Songwriting Tips from the Hitmakers, Pt. 1 | DIY Musician

Songwriting Tips from the Hitmakers, Pt. 1 | DIY Musician

LADY GAGA: THE END OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION?

Camille Paglia, Sunday Times UK - Although [Lady Gaga] presents herself as the clarion voice of all the freaks and misfits of life, there is little evidence that she ever was one. Her upbringing was comfortable and eventually affluent, and she attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton. There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga's melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

Photos of Stefani Germanotta just a few years ago show a bubbly brunette with a glowing complexion. The Gaga of world fame, however, with her heavy wigs and giant sunglasses (rudely worn during interviews) looks either simperingly doll-like or ghoulish, without a trace of spontaneity. Every public appearance, even absurdly at airports where most celebrities want to pass incognito, has been lavishly scripted in advance with a flamboyant outfit and bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves.

Furthermore, despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn't sexy at all – she's like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga's manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era. . .More

ANOTHER REASON TO BOYCOTT THE RECORDING INDUSTRY

WIRED

A federal appeals court is ordering a university student to pay the
Recording Industry Association of America $27,750 - $750 a track - for
file sharing 37 songs when she was a high school cheerleader.

The decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a Texas
federal judge who had ordered defendant Whitney Harper to pay $7,400, or
$200 per song. The lower court had granted her an "innocent infringer's"
exemption to the Copyright Act’s minimum of $750 per track because she
said she didn't know she was violating copyrights and thought file sharing
was akin to internet radio streaming.

The appeals court, however, said the woman was not eligible for such a
defense even if it was true she was between 14 and 16 years old when the
infringing activity occurred on Limewire. The reason, the court concluded,
is that the Copyright Act precludes such a defense if the legitimate CDs
of the music in question provide copyright notices.

Harper, now 22 and a Texas Tech senior, said in 2008 interview that she
didn't know what she did was wrong when she file shared Eminem, the
Police, Mariah Carey and others as a teen.

"I knew I was listening to music. I didn't have an understanding of file
sharing," she said.

Scott Mackenzie, the woman's attorney, said Friday that "She's going to
graduate with a federal judgment against her." The RIAA, which has sued
thousands of people for infringement, labeled Harper as "vexatious" when
she refused to settle the case.

Only two RIAA cases against individuals have gone to trial, both of which
earned the RIAA whopping verdicts.

--

Kate Miller-Heidke 'The Last Day On Earth' Official Video

I heard "Are You Fucking Kidding Me (Facebook Song)?" and wanted to hear more. Found this...

Dance Hall Crashers - Go

Used to love these guys! Kind of Prog-Ska!

Beck Comes Out on Top of Ridiculous, Somewhat Imaginary Band Feud

By Jocelyn Hoppa, Crawdaddy!

I’ve kinda been watching this one from a distance over the last week or so, trying not to care. But it’s gotten too ridiculous to ignore, and I suppose now is the right time to give you all the recap. Especially since, you know, today’s theme is all about our hungover brains being easily entertained with music people’s shit talkin’. That’s what today’s all about, in case you didn’t know.

SO. Way back in August, before we even had this blog, Radiohead released a one-off charity track called “Harry Patch (In Memory Of).” Patch was the last surviving UK veteran of WWI and died just recently at the age of 111. Proceeds from the single benefit the British Legion. Seems like a nice, sensible thing for a band to do, right?

Well, on November 3rd, the webzine Spinner ran an interview with the Fiery Furnaces in which the brother half of the duo, Matthew Friedberger, upon being told that Radiohead sent out a mass email describing the tribute, went fucking apeshit about it. He said, “F— you! You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool. That is bogus. That’s a put-on. That’s a branding technique and Radiohead have their brand that they’re popular and intelligent. So they have a song about Harry Patch.”

Confused? You should be. While I’m sure Harry Patch was a real cool guy, it’s a rather suspect thing for a band to align themselves with so to appear as thought they are all cool and obscure with their references. As it turns out, Friedberger confused war veteran Harry Patch with American composer Harry PaRtch. D’oh! Good one, dude.

THEN. Then, because he obviously had to answer to what was at least perceived as his giant fuck up, Friedberger issued a statement saying that he knew all along that it was Harry Patch, duh, and he just thought it would be funny to make a joke. Is that even believable though? I dunno…

The story gets better and continues on after the jump.

