Category: Music
MONDAY MUSIC: My Grammy Awards Performance Highlights
For me, the Grammy awards are never about the awards themselves (many of the artists/songs are either incorrectly categorized or nominated alongside incomparable acts). The unique performances are the real reason to watch the broadcast. This year, I felt like the performances were more miss than hit, but amongst the barrage of hip hop nonsense there were a few notable acts, so now I bring you…
My Grammy Awards Performance Highlights
I’m certainly not the only one putting my favorite 2009 Grammy performance moments online, but my list will likely be considerably shorter than most, as I only truly enjoyed four out of the twenty-something performances throughout the show. First…
The Not-So-Great Moments
I’ll probably get some flack for not being a U2 or Coldplay fan, but I don’t deny that I’m somewhat of a music snob. If I don’t like it, I’d rather it not exist. While I didn’t particularly mind either of those groups, I really could have done without Katy Perry, the Jonas Brothers (even with Stevie Wonder), Kid Rock, and the terrible foursome of Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, and T.I. The only good part about that performance was their supporting use of M.I.A. and I could have done without her bizarre “show the world I’m pregnant” shirt. I will admit that Kanye’s afro-mullet was rather amusing and the silver, sparkly outfits that he and Estelle were wearing as a duo went perfectly with their disco-influenced tune.
I really, really hate country music so Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney, and Sugarland were all mute-worthy for me. I had never even heard of Adele before last night and didn’t really pay much attention to her (though I’m pretty sure she’s not a country singer). Taylor Swift was the least country of the country bunch and I might have enjoyed her performance if it wasn’t ruined by Miley Cyrus’ gritty really-close-but-not-quite-in-tune vocals. I’ll give Swift credit for being an actual musician and not just a corporate creation.
Flying under the radar were Justin Timberlake, Neil Diamond, and the twosome of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Timberlake seems like a likable and talented guy, but I lost interest as soon as T.I. began his endless and breathless stream of words that I’m pretty sure at one point included the phrase “fried chicken.” Timberlake’s earlier performance with Al Green, Keith Urban, and Boyz II Men was better, but still not something I particularly enjoyed.
Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” seemed to bore anyone under the age of 50, including me, though every time I see him I can’t help but laugh when thinking of Donald Faison’s excellent Diamond-inspired rendition of the Transformers theme song. Despite the facts that I do enjoy the occasional Led Zeppelin track and that Plant and Krauss won several major Grammys last night, I wasn’t thrilled by their performance either.
It was great that Jennifer Hudson could belt out the notes that she did after living through some terrible family tragedies last year, so I won’t say anything bad about her performance. That type of music just wasn’t made for me.
So what did I actually enjoy about the performances on the 2009 Grammys?
Paul McCartney with Dave Grohl
YES. The Beatles meets Nirvana/Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl returns to the drum kit and pounds the life out of it to an ordinarily calm Beatles classic. Is there anything more fulfilling? Relive it here:
Disclaimer: I’m a huge Nirvana fan, so seeing Grohl drum is always a treat for me. I attended a Foo Fighters concert in Atlanta, GA several years ago and was pleasantly surprised when he played the drums for a song or two. I never had the chance to see Nirvana live in concert, so it was the next best thing for me.
Anyway, just prior to this performance coming on, I had commented to my wife that there wasn’t nearly enough MUSIC being featured on the show. There were plenty of vocalists, rappers, and some backing bands, but it wasn’t until McCartney and Grohl got out there that we could finally enjoy some simple guitar/bass/drums rock and roll.
Radiohead featuring the USC Marching Band
I’m not a huge Radiohead fan, though I do enjoy most of their music, but this performance was excellent. I am supremely jealous of those college kids. Here it is:
That was an excellent use of a marching band, as it didn’t sound like a football game for one second. Instead, the song was well arranged and you could tell that each of those kids was having a blast performing it. Giving the snare players hi-hats was a good move, as it definitely decreased the typical snare-driven marching band sound. The horn section really rocked their parts.
The Four Tops with Ne-Yo and Jamie Foxx
I’m a sucker for oldies. I grew up listening to them with my father and love to see some of the originals still in action decades later. Ne-Yo and Jamie Foxx filled in nicely alongside the two remaining members of The Four Tops. In case you missed it:
The songs have certainly been played to death over the years, but nothing beats hearing some of the original singers belt it out.
Tribute to Bo Diddley
Bo Diddley was one of the greats and while I’m not sure I would have included John Mayer or Keith Urban in this tribute, it still worked. Buddy guy was good but B.B. King was the one that gave the tribute some authenticity, as he had actually played with Bo Diddley. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a video of this tribute online (yet), so here’s some classic Bo Diddley instead:
From the sound of those screaming girls, you’d think the Jonas Brothers were performing. How times change.
