Arabic. Asian. Alternative Hip Hop.
The first of today's musical picks is "Tinkers Dance" by Emam and Friends, in the Arabic list on mp3.com. I had clicked on "Macedonian Song", and "Tinkers Dance" came up on my RealPlayer, but this turned out to be a happy computer-foul-up, whatever the cause was. The tune is uplifting and unfamiliar, unless you listen to a lot of classical Indian music, in which case it is uplifting and solid.
Most of the sounds on this track come from the tabla, a drum from which infinite tones and rhythms may be coaxed, and the sitar, a stringed instrument from which infinite scales and melodies may be derived. Both instruments demand years of grueling apprenticeship that instills a fluency in improvisation. Similar to the American jazz tradition nearly 90% of its music is improvised. Ravi Shankar is the seminal twentieth-century sitarist, has taught nearly every one of your favorite rock or jazz musicians who has ever made the trip to India to learn about its fantastic music. His daughter, Anoushka, is a tabla virtuoso as well as an established concert pianist, and she has not yet passed the age of twenty. Both she and her father are worth investigating live.
The next pick is under the Asian category of mp3.com: "Taiko Mania (Japan)" by Drum Army. It is big and rhythmic, and it was the number one song on the Asian list recently.
The last of today's musical picks is the special lyrics of "F*ck F*ck F*ck F*ck" by Scrilla Tee. The language is true to the title, taking advantage of the freedom of speech that the Internet provides. The song is available on the $5.99 CD form MP3.com and it has a beat that is fun and pretty cool. The last couple of lines are "Are you all bent up because my lyrics suck? Are you all bent up, well you're out of luck1x" Sometimes it is nice to take in a small dosage of rude. It works as a kind of vaccination against the inevitable rudeness that one meets which one cannot turn off so easily.
Arabic. Asian. Alternative Hip Hop. The connection here is quite simple. Each genre begins with the letter A. Mp3.com's genre list is enormous, and listed alphabetically. Sometimes it is fun to find music of quality by going one by one down the tree.
There are many other good sites for finding mp3 downloads; to name a few, there is scour.net, audiogalaxy.com, filequest.com, oth.net, listen.com, and launch.com. But what separates mp3.com from these sites is the rapidity with which one can listen to tracks. Other sites require a full download to listen to mp3s. Sometimes downloading one song can take 15-20 minutes. This is fine if you know what you want beforehand, but there is nothing more frustrating than downloading somebody's music onto your desktop and then finding out that it sucks. Mp3.com has the instant play option, which is found few places else. You can listen to 10 bad songs in a minute, as opposed to downloading 10 bad songs in an hour and then having to erase them.
By Ted Koch
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