Part One, MUSIC

If there is one thing I’m truly good for, it’s info on the entertainment industry. I log in a lot of hours listening to music, watching TV, going to the movies, etc., etc., etc.… Maybe too many hours. So to try to dissipate some of that geeked out energy I’ve decided to share the wealth of knowledge I’ve accumulated over the year with you folks, my loyal readers. Thus maybe my sad, sad hobby might help out another to find something new that they missed out on this year, or maybe you just want to know what I missed out on before this year and discovered on my own.

I can get a little crazy sometimes when it comes to CDs and DVDs, as you loyal readers already know. Stay tuned New Year’s Eve for some final statistics on what I REALLY was doing this year. First I’m going to try to knock out a little list for you folks. Music is as good a place to start as any. At the current tally I’ve bought close to two hundred CDs this year, so I’ve got lots to talk about.

Probably the most interesting fact about what I’ve been buying this year is that for the first time since probably 2000 the number of dance music albums I’ve accumulated during the last 365 days has been less than all other genres combined. A lot less. The last couple years the spread has been about 90% dance, 10% everything else. This year those percentages have pretty much flipped. This might not mean much to you, but this was a really big shift in trends and if you don’t mind I’ll let you know where and how the shift happened before I get into what it is you should be listening to.

MIX TAPES: Last year (while I was still unemployed) I had plenty of free time on my hands. Thus, when my dad had to go pick my sister up, guess who became his co-pilot? And nothing makes a boring road trip more entertaining than a good mix tape.

Of course my dad’s not the biggest dance fan. And frankly, when you have nothing better to do than look at cows, 8 minute dance anthems can make for a pretty boring road trip. So the quest for the perfect mix tape began. Something that could keep me entertained and at the same time could both enlighten my dad about my current tastes in music and let him have a little fun discovering what I mixed up with next. Rock is perfect for this. You get catchy 3 minute songs in all sorts of different styles and sounds, and I’ve always been a big fan of variety. And this became just an extension of my love for dance music, taking all sorts of songs and mixing them together to try and make one cohesive whole out of the lot. Matching beats, creating links, having fun.

After I started work I started making a lot more tapes. I get bored easy. So I made more and more tapes, and ran out of obscure areas of my CD collection to raid. I needed new material.

ROCK IS BACK: Something weird happened sometime last year; rock music became cool again. Gone are the horror show days of rap rock and boy bands. Suddenly there were bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes playing straight-out pure rock and roll. And it was catchy as hell too. Thanks to shows like the O.C. sampling new artists and bands like Modest Mouse and Franz Ferdinand suddenly becoming a phenomena radio became safe once again for rock. A little bit, anyway. And great bands are just crawling out of the woodwork, you just have to go out and find them. It’s a miracle, like when Nirvana and Pearl Jam knocked hair metal off the radio. I started listening to that stuff when I first started buying CDs, and it was good to go back.

Of course it is interesting that with bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Killers, they’re making dance rock the new style. Coincidence I got back into rock?

DANCE IS DEAD?: I don’t know what the hell happened. Sometime in the second half of last year the number of dance records coming out dwindled down to a trickle. 1999 was a banner year for dance and suddenly it was everywhere. Everyone had an album out. Of course that was probably the problem. As soon as the Underground became the mainstream dance went pop, i.e. became the crap people always made fun of me about when I said I liked dance music. Super clubs popped up all over England, which it couldn’t support, and thus most of them failed. The hardcore fans left as it all turned to crap.

Ministry of Sound is a perfect example. They’ve always been pretty mainstream, but their mix CDs when I first started buying them were filled with great club tracks. Then they slowly got less interesting. Then at least one of the discs flat out sucked. Everything went pop. The songs just sucked. I stopped buying them.

Global Underground is my favorite label. They bar none always put out the best stuff. Of course they too over-extended themselves and almost went bankrupt. As of now they are trying to restructure themselves, which means for me that half the number of albums they used to put out now come out, and I’m waiting almost a year for a new album.