Friedberger’s statement:

“Like most creative musicians, Matt Friedberger is not a fan of Radiohead and most of their chart busters. Of course, Matt and all the Fiery Furnaces family are great fans of allTommys living or dead, so much so that lots of the Fiery Furnaces’ work is, because of the pun, dedicated to imitating the Who’s Tommy.

“Back in the fall of 1996 or whenever that interview was conducted, the interviewer asked what Matt thought of the Radiohead song celebrating a WWI veteran. Matt naturally thought it would be interesting to pretend that they wrote a song about the celebrated American composer of a similar sounding name, hence his joking in the interview about Radiohead composing a song with something like 48 notes to an octave. It was easy and amusing to imagine Radiohead’s attempt to colonize that relatively arcane bit of our musical lifeworld. This is what they used to call, in some bohemian and advertising circles, ‘riffing’ or fooling around.

“Matt has not heard the Radiohead song about Harry Patch, but if he did, he is sure he wouldn’t like it. No doubt Radiohead and their fans can ignore his opinion of this matter and continue with their triumphant artistic interventions. Matt would have much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists.”

Okay, so this is the point where we cease being confused and start thinking to ourselves that this Friedberger guy is kind of a dick and should learn to keep his trap shut (and maybe get someone else to write his statements? I mean, lifeworld???). And the last sting on Beck from out of nowhere? WTF, Fiery Furnaces dude?!

AND THEN. Then, Beck posted a 10-minute tribute to Harry Partch on his website (click and scroll a bit). It says nothing directly of the Friedberger insult, but the implied “fuck you” speaks volumes. Awesome volumes. That there is a life lesson, from Beck to you.

So yeah… then… Friedberger, who apparently thinks more circular logic is just the answer to saving face here, penned a MySpace blog just yesterday about Beck’s song, titled “Imaginary Response!” If you want to read it go ahead, but I can tell you right now that it’s full of mind-numbing sentences like this one: “I propose nothing less than the liberation and use of only our imaginations for the direct purpose of, not just pop music writing, but pop music production and distribution. And subsequent, now imaginary, blog discussion.”

Ugh. So, yeah, that’s the recap. Beck comes out on top. Radiohead is obviously staying out of it. Fiery Furnaces dude reveals himself to be severely annoying. I mean, does anyone else have the image of him alone in a room talking to himself stuck in your head like I do?

The Dictators - Search And Destroy

The 'Tators!

John Coltrane - My Favorite Things - 1961

Pure aural magic! JC (no, not Jesus Christ, but damn close!) blowing My Favorite Things...

The Residents - Jailhouse Rock (Live)

Inimitable Avant-garde popsters The Residents perform their version of Jailhouse Rock. Good stuff!

Free: Mr. Big

Great live version of 'Mr. Big' by Free. Killer bass solo by Andy Fraser. Paul Kossoff kills, as usual, and Paul Rodgers kicks ass. Cool to be able to see Simon Kirke's simple but propulsive drumming style. One of the British blues bands that boiled Chicago blues down to a brutal, minimalist state, inventing a brand of proto-metal in the process. Watch for the parts borrowed by groups like the Black Crowes.

SoundsoftheSeventies : JON LORD Shatters LARS ULRICH's DEEP PURPLE Dream

Former DEEP PURPLE keyboardist Jon Lord has commented on rumors of a possible
reunion of the DEEP PURPLE Mk III lineup featuring a special guest appearance by
METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich.

In separate interviews for February edition of Classic Rock magazine (issue
No.128), David Coverdale (vocals), Glenn Hughes (bass, vocals) and Jon Lord have
all indicated that they would be up for playing together again, and all parties
have recently been in contact with Ritchie Blackmore (guitar).

Seeing as the only block to the band reforming could be Ian Paice — who, as a
member of the current PURPLE, would probably find it difficult and uncomfortable
to get involved — it has been suggested that Lars Ulrich could step in on a
temporary basis and handle the drum duties on a proposed reunion tour.

"I know there's talk about the fact that if they got Coverdale, Hughes, Lord and
Blackmore together, they would have four members who aren't in the current DEEP
PURPLE — then they just need a drummer. I'll volunteer myself for that," Lars
— a hardcore PURPLE fan who was fortunate enough to see PURPLE Mk III at the
band's first show, at the KB Hallen in Copenhagen in 1973 — told Classic Rock.
"If they need a drummer, David Coverdale has my number."

