I know that normally I wait until at least the following March or April to post my “Best Music of 20XX” mixes, but last year I managed to finish it by the end of January! However, in my “rush” to get it published, I inadvertantly left out one of my favorite albums of 2008, and so I figured I’d just go ahead and devote a whole post to it now, by way of apology. Another reason that I wanted to take the time to tell you about this album individually is that it was originally released in a really confusing & somewhat unfortunate way, which is unsurprising, considering the guy responsible, but a shame nonetheless, because it’s amazing!
The album in question is called (I think) 49:00 and it’s by former Replacements leader, Paul Westerberg. You’ve heard “Dyslexic Heart” maybe? Can’t Hardly Wait? Left of the Dial? Anyway, I’m not going to sit here and explain the Replacements to you, other than to say if you haven’t heard the following songs:
- Kiss Me on the Bus
- Swingin’ Party
- Waitress in the Sky
- Skyway
- Androgynous
- Left of the Dial
- Unsatisfied
Then you should. But back to the matter at hand: 49:00. Even if all the songs on this album weren’t awesome in their own right (they are!) then this album would still be pretty marvelous, just from a structural/conceptual standpoint, although this also has a lot to do with why it’s release was so confusing. Here’s the deal:
- Paul Westerberg turned 50 this year
- The album is titled 49:00
- It was initially released as a single-track MP3, that was 43:55 long
- It cost 49 cents to download
- All the songs kind of smoosh into each other, and occasionaly 2 songs will be playing at the same time. This seems to be done wilfully & often happens right in the middle of the most emotionally gripping songs on the record.
- The album was pulled from all sites where it was available, about a week afer its release. (Possibly due to royalty issues with a covers medley at the end of the album? Or the inclusion of tracks that Westerberg wrote for a film soundtrack?)
- Subsequently, a single track MP3 download was made available, which was called 5:05, and which was 5:05 long.
- This song featured lyrics such as “Wanna sue me. Can’t see through me. They got a lawsuit. I got a swimsuit.” and concludes with Westerberg shouting “Fuck you!” repeatedly, while the chorus vocals repeat “five-oh-five-oh-five-oh-five” over and over again.
Got it? Anyway, the album is just totally amazing, and as clever as all the craziness surrounding its release may have been, I have a feeling that it didn’t really help the album find an audience, which is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE! For people who are familiar with the Replacements, and who know the level of extreme fanboy-ism associated with tracks such as the ones on my “you must hear this!” list above, let me just make a bold statement. This album is as good as, if not better than, many of the classic records that the Replacements are famous for. I can’t necessarily explain why, but there’s just something about the shambolic, mixed-up, home-recorded rawness of the songs on 49:00 that works perfectly, and as much as I love Replacements records like “Tim” & “Let It Be” sometimes I just have a hard time getting past the “hey-it’s-a-big-dumb-80s-rock-song!” production values of many of the songs on these records.
But 49:00…? 49:00 is just perfect. I love this record so much that I actually went to the trouble of downloading a special piece of software that let me split apart the big, annoying 43:55 single-MP3 track into individual MP3s *without* recompressing them, just so that I can post them here & let you in on some of the awesomeness that lurks in the 2nd half of the album. Personally, I just burned the whole thing to a CD & left it on repeat in my car for about 2 months, but I certainly don’t expect *everyone* to do the same. So here you go:
Visitor’s Day - This is a song about how even if you can’t hitch a ride to visit me in prison, it’s OK. We’re still cool. But you should know that it sucks.
Everyone’s Stupid - Westerberg may be 50, but if anyone’s ever written a better song about teenage angst, then I’d like to hear it.
Out Of My System - I feel like this song relates to the apocryphal Steve Jobs quote, “Real Artists Ship.”
Squeaky Obscene - My soul is gold, my heart is silver / Please don’t ask me about my liver.
5:05 - Again, I have no idea to what extent the weirdness surrounding the release of this album was staged or conceptually intentional, but the way I read it, it seems like Westerberg realized that there’s no such thing as an album going “out of print” these days, so it doesn’t really matter if it’s on sale for 2 days or 2 years, because the nature of online distribution will ensure that it’s accessible to anyone who cares to look for it.
So anyway, now I’ve done my part. All you have to do is listen to the damn thing! Feel free to use this embedded player, or better yet download the whole thing as ZIPped individual tracks (so you can hear it without dumb gaps between tracks!) And tell yo’ friends!
This text will be replaced
Function: adjective
Etymology: from “file system fragmentation” a technical term from the computer industry
Date: early 21st century
Definition:
1: See Dictionary.com for existing definitions
2(a): The state of having so many simultaneous or conflicting tasks and responsibilities on one’s mind that the mental effort involved in balancing & switching between them halts or drastically reduces one’s work output.
