In Defense of the Familiar

When listening to the song “Candy” by The Men, I cannot help but think that it’s a jam session with The Replacements and The Velvet Underground.  But does this make the song happily familiar or depressingly derivative?

On one hand, familiarity is the compass by which we find new music.  Though new music discovery might seem somewhat magical, it really boils down to looking for a new take on what we know we like.  ”Recommended if you like…” has driven discovery dating back to the days of sales clerks and CDs, and still today remains the simple fact behind the complex math of Pandora.

But familiarity can cut deep.  In their review of the album Open Your Heart, Time Out referred to the band as “Thurston Moore and The E Street Band.”  Short of slurs, calling out a band as such an obvious pastiche is about the meanest thing that a music critic can utter.

The thing is, it has been years since I’ve listened to The Replacements.  And though my pride is hesitant to admit it, my memory can muster only a few tracks from The Velvet Underground.  So if these guys from Brooklyn want to pay an homage to these (and several other) artists, does that make them any less artistic?

Though we might feel mighty smug saying that we were going to take a stand against the familiar, I think we’d end up doing so in silence.

Candy, The Men

The People-Powered Pandora

In case you don’t see me for the next several months, know that it’s because I’ve discovered Angry Birds for music lovers.

With merely a month under its belt, Turntable.fm is already being billed as “the most exciting social service of the year.”  Although it wasn’t announced to anyone, and it’s still in semi-closed beta mode, Turntable got 140,000 users in the first month.

Much like other exciting social services, the premise is “why-didn’t-someone-think-of-that-yet?” simple: you play music together.  The appeal lies in what has been dubbed “social listening”: it takes competition, reward points, socializing, and music discovery and mixes it all together to create a people-powered Pandora.

And here’s a new song that has been well-received in the Turntable rooms… though it’s not yet finished, it looks to be the makings of J. Cole’s first radio hit off of his upcoming album.

Cheer Up, J. Cole

A Soulful Sneak Attack into Our On Demand Lives

The last decade of entertainment technology has been dominated by the breathless pursuit of an on demand life.  With revolutionary zeal, we have been dying to declare our independence from the bastions of broadcast who for decades have told us what we’re going to enjoy and when.

And now, with our iPhone in one hand and our DVR remote in the other, we are totally and completely free.

But, sadly, often what we are free from is surprise.  With everything we listen to and watch sourced from carefully choreographed playlists, musical serendipity has been stripped down to wondering which slight riff on “anthemic British rockers with piano driven melodies” Pandora is going to source next from our musical genome.

And then, every once in a while, an itty bitty Belgian belle with a Jamaican flow comes out of nowhere to break us out of our rut and remind us that what’s least expected is often what’s most enjoyable.

Selah Sue has yet to make her way to the States yet, but with a collaboration with Cee-Lo and the groundwork being laid by Adele, I can’t think that her breakthrough is far from coming.  Here are two of her recent tracks, as well as a riveting take on the Bill Withers classic.

So, quick, let’s go add her to our playlist!

Black Part Love (Album Version), Selah Sue

This world, Selah Sue

The Artistic Threat of the Radio Edit

For the first four minutes of their debut, To Kill a King sound like cousins of Mumford and Sons.  Not a particularly bad career move given the commercial ascendance of British folk-rock, but sleepily familiar.

Or so I thought.  Four minutes in, out of nowhere, this track explodes into a fantastic flourish.  With horns, strings, drums, and countless other instruments, 60 seconds of harmonic bedlam take these guys from follower to front-runner.

Unless you’re listening to the radio.

No doubt scared off by a five-minute run time, some A&R idiot insisted on lopping off the defining heart of this song to create a radio edit.  The result is artistically neutered; yet another example of the gravitational pull to pop pabulum that pervades the radio industry as they squint to remember the days before Pandora.

Luckily, I can save us all from this commercial conservatism and give this promising band a fighting chance.

Fictional State, To Kill a King

Day 18: A Song that You Hear Often on the Radio

Is radio disappearing or re-appearing in a different form?  Is it bit of nostalgia or a needed antidote?  A lingering habit for aging baby boomers, or something ready to be seized by youth?  As I think about it, a bit of all of the above.

A music fan since my youth, I have more awesome radio-centric memories than I can recall.  As many did, I got my start with mixtapes mashed together from live radio recordings: the first few seconds always missing as you leapt across the room; the last few seconds always polluted by the inevitable DJ chatter.  I had my yearly ritual of counting down live the top songs of the past year, pen and list in hand as if I were documenting some sort of draft.  And, as I’ve documented, much of my college years were spent over a radio mic.  If anyone is cheering for radio, it’s me.

In a hasty bit of blogger research, I tracked down an Arbitron research study from last month on the future of radio.  The findings were largely what you’d expect: huge drops in the percentage of people who think of radio as the most essential medium (strange to think that there still are 14% who still view radio in that way); and massive drops in the percentage of people who turn to radio to learn about new music.  All of these stats had the demographic skews that you’d expect: if you followed the data out the window you’d ship radio off to the AARP and forget about it.

But as we think about radio’s future, the first step is to define what radio actually is today.

The (Human) Music Genome Project

Back in the day, I worked in a music store.  And, though it was camouflaged as a homogenous chain store, a cadre of employees actually made it a pretty awesome place to randomly find yourself shopping for music (trust me, the only way you’d find yourself there would be randomly).  The group of us working there really knew our music, and the way that we liked to strut our stuff was to provide personalized music recommendations to customers.  More specifically, we’d ask for a customer to name a few songs or albums that they have liked, and we would in turn provide a few recommendations of things they had never heard but would probably like.  We were a collection of khaki-panted mini-pandoras.

Except any of you who have worked in retail know that’s not the entire story.  Because saying that we provided recommendations of music we thought they would like is not exactly the entire truth.  Full disclosure, we provided recommendations that were at the intersection of what we thought they would like and what we thought they should like.  We were mini-pandoras with not-so-mini agendas– and some (well, many) bands just didn’t make the list of said agenda.

But I think that our agenda-led recommendations created more serendipity and true discoveries than some “Pandora purist” if-y0u-liked-this-you’ll-like-this recommendations ever could.