I’m impressed by the effort with this shot-by-shot remake of the ‘classic’ music video by Journey. But, come on folks, 80′s the pop culture nostalgia must die. Really. It’s not ironic. It’s awful. It was awful. Especially 95% of the popular music. But, I suppose that probably has something to do with the fact that I was listening to records like this at the time.

The saying goes, “If you remember the 60′s, you weren’t really there.” So, shall we coin a phrase? : “If you remember the 80′s, you probably wished you didn’t”, perhaps?

Ok, there were actually many bright spots of that time for me. Just very few which are celebrated or recognized today.

And so, this is probably as good a time as any to cop to my own 80′s nostalgia trip this weekend, where I stopped by the Jack Hanley gallery to get a look at a show by Gee Vaucher. Gee produced much of the visual art used by the seminal punk band, CRASS. The show featured the original art from the album covers and posters, as well as paintings and insanely detailed works in gauche. We got a chance to meet Gee, and she was very sweet. We missed out on Penny Rimbaud’s poetry and saxophone deal, with bedtime schedules and all.

(Gee Vaucher)

obligatory out of context quote:

“…one thing we learned is that rebellion is obsolete.”

We’ll see how the RIAA responds to this one. Music sharing, taping, and lending, has always been a part of how people discover new music.

Anyway, being having a bit of DJ in me (control freak?), I don’t leave it all up to iTunes to select the music. ‘Party Shuffle” and a few smart playlists (and a bit of applescript) keep a good selection of tunes flowing.

Party Shuffle pulls tracks from the full Library, or selected playlists, and is great because you can reorganize tracks on-the-fly. I will prune/delete tracks from the Party Shuffle that don’t fit my mood which queues up 20 or 30 songs. This generally works well, but the songs are a bit too random.

I decided I wanted to sprinkle the source playlist with a few favorites (anything rated 3 stars or higher), and some newly added tracks (added in the last 60 days), along with a random selection of unplanned tracks from the library. Unfortunately, you can’t build this kind of playlist with one Smart Playlist. I created the following smart playlists : 25 favorites, 25 new tracks, 150 unplayed, and a ‘Shuffle Source’ playlist which builds a single playlist using the other three as the source.

Whew! (Really, it’s not much work.)

I found that while doing my shuffle list pruning, I’d run across the same songs frequently, which makes sense – deleting the track from shuffle doesn’t remove it from the source playlists. iTunes does not have a ‘refresh smart playlists’ command, so I would need to manually refresh the 4 smart playlists. This is where my master plan starts to break down (too much work!), but luckily, Applescript comes to my rescue.

I found this bit of applescript code at macosxhints:

set playlist_list to {"list", "of", "smart", "playlists"}
tell application "iTunes"
  repeat with the_playlist in playlist_list
    delete (tracks in (first playlist whose name is the_playlist))
  end repeat
end tell

Just replace “list”, “of”, “smart”, “playlists” with the names of your favorite smart playlists, and you have a quick way to refresh smart playlists.

The results? Here is my LastFM profile, which is currently rocking an ‘eclectic score’ of 86/100, which for some reason I am proud of.

With my record collection still back in Nebraska, this just adds insult to injury.

Music is mastered primarily for playback with little white stumps shoved into your ear. Which is to say, not the optimal listening experience. It’s interesting that portable mp3 players weren’t designed to playback audio to accommodate in-ear/earbuds, rather than the other way around. When played back in home stereos, the music will probably sound awful.

This christmas, I got a nice pair of headphones, and gave them for a spin listening to Rubber Soul in a lossless format. I was amazed that I heard guitar parts, vocal clarity, and even small ‘imperfections’ in the performances.

I suspect that the pendulum will swing back to High Fidelity, eventually, once people realize what they are missing.

I used to rack up $600 phone bills setting up tours for my band before everyone had email and net access. These young’uns don’t know how good they have it with cheap ways to promote their bands.

Then again, these days gas is $3 a gallon.

8 years old and 5 years old, respectively.

More from Sarascratch

(Via Slowernet.)