For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been listening to less new music. Oh, I still listen to a lot of it, but I’m also rediscovering a lot of stuff in the dusty back shelves of my iTunes library.
The way I do it is through a smart play list, which is a playlist that iTunes will auto-populate based on criteria you set. I realized a while back that, although I was succeeding in my goal of not just listening to the same stuff that was in my CD collection when I graduated college (and succeeding albums from only those artists, forever and ever, amen), I was turning into some sort of NME/Pitchfork douchebag who could only listen to artists that were five to 10 minutes from being discovered, and nothing else. (Which is ironic, since I think that the staff of Pitchfork should be dealt with harshly, using their titular farming implement.)
So back into the library my iPhone now goes, with a Deep Cuts play list, which I named after a segment that one of the Washington, DC classic rock stations (does anyone really have the ability to distinguish one classic rock station from another?) that basically consisted of “hey, it turns out there’s more than four songs that we can play, although we promise to still play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ every hour.” They would go “deep” into an album and play something other than the main hit said album was best known for.
My version of this idea is an iTunes smart play list with the following criteria:
Genre is Rock
Play Count is 0 (I reset the play counts of all the songs in my iTunes once a year, just so I can track the year’s top 100) Last Played is not in the last 12 months
Limit to 50 items selected by random
Then there’s several bands that I exclude — I have Billy Joel’s 1970s albums in my iTunes collection, but I don’t want him popping up in the middle of a bunch of modern rock tunes.
So every time I listen to the play list (which I have set to random play on my iPhone), I get a whole lot of surprises. Often it’s songs that have made my previous top 100 lists — the current Deep Cuts line-up includes “Swimming Pool” by the Submarines, “I Turn My Camera On” by Spoon and “One of these Days” by Kraak & Smaak — but it’s also a lot of stuff that I’ve rarely, if ever, listened to since getting my first iPod for Christmas in 2004 (including, at the moment, “Jesus Wrote a Blank Check” by Cake, “Since I Don’t Have You” by Guns N’ Roses and a remix of “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood).
The nice thing about this sort of play list is that it should work for anyone, whatever their taste. (If you don’t like rock music, just change the genre to one you prefer.)
Although J. Jonah Jameson’s newsroom was supposed to be a scary environment for Peter Parker, even as a kid, I realized that the Daily Bugle was a heck of a lot more realistic than the bland Daily Planet that Clark Kent worked at. Jameson and much of the rest of the staff are pretty recognizable newsroom staples, to the extent that I suspect a lot more people with actual knowledge of newsrooms have written stories relating to the Bugle than ever have dealt with the Planet.
Of course, this is comics, after all, where Superman can die, Batman can get his spine snapped, get better, and then later die, and eventually, it all works out. So the Bugle will be back in some form, eventually. Hopefully not as a TV station, which some fans seem to think is a more realistic choice — the issues of Amazing Spider-Man leading up to the Bugle’s destruction in December talked about the state of the newspaper industry repeatedly — when broadcast news is also facing its own substantial challenges. The folks at Marvel Comics’ House of Ideas will probably have to come up with a novel solution all their own on how to revitalize the Daily Bugle — and, frankly, the newspaper industry could use the help in that regard.
One of the things that I’ve learned from listening to Coverville for the past few years is that a great song can take a lot of interpretation by other artists. That’s as opposed to a great performance, which might well be singular. There are great performances that we mistake for great songs, but since no one else can do even a credible job with said song, it becomes clear that it’s just the performance that’s great, not the song at all.
In any case, “Glory Box,” originally performed by Portishead, is a great song.
Inexplicably, it never registered on the charts in the United States.
John Martyn’s cover makes me want to hear this done with a full-on blues approach, and no instrumentation or arrangements that aren’t true to that genre.
