Category Archives: Music

Consolidating Music Collections

The most difficult thing about getting married is consolidating your music collections. Two different people with different tastes and different ways of organizing these massive collections of music. And once you get married you’re not allowed to have a shoe box full of CDs anymore. It’s some kind of household decorating rule that you must have some high dollar CD rack or drawer or system. It’s really a pain in the butt. I’m a big advocate of no more CDs, tapes, or records. I think the digital age should take us into a new realm where we don’t have to worry about jewel cases and scratched CDs and liner notes. Just put all the music on a harddrive and pipe it through my stereo, my walkman, my car stereo. Then I wouldn’t have re-alphabetize the whole collection. Life could be so much simpler.

Observations from a performance by Ben Kyle

He sings from his heart to a crowded room. The lyrics drift through air, intermingling with the cigarette smoke like ideas in the mind. The people sit wherever there’s room, on top of the fading pool table or right on the dirty tiled floor. Some of them are focused on the musician, their eyes attentively watching his every move. Others are staring at the tiles, letting the music wash over them. A guy sitting on the pool table flips through the books he just bought at the used bookshop next door. The singer closes his eyes and lets the words roll forth, letting them bounce off the ceiling, off the inattentive ears, off the mismatched ceiling lamps and into the soul of the few people there who were really listening.

Music Collection Crisis

There are close to one hundred CDs sitting on my coffee table that I haven’t listened to in several years. That much ignored artistry has made me realize several things: 1) Teenagers shouldn’t be allowed to buy a used car worth of CDs they won’t like in five years. 2) Musicians shouldn’t be allowed to sell CDs that no will appreciate in five years. Not only is it a waste of money, but it’s an embarrassment to everyone involved when your award winning album sells for thirty-five cents on e-bay. 3) It’s time for a home stereo revolution. No more buying albums with one hit single and nine songs you’d rather forget. No more piles of CDs to gather dust on the bookshelf. No more boxes of CDs in the basement you wish you could get rid of, but you can’t because you never know when you’ll get the itch to hear Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” No more embarrassment when your friends come over and see what’s really in your CD collection (especially true for those into “Christian Rock”).

I’m probably giving away an idea worthy of a dot-com and a few million startup dollars, but I think somebody needs to take mp3 technology and start a home stereo revolution. I’m not talking about a computer-geek-in-the-basement revolution. I’m talking about the real thing. Somebody needs to make mp3 jukeboxes. Some kind of server that houses thousands upon thousands of mp3s. Instead of buying a CD, you buy the mp3s that get added to your personal jukebox. You could even share the mp3s among your household. You could keep every song you’ve ever owned, and you wouldn’t have to worry about the aging CD taking up precious shelf space.

Just think of the possibilities. No more cracked jewel cases. No more scratched CDs. No more lost CDs. No more reorganizing your alphabetized collection because you bought the newest Abba hits collection. We could cut back on all that wasted packaging and albums would cost half as much. We could even cut back on all those wasted songs and only buy the radio single you wanted in the first place. Think of all the plastic we’d save! We could even cut out the record companies and buy your mp3s straight from the band (whoa there tiger, you just shut that idea down. Okay, okay, we can keep the record companies. Somebody has to… um… do the marketing.)

It’s shear brilliance. Somebody should be paying me for this idea. Are there even any drawbacks? I suppose if you’re a musical connoisseur you wouldn’t be getting the liner notes. Yeah, sometimes they’re fun to look at, but we could strike a compromise. You could get the liner notes for an extra 50 cents. I suppose this plan might put album cover designers out of business, but we could figure something out. Maybe the new jukebox server would come with a monitor to help you select your album. The cover could be an image on the screen, and the designers could keep their cushy jobs. I’m telling you, this plan is ingenious.

Now somebody implement it really quick so I can solve my music collection crisis.

The Most Honest Christian Band Ever

The new U2 album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, came out today. Ordinarily I wouldn’t comment on this, but recently I’ve been reading a biography about U2. Put that along side my roommates’ intense love for the band and a weekend spent actually listening to some of their songs and you have more than enough reason to sit up and take notice of the four men from Ireland.

