Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001
From: ishbadiddle@yahoo.com
Subject: This week in Ishbadiddle (3/7/01)
To: meverettlane@yahoo.com


TWII

Well, it looks like Napster's caving in to the Controlling Legal Authority at last. No longer will anyone get free music, ever again. Unless they use gnutella. Or borrow CDs from the library. Or have friends with large music collections and a CD burner.

(Hey, if only there were some way for friends to share music over the internet. . . Oh, wait, never mind.)

By the way, has anyone figured out how Napster's proposed "copyright filter" is going to work? Any method I can think of is either easily circumvented (like, change the file names, folks!) or technically unfeasible. Maybe Giuliani's decency squad listens to every mp3?

So, in memoriam (or a last-minute shopping list), some of Ishbadiddle's latest downloads:

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The best thing I've collected from the world of Napster recently has been two tracks from Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra. Anyone who's seen Kusturica's film "Underground" (a deleriously wonderful attack on the perpetual martial conditions in the Balkans, or at least how it seemed in 1995) remembers the band that followed our two protagonists in the beginning of the movie as they lurched drunkenly from pillar to post one night. That's pretty much what the music is like on these tracks. Some sort of weird combination of klezmer, gypsy, big band, and Les Negresses Vertes music that I like to call "Hey, Hey!" music, the kind of thing that Krusty the Klown might listen to in his spare time when he's not betting on the Generals to lose to the Globetrotters. (If you'd prefer to call it "Hey! Hey! Hey!" music, you're welcome to your opinion, however wrongheaded.) Frankly, I have been too caught up in general enjoyment to take a closer peek at the components of the tracks, but they're a real hoot.
Corfu
Devil in the Business Class
No streaming, please.)

-- Trip Kirkpatrick

[NB, I think their music was also in Black Cat, White Cat, a fine example of the gypsy screwball comedy and worth a rent.]

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When Sarah and I were in New Zealand, we kept hearing this great song on the radio as we were driving our Trusty Rental Car around the gorgeous South Island. The song was called Just Add Water, and it's by a guy named Dave Dobbyn. It's unbelievably catchy -- you're singing the chorus along with Dave by the time the song is halfway through.

Anyway, we finally went into a CD store and demanded that they sell us this song. They didn't have the new Dave Dobbyn studio album. But they did have an album called Tim Finn, Big Runga, Dave Dobbyn -- Together in Concert: Live. At first, I was disappointed. But they let us listen to the Live CD in the store (now why don't US CD stores let you do that?), and it is *awesome*. We've been listening to it almost obsessively ever since. Some of our favorite tracks include: Six Months in a Leaky Boat, Whaling, Just Add Water (of course), and Good Morning Baby. But they're all good.

In case you're unfamiliar with these artists, as we were, it turns out Dave Dobbyn is the Kiwi Graham Parker. Tim Finn is Neil Finn's brother. He's been in Split Enz and Crowded House. And Bic Runga is the newish NZ female pop sensation.

The CD is available on import in the US. And I've also seen the songs on Napster. You can search for some of the tracks I've named or for the artist names. Enjoy!

-- Alex Bilsky


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About a month late (sorry), my contribution to Ishbadiddle is my complete panoply of 2000 Music Top 10 lists. I do these every year and usually e-mail them to a friend or two in the industry who care about such things; thanks to Ishbadiddle, I'll be able to widen the circle a bit. I say these are late because I really wanted to time them for February and the Voice's Pazz & Jop poll, the Grammys, etc. But hey, it's not like these albums went out of print in the past month. So if you're looking for buying-guide-type thoughts, here they are.

But first, while we're talking music...

Mike asked about what we've been downloading on Napster. I wish I could say I've been digging deep and discovering lots of rare, amazing music, but really the bulk of my downloading has consisted of replacing, in digital form, my cassette collection, including some frankly embarrassing mixes I compiled in the '80s. (Anyone who needs to hear Def Leppard's "Photograph," let me know...)

