Music Genres on Google Squared

Google Squared is a new Google Labs application for displaying search data in a more organized fashion than those regular ol’ search results.  For music collectors, this tool has the potential of being very useful for discovering musical genres.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to add more Rock to your collection.  A Google Squared search results for “Rock Music Genres” returns with many suggestions in a very organized view.

Having this detailed view saves you some time in cherry-picking through search results.  In a well-organized view you get to see all Rock sub-genres.  You’ll be able to tell from this view which genres you are missing from your music collection.

Good Music is Good Music

From time to time, I may have my music player on shuffle while a group of people listen to it.  Every so often, a song will come up that will make everybody in the room look at me with a quizzical look.  What just happened?  All of a sudden a song considered by many as “not cool” or “cheezy” happened to be next in the shuffle.  My reaction is always the same: hey “good music is good music”.  This is something I have learned to expect when playing my music of every single genre in random fashion for groups of people.

Here is someone else explaining the same situation:

Death Row Albums Now on eMusic

With Death Row record label now on eMusic, west-coast hip-hop classic albums such as Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (4x platinum), 2 Pac’s All Eyez On Me (9x platinum), and Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle (4x platinum) are now available at relatively cheap prices (as low as a quarter per song).

Death Row, specifically The Chronic, is responsible for establishing the west coast in hip-hop and popularizing the distinctive style of g-funk.

DJ Fly Setting A New Bar In The Turntablism World.

It has been years since I have seen innovation in the turntablism world.  Just when I thought that the art of turntablism has reached its limit in innovation, 2008 DMC World Champion DJ Fly from France enters into the scene.  He has taken the turntablism art to a whole new level and has set a whole new bar for the art of turntablism.  He has a style that can best be described as perfect-timing turntablist and scratching skills to create a musical journey using hip-hop and electronic flavors.  The one thing that sets DJ Fly apart from the rest is his attention to precision.  He rarely misses a beat in his very difficult and articulate sets.  I can’t wait to see what DJ Fly is going to do next.

… and finally, here is DJ Fly with legendary DJ QBert:

4/29/2009 Update: one more video here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x24ylt_dj-fly-le-6-minutes-vice-champion-d_creation

soundunwound: good for artist information, that’s about it.

soundunwound is a new Amazon.com music site that has been curated with information from Amazon’s own music database, imdb, and musicbrainz.  This is a great site to find all the information you need on a certain musical artist.  Soundwound is artist-focused, not enough emphasis is placed on genres.

Genres appear on each artist’s page to describe them.  This site breaks down the genres in three levels (mainly, quite, hints of), as you will see in the following screenshot for Calexico.

clicking on a genre takes you to a description and top artists on that genre.  These are a few criticisms that I have come up with after playing around for a while:

• there is not one page where we can take a look at all the genres together in an organized fashion.  It seems that the only way to get to a genre page is to search for an artist, then click on a genre describing that genre.
• many of the genres seem to have no descriptions.  Really ? how much would it have cost Amazon to pay somebody to simply copy-n-paste from wikipedia ? It seems that the information for the populated genres has been retrieved from wikipedia – so why not complete them all, or most of ‘em ?

For finding artist information this site has potential – maybe even calling it the imdb for music.  However as a site for finding information about genres and discovering music based on genres it lacks some points.

Not one genre for Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.

I was randomly listening to my music collection when the next song in the queue came up to be: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.  I currently have this song under my “Rock” genre.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I assigned “Rock” for this song.  Anyways, my first reaction was to move it from rock to …. – then, i froze.  What genre is this song, really ? It has a dance groove, but the vocals are heavy on R&B, hmm…

After a quick google search, I found an article that decomposes this song and mentions its genre:

“Crazy” is not really gospel, that “Ha ha ha, bless your soul” line notwithstanding. Nor is it disco (despite the undeniable groove), or hip-hop (despite the presence of a rapper and a DJ), or a pure pop song (despite the monumentally catchy chorus). In fact, “Crazy” seems to float outside genre altogether, which helps explain its wide appeal—most every musical constituency feels comfortable claiming it. “Crazy” has landed on the pop, R&B/hip-hop, adult contemporary, and modern-rock charts. No other hit in recent memory has crashed as many radio formats.

heh.  I knew I wasn’t alone.  There are very few songs that are released nowadays that have a great appeal to audiences from multiple genres.  Popular music is more than 50 years old and many music variations have been tried.  It takes songs like “Crazy” to prove that there is still room for uniqueness in the music industry.  It’s no surprise this song made a huge impact in 2006  (#7 top song of the year).

As to my personal dilemma in assigning a genre to “Crazy”, well I just left it at Rock, for the moment.  As I have mentioned before, I don’t place much emphasis/time in genre associations in my digital music collection – I just pick whatever makes sense at that moment.

3 Minute Documentary about Ugandan Hip-Hop

Wikipedia has a run-down on all the different styles of African Hip-Hop.

El Hijo de la Cumbia

Never have I heard the sounds of cumbia music being mixed with electronic sounds.  That is, until I bumped into “El Hijo de la Cumbia”, Emiliano Gómez.  El Hijo de la Cumbia has found a unique sound in focusing his music in Cumbia with sounds of Electronica, Reggae, Hip-Hop, and other sprinkled all over.  Definitely, a DJ I will follow, from now on.

My opinions are based by this mix, which is the only work I’ve heard from this DJ:

TRACKLIST

01_Intro_Real_ElHijodelaCumbia
02_Siempre Suave_ElHijodelaCumbia
03_Cambie la Historia_ElHijodelaCumbia
04_Como te Voy a olvidar_Angeles Azules_vs_ElHijodelaCumbia
05_Viento_Aron y su Grupo ilusion_vs_ElHijodelaCumbia
06_Homeja Al Dj Taz_ElHijodelaCumbia _Mix
07_Pobre _ElHijodelaCumbia
08_Cumbiatoons_ElHijodelaCumbia
09_Un escalon_ElHIjodelaCumbia

Download it here.

Aurgasm – free and legal mp3s

One of the sites on my rss feed is http://aurgasm.us/.  Each week, or so, they feature a new artist and a few mp3s by that artist.  Recently, they featured a great female vocalist: Melody Gardot.  Finding out about her made following this website worthwhile.  I just listened to her two songs offered by this post: Goodnite and Worrisome Heart.  Now, I must get all her songs.

Take a Glimpse at Upcoming CD Releases

A list that I view every few months is the upcoming CD releases to see what’s coming down the album pipe.

Personally, I’m most looking forward for Dr. Dre’s Detox, which is set to release sometime this year.  Detox should be Dr. Dre’s final album and one that will step aside from the norm.  In a 2002 interview with MTV, Dre stated:

“I’m not talking about lowriders and blunts and all that anymore,  I mean, that’s played. As a matter of fact, I’m tired of hearing other people talk about it, to tell you the truth.  I had to come up with something different but still keep it hardcore, so what I decided to do was make my album one story about one person and just do the record through a character’s eyes,  And everybody that appears on my album is going to be a character, so it’s basically going to be a hip-hop musical.”

Don’t know if this is officially from Dr. Dre, but here’s a teaser video promoting the album: