How did we get to the point where certain singing voices are racialized? Everyone I’ve spoken to (and me too) was surprised to discover (a few years ago) that Adelle was not black. Now it’s happening all over again with Meghan Trainor and “All about that Bass”. I’d heard the song at the gym and looked for the music video, when Ms Trainor appeared I was shocked. As was my wife when she walked into the living room. I’ve polled a bunch of others in the office and they were all shocked as well.

This quarter was a mix of new music, continuing to listen to my music in alphabetical order (by artist), and whatever I happened to listen to on my phone. And that resulted in a little something like this (a lot more ties than usual): 1. The Beatles (243 listens) - For the first time in a long time the Fab Four are back on top. I continue to love their later stuff although their older stuff is played out having spent my childhood listening to oldies.

It’s the First of MAY!! The original version of the song is quite, quite dirty and vulgar.

But there are clean versions.

Posts like this one and others I’ve mentioned recently help explain why I’ve had an increase in hatred of pop music as my music tastes have expanded. (Although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying Bubblegum - as it was once known - most of it is garbage) The record industry, as with any established industry (and not too differently from fast food chains), hates risk. They take artists who put out amazing mix tapes and make them bland. As a corollary, when I do enjoy mainstream acts (as opposed to indie), I tend to enjoy the songs they don’t play on the radio. (Lana Del Rey and Fall Out Boy are perfect examples)

I started 2014 with a bunch of music I’d acquired in 2013, but which I still hadn’t listened to. So I created a playlist with a high weight on unplayed music from Q4 2013 to Q1 2014. I changed my Amarok settings so that instead of populating the next 11 items, it would populate the next 3. That way if I was getting bored with the new music (a lot of which is music I got for free so sometimes it’s awesome (to my tastes) and sometimes it’s just OK) I could switch to another dynamic playlist for a while and I’d just be three songs away from hearing some music I know I like. I also bought an album with 100 of the best Beethoven compositions. However, since I’m scrobbling the orchestra that played it (not the composer), I’m not sure if any of them will end up dominating the list. (They didn’t)

Well, more like finishing each verse, but it’s still pretty fun.

Just read this. By the way, I Fight Dragons echoed the experience.

I was inspired to ruminate on this from this Boing Boing article featuring a Dust & Grooves interview with Sheila Burgel. The series seems to use interviews as an excuse to photograph people’s vinyl listening rooms. Many of these are quite beautiful, even if the beauty is just in the size and organization of the collection. I thought of my childhood.

Growing up, my mom always had music playing when she was cleaning the house. Ninety percent of the time she didn’t listen to the radio or tapes. Mom listened to her records. In fact, I only really remember tapes ever being played when we were in the car. Even when I was in high school and we had concert DVDs and CDs (and I was starting to get into the MP3 scene), mom would put on her records. That hiss and pop and then BOOM when the record goes from the non-audio grooves into the record mean “something’s coming” to my brain.

On 6 Nov I went to my 2013 concert. Because of time and money concerns, Danielle and I typically go to a maximum of two concerts a year, and usually just one concert. I was completely unable to resist seeing Five Iron Frenzy in their first tour since breaking up nearly a decade ago. I didn’t really care for Reel Big Fish and I hoped that Five Iron Frenzy would go first as Co-headliner so I could leave early. In fact, although being a fan of ska, the only Reel Big Fish song I’d ever heard was “Everbody’s Doin’ the Fish” because it was the Florida Marlins’ theme song for a season or two. A large part of that comes from the fact that when I got into ska, in the 1990s, I was only into Christian music to the exclusion of secular music - as was encouraged by my middle school church. (My high school church actually shied away from Christian music, which I thought was weird, considering how good it had gotten by the early 2000s) So I listed to Five Iron Frenzy, The OC Supertones, and The Skadaddles. This was going to be my first Five Iron Frenzy concert in nearly 15 years when I saw them at a festival in Florida (and actually filmed a pretty decent video bootleg)

Just four days after saying I haven’t listened to Gnarles Barkely in over two years, a song comes up yesterday when I tell Google music to play the “I’m Feeling Lucky” playlist. Sidebar: while I’ve enjoyed the automixes, so far I have not once enjoyed their picks for the “I’m Feeling Lucky” list.