Music

Music is a necessity. Though I focus mostly on alternative/industrial/EBM/electronic styles, my tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging.

iTMS updates

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Along with all the other introductions from this morning’s keynote, the iTunes Music Store got a lot of new goodies. Somewhere around 1000 more albums have been added to the classical genre (iTMS link), they’re listing the top 100 downloaded tracks (iTMS link) of 2003, and — most interesting to me of all of these — they’ve partnered with Billboard to present the top 100 songs of 1946-2003 (iTMS link)!

Out of curiosity, I looked up the Billboard Top 100 for 1991, the year I graduated High School…

All of the following links are iTMS links, which require iTunes to be installed on your computer. Bolded items I actually have in my music collection. Apparently they don’t have all of the top 100, as there are only 68 songs listed here — I wonder who they’re missing?

  1. Bryan Adams: (Everything I Do) I Do it For You
  2. Color Me Badd: I Wanna Sex You Up
  3. C&C Music Factory: Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)
  4. EMF: Unbelievable
  5. Extreme: More Than Words
  6. Hi-Five: I Like the Way
  7. Surface: The First Time
  8. Amy Grant: Baby Baby
  9. Boyz II Men: Motownphilly
  10. Damn Yankees: High Enough
  11. Bette Midler: From a Distance
  12. Color Me Badd: I Adore Mi Amor
  13. Mariah Carey: Emotions
  14. Roxette: Joyride
  15. Karyn White: Romantic
  16. Mariah Carey: I Don’t Wanna Cry
  17. Wilson Phillips: You’re In Love
  18. Amy Grant: Every Heartbeat
  19. Ralph Tresvant: Sensitivity
  20. Londonbeat: I’ve Been Thinking About You
  21. R.E.M.: Losing My Religion
  22. Gloria Estefan: Coming Out of the Dark
  23. C&C Music Factory: Here We Go, Let’s Rock and Roll
  24. Celine Dion: Where Does My Heart Beat Now
  25. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince: Summertime
  26. Scorpions: Wind of Change
  27. FireHouse: Love of a Lifetime
  28. Tracie Spencer: This House
  29. Extreme: Hole Hearted
  30. Luther Vandross: Power of Love/Love Power
  31. Wilson Phillips: Impulsive
  32. Rod Stewart: Rhythm of My Heart
  33. C&C Music Factory: Things That Make You Go Hmmm…
  34. The Divinyls: I Touch Myself
  35. DNA/Suzanne Vega: Tom’s Diner
  36. Bonnie Raitt: Something to Talk About
  37. Nelson: After the Rain
  38. Vanilla Ice: Play That Funky Music
  39. Bryan Adams: Can’t Stop This Thing We Started
  40. Hi-Five: I Can’t Wait Another Minute
  41. The KLF: 3 A.M. Eternal
  42. Enigma: Sadeness, Part I
  43. LL Cool J: Around the Way Girl
  44. Prince: Cream
  45. Heavy D and The Boyz: Now That We Found Love
  46. Styx: Show Me the Way
  47. Mariah Carey: Love Takes Time
  48. Rick Astley: Cry For Help
  49. UB40: Here I Am (Come and Take Me)
  50. Tesla: Signs (Live)
  51. Cathy Dennis: Too Many Walls
  52. Seal: Crazy
  53. Keith Sweat: I’ll Give All My Love to You (Live)
  54. Michael W. Smith: Place in This World
  55. Poison: Something to Believe In
  56. Chris Isaak: Wicked Game
  57. Oleta Adams: Get Here
  58. Tevin Campbell: Round and Round
  59. Queensrÿche: Silent Lucidity
  60. Aaron Neville: Everybody Plays the Fool
  61. Cathy Dennis: Just Another Dream
  62. INXS: Disappear
  63. Sting: All This Time
  64. George Michael: Freedom
  65. Warrant: I Saw Red
  66. Winger: Miles Away
  67. Rod Stewart: The Motown Song
  68. R.E.M.: Shiny Happy People

I used to be a DJ / Gig’s Music Theater

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Some of my long-time readers (and family and friends) will already know that prior to moving down to Seattle, I spent around eight years of my time in Anchorage DJ’ing for a number of dance clubs. From City Lights, to The Lost Abbey, to Gig’s Music Theater, to The Eclipse, and finally to Studio 99, I spun practically every possible genre — alternative, industrial, punk, goth, 80’s retro, new wave, disco, swing, techno, house, trance, and even (though I grumbled a lot) the occasional top-40 and R&B — and had an absolute blast doing it.