Writing on his official web site, JonLord.org, Jon Lord commented on the Classic
Rock report by saying, "It all seems like a lot of hot air and wild speculation
to me.

"I like Lars and what he has achieved with METALLICA. He's obviously always been
very complimentary in his comments about DEEP PURPLE, and I love the story of
his famous nine-years-old 'baptism of fire' at our '73 concert in The KB Halle
in Copenhagen, but if I was asked to be involved in a 'Mark III' reunion —
(which, by the way, I haven't. All I ever said was that the idea had a few good
points and a few not-so-good points.) — and I indeed considered that offer, I
would not be able to even imagine it without the presence of Ian Paice.

"By the way — I have NOT retired!"

Ron Asheton - !948 - 2009

Real Cool Time: The Life and Music of Ron Asheton, 1948-2009

January 7th, 2009 | Mark Deming
Allmusic Blog

Whenever folks talk about the Stooges, the first name mentioned is Iggy Pop, and not without reason — the man was and is arguably the greatest front man in rock and roll, and a spectacle that refuses to be ignored even today. But the real sonic foundation of the first two Stooges albums, The Stooges and Fun House, belongs to guitarist Ron Asheton, who created a sound that fully equaled Iggy’s vision. His primal guitar runs, howling like a glorious scream from the collective id that suggested two decades of teenage angst and delinquent cool given voice through a Fender Stratocaster and a Marshall amp, added bone and muscle mass to the moody blast of Iggy’s vocals. Asheton created a sound that easily matched rock’s most unshackled singer for sheer explosive impact and mutant soul. Iggy has made records with plenty of worthwhile musicians over the years, but listen to Fun House and it’s clear that Asheton is the only guitarist who was truly Iggy’s equal and not just an accompanist.

The Stooges were a band ahead of its time, and for many musicians that can be a thankless chore. It took rock and roll a few decades to catch up with what Ron Asheton was doing with the Stooges, but if fate was cruel in claiming his life at the age of 60 — he was found dead in his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 — in his last years he finally began receiving the recognition and reward that he clearly deserved, touring the world with the reunited Stooges and receiving rapturous approval from fans at every stop.

Born in Washington D.C. on July 17, 1948, Ron Asheton spent most of his childhood in Ann Arbor and became a major rock and roll fan in his teens. Asheton and his friend Dave Alexander were big on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Pretty Things, and in 1965 they dropped out of high school so they could travel to England and check out the scene first hand. When Asheton returned to Michigan, he decided to form a band of his own, and did time with a handful of Ann Arbor area groups, including the Dirty Shames, the Chosen Few, and the Prime Movers. Asheton was playing bass for the Movers when he made friends with their drummer, an energetic kid named Jim Osterberg, and in 1967, after Osterberg returned from a sojourn in Chicago (where he claims he took lessons from legendary blues drummer Sam Lay, though Lay contends otherwise), they decided to form a band. Asheton would play guitar, Dave Alexander would play bass, Osterberg would sing, and Ron’s brother Scott Asheton would play drums. Osterberg adopted Iggy Pop as a stage name (partly acknowledging his stint in another local band, the Iguanas), and the quartet coined the moniker the Psychedelic Stooges. The rest, of course, is history.

However, while the Stooges would prove to be massively influential in the years to come, the band was regarded as little more than a freak show during their 1967 to 1973 life span. At a time when the vogue among “rock artists” was to buff off their rough edges and adopt a more sophisticated approach, the Stooges were reveling in the power of rock’s primitive instincts. The Stooges did not want to compose a rock opera, perform with a symphony orchestra or “get back to the land” – they wanted to be the loudest and wildest band on Earth, and their willingness to confront the audience (both in terms of music and Iggy’s performing style) polarized the few who heard them during their heyday. A small handful of fans embraced them as something brilliant and ground breaking, as Asheton’s guitar ripped through the melodies and Iggy’s antics burned their eyes, but most others fled in terror, and the band’s descent into drug-addled sloppiness after they were introduced to heroin during the recording of Fun House hardly helped. (Ron Asheton was the only Stooge to avoid heroin addiction, but that didn’t slow the band’s downward slide much, especially after he moved from guitar to bass shortly before the recording of Raw Power.)

