Saturday Share revived - Jake Shimabukuro

This one is out there.  Last night I was bopping around the Stage6 website looking for more cool violations of copyright in glorious high quality, and I ran across a hi-def file of this guy, and one of the comments said, and I quote; “That dude is amazing. At five minutes into the video you’ll completely change your opinion about the ukulele.” I thought “Oh nonsense.  It’s a ukulele, how great can it be?”

This great.  If you have the DivX web plugin installed, hit the link to the high def file.  if not, the YouTube version will have to do.

What’s amazing is watching him play the melody and the vocal melody at the same time.  On a four-string freaking ukulele.  I can’t imagine him ever breaking into the mainstream with this, and I’ll admit, I did wonder a bit why he’s wasting such amazing talent on the ukulele.  It must be driven purely by passion, because it seems to me that he could become one of the best classical guitar guitar players alive today, and probably a rock god were he so inclined.

After I downloaded and saved that hi-def DivX video, I went looking around YouTube for more Jake.  There’s a lot there.  After hearing a few more things, including this one, I just said “I gotta have this” and bought the album.  I encourage you to do the same.  You can get his latest DVD here, or buy the latest CD here.  In order to entice you to do just that, here’s a sample:

From the album Gently Weeps, this is While My Guitar Gently Weeps in MP3, alt-preset-extreme, 6.8MB.  You will never think about Tiny Tim and his retarded ukulele ever again.

Posted by JimK at 05:59 PM on February 10, 2007
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The Saturday Share 4/23/05

This week is about covers and opposites.  If you watched the last episode of CSI (Vegas) you heard Marilyn Manson’s cover of the Softcell classic “Tainted Love.” It was done for a paycheck I mean the truly terrible “Not Another Teen Movie,” but don’t hold that against it...I’ve always liked Manson’s covers.  Somehow MM has always managed to find the dark side, the truly depressing or negative side of songs that, often because of their up-tempo nature or the cheeriness of the original vocal, never sound so...wrong in a good way.  “Tainted Love” is no exception in my ears...I love the cover.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is a song that should probably be left alone by everyone from now on.  No more American Idol contestants singing it, no more wedding singers tearing it up, remove it from all kareoke machines worldwide.  And most especially stop his daughter from doing it again.  That song is
Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” about as simple and pure a vocal performance as one can ever hope to find.  Sometimes a singer just sings, and their performance is so perfectly fitted to the song that you almost never want to hear it done again, not even live by that same singer.  I think this is one of them.  Pure, simple, perfect.  Which is why everyone probably thinks they can sing it, because he made it sound so easy…

So there’s the opposites.  Two songs, unalike in dignity, on fair Right Thoughts, where we download our MP3s.

Posted by JimK at 11:17 PM on April 23, 2005
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The Saturday Share 4/16/05

Time for a sort-of repeat.  Here’s a torrent file for NIN’s new album “With Teeth.” As opposed to the last time, this is the full release.

My hope that it was going to be at least half good has been beaten, thrashed, kicked and dashed all to hell.  I am less a fan of this release than I was of “the fragile.” I’m pretty done with Trent unless he manages to figure out how to make up with Chris Vrenna.

I was hoping, based on the pre-release “leaked” tracks, that we were going to be treated to a return to the old school and some new directions in energy and anger.  It’s nothing like old-school NIN. There’s no coherency, no melody, no structure. No symphonic orchestration that made even the harsh and angry ‘Broken’ a work of art.

This is faux-industrial dissonance masquerading as an attempt to recapture TR’s youthful anger and energy, and it fails miserably.  It is some strange attempt at an industrial White Stripes-ish indie/industrial rock/punk mess, and it just...well, again, it fails miserably on all counts.

It’s not all bad.  One track that worked from beginning to end was The Line Begins To Blur. Very “Eraser,” without being a clone. Conceptually the song stayed together and the layering TR is famous for worked. It actually sounded like it had a base. What Vrenna used to do for TR in the studio was create “atmosphere,” the background drones and melodies that grounded a song. “Line” seems to have that going on.

