American Mozart
By David Samuels
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/american-mozart/8931/?single_page=true
Intense, emotional, and frequently out of control, the hip-hop superstar Kanye West allowed his antics to turn him into a national joke and to earn him the criticism of two American presidents. Would a massive concert tour with his friend and rival Jay-Z offer the troubled rapper a taste of redemption—or disaster?
Whatever you think of the many controversies he has ignited, you must admit that Kanye West is at least some kind of musical genius, ranking among the top five producers and the top five rappers of the past decade. (His singing, by contrast, is kind of a joke.) Every one of his five solo albums has gone platinum, and he has sold 30 million digital downloads of his songs, to become one of the most downloaded musical artists of all time. He has won 18 Grammys—the most of any artist in the past 10 years—while serving as a backpack-wearing icon of black nerd chic. Kanye’s power resides in his wild creativity and expressiveness, his mastery of form, and his deep and uncompromising attachment to a self-made aesthetic that he expresses through means that are entirely of the moment: rap music, digital downloads, fashion, Twitter, blogs, live streaming video. He is the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music, intent on using his creative and emotional gifts to express the heartbreaks and fantasies of his audience.
In addition, though, Kanye West is, according to the president of the United States—the first black president of the United States—a “jackass,” a narcissistic monster who tore a massive hole of self-regard in the American cultural quilt.
Worse even than the president’s epithet, which he first offered on September 14, 2009, is the near-universality of his verdict, which has been echoed for years on talk shows and gossip sites across America. Most painful of all, perhaps, was the classic “Fish Sticks” episode of South Park, which portrayed Kanye as a designer shades–wearing egomaniac who is so humorless and devoid of self-awareness that he can’t comprehend a simple joke about fish sticks. Being represented as the most humor-impaired man in America by the South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker may have actually hurt more than what the president said.
DJ Spooky: Kino-Glaz / Kino-Pravda
Paul D. Miller, более известный как DJ Spooky, выпуском своей медиа-работы “Secret Song” отмел все обвинения андерграунд хип-хопа в цикличном вращении вокруг “guns, bitches & bling” и перевел акценты в сторону советского модернизма и документалистики.
Prime reason to hate modern music
Тема доклада – видеоклип Brokencyde – Freaxx.
Здесь ведь, наверное, бывают люди, которые музыку или любят или понимают.
Вопрос к тем, кто понимает – определения стиля как “emo growling hipster trash weird pop” достаточно?
Вопрос к тем, кто любит – представленный материал достаточен чтобы разлюбить музыку и жизнь?
I’m sooo confused..
BBC Sound of 2010: The longlist
BBC представила список перспективных новых исполнителей на 2010 год
Daisy Dares You (новая итерация софт–гррл)
Delphic (нью нью–вейв, хм)
Devlin (кокни реп, но норзерн)
The Drums (нью–вейв и серф, а голова не будет пухнуть?)
Everything Everything (не слышал)
Giggs (работал с Streets)
Gold Panda (не слышал)
Ellie Goulding (ривайвал 80 аз син фром 2009)
Hurts (“Интерпол” минус гитары)
Joy Orbison (надежда вонки, нид ай сей мор?)
Marina and the Diamonds (не прет, но ротация будет)
Owl City (тут, наверное, пролет)
Rox (голосистый соул/рнб, куда же без него!)
Stornoway (хуйня вроде АнКо, тоталли ретардед энд концепчуал (биографии доставляют, да!))
Two Door Cinema Club (Жиль и Масая, как всегда, держат хипстеров за яйца)
точность их прогнозов на 2009 поражает!
Sound of 2009 top 10: One year on
Феерическая расстановка точек над эмо – Video podcast
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Ляпис Трубецкой – Интервью часть №1
Vodpod videos no longer available.
GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO – BIGGER AND RUSSIANER
more about “GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO – BIGGER A…”
Тым-тым-тым
Это национальная японская песня, в оригинале называется «Zundoko Bushi», перепетая вокально-инструментальным ансамблем “The Drifters”, 1969 год.
Timbaland: Sampling vs Plagirism
Timbaland’s plagiarism controversy occurred in January 2007, when several news sources reported that Timbaland (Timothy Z. Mosley) was alleged to have plagiarized several elements (both motifs and samples) in the song “Do It” on the 2006 album Loose by Nelly Furtado without giving credit or compensation.[1][2][3] The song itself was released as the fifth North American single from Loose on July 24, 2007.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Very short summary: The commercial pop piece “Do It” by Tim “Timbaland” Mosley for Nelly Furtado supposedly has its origins in the tracker module “Acidjazzed Evening” by the Finnish C64/Amiga demoscener Janne “Tempest” Suni. See Wikipedia for a more detailed summary. Or perhaps this YouTube video if you just want to hear the similarities between all the related songs.
Note: This is just a list of links somehow related to the fuss. Some information presented as factual may actually be speculation or just plain wrong (even if repeated in multiple sources).
Тайные значения детских песен
Пусть бегут неуклюже пешеходы по лужам
И вода по асфальту рекой,
Ведь не ясно прохожим в этот день непогожий
От чего я веселый такой.
The Death of High Fidelity
In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever
David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he’s not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.
Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. “They make it loud to get [listeners’] attention,” Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. “I think most everything is mastered a little too loud,” Bendeth says. “The industry decided that it’s a volume contest.”
Producers and engineers call this “the loudness war,” and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn’t the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today’s listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. “With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse,” says Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. “God is in the details. But there are no details anymore.”
The idea that engineers make albums louder might seem strange: Isn’t volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum — and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It’s the same technique used to make television commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners’ attention — but at a price. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums “have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static.”
questionable topic - uneasy matters since 2008 
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