Being a better person blogging

My new years resolution this year was to buy more cd’s. So I’m trying to buy one CD a month for the whole year. It’s not been difficult: My purchases so far this year:

Diary of an American Witch Doctor – Witchdoctor. A dungeon family original drops a hodge podge of new and old stuff.

Hell Hath No Fury – If you find the run of the mill crack rap to be a little too upbeat here’s the cd for you. The Clipse take dark angry desperate music down the neptunes rabbit hole.

Alligator – The National. This is in my top 5 albums of all time.

Sleep Through the Static – Jack Johnson. It’s really hard for Jack Johnson albums to live up to expectations. This one didn’t, then I listened to it more and it’s grown on me.

Juno – I’m terrified Kyra will realize that we can loop the songs and only play “Scrunched up your face and did a dance / Shook a little turd out of the bottom of your pants” over and over and over again and thats all I’ll ever hear again.

Remember That I Love You – Kimya Dawson. Until Kyra put Juno on constant repeat I really liked Kimya. Unfortunately this CD is a not thematically appropriate for little kids. I like it a lot though.

So, being a better person is relative. Keep that in mind. And the only self improvement project I could really get behind involves me getting to buy things. But whatever, I do feel good that all these artists got some money from me (which is my primary buying criteria).

Music Info Porn

Synched the Ipod and here are the stats:

10,460 songs total (A lot of clipping was done this time around: I finally pitched stuff over the side if I’ve gone through this three times now and not liked it).
5,177 of those songs were rated ‘good’ (better than a 2)
4,211 of those songs were 2′s
695 were 3′s
254 were 4′s
17 were 5′s, but that really just means I want to listen to those songs a lot since 5 is a temporary rating.
3,497 were some variation of hip hop.

In other words I like about half the music I have, and about 2/3 of the music I like is rap music.

I'm Done!

I’m listening to the last unrated song on my ipod. Thats 14k songs and I’ve finally rated them all (The last song was Blam Blam by Killer Mike, which two minutes in has yet to actually feature Killer Mike. I’ll hold out before I knock it down to a 1.).

Tonight I’ll synch my ipod and figure out how many songs I rated good. It’s going to be different listening to music just to enjoy it for a while.

Rating Music

A few years ago when I got my first Ipod I went through and rated all of my music, then built playlists to fill the Ipod based on rating and the time since I last heard the song.

And whenever I get new music I go through and rate all the songs so they show up in the right places. Everything works great. But then I got a new computer and I was plotting how to best move those ratings over the new computer when Kim asked: Why not just rerate them? The idea being my taste has probably changed since then so it might be good to listen to everything again and give it a fresh rating.

I am a freak about categorizing and rating, so I liked the idea right away. So I just copied the music over, cleaned some things out (better genre’s in the ID3 tags for one), and loaded them up. Now all I have to do is listen to every song I have and give it a rating 1-5. It’s pretty nice because I’m listening to it in album order so I’m hearing full albums at a time. Right now I’m listening to Johnny Cash live at Folsom Prison.

I did about 150 yesterday. I’ll probably make 150 today too.

I have 14,000 songs in my iTunes library.

So it’s looking like 19 weeks. I’ll finish right before Christmas!

Might not have been the best idea ever.

Boxer

Boxer videos. I’ve had the album for a few weeks and like their two previous albums I’ve found that what I like about it has mutated slowly as I’ve listened to it. The songs I liked at first are still good, but on repeat listens other songs start to outshine them.

Boxer

Finally got the CD last night. Kim was kind enough to let me listen to it while I worked on Secret Project #1. And I’m listening to it right now while I work (I’m not working right now, right now I’m blogging. But I’ll be working in 30 seconds. You get the idea.)

Early review is positive with one song standing out. entangled lyrics and melancholy vocals are apparently a bad thing in some circles, which I guess I can understand, but again: Those are the things I love about their albums.

The National

We went to best buy last night to buy The National’s new album. Unfortunatly there was some kind of shipping mishap so they didn’t have it in yet. This morning I checked amazon to make sure it really came out (it did!) and read this review:

The first thing you’ll notice about this album is how slow it is. Only two songs, “Mistaken for Strangers” and “Apartment Story”, rock in any kind of recognizable way. Others like “Racing Like a Pro” and “Ada” barely resemble rock music at all. The band’s previous album, Alligator, was full of big rock songs and topped many critics and bloggers best of 2005 lists. This has largely been abandoned on the follow-up Boxer, a series of dark, mellow tracks, populated with low baritone vocals, horns, strings, pianos, etc.

I love the dark mellow tracks from Alligator and the more ‘rocking’ songs from Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers (their cd before Alligator) are just OK. But man I love the dark mellow tracks. I’m excited to get this album. I got a Best Buy gift certificate for my birthday and it’s been earmarked from day one for this album and the new Sage Francis (Human the Death Dance). So thats a great review (so far the album has a perfect 5 star rating, but for smaller indie albums with passionate fan bases thats not such a big deal).

Kim is probably really hoping I don’t get it before saturday: We’re driving to Flagstaff and I don’t think she’s ready for 4 hours worth of the National.

ps The Sage Francis album is very good.

Please change your lyrics

This is hilarious. The best part is the comments. Apparently people didn’t realize it was a joke.

Tis the season

For best of lists! I love these lists, to start its The top 40 band’s of 2006.

The list is pretty indie rock so I don’t have a lot to say about it except both indie bands I really like (the National and the Decembrists) are on it, so it seems ok to me, Ghostface is overrated (mostly because he’s inconsistent, sometimes he’s fantistic, but you have to wade through a lot of crap to get there), and Danger Mouse is incredibly over rated. He’ll be forgotten in 5 years.

For all you music listeners

Help me Panic less at the disco.