I would say it’s hard to believe that it’s gone this far, but truly it isn’t. Eurovision has always been garbage so I’m not particularly shocked at this outcome. The problem with Eurovision isn’t the music, it’s the voting. Every time there are some good acts in it, but the votes fall pretty much as the wind blows, it’s by no means meritocratic. (That is, even looking past the blatant political voting and back room deals between neighboring countries.) So if you watch it you’ll only be pissed that the best songs never get recognized.

But then they picked Rybak. Two-three months ago I’d never heard of him. I was visiting in Norway and I was told the biggest celebrity in the country right now is a guy with Belarusian origins who plays the violin. Sweet! What’s not to like about that?

It’s a feel good story, almost makes me feel like it could have been me. I’d like nothing better than someone like this get recognized. Norway is a great place, but like all immigration stories go, there are some people who look down on some people from certain geographic origins; it’s pure prejudice. And he plays violin to boot, an eccentric interest to say the least. Which I did too once! And this is the guy the Norwegian public loves to death.

All was rosy. And then I heard his music.

Awful stuff. The melody must be derived from some sort of folk music, evidenced by the lame dancing. I hate folk music. Then there is the violin, which he doesn’t really do much with, except play the theme. And even if you liked it up to that point, then he starts singing. Borderline off key. It literally doesn’t even make the standard of an average Eurovision entry.

Needless to say, pop music is not about music, it’s about image. And he certainly has that going for him. Maybe if he gets a good producer behind him he can crank out something actually worth playing on the radio. Having come this far, he can’t be completely devoid of talent, can he? Just talent misdirected, that’s my guess.

The Rybak story is a great story, but it sorely needs an injection of credibility. Maybe one day he could be celebrated on musical merit?

Amarok has the nice property that you can browse the collection right in the program. If you buy using amarok, it remembers the albums you got, so you can redownload and stuff like that, very handy. If you only stream, you get the same music, but you also get a short commercial at the end of every track.

Rob Costlow – Woods of chaos

It’s always difficult to determine genres. Magnatune calls this New Age music. Another description given is melodic piano pieces, which is dead on. It’s a suite of greatly soothing pieces I would say. One thing it perhaps lacks is enough complexity to last a long time, so after a while the pieces become too familiar and appear a bit dull.

Costlow has one other album on Magnatune, Sophomore Jinx, which I didn’t find as good.

Johannesburg Philharmonic – Coleridge-Taylor/Dvorak Violin Concertos

I found this album while browsing the classical section (which seems to be the best one on Magnatune).

Coleridge-Taylor is an interesting find. His concerto opens with an irresistably virtuosic voilin solo delivered by Philippe Graffin, and from that point on I knew I was listening to something I would like.

And then there is the Dvorak, one of the underrated Romantic composers I’d say, sure to catch my eye every time. The concerto in a minor is not his most well known work, and I think not as good as his cello concerto in a major, but still offers quite enough to satisfy.

Ehren Starks – The Depths of a Year/Lines Build Walls

Ehren Starks is more of a jazz piano act. These two albums are declared New Age and Classical respectively, although I’m not sure if I would stick them in separate categories. The difference is that The Depths of a Year also has a cello part, played by Kate Gurba. This offers a powerful dimension to an otherwise piano dominated offering.

Each album has a dozen discrete pieces, and they happen to be quite varied. Some are more calm and melodic while others are more busy and engaging. The mixed bag is tough to pull off, but when done right it produces an album that offers much more than a series of performances in much the same style.

An easy way to illustrate is by observing the piano keyboard. The most fundamental scale is C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C, and that’s an octave, of course. Each of the scales (or collections) built on these successive pitches has its own fancy Greek name, so if you want to understand what the heck people are saying, you better know these as well.

The problem is a typical memorization exercise, tie 7 different pitches to 7 Greek names. There is no obvious way to do this, match one set of numbers with another set of names. Except when you’re a football supporter. We can memorize lineups and shirt numbers like nobody’s business, linking them to faces and positions on the pitch. So why not leverage this ability.

