February 2010
14 posts
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Why I like Ke$ha's music.
(This post has been a long time coming. I think I saved my reference articles on January 7, ha. Oh, and heads up for stronger language.)
So. Ke$ha. (& yes, I’m going to refer to her always with the $ in the name). I think she’s great. Ke$ha manages to make guilty-pleasure electropop that makes you think about morals, values, gender roles, and sexuality in Western society today....
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TuneGlue Helps You Find New Tunes You'd Like by... →
“If you’d like to discovery some new music and do it in a visually appealing way, TuneGlue let’s [sic] you explore the relationship between artists and bands in a connection-based web… We went from Iggy Pop through Patti Smith -> PJ Harvey -> Tori Amos -> Alanis Morissette -> The Craberries -> Garbage.”
This looks like 1) a really fun way to kill...
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Turning Off Social Media
(Disclaimer: My blog posts are auto-tweeted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts; I’m not actively doing it.)
For Lent this year I’m giving up Facebook and Twitter. It’s not that I use those services all the time, obsessively, but like most people my age, I’ve gotten used to having Facebook as something to kill time with (read: procrastinate assignments with) on the...
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“To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.”
– Nadia Boulanger
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Study: Jazz Improv Cranks Up Brain's Creativity →
This is really interesting and brings up a few questions for music education: how do we (and can we even try to?) go about teaching this? There’s the straightforward, mostly academic “instruments, important figures, significant songs and albums, swing feel, groove, blues scales, syncopation, etc. etc.” kind of approach that I’ve experienced in my own education, but is that...
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MENC's poll on singing in television →
I didn’t contribute to this poll, but it seems that my thoughts were well-represented regardless. While I agree with the majority of the common themes, I have a problem with the following:
No educational value presented.
Granted, the poll is about all television shows that feature singing, & I could definitely see that statement being applied to American Idol, but is this really the...