Music Report

Whew, back to the normalcy of Thursday reporting.

I’ll start out with another music service trying to grab earshare on the Internet. Slacker Personal Radio offers a web service and downloadable application that resembles Pandora in that you can create stations based on musicians or group to which you’d like to hear similar music. It appears superior to Pandora based on its claimed ability to better learn your preferences as a local application, and you can minimize the whole system into an always-on-top one inch box displaying the album cover of the song playing and allowing music control when moused over. Not yet available for the Mac.
www.Slacker.com

Mike Doughty, a longtime Music Report favorite is coming to the intimate confines of Joe’s Pub this Thursday and Friday at 7:30 each evening. He is the former lead singer of Soul Coughing now doing the solo singer/songwriter thing. This tour is called “The Question Jar Show” featuring Mike playing requests yelled out from the audience, slipping in songs from the new album, & dipping into a big jar filled with the audience’s written questions. Tickets are $25, and this venue tends to cut to the chase with a single quick opener because they go back-to-back-to back with three distinct shows a night.
www.mikedoughty.com

Brief follow up from last week—Jay-Z will not allow his American Gangster album to be sold on iTunes, only on CD, because he feels that as a work of art it should be heard in its entirety. And the film American Gangster is not all that good in this reviewer’s professional opinion.
http://www.undercoverhd.com/news/Story.aspx?id=3436
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/11/02/american_gangster/

Early warning on two shows at Irving Plaza as tickets could be in short supply:

Lupe Fiasco 12/18—Robbie, Angel & I saw him at SOBs. He came on pretty late but then lit things up with his live performance. Kayne did 2 or 3 songs with him as well unannounced. They are both from Chicago. Lupe strikes me as a smart dude, not just smart for a rapper, based on the interviews I’ve seen and because he wears glasses. This date is listed as a record release event but beware. All signs point to this new album underperforming its predecessor.
http://www.lupefiasco.com/sneakpeek/index.php

DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist as The Hard Sell on 1/26-1/27—The two DJs will be performing together with the help of 8 turntables, 4 mixers, and 2 effects pedals. These are two of the best out there engaging in a fairly intense exercise in an environment I would expect to be primarily cooperative with a little oneupsmanship. See tour poster below. For their most classic solo work get DJ Shadow’s Entroducing and his single Six Days. Cut Chemist shines in his work with Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli, and on the video for his track called Spat.
http://www.myspace.com/pillageroadshow

The Report may have temporally dropped the ball on Cadence Weapon as he swung through town over the weekend opening two area shows for indie rock act Final Fantasy but better less early than never. Cadence Weapon is potentially the next phenom in a fickle hip hop scene. I am a sucker for his “dense, seedy beats, lascivious synths, ferociously articulate rhymes and shocking cohesion.” And also he is Canadian.
http://www.cadenceweaponmusic.com/

As the iPhone does support music, I’m deeming this SNL parody iPhone commercial that didn’t make it to air thoroughly appropriate to close this week’s report.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/leaked/the-snl-iphone-sketch-that-never-aired-321328.php?autoplay=true