Wednesday, June 25, 2008

lay it down.

it's been about a month since al green released his latest album, lay it down. and i still haven't had the best opportunity to really digest the music; that's one of the very few things i miss about being in spain. but i've listened to it a substantial amount, and it is good. and not just good by today's standards; put alongside most of today's r&b and soul music, it stands head and shoulders above the rest. i mean good in terms of 70s soul. this album belongs with let's stay together and call me and his other classic 70s records.

there isn't any fluff on this album. each track is just rich with soul. real, vintage, timeless soul. the whole thing just seems really organic; the way al green sings is so informal and you can hear his adlibs, a few mistakes, and laughter from the recording sessions. it's so great. it's organic and at the same time the musicianship is just smooth. smooth and exact, and it's so good. the musicians on this record are some of the best session musicians around today, and it shows here. tunes like stay with me (by the sea) and just for me both boast incredibly intricate arrangements, but they're pulled off so well.

listening to this album makes me proud. al green has been around for decades now and is basically a music legend, but in the last twenty years he hasn't released anything that rivaled his 70s work. the two main people aside from al green responsible for this album are ?uestlove and james poyser, two guys who have been around in music for about fifteen years but have made a name for themselves in the industry. all too often, when artists get older (past like age 50 or so) and start releasing albums into the double digits (i.e. their 17th, 18th studio album, etc.), usually the albums suck. there should be a weird genre strictly for these kinds of albums, because they all seem to sound alike. al green's i can't stop, eric clapton's back home, b.b. king's 80, stevie wonder's a time to love, ray charles's genius loves company, etc. it's such an interesting thing but they all seem like cookie cutter albums, all straight from the same formula book. there's always a few ballads, a few sad love songs, maybe one or two jaunty 12-bar blues numbers. but listening to this al green record has impressed me so much because it's the polar opposite of formulaic pap. there is real soul here. it has the lush sounds of his older, better records, but it just seems a bit shinier, a bit more polished because of better recording techniques than were available in the 70s, and the polish only adds to the richness of this record. it makes me proud to hear an album that my parents, or people who were lucid and impressionable in the 70s, can listen to and say it's as good as the old soul records they listened to when they were younger. proud because it's executive produced by one of my favorite producers, a guy known in the hip-hop world as a prolific musician. this album gives ?uestlove so much musician's cred among adults, it's great.

pick it up if you haven't yet. it's the perfect windows-down album.

-jon

Friday, June 13, 2008

itunes music store.

i love macs. i love every mac product i've used since about 2004. their older computers kind of sucked but only because the operating systems weren't up to snuff. or they were up to snuff but the pc operating system was ubiquitous, you couldn't get away from it and the mac's just couldn't compete. but since the release of the mac os x, literally every single mac product or accessory i've used has been satisfactory. except for one. the itunes music store.

i like the way the store is set up; it's extensive, it's broad, it's got so many different cool features that can appeal to whoever, and obviously it's loaded with tons and tons of music. they've got Top lists, artist/genre/time period essentials lists, celebrity/artist playlists, The World Of... is an extremely cool feature that really breaks down some of music's greatest artists and analyzes their sound (this is one of my favorites and this is one of my favorites. even if you aren't gonna buy, these are both very cool to look at.) podcasts are a way cool free mode of communication and information. heck, you can rent movies on there for crying out loud. the store has got something for everybody.

the thing i hate about it is their system for purchasing music. it's a dollar a song, or usually ten bucks an album, which is a pretty good deal, but after that it all goes downhill. first of all, what you're actually buying are a bunch of a files. and locked files at that. they are m4p format, which itunes uses for protection purposes. basically it means you're restricted from manipulating the file as much as you might want, or from sharing it as much as you might like. if you buy an album on itunes and a buddy wants it, you can share the files with your friend, but when they try to access them on itunes, it will ask for your authorization, and you need to enter your own itunes store account password in order for your friend to use the files on their computer. once you've entered your password in, you've "authorized" your friend's computer to play all of the restricted itunes files you've purchased from the itunes store. the problem is that itunes has a 5 computer limit, which means you can give your password to five buddies, and when friend #6 comes along and really wants to get the new lil wayne album* that you bought from itunes, and you've already authorized your 5 computers, friend #6 is out of luck. he'll have to find the lil wayne album somewhere else.