Fabric is the only label I can trust for CDs anymore. Not having any new music to listen to I had to find something new to move into.

THE iPOD GENERATION: Mix tapes just weren’t doing it after a while. (Side note: Now my tape deck won’t even play normal cassette tapes.) I needed new songs, all the time. Luckily, I work in an electronics store. I bought an iPod and I couldn’t be happier. Of course half the fun is filling it up, and you can’t just listen to all of the stuff you had before, can you? The other half comes from putting it on random and mixing songs you’ve heard a million times with those you’ve never heard before. Nothing feels better than hearing a song, saying “What the hell is this?” and then looking down to notice that it’s a long lost gem on an album you’ve barely listened to because most of it’s crap. The right kind of co-mingling can make you see something you never saw there before.

BMG BECAME MY BITCH, AKA HOW THE ROLLING STONE 500 CHANGE MY LIFE: Last year Rolling Stone came out with an issue of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Now there are three things I really love: new music, collecting, and learning the history of something I love. That issue is still sitting right next to my computer and I’ve read it cover to cover several times now.

A little after getting this issue I got a job, meaning a steady income, AND BMG starting running these really sweet promotions. I was getting CDs for 7 bucks or less, and this was AFTER you factored in BMG’s outrageous shipping and handling fees. (Seriously, 3 dollars for EVERY CD?) Armed with the RS500 I went crazy. Since pretty much my only education of rock music pre-alternative was the Beatles, I had a lot of work to do. I got into the obvious classics like Zeppelin, Floyd, and Bowie, but then along the way I found a lot of really cool stuff I never would have found before. One thing just fed off the other, and thus I got a lot of great stuff this year.

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The other interesting trend of this year, other than the fact rock has replaced dance in my heart, is that I’ve started to listen to (and really love) two genres I never cared for before: hip hop and punk. Hip hop was easy enough to shift into. Hip hop and dance have been pretty much linked since the beginning. You have only to look at Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa to see the beginnings of two genres split off. They’re both about beats. That combined with the fact that more and more of my dance mixes were including hip hop made me that much more receptive to the genre when OutKast came out with their double album. All the sudden I’m listening to Jay-Z and 50 Cent, Beastie Boys and Nas. And surprising even myself at how much I like it. I’ve become a stereotypical white boy playing hip hop too loud in his car as he’s speeding down the road.

Punk’s the other weird one. You pick up a few classic records by the Velvet Underground, the Clash and the Stooges and all the sudden you see a genre for what it’s suppose to be, and not for what it became. Punk’s an attitude sprung up from garage bands in the 60’s, just playing rock the way they wanted to hear it. When it became more about the speed and the noise instead of the rock, well it just blew. But how it became to be, oh man that stuff is awesome. It’s like Beatles music played the way you always wanted to hear it.

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So what were my favorite records of the year? So glad you asked:

THE NAME OF THE BAND IS TALKING HEADS

First of all, you should own every Talking Heads album. This is the shit. I don’t know where the Talking Heads have been all my life. It took watching the Stop Making Sense DVD at work a million times to make me understand how really awesome this band is. Their studio stuff is amazing, but if there is anything Stop Making Sense proves, it is that the Heads are SO much better live. Which is why this expanded reissue is so FUCKING great. Here you have three different eras in the Heads history collected on two CDs, and as if it were even possible this live material is even better than Stop Making Sense. I’m not a big fan of live albums but this is so good I can’t stop playing this CDs. I just can’t.

THE STREETS – A GRAND DON’T COME FOR FREE

Now this is really cool. Who would have thought a white English rapper could be so good? So entertaining? Here you have a story with a bookend of how Mike lost 1,000 quid, but the gooey center is where it’s at. He meets a girl, falls in love, gets thrown out, checks out some fit girls, but is really in love with the one he’s got. But it’s too late and she breaks up with him. Oddly enough the best part of this album is the romance, giving you both the best song about falling for a girl (Could Well Be In) and the best song about a girl breaking your heart (Dry Your Eyes). This is a definite must listen.

