Aaaand the Arcade Fire song "Wake Up" came on just as I posted this. How timely.
I consume music the way wildfires consume forests. For example, yesterday, I decided that System of a Down's "Toxicity" was an awesome song, so I listened to it 20 times in a row.
I did this with the two Arcade Fire albums about a year ago, so now I'm completely sick of them.
Yeah! Toxicity is great.
Since the thread will inevitably turn this way anyway, let me be the first to say that I never got the Arcade Fire. In fact, that band's position as the cornerstone of mid-to-late 00s indie rock made me realize that I don't like mid-to-late 00s indie rock very much.
Also, getting over the fact that exercising makes you look dumb is the first step on the road to exercising, at least for people who weren't jocks. Nice work!
I almost never turn on shuffle or genius for some reason. I guess I'm just used to the album format. But I suspect my distilled song would be something like this.
Related: I did both a Genius Mix and a Pandora Station for Prince's "I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man". Genius made Prince a soul/R&B mix, but Pandora did all wimpy indie pop.
let me be the first to say that I never got the Arcade Fire
I feel mildly this way about Bon Iver, by whom I do have a few songs I like all right, one of which just came on second when I genius playlisted The National's "Fake Empire".
My favorite songs to run to are "Wir tanzen im 4-eck" by Stereo Totale and "Destroy 2000 Years of Culture" by Atari Teenage Riot. Teutonic!
Yay lookin' stupid!
It's humiliating to report that LCD Soundsystem's 45:33, which was commissioned by soulless corporation Nike to serve as a running mix, makes an excellent running mix.
Mostly I just hope for shuffle to treat me right, though.
I listen almost entirely to disco and 1980s "Hi-NRG" or "Freestyle" pop dance music for elliptical-machine purposes, plus a few songs by Justice and Basement Jaxx, because one can zone out to them at high velocity. Plus occasional breaks to play Bad Religion or Rancid.
Because I feel foolish trying to buy compilations of disco and 1980s Freestyle pop dance music in search of songs that aren't incredibly stupid, I keep listening to the same 50 or so songs over and over. This blog is the source of many of these songs. Fortunately most of them are between 5 and 8 minutes. The best song of all for this purpose is Donna Summer's "Sunset People", and numbers two and three are "High On Your Love" by Debbie Jacobs and "Power" by the Temptations.
Oh yeah! Also "I Like You" by Phyllis Nelson. And "White Horse" by Laid Back of course. I want a compilation of whatever genre that song is.
I have stopped listening to anything other than Janelle Monáe.
With all the music I download from these parts and others, I find Genius is a semi-efficient way to turn up music I didn't know i had with some sort of context. It tends to push stuff it knows I like (higher play counts, higher ratings) but if I start with something less-heard (like one of the many dozens of Unfogged songs that still have play count 0) it usually makes me a new mix that hangs together.
9: I hate it when a long or even longish song comes up. I need turnover! Sometimes my weird OCDish practices whilst running involve counting the songs as I run (or, say, I get a "reward" after X many songs, like I can check my watch or something).
12: Me too. I don't want to burn out on her, but it's such a long album with so much variety that it doesn't seem like I'm listening to the same goddamn thing all the time.
I haven't used Genius, partly because I find the name appallingly arrogant, but when I inadvertently hit shuffle once I got a bizarre mix of bird song, Sibelius, Chinese language drills, fado, Flaming Lips and William Byrd. As a mashup, it would have perfect for neb's radio show.
Wir tanzen im 4-eck
Yes! Great running song. But it also makes me want to fling my arms out to the sides in exaggerated 80s aerobics moves, an urge I have to this point resisted.
I also like The Roots "Adrenaline!" for running; it somehow makes me feel like I'm in the training montage from a boxing movie.
It wasn't until the end of the post that I realized that "genius list" wasn't just your way of saying that you made a quick free-association mix based on the selected song.
"I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man"
Good choice, one of my favorite Prince songs.
it somehow makes me feel like I'm in the training montage from a boxing movie
Heh. Band of Horses' "The Funeral" does this for me. I often save it for the last couple blocks of running, which then feels like Awesome Movie Ending.
Yes! Great running song. But it also makes me want to fling my arms out to the sides in exaggerated 80s aerobics moves, an urge I have to this point resisted.
