The Lost Art of the Mixtape

I'm not one of those people that looks upon things from the past with longing. I'm not nostalgic by nature. Maybe it's because I didn't have a happy or fun childhood, so I have no desire to look at the past lovingly.

That being said, there's one thing that I truly miss: The mixtape.

Allow Rob from High Fidelity to explain the rules:

Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don'ts. First of all you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing. [...] You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don't wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules. [...] [It's] hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem.

Here were my mixtape rules:

1) The first song had to catch attention, but you could not use Side 1, Track 1 of any album. That's cheating, since artists usually put their punchiest songs at the beginning of an album.

2) Avoid tape clicks. I would pause the tape after each song, change out the CD, then unpause the tape. However, you had to time it right so that there was the right amount of pausing in between each song. It was a very specific process.

3) Don't play the same band twice in a row. Just bad form.

3a) However, if a song by a band moves into another naturally and you want to preserve that flow, OK. Just don't make a habit of it.

4) The last song on the tape couldn't be an album's last song. For example, you can't use "Everything's Ruined" by Fountains of Wayne to close out the tape, because it's the last track on their self-titled album.

5) Try not to use the same songs on multiple mixtapes. Mix it up. Get creative.

6) Better to be a little short than too long. If the tape ends in the middle of a track, you've just failed at mixtapes.

All of this requires that you really, really know what music you own. You had to know not only what tracks were the best for each situation, but you also had to know specifically how long each one was so you knew how much time you had to work with. Could you squeeze in that extra track, or would you run overtime?

A lot of artists would put the length of each track on their albums. Bless 'em. A lot of them wouldn't. Curse 'em. When they didn't put the track times, you really, really, really had to know how long your music was.

One of the other quirks of the mixtape is that you had to sit there and put the tape together. If your tape was 90 minutes long, you had to sit there for all 90 minutes or end up ruining your tape. It was a labor of love that required a bit of sacrifice.

At the risk of sounding like an old man, making a mix CD doesn't have the same charm. You can literally click a few times on a program, have it check to see if there's too much music to fit on a CD, step away, and let the program make the CD. I know we can carry lots of music on our iPods too, and that's great. Really. It is.

However, what made mixtapes so challenging is that you had to pick just a few tracks that were important to you. You couldn't include "everything by Radiohead." You had to pick, "Which song is more important to me? 'Black Star' or 'Let Down'? Would this person like early, guitar-rock Radiohead, or more unusual tracks like 'Pearly'?" (This was before Kid A came out, by the way.)

There was nothing worse than sending out a mixtape that you slaved over and spent time arranging carefully and getting a tape back to you that was recorded on the quick. I remember setting up a tape with all of my rules and carefully curating a collection of music for a girlfriend and receiving a tape slapped together with 10 songs by the same person. That was a warning sign if I ever saw one.

I know mixtapes were a lot of work, and I know it sounds like a hassle, but it was a lot of fun too. When you felt the urge to carve out a couple of hours of your life to make a tape for someone, you knew they were important to you. A mixtape wasn't just about the music. It was about carving out time to do something important, to share something about yourself and take pride in the way you were doing it.

Criminally Overlooked: Better Than Ezra: "How Does Your Garden Grow?"

Being in a band is easy if you don't have any desire to be respected. It's just a matter of making whatever people like and following the train to Moneytown.

Take the band Sugar Ray, for example. They had a one-off pop hit in 1997 named "Fly" that sounded like a fun reggae-themed jam, sold like crazy, made them tons of money, and everyone hates now. The problem was that the album that "Fly" came from, Floored, was a rap/rock album, and no one liked any other tracks off of it. What was a non-self-respecting band to do?

Sugar Ray decided that they were better off following the money, and abandoned all rap-rock aspirations with their next album, 14:59. 14:59 was a fun reggae-themed album, sold like crazy, made them tons of money, and everyone hates it now. But big deal! Sugar Ray made money, and that was all that mattered.

If Sugar Ray had more self-respect, they may have said, "Hey, we make rap/rock, we like rap/rock, and we'll make more rap/rock, no matter what people say. Deal with it." They didn't, and they made tons of money. C'est la vie.

That brings us to Better Than Ezra. They had one big hit in 1995, with a song called "Good." Everyone sing along with the chorus!

"A-wah-haw. It was goooood, living with you wah-haw. It was goooood, living with you wah-haw."

