50 quid bloke

That bit at the beginning of Word magazine where a dozen or so people list the books, CDs, DVDs etc that they really like (whether old or new), always turns up a few surprises and top tips.
Sasha (not normal Word material) has a bit this month, in which he announces that - despite having 35,000 12″ singles, he’s soon going to be giving up on vinyl to go completely digital, thanks partly to a bit of software/ hardware called Final Scratch, which allows you to control digital music files via a standard turntable/ mixer set up. Seems fantastic, although, personally, I’d prefer something that could do away with turntables all together (and not require two sound cards…which, I accept is impossible, if you want to preview as well).
Seems certain that that global status symbol, the record box, is going to be replaced with a laptop.
He also recommends a French site that I (in my ignorance) have never seen before: http://www.d-i-r-t-y.com: heaving with streamed dance mixes from all your favourites (and fortunately, with full track listings) . Strangely, but gratefully, he recommends Air’s Western Songs, which has the amiable French electric Maestros remixing such classics as Duelling Banjos and Lee Hazelwood’s My Autumn’s Don’t Come. As Sasha says..”it tells you a lot about where they’re at right now”.
Oh, and he (Sasha, that is) is also very into Grand National at the moment - and discovering Neil Young and Dylan having missed them first time round. I look forward to the re-mix of Blood in the Tracks.

On a recent queer eye for the straight guy, one of the closing comments was: ‘And if you’ve got something you haven’t worn for more than a year….give it to someone who will wear it..’.
I’m not bad at doing this with my clothes: but this mornining, I took a look up at my vinyl shelves, and started to wonder whether it’s time to get rid.
Most of my vinyl is too scratched to sell. I still have a few 12″ ers I use on my very, very rare DJ outings…now mainly 40th birthdays and office parties (where I’m chosing the DJ). We no longer have a working record player in the house. Out of a few hundred albums, there are probably only a handful that I both really, really love and haven’t yet replaced on vinyl.
All logic, says they should go.
Then again: that vinyl is like a photo album of my teens and 20s (and I have very few photos of my teens and 20s). The objects themselves carry memories with them, almost as much as the sounds on them. I might have a little rationalisation instead.

I’ve just read Nik Cohn’s 1969 history of pop Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom.
What a brilliant book. If you haven’t read it, and you like music: buy it now and take it on holiday with you.
Cohn was just the right person writing exactly the right book at the right time. Aged only 22 (22!!!!), he was part of the first generation to grow up through the birth of pop: and he loved its energy and excitement. And he combined this love of the subject with a spectacular knowledge and understanding of the industry, and a writing style that crackles effortlessly from one idol to the next.
The timing was also important: Elvis was still alive, The Beatles were still together, The Stones had just released Beggar’s Banquet, and the Who had just put out Tommy. All these bands were huge, but all had lost the raw energy they started with - and gone into slightly more mature waters (something Cohn isn’t necessary a fan of).
He loved Highschool doo-wap, thinks the Beatles lost it after taking acid; that Dylan was good and had a huge influence on pop, but nothing like the Messiah figure he was claimed to be (”In my own life, the Monotones have meant more in one line of Book of Love than Dylan did in the whole Blonde on Blonde“); that after Brian Jones the Stones were all about Jagger. No-one is above criticism (except Aretha Franklin and Little Richard), but to him Pop as a phenomenon is much, much more than the individuals involved.
Partly because of his proximity to the subject, and partly because of his fantastic writing style: he manages to say more about all these artists at their peak in a few paragraphs than any 5,000 word feature you’ll read today.
He also shows an understanding of the realities of the pop industry that pre-dates Pop Idol by 30 odd years, when he says of The Monkees:

“How computerized can pop become? The simple answer is, very.
Always, it depends on exposure. If you have the basic equipment, meaning that you look good and you can talk and don’t pick your nose in public, if you are then hyped into something like your own TV show, you can hardly miss. If on top of that, you’re given a sustained press build-up and you don’t make dumb records, you’re foolproof”.

End of story. Now let’s move on.

…until Wednesday. France calls.

…now I realise I was scrubing away a potential goldmine…

One of the truly great things about iTunes is the way its ’sharing’ facility works. At work, this means that anyone using iTunes can miraculously see anyone else’s library (assuming they’ve got sharing turned on).
First time round, I didn’t know where this collection of ‘Michael’s Tunes’ had come from: a ghostly music library appearing on my screen from nowhere (rather like the first time my dad went on AOL: someone sent him an IM and he unplugged the computer in fright). Anyway, there’s now about half a dozen of us who, off and on, share Tunes.
The shocking thing is: we’re all pretty much exactly the same. In fact, if you eliminated everything from everyone’s music collections that someone else had - we’d all be left with hardly anything at all.
Of course, if you were a music industry marketing man, you wouldn’t be surprised: we’re all of similar demographics, we (obviously) work in the same industry and we’re all of about the same age (ok, some of us are slightly older).
But for us: who have crafted our CD collections over a couple of decades through an apparently random and (so we believed) slightly inspired combination of purchases, gifts, freebies and ‘bo rrowings’ to find that someone else has ended up with almost 80% of what you’ve got (or vice versa) is ever so slightly crushing. We thought we were such individuals, but deep down, we’re all just bits of just another cluster group on the great marketing map of the world.
Women can be crushed by going out and finding out that someone has the same dress as them. But that is just a one off event: this is much, much worse.
Given that music is such a communal thing, this is a bit of a strange grumble: I’ve just stood in a field with 60,000 people singing along to Oasis: not much individuality there. Someone else has to be buying the same CDs as me: surely it’s better it’s someone I like than someone I loathe (although, if I could check the CD collection of someone I loathe, I’d probably find a lot of similarities there as well).
And yes, the whole Amazon phenomenon of ‘people who bought this, also bought this’ is leading us on shopping sprees that feel quite random to us, but which are, by the way their constructed, bound to make us buy exactly the same stuff as everyone else.
Anyway: I have a solution for this.
First, the iTunes sharing facility should actually produce a combined colour coded library. Each person on the network is assigned a colour. All tunes owned by one or more people should be grey, but all tunes with a unique owner would be coloured with that person’s colour.
Finally, on both iTunes Music Store and Amazon we all need to upload our music collections to allow for much more precise cross-tabbing. This was you can see, for example, the most popular albums actually owned by the people who have bough the CD you’re about to buy, or you can check, say, what proportion of people who own John Martyn’s Solid Air also own, Ulrich Schnauss’s Far Away Trains.