best of 2008: songs
The original conceit here was to highlight songs that weren’t represented on the albums list but I decided against that.
10. björk, “the dull flame of desire (modeselektor’s remix for girls)”: It’s customary for me nowadays to include at least one remix in my top ten singles list, which I guess sounds like it’s a token, but this song legitimately earns it. There’s a remix for boys, too, which turns up the Hoovers a little bit; this one is a little more traditionally tech house. If I played out anymore, this song would be in all of my sets. It also proves that Antony Hegarty is like Midas for dance music, which I don’t think any of us would have seen coming after I Am A Bird Now.
9. fleet foxes, “white winter hymnal”: I first heard this song while sitting under a shade tree in a park in Chicago hanging out with all of my friends at the Pitchfork festival this summer. In retrospect it was probably the perfect first time to hear this song. Ragged Wood is probably going to be my new jam for springtime for a long while.
8. little boots, “stuck on repeat”: Most appropriately named song of 2008. Pretty much everything about this song is perfect, from the bells in the opening to the molasses-slow bridge that builds back into the chorus like it doesn’t even care how triumphant it is. Victoria Hesketh doesn’t know it yet but I am totals going to marry her one day.
7. titus andronicus, “titus andronicus”: I spent most of this year being 25, alone in my apartment in a tiny college town 600 miles away from all of my friends, out of school for the first time in two decades, eternally unsure whether being a librarian is actually what I want to do with my life, and generally being terrified of everything around me. At times like these it’s nice to have a song whose chorus is nothing but the words “Your life is over” shouted at the top of your lungs. I probably listened to this song more times than any other single track that came out in 2008 (though you’ll never know because I turn my last.fm off when I do that sort of thing).
Soundtracking my existential crisis gets you on my top 10. Take note, songwriters.
6. cut copy, “far away”: Another thing that gets you on my top 10 is writing a pop song that sounds like falling in love with the entire universe.
5. portishead, “machine gun”: I’ll admit I faced the prospect of new Portishead, after all this time, with a little bit of trepidation. Happily, this song brushed aside all of my worries about it. This is the only happy thing associated with “Machine Gun.” But with Portishead, should we expect anything else? In twenty years people will rate the first two bars of this song among the all-time great openings in pop music. They’re still blazing the trail.
4. los campesinos!, “we are beautiful, we are doomed”: Almost frighteningly prodigious, my new favorite band put out a top-5 record in the spring and then decided they weren’t done with 2008 yet and put out another great - if devastating - pop record in the fall. It didn’t quite measure up to the first one for me, but this song may be their finest mission statement yet. If they keep dropping lyrics like “I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love/Is to like the other slightly less than you get in return/I keep feeling like I’m being undercut,” I’ll feel less silly comparing them to Harold Pinter.
3. hercules and love affair, “blind”: See #10 for Antony Hegarty, Relationship to Dance Music. I don’t think anyone realized disco needed to come back until this record came out, and I don’t think anyone is in any hurry to put it back in the box.
2. fuck buttons, “sweet love for planet earth”: I don’t want to make it sound like I’m rooting for human extinction; all I’m saying is that when it finally happens, I imagine this song will spontaneously start to play as the Earth finally begins to fix itself.
1. air france, “collapsing at your doorstep”: Can we get this song played at Obama’s inauguration? Where is the petition I can sign to make that happen? Because I’ll sign it. And then I’ll make all of you sign it. This is important. It’s not a dream. It’s better.
Posted on December 27th, 2008 in music | Comments
best of 2008: shows
A pretty short list since I live in the middle of nowhere:
Ra Ra Riot, Bowery Ballroom, March 7
Titus Andronicus, Pitchfork Festival, July 19
!!!, Pitchfork Festival, July 19
Dirty Projectors, Pitchfork Festival, July 20
Les Savy Fav, Pitchfork Festival, July 20
The Hold Steady + Drive-By Truckers, State Theatre, November 5
Posted on December 20th, 2008 in music | Comments
old things in music i only found in 2008
So it’s time for all the anoraks to talk about what they liked in music this year. I’m going to do this in three posts. This one will highlight all the older stuff I only got into this year. The second one will be my favorite songs of this year, and the third will be my favorite albums of the year. I don’t want to commit to a specific “top-x” number for those because I never know how many great records I want to talk about in any given year. We’ll see how it goes.
Everything goes behind a cut because these posts are full of Media.
More…
Posted on December 17th, 2008 in music | Comments
brooklyn we go hard
Hi! I am writing again.
