It's About Time

1. To get my ass back to the CD store and scrape this baby off the bottom of the $2.99 bin! Extra copy = big $$$$.

Tommy2:

It appears as if the debut release by The Jonas Brothers has become a collector’s item. Within months of its release, Sony lost interest and discontinued manufacturing copies of the CD. The result? They’re almost all gone. At Amazon, there are few to be had and the going price for the CD at their music store is $87.98!

2. To finish my column. Gotta do the final edit. It's about irony (sort of).

3. To revisit this Ola Stockfelt essay that I spent WAY too much time trying to incorporate until I realized that I was essentially disagreeing with almost all of it. Stockfelt uses the phrase "adequate listening" to discuss a sort of communication between composer/musician/programmer and listener, but he doesn't really address between listener and other listener. So the theory doesn't really stick in any situation that could possibly apply in real life, and the problem ends up being that he's imagining a world in which we have a relationship to a piece of music and can somehow analyze this relationship without ever coming into contact with other people in the universe -- his "adequacy" only relates to things like immediate listening conditions, parameters of genre. On this point he unwisely uses the word "mastering" to describe how we "develop" as listeners to accomodate ourselves "adequately" to the parameters genre, basically ignoring the fact that genres are constructed loosely by a set of agreed upon terms, can change as the terms change, and can't exist as a set of strict aesthetic parameters -- at least, if they do exist as this, they probably aren't worth talking about, e.g. you don't waste much time arguing or thinking about whether or not a bossa nova beat SHOULD characterize bossa nova music -- it just does. But you might argue whether or not when, say, Shakira or Beyonce or Amy Diamond uses a bossa nova beat it counts as "bossa nova." According to set parameters of genre (the beat), of course it does, according to trickier and more productive conversationwise parameters, maybe so, maybe not. So that annoyed me a little.

4. Uh, Miranda Lambert immediately = #1 of the year so far, no contest. Modest Mouse makes a shocking initial leap to somewhere around #5. Still not feeling Fall Out Boy at all. Dan Deacon annoyed the SHIT outta me. Jordan Pruitt was OK. Sophie Ellis Bextor gave me a glorious hookful headache, but a headache's a headache.