Here are the songs I listened to most on my iPhone last year:
1. “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” – Cage the Elephant
2. “Basket (Live)” – The Blakes
3. “Little Toy Gun” – Honeyhoney
4. “Methamphetamine” – Old Crow Medicine Show
5. “Fresh Blood” – Eels
6. “After Hours” – Rilo Kiley
7. “Ghost Town” – Shiny Toy Guns
8. “Wild One” – Those Darlins
9. “Titus Andronicus” – Titus Andronicus
10. “I Feel Weird” – Steel Train
11. “No Hope Kids” – Wavvves
12. “It’s a New Day” – will.i.am
13. “The Dissociative Fugue” – XOXO
14. “Coffin Factory” – The Mumblers
15. “Here It Goes Again (UK Surf)” – Ok Go
16. “Just Like Heaven” – The Watson Twins
17. “Strange Times” – Black Keys
18. “I’m Bad” – The Last Vegas
19. “Heterosexual Man” – The Odds
20. “Cartoons and Forever Plans” – Maria Taylor
21. “15 to 20 (feat. Lady Tigra)” by The Phenomenal Handclap Band
22. “I Just Want to Celebrate” by Rare Earth
23. “Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh” by Say Hi
24. “Percussion Gun” by White Rabbits
25. “Boom” by Anjulie
26. “Sorrow (Acoustic Version)” by Bad Religion
27. “Slogans” by Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard
28. “Oxygen” by Living Things
29. “Faith & Tenderness” by Liz Phair
30. “I Would Die 4 U” by Mariachi El Bronx
31. “Best Time to Say Goodbye” by The New Fidelity
32. “Alabama High-Test” by Old Crow Medicine Show
33. “It Don’t Move Me” by Peter Bjorn and John
34. “Science vs. Romance” by Rilo Kiley
35. “Sacred Trickster” by Sonic Youth
36. “Skullcrusher Mountain” by Jonathan Coulton
37. “Major Tom” by Shiny Toy Guns
38. “You Can Be Timeless” by The Henry Clay People
39. “Hymn #101” by Joe Pug
40. “1901” by Phoenix
41. “Horchata” by Vampire Weekend
42. “I Know What I Am” by Band of Skulls
43. “On My Way” by Billy Boy on Poison
44. “Boogie” by Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears
45. “Show Me What I’m Looking For” by Carolina Liar
46. “Believe” by Dirty Heads
47. “Rose City” by Vica Voce
48. “The Thief & The Heartbreaker” by Alberta Cross
49. “Chosen Armies” by Children Collide
50. “Trans Canada” by Constantines
51. “Run Chicken Run” by The Felice Brothers
52. “I Hate People” by Jemina Pearl & Iggy Pop
53. “Rebel Side of Heaven” by Langhorne Slim
54. “Above the Bones” by Mishka
55. “Wavin’ Flag” by K’naan
56. “Take Me With U” by Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings
57. “Sleepyhead” by Passion Pit
58. “I’m an Adult Now” by The Pursuit of Happiness
59. “Willie the Wimp (And His Cadillac Coffin)” by Stevie Ray Vaughn & Double Trouble
60. “White As Diamonds” by Alela Diane
61. “Weightless” by All Time Low
62. “Nothing Ever Happened” by Deerhunter
63. “The Ark” by Dr. Dog
64. “Smoke a Little Smoke” by Eric Church
65. “Re: Your Brains” by Jonathan Coulton
66. “Bloodletting” by Concrete Blonde
67. “Stillness is the Move” by Dirty Projectors
68. “Nobody Knows You” by Office
69. “Cocaine Habit” by Old Crow Medicine Show
70. “Burial Sounds” by the Phantom Band
71. “Let’s Go Crazy” by Riverboat Gamblers
72. “Train in Vain” by Susan & The Surftones
73. “Mandala (feat. Anoushka Shankar)” by Thievery Corporation
74. “Born On a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise” by Black Moth Super Rainbow
75. “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver
76. “Hey Ya” by Booker T.
77. “Beesting” by Buildings Breeding
78. “Darling Nikki” by Chairlift
79. “Down In Mexico” by the Coasters
80. “No One Does It Like You” by Department of Eagles
81. “40 Day Dream” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
82. “Devil Dog” by Eels
83. “Cheerleader” by Grizzly Bear
84. “Fire (Put in the Air)” by the Knux
85. “3rd Eye Vision” by Mishka
86. “London Calling” by the Pyronauts
87. “Dead Sound” by The Raveonettes
88. “Don’t Tempt Me” by Todd Snider
89. “Rudie Can’t Fail” by the Cocktail Preachers
90. “Mykonos” by Fleet Foxes
91. “Out at Sea” by Heartless Bastards
92. “Cities Burning Down” by Howling Bells
93. “Vapours” by Islands
94. “Bang” by Rye Rye & M.I.A.
95. “When Doves Cry” by the Twilight Singers
96. “Farewell to the Fairground” by White Lies
97. “Take Me Home” by After Midnight Project
98. “Scavengers of the Damned (Amended)” by Aiden
99. “Art of Revolution” by Bassnectar
100. “Safe European Home” by the Bombers/Vivesectors
