Click album covers for more info.

Inspired by Nick Carr, I decided to compile a list of my favorite albums for each year of my life. The constraints are: only one album per year and no repeated artists. To make the task a bit easier, I also decided to restrict the list to albums I own, and to only consider studio albums: no compilations, live album, or DJ mixes.

Exercises like this are kind of pointless, but I found it interesting nonetheless. First of all, it drives home how unevenly distributed over time good music is. For some years, like 1981, I had a hard time recalling any albums I liked. Other years like 1984, or periods like 1991-1994 (high school!) made for some difficult choices. Purple Rain, The Pod, and Buhloone Mindstate should really be on this list, as should The Chronic.

The other interesting aspect of doing this is seeing at which point my musical taste formed: it isn’t until 1988 that this list reflects what I was actually listening to at the time (no, my parents didn’t play The Modern Lovers and Lust for Life for me in my crib). From that point on, my tastes have gone through various phases and changes (I like jazz a lot more now than I did back then), but I still like now what I liked then.

Finally, it makes me realize how the album is linked to certain genres and modes of consuming music. I had a hard time recalling albums from 1996-1998, because I was DJing at that time and mostly buying and listening to music in the form of 12-inch singles and DJ mixes. And for the last few years as well, a disproportionate amount of the music I listen to is singles downloaded from MP3 blogs and mixes posted to the web. In fact, I haven’t bought any 2008 studio albums yet, but decided to include I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind II because I love Killer Mike and it’s his best album. Which isn’t to say that I believe that the natural unit of music is the track. It’s just that the web allows me to more easily dig for forgotten older stuff, and so most of the albums I’m buying recently are not current releases but older things like Desire Develops an Edge, Joggers & Smoggers and Idiot O’Clock. It’s a great time to be a music maniac…

I’m having trouble getting worked up about the imminent death of net radio. I’m a pretty huge music fan. I own around 1000 CDs, about as many vinyl LPs and 12″s, and I currently have over 50 GB of music in my iTunes. And of course I’m an obsessively heavy net user. But my cumulative lifetime total time spent listening to streaming net radio is probably under 2 hours. If it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t notice and I wouldn’t care.

Why is this? Part of it is I like to choose my own playlists. But I love broadcast radio. In high school I was a big fan of WREK and Album 88, and in college I was a DJ at KZSU. I like some commercial radio too, especially in places like Atlanta and Oakland where you can still hear sick DJing between the annoying commercials. But part of the appeal of broadcast radio is the local flavor, something lost completely in the move to the net. Net radio is the worst of both worlds: the impersonality that comes with global reach plus the loss of choice over what to listen to next inherent to the radio format.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t dig net music. Most of that 50 GB mentioned above has been harvested from MP3 blogs, which have morphed over the last few years from fanboys posting hot singles to an incredibly diverse array of musical flavor. MP3 blogs provide me with everything from super-eclectic mixes to worldwide beat culture to obscure and forgotten experiments to out jazz to hip hop tapes. As far as I’m concerned, the state of music on the net has never been better.

So farewell net radio, I hardly knew ye.

A beautiful holiday weekend needs rock of the purest kind.

The little sister headbanging and playing air guitar in the front is the best. Lesser bands would have kicked her out of the room, claiming rock as older brother territory. The Gauchos knew better.

The New York Times is reporting that Atlanta mixtape king DJ Drama has been arrested by jackbooted RIAA thugs. Ridiculous. No hip-hop artist releases an album these days without doing a DJ Drama mixtape first–the artists know that it’s all about iTunes downloads, ringtones and uses in advertising these days, and the best way to get those is with a hot mixtape. They could care less about the cut into album sales, especially since the people who buy mixtapes usually don’t buy albums anyway–those are for the suckers at Walmart. So what the hell is going on here? Is it that the record companies are pissed that the artists are going behind their backs to do mixtapes (most of Drama’s tapes feature the artists themselves doing cameos, shoutouts, freestyles, etc)? In that case, this is as clear a message to the artists as can be: leave your label and go independent because your label clearly doesn’t have your best interests in mind.

If you want to sample some of Drama’s handiwork, I recommend any of the tapes he’s done with Jeezy, and Welcome to the ATL, but it’s all good, really.

On a related note: anyone out there seen this movie yet?

Update: for those of you unclear on the whole mixtape concept, Jay Smooth does an excellent job of breaking it down:

Click To Play

My La La want list:

Currently awaiting Rid of Me.

Last weekend Yuki and I heard Thomas Brinkmann spin a set of his custom remixes of Detroit techno at Recombinant Media Labs. He played a bunch of Jay Denham, Shake, and Carl Craig among others. Here’s a little taste:

This Friday we’re going back to hear Thomas Köner.

Update (April 23, 2006): This weekend La La pushed a new catalog which considerably improves the metadata situation. There is room for improvement (still no Spoombung or Sarin Israel Nes Ziona), but I’m far happier than before.

I’ve been using La La a lot lately. La La is a great, simple idea: create a CD bartering marketplace, exploiting the web as an extremely efficient machine for matching those who want with those who have, and borrowing a streamlined postal delivery mechanism from NetFlix. All you really need is a database full of CD catalog metadata, a neato AJAXified interface, and a bunch of preprinted CD mailing cases, and you can sit back and let the $1.50 per trade pour in.

But that CD catalog metadata had better be good. Every CD missing from it is a trade that will never happen. Every CD filed under the wrong artist is a trade that will never happen. Every box set listed as a single CD, every truncated album title… you get the idea. Even incorrect cover art could lead to confusion and inhibit trading. Bad metadata is especially destructive for the long tail trades–if only one person out there in La La land has the CD I want, and they have trouble finding a way to list their CD because it’s listed in La La’s catalog with the wrong info… well, it’s goodbye La La and back to Amoeba for me.

Unfortunately for La La, their metadata sucks. They have all the problems listed above and more. Missing CDs I could possibly forgive–maybe they’re due to legal doubts around imports–but mispellings, uncorrelated artist name variations, and truncated album titles I can’t. My advice to anyone thinking of starting a similar venture: don’t try to build your own metadata catalog, and don’t buy one from some crappy closed metadata vendor. Closed vendors can’t scale to the long tail. You need metadata from an open system: in the case of music, something like MusicBrainz or Discogs (I think Discogs is slightly better). The closed metadata company’s drones won’t get around to cataloging the latest Spoombung album or a limited edition Muslimgauze CD. Hardcore music fans, on the other hand, will–especially if it means they’ll be able to trade them.

Services like La La exist by virtue of their metadata. If they aren’t careful, they’ll cease to exist because of their metadata too.

The iTunes Signature Maker scans your iTunes library and mashes up bits of your favorite songs to create a unique audio representation of your identity. This is a great idea–I’d much rather have cool aural signature than a visual one. The MySpace kids will be all over this.

my audio avatar

Now how about a “video signature” of all the porn news I watch?

Kent Bye says, “Playlists are to Music as Edit Decision Lists are to Film.” Yep, exactly.