INTERPOL – ANTICS

Interpol is one of those bands that should be out in the mainstream but somehow remains stuck in the cracks. It sounds something like Michael Stipe channeling Joy Division, only bouncier and a whole lot better than it sounds. It’s wicked catchy and played in the background of a get together is the best way to impress a friend with your taste in music.

BENT – ARIELS

Bent got rid of the samples, used all live vocals and created some extremely lush melodies, making this their best album yet. Listening to this reminds you of when you felt happiest and most at ease. It takes you to another world where things just don’t matter. It’s so smooth and magical. A perfect record.

SASHA – INVOLVER

Sasha has always been my favorite DJ. The things he can do with a turntable are amazing. He creates vast vistas in your mind, truly puts you in a trance, and creates subtle shifts in the music that just blow your mind. His first mix album in like, forever, is something of a unique mix album at that. Not only is he mixing together other people’s records, he’s also completely REmixing them as well. This not only gives the album an extremely seamless feel but also makes it somewhat of an original album as well. I tell you, nothing I bought this year is better to just crank up loud with the headphones on and get lost in the music.

NUGGETS: ORIGINAL ARTYFACTS FROM THE FIRST PSYCHEDELIC ERA
NO THANKS! THE ‘70S PUNK REVOLUTION
LEFT OF THE DIAL: DISPATCHES FROM THE 80’S UNDERGROUND

Here in these three Rhino boxsets, spanning three decades and featuring 12 CDs containing God knows how many songs you can find the history of true rock and roll, authentic music kept under the radar and unspoiled by corporations and arenas. From the proto-punk to the punk revolution to the post-punk New Wave you have some almost perfect collection of some songs you’ve heard before, but many you haven’t. What’s amazing about the one’s you haven’t heard is how insanely good they are. Why wasn’t this popular? This is marvelous! I’m in love with this music. Rhino simply outdid themselves putting all of this together.

ARCADE FIRE – FUNERAL

OK, I’m just going to assume you all have Modest Mouse’s new album by now (if not, what the heck are you waiting for?). It’s just a really great album. So once you’ve played it so much that you’ve put scratches on the disk, pop this in next. I really wasn’t expecting much when I bought this, but when I finally put it in my CD player my first thought was “holy crap, what IS this?” Very few albums have so quickly blown me away like this one has. Buy it. Now.

The complete albums of THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

It’s odd when you listen to an album from, say, the late 60’s, and it sounds so original that it could have been put out last year, and yet is familiar enough to believe that it came out when they say it did. That’s the Velvet Underground in a nutshell. When you listen to other artist from the same era (Beatles, CCR, The Doors, Hendrix) it’s hard to figure out where the hell this stuff came from. There’s no chorus in this song. This one is all the same beat. The lyrics are WAY fucked up in this one. This song is just…noise. And yet all of this is catchy as hell. You want to hear where they are going next. A fun side note: They say that almost no one actually owns a Velvet Underground record, but any one who did buy one started a band. That’s how revolutionary this music sounds.

THE SMITHS – LOUDER THAN BOMBS

Who knew I’d like Morrissey? This stuff is melodic and catchy as hell though, and just melancholy enough to make each song worth listening to happy or sad. This album wins the award for album I’m most surprised I like.

GOLDFRAPP – FELT MOUNTAIN

Technically this album has been stored in MP3 form on my computer since college. I never really got into it much though, either in college or after. Then I got my iPod, transferred all the music on my computer onto that, and rediscovered why the hell I even bothered to download it in the first place. Because hearing a few choice songs randomly on my iPod I decided to finally buy the album. That’s the way you need to hear it. This is like the perfect music for a Bond movie, retro enough for the Connery/Shirley Bassey era but modern enough to fit into Pierce’s world. It belongs as the score to Metropolis or something like that. It’s great.

There is so much other good stuff I could write about, but I’ll stop here. No need to rant on forever. I might update the list later on though if you’d like some more recommendations, or if I come to the realization that I forgot something really good (which I’m sure I will).