juliand said:
Exactly. I like to listen to the Radio in the car, but now (thanks to iPod and the hard work of the fans) I can listen to London pirate stations driving around Bristol, instead of the usual bollocks.
like a pig rolling in shit
- Thread starter blissblogger
- Start date
Exactly. I like to listen to the Radio in the car, but now (thanks to iPod and the hard work of the fans) I can listen to London pirate stations driving around Bristol, instead of the usual bollocks.
Grievous Angel
Beast of Burden
Links? Or is this p2p?Nick Gutterbreakz said:
I just looked at the piece, thought it was quite good. I don't really identify with it but I thought it was reasonably perceptive.
I suspect what people may be reacting to is the undercurrent of greed and fear to writing which is pimping a book.
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Links, posted at places like Dubplate forum etc. Many recent mixes/Rinse pirate recordings now collected at Dubway's blog . Welcome to my world...
jenks
thread death
Nick Gutterbreakz said:
yeah - i've kept my head down for a while, feeling not nearly hipster enough to take part in half the recent debates but i recognise myself fully in nick's description here - my main concerns this week were whether the younger son's birthday party would get done(shit i hired a children's entertainer, how middle class is that?) and how i'm going to reload all my tunes on my ipod.
the ipod has been the perfect way for me to grab more music listening time - something that wife/kids/work nexus had eroded. complete with broadband it has me allowed to pick up on music i had previously had no way of accessing - all the grime/dubstep stuff thrown up on here - the meme/eden lyric maker mix is the most played thing on the pod for example.
i didn't read dylan on this cos i think his preening self regard irritating but i think sneering at the technology is not the answer - if someone sees having a pod as way of getting and having then that's just part of the whole trainspotter ideology that has always accompanied music - the mad vinyl collector who has to have a record for no other reason that having it but like most of us i want the music to listen to. being able to get hold of stuff my local record shop never carries is a bonus (being able to then have it playing in the car through itrip is even more amazing).
no-one mentioned their design yet....
Rachel Verinder
Well-known member
walkman/discman was i found v. handy in terms of being only way to listen to music properly, i.e. on daily oxford/london/oxford commute. but i didn't use it as a substitute for going in the shop, rolling my sleeves up and looking for interesting things.
of course one notices that d jones has REDISCOVERED a lot of OLD music...didn't see any mention of the books or ariel pink in his list...so again it is technology being (mis)deployed to absolve ageing punters from physical/mental effort of going out and discovering music that cannot be easily obtained, preferring to seek solace in endless permutations of Things We Already Know, wch of course fits ideally with the desired OMM demographic.
of course one notices that d jones has REDISCOVERED a lot of OLD music...didn't see any mention of the books or ariel pink in his list...so again it is technology being (mis)deployed to absolve ageing punters from physical/mental effort of going out and discovering music that cannot be easily obtained, preferring to seek solace in endless permutations of Things We Already Know, wch of course fits ideally with the desired OMM demographic.
The Jones piece is a little consumer-capitalist happy, ("I can buy any/all music I want to") but "like a pig rolling in shit" seems a tad harsh; the man is simply talking about all the great music he can now listen to - is the problem that it's too easy for him/them (the non-hipsters)?
Also reminds me of the Freudian association of money with shit, filthy lucre, rolling in it, anal retention and toilet training as the first experience of hoarding/spending... amusing that this is in the context of the ultimate hyper-modern gleaming ergonomic digital techno-toy, pure Bauhaus beautiful functionalism.
Personally I've always loved the walkman experience of turning perambulations into a movie (think of the Morvern Caller supermaket scene with Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazelwood's Some Velvet Morning - on a walkman - "externalised" for the soundtrack... the way any urban noise could blend magically with say Public Enemy's Nation of Millions, 808 State's Ex:El, Orbital's brown album (back when I used tro perambulate), or later the way drum and bass transformed/enhanced an urban car ride at night...
Surely the iPod is just the latest mp3-friendly stage in the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? The biggest shock in this lineage must have been the original radio broadcasts and wax/vinyl recordings. It will be interesting to see if the iPod/mp3 era threatens and fragments the contingent hegemony of the (1950's) LP format.
Also reminds me of the Freudian association of money with shit, filthy lucre, rolling in it, anal retention and toilet training as the first experience of hoarding/spending... amusing that this is in the context of the ultimate hyper-modern gleaming ergonomic digital techno-toy, pure Bauhaus beautiful functionalism.
