I was watching an episode of Chuck called “Chuck vs. Operation Awesome“.  Besides the silly humor and marginally interesting plot, the show has some REALLY great music.  The theme for the show is Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” – the extremely contagious instrumental track for it that is, with some sound effects – here’s the video for the Chuck Theme song.  The first episode I ever watched had an extremely excellent placement of Foux Du Fa Fa by Flight of the Concords.  In any case, recently while watching the “Chuck vs. Operation Awesome” episode with my brother Konst, he got intrigued because one of the songs sounded “really familiar”.  So after some on-and-off googling, I figured out that it was “Space Monkeys” by the Dust Brothers.  Its on the Fight Club soundtrack, which explains why it was played during the “Fight Club” scenes in that particular Chuck episode.  Here’s a pretty funny home-made video for the song.

Anyway, that’s not the point.  While re-watching the episode, another song caught my ear.  I did my standard google for the lyrics strategy.  After googling for “when i’m with you all my brothers know” and coming up with nothing, then running a bunch more searches for other portions of the song I could figure out from the episode, and coming up with more nothing, I found a site that lists the songs used in Chuck episodes.  I think its pretty ironic that after getting so much nothing from google, the song I was looking for is called “Got Nuffin”.   Here is Got Nuffin by Spoon on YouTube.  And here are the lyrics:

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Whoever’s making commercials for Bacardi is a genius.  I usually don’t even drink rum, but this new commercial certainly has me thirsty for a mojito.  The music is by “Matt and Kim”, the song is called “Daylight”.  They’re on Green Label Sound (who seem to be some sort of musical offspring of PepsiCo/Mountain Dew – and also have some sort of relationship to an artist I’ve heard of before – Flosstradamus). Matt and Kim have an official website too!  You can download an honest to goodness MP3 of the song from the label’s site.  And finally there’s full access to a video of the commercial on YouTube!  Unbelievable, I guess after all those years of having to search out your favorite commercial’s songs, lyrics, videos, etc. are over and done with.  Now all this media is at our fingertips and I’m pretty sure the folks running the show at the companies that come up with the commercials, that make the products and that create the music … finally get it!  Thank you social media!

Here are the lyrics for anybody who’s trying to decypher the words:

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I finally succumbed to peer pressure and set up an account on Twitter.  Added the little Twitter widget to my sidebar, and have been playing with various tools for tweeting and consuming tweets.  One I came across today is particularly interesting – TweetDeck.  Its an Adobe AIR application.  AIR is essentially a cross-platform delivery system for rich Flash applications that can work independently of a web browser.  I’ve been seeing some very interesting applications of AIR recently.  This one however is quite elegant indeed.  I highly recommend it for anybody that is interested in tapping into Twitter.

Generally speaking, what intrigues me most is the dynamic that is created by mini-blogging sites.  Twitter is one of many sites (even Facebook is trying to jump on the bandwagon with their latest redesign) using this paradigm.  One of my favorite is Blip.fm – basically a mini-playlist site (if you want to apply the mini-blogging paradigm to this vertical).  On Blip.fm (which by the way interfaces with Twitter quite nicely) you select music or link to publicly hosted mp3 files.  Other people can then play your “mp3 mini-playlist” and give you props (a sort of social currency) for your selections, add you to their favorite DJs list, etc.  Check out my blips if you’re interested.

Here’s an article comparing the top 4 mini-blog options.  I haven’t comprehensively played with Jaiku or Tumblr, but the sites seem to be intriguing clones of the Twitter concept – according to a quick glance.  Pownce seems to be have been acquired by SixApart and is no longer functional as its own site.  Seems like there’s going to be some consolidation in this space, but I’m more interested in the apps being built around existing sites, like TweetDeck, and other verticals this can be applied to, like Blip.fm.

Anyone know any other cool examples in the mini-blogging space?

Musically, I am more of a sponge than an explorer. My brother Konstantin actively searches for music because of his DJ habit/hobby. I on the other hand like to surround myself with people who know all about music and soak up their expertise by engaging in good conversation during good times (usually lubricated by good spirits – the kind you imbibe and the kind you have when you’re surrounded by good people). In any case, be mindful of the long preamble – I usually ramble on this long only when something profound is about to be said.

My friend Sunshine (she’s basically a walking encyclopedia of music) recommended I take a look at a website called Theta States. The conversation arrived at this particular junction because we were discussing the music of Atmosphere – by far my favorite band. Theta States is the website of a DJ called CPI, who Sunshine introduced to on the premise that she mixes Atmosphere tracks in her hip-hop DJ mixes. Now I’m hooked, CPI is like water for my sponge. I can’t help but soak up everything she mixes or talks about and enjoy it without a second thought.

She puts out a somewhat-weekly musical blog via her Facebook page which includes new releases she comes across. At this point I’ve been eating up these blog compilations right out of her hand, and highly recommend them if you’re not into the mass-market top 10/40/100 Billboard kind of material. In fact, to pass the time between her blog releases, I’ve started going through her blog archives (which may or may not be up at the moment – her website went down recently and is still being restored). I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself once I’m done listening to all the DJ mixes on her page and with the complete blog archives.

The catch-phrase / witty title of her website is “bedroom music for bedroom people”. Don’t dismiss it as sleepy though, her hip-hop mixes which include quite a bit of underground hip-hop goodness are intelligent, absolutely brilliant works of art. She even sprinkles all that intelligent hip-hop goodness with some spoken word. Basically she plays stuff that gives the genre a good name – poetry set to music.

Finally, if you’ve got any sense of humor at all, you’ll love the way she writes about music in her blog. She reminds me of my buddy Josh who is a writer good enough to melt the hearts of Rolling Stone execs, but uses his skills for good – not evil (Rolling Stone being the mass-market leader-of-the-pack it is nowadays). So if you don’t mind the fact that she’s Canadian, you better hop over to Theta States, and then on to her Facebook page. I highly recommend a 4-part hip-hop mix called “City Hearts Aimed Skyward”. Its 4+ hours of the best music for background listening during work, intelligent conversation and the kind of good times with good people I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. Go, get to it, click click click.

I first saw Tony Hawk Underground 2 at E3 this spring. Needless to say, the visuals greatly impressed me, it just seemed like a definite hit. I mean, in what other game can you skate around as a fatso in tidy-whiteys? The game is coming out tomorrow (October 5th) and is probably going to break all kinds of records for sales, its been getting advertised all over the place. One thing that’s super impressive to me is the soundtrack, which includes one of my all-time favorite bands – Atmosphere. That’s right, their single off of 7’s Travels – “Trying to find a balance” is on there. I’m really glad to see them making inroads and getting placement for their music, its freakin’ awesome. Besides Atmosphere there’s Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, The Living End, and tons of other great bands. Unbelievable, Activision really scored with this lineup. Here’s the full list of music on the THUG2 soundtrack:

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