No lie -- I do this very thing sometimes, involuntarily. Sometimes even on the treadmill in the gym and people stare. Oh well. "Bizarre Love Triangle" (etc.) will not be denied.
For the machines in the gym, being able to zone out is a plus I would say. Running outside is obviously impossible so I like songs that are pretty long and zone-out-able. And isn't this song great anyway?
14: I can run to almost anything. The only actual show-stopper was a 20 minute satanic organ droning number by Hermann Nitsch. I was moved to stop and change the track when I realized my motivational thoughts had turned to horrible visions of running to escape a tunnel of fire and so on.
I realized that "genius list" wasn't just your way of saying that you made a quick free-association mix based on the selected song
So, basically, Nick, you take me for a real asshole?
I don't do the Genius playlist thing on my player or in iTunes, but I'm pretty sure most of my recent listening revolves around Bill Evans "re: Person I Knew", in some sort of way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfGHxzKeHvM#t=5m20s
Not just jazz, but classical, pop music and other vocal stuff, too.
I've never used Genius playlists; I've got an iPod nano loaded up with a bunch of high-energy music (Goa trance, progressive trance, punk, etc.) and choose whatever I haven't listened to lately.
I seem to remember Sify's blog repeatedly touting Shannon's "Let The Music Play" as history's greatest song, and that's another of my favorites, so maybe he could recommend some similar tunes.
24 -- I've been on a Bill Evans kick recently, too. So, so good. Not in the gym, of course.
One of the things I like about my new, crazy gym is that the guy who runs it has good musical taste. The running mostly consists of sprinting down a trash-filled alley, dodging semi trucks and homeless people, so not so much with the music and the running.
Never used the Genius feature.
I haven't used Genius, partly because I find the name appallingly arrogant...
I can relate to this. It's a silly thing to get hung up on, but at the same time - WTF, Apple?
I've been alternating between Mingus, Patti Smith, and Vladimir Vyssotski lately. With the latter I've got three albums - one is a french disk that transfered fine, one is a russian one I took from my parents and it's all 'unknown composer, track 1, 2, etc', and one is a double cd taken from RS that decided to appear as two full cd tracks with no genre and Cyrillic singer and disk names.
26: I suspect you would find everything on this four CD compilation set to be right along the lines you're looking for.
Mingus, Patti Smith and Vladimir Vyssotski!
Why didn't those three ever get together and make an album?
32: Which would have been a pretty good album name.
Oh! Peter Grimes: also less than optimal running music.
Hey Stereo Total is nice! Robots in Disguise is sort of similar, I really like their cover of You Really Got Me. The newish LCD Soundsystem is nice also. I don't listen to music while exercising, because swimming or otherwise moving outside.
Hey Stereo Total is nice! Robots in Disguise is sort of similar
And yet Blume loves one and hates the other. Where's the justice?!?
So, basically, Nick, you take me for a real asshole?
Heh, no. Reply re-directed to standpipe's blog.
Speaking of mixes I recently picked up a copy of this and I like it way more than I expected. I've listened to every disk more than once, and that's more than I can say about most box sets. I think disk 3 is a little bit weaker than the others, but they all work, and it's an interesting history,
I'm sure I was inspired to get it by reading Rip It Up And Start Again and, even though it doesn't cover the same music, it's a nice follow-up.
Re: Arcade Fire's
position as the cornerstone of mid-to-late 00s indie rock made me realize that I don't like mid-to-late 00s indie rock very much.
To the extent the first part of this sentence is true, it's mostly because they're willing to be all U2y and write anthems, rather than their sound. I don't think their is much that groups mid-to-late 00s indie rock, other than the sociological category of people who listen to it.
I no longer listen to music when running, but when I did the most frequent songs were Santigold, "Lights Out"; Joy Divison, "Disorder" and "Digital"; the Pixies, "The Happening"; Rihanna, "Rude Boy"; and a lot of that LinstrØm album that came out a couple years ago. No real common thread there that I can tell.
I'm thinking of making this my new workout soundtrack. Maybe that way I'll actually finish it.
I do dig the hell out of it when this song (which I put on my last unfogged mix, I think) comes on when I'm running. Dunno if that's responsive to Stanley's question.
