music – Page 3 – Tina Amirtha

It all started during my first finals week, ever, in college.

Sitting in my dorm room, in front of my Toshiba laptop, I lined up all of the things I needed to do during reading week in order to succeed in writing my exams: reading chapters of books that I eased up on after their corresponding midterm exams were finished, condensing what should have been two weeks of research on Medicare caps into two days, and completing two weeks’ worth of math problem sets.

Great, I thought, I have a good system put in place to learn all the information I need to ace those tests.

Perhaps it was procrastination, maybe genius, but I embarked on a relentless quest to burn all of my physical CD’s onto my Toshiba’s little hard disk (In the year 2002, those laptops didn’t hold very much.). Then, in 2007, I made the Toshiba-Mac cross-over. For a brief moment, I thought that everything was going to disappear in transit, along the cable, but it worked out. And so it was, my lifetime’s collection of albums was as portable as my pocketbook.

From then on, I was able to tote my own musical canon with me to every new work assignment, barely making a conspicuous dent to my two-piece luggage suite. Flipping open my Mac, I could enjoy everything from Bach to the B-52’s from little built-in laptop speakers.

Being a little older and wiser (I got a wisdom tooth pulled today.), I have grown accustomed to speakers that are a bit more rich-sounding, sophisticated, and generally require valuable shopping time at a dedicated audio (and visual) store (that my fiancé may or may not have dragged me to).

One of the clunky pieces of electronics in my living-slash-listening room is an amplifier. There are input and output ports for everything, and I mean, everything! That is, everything except my USB-clad external hard drive. I’ve grown tired of whipping out my computer every time I want to access digitized media (not just music, but movies, too!). I just want to push a button to play anything in my collection. No fuss, you know?

Some ideas I had were:

1. Apple TV – The guy at the Apple store really tried to push me to subscribe to iMatch, after having avowed to me that no internal hard memory existed on the thing. Upon asking if I could hook up my external hard drive, he retorted, “Why would you have something like that?” as though I were someone to have illegally downloaded music and movies from some Napster-like thing. Ugh, this idea wasn’t meant to be.

2. The Xbox 360. This is a really expensive thing for a device whose sole purpose I think should be to play various audio and visual formats. That’s it. Although it would be cool to use the DVD capability to play my Region 1 (US) DVD’s that I also don’t want to shove through the open-laptop-connect-to-amplifier process. Also, I could watch the Colbert Report anytime I wanted with this one.

3. Something called a media player. I could listen to or watch anything from my hard drive, but I lose those extra degrees-of-freedom that would not only renew the lives of my US DVD’s that won’t play on my Region-2 Blu-ray player but would also let me watch anything that streamed on the Internet, like this.

This last one is more make-shift than it is commercial. But the most commercial A/V titan, Apple, alienates the 20- and 30-somethings who have moved from college dorm room to grown-up apartment with a portable media library, whether or not it was intended.

Personally, I don’t think you should be forced to hook up a powerful machine. like my MacBook Pro, which could be capable of calculating large prime numbers if it had to, to my amplifier if I wanted to access my iTunes library. It would be like driving a 1930’s, restored Rolls Royce, painted in silver paint, to your office job everyday.

Lately, I’ve been wondering, what is the price of information? Apple seems to know. They devised a good system to enforce it.

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Mustaches represent a phase in rock history that we pretend wasn’t there, but in fact, everyone was sporting them and knew none the wiser. ZZ Top, running around like a pair of Cousin It‘s, Freddy Mercury‘s almost political over-the-lip fluff, and a slew of men who fashioned their ‘staches to resemble such things as walruses, pencils and the curiously daring “Fu Manchu with an inverted toothbrush” posed proudly during photo ops to show off their mustaches in all their glory.

Today, men from this era still sport them, like my dad, who wears a Little Richard–esque one. (It occurs to me now that many Bollywood actors have paraded around in this same look.) I just learned that mustaches can even protect you from harmful radiation, so maybe they will make a comeback with my health-conscious generation.

Jean Ferrat was not only a man who was unrecognizable without his moustache but also belted out a few records. His music reconciled these two facts, given that each album was a canvas on which Ferrat could display his ever-increasingly unwieldy mustache to the millions of women who bought them. Yes, as I listened to six of these vinyl records back-to-back, I knew that I was entering dames territory, or today’s equivalent of places where Robbie Williams or John Mayer rules.

There were a slew of records that I didn’t like. On La Montagne (Barclay Records, 1964), it seemed like Ferrat had picked up a mic at a supper club and decided to be the evening’s entertainment. William Shatner was brought to mind when during “Autant d’amours autant de fleurs” (“As Many loves as There are Flowers”), Ferrat relentlessy repeated, “La jeunesse, la jeunesse” (“Youth, youth”), ad hominem. His interpretation of gypsy culture and music on La Commune (Barclay Records, 1971) left me in critical need of listening to Beirut’s much more evolved work to repair my ears. It sounded like a book report that the record execs made him do in order for him to sound more worldly (which made me think that Lavillier had the same idea when he concocted what became O, Gringo!). When I got to Ferrat’s ambitious project to set Louis Arag on‘s poetry to music, on Ferrat chante Aragon (Barclay Records, 1971), something told me I should straighten my glasses on my nose and get into student mode. After a track or two, I felt like I was in a poetry lecture. I much more preferred NU‘s “Reading and Writing Poetry” to sitting through “Ferrat Singing Aragon”.

Although both La femme est l’avenir de l’homme (Barclay Records, 1975) and Premières chansons: Eh L’amour! Le p’tit jardin (Disques Temey, 1976) made me want to take Ferrat by his shoulders and demand that he get his voice out of my head, Maria (Barclay Records, 1966) was … palatable. Stringed basses accompanied the arrangements, and I really thought I could dance to “En groupe, en ligne, en procession”.

My theory is this. There is a linear relationship between the size of his mustache and his album’s release dates. The earlier the record was released, the smaller the mustache, and the later the record came out, the more sweeping its side tails became. I believe that it was in 1966 when Ferrat and his moustache hit a sweet spot. Well, his mustache had even not begun to be.

Verdict: Keep (the one from 1966).

Category: music

A Home Entertainment System

Father-in-Law Vinyl Purge 2012 – #4 – Jean Ferrat