There are 7 players, so we’re going to play a 2-2-2 formation. The numbering is standard, ascending from right to left. C is our fundamental pitch, so that’s where we start counting.

You’re going to look at this formation, and the next time someone mentions Lydian mode you’re going to think “Lydian… right midfield, shirt number 4, so that’s… C, D, E, F. The mode is then F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F”.

If only we could get this team into Football Manager, everyone would know this.

People fail to realize that hip hop first and foremost is a musical art-form. Right now, hip hop just isn’t living up to musical standards. It’s just plain bad.

From an opinion about why hip hop sales are plummeting.

I would go much further than this. To me, hip hop has always been bad music, with a few exceptions. I believe that any musical genre must always be about the music, otherwise it’s pointless. And while there are certain things that have always attracted me to hip hop – the energy, the bold form of expression, the rhythm, and sometimes the lyricism – I have always found it profoundly lacking in the music itself. It’s a genre that wants to be loved, but I just cannot find enough reason to embrace it, the music is so lacking.

Meanwhile, there have been exceptions. Songs that have the kind of musical quality that make them mainstays in my listening (most have previews on last.fm).

• 2 Pac – Changes
• 2 Pac – California love
• Coolio – Gangsta’s paradise
• Coolio – C U When U Get There
• Public Enemy – He got game
• Public Enemy – What you need is Jesus
• Will Smith – Black Suits Comin’ (Nod Your Head)
• Will Smith – Potnas

But these are exceptions, not the only ones, but taken out of a small set. When I do like a hip hop song, it’s usually because of the melodic/harmonic/rhythmic value, not the lyrics, whatever they may be.

Perhaps melody and harmony just don’t square with the core values of hip hop, but as long as it is music, it will always be judged on those.

So how can you tell if a hip hop song is worth its salt? Here’s one thing to try. Remove the vocals. Vocals are very important in hip hop, so removing this will make the music feel very empty. But here’s the question. Does what remains offer anything at all?

You need a last.fm profile for this. last.fm records music you listen to and sends the artist/track names to a website that has all kinds of statistics about your music taste. So this website takes your 30 most favorite artists and scores them based on how many other last.fm user listen to those. Finally you get a score in terms of a number, and so far I’m beating everyone at this.

Rock ‘n Roll! You are 5.72 % mainstream!

How to cheat: Rename your favorite songs to “Artist1 – Song1″ through “Artist30 – Song30″, play them for a while, then check your score. Better yet, change those names to something like “Qz6SioAp91Z – T1zIqmL09r” for a better shot at the title.

Seriously though, I’m in awe of Moby. His gift for making feel good music is seemingly unmatched. And the music is so simple too, I tend to be a sucker for complicated, but his basic compositions really appeal to me. The instruments obviously play a big part in it, Moby loves strings and so do I. But the arrangement is such that it brings out a different set of emotions than just about any other music.

Like this song from the “Miami Vice” soundtrack. The musical “canvas” isn’t at all cluttered with elements, he’s keeping it simple and meaningful. And lots of repetition. But repetition is only bad when you’re repeating something nasty. Then there’s Patti LaBelle’s excellent voice to top it off. It’s a winner.

Why do we care? The thing is, Magnatune is a pretty cool, modern music label that signs a lot of musicians and gives them a much better deal than the established music industry (which is known to sponsor certain marketable artists through the roof while leaving the rest in the gutter). They have also taken the new medium that is the internet for what it is and sell mp3s without DRM. And they cut 50% of the price right to the artists, so you know they are not being paid in peanuts. You can buy an album for a price you set yourself (minimum is $5).