“Hand that Feeds” is a decent straight-forward rocker. Nothing too fancy, but “March of the Pigs” wasn’t fancy either except for the drum timing, andI think we can all agree that MotP is an awesome song.  HTF is a fair companion to that particular NIN style...it’s not anywhere near as good, but it’s decent.

The rest?  Ass.  The one track I thought was going to be mind-blowing, “You Know What You Are,” turned out to be a complete disaster.  The song could not be any worse, a perfect example of having a great chorus and no song to go with it.  It’s actually two seperate and unrelated songs mashed into one.  Dissonance.

After hearing the album, I cam to this conclusion; It sounds like a demo of a Nine Inch Nails album.  It’s about half a record, unfinished and raw, and that’s not a good thing in a NIN record.

If you aren’t down with the Torrents, you can use a direct link.  Right click, save as!  75-ishMB, Mp3s.  Use the torrent if you can to aid others in downloading…

Posted by JimK at 12:26 AM on April 17, 2005
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The Saturday Share 4/2/05

For months and months I have been replacing badly-encoded and crappy sounding MP3s in my collection.  I am “buying” (it’s still borderline legal!) the MP3s through AllOfMP3.com, it’s so much easier to let them encode stuff if they have it available.  Half our 1600-ish CDs are still in boxes from when we moved into this house in 2000! 

I use preset extreme unless the song or album just isn’t worth the higer bitrate (old recordings, etc.).  This week I have been replacing the vast collection of 80’s music...I originally ripped all of our “Sounds of the Eighties” CDs, but you can’t polish a turd...those CDs were mastered by a deaf person.  They sound like old vinyl played on a portable record player with a dirty needle.  Plus they CDs were padded with a lot of total crap.  So I have been replacing them with my own giant 80’s collection a song at a time, and I re-discovered how much I love this week’s offering, Simply Red’s ”Holding Back The Years.” (Lyrics) It’s a great example of a singer just singing the song...simply.  Pun intended. :)

If that doesn’t float your boat, how about a stupid celebrity story and a funny song?

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If you saw the second episode of “The Office US” you’ll know why I was inspired to remember this story.  BTW: The Office US Sucks a dead donkey’s nutsack.  It’s really, really bad compared to the original series.  Hacky, hokey and hackneyed and I hope it dies a fitting death after a very short run.  I can only imagine they threw a truckload of money at Gervais to get him to pervert something he held so dear like that.

But I digress.  On with the story.

The last time the UFC was in Connecticut at Mohegan Sun, Joe Rogan hooked us up with some near-cage-side seats and we hung out after.  It was fascinating watching people come up as fans and interact with the fighters and especially how they interact with Joe, who is known for News Radio, Fear Factor, UFC and stand-up, so you never know from which fanbase the fan will come.  This one frat-type white guy comes up, drunk as shit, and was clearly a fan of Joe’s stand-up as he started saying a few words and lines here and there from the last DVD Joe released.  But they guy wanted so badly to work in the Chris Rock line from 1999’s “Bigger and Blacker,” from that table dance song.  He wanted to sound hip and cool, but was too scared to actually say the line, so he says, completely out of place and appropos of nothing being discussed, “Can a brotha get a table dance?”

Joe stops the conversation dead.  He smelled it the instant it came out of the guy’s mouth, this need to sound hip but being too afraid to say the real line, which is “Can a nigga get a table dance?” Joe called him a pussy and demanded that he say it.  The guy stammers all quiet-like “what, c’mon, c’mon...” Joe’s now yelling at the top of his lungs, which are quite the powerful, “Say it, you pussy! You wanted to say it but you’re too chickenshit to say the line right!  Say ‘Can a nigga get a table dance’ right now!”

The guy finally broke after like three solid minutes of Joe berating him and busts out with the line.  Everyone laughed, black, white, Native American, even a couple of the Brazilian guys seemed to get the joke.

That’s one of the things that amuses and annoys me about people...this need to be seen as hip and edgy but they’re total pussies when the chips are down.  I loved that Joe called the guy on it right there in front of everyone, and in the end, the guy was afraid of nothing at all, because in the context of a drunken fight-show afterparty...everyone laughed, because it’s a stupid song and that guy was a doof.