After the Stooges finally fell apart in 1974, Asheton put together a group called the New Order (no relation to the post-Joy Division act from the UK) which also included late-period Stooges associates Scott Thurston and Jimmy Recca as well as MC5 drummer Dennis Thompson, but the band generated little interest, and after touring Australia in 1981 with the intentionally short-lived New Race — which featured Asheton and Thompson paired with Deniz Tek and Rob Younger of Radio Birdman, the Southern Hemisphere’s most devoted Stooges fans — Asheton’s work was primarily devoted to Michigan-based acts such as Destroy All Monsters, Dark Carnival, and Empty Set. Asheton also did a bit of acting in low-budget horror movies (most notably “Mosquito,” which occasionally pops up on the Sci-Fi Channel and also features members of the God Bullies and the Demolition Doll Rods in the cast) and helped local bands in the studio, but for the most part the man whose guitar work made The Stooges and Fun House into underground touchstones was pretty much ignored, except by a tiny cult which appreciated the precise chaos of his playing.

Thankfully, a few members of that cult started becoming famous. A new breed of noisy guitar wranglers who clearly worshiped at the altar of Fun House joined the hipster pantheon in the 1980’s and 90’s — Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana were just a few of the players who had clearly learned a trick or two from the thick, heavy throb of Asheton’s leads, and they weren’t shy about citing him as an influence (or covering old Stooges songs on stage). Just as Iggy Pop finally found a context in which his onstage persona made sense with the rise of punk, the onslaught of noise rock, grunge and “heavy alternative” gave birth to a new musical universe where Asheton’s complex simplicity seemed to fit right in. In 1998, when Thurston Moore and Mark Arm were hired to record some Stooges-like music for Todd Haynes’ film “Velvet Goldmine,” they logically concluded that Ron Asheton would be the ideal lead guitar player for their ad hoc band the Wylde Rattz, and Asheton expertly recreated his manic fretwork on “T.V. Eye” for the soundtrack album. (A full Wylde Rattz album was recorded, but legal woes have prevented its release.) In 2001, Asheton teamed up with Powertrane, a powerful Ann Arbor rock band fronted by former Rational and Sonic’s Rendezvous Band singer/guitarist Scott Morgan, for a show that also featured Deniz Tek; the gig led to two other concerts and a short tour which were manna from heaven for fans of Michigan-style rock, and each night Asheton closed out the show with vivid recreations of classic Stooges tunes. (One of those shows was recorded for an excellent live disc, Ann Arbor Revival Meeting.) And in 2002, J. Mascis brought Asheton along for a European tour; eventually Scott Asheton signed on too, and the band of semi-Stooges received rapturous reviews in the British press.

Iggy Pop took notice of this sudden revival of interest in the Stooges, and when he was lining up guest stars for his 2003 album Skull Ring, he proposed the idea of reuniting the Stooges for a few cuts. Pop’s record company was enthusiastic, and Ron and Scott Asheton recorded four new songs with Iggy for the album, with Ron handling both guitar and bass. The organizers of the annual Coachella Festival made the Stooges an tempting offer to play the event that year, and on April 27, 2003, Iggy, Ron Asheton and Scott Asheton took the stage (with bassist Mike Watt standing in for the late Dave Alexander) and played a set that amazed the crowd in attendance. The Coachella set was intended to be a one-off reunion, but it wasn’t long before the Stooges once again became a going concern; within a few months, they were headlining shows in the United States and playing major festivals around the world, and in 2007 they released an album of new material, The Weirdness. If the world wasn’t ready for the Stooges in 1967, they seemed up to speed with them in 2007, and though the group played with an ferocious energy that would tax men half their age and Asheton’s guitar work was every bit as strong as it had been in his youth, there was something moving and almost sweet about witnessing the revived band in concert, especially in Michigan – after decades of being rejected and ignored, the Stooges were finally welcomed as the pioneering heroes they truly were, and they were obviously grateful and delighted to be on stage, especially Ron. The band stayed busy through much of 2008, playing 28 shows between May and September, and two festival dates had already been announced for the group in 2009 before Asheton’s passing was discovered.

