Giving in to Pandora's lure...

You may have heard of Pandora.com, the music genome project. Or you may not. Anyways, it's a pretty good little idea. You enter the name of an artist or song that you like, and then it will play that. Then it will play something that is similar sounding. Then you can click on a thumbs up or thumbs down, eventually cornering your music taste within that genre. It actually works pretty well. Dan Bryce showed me the web page a few years ago, and I thought it was pretty cool. However, I never really visited the page, and perhaps I was scared to.
You see, I like music. A lot. It can be kinda addicting sometimes I guess. So I didn't want to end up spending evenings and weekends trying to discover the most obscure band or artist. That's one of the things that annoys me about the underground music scene. It's all about dropping names or being the first kid on the block with the latest CD by "so and so". Lately I've been rebelling against this attitude. I give props to Emo Neufeld for showing me Mum, Looper, and The Notwist. I did not discover these bands. I give props to Kevin 'Boss' Warkentin for The Appleseed Cast, Sunny Day Real Estate, Mates of State, and so on. I give Props to Miles for Poison the Well and Zion-I, which I was listening to before all'y'all, whether you like it or not.
Bands I've discovered independently (and before the mass of the local scene) include .hopesfall., All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, As I Lay Dying (no don't even claim that one... I was listening to them for a year or two before Frail Words Collapse came out), China the Beautiful, Coastal, !!!, Creeper Lagoon... and that's just A-C... Okok. enough trying to reclaim lost claims and recover stolen scene points.
I have been exploring the world of Hip-Hop lately.
It all started a number of years ago with Zion-I, when I was driving Miles604 back to his Cloverdale Home. He brought along a load of CD's and in typical compulsive scene-kid style, he took over my car stereo and commenced 45 minutes of introducing me to good music. Poison the Well and Zion-I were two CD's that stuck out, and that I looked into and purchased (I had to order them both in, since there was nowhere in town that carried them. Okok, but back to hip-hop, I'm getting off topic. BAck in those days, I was a one sound man. I loved my hxc and emo. My idea of rap was that it was all gold teeth and Hummers and gatts. Zion-I showed me that rap could have a social conscious too. MC Zion's lyrics spoke on issues such as urbanization or life on the streets, like, the love/hate relationship that he had with his city, and so on. Stuff I completly can't truly connect with, but appreciate regardless, cause he's not spittin' about how big his hummer is. I bought Mind Over Matter, his debut album, and have since purchased his next two releases.
From Zion-I, I moved on to Blackalicious. Blazing Arrows was my first exposure to The Gift of Gab, and from there I went backwards to listen to Nia, an earlier album, but I did not appreciate it fully right aways. I have since realized how amazing it is. I then went out and got myself up to date by purchasing his latest CD, The Craft.
From features on the Zion-I and Blackalicious' CDs, I learned of other great undergroud hip-hop artists that could rap about things other than killin' niggaz. Talib Kweli, Common, Atmosphere, Black Moon, Shad (props to Furtney for the London connex), A Tribe Called Quest, Jurrasic 5, and so on. I even procured a French Hip-Hop CD; 'Sang Froid' by Sinik. I don't know what he raps about, so I can't put him in the social conscious. I shoudl get one of those pretty French speaking girls I know to check it out and tell me of what he speaks.
Anyways, I've finally given in, and just recently (an hour ago) tuned into Pandora.com and have a Blackalicious station going. It's been pretty decent so far. The current song kinda sucks, but a lot of them have been pretty good. So far on my little pad of paper I have scribbled down the names and albums of 5 pretty decent sounding hip-hop artists or groups. Hopefully I can swim out of the sea of good music that exists out there on the web, but we'll see how far downshore I surface. Ooooo, found number 6 for my list. Blood of Abraham. I like this song so far... we'll see what the rest of their stuff sounds like.
Aight, I suppose I'll log off.
Shalom.