but i don't like like the song

Earlier this year, I overheard a friend tell another friend, as Boom Boom Pow (Interscope) came on, "Oh my god! I love this song!"

This stuck with me, because the idea of loving this song is really funny to me. I can imagine liking it--maybe you think it has a good beat, or it's fun, or it makes you want to move your ass--but there isn't really enough to it to warrant love. You love a song that has a deep meaning or articulates a poignant emotion. Loving a song like this is, well, arbitrary; the song is largely indistinguishable from a whole host of other songs like it, which means that you have to love all those other songs too. But if you love that many songs, that dilutes what you mean by "love."

It's like when you meet a person who is exceedingly average (or Chinese); you wonder why his girlfriend chose him out of a whole sea of equivalent alternatives.

It's like if your favorite band is Train.

A decade and a half ago, someone I knew then called OMC's How Bizarre (Huh!) "the best song ever"; I still remember that vividly for the same reason.

I'm still having trouble deciding whether I find Fergie slightly cute or horrendously unattractive.

random thoughts

• Much pop music from the last twenty years has lyrics so bad and pretentiously cryptic that it's impossible to tell what many songs are about without seeing the music video.


• I'd like to see a multiple CD set (like a double album or a box set) in which the last disc contains just one or two songs.


• The problem with the iPod is that now everyone's an asshole about their taste in music.


• It's kind of remarkable that anyone takes bands like Anal Cunt with nonzero seriousness.


• For some reason, I think "Screed" would be a funny name for a band.


• I find, in general, that I am not particularly fond of bands whose names rhyme with "oobastank."


• Counting Crows should have called their band "Honors English."


• That would have been awesome if Chris Brown domestically abused Rihanna in the middle of one of her songs, so you could hear it. It would end abruptly.


• Alicia Keys should go back to her original name and then try to make it as a celebrity chef.


• Judging from his new album (RCA) cover, Adam Lambert is now a P!nk cover band.


• Have they used the word "murderate" in a rap song yet?


• Is there yet a band called "The Hipsters" or "The Ironics"?


• It's suppose to stimulate intellectual development if you play classical music to babies, but that probably doesn't apply to postmodern compositions like John Cage's 4'33".


• Keith Urban looks like he was trying to be in Goo Goo Dolls, but he messed up.


• Lady GaGa is not particularly attractive even after the plastic surgery, which is weird. She should demand a refund.


• Alice in Chains went out and got themselves a black lead singer, as though they were inspired by, since Layne Staley's passing, the success of Dave Matthews Band and Black Eyed Peas, and decided to hop on the interracial bandwagon.

a concert quandary

If you have the motivation to go out and see Dinosaur Jr perform, does that mean you're happening--because you go out and see live rock music--or does it in fact mean the opposite--because you have somehow managed to avoid learning about any of numerous better bands that have since established themselves?

random thoughts

• Andrew Lloyd Webber has cancer. He should write a musical about it.


• Strippers, it seems, don't particularly like jazz music. You never see a girl sliding down a pole to Take the 'A' Train (-).


• I don't completely agree with the idea, as posited by a Pepsi commercial, of Derek Jeter being the modern Babe Ruth, but I suppose you can argue that, despite being very different players (and Jeter far inferior) both are Yankees icons. But they also compare Bob Dylan and Will.i.am. There aren't too many parallels there other than that they both exist.


• That band Anthrax must write songs about being ugly, because every dude I've ever seen wearing an Anthrax T-shirt is pretty ugly.


• It seems like record labels often release the best song on an album as the second single, which must present a dilemma for an unknown band whose ability to release a second single--and thus not become a one-hit wonder--relies on the success of their first single. It's sort of like whether a baseball manager (of the visiting team) should use his closer in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tie game.


• Wait, if "Sean" is simply the Irish variant of "John," then "Sean John" is an incredibly stupid name.


• Sometimes you want to go up to someone on the street and try to guess what genre of music he likes, because it's not a very difficult game.


• Morrissey recently collapsed onstage during a performance; I wonder if this has anything to do with Andrew Lloyd Webber's cancer.

random thoughts

• Roy Orbison's Oh, Pretty Woman (Monument 851) (I used to assume he was British just because he is talented.) has something for everyone: personally, I love the chord changes over the bridge, but I think it's largely known for the weird growl that he does. It's simultaneously high brow and low brow.
  
  I recently discovered the Bollywood version they did of this song (SO) for the movie Kal Ho Naa Ho. I'm not sure why this is notable, except that this musical number takes place in what is apparently supposed to be America and contains, among other things, a huge American flag, skateboarders and a black church choir. I think what they're saying is that it's okay for us Americans to have stereotypes about Indian people back.


• I wonder if at some point Vanilla Ice was a doe-eyed earnest, if not talented, guy who took his art somewhat seriously.


• There should have been an episode of Shaq Vs in which Shaq had a freestyling contest against--I don't know, who's a good rapper? I am not ethnically qualified to make taht judgment: nonblacks all say, like, Mos Def.