Better Than Ezra, to their credit, didn't just want to be the band that made "Good." They wanted to be Real Artists. They tried with their next album, Friction, Baby, to prove that they could do just that. The album cover was even in black-and-white! That's as artistic as you can get!

Even though Friction, Baby was a really good record, they still got no respect for being a "real band." The public at large still viewed them as a one-hit wonder because of a song that had an unfortunate vocal tic. That mean that it was time for them to throw down the gauntlet and prove that Better Than Ezra was a Real Band, that they were True Artists that made Important Music.

Their next album, released in 1998, was called How Does Your Garden Grow? It was subtitled "A Series of Nocturnes," the first track was called "Je Ne M'en Souviens Pas," and it had electronic flourishes and two-part songs because that is Just What You Did when you wanted to prove you were a Serious Artist.

It would be easy to dismiss Garden as the work of a band adorably overreaching their actual talent level, and the first two tracks don't dispell that notion. The first track is desparately trying to sound mysterious and intellectual, with mumbled vocals and distored female vocal loops. The second track, "One More Murder," is their Message Song, where they try to end gun violence in their home of New Orleans forever through a song that tells people that it's bad. Like most Message Songs, it just ends up sounding turgid and silly in retrospect.

Then something happens. It's almost as if frontman Kevin Griffin really wanted to be a Serious Artist, doing electronically looped songs and songs that would blow your mind, but he just couldn't hold back his inner songsmith any longer. "At the Stars" is a lush, joyous, singalong of a song, three minutes of pop perfection that he follows up with two more catchy pop tunes, "Like It Like That" and "Alison Foley."

The rest of the album shifts back and forth between solid songwriting chops to electronic, Serious Artist pieces. No matter what, he can't keep away from those hooks, those dreadful, awful, wonderful, earworm-y hooks. It's almost like you can hear Griffin fighting himself:

"I know I have to prove that I'm a true artist, but dang if that hook doesn't sound pretty! But, no, I have to be an artist. How can you call yourself an artist if people actually like your music? But, oh, that chorus would be perfect here!"

The whole album switches back and forth like that, from electronic-based tracks back to catchy pop numbers and back again. If it sounds awful, the surprise is that it really isn't. It actually sounds like an artist trying something new and succeeding repeatedly, then retreating to safer ground when things get too scary.

That dichotomy can be best heard in the last two tracks, the dreadfully titled "New Kind of Low a) Low b) Coma," and the similarly awfully-titled "Waxing or Waning?" "New Kind of Low" opens with a blistering guitar-rock track where he sing-speaks half of the self-deprecating lyrics, then remembers that this album is supposed to be serious, doggoneit. The second half breaks out in an electronica and trip-hop influenced part that wouldn't sound out of place as the background music of a femme fatale in a Bond film. Then, finally, he just says "screw it" and makes "Waxing or Waning?" a lush acoustic track with a gentle chorus to conclude the album.

Garden was not a successful album commercially, and Better Than Ezra would get dropped from their label after its poor performance. They're still making albums and they have a few more minor hits under their belt, but none have been as adventurous as Garden. It's almost as if, chastened by their reach exceeding their grasp, they retreated into a shell from which they're not ready to emerge anytime soon.

Still, a wildly ambitious album desperate to prove something important that got quickly forgotten by the public at large but still managed to be pretty good? That sounds Criminally Overlooked to me.

NYANNYAN :3

Nyan Cat the Movie by blakerobinson

Just Some Music

A little something from White Rabbits:

So Long, Guitar Hero

I predicted that Guitar Hero was going to collapse, and verily, it came to pass.

Here's what a few people are saying:

“You can have an IP that you lovingly care for and release every so often that can last forever, or one you ride hard into the ground.” - Cliffy B

Sing it, Cliff.

Activision sez:

"Although we did well with the core gamer in 2010, we felt the effects of changing consumer demand for peripheral-based and mid-tier titles, which performed well below our expectations.

After two years of steeply declining sales, we’ve made the decision to close our Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on our previously playing Guitar Hero title for 2011.

Despite a remarkable 92 rating on DJ Hero 2, a widely well-regarded Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, as well as the 90-plus rated release from our most direct competitor, demand for peripheral-based music games declined at a dramatic pace."

