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Shocked by Jellyfish

I had a profoundly strange musical experience the other day. For a month or so, I’ve been feeling tired of my music collection, and I haven’t known what to try next. Nothing has reached out and grabbed me by the ears, but at the weekend I remembered that I’ve been meaning to check out some Jellyfish.

The reason for that is that a lot of musical threads I’ve picked up recently can be traced back to this band. To start with, there was Bleu, who I saw in support of Toad The Wet Sprocket back in 2003. I absolutely loved his album Redhead. One of the songs on the album, “Could be worse”, was co-written by Andy Sturmer, and I think that Bleu has co-operated with Sturmer on a few other projects as well. Andy Sturmer was the drummer and lead singer for Jellyfish.

Bleu has also worked with Puffy AmiYumi, who also work closely with Sturmer, and whose album Nice has been recommended to me at various points.

Back in February, Keith passed me Jason Falkner’s CD, Presents Author Unknown, which I liked quite a bit. Jason Falkner was Jellyfish’s guitarist.

Then, in April, Glen Phillips (formerly of Toad The Wet Sprocket, see above) released his excellent new CD Winter Pays For Summer, on which he is supported on several tracks by–guess who–Andy Sturmer.

So, hoping that they would break me out of my musical ennui, on Monday evening I finally downloaded their album Bellybutton from 1990. (They only put out two albums, the other one is Spilt Milk from 1993)

I skipped through the first two tracks, thinking, hmm, yeah, that’s okay. But I pulled up short on the third song: “The King Is Half Undressed”. The opening guitar riff sent a shiver up my spine. I recognized it. Then the drums came in, and the vocals, and the sense of familiarity grew even stronger. When the chorus burst out, I was in full-body goosebumps mode. Not only did I know the song, but it a favourite from many years ago. In fact, I’m almost certain I have it sitting on an old cassette tape in a box in our garage.

And yet I’d completely failed to recognize the band name “Jellyfish”. Weird. I’m usually pretty good about remembering music and artists, and around 1990 I was at a very impressionable age (first/second year of Uni) and a lot of the music I was listening to was laying down strong permanent associations. But also: from what I can find by looking around the web, Jellyfish made virtually no imact on the British music scene. So how did I know that song?

It gets even more interesting. It turns out that “The King Is Half Undressed” is not the only song I know from the album. I didn’t have time to listen to any more of it on Monday evening, but when I was in the car with Scott on Tuesday, we listening to the whole thing, and I knew three other tracks: “That Is Why”, “I Wanna Stay Home”, and “Baby’s Coming Back”.

But…how? Without any transatlantic success on their part, the only thing I can think of is that they must have been getting a lot of airplay when I spent the summer of 1991 in California. The station I listened to most was KFOG, and I reckon that Jellyfish’s music would have been right up their street at that time. But on the other hand, I bought a lot of (second-hand) CDs that summer (yay Amoeba!), and if I’d heard four tracks I really liked by an artist I hadn’t come across before, I’m sure I would have picked up their CD. But I didn’t.

I’m confused and disoriented. The music is tapping into a deep visceral pool of recognition, but I can’t make any conscious, intellectual connection with even actually hearing it or being aware of it before. It’s like a kind of amnesia. I’m feeling the same kind of cognitive dissonance as I did when I temporarily lost all muscle memory of how to tie a necktie. There’s just something wrong in my head.

(As for whether I like the rest of the album, well, it’s so-so. Apart from the four songs I noted above, I don’t think there’s anything on there that is likely to make my permanent playlist.)

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iTunes ratings

If you look at the ratings for my quick reviews, you’ll see that each star rating has a descriptive label associated with it. For example, a two-star rating is “Disappointing”, three stars is “Solid and enjoyable”, and four stars is “Recommended”. I use these extra descriptions as guidelines for myself when I’m assigning a rating, to try and keep ratings consistent over time. I have a tendency to be over-generous with ratings, and I need a way to keep myself grounded.

