Quite possibly one of the finest mash-ups ever constructed. All props due Divide & Kreate FTW! Okay, I guess Willie Nelson and U2 and MARRS deserve some props too .

I guess I’ve heard about original sin
I heard the dude blamed the chick
I heard the chick blamed the snake
I heard they were naked when they got busted.
I heard things ain’t been the same since…

- The Hold Steady from the song Cattle and the Creeping Things from the album Separation Sunday

If you asked me a month ago what my favorite cable channel was, I’d have told you it was Ovation TV. If you ask me today, I’d shout that answer at you.

On July 1st, Ovation kicked off a series called American Revolutionaries Rock and Soul that runs through the 18th. Normally I don’t get to watch much TV, but since I was already keeping tabs on Ovation I saw this coming in their promos and gave the DVR some appropriate pokes and prods well in advance. Today I was able to watch two exceptional shows:

Electric Purgatory is a thought-provoking look at how black musicians have had a more-than-challenging time making it as pure rock musicians. Footage and interviews with folks from Living Colour and Fishbone and Bad Brains brought back a lot of memories of the 1980s for me.

Welcome to Death Row is a  thorough history of Death Row Records – the notorious gangsta rap label created by Dr. Dre and Suge Knight (and maybe Harry O).

Neither of these are brand new documentaries. EP dates from 2006 and WtDR from 2001 (though with some updates at the end). Regardless, Ovation has done a stellar job  of pulling all sorts of amazing such shows together for this series. Thanks Ovation – keep ‘em comin’.

I positively giggled myself out of my chair! When you look up “sarcasm” in the dictionary there should be a picture of Gregg Gillis. Enjoy.

Someone is really “unclear on the concept” here. I was on Amazon looking for an album and this popped up in my search result:

In case the text is too small for you to read, it shows that I can download a lossy 256kbps MP3 of the album for $15.99 or I can buy the physical CD for $14.99 (I’m an Amazon Prime member, so I get ‘free’ shipping and two-day delivery).

Bollocks!

The actual CD provides me lossless audio, a hard backup, and more fair-use rights than the MP3 download does — and I pay $1 LESS for taking it up the you-know-what. WTF?

The more I listen to The Hold Steady, the more I think they’re one of the best bands to come out of this decade. Check ‘em out if you haven’t already!

The Swish from their first album Almost Killed Me (2004):

Chip’s Ahoy from their third album Boys and Girls in America (2006):

Sequestered in Memphis from their fourth album Stay Positive live on Letterman:

Der Bingle said it best:

Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest of them all.

According to my music server, I appear to own 1,132 albums by 457 artists encompassing 14,733 songs. If I had to choose only a fraction of my music to take with me on a desert island, at or near the top of the list would be The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books box set.

The set consists of sixteen (16!!!) discs containing 251 songs, spanning nearly a decade of recordings starting in 1956 (all remastered, of course, with extras). It covers the oeuvres of Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. Some fellas who knew how to write a song or two . The set also contains meaty texts on the recordings and historical contexts.

Although the price is in nosebleed territory, consider that it works out to just about the same as iTunes pricing per song, and you the stupendous packaging and documents for free!

UPDATE: I neglected to properly credit the great picture used above. Mea culpa! The picture was taken by a fellow Ella fan Edwin Lachica in Switzerland. Apologies Edwin!

Or is it Pip-ing?

I’ve blogged and twittered various lyric snippets from dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip over the last few months. I’ve been totally into these guys since the first time I saw/heard Thou Shalt Always Kill, and every new tune I uncover just cements the foundation of their sharpness (though they are, of course, “just a band”).

Their album Angles was finally released a few weeks ago. It’s still a bitch to find in the US.

Net-net, I’m completely enamored of their work. It’s fun, insightful, entertaining, thought-provoking, and fresh. They’re real guys without real attitude. I can’t recommend them enough. You can listen to lots of their stuff on their MySpace page.

Spend some time with Mr. Pip!

This chart should concern you.

I brought my daughter to the Natick Mall Collection for a birthday party. As I walked around, I realized that the low-key music playing throughout the mall collection was a Muzak-i-fied version of the theme to David Lynch‘s Twin Peaks. Two things immediately struck me like a brick. First, anybody familiar with Angelo Badalamenti‘s compositions knows that Muzak-i-fying them is a truly amusing concept – I laughed out loud when I realized what I was listening to! Second, I think the programmers at Muzak (or whomever feeds the mall collection) must be under the age of 30 or they’d realize the bizarreness of running the Twin Peaks theme at a lux mall collection.

She’s dead!

Wrapped in plastic!

Oooh – I must have those cute black sling-backs!