• Max Weinberg should be the drummer for Bon Jovi too. Really, he should be the drummer for all New Jersey bands, like the official drummer of the state.


• Joe Perry is now, hairwise, rocking the Bonnie Raitt.


• How come when black people sing a cappella, it sounds so much better than when white people sing a cappella? Seriously, white people--stop that.
  
  I never figured out exactly how much street cred Boyz II Men had--were they ever convicted of any crimes? The lead singer looked like he could have been a Wayans brother.


• People feel a particularly strong attachment to the music of when they came of age: the reason there are so many classic rock radio stations is that many people continue to listen to the rock music of their teenage years and early twenties. This is also why the '80s and '90s simply won't die. But I wonder to what extent your susceptibility to pop music is a consequence of the specific age, versus the novelty of the music; it's really the first time in your life that your taste in music is the result of active discovery. Like if you somehow manage to avoid music for the first few decades of your life, and then, at age thirty-five, hear indie rock for the first time, could you be blown away by it in the same way that high school kids are? Would you become something of a fanboy, and doodle band logos on your notebooks?
  
  I mean, I guess that's what happens with a lot of computer nerds.


• I heard an R&B/hip-hop type song on the radio in which a dude told me to "get down like the economy," which I admit is kind of cute. I guess if you know your song is has inherently short shelf-life, why not make it explicitly topical? Or it's possible that this guy does not believe recent projections that the recession is starting to end, because, despite other economic indicators, the unemployment rate remains dauntingly high, foo.


• I think Danny Elfman is actually the Spike Jonze--not the Tim Burton--of music.


• I recently learned about Chickenfoot, and I'm just as surprised as you are. Actually, I'm not surprised--I'm more apathetic.


• John Denver had a weird Gremlin look, kind of like Stephen King.


• Do you ever go to a concert and the ticket person's scanner device doesn't work, so the girl actually rips your ticket? That's so old-school.


• John Mayer is what you might get if you took Chris Cornell and, at an early age, cut his balls off.


• The way I play .mp3s from my computer doesn't have an easily accessible shuffle feature (I think that's really the big development of digital music--random shuffle.), so I find that I listen to stuff that starts with the firest few letters of the alphabet more than anything.
  
  On some level, "shuffle" features CD players was the beginning of the end of the album as an art form, because it validated the CD as a collection disjoint tracks with no continuity or global arc. For example, I don't think classical music fans ever play CDs on shuffle.

come into my [expletive]

Going to the Kylie Minogue show ended up being a game-time decision--tickets were sufficiently expensive that people aren't going to go on a lark or because they're open-minded; to spend that much money on a concert you have really want to go (and have the means to afford a ticket). (Or, I suppose, you can have a lot of discretionary income, or be particularly irresponsible with it.) So I had trouble finding a friend to accompany me. (For a dude who lives in San Francisco, I have surprisingly few gay male friends, as it turns out.)

Even though we saved money by paying less than face value for the tickets (I assume that the savvy concertgoer can guess how the price of tickets will change as a function of time, and optimize accordingly. I don't go to concerts this large often enough to have a sense for it.), it's actaully ideal--especially for a concert like this--to purchase the tickets when they go on sale, so you can enjoy the anticipation. If you had the tickets x months ago, then all that time, you would be enjoying the excitement of going to the show. You can talk about it with your friends, for example: talking about something that's happening in the future seems much less pathetic than harping on something that happened in the past. And, like foreplay, the build-up probably increases your enjoyment of the show itself.

On the other hand, that probably opens up the potentiality for greater disappointment.

i was one of only two straight dudes

...at tonight's Kylie concert, the other being my friend who I dragged with me. On one hand, that might have increased our odds as potential groupies, but on the other, gay dudes like Kylie enough that they might sleep with her anyway.

The show was fantastic (Seeing Kylie has long been a dream of mine.)--although I would have loved if they brought out four additional Kylies for her performance of Come into My World (EMI).

I noticed that this tour isn't going through Salt Lake City.

By the way, I think this is kind of your last chance for the Kylie concert experience, especially given the frequency with which she tours the United States. (This is her first major US tour; sadly, I couldn't make the first night.) Because she's getting to the age upper limit of sexy: if you wait until the next tour, she might be, like, fifty, and that really wouldn't quite be the same--it'd be like going to see Madonna.

why i love crowdsourcing

I've been thinking about getting a portable music player. I do not own an iPod of any form, which surprises a lot of people. (This was actually something over which a then-girlfriend and I used to have shared pride.)

I used to have a Diamond Rio--if you don't remember, these were the .mp3 players available in sizes like 32MB and 64MB--so it's not that I'm a technophobe. These days I have a really small portable music player--a 128MB Creative MuVo of some sort, no LCD screen or anything, not even an LED screen (It's funny that putting LCD screens was this big development for portable music players, and then, a few years later, removing them was another development.); someone sent it to my friend as a promotional item to lure him into subscribing an online audiobook services. (He did not.) I only use it for long runs; you can see that this is not something about which I care deeply.

