Last.fm: quantifying my media consumption

Using my laptop's iTunes, I've listened to 1,331 songs by The Hold Steady. I've listened to 59 songs by Murs in the last seven days. In the past three months I've listened to 79 songs by Belle and Sebastian. In the past year, I've listened to the Guided By Voices record Alien Lanes, more than any other album.

I know all of this because, since April 29, 2009 I've been using the music tracking website Last.fm, and I've been loving it. iTunes play-counts are nice, but a new computer, or a hard-drive crash can erase those fragile records. Last.fm records every song as you are playing it on your computer, it records these plays, and allow you to statistically analyze your listening habits in a number of ways. My obsession with Last.fm reminds me of the baseball debate between sabermetrics (advanced statistical analysis of players), and a veteran manager's gut-feeling assessment of his lineup. How can I love band A more than band B when band B has twice as many plays in my last.fm library. Sometimes tracking your play counts can become embarrassingly addictive, and it's sometimes difficult not to let your Last.fm influence your listening habits (I should listen to two more songs by Mos Def, because that will get me to 200 plays).

List of the Day: 7 Hip-Hop Records to Look Forward To (sorting through the blog hype)

There is more music readily available these days than you could possibly listen to. The internet had forever changed the music industry and this change is especially evident in the hip-hop community. Rap has become the first genre of music to embrace a model of music distribution that provides a large quantity of free or cheap music to fans (in the form of mixtapes). As a result of this constant stream of affordable entertainment, keeping tabs on the genre can be almost overwhelming. So I hope this post can serve as a guide to focus your fanship on the best upcoming hip-hop records that are slated for release before the end of the year.

There has already been a lot of great rap music released in 2011. Watch The Throne is already a classic, Curren$y continued to release a steady stream of consistently impressive music, and Big K.R.I.T. is keeping the south alive with records like The Return of 4Eva. However a lot of the best music of the year is still to come:

7) Childish Gambino -- Camp
The only reason that this is ranked in the seventh spot is that there has not been a concrete release date attached it as of yet. I can't wait to hear a solid studio album out of Mr. Glover. The highlights of is EP record continue to blow my mind.


6) The Wonder Years -- 9th Wonder (Sept. 27)
The legen- (wait for it) -dary underground producer looks to continue his reign of dominance with his latest project that is set to feature former collaborators like Murs and Phonte (of Little Brother), legends like Raekwon and Erykah Badu, and young talents like Kendrick Lamar and Tanya Morgan.

5) Radioactive -- Yelawolf (Oct. 25)
Yelawolf has an unquestionable unique flow and above all else is madly in love with hip-hop (listen to his interviews). It remains to be seen whether is major label debut will be dumbed and watered-down for a mainstream audience or if he will stick to the aesthetics of his raw mixtapes.

4) Cole World: The Sideline Story -- J. Cole (Sept. 27)
J. Cole is one of the hyped MC's of the 21st century, this will be his chance to prove himself, and if his Jay-Z collaboration is any indication, this record should be solid.

3) Ambition -- Wale (Nov. 1)
I'm a little worried about Wale, he started off as a creative and socially conscious poet, and now he's signed to Rick Ross' MMG label and his rapping about women a cash a lot more. This is not a knock on Ross, he's justifiably dominated hip-hop radio all year, but he doesn't make timeless music. Wale has the potential to be one of the best lyricists alive, but it's hard to do that when you're rapping over Lex Luger sound-alike beats.

2)  Take Care -- Drake (Oct. 4)
Drake is setting himself up to move up to a whole new level with this record. 40's smoked out and faded beats are better than ever, and Drake sounds angry and hungry. Headlines is one of the hottest songs of the year and if you believe Drake, it's not even one of the strongest tracks on the record.

1) Love and Rockets Vol. 1: The Transformation -- Murs and Ski Beatz (Oct. 11)
I threw the wild artwork for this project at the start of this post. While the lyrical quality of Ski's second Karate School project may have fallen slightly, his instrumentals were arguably improved. Hopefully Ski can replicate what he did for Curren$y's career with underground veteran Murs.

Moment of Clarity

In my Media Theory class, we've been talking a lot about the distinction between art and entertainment. One proposed way to differentiate, was that art is something that takes effort to absorb, while entertainment is something you can get lost in without effort. Personally, I don't think that the difference is that easy to define, in fact in many cases I don't think there is a difference. To make something that successfully captivates and entertains an audience requires a great deal of artistry.