Personally I've always loved the walkman experience of turning perambulations into a movie (think of the Morvern Caller supermaket scene with Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazelwood's Some Velvet Morning - on a walkman - "externalised" for the soundtrack... the way any urban noise could blend magically with say Public Enemy's Nation of Millions, 808 State's Ex:El, Orbital's brown album (back when I used tro perambulate), or later the way drum and bass transformed/enhanced an urban car ride at night...
Surely the iPod is just the latest mp3-friendly stage in the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? The biggest shock in this lineage must have been the original radio broadcasts and wax/vinyl recordings. It will be interesting to see if the iPod/mp3 era threatens and fragments the contingent hegemony of the (1950's) LP format.
don_quixote
Trent End
the whole john peel, sweaty out of the way record shop thing just shows that hes become lazy i guess, so rather than a renewed interest in music it's more of a mid-life crisis thing
dHarry said:
That's something I've been thinking about a lot. Right now I think it's the CD format that has most to fear from MP3. I read somewhere that sales of 7" singles is actually on the increase this year, so maybe this is an indication that vinyl's future is secure. The vinyl LP format will probably survive as an audiophile specialist thing - heavy 180gram pressings spread over two or three discs. Probably the finest way to listen to music still. I think one of the things that contributed to vinyl's demise in the '80s was the poor sound quality of a lot of album pressings, especially re-issues and compilations. Cramming more than 45 minutes of music onto one vinyl disc isn't gonna be able to compete with CD. I reckon it was a deliberate act of sabotage by the industry to turn consumers off vinyl, so they would buy all their albums again on CD. Fuckers.
On topic - when it comes to listening to music while travelling/mowing the lawn etc, what advantage does the iPod really have over a walkman/MD? I mean, unless your lawn is 40 acres, or you're taking the Tran-Siberian railway, you don't need more than an hour or so of music at a time, right? I'm not convinced this sort of thing is the best argument for how iPods are a quantum leap forward for music. There are cool things an iPod does - mostly to do with music distribution/accessibility over the net (downloading Rinse shows in Australia, eg) - none of which are ever the focus of eulogising articles like this. They're always written from the standpoint as though portable music players are completely new. It's odd.
Rambler said:
Speed!! In conjunction with a broadband connection I can get a 2-hour pirate radio recording from the server into the iPod in less time than it takes to unwrap the fucking packaging from a C90. This is progress.
Ness Rowlah
Norwegian Wood
Rambler said:
I've been through the lot from a WM2, to discman, to MD, to a 32mb MP3 player to a 40 GB iPod.
Funnily enough I don't use the iPod to re-discover old stuff, I use it to find totally new stuff and fill it
with MP3s found on the net (mostly legal free stuff) and mixtapes/pirate sessions.
As Gutter says, broadband and MP3 is the enabler.
6 months on I have only encoded a handful of my CD collection (encoding takes 10 minutes or so for each CD).
As for the number of tunes etc. It's great to have all that space - but if you carry a "blogger-dad-shoulder-bag"
there is no great advantage to the iPod over having a tiny MD player and a small file of MDs.
An advantage for me personally is that is also a portable USB hardrive. So I can carry all sorts of files on it -
and show some of them on the iPod itself (like the list of stuff I should check out the next time I am in a proper record shop).
Sound quality is as good or similar to MD, it's very hard to hear a difference from 160kBps upwards.
I guess one other advantage is the iPod economy - ie all the power supplies, cables, car hi-fi sets etc around it.
Like many I did NOT want an iPod (because of the smugness I associated with it) -
but after going to the shop and looking at the competition (the player iRiver had at the time was just too ugly. I like well designed shit like the Sony WM2 and my Panasonic MDs) and playing
around with the players I still decided to get an Ipod. Get some proper (black) cans to use on the move, and you don't look like a jerk (although for my wife the white headphones is almost the point of it ...).
I've come to like iTunes - although the first few releases for Windows were unusable.
The podcasting interface is pretty much a beta, the rest is good.
It's a shame iTunes does not have a 100% open interface
and that Sony sink their stuff with DRM. In an ideal world I would want a Sony/Panasonic (Jap) MP3
player and use iTunes to manage the library (and playlists - a feature I thought I would not use, but
I now am). It's a shame Sony totally mismanaged the possibilities with hi-MD - it could have been
a contender.
Bad: much worse battery than a decent MD-player, no FM radio (would have been useful a couple of weeks ago here in London), no line-in or recording function (so no easy way to get those old LPs over), price is high (but similar to other MP3 players with similar hard disk sizes), no remote and can't get a black one (no way am buying an U2-badged player).