It appears that Activision learned the wrong lesson here. Instead of placing the blame on peripheral oversaturation, as yours truly talked about back in 2009 and everyone could see coming from a mile away, they said that demand decreased dramatically. In other words, it was completely out of their hands and just a market fluctuation.

When Guitar Hero came out, it was a revelation. It was fun, easy to learn, and just plain brilliant. You could tell that it had a limited shelf life, but there were ways to stretch that shelf life considerably. By metering out carefully the releases, Activision could have kept Guitar Hero viable for several years.

Don't believe me? Think of this: What if they would have ONLY released Guitar Hero 3 and Guitar Hero: World Tour this generation? They could bide their time, wait a a few years, and then release the next Guitar Hero with cool new features. They might even wait a generation for the next one. Can you imagine the demand for the next game? Instead, they pummeled the tar out of Guitar Hero so badly that no one wanted anything to do with it.

They also learned the wrong lesson from Guitar Hero in a different sense. Instead of understanding that the appeal wasn't in the motion or the peripheral but rather the gameplay, they started pounding out peripherals like mad. Here's the thing: No one liked the extra cost involved with the peripherals. They used them because the games they were attached to were fun.

What a concept! Instead of peripherals driving purchases, people actually would buy good games in SPITE of the extra expense BECAUSE they were good! WOW!

I've hammered Activision on this point repeatedly, but don't be surprised if they go the way of 90's Sega. They have no idea what they're doing. So why aren't we having this conversation about Call of Duty instead? We'll discuss that a different time.

Music Thoughts

A few thoughts about music on a blustery Wisconsin day:

- Dirty Projectors' "Bitte Orca" is getting thrown around as an Album of the Year candidate, and I can see why.  First, it has two girls in the band, which turns it into indie catnip.  Second, if you "appreciate" Dirty Projectors, you now have intellectual cred and can sniff at people while explaining that they don't "get" it.  Look, Dirty Projectors has a lot of interesting ideas, but ideas do not a song make.  You need a lot more, like melodies and tunes that are pleasing to the ear.  If you don't have that, then you're just showing off what you know.

- It took me several years, but I finally get Beck's "The Information."  I'm one of the biggest Beck fans around, but I felt really let down by "The Information."  It felt too cold and clinical, just like a pure stream of information.  All the beats, absurdist lyrics and hooks were there, but they didn't add up right.  Usually, what happens is that one song brings me around to a band or an album.  For Animal Collective's "Merriwether Post Pavilion" it was "Lion In A Coma."  For Sleater-Kinney it was "One Song For You."  For "The Information," that song was a live version of "Nausea" that sounded fantastic.  The rest of the album fell into place shortly thereafter.  I still think you could cut out a few songs and make it a much tighter album, but I enjoy it now.

- Speaking of Animal Collective, couldn't they have picked a better song to open their album?  For someone unfamiliar with them, it sounds like a circus on meth and is really offputting.  Just a suggestion, guys.

- My favorite album of the 00's?  The Walkmen's "You and Me."

More Beatles Reasons

There were a couple more things I thought of overnight about why the Beatles remain as popular as they do.

1) They let themselves be influenced by others.

The Beatles did not exist in a vacuum.  Their early work was inspired by Elvis and skiffle.  Some songs bear the clear stamp of Bob Dylan, like "You've Got Hide Your Love Away." (Incidentally, my wife actually thought that was a Dylan song until I pointed it out to her.)  Later on, they were influenced by Ravi Shankar and eastern philosophy.  Even an album as seminal as "Sgt. Pepper" has its roots in other albums like "Pet Sounds" and "Freak Out" by Frank Zappa, which they've acknowledged as a clear influence.  You could say that they were copying others, but like any good artist, they understood that inspiration doesn't just happen.  You need...a little help from your friends.

2) The finality.

Consider The Rolling Stones.  From 1963 to 1972, their catalog is a murderer's row.  Think of the fantastic songs they have: "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'," "Gimme Shelter," "Get Off Of My Cloud," we could go on for a while.  But when you think of the Stones, what do you see?  The cool Keith Richards pursing his lips while he plays his guitar?  Mick Jagger swaggering his way through "Brown Sugar?"  Or do you see a couple of old wrinkled guys who haven't made a really top-of-the-line album in a while?

Consider The Who.  Their catalog is also mostly unimpeachable to a point.  They were a band with three frontmen and a fantastic bassist.  But they're still going, long after Keith Moon and The Ox died, still plugging along long after they're relevant.

