a U2 anthology

Music challenges are a big part of why I'm still on Twitter these days. I'm working on about four this month, including a U2 anthology. This is going through their discography and picking a set number of songs from each album to make up a group and a personal best of collection. 

A short time back, we did an R.E.M. anthology. For me, there are a lot of parallels between the two bands. I'm not usually on the cutting edge of the music scene, but I was there at the beginning for both of them, working at a college radio station in a po-dunk Georgia town in the early 80s. Big, big favorites from the get-go. 

Similar career trajectories for both, from humble beginnings to international superstars. Great album after great album with very few clunkers along the way. And I followed every twist and turn along the way. I reached a musical dead end sometime in the mid-90s, with a wife and kids and money too tight to spend on a lot of albums and concerts, but I still made the effort for R.E.M. and U2 until...I just didn't anymore. Maybe we (the bands and I) just got old.

Rattle and Hum was the first U2 album that didn't WOW me. A couple of the songs are among their best, some of it was okay, some I didn't like at all. (They might have stolen Helter Skelter back if Bono had gotten the damn lyrics right.) I remember a scene in the movie where they were talking about closing this chapter of their career and starting a new one. For me, this new chapter started out great, but it just reached a point where that connection wasn't there anymore. I stopped listening.

Why Most New Music Sounds Like Crap

Rolling Stone has a great article that explains how sound compression and audio manipulation software destroy the details of modern music...

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

The idea that engineers make albums louder might seem strange: Isn't volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum — and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It's the same technique used to make television commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners' attention — but at a price. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."

...To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense of spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments — as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan's Modern Times and Norah Jones' Not Too Late. "When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart," says Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. "It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. Analog sound to me is more emotionally affecting."

There are also many quotes from some top producers and artists, waveform diagrams that show what they're talking about, and links to more information.

I do most of my music listening through computer speakers or mp3 player headphones, and have a lot of old stuff mixed in with newer songs (as you might have noticed from my music quizzes.) I have to do quite a bit of volume adjusting between songs. The newer stuff is almost always a lot louder, but more muddled than the older songs.