Thoughts on car stereos

The time has come around again for me to think about a new stereo for my truck. My current head unit, a Kenwood mp2032, is still working fine, so I kind of hate to get rid of it.. The reason I'm entertaining the idea is because the drive on my phatnoise phatbox mp3 player finally died. For those unfamiliar, the phatbox is the OEM version of the Kenwood music keg a hard drive based mp3 storage solution from the late 90's. It was a nice system for it's time and integrated with Kenwood head units well. It's inherent shortcoming was the use of mechanical hard drives as well as a proprietary file system that would only allow drives sold by phatnoise to work.

Now that my drive has died, I'm stuck listening to the radio and CDs. The MP2032 can play mp3 CDs, but I find the 10 or so album capacity of a CD really isn't enough variety and I don't like toting around and constantly switching a pile of CDs. After browsing Crutchfield for a while, I'm thinking there are two likely candidates for mass media storage - a head unit with either a usb port or iPod controls. I think the usb option is more my speed.. My iPhone doesn't hold much music so I'd have to get a new pod if i went that route. A 32G flash drive costs about $50 at the moment and should hold most of my music collection. Still not sure if I'd want the usb port on the back or front of the receiver though. There are pluses and minuses to both. I think I'm going to stick with Kenwood. I've been using their stuff since Pioneer quit adding features to their 1.5 DIN GM fit head units. The KDC-X693 and KDC-MP438U are the two main units I'm considering at this point, although I'm still debating getting a similar unit with the bluetooth hands free calling system built in.

The state of music?

I fully admit that I am out of the loop with regards to current pop music. At some point things seemed to spin out of my realm of comprehension. This is really odd, because music hasn't changed much in the last 50 years, and neither has the media's handling of music. (with a couple of exceptions)

I think the most significant change that has happened in my lifetime is the integration of so-called "urban" styles into the media-hyped mainstream. It's cool because although a lot of the music is kind of copy-cat and repetitive, there seems to be a lot of freedom allowed in some of these styles. One of the most practical demonstrations of this in my opinion is the latest Beyonce Knowles record, I am... Sasha Fierce. Mind you, I'm not particularly a Beyonce fan, or even a fan of the style of music, but after catching her performance on SNL, I was intrigued. The first tracks of each disc in the set were really interesting. The first, If I were a boy, was interesting to me because of the live performance. It's a slow, ballad-y type thing, and on recording, not terribly interesting. Live however, Beyonce is going with a "rock band" setup, with drums, guitar, bass and keys. More importantly, she seemed to perform (during this song) like she was fronting a rock band. She really seemed to be rocking out - It seemed somewhat cathartic and even at times kind of awkward, but my personal belief is that kind of awkwardness is a part of the ethos of rock music. It seems like this absorption of elements of rock might be a trend, especially with more hip hop artists like Kanye and T-pain using sung vocals a lot more often because of the popularity of vocoding/autotuning. (but that’s another post in itself)

The 1 track of the second disc is Single Ladies, which is a just plain weird song when you look at all of it's individual parts. It's pretty much just a rhythm with some samples over it and then the really repetitive vocals, but it works somehow. It's got more emotional content than some of the other similar dance songs I've heard.

The rest of the album is more common fare, but I really got into those two tracks a lot.


On the other end of the spectrum, the bland, cookie cutter pop is still kicking. Brittney Spears has a new record, and I was really hopeful when I saw the video for the first single, Womanizer. I hoped that maybe the pop tart had returned from the brink of paparazzi fueled, post partum nut-bar status with a clear head with this (assumed) stab at an ex, but it panned out to be just another crappy song written by a random production team. Spears is such a train wreck. There is enough of her that’s small-town-girl to make you like her and hope she will become normal, but it seems like the child-star damage runs too deep. (by the same token, I have to give her former boyfriend Justin Timberlake a lot of respect for not only avoiding being a douche, but being so level headed and maintaining a really good sense of humor.. in the public's view at least)




So here I've been rambling about pop-starlets.. Music that I'm fairly averse to. Why? These things seem kind of relevant to me as a study of media effects, and more specifically their role in the new pecking order of musical taste making and delivery, and a lesser extent, the evolution of music creation. We're still speculating about the fall of the majors and the rise in importance of the "long tail". I'm not going to speculate on the future of music, because it's really too fluid right now to say. I have much more hope for the future of creative music now than I did years ago though. Technology has brought the ability to make and deliver music to people who don't know/want to avoid the rules. I'm too set in my ways and shortsighted to be much a part of that new movement, but I'm glad to watch it happen.

I often feel that my time as a member of pop culture society is over. I heard about the launch of the mtvmusic.com site and was really excited. A collection of just music videos had a certain feel reminiscent of the days when Mtv only played music. I picked up right where I left off when the channel jumped the shark, looking up some of the ridiculous videos that amused me around that time - the jerseey rap-rock of progenitors of the genre, Brougham.. the failed frat rap of Bad Ronald, and then went after some of the vids that were introduced to the world by Beavis and Butthead. (sadly, I couldn't find any Plantman) As cool as all this was to me, I don't even think the site was a blip on the radar of today’s culture consumers.