The Beatles broke up in 1970, and then John Lennon died. They've never, ever gotten back together.  (Yes, they recorded "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love," but those were Lennon compositions.)  They didn't throw Julian Lennon into the mix and hit the road again, and they're not endlessly touring.  When you think of The Beatles, you think of them the way they were, not the way they are.  Paul will always be the guy with the flirty eyes, John will always be the dreamer and tortured artist, George will always be the mysterious guitar savant and Ringo will always be the fun-loving drummer.  If Paul McCartney were arrested tomorrow with his trunk full of dead Chechnyan prostitutes, it wouldn't reflect at all on the Beatles' music.  It exists in a vacuum in our minds since it came, it rocked our faces off, and then it left, leaving us with fond memories ever since.

The Beatles: Legendary Or Not?

This topic occurred to me when reading an article written by Paul Shirley on ESPN.com. In his blog post, he complains about people liking the Beatles, saying they really were primitive and other bands are better. Every once in a while, a contrarian viewpoint like this one will pop up, and as Shirley did, they usually don't have anything to back it up except statements like this one:

I'd much rather listen to Oasis than The Beatles. Oasis, or any band that came after The Beatles, learned from The Beatles, improving on their work by listening to, building on and perfecting the styles pioneered by The Beatles.

*Cough*

There's almost no way that someone from my generation can listen to the primitive hackings of "Eleanor Rigby" finish, and then listen to "November Rain" and say, "Yeah, 'Eleanor Rigby' is the better piece of music."

*Hack*

But I do know that the Dean Koontz books that entertained my 14-year-old mind are infinitely more complex and frightening than "Dracula."

*Sputter*

These are usually the kind of statements you see in this type of article. It's never anything concrete, such as, "Listen to the last third of 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' where they just repeat the same thing over and over again and tell me that the Beatles are a good band." That sort of argument I can understand, but the only songs this guy mentions are "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "Eleanor Rigby." Those are both fine songs, but he doesn't even talk about what he doesn't like about them. He says that he doesn't like the chorus of "I Want To Hold Your Hand," but his trashing of "Eleanor Rigby" has no hard statements as to what's wrong with it. He also brings up "Abbey Road," which he trashes once again without saying why he doesn't like it.

When people trash the Beatles, they usually don't mention things like "I listened to 'Revolver' and I didn't like it." Their point almost always boils down to "They're not as good as everyone says they are." That's essentially what Shirley is saying, along with a healthy dollop of "I wasn't around then so maybe I don't understand the attraction." Paul McCartney will even admit as such. His exact words on the subject as quoted from The Beatles Anthology?

We were just a band that made it very, very big. That's all.

However, the cascades of adulation heaped upon the Beatles do have some merit. I myself was skeptical of them for a while. The first albums I ever bought (after The Wallflowers' "Bringing Down The Horse") (don't laugh) were "Abbey Road" and "Let It Be." I was very disappointed in both of them, but I kept trying to break through and figure out what I was missing. After a while I bought "Sgt. Pepper" and I liked that even less. It wasn't until I listened to "Revolver" that I got it for good, and I consider "Revolver" to be their finest album and one of the best albums I've ever heard.

To be fair, the Beatles are, first and foremost, just a guitar band that got opportunities for musical expansion that other bands of the time didn't get. You could make the argument that a band like Radiohead is far more experimental than the Beatles ever were. However, the Beatles didn't have the tools to be that wildly experimental. They were using 8-track recorders. Electronica was in its infancy. Plus, Radiohead, while popular, is nowhere near as popular as the Beatles, and that's because the Beatles understood when to be experimental and when to dial it back.

The strange thing is that Radiohead's career arc and the Beatles career arc follow each other pretty well. Both started out as simple guitar bands. Early Beatles songs like "Please Please Me" and "All My Loving," while good, aren't earth-shattering. Likewise with Radiohead's "Creep." I would actually say that "Creep" is an awful, overplayed song. Neither gave any indication about the eventual endpoint for their respective bands. As they grew and changed, they experimented with more sounds until they created their breakthrough "sound of a generation" albums. The Beatles made "Sgt. Pepper" and Radiohead made "Kid A."

