Turntablists use record players to play records in ways they weren’t meant to be played. By speeding up, slowing down and reversing the record under the needle, a whole universe of new sounds becomes possible. The record player as musical instrument is still in its early stages of development. DJs already invented the instrumental sound …
Author Archives: Ethan
Good old Grateful Dead
See also a post about the Dead and electronic music. Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding like Jerry Garcia. I can’t help it. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning years, there was no musician I cared more about in the world than Jerry. Contrary to popular stereotype, I didn’t care …
Halo is a giant mashup
My taste in video games mostly runs to the cartoony Japanese stuff: Mario, Zelda, Katamari. But I had access to an Xbox and a copy of Halo for a while, and I couldn’t rest until I finished it. I walked around thinking about it whenever I wasn’t playing. Every aspect of it was familiar, except …
Janet (Ms Jackson if you’re nasty)
Janet has been on my mind a lot the past few months, what with Michael, and I was driven to go listen to Control again. It must have been quite a shock for Ms Jackson’s fans when it dropped in 1986. I wasn’t aware of her teenage bubblegum pop stuff as a kid, though I suppose …
In spite of everything, I still listen to Kanye West all the time
Okay, so we’ve all firmly established that he’s not exactly a model of decorum. President Obama called him a jackass. Even before he disrupted the MTV awards, a lot of my friends disliked him intensely. This dislike crosses racial, class and gender boundaries. And yet, I like Kanye’s music better than just about anything that …
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DDR at Turkey Day
My family does not, as a general rule, dance. Maybe individually. Very rarely together. It takes a wedding or bar mitzvah or other major state occasion to get even some of us on the dance floor. When left to our own devices, it doesn’t happen spontaneously. At least not until last Thanksgiving, when we tried …
Who owns the Michael Jackson makossa chant?
My favorite Michael Jackson song is “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” This post is part of what’s turning into a series on it. The previous post is about the song as fan art, and some of the fan art that it’s inspired, from bootleg Youtube videos to licensed remixes. This one is about who owns the …
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The web browser as a musical instrument
Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on …
Michael Jackson fan art
Today the Michael Jackson fan art I have on my mind (and on the iPod) is “Please Don’t Stop The Music,” sung by Rihanna and produced by a couple of Norwegian guys. It includes a sample of MJ singing “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” The sample includes both his quasi-Swahili chant and his unearthly woo-hoo. It …
Rhymefest is looking at the man in the mirror
Rhymefest is best known for co-writing “Jesus Walks” with Kanye West. He did this incredible Michael Jackson mixtape with Mark Ronson and a slew of A-list guest stars, a whole year before MJ died while the rest of the world was sleeping on him. Click for the free download: