music

Chris Knight's avatar

It was thirty years ago this week that the Sony Walkman – the gadget that gave birth to portable music – made its debut. To commemorate the occasion, BBC Magazine asked 13-year old Scott Campbell (above) to yield his iPod for seven days in favor of a classic Walkman. And young master Scott wrote about the experience…

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

As I boarded the school bus, where I live in Aberdeenshire, I was greeted with laughter. One boy said: “No-one uses them any more.” Another said: “Groovy.” Yet another one quipped: “That would be hard to lose.”

My friends couldn’t imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked.

In some classes in school

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Chris Knight's avatar

That was the question I was asking everyone late on Tuesday night at the Palladium in High Point when we were there to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The crew from 107.5 WKZL FM was there giving out prizes during a Transformers trivia contest. Phillip and Matt and I were sitting up around the top rows of the theater and one of the 107.5 guys asked “What does Barricade transform into?”

I raised my hand and shouted “Police car!” Which was the right answer. So I ran down to collect my reward.

Which turned out to be this…

A copy of Britney Spears’ new CD Circus!

And I thought I was gonna get a Transformers t-shirt, or somethin’…...

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It came out last week and I haven’t been able to post about it ‘cuz I’ve been out of town since then (maybe it’s time to finally get a laptop?) but “Weird Al” Yankovic has done it again. His latest release “Craigslist” is about the (in)famous classified ads website, done in the style of Jim Morrison and The Doors. It is hilarious and Al even got Ray Manzarek to do the keyboards for the song!

Click here for the “Craigslist” music video on Al’s YouTube channel, which also includes links where you can buy the song from iTunes and other online outlets....

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Per the man himself on his weirdal.com website, “Internet Leaks” isn’t the name of his forthcoming new album (which Al claims he doesn’t know when it’s coming out). Instead…

Al will be “leaking” new tracks to the Internet over the summer, and for bookkeeping reasons we had to call them SOMETHING, so “Internet Leaks” it is! Al’s T.I. parody “Whatever You Like” retroactively becomes the first song in the collection, and there will be 4 new original songs released digitally over the next few months. The first new song (and video!) will be out on June 16, and will be available wherever mp3s are sold or stolen.

Just one more reason why I believe that “Weird Al” Yankovic is not only one of the most successful musical entertainers in modern history, but also among the most innovative. Yeah sure, selling songs over the Internet isn’t a new thing, but ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Praise be the Allspark, we do NOT have to go through this crazy mess a second time…

Good friend of this blog Kartik Kaul has passed along the word that Steve Jablonsky’s score soundtrack CD for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will go on sale June 23rd! Also on the same day will be a “Music From…” CD for the movie. Which is all well and good but uhhh… as most people know it’s the orchestral score that we are mostly interested in on this blog 😛

Here’s the link to the score CD’s page on Amazon.com where you can pre-order it. Which I’ve already done for mine 🙂...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It was already fairly well known that Steve Jablonsky would be returning to score Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, just as he did the original in 2007. But in the past few days the word has come that Linkin Park and Hans Zimmer are also contributing to the film’s score. Linkin Park had some stuff on the Transformers soundtrack album (the one with all the songs, not the score that Yours Truly went more than a little nuts for :-P).

And if Hans Zimmer rings a bell, it’s prolly ‘cuz he has worked on the scores for Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, and a ton of other good movies.

Just from a musical perspective, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is sounding pretty epic. Can’t wait to see – and hear – it come June....

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All of y’all who’ve been wondering when the soundtrack for Lost Season 4 would be coming out: be of good cheer! According to the Varèse Sarabande website, Lost: Season 4 Original Television Soundtrack is due for release on May 12th, just before the Season 5 finale.

Here’s the pertinent info that’s on the site…

It’s here! Michael Giacchino’s brilliant soundtrack, which follows every mysterious twist and turn of Lost‘s addictive Fourth Season. Exploding with excitement, Lost reached new heights in the fourteen episodes of its fourth season. More than three months after their fateful crash, the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 discover that the only thing more dangerous than the island might be the people who have come to rescue them. The mind-blowing story was told with original flashbacks and mind-bending flash-forwards. There was no shortage of drama in Losts thrilling Season 4 … just what you

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Twenty-five years ago today “Weird Al” Yankovic In 3-D was released… and neither music or pop culture in general was ever the same again.

True, this was the second album that “Weird Al” Yankovic came out with (following his self-titled debut record). But In 3-D was the one that blasted his career into high orbit and he hasn’t come down yet. The first song of the album, “Eat It”, was a culinary parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. The song itself is a mirthful marvel in its own right, but the “Eat It” music video is what grabbed everyone’s attention: in 1984 and the height of the MTV revolution, nobody had seen a music video packed with so much humor! “Eat It” wound up winning a 1984 Grammy, for Best Comedy Performance Single or Album, Spoken or Musical. It would be just the first of many for Yankovic.

So to ...

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Leopold Wrobel of Wingerforth, England has been remanded to gaol by the constabulary for a period of twenty weeks after being found guilty of harassment and violating an “antisocial behavior order” that was sought against him by his neighbors.

Apparently, what Michael and Kathleen Sharpe found so offensive is that Wrobel would constantly whistle the theme music from The Addams Family whenever he saw them.

In his defense, Wrobel claimed that he was only whistling at his dog. But “closed-circuit TV footage shown to the court depicted him repeatedly whistling when the couple left their house or arrived home.”

I don’t know what’s more disturbing: this guy’s whistling fetish, or the fact that England now has so many surveillance cameras that one was looking out for Wrobel’s performance....

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