The Cassette Generator, via things magazine, which/who I was surprised to realise I hadn’t already added to my blogroll.
Tag: music
If you’re very observant, you may noticed a new link in the sidebar: Music and Books. I’ve been gradually tweaking it to my satisfaction, and you can now not only see a list of the ten most recent songs I’ve listened to and the ten most recent books I’ve read, but click through to see my profile on last.fm, reviews of the books, and a sort of bookshelf of all the books I’ve read since installing it. Since I’ve only read four books so far, the ‘bookshelf’ hasn’t really come into its own yet.
I have to admit that if I was criticising this particular design work done by someone else, I’d suggest that the navigation possibilities were a bit opaque, but it’s my party and I’ll make the links difficult to find if I want to.
None of this is currently working unless you’re using the Scallop theme. I’ll probably edit the other themes accordingly in due course. Or just turn the theme switcher off, to save myself these kind of compatibility headaches.
Categories
War—hunh—Good God, y’all
We’ll soon know whether the ‘Ugly Rumours‘ version of War has made it into the UK charts. I’d be more sympathetic to the project if it wasn’t so closely linked with the all-conquering ego of greasy, self-serving media strumpet George Galloway. Anyway, here’s Edwin Starr:
EDIT: the new version went in at #21, which isn’t bad going, but not really high enough to make a big political point.
FURTHER EDIT: I decided not to clutter up the place by putting this in its own post. There’s no particular connection except it’s music on YouTube. This is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who I just learned about today via this post over at Soul Sides.
Categories
last.fm, again
I’ve joined last.fm, again, under a different name. The intention, again, is to post a ‘recently listened music’ widget somewhere on the site, but I’m still thinking about how best to rearrange various things. In the meantime, I was slightly startled by this. The ten most listened to artists for this week are:
- Red Hot Chili Peppers
- The Beatles
- Radiohead
- Coldplay
- Muse
- The Killers
- Nirvana
- Metallica
- Bloc Party
- Death Cab For Cutie
I’m not going to type out any more, but the trend continues.
I’m not generally comfortable using the term ‘white’ as a term of mild derision, because I’m not given to self-loathing (about my race, at least), and I’m well aware that, on so many levels beyond mere skin tone, I tick all the boxes. This isn’t a misguided bid for some kind of urban cred, but: that is just the whitest list I’ve ever seen in my life.
Really, of course, ‘white’ has nothing to do with it; I just don’t get guitar rock. It always seems like the basic principle is that ‘if we make enough messy noise, people won’t notice that we’ve got rubbish voices and no rhythm’.
Having exposed my own musical prejudices, it’s only fair to point out that you can see what I’ve been listening to recently on my last.fm profile page. Feel free to mock accordingly.
Categories
Bessie Smith
I promise not to spend too much time posting stuff from YouTube, but I thought this was amazing: