FAC SEVENTY THREE, FORTY

1 year ago
Today is the 40th anniversary of Blue Monday, the canonical synthpop song: the Platinum-Iridium reference 12" single, stored in a vault in Manchester,* against which all other 12" singles are measured.

    * Under what is now a parking lot and upscale condominiums.

In addition to being just a perfect song, it was also a glorious physical artifact. I still remember the first time I saw it: the three die-cut holes, revealing not the usual white paper inner sleeve, but weirdly-textured flat black plastic that looked exactly like the surface of a floppy disk. The two little notches at the bottom. No text at all. And the mysterious color code down the right edge. Perfect. No notes.

I have been "borrowing" from the designs of Peter Saville, Factory Records and The Haçienda for the last couple of decades, but this is where it all started.

It remains the best-selling 12" single of all time, and the production costs on the die cut sleeve were so high that it was being sold at a loss, which is just the most Peter Saville / Tony Wilson thing ever.

Here's a good article in The Guardian with some well-chosen musical selections: Who inspired it and who it inspired - they spliced Donna Summer with Ennio Morricone to make a futurist dance smash.

I have listened to Blue Monday at least a dozen times while composing this post and you should too. Sadly, the only official music video of the song is from the far inferior 1988 Quincy Jones remix. (It's a great video, but a terrible remix.)

Might I also recommend:

Extremely relevant Previouslies:

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Current Music: As noted

lp0 on fire, retry

1 year ago
This morning's mastodon.social antics actually synched up well with the music that was playing at the time...

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Current Music: Underworld -- Moaner ♬

jwz mixtape 238

1 year ago

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 238.

It's been a little while since the last one. Not as long as the previous gap, but still, my rate of discovery has noticeably slowed in the last year....

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Current Music: as noted

Black Eyed Peas v. Pooping Unicorns

1 year ago
BMG is suing the makers of Poopsie Slime Surprise for ripping off "My Humps" with their own song, "My Poops."

Poopsie Slime Surprise comes from MGA, who are responsible for the Bratz line of dolls. According to the lawsuit, "My Poops" plays on one of the dolls when you press a button on its belly, leading both to dance moves and to a less savory movement: the toys "excrete sparkling slime." [...]

"My poops, my poops my poops my poops," the unicorn sings. The lyrics continue, "Whatcha gonna do with all that poop, all that poop," and adds, "I drive my parents crazy, I do it every day."

BMG alleges that Poopsie Slime Surprise has made MGA tens of millions of dollars and that the company ignored cease-and-desist warnings. They are asking for a steaming $10 million in damages.

(This is of course not the first time a wide-eyed shitting unicorn has graced these pages.)

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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BART Punks

1 year ago



Everything about this is fantastic:

Imagine the most packed rush-hour train you've ever been on; then multiply the crowd by three, and add the deafening pulses and surges of two live punk bands, plus the swelling energy of a sold-out stadium show. People were standing on top of seats and hanging from the handrails to catch the action, some thrashing around mosh-pit style as best they could without knocking over band members. One person even briefly crowd-surfed.

"I was genuinely shocked to see how many people showed up and were interested in supporting what we're doing. I didn't expect that many people to be there to see this. And I was really inspired to see everyone smiling, singing along and just having a good time," Cody said. [...]

The train kept quaking, and the music raged on. By now, any fears I'd had of the event turning into a dangerous situation had dissipated. Despite the crowd's rowdiness, there seemed to be a shared understanding of care.

"Creating a safe space is one of the reasons I really like the hardcore scene that's happening right now in the bay. The people there are very careful about making sure everyone there feels good," said Bayden, the drummer for False Flag. "People really are there to enjoy the music and have a good time without hurting others."

"We really look out for each other," Pretty said. "We like to get in the pit and do stuff like that, but we still know what's right and what's wrong. We still know how to pick each other up."

What also stood out was the crowd's age; instead of a surly group of white dudes in their late 20s, as might be expected at a show like this, the train's passengers were mostly teenagers, of different races and genders. I later learned that this is also true of the bands themselves. The members of Surprise Privilege are all in their very early 20s, and two-thirds of False Flag are still in high school. Their shows, then, tend to act as safe spaces for young punks who might not have access to other events.

"The Bay Area is pretty small regarding venues, and there's especially not that many that are all-ages. Spaces like this provide an opportunity for everyone, no matter who you are, to come and watch. And it's just an opportunity to create a thriving arts community in the bay and show young people that, hey, this stuff exists and it's pretty cool," Cody said. [...]

The music and chaos went on for five more stops -- about six songs per band, to the surprise of the band members, who thought they'd be handcuffed before the first set started. BART police entered the train at Fruitvale Station and ordered everybody off but didn't detain or fine either band. According to the band members, the only reason the train stopped was because "someone's vape got stuck in a BART door." "If that hadn't happened, the show would've kept going," Bayden said.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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jwz mixtape 237

2 years ago

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 237.