I realized this morning, though, that I don’t have a similar set of descriptions for the star ratings I give to music in my iTunes library. I’ve just been dishing out stars because of what the music feels like at the time, without giving much thought to why it ends up with a particular rating. With only five choices (1-5 stars, no in-betweens), you’d think that the options would be limited enough to eliminate most grey areas, but now that become aware of what I’m doing, it feels haphazard. I’m not a compulsive categorizer, but it feels nice to have some kind of a system for when I do want to rate things. So here are my new definitions for assigning music ratings:

  • 5 stars : An absolute favourite song, that I like listening to again and again. Must have this available on the iPod at all times.
  • 4 stars : An good song that I like listening to both in an album context, on its own, and mixed in with other playlists.
  • 3 stars : I’ll usually only listen to this song when I’m listening to the whole album it appears on.
  • 2 stars : I’ll usually skip this song if it comes up while I’m playing an album.
  • 1 star : I could live a happy and fulfilling life without ever hearing this song again.

(Note that “no stars” means “not rated yet” rather than “worst song in the world EVER”. The ones that are so bad just get removed from the library.)

Do you have a consistent way of rating music?

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New Apple gear

  • New iMac, with built-in iSight camera, media centre features, and a remote control. Yum.
  • iTunes 6, with video store. Buy music videos, films, and TV shows–presumably all at an iPod-appropriate resolution (320 x 240). (Can it rip DVDs, though, is the big question? I’m in the process of installing now to find out…) Whatever–yum.
  • New iPods WITH VIDEO. 30GB and 60GB models. YUM YUM YUM.

new iPod with video

I’ve had my Mac Mini for a month now, and I’m liking it enough to say that I could definitely see myself buying another Mac in the future. But the iPod video? HOLY CRAP I WANT ONE NOW.

(Probably not, though, with my birthday and Christmas not too far away. Hi, Abi! I love you honey!)

Updates 12 Oct at 20:57 :

  • It looks like the UK iTunes Music Store is lagging somewhat behind the US one…the selection of music videos on offer for purchase is slim, and there appear to be no TV shows on offer–yet.
  • Music videos also appear to be more expensive in the UK vis-a-vis the American store, as compared to music tracks. (£1.89 / $1.99 for a music video as opposed to £0.79 / $0.99 for a song.)
  • You need Quicktime 7.0.3 to play purchased tracks, but Apple hasn’t made this available from their Software Update site yet. (It’s there now.)
  • I can’t see any option to rip DVD movies directly into iTunes, and thence onto the iPod. (Maybe this will be available with QT 7.0.3? Or will you need something like Quicktime Pro to do the encoding? Hmm. Seems like they’re missing an integration trick here.)
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Net.pressure

About half-way through Elizabeth Bear’s novel Scardown, two characters talk about how merely “good” is not enough any more:

“You ever think about how much better you have to be at something now than you did two hundred years ago?”

“What do you mean?” Koske turned around and leaned his butt against the wall. The mocha was okay as long as he let himself drink it on automatic, without trying to taste it.

“Say in nineteen hundred, or whatever, before there was television and radio.”

“There was radio in nineteen hundred,” Koske corrected, but he wasn’t sure after he’d said it.

“Whatever. The point is, you’re a singer in the year whatever, and you’re a pretty good singer, and you make a pretty good living at local bard or singing on street corners or at fairs or whatever. And suddenly somebody invents the radio, and you don’t have to be the best singer in the town anymore. Now you have to be the best singer in the country. And then you have television, and you have to be the best singer in the world. And you have to be pretty, too, and look good on camera.”

Koske realized he’d finished his mocha and folded the cup into the recycler. “Okay.”

“So a lot of people are frustrated, and go to work making widgets or whatever, because everybody in the world has access to the, like, ten best singers anywhere.”

There’s a whole bunch of context around this exchange–interpersonal and international rivalries abound. The main speaker (Lt. Chris Ramirez) is a covert agent of the Chinese government trying to subvert Trevor Koske to his cause. Koske has been edged out of the first pilot slot on the starship Montreal by nano-enhanced Jenny Casey, and he is somewhat bitter about this. Ramirez is using the above line of reasoning to lead in to the idea that the Chinese socio-political system has its advantages over the free-for-all corporatized Western democracy they live in.

[Ramirez] “…What I’m saying is in the old system, people who had a gift were nurtured. Even if they weren’t the best in the world. And PanChina has protocols that take the place of that sort of nurturing–“

“–creche environments for kids, parental visits on weekends.”

