Rock on! – someone’s been keeping tabs on patti rothberg while she floats endlessly between albums. If she’d ever get her nearly completed record on the shelves it would make my top10 for sure…
by krisis
Having just tiraded about music for a while, here are the discs that are looking to appear on my 2000top10 list. Keep in mind Pj Harvey is releasing a disc next week, and that last year’s favourite came out November 16th. Here we go, in a slightly biased order… Peter Mulvey the trouble with poets, Aimee Mann Bachelor No.2, Victoria Williams Water To Drink, Veruca Salt Resolver, Juliana Hatfield Beautiful Creature, Elastica The Menace, Tracy Bonham Down Here, Madonna Music, …. and i’m sure i’ll be adding a few more in the weeks to come as i pick up the discs i missed. If you know that i totally skipped over something worthy, point it out, by all means. I mean, i would have never bought Beautiful Creature (it was a donation to my collection from the promo bin at the phila. weekly) and it is definitely going to make my list, so i obviously could have missed out on some other good discs. And, no, i didn’t really like Belle & Sebastian’s. And, yes, i still have to buy Elliot Smith’s. Okay.
People who review music are interesting creatures. Do we listen to them because they offer us unique and informed insight into artists we both love and have never heard of? Or, do we enjoy their outrageous opinions and biases? Obviously the answer is a little of both. Some reviewers are so immersed in a love of music that they cannot give a bad review. Should any true musical effort get a bad review? Here i’m obviously differentiating between thoughtless or overly-produced music that one often finds on the radio and the totally opposite effortless or carefully assembled music that most people would consider as art. As much as i hate the new Radiohead, and though i might give it less than two stars if i were to review it for the paper, the review itself would doubtlessly offer many positives about the album so that people who liked those facets of it would know to buy it.
That, of course, is why album ratings are arbitrary; are they personal opinion or objective rankings? I found myself battling over such thoughts earlier while i was commenting on Nelly Furtado. While there are only a few tracks on her disc that i enjoy, a quick read through Amazon.com‘s reviews pointed out to me the many aspects of her disc that my ears weren’t open to. After several revisions, my review sounds like it should be nearly four stars, but i plan to submit it as a two star review on monday. Obviously i intend for people to glance at the rating and then read the article, because the rating is probably only applicable if they share an overwhelming overlap in musical taste with me. And, god help them if they do…
Dave Matthews Band sucks. Really. They are surely decent enough, but the amount of hype they are prone to receive makes me want to hate them all the more. After having listened to some of Before These Crowded Streets last night for the first time in a while, i was simply struck by the fact that i listen to easily a dozen bands that are more dynamic than DMB. Matthews is all about abstract storytelling and thinly veiled sexual metaphor while the band totally obscures Dave’s dynamic guitar playing. On some songs like the uniquely executed “Stay” i love every second of it, but otherwise i am left reminiscing about when “Ants Marching” first came out and i could never discern between DMB and Blues Traveller.
I know that DMB are all talented musicians, and i know they’re a band and not a backup for a solo act, but jesus, why does every drunk frat boy and arty college girl love them so much? The only argument in their favour comes from the blue Luther College set that features Dave Matthews and his sideman Tim Reynolds all alone. Here we can see that Dave goes way beyond his empty bombastic vocals and prolific undifferentiated songs to prove himself as one of the premier singer-songwriters in our generation. Of course, afterwards he went back on tour with his DMB, which lets me easily forget why i found any reason to like him at all. But, i do have those blue discs…
There is definitely a very significant amount of population missing from the blog world. I mean, aside from a lot of ethnicities which don’t seem to be represented, the gender ratio is all off. Girls seem to dominate the mid-level diary-ish sites and weblogs while the boys are all the infamous ones at the top of the pyramid. Of course, i’m always wrong, and there’s got to be over 5000 blogs at this point for me to be generalizing from, but i’ll again posit that the only blogs that really count are the ones that are active enough to register on Power Blogger once and a while. Really, those big-boys at the top aren’t blogs anymore, but syndicated columns using blogger as a device. Blogs themselves seem to be a bit more active-oriented … what really is the point of using blogger if you aren’t going to be posting constantly? News Publisher works plenty fine for posting as many as three or four times a day, and you don’t have to rely on any external service. So, blogger really is more of an active device. Which brings me back to my point about the gender inequality as well as the inequality of content. Much in the same way that i am constantly searching for more singer-songwriters on the web (are you one?), i am always looking for other pages with the light balance of real life and personal musings that i attempt to have. Of course, being intimately acquainted with my own life and all therein, maybe it’s just that my site makes a hell of a lot of sense to me but other sites don’t. I’m not sure. I don’t know what i’m saying really… i guess bloggers are as unique as snowflakes. Go figure.