I finally got tired of letting my old domain sit inactive after moving my weblog to TypePad, and have resurrected djwudi.com as a monument (however small) to my years as a club DJ. In addition to some oddly third-person ramblings about my career, there are no less than (though no more than) eleven different mix sessons posted and available for either download or streaming audio listening. Ten of them are even worth listening to — the eleventh (Difficult Listening Hour 03) has some truly horrendous trainwrecking going on, and I only leave it posted out of my anal-retentive need for a complete set.

Anyway, feel free to stop by, download or stream the mixes that are there, and (hopefully) enjoy! Who knows — I may not have a club gig anymore, but since I’ve still got my equipment and a ton of music, there’s always a slim chance that there may be more in the future…

As an added bonus, I’ve resurrected the last archived version of the Gig’s Music Theater website that I maintained for the club. This archive dates from March 30, 1998, and serves both as a nostalgic remembrance of one of the best all-ages clubs in Anchorage’s history, and as a monument to my web design and coding skills at the time. ;) Hopefully some of Gig’s old patrons might get a kick out of this (especially the pictures in the ‘Scene’ section)! I also have an archive of old flyers for Gig’s that I made, though I’ve mentioned those before.

Sympathy for the Devil remixes

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Apparently the Rolling Stones just released a new CD of remixes of Sympathy for the Devil. For me, this is definitely a must-get (and thanks to the beauty of Amazon and credit cards, should be in my happy little hands in a few days).

Sympathy for the Devil has been one of my favorite songs for years, and I’ve collected quite a few versions over the years. I’m sure I don’t have all of the various versions out there yet, but so far I’ve managed to dig up:

  • The Rolling Stones, from Beggars Banquet: The original.
  • Jane’s Addiction, from Jane’s Addiction: just titled “Sympathy” here, Perry and the boys deliver a blistering live cover during one of their early concerts. One of my favorite versions.
  • Guns and Roses, from the Interview with the Vampire soundtrack: A solid but fairly straightforward cover, nothing terribly fancy.
  • Skrew, from Shut Up Kitty: A rather noisy, almost unrecognizable industrial cover. Not at all one of the best, but it comes from a fun album of industrial covers of old songs that is pretty solid overall (but more notable for KMFDM’s cover of U2’s “Mysterious Ways” and Blue Eyed Christ’s cover of Animotion’s “Obsession”, to tell the truth).
  • Laibach, from Sympathy for the Devil: German industrial band Laibach’s single contains no less than seven different mixes of their cover, ranging from dark-and-gloomy brooding to bright-and-bouncy dancefloor versions which were popular when I was DJ’ing back at Gig’s.

I think that those are all the versions I have now, at least until this new disc appears on my doorstep (though as I’m still working my way through my CD collection, there may be one or two more that I’ve forgotten). According to Flocculent, the new versions aren’t bad at all, either.

“Pleased to meet you…won’t you guess my name…”

The miracles of Christmas

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The real miracles of Christmas, according to me:

Miracle One: In thirty years of Christmas seasons, to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen either It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Never. Not once. I haven’t gone out of my way to avoid seeing them, but I certainly haven’t gone out of my way to attempt to see them, either. For one reason or another, it just hasn’t happened.

Miracle Two: That despite having no less than three different versions of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” programmed into the in-store Muzak at work, resulting in my having to listen to that insipid song no less than 240 times over the past month (three times in a two-hour repeating block of music over eight hours, twelve times a day, 40 times a week, 240 times since Thanksgiving), not to mention being treated to innumerable different versions of every other Christmas song ever recorded every time I stepped out of the house since Thanksgiving, I still managed not to devolve into a gibbering psychopath and start randomly destroying speakers, PA systems, stereos, and random carolers whenever I passed them.

It was really, really, really tempting, though.

Famous Faces

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(Just after a customer picks up a job…)

“That guy looked familiar.”

“Yeah, I had the same thought.”

“I think he was in a band.”

“…wasn’t everyone in Seattle in a band at some point?”

