Category: Music
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I feel great! You can too.
One of my all-time top 5 favorite albums ever recorded is Telecommunication Breakdown by Emergency Broadcast Network. EBN’s schtick was remixing video sources to techno beats, basically popularizing the mash-up a decade before it got popular. Their video releases were pure capital-G Genius but could get tedious quickly. The best example of that is the…
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Stop winding it up so much please thank you.
I was watching “Saturday Night Live” this week (eyes over here, Mrs. Beatty) and the first musical guest was Gwen Stefani doing “Wind it Up” with an over-enthusiastic drum line and a throng of badly-dressed dancers. It’s difficult for me to describe my reaction to seeing this, but in short: I became firmly convinced that…
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A Bunch of Noise
What started out innocently enough as a search for “I Want Candy” by MC Pee Pants (second page) somehow ended up with me on the iTunes Signature Maker. It’s a java app that digs through your iTunes library and generates a file that contains snippets of your favorite tracks mixed together. It’s not exactly pleasurable…
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Lousy Runs Both Ways
Every time I’ve tried to see Alison Krauss and Union Station in concert, the tickets have been sold out long before I even heard they were going to be in town. One time I even considered driving down to some God-forsaken town in central CA to see them because the Bay Area shows were sold…
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Who’s Peeking Out From Under a Stairway?
When we went to Disneyland last year, Rain played a CD where every track was a person’s name, from A to Z. The entry for W was “Windy” by The Association. And so began my two-month-long nightmare. I’ve always been susceptible to getting songs stuck in my head, but this one is the worst since…
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Fat Drum
I was in Japan Town for dinner tonight and was reminded of the International Taiko Festival this weekend at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. I’m not going this year because I’m headed to Disneyland for Jessica’s birthday, but everybody else should go. Seriously. The shows are really spectacular on every level, breaking out…
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Switch (jimmy smits)
Apparently I’m turning into a woman. The only question is whether I’m becoming a middle-aged housewife, or a disaffected angry young soulful woman tryin’ to make it in a man’s world. Evidence for the housewife: I’ve been listening to “Con te Partiro” by Andrea Bocelli non-stop for the past couple of days. Often — and…
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Can you smell what The Rock is cutting up with a chainsaw?
What was almost as good as Serenity was seeing the trailer for the new DOOM movie which is going to be out at the end of the month. Hot damn, I can’t wait. As much as I love the Resident Evil movies (no, really), they still cling to this idea that they’re somehow real movies.…
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My Entertainment Dollar
At the beginning of the show, Doughty promised we’d all get big value from our entertainment dollar, and I got that this weekend. First was Serenity on Friday night at the Northgate. It was awesome. Sure, I’d been looking forward to it, but once I actually got there, I was going into it as critical…
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Remixed, Remastered, and Bewildered
A while ago, my hero and name-dropping victim Steve Purcell was talking about some toys he’d seen at a store and said, “I liked them so much, I wished I hadn’t bought them already so I could buy them again.” Today I got to do exactly that, because of the media companies who’ve hatched an…
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James Van Der Beek and them sisters from “Sister, Sister”
The title is from Mike Doughty’s song “Busting Up a Starbucks”. If I’m interpreting it correctly, the song’s about impotent outrage at “corporate culture,” pop culture in particular. So at least for the rest of this post, that’s exactly what it’s about. And what a coincidence, because that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot…
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Haughty Melodic
I listened to Haughty Melodic, Mike Doughty’s new solo album, a lot on the drive from LA back to SF, and it’s great road trip music. Turns out it’s good sitting at the computer doing nothing music, as well. There’s nothing really “astounding” about it, like there is with a Soul Coughing album, because it’s…