Some found music I like a lot. Add yours or just enjoy these.

Wilco: Impossible Germany

Jay Ferrar: Highways and Cigarettes

Susan Tedeschi: (Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: King's Highway

The Corrs: Little Wing

Drive-By Truckers: Easy on Yourself

The Gibson Brothers: Forty Years of Trouble

Makin' Music with John Mayer

I ripped this idea off from Stephen King's latest column in Entertainment Weekly. His point was to put his playlist where his mouth was, rather than list what he thought were his favorite songs.

Step 1: Open up your PC music library.
Step 2: Sort your tracks by number of plays.
Step 3: List the results in this thread.

Let's see what you really listen to when you're at your computer.

Joshua Allen | April 21

The Morning News - I schedule 35 minutes a day for recreation. That’s all I need to refresh myself from the rigors of punching holes through the guts of this world. Recreation typically consists of lifting something heavy or posting a new sonnet to my blog. But sometimes I want to unwind with a fine carafe of Popov and some good tunes on the hi-fi. I yearn to—in the words of Boston—lose myself in a familiar song, close my eyes, and slip awaaaaaaaaaaaay.

Here’s the problem: “More Than a Feeling” is four minutes and 47 fucking seconds long. I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense. That’s, like, one-seventh of my recreation right there.

Christopher Parkening

Michael Kelsey

Antoine Dufour

Dominic Frasca

... excuse me while I go outside and smash my guitar.

While Herbie Hancock was getting on stage to receive his Grammy for River: The Joni Letters, the other star of the night was thousands of miles away. The Grammy Awards this year was a tale of two very different artistic trajectories indeed. A year ago, Amy Winehouse was virtually unknown outside of her native UK market; Hancock has been a force on the jazz and pop scenes since the mid 1960s. On the heels of her retro masterpiece Back to Black and a series of media exposes on her troubled personal life, Winehouse catapulted into the global pop music consciousness virtually overnight. Girls dressed like her on Halloween; her often-unkempt face appeared on magazines from Boston to Beirut; she took home five Grammy awards, although visa problems prevented her from showing up in person to collect them. All this time, Hancock has quietly pursued his usual string of jazz-pop albums and touring. Two events - the rise of Amy Winehouse and the crowning of a Herbie Hancock jazz record as album of the year - speak to a potent and intriguing force in today's pop culture. How did Amy Winehouse get so popular so quickly and what does the wild success of her album say about the contemporary pop music market? And how is Hancock's long career and Grammy triumph reflected in the young diva's work?

Violence as Order

"I believe that music should be collective hysteria and spells, violently of the present time."
- Pierre Boulez

In many ways, the shape of Western music history since the Middle Ages can be likened to a gradually sloping hill, followed by a very sharp incline, then terminating in a cliff. Although the last 800 years of music have been marked with periods of relative stasis, the general trend seems to have been towards greater and greater technical complexity with each successive generation of musicians. Like the story of evolution on this planet, recorded Western music started with its plainsong chant (the musical equivalent of single-celled organisms), then added more voices to that, started adding instruments, greater compositional complexity and scope, denser structures, etc. By the mid-18th century, courts all over Europe had their very own collectives of musicians all playing specialized instruments and reading little squiggles on a page to translate the abstract sound ideals of composers into sound. Music was getting so complex that someone even started to have to stand in front of all these musicians and beat his arms around like a bird just to keep everyone in the same place.

Before continuing with some examples, let's ask a fundamental question: what is sonic violence? Since the perceptive apparatus of every individual is quite different, we can't ascribe the principle of musical violence to any of the technical parameters of music. Where a young man might hear a deep groove in a hip-hop track, an old man might hear nothing but repetitive noise in the same piece. Thus, dissonance is not in itself violence, although in Western music is has often taken the role of the deviant force that is purged throughout the work. Similarly, volume (amplitude) is not in and of itself violence. When we get into the realm of registration and timbre, however, certain sonic qualities can emerge that are - when combined with the proper volume - intensely violent. The motorcycles that drive under my window day in and day out, for instance, are an assault on my ears: to everyone except the individuals driving the machines, the combination of extreme decibel levels and that roaring, grimy quality of the timbre is enough to make me feel tortured, if just for three seconds. Sirens and alarms are similarly calibrated to be as conspicuous as possible.