What were your favorite moments and performances from the 2009 Grammy Awards? Comment!
TweetTUESDAY TECH: DIY Media Center with XBMC and Boxee
Anyone who has amassed a large library of music, movies, and television shows on a combination of CDs, DVDs, and hard drives has at some point come to the realization that it’s very difficult to keep track of all of it. Fortunately, there are two fantastic (and essentially free) ways to not only organize all of your media, but also access it from any networked location in your house…
XBMC and Boxee
While there are quite a lot of media center “solutions” out there, including Microsoft’s “Media Center” version of Windows, Apple’s AppleTV/Front Row software, and the XBox 360, none give you the flexibility of XBMC and Boxee. These two free, open-source pieces of software can allow you to access not only your own digital content from any device running them, but also streaming content online.
In fact, there are so many features for each, I couldn’t possibly discuss them all here without this post turning into an essay, so I’ll just highlight a few of my favorites below.
XBMC
XBMC got its name from its beginnings as the XBox Media Center. That is, it was an open-source project that transformed the original XBox into a networked media center, allowing users to watch movies, listen to music, view pictures, check the weather, and still play their XBox games as well. While XBMC has been a fantastic piece of software for several years now, it never had a shot of becoming mainstream due to its difficult installation onto the XBox. Even with many tutorials online, installing XBMC onto an XBox involved a bit of “hacking.” In addition, binaries of XBMC could not legally be distributed due to the proprietary Microsoft libraries needed to compile them.
So if that was the state of XBMC when you last checked it out, now is the time to revisit it.
XBMC has since been ported to nearly every Intel-based platform available, enabling it to run in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and yes, still XBox. The Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X versions are completely free to download and easy to install. No compiling or hacking necessary.
If you have a spare computer that you can hook up to a television, XBMC may be the best interface for you to use to finally enjoy all of your digital content in one place.
Boxee
Notice that I wrote “XBMC may be the best interface for you” above. That’s because of a spin-off project named Boxee.
Watch this video for a summary:
quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.
Boxee takes XBMC’s back-end and turns it in a different direction. It still allows you to enjoy your local digital content but that’s not its main focus. Its intent is to bring the world of online digital media easily to your television where you can sit back and enjoy it as if it were cable. Sites like NBC’s Hulu, CNN, Comedy Central, MTV, and YouTube are no longer locked to your computer screen.
Now, Boxee won’t run on your XBox but it will on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and even a “hacked” AppleTV. Unfortunately, the software is still in the early stages of development, especially for Windows where it is only in an Alpha (very early) private release.
But there is a big future for Boxee. They plan to release a separate set-top box that runs Boxee and license the software to be used in other companies’ set-top boxes.
Unlike Microsoft’s Windows Media Center or Apple’s AppleTV device, XBMC and Boxee aren’t locked in by any particular branding or business plan. They’re constantly changing and being improved upon to allow for maximum flexibility, ultimately giving users the choice of what they want to watch and how they want to watch it, rather than having that choice made for them by big companies.
If you use XBMC, Boxee, or other free media center software, post in the comments!
TweetTUESDAY TECH: Enhance iTunes with AppleScript and Utilities
I spent a couple hours last night happily playing guitar and using my new Guitar Tab Search AppleScripts. So today I decided I should share a few more of the AppleScripts and programs that I use to…
Enhance iTunes
iTunes certainly has plenty of built-in features that make it the best MP3 player around, but it doesn’t quite have all of the features I need to fully make it easy to use. Here is a list of programs and AppleScripts that I use almost daily to make my music listening experience that much more enjoyable.
Note: Everything below is for Mac only.
SizzlingKeys
I very rarely use iTunes directly as a result of having SizzlingKeys. This System Preferences add-on allows you to easily create keyboard shortcuts to all of iTunes basic functions like Play, Pause, Next, Previous, Volume, etc. So when I’m working in PhotoShop and a song comes on that I don’t want to hear, rather than switching over to iTunes to change it, I can just hit a few keys and move on with my work. It’s all fully-customizable:
SizzlingKeys allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to rating songs. I’m guessing that most people reading this never rate their songs, but it’s a great habit to get into as it allows you to create Smart Playlists of only your favorites or, more importantly, eliminate those songs that you never want to hear. Every time a song changes, I simply hit option-command and a number 1-5 to determine the number of stars I want to give a song. I’ve rated most of my music library this way.
Finally, SizzlingKeys also features a small iTunes HUD:
This semi-transparent box features all the basic song information and cover art and can either stay on-screen at all times or pop up for just a few seconds whenever the song changes. It can also be dragged to any spot on your screen.