another thing is that the file quality is not very good. i'll admit, i know very little about this subject, about sound quality and headphones and speakers and bass vs. treble and things like that. thanks to the advent of the ipod and of the inescapable nature of laptops, speaker quality and the desire for speaker quality has decreased by magnitudes. when john mayer was mixing his second album heavier things, a lot of it was mixed on a laptop because he knew that would be one of the main ways that people would play it. if you think about it, do you ever listen to music other than on an ipod or on your laptop? the other most common mode of playing music would probably be off cds in a car, but other than that, it's mainly ipods or laptops. this is all just to say that sound quality, and more importantly the desire for sound quality, has decreased in a huge way the last decade or so. i doubt all those hannah montana fans are concerned with the bit rate of the music they're listening to on their ipods. which is probably why itunes can get away with bad file quality; no one really cares. the bit rate, or the bits of information that are processed per unit of time, is too small. the normal sound file bought off itunes has a bit rate of 128 kbits/second, while a cd has a bit rate greater than 256 kbits/second. to be fair, for the last year itunes has offered a new service called itunes plus, which offers sound files which are unprotected and play at a higher bit rate, closer to that of a cd. and a few months ago, they changed the service from costing more to just being mandatory for some albums and lowering the price back to the normal 10 dollars/album; so instead of being able to buy the cheaper, lower-quality version of an album, the only version available is the itunes plus version for the same cheap price. so that's definitely to their credit.

this is a smaller issue, really nitpicky, but i'm an itunes elitist, and when i see someone's itunes library that has loads of single songs or half-albums, it annoys me to no end. and a lot of the shoddy itunes music libraries in our country are due to the nature of the itunes music store. they offer the majority of their albums track by track as well as in bulk. like i said before, you can purchase the whole album for usually 10 dollars or you can pick out individual tracks for 99 cents each. this has led to a breakdown in the whole concept of "the album". for the last 50 years almost, albums were sold as units. an album was its own individual, self-contained work of art. there was no pick and choose of tracks by listeners; you couldn't burn a cd for your mom of the "best" tunes of your choosing in two and half minutes. a record was a record, not a "choose your own adventure book**". and nowadays no one cares. you can buy rihanna's 5 hot singles off her album and skip the rest of it. it takes away power from the artist and it makes itunes music libraries look like crap. it's a lose-lose situation.

related to that, you don't always get album artwork with the purchase of an album from the itunes store. it's really hit and miss; on the Top 20 albums on the itunes front page, 11 of them come with album artwork, 9 don't. i'd wager about half of the albums on itunes come with artwork and the other half don't. what a lame deal. with a cd you get the jacket too; all the artwork, in many cases you get lyrics, all the personnel information, and artist thank yous. it sucks getting an album off itunes without all that stuff. and even if you do buy an album that happens to come with album artwork, it's in the form of a "digital booklet", which just a big pdf file that you can only look at on your computer. weak sauce.

and after all this, to add insult to injury (in a metaphorical sense), itunes offers "album only" or "preorder only" bonus tracks, not readily available to the poor shmucks like me who don't buy from the online store. sweet ones too, like acoustic takes on certain tunes or remixes or just altogether new songs. if you preorder coldplay's new album you'll get two acoustic tracks along with all the others when it's released, and when john mayer released continuum two years ago, there was a totally new track called can't take that plane, only available with the preorder. to be fair, that track kind of sucked, but it's the principle of the thing. it's just unfair. i don't use limewire so i can't get single tunes that way, so for the few of us*** who actually buy real cds anymore (or download illegally), we get gypped out of extra tunes. i don't like it.

there you go. mac is golden; it seems they can do no wrong except for the itunes store. i think their next project should be either fixing the store or making a tv monitor. like a real apple brand tv monitor to go along with the apple tv system. how money would that be?

