Music Update

I've been thinking a lot about audio and music lately. Partially because I have had that strange experience of having a car full of kids, each with their own iPod, each listening to different songs.

Rebel Music
Boy is now 14, and I am considering giving him the key to exit Kid Zone on the Tivo. But he did manage to get onto my desktop and download The Best of Korn onto his iPod. This is moderately disturbing but I'm not beginning to panic or worry too much about how he might be corrupted. Part of their growing up is letting kids be fully exposed to dirt. Handling chaos is the key to civilization. Anyway I thought it quite ironic that my kid stands in contrast to the well known trend of white suburban kids tripping on gangsta and appropriating that flavor of badness.

Axiom & On-U
I have been, for the longest time, a huge fan of these two labels. Bill Laswell and Adrian Sherwood are a couple of funkmasters extraordinaire. But what I just learned is that Keith LeBlanc, the funky electronic percussionist, originally got his start on Sugar Hill Records. Yes, that Sugar Hill. His 'Comedy of Errors' with the samples of Lenny Bruce is one of my all-time favorite cuts, precisely because I am an HFN. Right about now I'm deep into Funkcronomicon. Hideous Mutant Freakz. I would also say that probably my favorite album of all time is Material's Hallucination Engine. That is music that goes straight to my soul.

Reripping & Disk Management
I've been re-ripping all of my CDs at 320 into AAC (m4a) because I found a neat tool that allows me to get rid of duplicate files. It's by a Brit company and the UI sucks beans, but it is an effective tool called NoClone. Since I've had several disk crashes and often when you trash your allocation tables, the names of files recovered don't get back. So I've got many GB of files with names like 'Recovered_file_00909.mp3'. NoClone can prove that's actually Breakadawn by De La Soul by comparing it at the bit level to the other file. I'm considering moving to Mac this and next year, and I can build my own scripts in Unix to do this, but it has been a big pain in Windows for a long time. NoClone has saved me 86GB so far. Nice.

Best De La
Now what I really want to talk about is the best De La Soul songs. A top five would suffice, but let's stretch it to 10.

In no particular order:
In The Woods. Trying People. View.  Bitties in the BK Lounge. The Art of Getting Jumped.
All Good. Itszoweezee. Stakes Is High. Verbal Clap. Schwingalokate. Set The Mood.

I put these out there because I haven't heard any word on the Impossible Mission the third and final AOI. How is it?