The scuttlebutt among fans had been that the Stooges were planning another studio album and a few more rounds of touring in support over the next few years, and it’s impossible to say what if any future the group has now — the concept of the Stooges without Ron Asheton seems inconceivable. But while this great band may have come to an sudden and unexpected end, the Stooges’ second act reconfirmed what was important about the band and their music, and Ron Asheton’s return to the spotlight not only affirmed his vital importance in the pantheon of rock and roll, but gave him the chance to enjoy the acclaim (and a few decent paychecks) that long should have been his due as one of the best and most powerful guitarists of his generation. Just this once, the nice guy didn’t finish last.

And now, time for Fashion/Dance/Futbol!

Whoa, huh?

Faux News won't have Alan Colmes to bitch-slap around anymore!...

...which actually was his entire job desciption.

And now, Hall and Oates!

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Hall & Oates Pay Tribute to Alan Colmes

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

2 Car Pile-Up

This is 2 Car Pile-Up, a group consisting of guitarist/songwriter David Luther (an English surname meaning "lute player"-appropriate) and singer Lisa Parris Jacobs, who I'm proud to say is my niece (by marriage). Watch Lisa be uncomfortable! Great song, too.

Hillbilly Town (Live!)

Pearl Jam's anthemic "Alive" from the immortal first album!

Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.

Remember Klaatu? Remember the "they might be the Beatles" crap? Well, they weren't, but this is an excellent CGI animation done to their song "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft". Remember Karen Carpenter's version? Karen Carpenter? Whoa!--Pete

Jeff Beck Says "NO!" to Half-Assed Led Zep Reunion

JEFF BECK Slams LED ZEPPELIN's Comeback Plans

Sat Dec 6, 2008 12:17 pm (PST)

According to Tiscali, rocker Jeff Beck has slammed LED ZEPPELIN's comeback plans — insisting it will be pointless without former lead singer Robert Plant.

The 64-year-old legend — who played in cult act THE YARDBIRDS with LED ZEPPELIN guitarist Jimmy Page — praised the band's huge one-off concert at London's O2 Arena last December. But Beck argues plans for a full-blown tour should be shelved without Plant, who has repeatedly refused to join his old bandmates full-time.

He says, "I really don't think it's a good idea, not if Robert doesn't want to. I was there at the one-off show at the O2 Arena and it was fantastic. But I think they should just leave it there. They will have been offered loads of money and it'll be tempting but that's not a good enough reason to me. It would be different if they all wanted to do it and record new material but that's not the case."

Levi Stubbs Shuffles Off This Mortal Coil

http://blog.allmusic.com/2008/10/17/rip-levi-stubbs-of-the-four-tops/

It’s hard to imagine the voice of the Four Tops ever being stilled. It was so huge, so tough, so full of everything that make life worth living (love, hope, heartbreak, pain) that you’d figure somehow Levi Stubbs would live forever. Sadly, Stubbs passed away today at home in Detroit after a long illness but that voice, and the songs he sang, will never die. You know the hits. They are massive and timeless, glittering products of the Motown machine like “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)”, “Standing in the Shadows of Love”, “I Can’t Help Myself” and the awe-inspiring “Bernadette”. Songs that Stubbs destroyed with his gravel-throated howl and his raw, exposed soul. If you dig behind the songs you can hear daily on oldies stations around the globe though, you’ll find some pretty great songs that Stubbs (and the other three guys, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton, who all stuck together for an unheard of 43 years!) knocks out of the park as easily as tying his shoes. (By the way, that’s Stubbs on the left in a rare photo in which the Four Tops weren’t standing shoulder to shoulder.)

Erik Davis on digital music files (data)

The Analog Life
by Erik Davis ( techgnosis.com )

July 25, 2008

http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?p=2969

Last month Paul Miller—the avant-garde DJ, musician and theorist who always appends his name with “aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid”—finally released a collection of essays he has been editing for ages on digital and sampling culture, called Sound Unbound. It’s a cool book, and I’m not surprised. I first met Paul at the Village Voice in the early 90s, when I recognized the voodoo vévé for Legba that appeared on one of his stickers. Over the years, his DJ mixes, thoughts, and restless career represent a lot of what I continue to love about digital culture. Paul is relentlessly interconnected and multi-disciplinary, refuses to be locked into one career identity or scene, and restlessly moves between worlds. He thinks and acts like he spins, an endless collage that draws equally from high and low, here and there, old and new.

