welcome, and even if I reserve the right to edit or delete them altogether, I won’t do so unless a post is grossly uncivil or otherwise egregious. Spammers will be taken out back and pummeled mercilessly. If you’d rather not be public, feel free to email me via the info on the Contact page.

Thanks for visiting! I’m excited to see — and hear — what happens next.

According to iTunes, the last song I listened to in 2006 was “More Bounce To The Ounce” by Zapp and Roger, a big hit from 1980 co-produced by Bootsy Collins.

Zapp was founded by four brothers — Larry, Lester, Roger, and Terry Troutman — and a collection of other musicians. Roger, the lead singer, also recorded as a solo musician under his first name and was a master of the electronic Talk Box, lending a distinctive robotic sound. The band’s unique mix of funk, R&B, dance, and electronica was widely sampled in later years by numerous hip hop and rap musicians.

In April 1999, Larry Troutman reportedly fatally shot Roger, then killed himself, due to a long-running dispute over finances and other issues. A tragic end to an influential partnership.

• Zapp and Roger Troutman articles on Wikipedia
• SF Weekly story on the deaths of the two brothers