Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a band that I discovered when I was a sophomore at the University of Waterloo. The professor of one of my Computer Science courses, Prabhakar Ragde, hosted office hours for students to ask questions in a one-on-one or small group setting, and he would announce these sessions by posting to the class newsgroup. He ended each of these weekly messages with a line like, “This week, I will be playing [name of album] by [name of musical artist].” I have a memory of attending his office hours with Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven playing in the background, and I’ve been a fan of the band ever since.

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To best enjoy this musical about the six wives of King Henry VIII, it’s good to brush up on the history. The lyrics contain a lot of jokes and references that I wouldn’t have gotten had I not learned a bit about the real-life stories.¹

The songs are catchy, though unexceptional. The best song for me is the one for Catherine Howard. Through several repetitions of the chorus, she comes to realize that men objectify her, and goes through an emotional journey from playful to tragic. The singer ends the song with a sob, a surely challenging feat for an actor.

Footnotes

1. by watching The Tudors TV show, which is not necessarily the most historically accurate, but close enough ↩

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I’m clearly two years late on this, but when I recently looked back at my post of favourite albums of the previous decade, I couldn’t help doing this again, if only to leave myself something to look back on in another 10 years.

1. 12 Bit Blues - Kid Koala (2012)
2. The Navigator - Hurray for the Riff Raff (2017)
3. Lonerism - Tame Impala (2012)
4. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West (2010)
5. Trouble Will Find Me - The National (2013)
6. Love & Hate - Michael Kiwanuka (2016)
7. The ArchAndroid - Janelle Monae (2010)
8. A Moon Shaped Pool - Radiohead (2016)
9. Art Angels - Grimes (2015)
10. I Am Easy to Find - The National (2019)

Bonus List - Favourite Songs That Aren’t on the Aforementioned Albums

In no particular order:

• “begin again” - Purity Ring, Another Eternity (2015)
• “Piss Crowns are Trebled” - Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress (2015)
• “Wide Open” - Chemical Brothers (feat. Beck), Born in the Echoes (2015)
• “The Heart Wants What it Wants” - Selena Gomez, For You (2014)
• “Blood and Rockets - Movement I, Saga of Jack Parsons - Movement II, Too the Moon” - The Claypool Lennon Delirium, South of Reality (2019)
• “Good Intentions Paving Company” - Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me (2010)
• “Optimist” - David Byrne & St. Vincent, Love This Giant (2012)
• “Time” - Hans Zimmer, Inception (2010)
• “Do I Wanna Know?” - Arctic Monkeys, AM (2013)

Bonus Bonus List - A couple of artists who have been incredibly prolific during the 2010’s, and who don’t have any specific works that I especially love, but still, I like almost everything they do

• Lana Del Rey
• Run the Jewels

Seems like everyone is doing this, so I’m jumping on the bandwagon. Here goes…

1. Third - Portishead (2008)
2. I'll Sleep When You're Dead - El-P (2007)
3. The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place - Explosions in the Sky (2003)
4. Icky Thump - White Stripes (2007)
5. Illinois - Sufjan Stevens (2005)
6. Kill Bill: Volume 1 Original Soundtrack - Various Artists (2003)
7. Finally We Are No One - múm (2002)
8. Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven - Godspeed You! Black Emperor (2000)
9. The Crane Wife - The Decemberists (2006)
10. Vespertine - Björk (2001)
11. Deltron 3030 - Deltron 3030 (2000)
12. In Rainbows - Radiohead (2007)
13. Person Pitch - Panda Bear (2007)
14. Kid A - Radiohead (2000)
15. Ágætis Byrjun - Sigur Rós (2000)

Bonus List - Favourite Songs That Aren’t on the Aforementioned Albums

In no particular order:

• “Roscoe” - Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther (2006)
• “Paris is Burning” - St. Vincent, Marry Me (2007)
• “Hoppípolla”, “Glósóli” - Sigur Rós, Takk… (2005)
• “There is a Number of Small Things” - múm, Yesterday was Dramatic, Today is OK (2000)
• “Jurass Finish First” - Jurassic 5, Quality Control (2000)
• “Always For You” - The Album Leaf, Into the Blue Again (2006)
• “Reptilia” - The Strokes, Room on Fire (2003)
• “Grace Cathedral Hill” - The Decemberists, Castaways and Cutouts (2002)
• “What Would I Want? Sky” - Animal Collective, Fall Be Kind (2009)

So Radiohead announced the release of a new album called “In Rainbows”, coming out October 10th. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an album announcement so close to its release date. Usually there’s months of anticipation before a release, but this time they’ve decided to spring this on us on short notice. Like “Hey, new album next week!” Apparently, they’re able to do this because they’re no longer signed to a record contract; this is basically an “indie” release.

Because of their newly gained indie status, the band is also doing things a little differently in terms of distributing and pricing the release. The album is coming out as an online download at first. The price: “It’s up to you.” Kind of like selling it through an honour system. You can even download it for free, and they won’t mind. (I’m going to give them a couple of bucks anyway. You know, for their trouble.) This is great and very forward-thinking of them, and gives fanboys like myself ammunition when discussing the greatness of Radiohead with fans of other, more inferior bands.

BUT

They’re also selling the album as a boxset to be released later this year. The boxset will have CD and vinyl versions of the album, which makes for good collector’s items to be sure. But the thing that’s killing me is, there’s a second CD with more songs, that’s only available in the boxset. It’s like they’re selling a double album where you can download the first part for free, but you have to buy the special collector’s edition for the second part. And how much is the boxset? £40. Or about $80 CAD. (Or $80 USD, ha!) That’s a long way from “It’s up to you.”

I know I’ll probably buy the boxset anyways, and the fanboy in me wants to forgive them, but this is really a rip-off. It’s like they’re trying to trick us into thinking they’re really cool by giving away the free download, just so we’ll be happy to spend the money on the boxset. I only hope they’ll come to their senses and make the second CD available as a standalone purchase. Otherwise, I’m boycotting Radiohead forever. Oh, who am I kidding? I love you, Thom Yorke.

Evidence of John Lennon’s god-like power: my iPod has played his songs more frequently over the past couple days (since December 8, the anniversary of his death). The spirit of John Lennon permeates all portable electronic music playing devices.

Let me explain. There’s this online music player called Pandora, which is supposed to “read your mind” and play music that you would like. You start off by giving it the name of an artist or song that you like, and it will play things that it deems “similar.” The people behind Pandora analyzed a whole bunch of songs and assigned traits to them using a lot of pretentious musical terms, like “subtle syncopation” and “minor key harmonic tonalities”. (They call this the “Music Genome Project.”) The player uses these traits and builds a playlist of other songs or artists that share the same properties.

I’m sure that the system works well, but for some reason, I just don’t like most of the stuff it plays. I give it some of my favourites like Radiohead and Björk, and it just starts playing absolute crap. The common traits are definitely there, but I end up not really enjoying the playlist it generates.

It could be that I’m just picky, but I think the whole concept is fundamentally flawed. It’s very difficult to quantify the elements that make you like or dislike music. For example, you might like a particular song for its repetitive beat, but another song with a repetitive beat might drive you nuts. Pandora is a noble effort, and I’m sure many people will like it, but unfortunately it just doesn’t work for me.

As promised, I did a bit of research to find out what it would take to get LongPlayer to work together with amaroK. It turns out that amaroK supports a DCOP interface. DCOP is a protocol shared by KDE applications that allows you to control them via the command line. For example, you can add songs to the amaroK playlist by executing the following shell command:

dcop amarok playlist addMedia  

It’s definitely possible to modify LongPlayer to use these DCOP commands to control amaroK, instead of performing the equivalent operations with XMMS. And it’s probably not even difficult.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), while I was looking into this, I realized that everything I liked about amaroK were just gimmicks (e.g. lyrics lookup, album cover images). After initially being impressed with all these bells and whistles, I came to see that there’s ultimately no real usefulness to any of it. On the other hand, LongPlayer really does perform a useful function, and changes the user’s experience.

Therefore, I declare the LongPlayer/XMMS combination to be the winner of this little competition. Somewhat anti-climactic, but I’m glad it turned out this way… saves me the trouble of actually going through with modifying LongPlayer code.

(Aside: I think I learned a bit about myself through this little “ordeal.” I may at first be impressed by superficial things, but I eventually tend to gravitate towards a more practical ideal. In general, this probably does describe my general outlook on things. So, there you go: self-discovery through software.)

I’ve arrived at a bit of a crossroads concerning audio player software, and which one to use. I have a moderately large collection of music on my computer, and dumping everything onto a playlist and shuffling isn’t quite good enough for me.

I’ve narrowed it down to two candidates:

XMMS + LongPlayer

XMMS is pretty much the standard audio player on Linux (it’s basically a clone of Winamp). However, its shuffle functionality (as with most audio players) is pretty rudimentary. In particular, it is susceptible to the so-called birthday paradox. I have no desire to start explaining probability theory here, but essentially, this means that it does not take long for the same song to be played twice, which quickly becomes annoying.

LongPlayer is a program that runs alongside XMMS (it also works with Winamp on Windows, and iTunes on MacOS), which basically continually populates your playlist queue with “random” songs. It is not completely random, because that would lead to the birthday paradox; instead, it tries to play the songs in such a way as to maximize the average time between playing the same song twice. Also, it supports a rating system which causes the higher-rated songs to be played more often.

The combination of XMMS and LongPlayer does a very good job of randomizing my playlist. On average, it takes about 4 weeks for a song to be played again (according to LongPlayer’s statistics).

amaroK

amaroK takes a completely different approach. This is the most full-featured music player I’ve seen. It places a strong emphasis on organizing a collection of music, and can group your tracks based on genre, artist, year, etc. It also uses this information to make suggestions as you’re playing something; for example, it gives you a list of albums by the same artist, and other artists of a similar genre.

I also like the fact that amaroK downloads album covers from Amazon.com and displays them as you’re playing tracks. It even displays lyrics for the currently playing song. (How this works, I don’t know—I should take a look at the source code.) Yes, I know that these are kind of frivolous features, but it gives the app a professional, polished feel.

So, here’s the dilemma. I really like the full-featuredness of amaroK, but its shuffling mechanism is pretty basic. There is a rating mechanism, but it doesn’t seem to obviously affect the selection of tracks. Now, amaroK is a larger project than LongPlayer, so it is likely that future updates will have an improved shuffling function. In fact, many people have requested a smarter shuffle on the amaroK forums.

The “best-of-both-worlds” solution would be if LongPlayer could interface with amaroK and feed songs into the amaroK playlist. I believe that this should be possible, because both apps are open-source. If I have time, I’ll try to find out more about this… (to be continued…)