All this is reflected in the book, a somewhat amorphous but fascinating collection of essays by musicians (Steve Reich, Brian Eno), techies (Bruce Sterling, Jaron Lanier), edge academics (Ron Eglash, Manuel De Landa), and nomads like me. I contributed an essay I wrote over a decade ago called “Roots and Wires,” about dub music, polyrhythm, the African diaspora, and their digital mutation into drum’n’bass. (Today I would talk about dubstep, though I would be rather less enthusiastic.) In retrospect, I realize that my desire to uncover both the spiritual roots of the dub virus and its futuristic implications was another version of my concern with understanding the rapport—and conflict—between the digital and the analog, coding strategies that are also metaphors for much larger processes of understanding and experiencing culture and the world.

I like roots with my wires, but that’s not always how it goes. How much digital and analog can diverge was starkly brought home to me in the foreward to Paul’s book. The short piece was written by Cory Doctorow, a tireless electronic freedom fighter who writes science fiction and posts frequently at the popular group blog Boing Boing. The stark part came a few paragraphs into the piece where, after explaining that he can’t work without music, Doctorow describes how he manages the 10,000 tracks he keeps in iTunes:

I’ve rated every track from 1 to 5. I start every day with my playlist of 4- to 5-star music that I haven’t heard in thirty days, like making sure that I visit all my friends at least once a month…After that, I listen to songs I haven’t rated, and rate them. Then it’s on to 4- to 5-star songs I’ve heard fewer than five times, total. I don’t want random shuffle: I want directed, optimized shuffle.

There is no other way to say it: this vision of listening to music blew my mind. It seemed so alien to my way of listening, so alienating in general, that I had to write a column about it to figure out the source of my freaked-outedness.

Some caveats first. One is that Cory Doctorow seems like a prince among übernerds. His Boing Boing posts about the ongoing intellectual property wars are always sharp and informative, and they help insure that the website remains an exuberant if sometimes goofy bastion of old school counter-cultural net values. I haven’t read Doctorow’s SF, but I do admire what he does with it. For one thing, he gives it away for free online—as pure a gesture of ethical culture a professional author can make. And his new book, Little Brother, is a piece of tactical genius: a young-adult near-future novel about a group of kids in San Francisco who use a variety of real-world hacking and encryption tools to take on the Department of Homeland Security in an era of civil liberties crackdown. Lifting a page or two from Encyclopedia Brown, Doctorow includes actual tips and technologies so that kids reading the novel can get their cyberactivist groove on right away.

My other caveat is that listening to recorded music is a matter of pleasure, and it seems silly to spend much time worrying about other people’s pleasures. I think its fine to judge music, and to judge other judgments as well—part of the enjoyment of music for many of us is the pleasure in discussing it, describing it, even arguing about it, although I believe the depth of those conversations are not weathering the Internet well. In any case, it’s hard to overturn the core wisdom of chacun à son gout. Doctorow clearly enjoys music, and I enjoy the enthusiasm. But his pleasure also seems deeply bound up with the process he has created to manage, filter, and tag all those MP3s. This is where we part ways, because all this algorithmic fiddling seems less like listening to music that doing something that, for most of us, is much less fun: data-processing.

Here’s the nub: the more we deal with recorded music in the form of digital files, the more that music takes on the characteristics of data, and the more its specific qualities as music melt into that multimedia torrent of bits that keep us chained to our screens. From a new media perspective, this breakdown sounds kind of cool and futuristic, and it certainly opens up new possibilities of expression and intervention. But I’m not sure these transformations really support deep and engaged listening. Amidst the endless bruhaha over downloading and the radical shake-up of the music market, we have yet to come to terms with this massive transformation in the culture of collecting and engaging recorded music.

Recordings have always been a form of data of course. The music itself can be quantified by wonks as a species of information, while covers and labels come printed with all sorts of words and numbers. Vinyl hoarders face issues of organization as well as physical storage, while the records not yet in one’s collection are also forms of data that hover around your music. Collectors of, say, deeply obscure R&B singles trade lists of recordings so obscure that even almighty Google does not know they exist. But recordings become much more data-like once they go digital. With the severing of music from vinyl discs, magnetic tape, and increasingly compact discs, recorded music does not transend the body but takes on a new one—a body furnished by binary code, the new vehicle of song.