“Good point.”

(A few minutes later…)

“Ha! I was right!”

“Really?”

“Yup — he was in the Murder City Devils.”

“Good eye.”

M/A/R/R/S: Pump Up the Volume

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Pump up the volume, pump up the volume, pump up the volume, dance! Dance!

This was the first single I ever bought. I had no idea what a ‘single’ was until that point, and didn’t even realize I was buying one until I got home. I’d just heard the song on the radio and seen the video on Friday Night Videos, saw the cassette while out shopping, and bought it. I was really confused when I got home and the ‘album’ I’d just purchased had four versions of the same song in a row, plus one other song, and the same thing was repeated on side two. I thought it was a mistake of some sort.

Put the needle on the record…put the needle on the record…put the needle on the record, put the needle on the record, put the needle on the record when the jump beats go like this!

Another star for Clark

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Just not another star on his collar. Rather, the four-star General’s newest star is none other than Madonna, who expressed her support for Clark’s campaign in a CNN interview.

“I think he has a good handle on foreign policy, I think he’s good with people, and I think he has a heart and a consciousness,” pop singer Madonna said. “He’s interested in spirituality — I mean, those things mean a lot to me.”

I guess everyone else just better throw in the towel, huh? It’s all over now!

(Naaah. I’ll stick with Dean.)

(via Don Nunn)

Billy Idol’s ‘Cyberpunk’

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The future has imploded into the present. With no nuclear war, the new battlefields are people’s minds and souls. Megacorporations are the new government. The computer generated info-domains are the new frontiers. Though there is better living through science and chemistry, we are all becoming cyborgs.

The computer is the new “cool tool,” and though we say “all information should be free,” it is not. Information is power and currency in the virtual world we inhabit, so mistrust authority.

Cyberpunks are the true rebels. Cyberculture is coming in under the radar of ordinary society. An unholy alliance of the tech world, and the world of organized dissent.

Welcome to the cybercorporation.

Cyberpunks.

1993. Bill Clinton is beginning his presidency. The World Trade Center suffers its first terrorist attack. David Koresh and his followers die in Waco, Texas during a raid by ATF agents. Saddam Hussein orders the assassination of George Herbert Walker Bush. Cruise missiles repeatedly hammer Baghdad during the Iraq disarmament crisis.

Intel ships the first Pentium chips. A bug in a posting program sends a single message to 200 Usenet groups simultaneously, and the term “spam” is coined. The ‘net is still in its infancy, existing primarily through the green and amber glows of text-based computer terminals, accessible only through arcane Unix commands typed into keyboards by a legion of geeks (before the term “geek” gained street cred). Usenet denizens dreading the rush of “newbies” each September as college campuses opened and allowed new students onto the ‘net suddenly face the “September that never ended” when AOL opens Usenet access to its subscribers.

And Billy Idol discovers the power of computers, harnessing the power of Macintosh-based small-studio recording to produce his “Cyberpunk” album.

Cyberpunk

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0 is also a number

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Does anyone know how to access and rip the hidden tracks on the X-Files Songs in the Key of X soundtrack CD on a Mac?

For those who don’t know, the CD (a collection of music featured in the X-Files television show) contains a liner note that says, “Nick Cave and the Dirty Three would like you to know that ‘0’ is also a number.” When you put the CD in a CD player and, rather than hitting ‘Play’, you hit the ‘Rewind’ button (not the ‘Skip Back’ button), you can rewind to the -9:15 mark and find two hidden tracks by Nick Cave and the Dirty Three. The first is “Time Iesum Transeuntem et non Reverendem” (Dread the Passage of Jesus for He Will Not Return), and the second is a cover of the X-Files theme.

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t seem to want to scan backwards past the 0:00 mark! I can’t scan backwards, nor can I put a negative value into the ‘Start Time’ option. I looked at the audio file that the Finder displays, but it only reads as 3:25, so it looks like the Finder isn’t reading the extra information either. I even checked it on my “normal” CD player (as it has an optical audio out that I could plug into my G5), but it’s new enough that it isn’t reading the extra bits either.

Has anyone found a way to pull the hidden information off on a Mac? I’d love to know (or, alternately, if anyone happens to have a 128kbps AAC rip of the two tracks, that’d be nice too…)!