I'd never really invested in a "serious" portable music player or hopped on the iPod bandwagon for various reasons: My music wouldn't fit on even a relatively large (160GB) capacity iPod, so I wouldn't have been able to make the leap from portable music player as transient music listening device to portable music player as permament storage. I don't feel compelled to take my music "library" with me everywhere I go--for example, when I travel, I never bring music--and, at the time, most of my daily commute was via car, in which I had CD player and radio. Most importantly, portable music players aren't designed for the way I listen to music, which is, I think, a little less passive than your average user. (I'm pretty sure I've written about this last topic before, but I can't dig up my old post, because the Blogger's search functionality is currently broken).

But now I realize that I can get a better portable music player, with a built-in rechargeable battery, for less than a few months' worth of AAAs for the MuVo. I've been researching, trying to find something that fits my constraints, one of which is that it's not an iPod of any variety. (I am eschewing them for various technical and philosophical reasons that I'm not going to discuss now.) I think it's amusing that this site exists: Anything But iPod. Anyhow, the online consesus seems to be--from Anything But iPod as well as a few other sources--that the SanDisk Sansa Clip is pretty much awesome--almost to the point where it's essentially the iPod of the non-iPods. In particular, it's heralded for its excellent sound quality--and the guy at Anything But iPod does listening tests with $200 headphones and shit.

I decided that I would get one, but Amazon's price for the specific model I'd chosen had increased between when I first looked at it and when I'd decided that I'd pull the trigger. (Or I misremembered the price I originally saw.) So I searched the Web to try to find a better price. In doing so, I stumbled upon this information: it turns out that various SanDisk players--including the Clip--have a firmware bug causing audio sampled at 44.1kHz--which is a lot of music, since that's the sampling rate of CDs--to be played back slightly slowly. The change in speed would be unnoticeable except that the resulting change in pitch is almost 20 cents.

I realize that many people can't detect a shift of 20 cents. I find remarkable that more people who can (There are definitely some.) didn't speak up, and even more remarkable that so many people were so vocal about the sound quality of these devices, because these clearly are those people who cannot. (You would not rave about the sound quality of a machine that introduced a noticeable infidelity.) If you can't detect that shift--not that there's anything wrong with that--then your ears are not particularly discriminating, so then on what, exactly, are you basing your judgment of the sound quality? You are clearly just making shit up. (And this includes the guy with $200 headphones.) I can't trust any of you.

Keep in mind, though, I'm not endorsing or not not endorsing this particular product--I haven't seen it in person. I just think it's interesting that you can sometimes tell that people are wrong even when you don't know the right answer.

random thoughts

• I didn't realize they were even dating, but I guess it makes sense that Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard married. I guess it's a match made in heaven like, well, Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley.
  
  Is "Deryck" not an incredibly ugly spelling of those syllables? In that regard, it's fitting for the guy's face.
  
  On some level, this is marriage is like a marketing synergy, but the question is whether they buy into each other's public persona (and their own) to make it work.


• Sometimes I wonder about a celebrity whether that his parents are proud of him. If you're a celebrity, but clearly an abject idiot, how do your parents feel about that? Although, I suppose that the drive to become a celebrity is often the result of having been raised with a not particularly strong set of values in the first place, so maybe this question is totally irrelevant.


• Musicians, you have a responsibility to your fans not eventually to become a total douche. Because when you become a total douche, that makes all the people who were rooting for you at the beginning look bad.


• Is this Convenience place, where the kings reign, near this Leon place? And are the children fo the Kings of Convenience going to breed with the children of the Kings of Leon, and have hemophiliac children?


• Ray Lewis should start a football band called "The Killers."
  
  It's considered edgy that there's a band called "The Killers," but if someone had a band called "The Rapists," women would get all mad and shit.

random thoughts

• I wonder if Avril Lavigne and Deryck Whibley's separation had anything to do with their finally hearing each other's music.


• About ten years ago, I took an online quiz that determined that the Spice Girl I was is Sporty Spice. I was somewhat incredulous, because she's not the Spice Girl with whom I most strongly identify. But then then I took a similar--but not the same--quiz last night, which confirmed that I am still Sporty Spice, which blew my mind. These online quizzes hit at deeper truths than I thought.
  
  In retrospect, Scary Spice was the only one that was objectively attractive which, at the time, I wouldn't have guessed (because I am/was racist).


• Sometimes you are in a store or other public place and you only hear half of the song, because it's in stereo and the other speaker is on the other side of the door.


• Stone Temple Pilots is like a supergroup of Velvet Revolver and Talk Show.


• It just seems like most of the popular indie rock these days--both the artists and the fans--is populated by people in their thirties who missed rock when they were in junior high school, because they were too nerdy.


• It turns out that the entire genre of grunge was just Seattle's dealing with seasonal affective disorder.


• I thought I saw Sammy Hagar but it turned out to be just a middle-aged curly-haired blonde woman from behind.


• Someone should make a music video that's just a visualization of the audio's spectrum. Actually, that's what MTV should play when they want to play a video for a song that doesn't have a video.


• Vin Scully should release an album of just him talking.