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jwz mixtapes: 15th Anniversary

2 years ago
15 years ago today, I posted jwz mixtape ØØ1, the first in a series of at-the-time weekly and audio-only 90 minute chunks of music. To commemorate, I have re-enabled all of the old audio-only mixtapes for two weeks.

Scroll down. Farther. Farther. Keep going. No, scroll down really far. There it is.

In the early days, the theme was "music I have been enjoying this week", so it wasn't necessarily new stuff, though I did try to make them flow together well. Occasionally I would do a mixtape with a secret or not-so-secret "what's the connection?" theme, like "songs with Control in the title" or "songs whose titles are 4 character acronyms."

I kept up the nearly-weekly pace for a few years, through mixtape Ø75, running out of steam in early 2009. That's when I switched to the new format of video-only mixtapes, containing only new music. I've managed to keep up the nearly-monthly pace ever since.

Since mixtape 237 isn't full yet, enjoy the ancient history!

Notes:

  1. Track names aren't displaying in the popup audio player because things have atrophied somewhat in the intervening decades. Oh well. Make due. Update: Ok, maybe I've fixed that.

  2. Many of the video-only mixtapes are missing up to 30% of their songs, because they vanished out from under me on YouTube at the fickle whims of the Content Mafia, and keeping track of those shifting sands proved to be far too much work. I tried for a while, but it was hopeless. As Textfiles often says, "YouTube is a video archive in the same sense that a supermarket is a Food Museum."
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Current Music: jwz mixtape ØØ1

iPod

2 years ago
Dear Lazyweb, what is the maximum number of tracks you can load onto an iPod 5?

I picked up a refurbished iPod 5 with 1TB of storage. I am trying this experiment because the iOS "Music" app just gets more and more annoying with every passing month. It barely seems to acknowledge that one might play music from files that one owns rather than whatever streaming clown nonsense.

Anyway, I got this iPod and then I immediately bricked it.

I verified that it was working with a few dozen songs; and then I copied around 67,000 tracks onto it, which took two days. This caused it to become permanently stuck at the white-on-black Apple logo boot screen. It would stay there for several hours, then run out of battery (even while plugged in), shut down, charge for a bit, reboot, sit at the Apple for several more hours, and repeat. The only way you can do a wipe-and-reset on these things is via iTunes / Finder, and it wouldn't even boot far enough to connect. Bricky brick brick.

Thankfully the person I bought it from let me exchange it, but I'm eager to not repeat that mistake, so my question is: how do I determine the actual maximum number of tracks I can load onto this?

If you do the same googling that I did, you will find some people saying "about 50,000", but "about" is not a real number. Further searching shows some people theorizing that the limit is based on the size of the files, not the number. These people are claiming that having album art inside the MP3 files reduces the number of files you can load. Presumably bitrate would as well?

I would like to avoid the scenario of, loading 49,000 tracks, then trying to load 5 more, then it's bricked again. If it was failing in a non-bricky way, some amount of trial and error would be fine, but this is a very unforgiving failure mode.

Anyone have experience with this?


Update: To spell out what I didn't think I had to spell out, a helpful answer here might take the form: "The actual limit is ██ MB of files. If you add up the bytes in the set of files you want to sync and it's more than that, don't." Answers of the form "buncha thousand, plus or minus 30%" would only be helpful if guessing wrong didn't permanently brick the device.


Update 2: With 32,000 songs:

  • Everything seems to work fine.
  • But Shuffle Songs takes around 25 seconds before it starts playing.
  • But Play and Next within the current shuffle set are instantaneous.

But with 33,000 songs:

  • Shuffle Songs makes it crash and reboot.
  • Play All from an Artist or Album page works.
  • Sometimes Next freezes the UI for a few seconds.
  • Play All, either via the All Songs or All Albums pages, freezes for a couple seconds then does nothing.
  • But at least it did not brick itself!

I still do not know how to determine this number other than by trial and error.


Update 3: Having used this thing for a month, I'm quite pleased with it! The sound quality is great and the battery life is gargantuan. The only downside is that it does not understand the inline buttons on my headphone cable to change volume and pause/play, so I have to actually take it out of my pocket and unlock it first, like an animal.. Still, it is 1000% less frustrating than the iOS "Music" app.


Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Current Music: Le Cliché -- Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Cheat ♬

Rick Roar

2 years ago
ButWithRaptors:

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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jwz mixtape 236

2 years ago

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 236.

It has been almost two months since my last mixtape, which I guess means that my music discovery has slowed down again. So I guess it's time to ask again, what music-related (or preferably music video-related) feeds do you read? Things curated by humans only. I am very much not asking what streaming services or algorithm-fed nonsense you prefer.

Anyway, if you are amazed by that first video, which I've been describing as a Stonehenge-like monument to the 90s, you might also enjoy this interview with Louise Post.

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