But Magnatune only has music that isn’t licensed by other labels, which means none of that stuff I’ve ever even heard, how do I know what’s what? This is where Amarok comes in. On Magnatune’s site, you can listen to the music before you buy anything (you could even record it if you wanted to bend the rules a little bit), but with Amarok now integrating the collection, you can just drag and drop albums or tracks right onto your playlist, just as you do with files on disk. Hell, you can queue up all of Magnatune if you wanted to. So essentially, you can listen to all that music for free, just as long as you’re online. Of course, if you want it on the mp3 player, you’ll have to buy it. (Or if you want to support Magnatune and the artist for offering this.) They sell albums in mp3 format and on cds (remember those plastic things?).

So up until this point Magnatune was there, but with Amarok it’s going to be a lot more accessible and a lot more people are going to hear about it. Classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

1. They let you preview a track before buying in low quality (this is actually disappointing, because you have no idea how it really sounds).
2. They let YOU pick the encoding you want, among all the most widely used formats. How amazing is that?
3. All content is usable (no DRM).
4. The price of a track depends on the the sound quality you pick (ie. you pay by quality), but the prices are generally low.
5. Their collection is wide enough to carry albums that I actually want.

To give you a concrete example.. The other day I was raving about “Chevaliers de Sangreal” from the Da Vinci Code movie. I search for the album on allofmp3, they have it. The price for this track (at 192kbps mp3) is $0.18. I put it in my basket, I set the encoding to FLAC lossless compression, the calculated charge is $0.71. Meanwhile, Apple’s iTunes Store, as far as I know, charges $0.99 per track (I cannot verify this as the store is only available through iTunes, which of course, has no linux support).

Granted, their payment system is a bit of a pain. They make you transfer a minimum of $10 into your account before you can buy anything. And I had to do this through a different site, even had to use my cell phone to retrieve a pin code they sent me. But, if you’re a frequent customer, just transfer $100 in one go and you won’t have to do this for a long time again.

The one drawback I’ve seen is that while they keep track of the tracks you’ve bought (no pun intended), they won’t let you re-download them. So once you download, keep it in a safe place (like backup to CD/DVD).

The average album on allofmp3 costs about $2.50, that is 11x, E-L-E-V-E-N T-I-M-E-S, less than the average album in a music store in Norway, at 180kr ~ $27 (perhaps Holland is a bit cheaper, I rarely go to music stores anymore, I wouldn’t know). And for that you get tracks at 192kbps (which is fine for most music, soundtracks and classical is more demanding music, I might get that in higher bitrates or FLAC), and you can buy per track. Not to mention that I never use CDs, because mp3s are so much more practical (and even if I did I could burn the CDs myself). Give me one good reason why I should ever buy another CD again.

But wait, there’s more. There hasn’t been an album yet where Willie talks about himself and his greatness in every feckin song. Now I realize that rap isn’t a genre of humility, a rap song without trash talk and self adoration just wouldn’t cut it (unless it’s about something else entirely). Rap is about struggle and adversity but enough is enough. When there’s nothing else on the entire album than manifestation of the artist’s greatness, something has gone terribly wrong somewhere. What’s more, the music is terrible, so there’s absolutely nothing to rescue it. When I heard the song “Switch” (presumably something to do with the movie “Hitch”, although the song wasn’t in it), I thought it was crap. Yet on the album you get it in three different versions!?

I sincerely hope the album sells exceptionally badly so Big Willie gets a wake up call and starts putting out quality music again. Jeez, he even did one song with that clown Snoop Dogg, big surprise it really sucks.

2/10

Having heard only a couple of tracks before I was excited to see what the album would be like. It was released in 2002 so by no means brand new but as I hadn’t heard it before, it was all new to me. The opening track “Introducing” makes a very good impression (which is unusual) and from there it goes slightly downhill but still very worthwhile.

Track rating
Introducing
Last Lieutnants
Barcelona
Moving Up
Put It On
One Of Them Days
In Between
Trust Me
Ras Steven Skit
Feel It
Boatdrinks
It’s Paper
No Cure For Life

7/10