I have the technical skill to publish a database of my entire music collection online, but I don’t have the inclination to spend that much development time doing it. So instead, I’m letting Rate Your Music do it for me.
I spent the last few days pretty much putting everything online, including albums I don’t even own anymore. I even went so far as to include vinyl and cassettes, the latter of which I sold off nearly four years ago. As of this writing, 1,273 albums are listed in my profile. Yeah, that’s small beans compared to hardcore collectors.
Limited Express (has gone?) has really gone, so says Bounce.com. The band announced its dissolution through its official website on Dec. 31, 2006. Each of the trio’s members will pursue individual projects, according to the band’s statement.
When Natalie Merchant announced she was leaving 10,000 Maniacs back in 1994, my first thought was to wish John Lombardo would rejoin the band and bring Mary Ramsey as Merchant’s replacement. And that’s exactly what happened.
Lombardo and Ramsey had been performing under the moniker John & Mary, and the duo recorded two albums for RykoDisc that sounded just like the Maniacs. Perhaps the presence of Maniacs drummer Jerome Augustinyak and guitarist Rob Buck had something to do with that.
Ramsey herself toured with 10,000 Maniacs, playing viola and singing back-up. (She can be heard on the band’s MTV Unplugged appearance.) So it seemed like a perfect match, and for a time, it was.
Here’s the chronology of events as I remember them:
1987 — 10,000 Maniacs includes a cover of Cat Stevens’ "Peace Train" on In My Tribe
1989 — Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) declares his support of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie’s life.
1989 — 10,000 Maniacs pulls "Peace Train" off of subsequent pressings of In My Tribe.
I bought In My Tribe on vinyl, just as 10,000 Maniacs were starting to gain momentum, and "Peace Train" was on it. By the time I started converting my vinyl collection to CD, the band had already pulled "Peace Train" from the album. I found a used CD that included the track at a music shop near the University of Hawaiʻi campus.
A while back, I floated the idea of writing about only music already in my album collection. I noticed when I post a "Listen" column, I tend to write more personally about music than I would a review or a news item.
I want to do more of that — write personally, that is.
So I brought the two ideas together into a year-long project: "365 Days, 365 Files." My New Year’s Resolution for this site in 2007 is to write about a particular song every day for the whole year.
I’m not sure what about In Tua Nua’s "All I Wanted" telegraphed to me one very late night listening to the classic rock station in Honolulu back in the late ’80s.
I was getting into college rock at the time, and the college station in the area could only broadcast within a 3-mile radius of campus. I lived 10 miles away. The classic rock station would sometimes include a dribble of modern rock in its playlist — an occasional R.E.M. or Midnight Oil song thrown in among hours of Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones. I couldn’t stand it.
So it was probably that dribble of In Tua Nua, played in the wasteland of late night, that whetted my appetite. I heard the song maybe once, but it was enough to get me curious. I would eventually scrape enough lunch money to get The Long Acre from the record store, and it would be one of my favorite albums for a long time.
My friend Ryan pointed me to an article about getting iTunes Japan music cards from online retailer jbox. I’d be tempted if only I weren’t so turned off by iTunes itself.
It’s the digital rights management — iTunes-purchased music can be played only on iTunes, and I’m not fond of the iTunes interface. Winamp has spoiled me rotten by taking so little real estate on the view port of my monitor that iTunes just feels bulky by comparison. Winamp also takes up less memory. The fact iTunes files can’t play on Winamp — not without some intervening conversion — is an inconvenience I’m not willing to accommodate.
When JHymn stopped working, that pretty much killed my patronage to iTunes. Now when I fire up the application, it’s to listen to the 30-second previews.
I was wondering why I hadn’t seen an update from ArtsJournal in my feed reader, so I visited the site itself and discovered it had redesigned. And the feed? No longer RSS but Atom. The RSS feed just listed headlines. The Atom feed now includes article descriptions. Good job!
Mind you, I’m only pointing out the music section of the site — it’s got a numberofothers. What did I miss in this past week?
In Berlin, a lack of controversy where it was expected.
A fairly interesting article about buzz vertigo published on a site that doesn’t realize 10-point Arial font is so 1997. Hello, LA Times? Web 2.0? Part of me wonders why I don’t get solicited till I looked at my contact page and remembered — huh, I don’t like SPAM. I guess my crankiness preserves my integrity.