Random Music Musings–The Return of the Blog

In fits and starts, I try. The drafts folder on my PC is testament to these efforts, but heck, this seemed like an easy way to get something up here after one previous attempt to restart this blog. Someone once said “Great artists ship”. So wannabe bloggers…tweet?

-  It is not very often that chart-topping popularity and true quality meet in music, especially in that all-encompassing ‘pop’ category. However, Adele has managed just that, and how! 21 is a powerhouse album. It’s impressively mature, especially as a musical statement, drawing on the same neo-soul vibe that made Amy Winehouse’s short career. While the songwriting is frayed in places, you want to forgive her that. She is only 21, after all. 

- Radiohead is one of my favorite bands, simply because of the amount of texture in their music and arrangements. However, one of the things that dawned on me recently was how dance-friendly some of their tracks can get. I was browsing in a bookstore this week, and found myself bobbing my head and tapping my feet to Reckoner from In Rainbows. That rhythm section is to die for.

- I’m quite annoyed by the constant sniping about lyrical quality in Hindi films today. While all the attention was paid to Bhaag DK Bose and Character Dheela, I wish there was more attention paid in media to the good songs and the people behind them.

Except for a recent profile in Open, I’ve seen no good profiles of Amitabh Bhattacharya, who in addition to doing DK Bose and Character Dheela, has also done pretty amazing “traditional” songwriting for Udaan, I Am and No One Killed Jessica. Aitbaar in NOKJ comes together in a way no song in any soundtrack this year has – the lyrics and music conveying anger, despair and a welter of complicated emotions in one explosive package.

Previous music musings - I, II, III, IV and V

Inside my comfort zone

In It Might Get Loud, Jack White makes a remark that stuck. To paraphrase, he states that great art comes from emotional conflict. He talks about how he has to stop himself from getting comfortable and take himself to a hard place emotionally, because that’s the only place from where his creativity flows.

As I look at the frequency of posts on this blog go down, I wonder about that more and more. This blog isn’t high art, and I’m not Jack White. However, writing here requires a level of ardor that I don’t feel that often anymore. I’ve been in a number of situations this year that would have me mad, or angry or happy and pages of (bad) musings would’ve come out of it. But not anymore. So this blog sits, forlorn.

This emotional settling down isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I was too excitable for my own good in the past. But I worry about crossing over and becoming blasé. The world is a beautiful place and there’s lots to love and be excited about here. It’s just that a lot of things don’t seem  as blog-worthy anymore. In addition, tidbits, random insights and link-love have passed over to Twitter. 

As the zeros draw to a close, I don’t fret about the future of this blog. It has its place and its pleasures. It’s just that I (or you, dear reader) will partake of it less frequently than before.

I'm pretty sure my blog is feeling neglected right now. The right navigation bar has a section 'posts worthy of your attention' with pretty much nothing noteworthy for five months. It's been a fallow few months creatively. It's not just my blog though.

I've been sucked up into a lot of activity and suddenly I realize that though I'm giving the usual things enough thought, my opinions, though well-formed are not expressed enough here. A number of books I read have simply gone back to the library or on my bookshelf with no reviews on here. Some amazing music has passed by with no mention here. (That was a deadline I just heard whistling by, now that you mention it).

However, resolutions have been made to change things around on this blog. After a long winter, spring is here. Summer too will be here soon.

To everything, there is a season....

Change is good...

I changed the layout of the blog since it wasn't rendering well on PocketPCs (Special thanks to Shailu) . I've been playing with the template code as well. Please leave comments if it won't render well on your browser. Browser name,version and monitor resolution information would be useful as well.

Blog, meet world

Somehow, my blogging and physical spaces have always had a disconnect. I've never really lived in the same area or frequently met many of the people who read my blog, and people around me haven't really read my blog much (they've never cared for that sort of thing, I guess). It's been changing over the past few months.

I re-use observations and insights that I've blogged about pretty often in regular conversation. It makes me look more well-read than I really am, since people don't realize that these are things I've given careful thought and time to. They (probably) assume this stuff is off the cuff.

However, I'm getting caught now - "I read that on your blog" is something I've heard a couple of times from a friend over the past few months. Another complained that he couldn't read my blog on his Pocket PC.

Yes, I'm pleased. I consider my blogging to be an important part of who I am (this was an exercise to try my writing skills, and I've realized I enjoy it a lot), and if people I consider good friends are taking the effort to visit my blog, that means a lot to me. The converse is also true - I am truly thankful for the acquaintances I've made and re-kindled over the Web since I started blogging. Some of these have spilled over to IM and email and have been rewarding to varying degrees.

In keeping with the fact that people blog for various reasons, I welcome a couple of new blogging friends (these are people I meet regularly in meatspace) - Brad and Shailu. Brad chronicles a very active lifestyle - hiking, sports and (here I hope to join him more often this winter) snowboarding. Shailu and I go back four years - the first time we met was at a CMU tradition - painting "The Fence" in the Indian tricolor on the eve of the 15th of August. Shailu's blog is kind of like mine -varied topics and life chronicles, though he is less into navel-gazing than I am.

Edit: Fixed grammatical errors and formatting.

Find your way to me

"kimi raikkonen rotten luck" - tell me about it. Hungaroring was no better.
"internet intermediary disintermediary" - ah, favorite topic, tech + econ.
"Shiny Ahuja biography" - HKA was great, but what next?
"opinion of becoming pm of india for one day" - WTF?
"proven world does revolve around me t shirt" - OK, I own up. I own this narcissistic tee. I blogged about it too.
"Life's song by SLB" WTF?
"hazaaron khwaishein aisi buy audio CD" - Do so, please.
"Dosas Uttappams" - aijo, what?! Not on my blog.
"I remember someone old once said to me that lies will lock you up with truth the only key.." - Missy Higgins, a spare Aussie with a beautiful voice
"mera chain vain sab ujra" - yay for Kajra re!
"ripping afterglow live" - DRM sucks, methinks. Don't try this at home. Sarah rules though.

These are selected Google search strings that lead people to yours truly's blog over the past few days.

Ideas, or the lack thereof

My site-meters gone crazy over the past few weeks. I wish I had a clue what was so interesting about my October 2005 Archives that people seem so attracted to it. October was one of the crazier months in my life in the past year (work and otherwise). But it was not the craziest. No sirree . Not by a stretch. Does the October archive have some special pixie dust that has given it all this page-views? I wish I had a clue. No, Technorati hasn't been very helpful either.

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What is it with Pakistan and the mass production of:

1. Squash players?

2. Fast-Medium bowlers?
3. Good pop/rock bands?

First there was Junoon, then Strings redux, and now Jaal/Jal. I heard a cover of Woh Lamhe at a CRY fundraiser concert last week. I got the CD of the album from a friend this week and have been hooked. The same things about Strings that appeal to me make their appearance here. More rock-sy and less pop, surely. Definitely better lyrics, especially on Aadat, filched shamelessly on some Mahesh Bhatt production. So was Lamhe, I hear.

Musically, there is a lot of influence from rock bands, but the sound is original. I think the original singer Atif had a slightly better voice, but the new vocalist manages to do a good job. I recommend Aadat, Bikhra/Aadat, Woh Lamhe, Rangon Mein and Panchhi. There are low bitrate MP3s on the band site so check them out!

This CD's been playing in my car, at home and on my work headphones all day(and night) long.

Where are the good Indian pop/rock bands? I haven't heard any new ones in a while.

Hiatus

General ennui and busy-ness in general has led to this unprecedented 10 day gap in blogging. Apologies. Beethoven, I'll be. hmm.

Commenting on the Grammys cannot be done without though. U2 are the media, industry and crowd favorites at the Grammys. I don't mind them winning, but there is something about double-dipping. They won a number of awards last year, and exactly how they won again this year isn't something I understood. I wish they'd keep the rules simpler.

More names have been added to the list of artistes to listen to. Books have been read and discussed, and posts will be made when this phase passes.

Till then, sample this fine video from SNL to keep you entertained.

Blogger Boos

I started blogging at the cusp of it taking off - mid 2004. It had already taken off in the tech and early adopter world, and six months into me blogging (three months into me being serious about it), it was the Word Of The Year for 2004. It felt nice to be part of a phenomenon, since I definitely wasn't part of the 2003 Word Of The Year 'Metrosexual'.

At the time, Blogger seemed sufficient, especially since it was the most well-known one, and everyone I knew seemed to be on it. That it was owned by Google meant that I hoped it would keep getting better all the time.

I must say I am disappointed. As I've blogged more, some of the other features of blogging that I'd love, most importantly, blog categories haven't been added to Blogger. I've already posted over 150 entries, and I'd love to be able to (natively) categorize these posts as I write them. I've mulled over hacking something with Technorati tags, et al, but I'm too lazy to do it.

Another very helpful thing would be stats. My site is not very widely read, but it's still nice to know that there are people out there who like to read what I write (heck, everyone needs a little ego-massaging now and then), and there's no way for me to know how many people subscribe to my feed, since the site meter only tags the site visitors.

Lalit's already canvassing me to move over to MSN Spaces. I don't want to yet, but a migration tool might make it tempting for me. There's already migration tools for blogger to wordpress (there might be stuff for typepad too, haven't checked).

In addition, things like better templates and ways to organize links (there's only so much HTML hacking you can put up with), plus an easier way to get photos on your blog (admit it, the hello! route is the pits).

Blogger was once the pioneer, boldly going where no blog tool had gone before. I wish they'd get back to those ways again.

Additions to the Blogroll

Microsoft-followers and developers have their favorite blog to counter Slashdot's rabid zealots. It is Channel9, populated by MS developers and run by the good folks at the company. The nomenclature is interesting - Channel 9 is the audio channel on a flight on which you can hear the pilots communicating. So, Channel 9 on MSDN is presumably where you get the dirt on Microsoft's offerings from the guys at Microsoft itself. Also, I add Robert Scoble, Microsoft evangelist, who also says that the Apple Powerbook is cool.

A couple of other blogs to add to the list, just as shameless self-promotion - the Web Transports group that I work with, and IE . Watch out for IE7, expected out by the end of this year. That will be interesting. The browser wars will be back, I promise.

And to top it off, an Alhad pick, Larry Osterman. Pure geek. Writes about software, and stuff. Fun to read, very insightful on programming stuff.

first post!

Here it is, finally. My blog. I have been unwilling to put my life on public display for so long, but some of blogger's features, (especially the one where you can email in your posts) tempted me enough to think of this. This is not so much for personal musings, but more of a personal scratchboard. I would like to use this to put up my opinions on all things tech, hacks that I figure out, or find on the WWW somewhere. Might prove useful if I keep at it.