Moral: Don’t half-ass anything.

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Posted by JimK at 04:46 PM on April 02, 2005
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The Saturday Share 3/26/05

This week I went old-school metal.  Back in the day, and I can’t even remember what year, there was a big metal tour.  If I remember right it was Raven opening for Wasp opening for Megadeth opening for Slayer.  It had to be the early days of Megadeth’s “Peace Sells” release or else they would have been headlining.

Anyway, we were Slayer fanatics in Albany NY.  Just insane.  We booed Raven off the stage in the first song, we chanted “SLAY-ER” at Wasp until Blackie Lawless actually said “If I play ‘Fuck Like A Beast’ will you guys shut the fuck up?” and he did...so we did.  We wouldn’t let Megadeth off the hook though.  SLAY-ER!  SLAY-ER! They played four songs before Dave Mustaine just walked off and left the band playing, whereuppon they realized he wasn’t coming back and left.  SLAY-ER.  SLAY-ER.  We were relentless.  House lights came up and we started to riot.

This was the Palace Theater in Albany, but even if you’ve never been, all cities have a place like this.  Created mainly for theater, with a balcony/mezzanine, holds maybe 2000 people tops.  People were jumping off the balcony into the crowd.  We ripped rows...ROWS!...of seats out of the concrete floor screaming for Slayer.  Finally they came out, the whole band and said if we didn’t knock it off they weren’t going to play.

Like a church, it was so quiet.  Tom Araya spoke and we obeyed.

I don’t even remember why it all happened.  We were never that rowdy as a general rule in the Albany metal scene.  It just seemed that on that night, no one wanted to put up with anything but Slayer.  Somehow all 2000 people seemed to have the same unrest strike at once.  I never saw anything like it again.

In honor of the salad days of speed metal, this week’s song, cheezy satan lyrics and all, is Slayer’s ”Altar of Sacrifice”.  I never did listen too closely to the words to any Slayer song.  I was always hypnotized by those monster, monster riffs.

Posted by JimK at 11:31 AM on March 26, 2005
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The Saturday Share 3/19/05

In case you didn’t know, I am/was/might still be a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails.  In fact, it was NIN that brought my wife and I together in the Usenet newsgroup alt.music.nin.  Tat was back when you could still get on Springer for dating online.  :)

Anyway, I was truly disappointed with Trent’s last opus, “the fragile.” I found it meandering, ponderous, pretentious, self-inflated and bombastic.  It was like a Stephen King book post-1990, only audio.  It needed a good editor.

So I am kind of looking forward to the new NIN record now though after hearing the two “leaked” songs and the promo clips, which you can get here.  That is an 18MB zip file with MP3s inside, and they are:

# Archive C:\Documents and Settings\user\Desktop\nin_with_teeth_promo.zip

Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 01 - all the love in the world.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 02 - you know what you are.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 03 - the collector.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 04 - the hand that feeds.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 05 - love is not enough.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 06 - every day is exactly the same.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 07 - with teeth.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 08 - only.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 09 - getting smaller.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 10 - sunspots.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 11 - the line begins to blur.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 12 - right where it belongs.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 13 - Promo track.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 14 - Getting Smaller.mp3
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth (Promo) - 15 - Hand That Feeds.mp3

The last two are full-length songs.  I don’t know if they are the album versions or a single version made just for “leaking,” but they;re full.  Also, there is a video for “hand that feeds” which you can get here also (34.6MB Quicktime).

My take: Some of it is alt-rocky, too White Stripes for me.  P.S. - I fucking hate the White Stripes.  But, some of it is goddamned good, harkening back to the old days when TR was all raw anger and balls and pain.  “you know what you are” made me sit right up and take notice, very Broken-era NIN.  Some is a bit Pretty Hate Machine, which is also perfectly OK with me.  A few tracks just blow if the samples are any indication.  But...there’s enough of the good stuff that I definitely want to buy the record.

That’s right...buy.  Not download, not pirate...buy.  I still do that sometimes.  :)

Posted by JimK at 03:09 AM on March 19, 2005
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The Saturday Share 2/19/05

This week’s track is just a fun romp through an old Steppenwolf classic.  It’s the Philip Stier remix of “Magic Carpet Ride” from the soundtrack of the 1999 movie Go!.

Steir is well-known as a producer and remixer, and has done work for everyone from No Doubt to Rob Zombie to Pete Townsend.  I love this remix because it captures the non-stop drive of the original song and brings it into the modern realm of big beat electronica, a genre of which I am particularly fond.

Mostly it’s just a fun little track though.  Nothing deep or spiritual or meaningful.  Sometimes music is just supposed to be fun. :)

Posted by JimK at 01:34 PM on February 19, 2005
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The Saturday Share

This week’s track is MC 900FT Jesus, If I Only Had A Brain.  I’ve loved this song for years now.

MC 900FT Jesus is Mark Griffin, who started in 1989 with a couple of albums that never really came together.  but the 1994 release One Step Ahead Of The Spider was brilliant.  A strange, other-wordly blend of jazz, story-telling and hip-hop, Griffin was ahead of his time.

In 2003, Griffin released Hell with the Lid Off, but it doesn’t have that special something of the 1994 record.

Last word anyone had was that he was still in Dallas training to be a pilot.

Posted by JimK at 11:41 PM on February 12, 2005
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Something new: The Saturday Share

I love music...my whole life, since I was little, music has been a big part of everything about me.  I don’t pay enough attention to it on the blog, so to rectify that, I’m going to try something...the Saturday Share.  I’ll throw up a song that I think people should have in their collection, along with some history and whatever else I feel like saying about it.

First up: Dusty Springfield, Son of a Preacher Man (MP3, --alt preset extreme, 4.29MB).  Released in 1968, written by John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins, it peaked at #10 on the charts.  It sits at #240 on the Rolling Stone 500 greatest songs of all time.  The album it was released on, “Dusty in Memphis,” was a bit of a flop, as Ms. Springfield’s career was on it’s way down by 1968.

While the single strongest selling point of this song is Dusty’s silky, sexy voice, the amazing vocal melody and simple musical accompaniment make it one of the most perfect songs of all time.  It’s also a testament to what a great singer can do: Dusty was a white chick from England.  Listening to this song, you’d swear she was the daughter of a black preacher in Mississippi.

Dusty Springfield never had much of a career after “Dusty in Memphis.” She did a few things with various people over the years, including something with The Pet Shop Boys in the late 80’s.  Springfield died in March 1999, succumbing to a four-year battle with breast cancer.

You’ll find the lyrics below.

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Billy-ray was a preacher’s son
And when his daddy would visit he’d come along
When they gathered round and started talkin’
That’s when billy would take me walkin’
A-through the back yard we’d go walkin’
Then he’d look into my eyes
Lord knows to my surprise

The only one who could ever reach me
Was the son of a preacher man
The only boy who could ever teach me
Was the son of a preacher man
Yes he was, he was, mmm, yes he was

Being good isn’t always easy
No matter how hard I try
When he started sweet-talkin’ to me
He’d come and tell me everything is all right
He’d kiss and tell me everything is all right
Can I get away again tonight?

The only one who could ever reach me
Was the son of a preacher man
The only boy who could ever teach me
Was the son of a preacher man
Yes he was, he was, lord knows he was

How well I remember
The look that was in his eyes
Stealin’ kisses from me on the sly
Takin’ time to make time
Tellin’ me that he’s all mine
Learnin’ from each other’s knowing
Lookin’ to see how much we’ve grown

And the only one who could ever reach me
Was the son of a preacher man
The only boy who could ever teach me
Was the son of a preacher man
Yes he was, he was, oh, yes he was
He was the sweet-talking son of a preacher man
I guessed he was the son of a preacher man
Sweet-lovin’ son of a preacher man
Ahh, move me

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Posted by JimK at 05:45 AM on February 05, 2005
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