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Nick Gutterbreakz said:
Yeah, sure, but there's also the compulsion - with most iPod users I know anyway - that that 10,000 song capacity demands to be filled, and demands that you spend an entire weekend format-shifting hundreds of CDs. Or weeks transferring your vinyl. I take your point Nick, but if you record live (off the radio, net stream, MP3 download) while listening, that's literally no time at all (other than tearing off packaging...). I think the speed thing is an illusion in many ways: unless you're dealing with purely digital media, things have to be recorded in real time; and if you're not, there's a compunction to spend time transferring/downloading things to fill the space anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I think in principal iPods are fine (or at least an iPod that synched with other MP3 stores, had a decent battery, etc. etc. would be fine), and Ness lists a lot of advantages; it's simply the idea that listening to music on headphones in a bus is a revolutionary idea, and worth pages of newsprint, that I don't understand.
< devil's advocate has left the building >
blissblogger
Well-known member
dHarry said:
yeah there's all this stuff in the piece about consuming and consumability, but nothing about the effect of any of the music on him.... which chimes in with my general sense about mp3 "culture" -- it's far more about the fetishising of convenience, speed, stockpiling, etc than love of music per se...
the fact that the sound of mp3s is so thin and lacking in body -- like the outlines of the music are there, often intricately detailed, but something's lacking -- seems to reinforce that
but then i'm a born-again vinylist -- think it just sounds better, if you have a halfway decent turntable
talking of which
dHarry said:
i think CDs actually started the erosion of that -- A/ by the fact that they have twice the capacity of a LP, tempting artists to use the full capacity, leading to releases that were hard to listen to all the way through -- combined with B/ the programmability of the CD -- meant that the album becomes a collection of resources to be reshuffled or reduced to a much more manageable selection of fave bits
i noticed this almost as soon as i got a CD player with a remote in 1990 or so ... that even with my favorite albums, on CD i'd almost never listen to them all the way through
in fact -- unless it's a mix-CD or comp or sort of backgroundy music -- i don't think i ever let CDs run all the way through -- the only time i treat them as Integral Artworks To Be LIstened All the Way Through in One Sitting is when i'm reviewing them
in that sense i think there's a clear relation between consumer-friendly and artist-unfriendly --
the more the consumer is empowered, the less the music is seen as Art and more in terms of use
[Heaven 17 anticipated this with their British Electric Foundation Music For Stowaways project, stowaways being what Walkmans were called back then]
even the fact that you can pause a track interferes with the idea of the art-as-integral-experience
the industry didn't realise it but they were shooting themselves in the foot with the CD -- as soon as sound became digitalized rather than analog/material the possiblity of it being pure information -- and thus harder to control -- was created -- the CD will just historically become a mere interval, a transitional phase -- between the vinyl album and downloaded music
you can see this in the fact that there's no such thing as a collector market for compact discs -- they have zero fetish value -- their packaging is ugly and deriorates much quicker than the album sleeve -- even box sets start to look shabby
[i can imagine the prerecorded cassette actually becoming more fetishisable (all those bonus tracks and 80s-era tacked on remixes) than the compact disc]
so yeah, the scenario i imagine is vinyl-will-never-die on the one side and music-as-abstracted-data
****
talking of greed, there's a thread on ILM about IndieTorrents sites -- heard of this? the concept seems to be they're for people into sharing unimaginably vast chunks of music -- like downloading in very short period of time 10 CDs of lee perry 7 inches -- sounds sort of great, yet also sort of loony -- also interesting that one commentator on the thread said he wanted to join a Torrents site, but only to make available stuff, not to actually acquire -- better to give than to receive!
Diggedy Derek
Stray Dog
There's an astonishing amount of brackets in that piece, as if everything needs to be cross referenced, footnoted, justified. It's very tedious.
Ness Rowlah
Norwegian Wood
Diggedy Derek said:
I tend to like that and in some broadsheet (Times or The Guardian as those are the ones I mostly read) there
was some reference in a review (for fiction!) to this practice as "being proper literature" ...
Rambler said:
Or if you have a long train journey. The best thing about iPods etc is that you can have a two hour dj mix without breaks in it. That's why I'm getting one.
This is very true. There was a big article on the ago over the weekend about it, claiming that now everyone is using portable music players when they weren't before. And then they spoke to a whole group of people, most of whom were listening to FM radio...