Before coming to college and rooming with U2 fans (every year) I couldn’t name a U2 song. If one was playing on the radio, I wouldn’t have known. I was raised on Christian music (by my own choice, certainly not by my parents’ will) so I had an extremely limited knowledge of mainstream music. Oddly enough, my strict desire to hear only Christian music kept me from hearing what has to be the most honest Christian band I’ve ever heard.

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Radio vs. Napster

What does radio have to do with Napster? This whole Napster controversy has been going on with the record companies suing Napster and millions of pirating web surfers complaining about their rights. Yet no one is talking about radio stations. I’ve been realizing lately that the mainstream radio stations are glorified extensions of record companies. They play exactly what the record companies want, when they want it. A band only has one hit single at a time. Why? The record company releases one single at a time. That way the album receives more airplay because more songs are on for a longer period. You get the public hooked on one song until they’re sick of it. Then you pick a new song and get ’em hooked on that one. You keep doing it until you’ve exhausted the worthwhile songs on the album, and by that time the band has released a new CD. They also hate those number one singles.

But what does that have to do with Napster? Well, millions of people have been downloading the songs they want for free. Apparently they’re too cheap to buy CDs and they’re not satisfied with the variety on the radio. Shouldn’t radio stations be trying to cash in on this some how? Radio stations deliver songs to the public for free. They don’t worry about any kind of copyright infringement. But no, the radio stations keep a tight grip on their 50 song play list and rarely depart from it. It’s really fun to listen to multiple stations and watch as each station realizes a new song’s going to be a hit. First one stations starts playing it a few times. When they start to overplay it another station picks it up and plays it occasionally. Then a third station picks it up and pretty soon everyone is overplaying the song and it’s featured on the end cap at Target. Too bad most of us were sick of the song a month ago.

It just seems like someone in the radio industry should wise up and discover a way to tap into all this technological wizardry and unappeased audiences.

Of course I haven’t thought of how to do it yet. I’ll save that for another past-midnight evening.

Concert at a Now-Defunct Club

What’s it like to be a no name band traveling across the country playing hole in the wall clubs with reject Salvation Army furniture? It’s a plywood floor and the brick walls and exposed pipes make it look like the walled in the alley. The punk kids pour in, spikes, chains, colored hair. I can’t help but wonder if this is the cutting edge of the music scene, or just a hole in the wall. Cigarette smoke lingers, adding an interesting contradiction to the words from the stage about this Jesus. The lead singer has the look of a rock star. You think he does it on purpose. His skateboard shoes, tattered jeans, and old Cincinnati Reds T-shirt. His hair hangs down past his chin in tangles. But it’s not on purpose so much as it’s the life on the road. It’s not fashion so much as necessity.

Inviting Marilyn Manson Over for Dinner

Today at the beginning of chapel the campus pastors took a moment to share about some new prayer thing that was happening, and they shared a quick story about praying against the Marilyn Manson concert that was in town this week. Sherry made a slip of the tongue and said something about, “When Marilyn Manson comes to Bethel.” Everyone laughed and thought it was funny, and Sherry’s face turned red and she laughed for a minute before continuing.

But I wasn’t laughing. I obviously didn’t listen to much they were saying about the prayer meetings. I was thinking about Marilyn Manson. He’s taken a lot of flack lately. A lot of people have been picketing his shows because of whatever connection there may be between the “goth” followers of his music and the Columbine shootings. As rumor has it, at the Minneapolis show somebody put a big yellow smiley face somewhere on the stage, and when Manson saw it, he stopped the concert mid-song, and stormed off the stage. Sherry related this story as a victory story for the group that was praying for the presence of God to be in that concert hall.

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Dancing at Bethel

Tonight I watched a concert in the Benson Great Hall at Bethel College. Now picture the scene, Bethel is a Baptist General Conference school. This means conservative. The lifestyle statement has a “no school sponsored” dancing provision, however you want to decipher that. The Benson Great Hall is this really nice, acoustically harmonized concert hall that would be perfect for the Vienna Choir Boys (who have sung there). Then imagine a swing/punk band named Skooch taking the stage. Hepcats in their zoot suits (not really, but it sounds good) prancing around stage, and twenty people clustered in front dancing away. Dancing. In the Great Hall. At Bethel College. It’s nothing new, I saw it last year at several big time concerts. It’s just fun to see a reminder every once in a while.