The ancient Scots blared bagpipes before a battle in order to stir the emotions of their own fighters and strike fear in the hearts of the enemy. Ottoman Turks accompanied their regimens with a battery of clanging percussion, and the sound of cymbals was described in European concert music for the next couple hundred years as the "Turkish style." In perhaps one of most disturbing scenes in Apocalypse Now (a rare distinction in a film with so much of "the horror"), American helicopters conduct a bombing raid on Vietnamese hamlets with Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries" blasting on their speaker systems. In 1989, the US army blared loud music in an attempt to induce Panamanian president Manuel Noriega's surrender. The method was called "acoustic bombardment."

Inspired by Quiet Bill.

Yoo Toobs below the fold...

Too much intraparty sniping, too much Bush'n'Cheney, too much financial woe, and my boss is still an asshole.

Let's twist one up and cruise with the muse.

yoo toobs below the fold

Dan Goodin | San Francisco | March 3

The Register - Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor has become the latest recording artist to bypass the traditional music distribution machine by releasing a 36-track album over the internet.

The album, titled Ghosts I-IV, is available on the band's official website for prices that range from free to $300 depending on the package. Reznor is giving away the first nine cuts, as 320 kbps MP3 files, along with a 40-page PDF book that covers the entire album. For $5, fans can get the remaining 27 songs and have the option of getting the files in lossless formats including FLAC.

Less than 24 hours after the album became available, the band's website had slowed to a crawl. At time of writing, attempts to download the free package were greeted with an error message indicating the URL was not available. A download of the $5 offering initiated, but at a speed of just 10 kbps, we weren't optimistic we'd be hearing the new tunes anytime soon. (Administrators are racing to add more servers "to accommodate the unexpected demand," according to a note on the site.)

Tom Huizenga | Milan | March 3

NPR -
Giuseppe Di Stefano, one of the greatest tenors of the 20th century and a celebrated singing partner of soprano Maria Callas, died Monday, his wife said. He was 86.

Di Stefano died at home in Santa Maria Hoe, north of Milan, from injuries sustained in a November 2004 attack at his family's villa in Kenya, said his wife, Monika Curth.

Unidentified assailants struck the retired tenor on the head during the attack. Di Stefano underwent surgery twice in Mombasa before being flown to Milan. He awakened from a coma, but never fully recovered.

Sean Michaels | March 3, 2008

Guardian - For the first (and perhaps last) time, we can compare Mick Jagger to Queen Elizabeth I, and the Hells Angels to the Spanish Armada.

It's an analogy that would not have made much sense before the revelations contained within a BBC Radio 4 documentary, which airs tonight.

The programme alleges that Jagger was the target of a 1969 assassination plot by the motorcycle gang. And he was saved by the stormy, bucking sea.

The plot was hatched following the Stones' tragic Altamont Speedway performance in December 1969. Eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was killed during the gig, allegedly by one of the Hells Angels providing security. Jagger resolved, rather sensibly, that the band would never use the Angels' services again. A decision which caused some consternation.

I was scrolling around iTunes today just listening to some of the new 'alternative' (never mind the irony that they are all mainstream) artists and it occurred to me that there is very, very little original music therein. Most of it is either a cross of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Green Day and Sarah MacLachlan. I guess when there are but a few companies that dominate the mainstream music publishing business pathbreakers and innovators aren't marketable. In the past there seemed to be, at least once every decade, a breakthrough band--or town--that changed the calculus. But music today and for the last several years has remained very stale. Is there a change in the wings? I doubt it--my love for Roots Americana music notwithstanding. I had hoped that the power unleashed by self-publishing music inherent with the web (and inside of iTunes and other online music stores) would create such a change. But considering the balkanized, niche nature of modern music it just doesn't seem to be happening. Call it the big-boxzation, long-tail paradox of modern music, I suppose. The more available it is, the more homogenized.