The simple equation of these new bodies is more for less: more tracks cost less money and require much less storage. At the same time, collections always expand to fill all available space—hard discs fill up as reliably as physical bookshelves do. As the capacity of digital memory increases—in inverse proportion to its price—our compulsion to gather bits is compounded, and we hoard. I held off from mp3s so long that I missed the great Napster potlatch, but when I did start hunting and gathering I could not stop, and amassed hundreds of gigabytes in a very short period of time. This is just my experience, but it is hardly unusual. Once touched with archive fever, the forest grows more important than the trees, and the forest keeps growing.

It grows in part because our field of attention is constantly being seeded with information about further recordings, which are themselves multiplying like mad. Your older sister or Spin or the cool guy at the record store has been replaced with a myriad of online environments designed to expose and communicate commentary or links or streams directly to fans: social networks, listservs, collaborative filters like Pandora, online stores with samples, emusic, the blogosphere, myspace. Behind a lot of this proliferating metadata—information about information, in this case, musical information—is the urge to share. This is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with listening. Music becomes a chip in a game—a sign rather than a sound, or even—in the case of closed file-sharing communities that demand uploads—an entrance fee. Perhaps the cultural Darwinists are right, and music is just a selfish gene—restless sonic DNA seeking to reproduce itself within this dank hothouse environment of copying and transmission. But I think the aptness of this evolutionary metaphor says more about the environment than the thing itself.

Within this environment, our collections take on the sprawling hairiness of the databases that everywhere process and capture our lives and labors. We are inevitably faced with the problem of organizing, managing, and processing the material, not to mention figuring out a way to extract pleasure from it. Every music fan becomes her own sysadmin. I often ask people how they deal with their mp3s, and am amazed with the ingenious and obsessive systems of rating, tagging, categorizing, and file shuffling that some develop. Others throw up their hands, resist the endless fiddling that technology demands, and allow the mysterious algorithms of the Apple corporation to determine the programming on their portable radio stations. Because I court synchronicity, this is often my method. Doctorow’s system, in this light, is ingenious, as it balances the need to process (rating tunes), and to enjoy, and to enjoy in a quasi-controlled, quasi-random manner that maximizes the efficient delivery of pleasure.

But there’s the rub, at least for me. The efficient delivery of pleasure is not what I want out of listening to music. In fact, the technical cult of efficiency, of developing algorithms to maximize pleasure, is part and parcel of the calculating, over-processed and data-saturated world that I turn to good music to escape, to interrupt, or to buffer. I don’t want to listen to what Heidegger, in his famous essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” called a “standing reserve.” What bothered Heidegger was not machines themselves, but the way that machines turn everything into a reserve of potential usefulness. Once you create a hydro-electric dam, then the rushing stream that inspired poets or musicians or hippie trippers becomes, inevitably, a “standing reserve” of power, another item in civilization’s immense calculus of extraction.

While all music collections can be seen as standing reserves in a sense, the dynamics of digital collections invites that number-crunching calculus much more intimately into the heart of the experience. When I review records, I am sometimes forced to assign a rating, and I understand the value of such consumer guidance. But if I tried to rate every single track as I listened to it, I would feel like a foot-soldier of the machine, because one of the core moves of the machine is to quantify quality, to take fuzzy values and translate them into numerical values. Listening itself becomes processing rather than process, an endless taxonomical twitch mediated by yet another window on yet another screen. And not even a very useful one at that, at least according to my own hedonic calculus. A lot of my favorite music bugged me or flew over my head the first half dozen times I listened to it, while a lot of the pop gems that instantly floated my boat lost their glamour after two or three listens. How do you rate that?

In a way I envy übergeeks like Doctorow. They take the bull by the horns, and tweak the systems that other übergeeks have developed to manage the glorious excess still other übergeeks have helped create. Their engines of musical discovery and pleasure seem like crisp, smoothly oiled machines, controlling the uncontrolled, managing the mania. I look at my collection and my listening habits and just see a big fucking mess. My stereo is in a room without computers, where I love listening to vinyl I still buy because it sounds better and is really fun to shop for. But I don’t have any room for it so it seems kinda stupid too. I am way too lazy and cheap to do lossless rips of the thousands of CDs I have. Besides, even though these pieces of plastic hog my office, I prefer to have my digital memory externalized in a three-dimensional world of objects and colors and images. But of course now I also possess lots of burned CD-Rs and tons and tons of mp3s, which reside on various pods and drives split between my office, my car, and my home. I don’t know where to begin and where to end, but somehow, lumbering around like a dinosaur, I am blessed with an abundance of marvelous encounters.