Favourite Year-End Favourite

I always love reading The A.V. Club's Year In Band Names.

Awesome Beatles radio show

From about a month ago, here's a very cool episode of NPR's All Songs Considered about the Beatles' self-titled double album, a.k.a. The White Album.

On this edition of All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen talks with Bruce Spizer, author of The Beatles On Apple Records, about the groundbreaking White Album and how it came to be.

Very interesting listen for Beatles fans and music fans in general.

Goldfrapp on the brain

I've been listening to this song a ton since reading the PopMatters top singles of the year. I totally missed this one, but I've certainly made up for it since.

Why Prince is still the king

There's a couple of artists with gender bending tracks on the pop charts right now, coincidentally under the same major label control. Usher's "Trading Places" and Beyonce's "If I Were a Boy" offer some very interesting commentary of what the lowest common denominator really is.

Usher's chorus talks about what's going down "tonight", but clearly the events in the song take place over a couple of days. Let's have a little consistency here if you're going to try and convince me that Usher doesn't actually have his maid make his dates coffee and jelly and all that. And, I can't wait for part two. Can't wait.

Beyonce goes for heaps of melodrama. I'm not really sure what the hell she's talking about, but I think she missed Usher's memo about having a "getting it on" part of the song, replacing it with bitterness and resentment.

21 years later, and the mainstream is still mining his Royal Badness for ideas it so desperately needs.

In fact, Prince's lyrics also refer to breakfast, going out for a movie, washing of hair, but for some reason, Usher's lyrics didn't go as far as oral sex.

Prince is like a weird pop alien from Mars who fell to earth bearing sounds of the future, but here we are at the end of 2008 still stuck in the past. Hopefully the good news will come in 2009, and we'll have Usher do a track with pitch-shifted vocals. That I would buy.

Beaten to the punch!

I was going to rip the audio from the hottest viral video in the city, "I Get on the TTC", but someone beat me to the punch.

Get it while it's hot! Also, the rapper is a Humber comedy student, and former MuchMusic intern.

/off Torontoist comment section

Get on the TTC!

LOL for the day, a spoof song/video of a Young Jeezy track, "Put On", done all about our beloved transit system.



/off blogto

Sweet mp3 tagger

I've been looking for something like this for a while. Found this link after scouring message boards:

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more. The program supports online freedb database lookups for selected files, allowing you to automatically gather proper tag information for select files or CDs.

It works well and it'll actually update file info without checking an evil web database... unless you want it to. It'll even check amazon as a tag source.