sleepinginmyhead

hot dam...

 

hey how did this pass me by? Peter Jackson is producing a re-make of the Dambusters. But that's not the best bit, the script is being written by Stephen Fry! Woah!

Black cabs, taking liberties

 

There have been endless pieces about the lack of mutual respect between cabs and cyclists, so i'll bear that in mind here, but I cycled into work today, and had four (admittedly minor) incidents, all with black cabs. Here's my two main beefs:

1. The law.

We have road laws and a transgression of those laws means a warning, a fine or jail term. There's no stopping on a red route, no stopping on double yellow lines and no stopping on the zig-zags by crossings. I saw three cabs doing all of those things during my short ride to work today. Why doesn't anyone go mental at cabbies when they do this? If i did similar things in my car, i would expect a bollocking, and perhaps a fine if the police were about. Why are cab drivers any different?

2. The congestion charge.

Why don't black cabs have to pay the congestion charge? Think about it. I know it's their job, and they need to get into central london, but why does that make them any different from hundreds of other businesses? Picture the delivery man in his van, delivering bread for example. He has to drive around london all day, and yet he has to pay the charge, why? Also let's not forget, the delivery man is constantly doing his job, driving around carrying stuff. A cab spends a proportion of it's time sculling around with no-one inside, burning diesel and filling up the roads, the very definition of congestion. Even if it meant bumping up the price of all the fares, it's only right that they should pay too.

Now, i do take black cabs from time to time, and i do appreciate them, but i think they need to be treated like any other road user and not given such leniency. Honestly speaking, if black cabs were outlawed tomorrow, i don't think i'd miss 'em.

up next: dubstep

So, onto dubstep we move in the syrupy world of dance music. I've watched the scene develop from afar to be honest, but have made concerted efforts of late to get involved. Whilst i'm far from an officionado, it's clear that there are many positives and many negatives, but for me, on balance, dubstep is a win. To the uninitiated, dubstep is the bastard child of dub (which i don't have a taste for), drum 'n bass, garage and grime. The result is a half-tempo cut down Amen break, with undertones of grime basslines, all tied together around a simple melodic hook. The scene is moderately new, and as such it's following the same path as many of it's predecessors. There's the champion scene anthem (midnight request line - Skream), the shaolin and kung fu samples (Bar 9), and the strange indian samples (Chase and Status). Similar to UKG and Grime, Dubstep events have also become darker and darker affairs, and it's now apparently very difficult for promoters to get clubs interested in hosting Dubstep nights.... which is a shame, as there are bit's of it which i really love.

Actually there's just one bit of it i love: and that's the first hard hit of bass after a quiet (and often terribly trite) intro section. Hearing this on very good headphones or a big stack is a great pleasure to me. The pirate radio scene has obviously been the flag bearer of the this gritty sound with Rinse FM taking the lead. Whilst Radio 1's Mary Anne Hobbs has taken the music to a wider audience, it hasn't really taken to the mainstream very well, unlike Garage and Grime. Perhaps it's too ponderous and dark for radio, or maybe the bass doesn't work so well over FM, perhaps it's just that it's so very minimal, often with no vocal at all. That's all good for the fans though, who might finally have found the holy grail: an urban music which doesn't cross over.

It's easy to dismiss this as 'not real music', (i'm looking at you Aldo), and whilst there aren't going to be many Ivor Novello Awards here, a little bit of what you fancy does you good. Once the genre develops, hopefully it can branch out of this repetitive (if appealing) one liner. But for now, have a go, and enjoy the vibrations.

Sandsnake - Skream 

Saxon - Chase and Status 

Eastern Jam - Chase and Status 

a bear, dancing

This is some stupid shit, to be sure, but that's never stopped me before. It's the shimmy halfway through which works best. 

Lacie iamakey

lacie have just launched a cute USB key. Quite literal but nicely executed, it comes in 4GB and 8GB models. The thing is, i can imagine getting to my front door and realising that my housekeys are dangling out the back of my PC at work.

the ghost in the machine

I've mentioned spotify a couple of time now, and it has received a fair amount of press in recent weeks, scoring an exclusive of U2's new album. It looks like it's here to stay, so for those of you who don't know what it is, here goes:

It's like itunes, but imagine that all the songs are stored on a hard-drive somewhere else instead of your machine. You just type in what you want, and the application then finds it, and streams the music directly to your machine. This has many benefits, it's free for starters and there's a fairly big selection of music, but best of all, it doesn't clog up your hard drives with files. At least that what i thought...

I was doing a diligent clear up of my macbook today, and in so doing i found that spotify had been collecting temp and cache files. This isn't unusual of course, but what seems weird to me is that there are thousands. In total there's nearly three gigabytes of them. Which is mental.

I have decided against backing this software now. It's silting up my hard-drive with loads of rubbish, when it should be clean and simple. Until they sort this out, i'm sticking with itunes.

why...

...is the design of consumer electronics so bereft of humour and joy. I spend a great deal of time designing electronics, and it's all so serious. Saw this today, and it made me realise how things could be if we all lightened up a bit... It's the 'music ballon' by Yuento. It's just a speaker for your ipod, like thousands of others, but look at it, it's ace!

no covers

Is Hip-Hop the only music genre without cover versions? Think about it, from rock and pop, to R&B and country, you can find alternate versions of classics by all sorts of artists. I think hip-hop might be unique in being cover-version free. I had a quick think about why, and it might be for two reasons: 

1. Hip hop lyrics are so personal to the artists, and delivered in such a personal way (local slang etc.) that a cover version just wouldn't work.

2. There's also the Hip-Hop code where you don't steal (bite) another man's rhymes. Listening to Hip-Hop, you hear lots of references to other tracks, and from time to time rappers use the same beats as each other, but i don't think there's ever been a straight cover version.

But, that hasn't stopped the king of cred-suicide Vanilla Ice from releasing his own covers album. Listen to bits of it here: (link) or use spotify for the full album in all it's glory. I highly recommend the heavily vocodered version of Buffalo Soldier... Ace.

Andy Griffith

been listening to some very old Andy Griffith today. Brilliant:

"Today I want to talk about Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. Now you may have heard that she was a beautiful woman, but she wasn't a beautiful woman at all... I mean she was all right, but she wasn't beautiful. Now you're gonna ask me 'if she wasn't beautiful, then how come Julius Caeser and Marc Anthony and everybody went so crazy over her?', well you'll have to remember that Julius Caeser and Marc Anthony were soldiers, and overseas...."