Tag Archives: NPR

The Flood Begins…

NPR has released their top ten albums of the year, even though there is a almost full month left.

Based on their list, I’m fairly sure they listened to only ten albums. Of the top ten, I have listened to four of the albums on the list–Regina Spektor’s Begin to Hope, Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins’ Rabbit Fur Coat, Cat Power’s The Greatest, and TV On the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain–and none of them are very good, and I consider myself a big fan of Spektor and Lewis.

While I do appreciate NPR’s recent (within the past year or so) focus on music, it really is designed for the wannabe hipster or older person with a young ear. They are about as pop as you can get for “indie.” Ugh, I totally sound like a hipster.

NPR’s Music Coverage

NPR’s music site always amuses me. They just posted an audio review to Ghostface Killah’s Fishscale. I can imagine the older listeners being confused and annoyed, the old listeners trying to intellectualize Ghost, and the young listeners thinking they are cool because they can now talk about the album when their not (indie) label droppin’.

In any event, the review is not worth listening to (and the album is not all that great, especially compared to Supreme Clientele and Pretty Toney Album; although, the interview with Rza by Terry Gross that is linked to on the site is worth listening to, just to hear Gross beg to be cool). However, the site is still worth keeping tabs on, assuming you can handle the indie-biasness and forced hipness of the whole thing. Some of the people NPR have working on the site are people/heads NPR brought in because of their knowledge and quality.

(Y)Our Senses

Reconceptualizing ourselves and our environment interests me from both a social science perspective (e.g., constructivism) and a musical perspective (e.g., noise and field recordings). A recent All Things Considered on NPR reported on composer Brent Michael Davids’ Tinnitus Quartet, which replicates the sound Davids hears as a result of his tinnitus.

Davids’ idea is to communicate what he and other people with tinnitus hear to those who do not have the condition, and the radio segment approaches the music in this way. A more interesting approach, however, would have been to use the different ways in which we (in this case, people with and people without tinnitus) hear to question our conceptualization of sound and hearing (or, more generally, the senses). More specific, it demonstrates the personal/individual character of our senses and breaks apart the uniformity (among people) with which we treat/understand each sense. Unfortunately, neither the reporter, Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr, nor Davids does so directly.

Based on the snippets of the piece in the segment, I would certainly like to hear the full version, which is an 18 minute piece of a constant high-pitched tone with violin-created grasshopper chirping noises that eventually fall away to silence.