32: Which of the three ---Mingus, Patti Smith and Vladimir Vyssotski --- was actually a heroin addict?
Which of the three was an actual Communist? Probably no good answer to that question.
Vyssotski was an everything addict by the end of his life. He used heroin to soothe the pain caused by a body disintegrating from severe alcoholism, and speed to provide him with the energy to perform. There's a song of his about a rehab center, but I can't remember the title.
43: Yes. And apparently neither Patti Smith nor Charles Mingus were. I would have gotten this totally wrong.
I don't own an i-pod or any such device, and I don't run or do any other kind of exercise while listening to music.
I did discover Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea this year. Only 12 years after it came out! That's pretty quick for me. It's my new favorite.
I assume my distilled song would be something off "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" performed by a Polish contralto. But I've never used a Genius playlist either.
I did make a running playlist once when I was being optimistic about using the elliptical.
45 I discovered it late too and then listened to it approximately thirty billion times in a row.
I would have sworn on my mother's grave that Mingus was a heroin addict -- it was just one of those facts that I "knew." But apparently not.
Peter Grimes: also less than optimal running music.
But great if you're doing weight loss through depression and despair. The pounds just melt away.
34: It stands to reason. I did have a track from Nixon in China on my running playlist. p.s. if you tell the Phillip Glass knock-knock joke about John Adams, I will be cross.
51: I had to google that joke. Hah!
I seem to remember having a good time running along to Reich's Electric Guitar Phase, so there's that.
My sound would be produced by Dust Brothers or Crystal Method (also available by Nike). I elliptical with tunes but run bearear spas to prevent flat feet .
. I did have a track from Nixon in China on my running playlist
Which one? (I've have to admit, I've never gotten much farther than Act I, but I am very fond of that).
I am apparenty losing it. I thought it was you who made that joke when I broadcast the fact that I had seen Ph. Glass in the flesh on 8th Avenue.
run bearear spas
"Well, yes, it's quite tough on a bear's ears out there, Ben, which is why we offer a full slate of relaxing full-bear-ear massages here at the Don't Come To Hunt Spa And Resort."
51: I made a relatedly, equally cruel joke, but then deleted it because I felt bad.
There was a great Harper's Reading some decades back where sex advice from Mingus's autobiography was found to be the same as the sex advice from an incredibly popular Christian sex advice book. The summary: tease her with the tip before you go all in.
57 to 52
54: Madame Mao's act-ending barnburner "I am the Wife of Mao Tse Tung.".
Unfogged.uk people - do any of you do music? if so, you're in line for a booking at the end of August...
So what's the John Adams joke? (You can whisper it so as not to drive Smearcase bonkers.)
OK, here's the Mingus sex advice. Page 73.
I can't find the Christian sex advice manual. I know it was a big seller in airport bookstores.
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Also: I just got a message from my pops. "Hey, [Stanley]. It's your dad. Just letting you know that Mom made it through surgery all right. She's recovering now and doing fine."
Oh? Did I know my mom was going through surgery today? I did not. Am I a terrible son? Yeah, pretty much.
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Embarrassingly, probably AC/DC's "Thunderstruck." Maybe Metallica's "Seek and Destroy."
67, was it "The Act of Marriage"?
66: Oh it's usually a Phillip Glass joke because he's better known and (I think) disliked for his modicum of commercial success.
Knock knock
Who's there?
Phillip Glass
Phillip Glass who?
Knock knock
Who's there?
Phillip Glass
Phillip Glass who?
[repeat until someone laughs.]
(Were they hiding it from you to be kind, Stanley? My parents tried that with their divorce. People in pain and fear make odd decisions.)
'Genius' is awful for my work music; the lists built around classical/early tunes are coherent in a way that makes the whole boring, and it can't do anything with Hoven Droven.
That Disco Delivery blog Cryptic ned cites has a Guy LaFleur disco album on the front page. I pride myself on never saying (or typing) this, but in this case: SQUEEEEE!
Were they hiding it from you to be kind, Stanley?
Nah, it was a long-ago-planned thing (foot surgery after a car accident last year). I just hadn't realized that today was the day, because I talk to my parents only every week or two and was out of town this weekend (though I did exchange a couple of texts with Mom, so maybe there was a bit of not-wanting-me-to-worry on her part). Or something.
67: I own that book! I have not read it.
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How is it possible that Twitter is so popular when it's such a piece of shit as software? I don't have a Twitter account, but I encounter more and more links to tweets, and almost inevitably when I click one, one of the following two things happens:
1. I get a message that says something like "too many tweets, please try again later."
2. The link goes to a "re-tweet" that cuts off the end of the original tweet. The only apparent way to find the original is to click the name of the person whose tweet they're re-tweeting. But when I click that link, I find it's scrolled off their front page. So I click "More" at the bottom of their page, only to see a message that says "Whoops! Something went wrong. Please try again!"
Does the site ever work? How is it so popular when it gives error messages an order-one fraction of the time?
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Someone at a party last week tried to explain that I would enjoy Twitter more if I put a lot more effort into it, subscribed to a lot more feeds, tweeted and retweeted a lot more, etc. All I see is people linking to their own blogs, which I already read, or saying incomprehensible shit out of nowhere.
76: I hate Twitter like I hate my fellow man the smell of New York City in July, but I believe that many people deal with it not through Firefox or Safari or whatnot but through various writer/reader clients, which may not have the same sort of problems.
I also think people enjoy using Twitter to talk to famous people who actually respond to them. The possible joy of getting a RT from Colson Whitehead is outweighed, for me, by the desire to have a private account.
Twitter is how William Gibson picks out my shoes.
You don't think Bill would pick out shoes for you in person, Sifu?
I'm not sure. He lives pretty far away, though.
2. The link goes to a "re-tweet" that cuts off the end of the original tweet. The only apparent way to find the original is to click the name of the person whose tweet they're re-tweeting. But when I click that link, I find it's scrolled off their front page. So I click "More" at the bottom of their page, only to see a message that says "Whoops! Something went wrong. Please try again!"
This actually works differently if you're a logged-in user. In that case, at least on their website, you'll see the full original tweet.
(I resisted creating an account, but the World Cup broke me. It was a lot easier to just follow a bunch of people rather than constantly refresh their webpages.)
Is this the Twitter-hating thread? Good.
So anyway. DS at 73: SQUEEEEE!
I love ya, man, but I can't believe you did that.
(/grump)
Why didn't those three ever get together and make an album?
Let's imagine Москва Одесса as a duet with Patti and Mingus's band providing the backing. Hmmh.
Ok let's try again, Москва Одесса
76: Welcome to the club.
83: I'm not sure that's always true. Twitter still seems to make a distinction between the old style text "RT" and the specific function retweet. But I don't know, since the result of my installing Tweedeck a while back for my twitter reading has been that I don't read twitter on any platform at all ever. It's kind of nice.
Oh, and this post is incomprehensible to me. I think I've heard of Arcade Fire.
I recently discovered Europopped (through a link on GFY). It completely satisfies my need to occasionally enjoy really, really cheesy European music and funny music videos.
run bearear spas was supposed to be
run with no earphones so as to not run and land flatfoot and get shin splints or worse. Technique suffers when not hearing my feet flopping about.
Twitter is only workable if you remember that it's one way communication only, a couple of million people screaming whatever comes into their heads into the void. Following links from somewhere to twitter is pointless, but getting fresh stuff from twitter works a treat.
Apart from that it's irc without the social interaction.
I also think people enjoy using Twitter to talk to famous people who actually respond to them.
C was chuffed the other day when he replied to something someone said about the Woodentops, and then got a tweet from *the actual Woodentops*. Haven't seen him that excited for a while.
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Up late due to having to retrieve someone the bus station in Richmond. So, Mr. Holland's Opus: pretty fucked-up, right?
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This post is a relief to me. I'm going to an Arcade Fire concert on my birthday and I've never heard of them and this post confirms that they are the well-known and well-thought-of kind of band I probably should be familiar with. (Sure, I could have Googled them or searched iTunes for them to see if they have any songs I recognize, but where's the fun in that?) Obviously, I don't care about new music all that much.
Up late due to having to retrieve someone the bus station in Richmond. So, Mr. Holland's Opus: pretty fucked-up, right?
