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The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme. If you’re a Mac nerd, you’ll love this because it’s pretty damn funny and if you’re not, you probably won’t get it.
Apple introduces the iPod nano, which, wow, it’s like a baby iPod. So cute.
As technology plunges ever forward (or as we perceive it doing so), it’s not often that we stop to take a look back at how people thought the future was going to unfold before them. Peter Edidin of the NY Times recently did so, reviewing prognostications about radio, films, and television. It’s fun to read the ones where people thought the new technology was going to complete overtake and eliminate an older technology (which does happen, but not as often as people expect). Bruce Bliven on radio in 1922:
There will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly worldwide concerts; when all universities will be combined into one super-institution, conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloose; when, instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bedtime story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world…
D. W. Griffith, the great filmmaker of the early era, had this to say of film in 1915:
The time will come, and in less than 10 years, when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again. Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance. There will be long rows of boxes of pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to “read up” on a certain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.
But it’s also fun to see when people got it right, more or less. In 1936, J.C. Furnas had this to say of television:
It is my hope, and I see no reason why it should not be realized, to be able to go to an ordinary movie theater when some great national event is taking place across the country and see on the screen the sharp image of the action reproduced - at the same instant it occurs. This waiting for the newsreels to come out is a bit tiresome for the 20th century. Some time later I hope to be able to take my inaugurals, prize fights and football games at home. I expect to do it satisfactorily and cheaply. Only under those conditions can a television get into my house.
Under that set of criteria, it probably took awhile for a TV set to enter the Furnas household, but by the time NBC started broadcasting sporting events in the mid-1940s, they probably had one.
Plastic recently considered the question of perfect albums, those where every song is great and you never want to skip over them. Philip compiled a list of the responses; Radiohead’s OK Computer and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue came out on top.
Bob Moog, electronic music pioneer, died yesterday aged 71.
Radiohead has a weblog, although it just got going and Thom’s the only person who’s posted to it so far.
Billboard is now tracking the top-selling ringtones. The list seems to track pretty close to the top singles list. Well, except for the Super Mario Bros theme song ringtone. (via rw)
Grant McCracken offers an alternate theory for why crime fell in the 90s: rap music replaced violence among urban youths as a way to gain esteem. Compare with Levitt and Gladwell.
Goin’ Dot Com! - The Musical. Back in the day, some friends of mine and I used to joke about doing “Dot Com, the Musical”. I believe someone even wrote a song.
Sasha Frere-Jones on Diplo and Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta, who is a Brazilian funk DJ.
The Hyperreal home page has lots of information about rave music, rave culture, and drugs.
Announcing the world’s smallest mp3 player: the iPod Flea. Love the Flea collar.
Video Games Live is presenting a series of concerts featuring music from video games. Last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic played in front of around 10,000 people.
Icelandic band Sigur Ros has a Flickr account that they’re updating while on tour.
Have you ever wondered how actors seem to play the piano so well in movies?.
Spin magazine’s recent list of the best albums from the last twenty years (as well as MSNBC’s alternate list) got me thinking about what my favorites list from that era might look like. Since I’m not Spin and my musical opinion doesn’t carry any weight, I felt free to list what I like, influenced me, continue to find enjoyable, and will still listen to in the future instead of what’s actually good…whatever good means.
In rough chronological order and briefly annotated:
Conclusions: I seem to like all sorts of music, but the common thread is the mainstream-ness of these albums; they’re typically the most popular examples of a particular genre, style, or time period. Gangsta rap wasn’t that mainstream at the time, but The Chronic went multi-platinum. Nevermind was grunge for the mainstream, and The Downward Spiral was one of the few industrial albums to make it big. The same for Rave ‘Til Dawn, Daft Punk, DJ Shadow, Smashing Pumpkins, and Sigur Ros, if to a lesser extent.
The illegality of “Rio funk” music has driven it deep into the slums of Rio De Janeiro, controlled by the drug lords. “Funk songs used to pay homage to those who had died, but now it is fashionable to name-check those still alive. Juca is often asked by drug soldiers to write lyrics that include their names.”
Podcast subscriptions through iTunes top 1 million in the first 48 hours. Also, “podcasting is like cappuccino”…read on for the punchline.
All of Franz Ferdinand’s albums will not have names and will only be differentiated by color. Their second album — the black, red, and green one — will be out in September.
Apple has merged their iPod and iPod Photo lines. All iPods will now have color screens.
Final four Beethoven symphonies in mp3 format available for download on the BBC site this week.
iTunes 4.9 now supports podcasting. Boy, podcasting went from zero to corporate in no time flat. Will that pace stunt the growth of indie podcasting before it even has a chance to get started?
Depressing article on how much hassle it was for the makers of Mad Hot Ballroom to clear all copyrighted music in the film. “If I had known all that I had to go through, I’m not sure I would have done it.”
Spin names Radiohead’s OK Computer the best album from the last 20 years.
The scoring of movies and the -atsi movies scored by Philip Glass.
Stats on the BBC’s Beethoven downloads. “Live performances of Beethoven’s first five symphonies, broadcast as part of The Beethoven Experience on BBC Radio 3, have amassed an incredible 657,399 download requests during a week long trial.”
A man’s letter to the music industry detailing what he’s stolen from them and why. “I refuse to pay you to play these pointless games with arbitrary dates and obsolete borders.”
Drawing Restraint 9 is the first collaboration by super-couple Matthew Barney and Bjork.
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