“There’s an old political philosophy…do you know any history, Trev?”

Trvor snorted and kicked his heel against the wall. “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”

“Have you ever heard the expression from each according to his ability, to each according to his need?”

“Can’t say I have. Why?”

Ramirez shrugged and moved to the dispenser to refresh his drink. “It’s the boiled-down version of a discredited political philosophy. One that was the root of the PanChinese system, several revolutions ago. They also believe in individual service to the state, and state service to the individual. It doesn’t seem like a bad ideology to me. I think more people can excel, given the kind of support you see on a village level rather than worldwide competition. And I think people should be given a chance to just be good at something, and live their lives. Instead we’ve got a world full of unhappy people in dead-end jobs medicating themselves to stay sane.”

Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to be the best to be recognized?

Do you ever feel like that? I know I do. On the net, you’re constantly exposed to the best that is available in the digital medium. The best in blogs, the best in podcasts, the best in software, coding, and digital design. And if you live your life in the net, as more and more people do, then you are not only aware of these ultimates, but you and your efforts stand side-by-side with them.

In my professional field (web development) you have to be up to speed with a great many skills and technologies these days, and all of these technologies are represented on the net by an abundance of masters and experts. You want a Javascript expert? Go see Peter-Paul Koch, Dean Edwards, or Thomas Fuchs. Need a CSS/Web standards guru? Check out Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, Dave Shea or any number of others I could mention. You want graphic design, ASP.NET, python, ruby, or any other kind of speciality under the sun? Take your pick. They’re all out there, just a google away.

(It’s not just software, either. If you’re a writer, you’re going to be a long time hunting for a field that isn’t already covered by a dozen high-profile bloggers sucking up most of the traffic for it. Anyone whose craft involves shifting bits is sooner or later going to come up against the phenomenon of the long tail, the modern equivalent of the 80/20 rule: 20% of sites get 80% or the attention–or customers, or recognition, or whatever.)

The constant visibility and proximity of excellence is both enormously valuable, and tremendously intimidating. Because world-class excellence is what I have to measure myself against. Sometimes this is a great spur onwards, but often it just feels like great pressure. To perform at that level, and to be recognized as one of the elite (you know who you are), takes a lot of effort. And the fact that I haven’t yet reached those heights feels like failure.

But not only that: because web development is such a fast-moving field, the very act of keeping up with all the latest developments can seem like a full time job, and a black hole down which all my spare time is doomed to disappear.

So here’s another quote to counterbalance the first one. It’s from Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Paladin Of Souls:

“There is this, about being the sparring partner of the best swordsman in Caribastos. I always lost. But if I ever meet the third best swordsman in Caribastos, he’s going to be in very deep trouble.”

This isn’t an argument in favour of mediocrity, or for not striving to be the best. Rather, it’s a caution to occasionally stop looking forward all the time, and to take a step back and look at what you have achieved already. Second best is usually still damn good.

Lately I’ve been finding myself in the blinkered, forward-looking mindset. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by technologies I feel I ought to be learning, by projects I should be working on, by articles I should be writing, by films I should be seeing, and on and on. I’ve been overloading myself with goals and targets. I’ve been living for the future: planning ahead for what I’ll do after this meeting, what I’ll do when I get home from work, when the kids are in bed, when I’ve got this piece of software up and running, when I’ve finished this project….

It’s time for me to spend some more time in the now, enjoying things that don’t have purpose other than that they’re fun. I need to spend less time in Bloglines, and more time playing games. Less time on my PC, and more time in bed, getting lots of sleep. I’ve got some holiday coming up in a couple of weeks, and I’m going to try and do as little as possible in my time off. Yeah.

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Just cruisin’

Not doing much work on the Mac Mini right now. I’m mostly doing some much-needed maintenance on my archive files and backups: reorganizing folders, deleting duplicates, burning DVDs, that sort of thing. Boring, but it’s laying the groundwork for sharing my iTunes and iPhoto libraries between Mac and PC, and that automatic nightly backups will run smoothly. Gotta have the backups.

I’ve also been playing a little Ratchet & Clank 3. I never finished the game last year, and with R&ampC 4 due out soon, that’s an oversight that just has to be remedied. I haven’t done much gaing in ages, and I’m finding it a nice break from incessantly worrying away at the computers.