Recently, I got embroiled in a discussion regarding whether musicians today could ever live up to past masters. Naturally, any discussion of this nature will end up with the usual suspects being banded around, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, BB King… I may be a while.

This got me thinking…

Will it ever be possible to live up to the standards which have been set?
Talk to an aging rocker and they will always harp on about how you don’t get the rawness with today’s digitally influenced artists. If that’s the case, is that the musicians fault? Record companies demand to see a hefty return from their investments. Is this causing musicians to succumb to the fear of losing contracts thus forcing them to resort to digital tweaking in the same way an athlete resorts to steroids.

Its been 40 years since a “ground breaking”, “legendary”, “iconic” or what I like to call “bloody good” album was released. Of course, I am talking about Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. BBC2 (Or was it 1) aired a programme which took today’s leading bands and artists and put them in a studio with the same producer and hardware which was used to record the album. This was to try and recapture the vibe of days gone, inevitably it ended up being a “can today’s artists cut it” experiment. It was clear that some found it more difficult than others. Especially the Kaiser Chiefs. I lost count on the number of takes they took to only get within a long haul flight’s distance of how it originally sounded. Surprisingly, Bryan Adams pretty much nailed it first time. I still haven’t forgiven him for fooling me into thinking “I do it for you” was a good track and worth learning the guitar to. Cannot believe that I managed that without mentioning the Beatles.. oh…

Can today’s musicians be as ground breaking?
Jimi Hendrix was regarded as ahead of his time. So was Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. When was the last time you said the same about any of today’s musicians? It seems now that a successful musician is one who can play to the same level of past masters. Very few seem to be breaking new ground, or if they are, then the music companies aren’t doing much to promote them. Today’s music seems to be old classic sounds regurgitated and “fusion” music which is taking regurgitated music and mish-mashing to create something new.

Is it possible to say if a piece of music is ground breaking?
Music has always been a personal thing, If I played a 300BPM techno track to my dad he would probably consider it new, therefore ground breaking? What is ground breaking music? Is it when a new sound is taken up by the masses? If so, who are these “masses”. Teens? toddlers? 20 something’s? Oldies? When does a large group become a mass? This, as far as I can see, only leads to one conclusion, we, the listening public don’t decide what’s ground breaking. The ones who decide are the ones with the money to tell the ones who tell us what to listen to, i.e. the record companies telling the media. With the music media being such a competitive environment, every one of them is constantly on the look out to be the first to have mentioned a musicians name before they have even released a single to create a perception of being on the pulse of contemporary music. Hearing a musicians name places it in our sub-conscious ready for being called upon when the first single is released. So familiarity is set so we are no longer put off or afraid to give them a listen. This compounded with incessant “Amazing” and “Greats” seals the commercial deal and behold, the next Rick Waller is born. We all know this happens, yet we are helpless to do anything about it. Probably because we have far more important events in our lives to give it a seconds thought. Facilitated with the ease of online purchasing of tracks and albums thanks to Itunes and with charts now taking into account downloads means our snap decision to purchase a track by an artist we heard of a while ago whose single is being played and clearly liked by the DJ along with external sub-conscious peer pressure from magazines and television means the record company has just become a pound richer.

Where do I get my music from?
I have a library of music that I listen to on loop. Whilst writing this, I am foot tapping to the Black Crowes best of album. The last new band I thought were the mutts nuts were Buckcherry. Yet, they sound like a newer Aerosmith or Guns ‘n’ Roses band. So nothing new, just a touch different. A popular source of new music has been the Last.FM radio player. I choose to listen to rock, and if you can put up with someone having classed John Denver as rock there are many bands that I had not heard of whose CD’s I subsequently purchased.

Where does music go from here?
Thanks to t’internet, you no longer need that record contract to gain recognition. Myspace and Youtube are part of any bands weaponry for world domination. (I am now listening to Crowded House! I don’t care what you all say, I like ‘em!) Even established musicians have Myspace pages. Justin Hawkins (ex Darkness) releases tracks through his page. (What has happened to Justin?!?! Discussion for another day). Once popularity reaches a certain level, record companies take notice, the cash register goes kerching and before you know it they have been signed and become part of the music machine.

It seems that we can no longer provide a service to the movie industry by dedicating space on our sites and blogs to streaming movie trailers. Well, not until they want us to again. Grrrrrr, make me so mad… feel like I have in fact located my hudlums requiring a severe roughing up. They wear suits and run the movie industry.

COME ON!

Feeling all pumped after that, might go out a rough up a few hoodlums if I can find my scarf and gloves.

Even if you gave me a week, an xbox, FIFA 2007 and a steady supply of pizzas, I STILL wouldn’t be able to do this.

I am no designer, I enjoy designing, but I cannot really put myself in a position to criticise other designers… but this time I cannot stay silent.

What the hell were they thinking of?!?!

Here are a few quotes lifted straight off the BBC web site:

“This is the vision at the very heart of our brand,”
“It will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world.”
“It is an invitation to take part and be involved.”
“We will host a Games where everyone is invited to join in because they are inspired by the Games to either take part in the many sports, cultural, educational and community events leading up to 2012 or they will be inspired to achieve personal goals.”
- Seb Coe.

“When people see the new brand, we want them to be inspired to make a positive change in their life…”
- Tony Blair

“This is a truly innovative brand logo that graphically captures the essence of the London 2012 Olympic Games - namely to inspire young people around the world through sport and the Olympic values.”
- Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge

Do all these quotes sound like they were written long before the logo was revealed? They sound so “generic”.

Can someone explain to me how pink and yellow jagged fuzziness will make da’ yoof feel inspired?

I can appreciate the risk they took in trying to come up with something new, well, the risk the design agency took… for a fee reportedly at £400k I might add. (Not confirmed though…).

Naturally, like most departures from the norm. There is the backlash which the committee will have to weather. A mere few weeks and all will be forgotten.

But if like me, you cannot stay quiet on the topic then thanks to the t’internet, you can have a say.

Sign the petition! As of writing this, over 4,000 other have.

Take the piss! Again, many others have.

In this post i discussed how to play random media files using wordtube by passing a comma delimited list of media ids.

Josh asked if there was a way of playing files from a specific directory rather than having to upload through wordtube and listing all media file ids.

Having helped Josh I thought it would be of use to others if I posted a little how to.

Firstly, you will need to download, install and activate coffee2code Random File plugin. This will randomly select a file from the specified directory and return it as a url ready to pass into the flash player.

Next, you need to download Flash Mediaplayer and upload mediaplayer.swf. For the sake of this how-to, I have uploaded it to the web root.

You will need to create the code to embed the flash player. Fortunately there is a wizard available here which will create all the code for you.

Copy paste the generated embed code and replace the file parameter value with a call to the random file plugin like so:

Taken from plugin authors page:

The directory of random files must exist at the directory structure level of your WordPress installation or below. (i.e., if your site is installed on your server at /usr/local/htdocs/yoursite/www/journal/, then the directory of random files you specified will assume that as its base… so $dir=’randomfiles’ would be assumed to actually be: /usr/local/htdocs/yoursite/www/journal/randomfiles/)
Leading and trailing ‘/’ are unnecessary… ‘/randomfiles/’ == ‘/randomfiles’ == ‘randomfiles/’ == ‘randomfiles’

Finally, you need to place the code in one of your theme templates. Hopefully, you will have the player stream a random mp3 from a specified directory on every page load. If you encounter any problems then ask.