Obtaining Cover Art
What good is displaying cover art if your music doesn’t have any? Worse yet, do you know if your music files have the art embedded or is your copy of iTunes just storing it locally?
If you’ve bought music from the Amazon MP3 store or iTunes Music Store, you should have high-resolution cover art with every song. However, anyone who has ripped an entire CD collection knows that finding good art is not easy and attaching it to individual MP3 files is even harder.
I tried a number of utilities that claimed to be able to download cover art automatically. Unfortunately, none of them worked well enough to trust. Many albums were misidentified or low-resolution cover art was grabbed. I realized that the only way to properly add cover art to albums was to do it manually.
To help in the tedious process, I used the Amazon Lookup and Search Wikipedia AppleScripts. Between these two sources, I was able to find cover art for nearly every album I owned, resorting to a manual Google Images search only on the rare occasion that both of these failed to find what I was looking for.
In addition, once you have cover art, it’s important to tell iTunes to actually embed the art into each music file. If you don’t, it will simply store the artwork separately on your computer’s hard drive and if you ever transfer your music files to another computer, your artwork won’t necessarily go with it. I use the appropriately named Embed Artwork AppleScript to accomplish this.
Share your iTunes
In the past, the common way to let friends know what you were currently listening to was to update your iChat (or other instant messenger client) status. Today, IMs are hardly used, replaced by Facebook and Twitter. So if you want to tell the world what music you’re listening to, try this:
DOWNLOAD: TwitterTrack
“TwitterTrack” is my version of this AppleScript. The original automatically updates Twitter with whatever you’re playing in iTunes. I find this to be particularly annoying. No one wants to read the title of every single song you listen to. But occasionally, you might want to blast out a quick tweet letting people know what tune you’re jamming to, so TwitterTrack lets you do just that.
You’ll need to set up a special entry in your keychain to securely give the script your Twitter username and password. To do this, run Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access. Select File, New Password Item… and enter “twittertrack” as the name along with your Twitter login information. Don’t worry, none of this information is sent anywhere except Twitter. Upon launching the script the first time, you’ll need to allow access to the keychain.
The best way to activate this script when a song that you want to tweet comes on is to use FastScripts, which I blogged about yesterday.
If you have a favorite iTunes add-on, AppleScript, or program, tell me about it in the comments!
TweetMONDAY MEDIA: iTunes Guitar Tab Search Applescript
Occasionally, I like to sit down in front of my Mac and play guitar along with music playing through iTunes. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to play every song that iTunes’ shuffle decides to pick and I need to find a guitar tab to help me learn. After a couple of hours of failed online searching, I customized my own…
iTunes Guitar Tab Search AppleScript
In looking for a simple AppleScript that would search the web for a guitar tab for whatever song I was currently listening to in iTunes, I first found the OLGA Tabulature Search over at dougscripts.com. Unfortunately, that script hasn’t been updated since 2003 and the On-Line Guitar Archive (OLGA) has been offline for quite some time due to numerous legal issues.
So I decided to revise this script and turn it into:
DOWNLOAD: Guitar Tab Search & Guitar Tab Search Next (ZIP file of two AppleScripts)
“Guitar Tab Search” will take whatever song you’re currently listening to in iTunes (or whatever song is highlighted if no song is playing) and search ultimate-guitar.com for it. It uses that site’s advanced search to limit the results to guitar tabs and chord files only. It also includes both the artist name and song title in the search to eliminate other versions of the song from showing up.
“Guitar Tab Search Next” extends the functionality of “Guitar Tab Search” one step further, automatically telling iTunes to skip to the next song before pulling up the new tab. This script allows you to quickly activate it when you grow tired of playing a song or want to skip one that iTunes selects and just move on to the next one easily.
Making It Even Easier
I quickly realized that I didn’t want to mess around with clicking between iTunes and a web browser just to play a new song and pull up a new tab using the above scripts. To make the whole process even easier, I installed the “lite” (free) version of FastScripts. This menubar extra allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to scripts, letting you launch them from within any program.
And here’s how I set it up:
Now, when I’m sitting in Safari reading a tab and decide that I’m ready for the next song to play, I just hit control-option-command-right arrow to launch “Guitar Tab Search Next”, which tells iTunes to skip to the next track and pulls up the online tab listing for that song. It’s a very simple and quick way to play along with a lot of songs with very little effort. You can customize that keyboard shortcut to anything you want. For one-handed use, I recommend option-command-z or option-command-/
The Fine Print
Since this solution utilizes AppleScript, you must be on a Mac to use it. Sorry Windows users.
