Madonna’s most well-known album, Like A Virgin just celebrated its 40th anniversary.
Like A Virgin was the first record I owned, given to me by my parents for my 9th birthday. The subject might have been a bit mature for me at that age, but it hardly mattered because I promptly broke the stylus on the family turntable. I couldn’t even listen to my gift. Of course, the hit songs from the record were all over commercial radio, anyway, so it wasn’t like Madonna’s tunes were hiding in obscurity.
Roon Audio has a new feature that should delight headphone lovers — OPRA (Open Profiles for Revealing Audio). OPRA is an open-source repository hosted on GitHub that contains precisely crafted headphone curves for different headphone models (and you get an equalizer, and you get an equalizer…).
I love Roon, although I’ve had my share of technical challenges — today I need to bring up two issues on the Roon Community forum. The ability of the platform to continuously innovate ways to give audio enthusiasts a better experience is impressive.
For my money, Garrison Keillor does the gratitude thing about as eloquently as one possibly could.
I sit and stare at the screen watching men crash into each other and I’m grateful for cowardice: I never played football so now I don’t have the aches and pains that my heroic classmates have. I fooled around with drugs in college but they were cheap crummy drugs, not the powerful chemicals of today that lead a person to make a life sleeping in the park. I’m grateful that I was born late enough so that when I developed mitral valve problems, open-heart surgery was rather common so I didn’t die in my late 50s as two of my uncles did.
Sam Tornow writes about Thurston Moore and The Smell of Vinyl for Discogs. Moore is a famous vinyl aficionado who stuffs his apartment with records.
“I kind of have to draw some limitations with my responsibility toward my own budget. I can’t just be living, building furniture out of records. I [still] have a pretty healthy Wantlist on Discogs, though. I continue to buy records all the time. I’m always interested in going to record stores, and I get my Discogs alerts for records I want. I would say I purchase on Discogs at least two or three times a week.”
This happened to a friend of mine, who was once named by the News & Observer as the biggest record collector in Raleigh. He eventually ran out of space for his collection and moved on to clothing.
I found the position Moore now takes on CDs interesting.
Originally sticking to vinyl and cassettes, CDs have also made their way into his collection. At first he was apprehensive of the medium when it initially exploded in popularity, but now he thinks they aged well.
This sounds a lot like the conclusion I have come to. With the right DAC, CDs can sound fantastic. The most recent CD I was looking at (an upcoming Pains of Being Pure At Heart collection) was also half the price of the record. That’s hard to beat, especially if you’re on a budget.
Just finished reading Shogun - Part 1 by James Clavell 📚. I don’t want to sound like a snob and say the book was better than the show. Especially because the show was amazing. The novel did have some differences, though, and a bit more of the political machinations.
David Saavadra writes for El País about the rise and fall of the Stone Roses, a band many had pegged as the saviors of britpop at the end of the 80s.
Why did U.K. music critics place so much hope in them in the late 1980s? “Everything was exaggerated, because it was a time when the media was looking for someone to occupy the throne that the Smiths had left vacant,” notes music critic Carlos Pérez de Ziriza. “They had the merit of fusing, like no other group, the British pop heritage of the 1960s and its most exquisite melodic tradition with the new rhythms emanating from Manchester, favoured by the rise of rave culture, acid house, and that new lysergia that had driven the second summer of love, that of 1988.”
The Stone Roses, perhaps most notably, at this point, were a huge influence on Oasis, in style as well as substance. Of course, my link to the article isn’t anything less than encouragement to read it, but if you want to save a click, the downfall of the band can be mostly attributed to old-fashioned rockstar hubris.
Austin Kleon has a post on Dave “Big Dutch” Nally, whose deceptively amateurish art looks like a cross between something that would have been created by Daniel Johnston and the liner notes of a Pavement record.
I especially love the reference to Ezra Jack Keats' exquisite children’s book The Snowy Day (bottom left).
I disclosed my most fondest Christmas wish list item to my lady friend last night — a FiiO DM13 portable CD player. She laughed at me. You want a discman for Christmas?
How can I explain my love of single-purpose devices and high-fidelity to someone who lives on their iPad and sees no problem with lossy streaming music? I want something that doesn’t have a screen with which to focus on music and, for goodness’ sake, some time to part with my phone during the day.
Bluetooth codecs have progressed, but Apple hasn’t seen that as a priority in their annual device updates.1 Their hardware can’t even output the high-fidelity audio that you can stream from their Apple Music service. One could probably successfully argue that Apple is more of a mass-consumer device manufacturer now than the company that used to cater to creatives.
The election is, whether mercifully or unmercifully, in the rearview mirror. Like some others, I want to turn my attention away from the day’s news, so closely coupled as it is with political events. Before I read about Kid Rock being appointed ambassador to the U.N., I mean to spend some time with my head in books. Standard Ebooks has inspired me by making the barrier to reading well-produced classics low and ebooks free to obtain.
My mom asked my brother where he gets his news. He listed WRAL (a local news channel/site), IGN, Kotaku and Nintendo Direct Mini. In the past, I may have scoffed at this. Now, I think he may be onto something.
Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague about music. I had gone to see one of my direct reports' bands, and they were really genre-hopping. I told her about the experience and mentioned that they blended such far-flung musical styles as punk, hip-hop, and shoegaze. She said she loved shoegaze, but when I asked her if she was going to the Slowdive show, she confessed that she hadn’t heard of them. I was a bit shocked, since I would consider them just below My Bloody Valentine in the pantheon of shoegaze progenitors. I asked her what shoegaze bands she was into and she mentioned Emma Ruth Rundle, whom she described as metal/shoegaze.
Upon discovering the new single from Yvette Young (via Instagram of all places), I was immediately reminded of Sophie And Peter Johnson. The breezy sophistipop certainly merits easy comparisons. Then I realized that Young did vocals for Brothertiger’s mesmerizing cover of Sophie and Peter Johnson’s “Torn Open.”
Some of my fondest memories are of times at the Disney World theme park. In fact, some of the first memories I’ve retained are from my first trip to the amusement park. I was four, and sitting in between my parents in a car on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, filled with a mixture of excitement, fear and familial comfort. I also remember the thrill of going on Space Mountain over and over again later at night as a teenager, the unfettered access to the ride that was so elusive earlier in the day becoming manifest. I can’t forget the luxurious dining experiences my wife and I had on our honeymoon, the kind of which we continue to talk and joke about. I still get a twinge of panic when I think about buying several Lego Star Wars sets and then almost feeling them slip out from underneath my legs on the lurching, fast-paced Aerosmith Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster.
I had been reading a lot of buzz around the Indianapolis band, Wishy, and their seamless blend of shoegaze and indie pop lately. Their debut album Triple Seven was stashed in my queue for later listening. Thursday morning, I browsed through the bands playing in clubs downtown for the free Day Parties, a staple of the annual Hopscotch Music Festival. The schedule app revealed Wishy was playing at a fairly small venue later in the afternoon. I quickly cranked up the streaming and fast-tracked listening to Triple Seven with just enough time to garner an appreciation for the recording before my trek downtown to see them play.
Wishy stays true to their description: “Wishy was born as a kaleidoscope of alternative music’s semi-recent history, with traces of shoegaze, grunge and power-pop swirling together.” When I shared this assessment with my son, he remarked that was how most indie bands today could be described. I’m wondering when my 18-yr.-old became so wizened and cynical, but I’m also not sure he’s wrong. For my part, the description reminded me of a band like Hotline TNT. Indeed, at the Wishy show, I spotted someone wearing a Hotline TNT shirt.