So Jay-Z has a new track out, “Brooklyn Go Hard,” which will be on the soundtrack to the Biggie movie that’s apparently coming out next year. It’s streaming on his MySpace as we speak. Kanye produced it and Santogold has a verse, so it’s pretty unstoppable all around. The best is that he obviously recorded this before all of the banks in the world exploded because it’s got this line in the middle:
when I bring the Nets/I’m the black Branch Rickey
oops! I’m still playing it on repeat, though.
Posted on December 10th, 2008 in music | Comments
comeback
Been missing the blog; I need a place to talk about libraries and the Internet and cities and baseball again. So I’m bringing it back. We’ll see how it goes.
I’ll probably make a few cosmetic changes over the next few days. I have an idea about how this site should look that isn’t quite realized. We’ll see if I find the time to do it all, in between all of the sitting around listening to baseball games and playing Football Manager that I do after work.
Posted on September 9th, 2008 in meta | Comments
thatcamp
I’m here this weekend. It should be pretty awesome. I’ll probably be actually using my oft-maligned twitter account to post random thoughts I have, with some longer posts coming here later.
Posted on May 31st, 2008 in history, internet, library | Comments
muxtape
Here’s mine. You should make one! And then tell me where it is because I like listening to people’s muxtapes when I should be doing other things.
Posted on March 30th, 2008 in internet, music | 1 Comment
untrenchant
Hello friends,
I am bringing my moribund Internet magazine back, after a long and protracted absence. There will be a new site design and everything. I’m hoping to have it finished by the end of this month, in between the various other things that I do. In the meantime, if you have some good stories you’d like to tell, or some pictures you’d like to share, by all means send them along to [untrenchant AT gmail.com].
Posted on March 9th, 2008 in internet | 1 Comment
some musical notes
There are some interesting discussions happening on the internets about the Dublin Core Abstract Model, and its relationship to RDF, and how to usefully implement a general metadata model when so many institutions are so caught up in local practices and multiple competing standards, that I promise I will try and contribute to or at least summarize when I have the time. I haven’t written about libraries enough lately.
Part of that is that I come home at night after work, and all I really do is listen to music. I finally got on the Cut Copy bandwagon about a month ago, and the Flosstradamus bandwagon shortly thereafter. All that and the new Hot Chip record have been running 2008 around my apartment. And the new Los Campesinos! record. I could go on but I won’t.
Cut Copy put out a mix a while ago called “So Cosmic” (get it here), and it’s amazing; if radio stations told the truth when they said they played the best of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, it would sound like this set. I was listening to it more or less non-stop for a couple of weeks wondering why nobody plays music like this in State College. So I’ve decided I’m going to try and make it happen, and if it doesn’t work I’ll let myself complain about it then. So all my designated creative time lately has been dedicated to planning set lists and putting mixes together. A friend of mine and I decided a while back to try and get a good dance night together; he’s got a lot of old new wave and post-punk records, and I’ve got a lot of records made by people ripping those people off. So it works well together. We’re going to try and play out once a month, I think. We don’t have a name yet, or any dates to announce, but it’s coming together. Oh yes.
I’m probably more excited about this than anything else I’m up to lately, so I’m breaking my blog-silence by prematurely announcing our plans. Rest assured I will keep you posted with details.
Audio footnotes:
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Cut Copy, “Hearts on Fire”
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Matt and Kim, “Yea Yeah (Flosstradamus remix)”
Posted on February 20th, 2008 in music | Comments
the library of congress is awesome
One of my things that I frequently get on about is the need for cultural institutions to embed their content outside their own space. Particularly now with Web 2.0 applications, where the barriers to entry are low ($20 a year for a Flickr Pro account? You could get a thousand of those for the cost of one science journal subscription!) and the relative costs of failure are fewer, it makes perfect sense for libraries or museums embarking on digitization projects to release some of those images to Flickr, or some of those videos out to YouTube. It’s a simple way to bring lots of users to your digital collections who would never have otherwise seen them.
It so happens that the Library of Congress agrees, and has launched their own Flickr account. I’ll let them explain why:
If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.
Two things about this are exciting. First, it draws upon a huge potential audience, not only of viewers of the material, but of potential contributors to the metadata and the context surrounding the photos. Users can add as many tags as they want, which will beget even more tags and associations, which will draw even more users. In future phases I’d like to see these pictures added to community image pools; this shot would look pretty great in the Gapers Block or Chicago Reader pools, for example—which would draw users who frequent those sites, too! It’s a feedback loop.
Second, this is part of a broader pilot project Flickr is taking part in with LoC called the Commons. As part of this initiative, Flickr created a brand new rights statement essentially stating that there is no known copyright associated with the image in question. This opens up the site to any number of institutions holding public domain images. If the pilot works—dare I say when it works?—they’ll allow other interested institutions to participate and to use the public domain rights statement.
I’m really excited about this project, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Posted on January 17th, 2008 in internet, library | 2 Comments