Another topic we touched on in the course was the idea that a lot of art is dumbed down so that it can be more easily understood and accepted as entertainment.

Jay-Z immediately jumped to mind as an artist who claims to dumb down some of his music, in order to connect with more people and to also sell more records. And I feel that to be able to be in such control of your abilities, altering the lyrical complexity of your work while maintaining the quality of that work, demonstrates tremendous artistic talent.

In his song Moment of Clarity, Jay-Z said, "If skills sold/Truth be told/I'd probably be/Lyrically/Talib Kweli/Truthfully/I wanna rhyme like Common Sense/(But I did five Mil)/I ain't been rhyming like Common since."

Here is is explaining that he would prefer to rap like Common or Talib Kweli, both of whom are renowned for their lyricism, but that lyricism doesn't sell records. On a number of songs over his career, Jay-Z has indeed displayed that when he wants to be, he is one of the best technical rappers alive. However when it comes to his singles he dumbs down his high art for the sake of the masses.

Morrissey, Kanye and the Media

This is a column that I wrote for Hope College's student newspaper The Anchor, it deals with the idea of following an individual's life as a form of entertainment:

Steven Patrick Morrissey was the lead singer of The Smiths and along with Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce, wrote and performed some of the finest songs that have ever existed. While The Smiths are no longer together and touring, Morrissey is still making music and touring the world. But the more I hear about Morrissey, the less I want to pay money to see him preform. He has described Chinese people as a “subspecies,” and after a mass murderer killed 77 people in Norway, he said that the violence was “nothing compared to what happens in McDonald's and K.F.C. every day.”

But should what Morrissey thinks or says influence what I think of his music? I've often heard the argument, and previously used the argument myself, that the art a person produces should always be evaluated on its own, that even horrible people can make beautiful art. The prototypical example of this being Michael Jackson and the controversy and allegations that surrounded him during the later part of his career.

However, I've recently come to the conclusion that there is no universal answer to the question of separating an artist's actions from that artist's creation. I now believe that it's a personal decision, and how you feel as an individual is the only evaluation that matters. If you knew someone who was killed in the massacre in Norway, it's not artistically close-minded of you to choose to never listen to Morrissey just because of what he said. Art is successful when it evokes certain emotions, that's how it connects to an audience, and when you have to shut off or ignore your own natural emotions to connect to a piece of art, I can't imagine that the net result is always positive one. Believe me, this is personally an extreme philosophical jump to make. I hate subjectivity. I don't even believe in subjectivity in sports, or when it comes to the quality of the music I like. If you don't think the Tigers are the greatest franchise in baseball, or if you dislike my favorite music. I think that you're wrong. I have never enjoyed a movie that has had an ambiguous ending (I HATED Inception).

Cramming for a Concert (I've returned to posting)

Kyp Malone

I've returned to writing here which is something I've been meaning to do for a while. I should write with more consistency here now that I have a motivation: I'm doing it for a grade. This may sound a little depressing but it's actually kind of cool, but I don't think it will in any way ruin the fun of writing about music, if anything it makes me feel like I'm actually being productive while maintaining this blog.

But on to the music:

This Friday I will finally see TV on the Radio, one of my favorite bands of all time. A band that has been my favorite at different points in time. However I haven't listened to them since April. I was in Detroit on April 20, incredibly excited to see the show. When I arrived at the venue with my now fiancee, we paid for parking and walked up to the door (where there was strangely no line). A sign very directly stated that the show had been canceled. I rang the doorbell, and a man came to the door and told me that the band arrived in Detroit but they had to cancel the show for personal reasons. I found out later that night that the band's bassist, Gerald Smith had died of cancer, he had not been touring with the group, and his friends canceled a handful of tour dates so that they could mourn their former band-mate.

I don't know why I stopped listening to the band after that. I listened to a lot of hip-hop over the summer and TV on the Radio didn't seem to mesh with that particular musical mood. My iTunes also emptied itself of music this summer and I was too busy to reorganize it for a while. I also think that I was so looking forward to seeing TV on the Radio, that hearing their music in any context other than a live show might seem like a letdown to some extent.