![[Music]](http://www.christopherstreetjournal.com/topicons/music.jpg)
My shameful admission.
God help me, I like the new Jennifer Lopez single. I like it a lot. A real lot. I have probably listened to it a dozen times this evening and I am not tired of it yet. I'm hooked.
My husband doesn't know whether to spring for a therapist, a hearing specialist or a divorce attorney.
Let's start with that last bit. Earlier in the year, I became obsessed with ripping my entire CD collection. I was tired of looking for music that I knew I had, if I only knew where it was. I was tired of making CDs for the car, when that process involved swapping 15 CDs in and out of the cd drawer. I had also become addicted to internet radio at my job, and had gotten used to listening to tunes while I worked on the computer. Internet radio was not an option for the house, though, as it sucked down too much of our precious bandwidth. So, with all of these things in mind, I attacked the ripping of my collection with a vengeance. Over the course of a week or so, I had ripped something on the order of 3000 songs...and had my own personal jukebox, right there in my PC. It was cool.
What it wasn't, though, was particularly portable. See, I have this laptop that I spend more time on than I spend at my desktop. But since the desktop had the big hard drive, the desktop got the tunes. I was in a fix. Pulling the tunes over the network wasn't good--latency issues meant that a song would halt for a couple of seconds every 40 seconds or so. Blah. I tried pulling a few albums over the network to store locally on my laptop--but it just wasn't the selection I was used to. And, if I decide that I want to listen to the first "Four Bitchin' Babes" album, and I didn't have the forthought to put it on my local drive, I don't particularly want to wait the 12 minutes that it will take to transfer. So...a new solution was obviously needed.
If I had known that all I had to do was ask John, well, I would have asked sooner. He spent most of the day yesterday combining all of our .mp3s onto a single server and then importing them into a streaming jukebox solution that runs on the network. Since it's streaming, no latency. We have a web page that lists all the music we have by artist and album, and all the music is easily accessible from any computer in the house. It's wicked.
New music is something that I am vaguely suspicious of, even in the best of circumstances. Even when bands that I like release new music, I don't usually like it much, until I have listened to it enough for it to become familiar. Most songs garner very lukewarm reactions from me on first listen. Very few songs grab me out of the gate--so it's really odd that I feel totally in love with not one, not two, not three, not four but FIVE new songs this weekend. First, there is the aforementioned "Jenny From the Block, " the song of my shame. What can I say--it has a good beat, the lyrics aren't deep by any means but the phrasing is interesting and, aurally, it's stunning.
There are also a couple songs on the new Shania Twain CD that I really, really like. Don't get me wrong--I think that the whole CD is really strong. I think that it is a more than adequate follow-up to 1997s "Come On Over". She cops to a range of influences in the liner notes, from Stevie Wonder to Dolly Parton to the Bee Gees and you can hear some of all of them in the songs, plus not just a little Abba on the "Dancing Queen"-like "C'est la Vie". But the standouts on first listen are the first single, "I'm Gonna Getcha Good" and, what I think will be the second single, "Up!". Both are the funky-honky-tonk that Shania does better than anyone and while "Getcha" has catchier lyrics--and one hell of a hook--"Up!" has a pop-ier sound that will serve her well on the charts. Worth mentioning, if you haven't heard it already, is that Shania and her producer-husband, Mutt Lang, actually recorded three different versions of this CD, with three different bands. One has more of a country flavor (the "green" disc), one is more pop ("red") and one has an international feel ("blue"). The red and green discs are being sold together as a double CD in the states; the red and blue discs are bundled internationally. I have only been listening to the "red" disc this weekend--I haven't braved the twangier "green" disc. Mind--they all contain the same 19 songs...it's just the arrangements that are different. Odd, but it explains why it took them so long to release the damn thing.
Finally, Matchbox 20. Or matchbox twenty. Whatever. It doesn't matter, because the new music kicks ass. I have only heard two cuts--I didn't buy the CD this weekend because I am unemployed and I hadn't heard anything off of it and I thought, wow, you know--irresponsible to buy music that I don't know I will like. But I downloaded a couple trax off of Kazaa this weekend and--wow. Wow. I'll be going out in the morning to but the CD. The first single, "Disease" rocks--it was cowritten by Mick Jagger--but the breakout single is going to be "Unwell" and it will be bigger than "Smooth".
As for Lopez, well, I am listening *again* to "Jenny From the Block" as I type this and I still like it. But I'm still not going to buy the CD. I mean, a girl has to have some standards.
Posted by Lori at November 25, 2002 2:21 AM