Best band name ever?

I nominate Rage Against the Machine. It was novel without being too clever or too cute. It was descriptive but not verbose. And you knew exactly what you were getting. You knew they were political and what their politics were, and you knew to expect aggressive and angry. Zack de la Rocha isn't the smartest or most eloquent guy around, but this isn't Brains Against the Machine or Eloquence Against the Machine. It's Rage, and the man's certainly angry.

Movie idea

I had an idea last night for a movie. A noted music critic encounters a busker on the street singing incomprehensibly while playing unusual instruments. He promotes him to the wider world. The singer does not appear to understand any language spoken to him. The chorus of speculation eventually reaches consensus that he somehow illegally entered the country, originating from some poorly known region of Central Asia, the Amazon, or some similarly obscure place. Linguists struggle to make sense of his language, and anthropologists are baffled by his novel instrumentation. Through it all, he wanders with apparent dim incomprehension, mute but for the enigmatic verses of his incomprehensible songs. Then we discover he's really an ordinary guy from Ohio who made his own instruments because he couldn't afford the real ones, sang made-up nonsense because he can never remember the words to any songs, and kept his mouth shut because he didn't want to get in trouble.

~ Fin ~

Blackfest

I'd like to see (in existence, not in person) a music festival organized along the theme of black. It might feature:

• The Black Angels


• The Black Crowes


• The Black Keys


• The Black Lips


• Black Sabbath


• Blackstreet


• Clint Black


• Frank Black, aka Black Francis

etc.

iTunes spurs a cleanup

iTunes doesn't respect existing directory structures and isn't very useful for files without good ID3 tags. I had little luck finding good alternative mp3 players for the Mac, so I bit the bullet and cleaned up my mp3s.

MusicBrainz was a real time saver. It's a site that stores fingerprints of mp3 files. You can use software such as their Picard to identify your mp3s. Then you can use it to group them by album, set the ID3 tags, rename the files, and move them somewhere, all in bulk. It knows what songs go in an album from its database, so if it can't automatically figure out what song/album a file goes to, you can drag-and-drop it to the right place.

Picard makes this whole process a lot simpler. What would have been days of work was only a couple of hours (for ~1100 files in ~100 albums). It is only at version 0.10, so it's still pretty rough, but it's free, and it gets the job done better than anything else I've tried.

Billy Jean is not my Ice, Ice, Baby