escape to insanity

Last night I went down to Summerfest, perhaps known best for being the world’s largest collection of fat ugly drunk people. Of course, the promoters call it “The World’s Largest Music Festival” but clearly that’s just marketing jive talk to hide the truth. I generally try to avoid Summerfest to the best of my ability, but last night there was an event so monumentally awesome that I was practically compelled to go.

I’m talking of course about The Crystal Method.

These guys are, without a doubt, hands down (as opposed to hands up) my absolute favorite musical group of all time. If you haven’t heard of them, first crawl out from under your rock and then go look them up. They make sweet sweet music. I suppose most people call it “techno” or “electronica” — I call it heaven. This was my first time seeing them, and let me say… it was like a two-hour orgasm for the ears. I’ve heard people talk about being able to “feel” or “see” music, but I’d never actually experienced that until last night.

I actually had the opportunity to see them from the covered “VIP” deck, but the stage acoustics were not meant for that area. They’re meant for the benches in front. So that’s where I was. Standing up on the bleachers, from just about 9:45 to 11:45 when the Summerfest organizers literally shut off the lights and speakers to enforce their curfew. I also discovered that it’s actually quite liberating to not be around anyone you know; I was supposed to meet up with some friends for the show, but they either bailed or we were split up. It’s okay, because it let me focus entirely on the show. …and the two girls making out in the row ahead of me (despite the best efforts of some guy to get them to include him, which they were having none of).

Holy awesome, Batman. On an awesomeness scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most awesome thing you can think of, this show ranked somewhere around, oh, I don’t know, a billion. It’s quite possible that last night was the single greatest night of my entire life. Most of the two-hour set was new stuff as far as I could tell. They did include a few samples of their released stuff — off the top of my head I remember hearing “Busy Child,” “Born Too Slow,” “Trip Like I Do,” “You Know It’s Hard,” “Renegades of Funk” (their remix of the original Rage song); there were also some unexpected samples of songs I hadn’t heard them deal with before — a great mix of “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, and a crazy take on “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees (made even more popular by the great John Travolta).

My ears are still ringing, actually. At 5:30pm the next day. That’s probably not good, but it was TOTALLY worth it. Too bad they’re not coming back anywhere nearby for the foreseeable future, according to their tour schedule.

I’m a big fan of Pandora Radio. I’m also a big fan of last.fm. If you haven’t heard of — or don’t use — either of those, I highly recommend you go check them out immediately. (quick run-down: Pandora is a streaming music service that learns from your input what kind of music you like and plays more music like that. last.fm is a service that lets you track your listening habits over time to see what you listen to the most, etc. Also decent for recommending other music.)

By your powers combined when you mix those two services together, you get Pandora FM. All the awesomeness of Pandora’s music recommendation engine, combined with the tracking service of last.fm.

One of the features of Pandora is that you can request to see why it played a particular song for you. The idea is that even if you don’t like a song that it serves up, you can see what it has in common with music you’ve tagged as being more suitable to your tastes. I had occasion to use that feature today, when Pandora played Nine Inch Nail’s “Every Day Is Exactly the Same” on my station dedicated to electronica (named “Daft Punk Radio” because I seeded it with Daft Punk exclusively). Here’s what it told me (by the way, I should mention I don’t dislike that song. I like it a great deal, just not for this particular station — you should be as specific as possible when training Pandora):

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features mellow breakbeat rhythms, electronica roots, rock influences, a dynamic male vocal, and angry lyrics.

Angry lyrics. Hmm. Apparently that song has angry lyrics, and apparently Pandora has decided that I like my electronica to have angry music. I’m honestly not sure how it picked that up from the stuff I’ve fed into it. I seeded the station with Daft Punk’s best stuff, some Crystal Method, a dash of Fatboy Slim, etc. Nothing angry. And as far as I recall, nothing that I thumbed-up would qualify as “angry.”

But apparently… angry music it is. I’m waiting for it to decide that Seether is an appropriate electronica group to play.

Today on the road, I happened to be listening to the radio when the DJ came on to do his spiel. He introduced the song that was about to play as “brand new music” — and then proceeded to play “Knights of Cydonia,” a song that was “brand new” in July of 2006. July. July of last year.

After that song, he introduced another song, this time “Pain” by Three Days Grace. Guess what? He said that song was “brand new” too. “New music now from Three Days Grace, this is ‘Pain.’” That album came out in June of 2006.

Now, at what point do songs cease to be labeled as “brand new” by radio disc jockeys? I would think that a song over six months old should cease to qualify as “new” material, no? Am I missing some law of radio, that says you can tell your listeners that songs are new even if they’ve been out for a year or more?