Example: “Man today is totally fragged and it’s only 10 AM!”
You say black I say white / You say bark I say bite
Published June 18th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsDavid Byrne reviews a new book on the past, present and future of urban bike riding and agrees with the author that “when more women begin riding, that will signal a big change in attitude, which will prompt further changes in the direction of safety and elegance. I can ride till my legs are sore and it won’t make riding any cooler, but when attractive women are seen sitting upright going about their city business on bikes day and night, the crowds will surely follow.”
Anyway, I don’t know how things are in NYC, but based on my observations here in SF I’d say that it’s already a fait accompli!
Man, what was I *thinking* when I stepped to Weird Al’s game? Wasn’t it obvious that he would come along and wipe the floor with me at some point?
Well played, Weird Al… Well played!
Beachwood Sparks did a really awesome cover of “By Your Side” by Sade several years ago, but does anybody even listen to Sade in the first place? Anyway, here’s your chance to hear both versions!
Sade:
Beachwood Sparks:
Hm, looks like I’m booked to narrate a commercial this afternoon
Published June 3rd, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsNot that I’m a fan of the indier-than-thou music & theres-an-app-for-that smugness of Apple’s iPhone ads or anything, but holy christ have you seen these hilarious promo videos for the Palm Pre?
I haven’t heard inner monologue that pedantically douchetastic since the Genesis & Huey Lewis chapters of American Psycho!
From Google’s Rubin: Android ‘a revolution’:
When Android was a start-up company, it was always a razor/razor blade business. The razor, the free thing, was the open-source operating system. In Android’s original business model, the blades were basically provisioning systems that we sold to wireless carriers that had hooks into the open-source operating system. That was an unproven business model, I would say, and certainly the feedback I got when we were going for venture financing was that it was an unproven business model.
I was willing to give it a go, but then Larry and Sergey and Eric came along and said, “it’s much more aligned with Google’s core business and Google’s business model, and you’ll have a much easier time executing within Google.” And retroactively, I agree.
Furthermore:
Remember people used to trumpet “write once, run everywhere”? Well, I think we’re actually there. I think when we start talking about the possibility of exploring things like Netbooks and car navigation systems, you have potentially different processor architecture types. You have Intel, you have ARM, set-top boxes have MIPS.
I think that we have an open ecosystem, we have an open-source platform, we chose the right license, there are no viral aspects, it’s absolutely 100 percent free, it’s complete, it’s everything you need to build a phone. When you add all that stuff up, all those ingredients, potentially–I think the jury’s still out–we can make a really successful product.
Additionally: Why Google chose the Apache Software License over GPLv2 for Android
One of my favorite pieces of writing is by Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista leader, describing his initial journey to join the rebel group:
Perhaps you are asking what happened to my intention to turn back and abandon the guerrilla life, and you might suppose that the vision of that first dawn in the mountains made me abandon my idea of fleeing, lifted my morale and firmed my revolutionary conscience. Well, you are wrong. I put my plan into operation and went down the hill. What happened is I mistook which side to go down. Instead of going down the slope that would take me back to the road and from there to “civilisation”, I went down the side that took me deeper into the rainforest and that led me to another hill, and another and another . . .
Seriously though, read the whole thing, it’s pretty cool. But anyway, I just wanted to point out a thematically linked passage in this article about game design from a 2007 issue of Wired:
“This, he says, is bad: It means that people were wandering aimlessly instead of progressing through the level. “People were lost,” Pagulayan says. “There wasn’t much deep analysis to do here.”
To solve such problems, the designers must subtly direct player movement by altering the world in small ways. In this case, they decided to change the geography of the Jungle level so that in certain places players had to jump down a steep ledge to reach the next area. This way people can’t go backward, because they can’t climb back up the ledges. Pagulayan shows me a map from the next testing round, after the fix was implemented — and sure enough, all the dots are clustered in tight bunches, right where they are supposed to be.”
So it goes.
Great news everyone, Honda is bringing back the Insight hybrid! Oh wait… waitaminute… what is this crap? I seem to recall the *real* Insight being a crazy machine from the future with only 2 seats & some sweet rear wheel covers and it got 60-70 MPG in 2001! Meanwhile, this horse-shit compromise of a Prius-nipple-wannabe has 4 (boring!) seats, no wheel covers and only manages “40+” MPG. I call shenanigans on that. Oh well, at least it has a “totally meaningful” web 3.0 FOURTH WALL BREAKING ad campaign on Vimeo (the “alt-est” of the web video networks!)
In other news, VW is bringing back the Scirocco and this new version actually *does* look pretty sweet! Except… Oops! It’s not available in North America.
Whatever, fuck all this noise though. Once my dumb Toyota Matrix lease is up, I’m totally converting an old CRX to 100% electric, unless Honda does it first, which I doubt.
