Good music and samples

Hi. My name is Corey, and I'm a music addict. Anyone that knows me is already aware of this, but a good chunk of my life revolves around music - programming, teaching, playing, and just listening. I gotta say that I love discovering things about music through the web, and the iTunes Music Store rules for anyone that enjoys music. Here's what I went through today.

I read Macsurfer daily - for some reason I don't think it's as good as it was a few years back, but I still get this weird feeling inside if I don't check it every day. It had a link to a Slate article "Beyoncé, Your Mix Tape Sucks" which, in addition to supporting the title, also mentioned that there is a great iMix from the Thievery Corporation. Track #17 from their list is a cool old track from the Jungle Brothers (circa 1988). Their name sounded familiar, so I listened to a bunch of their other stuff and found samples that Fatboy Slim has used - most obviously "Because I Got It Like That", which is track #4 from On the Floor at the Boutique (which is a great album that isn't on iTMS - check Amazon).

I got hooked on FBS back in college, before everyone else in the world heard of him (well, in Iowa at least - ha!). I was amazed that I could find an artist that had so many great tracks that all sounded so different - most electronic/dj groups I had heard at that point would only have a couple of songs that I enjoyed. But FBS was the exception, having only a couple of songs that I DIDN'T like ("Praise You", and others I can't think of at the moment). I grew tired of the direction he was going as time went on, but that seems to be the way things work when some obscure thing that I really like goes mainstream. Songs also started to have a single sampled lyric that was played over and over, and I really hate that ("Praise You", "Fatboy Slim is F*ing in Heaven", and "Bird of Prey" - to a certain extent). In some later post I'll probably talk about what makes a piece of music interesting to me (if anyone cares), but I'm straying far off the topic at this point.

Anyway, lets just say that FBS does a great job of sampling from really great music. And I LOVE that stuff. I've always loved hearing a piece of music and figuring out where it came from: the Beastie Boys song that sampled from Sgt. Pepper, another from Tower of Power's "In the Slot", the old surf versions of "Apache" (redone by FBS later), and on and on.

And these days we can easily search, preview, and individually purchase them - things that couldn't have been done a few years back. Hrm... the direction of this paragraph was sounding too much like a marketing note, which is not what I originally intended. I think I should go to bed before it gets any worse.

My main point is that all of this stuff is really cool and really exciting for music addicts! And I did it without an exclamation point in the title! :) The double-edged sword to this means that I end up spending more time looking around for this stuff (and later much more time for the blog entry), and then spending more money on music. Worse things could happen, I guess.

Also, Blogger's great and all, but I'm getting sick of manually typing in (or copying, usually) the html tags for links. Bleh.