things i’ve liked this week, vol. 1

2024-12-06 15:48

here are some things, new (to me), that i liked this… uh, week. yeah. let’s go with that.

music

underscores’ cover of imogen heap’s “headlock”`

apparently the zoomers are into imogen heap? particularly the song “headlock”? because of tiktok? this is great news to me, as someone who used to play this nonstop on her ipod touch in high school and wondering if she would ever catch on among my peers.

here’s a cover by underscores, who’s put out some of my favorite new music. the kicker: it’s secretly also another cover.

i found this on soundcloud and there doesn’t seem to be an official stream. so who knows if it’s even real. whatever, it’s good!

transa

this album is everything. it’s a warm hug, a heartbreak, it’s catharsis, it’s an oral history. it contains a 26-minute andre 3000 song and a song by the legendary Sade Adu about her son. to my trans sisters, brothers, and siblings: we will live to continue telling our story.

video

“the road to magnasanti”

a pre-how to john wilson short. it features, among other things, the gamified architecture of mid-2010s new york city apartments in the (then-still-gentrifying) bushwick neighborhood, which he contrasts with magansanti, a simcity 3000 save file which tells the story of a megacity that treats its populace merely as a number.

if i’m going to be honest the execution is a little messy. i can see why in how to john wilson consciously chooses to chase tangents instead of trying to tie things together: he’s better at that, i think. but i love the subject matter and i think it’s a cute little short.

software

beets, maybe

i’ve started managing my own music again. i don’t think i’ll move off of streaming (it’s too convenient!) but i want to stop using a streamer as a primary entrypoint into music.

by the way, if you want to do this, probably the best thing to do is to just download mp3/opus files and keep them locally on your computer. an album doesn’t take up that much space nowadays! but if you’re a freak like me that insists on keeping a bunch of lossless media¹ though, you might be a little too obsessive about music organization.

in that case, and you don’t mind the command line, check out beets. it’s an incredibly well-considered piece of software, and i’m glad it has been actively deeloped over the past decade. it uses MusicBrainz to tag and sort things. there is a veritable smorgasbord of plugins that provide lyric syncing,

this recommendation does come with some caveats though. for one thing, i wish there was a GUI of some sort. the import process is purposefully very interactive; the authors liken it to manually alphabetizing your vinyl collection – something that while tedious allows you to gain more knowledge of what music you have. perhaps this would be true if all computers worked like Dynamicland but they don’t, so you have to sift through long text streams.