-jon

* don't buy this album. it won't be good and he annoys me.

** jm quote.

*** i don't actually include myself in that group because in the last year or so i've only bought like two cds, and both of those were in the last month.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

pre-viva album post.

first, it helps to go here, and double click the 30-second playable clip of this song.
incredible that in 30 seconds, you can hear themes of life and death, glory and triumph and defeat and past heroes. add to that the grandiose nature of the music. a thumping beat with monumental orchestrated strings in the background, and then church bells? how majestic.

we're finally one week away from a new coldplay album. not having heard new coldplay in three years, it will be comforting to put on headphones and take in a whole album. there is something so interesting about coldplay that i've never been able to pin down. they've seemed to nail the thing, the idea for me where the lyrics that are being sung or the music that is being played is just too good, it's so grand and it's almost too big for anyone to handle. coldplay's ideas are just so big. i guess i'm talking about ideas mainly in a musical sense, and when their music soars, as it does on every album they've released yet, their lyrics are amplified so much. i can't wait to see what happens on this new album. i love how their sound has changed a lot but kept the same feeling of grand. even on parachutes, which had loads of pretty simple acoustic-based tunes, the music just felt big. coldplay's nailed this kind of anthemic music better than anyone in our generation and just from that 30-second clip of viva la vida, it's exciting to know they're still doing it.

violet hill was the first song i'd heard off this new album (i'm unsure whether it's called just viva la vida or viva la vida or death and all his friends. i'm gonna stick with the former for now) and it had a familiar feel to it. a bit of crunch, similar to X&Y, and a killer hook, reminiscent of just coldplay in general. they are the master of good hooks. when the band goes from the verse to the chorus in the tune warning sign and chris sings "and the truth is...i miss you", it's a perfect moment in modern pop music. such a good hook. and then the piano outro in violet hill just kills me. leave it to coldplay to leave the best part of the song, a beautiful piano part, for the last 40 seconds of a song. what a tease they are.

there really can't be any way coldplay could go wrong with this new album. they have a pretty big fan base, basically including every person on earth, and as much as the average american music listener is a cynical s.o.b., no one can win him over as well as coldplay can. their anthemic (soft) rock has been luring in fans for years and this album will surely be no different story. awesome music by an awesome band makes for awesome record sales. simple enough.

-jon

Monday, June 9, 2008

finally. something new.

ok. i had a blog started about being back in the states, leaving spain, starting my summer, all this thoughtful stuff. then i got bored of it. here's what i decided to write instead.

i sincerely hope to keep my blog up. it's a nice outlet, even though i have no idea how many people read it. but lately it's been hard, not enough time to just sit around and write. but i'm sitting in joel's room right now, waiting until the movie he and ryan are watching gets over so we can pop in either strange wilderness or batman (the michael keaton one) so i had some free time now. tomorrow N*E*R*D's new album comes out, seeing sounds, which hopefully will result in a new blog. a week later coldplay's new album comes out, which i am insanely excited for, which will almost certainly result in a new blog. in three days i'll be able to throw down a new itunes update, which i didn't think i was gonna do after my last one sucked but with the new al green album that came out a few weeks ago and the fact that i'm in a full blown kanye west phase, i'm really excited to see how my play counts have mixed up.

this just in. i just finished listening to the 30 second clips of seeing sounds, and i am out of my mind excited about it. i would buy it on itunes but i am kind of against buying music off itunes, as onboard as i am with everything mac (that could make for a dece blog.) i will probably just sleep and go grab it in the morning at best buy.

so here are the few thoughts i had in my failed return-to-iowa blog. i like iowa. i like farmlands. i like my girlfriend. and my friends. i was right about my trip to spain. it felt good to be there, and even better to come home. this is my real home. being with colleen is home. i learned tons, and it's so good to be back here. and i really encourage you to go out and buy N*E*R*D's album tomorrow. it's gonna be bomb.

-jon