Well here we are, sadly, at the final “Summertime” jam of the season. This song from Death Cab for Cutie, from the Plans record, isn’t technically titled “Summertime,” but the lyrics and music really capture the sense of loss that comes with the realization that summer has ended. This version of “Summer Skin” is from a Death Cab performance up in Toronto.
Enjoy one last weekend before you have to put those summer whites back in the closet until next year! Peace out, kids.
There have been a myriad of iPhone applications released recently, the most interesting (and creepiest) of which use GPS technology to locate where your friends (or strangers) are in relation to you. Some of the intended uses of these apps are more tame than others. A brand new app still in development by iPhone game publisher Chillingo, called “Crystal“, is rumored to combine this type of technology with social gaming (a la Sim City). So even as people are walking around with their iPhones, they won’t have to actually interact with other people in the “real world”. As Chillingo’s Chris Byatte told Pocket Gamer.biz “We want to create the slickest, smoothest and fastest experience so the user isn’t really aware they’re even using a social gaming network.”
Maybe The xx, who are all rumored to be quite shy, were ruminating on this concept when they wrote the first single “Crystalised” off of their self-produced debut album, xx. The band members met at the Elliott School, which also claims Hot Chip among their alumni, and they recently made NME Magazine’s The Future 50 list. xx was released on Young Turks Records on August 17th and “Crystalised” was the single of the week on iTunes that week. Just a few days ago, the band appeared at the 2009 Reading and Leeds Festivals, and are currently touring with another EV2BK favorite, Florence & the Machine. This song is catchy and is sure to be huge this fall, when we’ll all hopefully be listening to it live and in person, with some real human friends!
Not to sweat Jay-Z too hard after yesterday’s post, but ever since the entirety of The Blueprint 3 (the much-hyped and anticipated eleventh studio album from Jiggaman) leaked online yesterday, it’s pretty much the only thing that music bloggers and Twitter users want to write about.
But in characteristic fashion for the de facto King of the Rap Game, Jay-Z kept his cool and has now offerred up a free stream of the record for all to enjoy through MTV’s The Leak. This seems like a pretty smart business plan to me, since he’s diverting attention away from the fact that it’s available for free download, and turning everyone’s attention to the MTV stream instead.
So in a show of support, today’s “jam” is a link to the streaming version of the whole record. I’m only one spin deep so I’m not trying to talk high points or low points, but I think I heard a line in there about “Obama on the text”… haha, Jay-Z is running this rap shit.
Yesterday, at the final JellyNYC pool party of the summer, featuring performances by Grizzly Bear, Beach House, and Vega, Jay Z and Beyoncé were in attendance. This has been all over the news today for some reason, mostly for Jay Z’s praise for Grizzly Bear and indie rock in general, for pushing the envelope in music and giving Hip Hop a reason to go further. As he told MTV, “They’re an incredible band … The thing I want to say to everyone — I hope this happens because it will push rap, it will push hip-hop to go even further — what the indie-rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring … I hope that they have a run where they push hip-hop back a little bit, so it will force hip-hop to fight to make better music, because it can happen, because that’s what rap did to rock.” Not everyone will agree with Jay’s comments but it can’t be denied that there are some really ground-breaking acts out there these days.
Another Brooklyn band who has been getting a lot of notice lately for their music and innovation, and happen to be great friends of and collaborators with Grizzly Bear, are the Dirty Projectors. Their latest album Bitte Orcha, released in June, has recieved some rave reviews. With Beyoncé on their list of top friends on myspace, they could be next in line to get pulled into the hip hop game. They make their national television debut tonight on the Late Show with David Letterman, so they seem to be on the move.
Well it’s already come to the third “Summertime” Friday, and for this one we’re reaching pretty far back in the vault with the 1965 hit “Summertime” from the record Begin Here by The Zombies. I think this is probably my favorite cover of the Gershwin classic, and the photos in this video are almost enough to fool you into ignoring the rain outside.
Clearly, Twitter and other social networking sites are changing the way that companies interact with and listen to customers, and now, that interaction has also turned into a business of its own! Yesterday the New York Times ran an interesting article about the “virtual currency” of online opinion, and takes a look at some of the early frontrunnrers in this emerging field unsentimentaly dubbed “sentiment analysis.” Companies such as Scout Labs in California and Jodange in Yonkers are powered by increasingly complex algorithms that serve to aggregate feelings, thoughts, and opinions as expressed by users of various online social networks, blogs, and other community web sites. The companies can then theoretically use this information to gain valuable insight into new marketing strategies or products (essentially free market research, replacing 20 random people in a room with 200,000 readers of a blog, say), or to better manage public relations, such as this spring when StubHub used data from Scout Labs to notice brewing discontent over its bad weather policy and was able to avoid any major backlash.
Of course, this all sounds nice until you hear that the accuracy of even the best of the companies’ algorithms are only “70-80% accurate” (as quoted in the Times piece). And as the article points out, “translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science.” I’m no moral philosopher, so I’m not looking to get into all that right now, but it seems like this article gets it right when it points out that this road may ultimately lead to a dangerous conflation of feeling and fact.
It’s almost like Chris and Thomas are commenting on the potential downsides to this “innovation” in their song “Take These Thoughts,” when they warn:
Take these thoughts /
They’re heavy and they’re old /
Don’t let ’em steal your soul
Chris (Anderson) and Thomas (Hien), a folk duo in the vein of Simon and Garfunkel, met in Liverpool at the same art school where another pretty famous pair first got to know each other (although come on, the comparison is QUITE a stretch, Ms. Dunham, no matter what their PR peeps told you). Their first full album, Land of Sea, generated a lot of interest in the group, and I’m sure that comparisons to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have helped almost as much as the major success of last year’s Fleet Foxes record, which sounds awfully similar to these guys at times. They don’t seem to have any tour dates up on their myspace or official website, so for now, I guess you’ll have to settle for this video.
East Village to Brooklyn 