Funny Thing: Muzak

As any reader of this blog knows, I am fairly dedicated to music. I am learning how to play the guitar (for 15 years now), am a recovering mid-life crisis band member, and I provide a song recommendation with each entry in the “PS” section of the post.

I also have a good-sized CD collection. Not so large that I can start my own rebel Internet radio station anchored off the New York skyline. But large enough that it can be reasonably blamed as a major contributor to the fact that I continue to rent an apartment rather than own my own home.

I have been having a devil of a time migrating my collection out of my ‘90s-style entertainment unit--which hulks in a corner of my living room intimidating the bric-a-brac and the smaller furniture--and into my iMac. Sometimes, I sort of want to follow one well-heeled pal’s lead and just pack it all up in boxes and send it to a company that loads it onto a drive for you at a fixed price per CD...but then the Scotsman in me goes nuts and says, “Hey, English fancypants, you canna load them yourself, you valueless yuppie?!”

But the prospect of logging serious time at the computer swapping hundreds and hundreds of disks in and out is daunting. It is a mirage of discipline that fades as I walk across the desert of dinner dates and movies and work. What to do?

Well, I’ll tell you, dear reader. I determined to load one CD onto iTunes each day when I get home from work. Not more. Not less. Just a few minutes every day. In a few years I’ll have all my music in there and each day my iTunes reservoir groweth rewardingly.

This has, surprisingly, been working exceedingly well. I just refresh a small stack of CDs on my desk and pop one in nightly when I get home from the grindstone factory. I am up to 5.1 days of music already (you gotta love the Apple measurement systems).

But I did recently have one moment of panic that reminded me that I am not a digital native; that, like Larry, Curly, and Moe, I am perpetually waiting at the nun’s orphanage for digital parents to adopt me, getting older and more eccentric with each passing software release (woo woo woo).

As I got into the groove of slugging a new CD into the collection each day I inserted one that was both a DVD of music videos and a CD of songs all on one platter (damn you, broken-up R.E.M. and your tech savvy). As only Apple can, when it came time to eject the disc, my iMac wanted to know which format I wanted to eject: one, the other, or both. I panicked. I began pressing buttons at random. The pretty, rainbow wheel of “loading” began to spin perpetually like a digital Tibetan prayer wheel in the center of my screen. My system began to Escher itself into a Mobius strip of indecision. Nothing worked. Nothing responded. I was screwed.

I looked desperately for an override. I examined with minute attention to detail the body of the computer, looking for a pinhole into which I could insert a paperclip to eject the disc as in days of old. I swore. I begged Steve Job’s ghost for insight. I promised to put an Apple bumper sticker on my car. Nothing worked.

After some serious sweating, I recalled that I had a brand new, shiny, optical drived, envy-inducing iPad. Ha! Salvation. I sat by my recursive iMac and used the iPad to Google how to force a disc out of a Mac. It was so meta.

And here is what it the sum total of mankind’s knowledge, stored on the Cloud and delivered at the speed of light from a self-repairing global network of servers told me: push the eject button on your keypad. Push “|>”

Doh!

PS -- Seriously? I overlooked the eject button?! Sigh. Oh, one song you should load into your collection is "The Heartbreak Rides" by  A.C. Newman; now playing on iTunes.

5-4-Fri: Muzak

Herz the drill: I have been listening to some new music. Perhaps you will likie, perhaps not. Please to be enjoying the recommendations.

1. Lonely Avenue by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby. This 11 song collaboration is awesome. Ben is claimed by Chapel Hill as a favorite son for his eponymous + Five band and Nick wrote 2003's excellent set of music criticism essays, Songbook, among many other things. Any album with a song written from the perspective of Alaska's Billy Carter, Levi Johnston, is okay by me.

2. Collapse Into Now by the remnants of R.E.M. The beauty of the Interwebs is that you can hear the new R.E.M. album almost in its entirety well before its Spring release date. This successor to the return-to-form Accelerate seems like a bit of a retread -- one song with classic backing vocals and use of the the word "Honey," one song with the sing-song cadence memorialized by "hey...kids...rock and roll," one song written like a Dadaist poem, etc., etc. Still, dude, R.E.M. Gotta get it.

3. National Ransom by Elvis Costello. Not everyone knows that Elvis has a huge country streak in him, but the man has some serious Nashville-type cred. Produced by none less than T Bone Burnett, the newest album by Spike is woefully long and, somehow, not as compelling as you'd expect the formula Elvis + Leon Russell + country/folk x bluegrass to be.

4. Twilight Saga, Eclipse Soundtrack. I am ashamed to have purchased this album -- but NPR recommended it so highly and, while it is not entirely the bomb, I will say that I am loving--as I always do--Metric's contribution ("Eclipse") and really enjoy The Bravery's "Ours" and Florence and the Machine's "Heavy in Your Arms." Judge if you must, but it is a solid soundtrack.

5. Sigh No More by Mumford and Sons. So good they could be Irish. The hit single from this London folk band debut album is the infectious and radio-edited "Little Lion Man." Here's a recap for all the studio execs out there: serious talent self-finances to avoid your deadening grasp, earns a reputation from live gigs, gets screaming endorsements from influential DJs, and then hits gold from a distribution deal. Fear the future, people.

PS - I anticipate new R.E.M. albums with mixed emotions these days. Accelerate was so good. Collapse Into Now promises to be little more than listenable. Oh, and "Mine Smell Like Honey" by Buck, Mills and Stipe is looking to be the US single; now playing on iTunes.