This particular script set also is specific to using Safari to pull up the tabs. I would have used Firefox, but its AppleScript support is poor and it would open a new window every time the script ran rather than just opening it in the existing window/tab like Safari does. If anyone knows a workaround to this, let me know and I’ll release a Firefox version of the script as well.
Finally, ultimate-guitar.com features quite a few Flash advertisements on every page, so loading times can be a little slow. Fortunately, there is a way around that (though I don’t encourage using it regularly as blocking ads removes many sites’ only revenue source, including this blog).
Guitarists out there: Let me know if you find this script useful by posting in the comments.
TweetWEDNESDAY WHINE: Those Annoying ‘Kidz Bop’ Albums & Videos
I’ll admit I’m a bit of a music snob. Nearly all popular music does not appeal to my ears. However, I can still understand why pop music is loved by many. But when children are grouped together to cover contemporary music for the sake of relating it to a younger generation (and supposedly cleaning it up), that’s when I cringe. Unfortunately, that act has happened 15 times in the form of…
Kiz Bop Music
Before I get into it, here’s a sample:
Would you believe that’s only the latest installment of 15 Kiz Bop albums (in addition to several other themed collections)?
You might be asking: ”What’s so bad about children singing popular songs?” Plenty.
This week, I’ll go for a three-pronged attack:
1. What’s wrong with the original songs?
Covers of songs are fine, and sometimes better than the originals, when actual musicians are performing them. Do we need to “dumb” these songs down for children by having kids sing them instead of real artists?
There is already enough wrong with the over-commercialized world of music today. Vocals from artists who have little talent are digitally enhanced so they are at least in tune. Real instruments are replaced by samples and loops. Now we expect children to properly appreciate music by listening to other kids sing?
Now, I realize that many would say that much of today’s popular music contains lyrics that are not appropriate for children to hear. I don’t necessarily see that as true, as I was listening to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic when I was only 11 years old. I knew enough not to repeat its many swear words in public. Why are today’s children being babied so much?
But despite the fact that Kidz Bop changes some of the lyrics to its songs to make them more wholesome, they are still fooling parents with these supposedly child-friendly albums. Which brings me to…
2. Inappropriate Lyrics
Again, I’m not fond of the act of censoring any songs for childrens’ sake. But, if it’s going to happen, at least do it right. Don’t trick parents into thinking that the song selection is carefully chosen and lyrics are carefully altered (as they’ve stated here) to make the songs appropriate for kids. Kidz Bop certainly claims to be doing this.
An example: “Disturbia” by Rihanna
This song was featured in the above commercial as a selling point for the album. The song, among other things, describes a mental place in which one is confused about life. I could see that relating to children. But, the song does contain this lyric:
Faded pictures on the wall, it’s like they talking to me
Disconnecting on calls, the phone don’t even ring
I gotta get out or figure this sh** out
It’s too close for comfort, oh
I’m not a parent, but I’ll guess that most parents who are concerned enough about music content to buy their kids a Kidz Bop album wouldn’t want this lyric sounding out in their house. Of course, Kidz Bop censors the lyric… but does anyone really think kids aren’t going to want to seek out the original after hearing the butchered version on the Kidz Bop CD? And won’t they hear the original lyric then? And potentially want to sing along with it?
If you don’t think this would happen, check this out. Kidz Bop encourages children to upload videos of themselves singing to their Web site, like a mini-YouTube. In this case, young Paige decided to sing along with the original Rihanna version of the song. It turns out it was the radio edit, where the swear word is muted, but you certainly still get the idea.
This is just one of many, many, many examples of songs that make their way onto Kidz Bop that will likely be seen as inappropriate for children by the very parents that hope to buy a CD that contains nothing but appropriate material. Nice work, Kidz Bop!
For some real humor on this subject, don’t miss this Kidz Bop parody video.
3. Annoyance Factor
This is the most petty of my three complaints, but I’m sticking to it. These songs sung by children are simply annoying. Couldn’t Kidz Bop have gotten some individual, talented kids to sing them rather than just lumping a bunch of kids together and having them all sing simultaneously?
Despite the fact that I think most of the songs featured on Kidz Bop are not good in their original form, they’re a thousand times worse when the backing tracks are re-synthesized and the vocals replaced with sub-par singing from children. It all just seems like an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of ‘tweens’ uploading videos to YouTube of themselves dancing around to various songs. Oh wait, that’s exactly what it is.
A Closing Message to Parents
Don’t buy this garbage. Subjecting your kids to listening to poorly-covered pop songs sung by children is not the way to get them to appreciate music. There is absolutely nothing artistic about Kidz Bop.
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