This Month's eMusic Downloads (September)

The Beach Boys- Good Timin'.  Live in England in 1980 with the real line-up for one of the last times.  

The Hold Steady- Boys and Girls in America.  I realize that everyone is in love with the band at the moment, but goddamn are they great.  Now if they could only manage to not schedule their shows opposite Murs.  

The Hold Steady- "Teenage Liberation"

P.O.S.- "All Along The Watchtower".  Kind of a hip-hop Dylan cover, but the Rhymesayers MC wrote new lyrics for his version of the Dylan standard.

The Kinks- Muswell Hillbillies.  Wikipedia describes this 1971 album as being about "the frustrations and stress of modern life".  This makes it stand out among the Kinks catalogue how?

Rick Danko- "Blind Willie McTell".  One of the Band's lead singers covering one of Dylan's absolute greatest songs live.

Murs- Varsity Blues

The 3MG's- Gypsy's Luck.  More Murs, in preparation for his show at the Cradle in November

Ian Dury- New Boots and Panties!- We need more rock stars with Polio.  Who are also awesome. And how great was the Stiff label?  Besides Ian, you have Elvis Costello, The Damned, Nick Lowe, Madness, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Wreckless Eric and the Pogues.  

The High Llamas- Gideon Gaye.  If I wind up disliking one album from this set, I'm guessing this will be it.  I was reading about them in a book I picked up called The Rock Snob's Dictionary, and thought I'd give it a chance.

On September 10, 2001, I had two things to do the next day.  I failed on both counts.  The first thing I was supposed to do was turn in a paper about a Hawthorne short story ("My Kinsman Major Molineux", for those keeping score at home), and my failure to go to class and hand in the paper had everything to do with procrastination and oversleeping.  My other task that day was to hit Schoolkids Records and buy the new Bob Dylan album, "Love and Theft".  I didn't accomplish this because after my roommate woke me up that afternoon I wound up watching CNN for the rest of the day.  

I actually don't remember when I wound up finally buying the Dylan album.  I think it was that same week, because I remember agreeing with David Menconi's piece about the album from the Sunday News & Observer. 

But that's not what I've been thinking about over the last day or so, even when I think about music and 9/11.  What I've been fascinated with is that Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's original release date was also September 11th, 2001, but the Reprise label's refusal to release the album (this is a whole other story) wound up pushing it's official release back to 2002, although the band, in an effort to stop piracy of the MP3s, began streaming the album online on 9/18/2001.  

If Reprise hadn't been such dicks about an "unreleasable album" (that went on to sell about half a million copies, despite Wilco generally being absent from radio that isn't prefixed by the word "college"), and the album had come out on 9/11, I can't help but wonder if Menconi's piece from that first Sunday paper after the attacks wouldn't have been about this album.  Despite being finished before the attacks, the album seems to have echoes of 9/11 throughout- from the cover picture of two towers in Marina City, Chicago, which bear a passing resemblance to the Trade Centers, to songs with titles like "War on War" and "Ashes of American Flags", to the lines in "Jesus Etc" about "Tall buildings shake/voices escape singing sad sad songs" and "Voices whine/Skyscrapers are scraping together/Your voice is smoking/Last cigarettes are all you can get/Turning your orbit around".

Fun With the New iTunes

So, at the moment I have a very favorable view of Apple, since my computer turned out to still be under warranty and I got a new wireless card for free.  Full of good cheer and in possession of my computer, I thought I'd try out the new version of iTunes, which added a potentially interesting new feature called "Genius".  "Genius" sends Apple an anonymous list of all of your songs and playlists, and then, when you click on an individual song, it creates a new playlist for you based on that song.  I've been playing with it, and the results seem to be pretty decent, albeit predictable and somewhat repetitive (although hopefully that will change when more playlists are added to the Big Brother database).  So, in the spirit of fucking around before I go to sleep, I thought I'd try out five of my favorite songs and see what songs Steve Jobs thinks will complement them.  Even though I've put up unfortunately long lists of songs here before, I'll limit my results to the first five suggestions, as then someone might actually get to the labels at the end of the post.

The Coup- "Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night"

1. Living Legends- "After Hours (Extended Euro Mix)"

2. Brother Ali- "Self Taught" (Great call, but that might be from one of my playlists)

3. The Roots- "Criminal"

4. Little Brother- "Good Clothes"

5. Black Star- "Astronomy (8th Light)

The Hold Steady- "Constructive Summer" (I can't stop listening to this fucking song.  It's awesome and the Hold Steady are becoming one of my favorites.  They're playing in Raleigh in November, on the same day that Murs is playing the Cradle, which is creating an agonizing dilemma for me.)

1. Beck- "Orphans"

2. Wilco- "Impossible Germany"

3. Spoon- "Finer Feelings"

4. Nick Lowe- "I Trained Her To Love Me"

5. Guided By Voices- "I Am A Scientist"

I'm not too impressed by these.  I have plenty of songs by acts like Springsteen and the Clash who have much more in common with The Hold Steady than Wilco or Beck or recent Nick Lowe.  

Bob Dylan- "Shelter From The Storm" (Live version from Hard Rain)

1. The Band- The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"

2. Bruce Springsteen- "Thunder Road"

3. The Rolling Stones- "Midnight Rambler"

4. Warren Zevon- "Lawyers, Guns and Money"

5. David Bowie- "Rebel Rebel"

Again, I'm not blown away here.  It almost seems like they chose five songs upstanding classic rock songs at random to go with Dylan, particularly the final three.  

Otis Redding- "Cigarettes and Coffee"

1. The Marvelettes- "Please Mr. Postman"

2. Aretha Franklin- "Soul Serenade"

3. Sam and Dave- "Hold On! I'm Comin'"

4. The Supremes- "Come See About Me"

5. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes- "If You Don't Know Me By Now"

Oh come on, "Please Mr. Postman"?  You're just choosing R&B and Soul songs at random, aren't you?

Tom Waits- "Clap Hands"

1. The Velvet Underground- "Beginning To See The Light"

2. Neil Young- "Mr. Soul" (Unplugged)

3. Wilco- "Hotel Arizona"

4. Pavement- "Summer Babe [Winter Version]"

5. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds- "Red Right Hand"

A little better.  Not sure about the Wilco song here, and I'd have chosen a different Neil song, but we're showing a little bit of improvement.

The most obvious issue for the "Genius" gadget is daring to make the leap from one genre to another within one playlist.  The problem is so ridiculous that when I tried a Howlin' Wolf song, I got a playlist of 25 songs, all of them either Robert Johnson or Howlin' Wolf (which reminds me that I really need to load my other Blues cds onto the computer).  If the music supercomputer can learn how to do that, then this might actually be pretty cool.  

Let the Mediocrity Resume

I got my laptop back from the Apple store today, and it seems like my internet problem has been fixed, and I can return to failing to do as much as I'd like with this blog.  

That is all.