Yep. As you now know, there is nothing really all that glamorous about picking someone up at the bus station. It can be a hard lesson.
Musical bleg/Archives help.
Somewhere in a recent music thread (I think it was one of those where Janelle Monáe was mentioned) someone (apo?) recommended a female blues/soul singer who had done great stuff in the 70s* but stopped when she was young but now an album of her had just been reissued (or finally released, or some goddamn thing like that). Does anyone recall? K thx bai.
*Speaking of music past, I find myself semi-intrigued by Eric Burdon appearing at a local blues festival here. Never saw him back in the day.
There was a point where I had never heard any Arcade Fire, or seen any part of Once Upon a Time in the West. This video solved both problems.
Wow, he sure don't. Early mornings are a very strange time.
There's a school of musical journalism which is off the opinion that Arcade Fire aren't all that, and I'm inclined to agree. I can see what other people like in them, however, I'm probably not in their target audience as I can't really be doing with that level of epic crescendo-laden portentousness. I can't be doing with Mumford and fucking Sons, either, for that matter.
'of' the opinion. Bah.
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I got injected with radioactive shit today for a scan.* I'm disappointed to discover I can't walk up walls, or shoot laser beams, or even just get green when angry.
Hollywood has lied to me.
>
* nothing serious.
Also, 104 isn't meant to be snarky about people who do like Arcade Fire. Reading back it might seem that way.
that level of that level of epic crescendo-laden portentousness.
Yeah, I get that that kind of thing is cheesy and manipulative and doesn't require much musical talent, but it seems that it just takes a lot of that "epic crescendo-laden portentousness" to make me feel anything.
101: Thanks, that was it. (Not that 100 did not add value in its own snowflake-y way.)
100, 101: In fact, the closest name I dredged up on my own was Betty Page.
Also, 104 isn't meant to be snarky about people who do like Arcade Fire. Reading back it might seem that way
ttaM, you're a radioactive Glaswegian kickboxer. Why on earth do you care whether people think you're being snarky about their bands or not?
I'd like to see Betty White performing the Betty Davis catalog.
Betty Crocker and Betty Boop remain unimplicated in this somehow.
107: but it seems that it just takes a lot of that "epic crescendo-laden portentousness" to make me feel anything.
Wait a few years, it can now take a truck driver's gear change and amyl nitrite poppers to make me feel anything.
I once started to make a mix of nothing but Bobbys and Bettys (I have enough of each in the iTunes library to make separate ones, even), but then I got distracted. And found five dollars.
truck driver's gear change
Are other people familiar with this term? I read the FAQ on that web-site, and I still have no idea what he's talking about. But then I know even less about music than I do about most other things.
107 but it seems that it just takes a lot of that "epic crescendo-laden portentousness" to make me feel anything.
peep masturbated a lot as a kid.
The shift up one key happens about 1/3 way through this short clip. You can't miss it.
I hated the Arcade Fire at first, having read and heard a lot of glowing bullshit about them. The high point of my hatred: at a Dan Bejar show in New York, the annoying hipsters standing behind me (who also managed to burn a hole in my jacket with a cigarette, in a place where no smoking is allowed) were chatting the whole time about how much they thought the show sucked. Then, in between acts, an Arcade Fire song played over the speakers, and they had some sort of collective shouty orgasm over it.
But anyway, years later, with less of the annoying hype to cloud my judgment, I find that the Arcade Fire are okay. Not one of the best bands ever, but I enjoy listening to them now and then.
peep masturbated a lot as a kid.
You were watching, weren't you, essear? I knew it!
117: You don't tell peep that something is foolproof. And you don't tell him that he can't miss something. He can.
re: 115
Yes, familiar with it for ... scarily, actual decades. I remember the singer in a friend's band that I used to sometimes play with joking about it, although I can't remember when I first heard that particular term.
me: "How does this one go?"
him: "Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle-8, guitar solo, verse, chorus, chorus-up-a-tone."*
* lies, since it was pretty proggy music.
I feel Bettye Lavette isn't getting enough consideration here.
Maybe you could trade your cell phone for a Porsche
Betty Lavette is the shit. I've put her on an Unfogged mix, at least once.
Awesome voice, and great unhackneyed arrangements, too.