We're digressing, but the point is this: Every band starts with humble beginnings and eventually becomes something bigger. Every band is "just a band." However, there are specific reasons why The Beatles became as big as they did and continue to be. Sure, their mythology helps, but there's a lot more in play. Here's a couple of points:

1) The quality of their music.

This is the first and most obvious reasoning. In the space of 8 years they released 13 albums (14 if you count The White Album as two albums) and almost every song is good. There are a few clunkers, like the second half of "Yellow Submarine" and some of their cover songs at the beginning of their career. However, just about every song has something worth hearing. Even a song like like "I Want To Hold Your Hand" has that three-chord introduction that gets repeated throughout the song. It's endlessly sing-along-able (is that a word?) to boot.

On top of that, the depth of their library is fantastic. You can randomize their library, pick out 14 songs and get a pretty good album out of it. It's a rare group that has almost no worthless songs, especially with the volume of songs that they have.

2) Their initial popularity.

There's no denying that Beatlemania plays a large part in their ongoing popularity. That's actually okay. There are galvanizing moments in culture that everyone who was around still remembers: Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, 9/11. "Beatles on Ed Sullivan" is another one of those moments, and we really don't see mass cultural events like "Who Shot J.R." anymore. It's a bit of a relic of the old mass media, and just the same as we still talk about other cultural seismic shifts, the Beatles influence deserves the same recognition.

3) Their experimentalism.

The Beatles were just experimental enough to be dangerous. There was always a little bit of danger underneath the moptop haircuts and suits, even at the beginning. They may have looked clean-cut, but their music was raucous party music in a style that really hadn't been around. Elvis' music was sharp at the beginning, but by the time the Beatles rolled around, he was willing to just make movies and take drugs without taking any real risks.

The Beatles made fun, rollicking guitar songs for quite a while, but they had the clout to do more and they did. "Helter Skelter" is still a harrowing work and wholly shocking from a band that once sang "She Loves You." "Tomorrow Never Knows" is more experimental than a lot of modern bands are. And unlike a lot of bands that have tried to be experimental and failed, The Beatles experimentalism actually works and sounds great without being too far out there ("Revolution 9" aside).

--

Now, the question is, are the Beatles substantially better than any other band in existence ever? Not really. They're really good, and I would classify them as the best band so far, but there are a lot of other bands who have very solid catalogs as well. However, none have had the reach culturally, have grabbed as many people, and are as universally loved as the Beatles. I guarantee you that long after we're gone, a big chunk of their music will continue to live on.

Digital Distribution Has Worked Out Sooooo Well For The Music Industry

Via NY Times:

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

How crazy is that? And obviously, people didn't stop listening to music. So where did they get their songs from?

I'll let you put two and two together.

A Little Something About Coldplay

If you take a look at my "Currently Listening To" section along the right side, you'll see a pretty wide variety of music in there. I like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Springsteen and the Who through Weezer, Nirvana and Hum and down to Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, the New Pornographers, and Radiohead. I have a pretty diverse collection.

I'm also fairly picky. I don't like things just because critics fawn all over them. I've started going back through Jimi Hendrix's work, and I'm really not impressed. I think the Doors were overrated. I can't listen to Girl Talk because it annoys me. I've tried getting into TV on the Radio, and it just hasn't clicked. I really liked Weezer's new album, even though a lot of critics didn't.

That being said, I don't get all the hate for Coldplay. If you look all over the interwebs, you'll see people bashing them left and right, calling them a homeless man's U2, saying that they're no-talent hacks and the like. Among the internetati, it's a foregone conclusion that they stole a song from Joe Satriani. It goes on and on.

I don't get why a halfway-decent band inspires such hate. I mean, okay, X & Y was a lousy album. It had its moments, but it was pretty lame. But Parachutes and A Rush of Blood to the Head are pretty much unimpeachable. Viva La Vida is a great, great album and one of my favorites of 2008.

Now, I can get that you may not like that style of music. I get that. I also get that sometimes people don't want to see someone get successful doing something that's really not that special. I get that. But the unbridled hate for Coldplay really doesn't have any basis. I mean, I can say, "Coldplay is the suckiest sucky band ever to suck," but unless I have something to back it up it's a worthless opinion.

I guess where I'm trying to go is that I hate the drive-by criticism of the internet. It's so easy for critics to swoop past any argument or site and say "You suck" without any basis. Coldplay is one example of how real life many times bears no relation to what happens on the internet.