What has been great about Napster, besides the obvious free-music and cassette-replacing innovations, is the ability to scratch the itch when you're just curious to know what something sounds like. Seen an article about some up-and-comer or forgotten music veteran and wondering what they sound like? A song is minutes away. (After reading a number of obituaries for out-there guitarist John Fahey in the last couple of weeks, I downloaded several tracks by him, including rare Christmas songs that might just make one of my future holiday compilations.) Just finished watching a movie and dying to hear the rest of that song Kevin Spacey keeps babbling over? Download it. (I never would have bought Annie Lennox's 'Medusa,' but I had to download her cover of Neil Young's "Don't Let It Bring You Down" after hearing it as background in 'American Beauty'.) Finally, for a chart junkie like me, it's a godsend to finally hear records my chart books tell me were big hits in the '60s but never get played on oldies radio anymore. Fifteen years I've been wondering what "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band (#1, 1967) sounds like. Now I know. And hey, it sucks -- anyone who thinks the '60s was one long parade of classic songs needs to hear this crap -- but it's good to know that for myself.

I'm still downloading from Napster, despite the supposed crackdown on copyrighted material that went into effect this weekend. But I suppose we might as well start the 128-kbps dirge now. Alas, dear Fanning, we hardly knew ye.

Now, without further ado, here are my Top 10s (and a few Top Fives and Threes)for 2000.

Albums
1. Badly Drawn Boy, 'The Hour of Bewilderbeast'
2. Radiohead, 'Kid A'
3. the $5 street-bootleg copy I purchased of Eminem, 'The Marshall Mathers LP,' thereby depriving the talented but homophobic little twerp of royalties
4. PJ Harvey, 'Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea'
5. Shelby Lynne, 'I Am Shelby Lynne'
6. Coldplay, 'Parachutes'
7. Outkast, 'Stankonia'
8. Lambchop, 'Nixon'
9. Aimee Mann, 'Bachelor No. 2'
10. Idlewild, '100 Broken Windows'

Top Three Soundtracks/Compilations
1. 'High Fidelity'
2. 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'
3. 'Machine Soul-An Odyssey Into Electronic Music'

Top Five Perfectly Okay Albums That Are Either Overrated or Should've Been Better
1. U2, 'All That You Can't Leave Behind'
2. Belle and Sebastian, 'Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like a Peasant'
3. Elliott Smith, 'Figure 8'
4. Steely Dan, 'Two Against Nature'
5. Madonna, 'Music'

Singles
1. Eminem featuring Dido, "Stan"
2. Outkast, "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)"
3. Outkast, "Ms. Jackson"
4. Coldplay, "Yellow"
5. Madonna, "Don't Tell Me"
6. Aaliyah, "Try Again"
7. BT featuring M. Doughty, "Never Gonna Come Back Down"
8. Third Eye Blind, "Never Let You Go"
9. Wyclef featuring Mary J. Blige, "911"
10. Mystikal, "Shake Ya Ass"

BONUS: Best Stuff I Dowloaded via Napster
1. Peter Gabriel, "In Your Eyes" (rare extended mix)
- I spent 14 years looking for this in record stores; one week on Napster, I found it...and the industry wonders why we love this thing?)
2. Daniel Johnston and Yo La Tengo, "Speeding Motorcycle"
3. Negativland, "U2 (Casey Kasem Mix)"
4. Coldplay, "Trouble (Big Beat Remix)"
5. Lindsay Buckingham, "Go Insane" (great forgotten single)
6. Mary J. Blige, "Everything (Stylistics mix)"
7. Erik Satie, "Gymnopedie #1," the most beautiful classical piano piece I've ever heard
8. Automatic Baby (U2/R.E.M. members at 1993 Clinton inaugural), "One"
9. Yarborough & Peoples, "Don't Stop the Music"
10. every song I purchased on cassingle from 1987 to 1993

BONUS: Worst Single
Britney Spears, "Oops...I Did It Again," for its give-'em-what-they-want cynicism

-- Chris Molanphy

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A few random things I've found:

* Did you know that A-ha's "Take On Me" (one of the coolest videos of all time, IMHO) is really a ska song? (Reel Big Fish)
* Or that Bohemian Rhapsody is really a Celtic reel? (Hibernian Rhapsody by De Dannan.)
* The Boswell Sisters: great 30s girl group (did they call them girl groups then, or is that only a Phil Spector thing?) I don't know much about 'em, but their vocalese shines.
* Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Mark O'Connor: Appalachian Waltz. This is such a gorgeous piece that after hearing it on the radio I immediately bought the album.
* And of course there's the things you would never search for, but stumble across in other people's collections, like a Cantonese version of YMCA. Of course, browsing other people's collections carries the danger of the "un-covered download": the song you download because you *think* it's covered by someone else, only to discover on listening that it's not a cover, it's only mislabelled. (For the record, as far as I know the Bangles never recorded Video Killed The Radio Star.) Well, heck, what do you expect for free?

-- MEL

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