Jon Jolly

Well I have kissed a girl, but that’s not what I’m talking about! Jonathan over at thesource4ym has flagged up a new song by female singer Katy Perry called “I Kissed A Girl”.

This song isn’t so much about homosexual activity as it is just “doing what feels good at the moment.” Just like current hit songs “Lollipop” or “Love in the Club,” this song preaches, “follow your gut in the moment.” Another misleading message for our kids.

The tune is currently at Number 3 in the US iTunes Store and will likely be a big hit over here too as it’s a catchy, funky, singalong song. The provocative video (below) is going to be a big deal in the lives of many of the teenagers we work with so you should probably be prepared to discuss some of the issues it raises around exploring sexuality. In my mind, it’s no better or worse than other over-sexualised music such as The Pussycat Dolls, we should just be aware of what young people are listening to and help them to critique the messages they are being sold.

I Kissed A Girl

Update: YPulse just posted a good summary of teen sexuality trends based on discussion drawn out of this particular song.

As a part-time Mobile DJ, tagging and organising my music library is very important to me. I’ve previously spent hours changing incorrect track information and I currently have around 12,000 songs in my iTunes library. Playlists are essential to manage all the songs and I rely on Smart Playlists to filter genre, new songs, decades, etc. In the same way, giving a rating to each song is also vital so I can easily filter your Arcade Fire from your Aqua.

Now I realise that rating anything is a subjective experience based on the taste of the reviewer so not everyone will agree with my decisions. A good example is the website metacritic.com where they give music, movies and games an average rating out of 100 based on cumulative reviews from known publications. However, I recently realised that even the seemingly simple 5 star rating has hidden depth that can be used in a variety of ways to produce very different results.

For example, some people might only have music in their library that they enjoy or appreciate (probably a lot of people). Therefore 1 star could represent a casual liking of a song, while a 5 star equates to a passionate auditory experience which few songs ever attain. This approach would be similar to the four star rating in Halliwell’s Film Guide, helpfully explained by Chewing Pixels:

all films by default receive a zero star rating. Only exceptionally interesting and important films manage to receive a one or two star rating with a tiny handful (just over 1%) of the 23, 000 odd films covered receiving the maximum recommendation of Four Stars.

For me however, a song in my library always starts as a 3 star by default. This is the middle ground and a safe arena which the majority of tracks fall into; not great but not terrible, just OK. Anything below par becomes a 2 star or, if woefully inadequate and pathetic, a 1 star. In contrast, anything that rises above the norm and stands out becomes a 4 star, with particularly inspired compositions receiving the full 5 stars. Any track that has no stars is classified as not yet rated.

I currently have 408 5 star rated tracks. A random selection includes:

• Arcade Fire - Windowsill
• Daft Punk - One More Time
• Lupe Fiasco - Daydreamin’
• Gorillaz - Dare
• Bloc Party - The Prayer

So how do you rate your music and what’s in your 5 stars?

Happy New Year!
This time last year I posted my favourite stuff of 2006, and there’s already been a whole slew of bloggers doing the same thing for 2007. So to jump on the bandwagon, here’s my top 3 of everything…
Books
Although I’ve read quite a few books this year, most of them have been around a while and are nothing new, so these 3 are the ones that have influenced me most this year.

1. Contemplative Youth Ministry: I found this a really inspiring and helpful challenge to get back to ‘being with’ young people instead of running programmes.
2. Purpose Driven Youth Ministry: Although quite programme driven, this is an excellent resource for planning and understanding what you do with young people.
3. The Radical Reformission: an excellent call for Christians to be relevant to our culture.

Music

1. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible: great songs with deep themes laid over giant, sweeping orchestral sounds.
2. Block Party - A Weekend In The City: I missed Silent Alarm, the original release by Bloc Party, so this album was an eye opener. Strong melody and beats with quirky lyrics.
3. Tim Hughes - Holding Nothing Back: simply one of the best written and produced modern worship albums.

For more music that I love, visit my Last.fm profile.

Movies

1. This Is England: (released last year but only watched recently) gritty, but beautifully shot in the north of England, it follows one young lad’s friendships and struggles.
2. Ratatouille: a gentle and fun animated movie that follows a slightly different story to the usual Pixar fare.
3. The Bourne Ultimatum: a good ending to the trilogy and much better than the second installment, Bourne finally finds out the truth about his past.

Websites

1. Facebook: the all-conquering social networking website that brings together various elements from around the web under one playful roof.
2. Last.fm: a revolution in music sharing and discovery where you build a profile simply by listening to your favourite music and then share it around the web (including Facebook)!
3. Netvibes: an alternative homepage to iGoogle that has a lot more options and works faster too!

TV

1. Heroes: gripping story of people finding out they have super powers.
2. Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares: He’s rude and arrogant, but he makes great TV! You watch it because it’s terrifying!
3. My Name Is Earl: Season 2 really developed the characters and it was funnier than ever!

So what was your best? It’d be good to see some posts from friends who haven’t written anything for a while (Mumf, Kirsty, Ben, Pete).

Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows was released on download earlier this week to great anticipation from fans. Their first release since 2003, In Rainbows is only available directly from the Radiohead website, but in a ground-breaking move, fans get to choose how much they pay for the music - anything from the 45p processing fee upwards! NME has an interesting article showing how much fans have decided to pay and the average seems to be around £5.

However since the release there’s been a huge backlash around the internet due to the compression of the download files. Each track is encoded in DRM Free 160kbps MP3 which is generally fine for listening to on MP3 players, but pretty poor for decent systems as it loses all the intricacies and detail of the music. It now appears that the low quality download is only a promotion for the full high-quality CD album to be released next year. This has angered a lot of fans who feel duped into buying this inferior version even though they set the price they paid:

First and foremost, all of Radiohead’s previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second…

Second, most took issue with when Radiohead chose to announce that In Rainbows would be available at 160 kbps — after the majority of their fans had already paid for the download.

I’ve yet to download it myself. The 160MP3 will be fine for my macbook, but not for my home stereo or headphones. I think I’ll probably pay a smaller amount for the download and if I really enjoy the album then I’ll but the full physical copy when released to appreciate the detail.

I meant to post this on Sunday afternoon, but the internet’s been down at home! Sunday’s Thanksgiving Service was fantastic with the band sounding really great! It was Lea’s vocals and strong harmonies that really help lift the whole tone, but all real credit must go to God for inspiring us all to praise him.

If you’re interested we actually only played 4 songs in the end:

• Beautiful One - Tim Hughes
• Oh Happy Day - Tim Hughes
• Holy is The Lord - Chris Tomlin
• Oh Praise Him - David Crowder Band

The best part of the service for me was the dedication of little Cora Star Debnam. It was an especially moving experience to watch two parents cry tears of joy over their new baby. That’s real thanksgiving.

Tomorrow is Sunday 1st October and Arun Community Church is having a thanksgiving service. It just so happens that I’m on the rota to lead worship for the meeting and have spent much of the day with a guitar in hand, trying to choose a set of songs that reflect what I believe God wants to do tomorrow!

As I’ve said before, I absolutely LOVE to worship. It’s one of those things that just captivates and inspires me so I take the responsibility quite seriously. What I’ve found today is that it can be very hard to find songs that fit in with a particular theme. After a bit of trawling across Google, I’ve found a few websites that allow you to search for a particular theme or subject in a song, yet often I (or the church congregation) aren’t familar with the song results they return. The other option is software packages. The church have tried a few different worship programmes over the years yet none are that satisfactory or available to me on my home computer!

So that just leaves me with pages of song books and print-outs. It’s quite time consuming but I actually appreciate looking at each song individually and deciding if it will fit into the mix. The list I’ve prepared for tomorrow is:

• Beautiful One - Tim Hughes
• Happy Day - Tim Hughes
• I Will Dance (Undignified) - Matt Redman
• Oh Praise Him - David Crowder Band
• Holy Is The Lord - Chris Tomlin
• Everything/Consuming Fire - Tim Hughes
• My Jesus, My Saviour - Darlene Zschech
• See his Love - Tom Lockley
• Praise Him You Heavens - Russell Fragar

My concern with this list is that although they are mostly around praising God, they are not specifically about thanksgiving - the theme of the morning. It’s not a major problem as I guarantee we won’t get a chance to play all of these and I usually end up swapping things around as God does His thing. Maybe I’ll post the actual playlist tomorrow afternoon to see how it differed!

Various news sites are awash with the high profile targetting of Russian download site allofMP3.com. Possibly the best explanation is here at The Register.

Tim Jupp had previously warned me about the ‘grey area’ this was causing in the music industry so it was only a matter of time really. Price aside, there’s still a need for a DRM-free, multiple-format download site. Let me know if you find a legal one…

I’ve recently been buying a lot of albums off the iTunes Music Store, partly because it’s relatively cheap, but mainly because it’s instantaneous. Now don’t get me wrong, I will always prefer having a physical copy of a CD, but it has become so convenient to get the latest music straight onto my ipod and out wherever I take it!

Today I found an even more compelling reason to buy digital… www.allofmp3.com

This fully-legal Russian music download service is amazing for the sheer volume of it’s globe-spanning library and the way that you can choose to download any song in MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV files at a variety of unprotected bit rates. But the most amazing feature is the price.

Aimed at the fledgling download market in Russia, all prices are in US Dollars and very, very cheap. Today I bought the excellent lo-fi offering of Veneer by Jose Gonzalez for $0.87. That’s all 11 tracks in MP3 format at a bit rate of 192, for a grand total of 49p! Yes, 49p.

allofmp3.com does have it’s failings. You have to transfer credit to your account, and you have to individually download each track by right clicking and saving to your hard drive - tedious if you’re buying a long album. But at these sorts of prices and with the choice of unprotected file formats, it’s surely worth it. For a review of the website, Click Here.

Is this the new true video ipod? I certainly hope so!

Although I signed up for MySpace back in November, I’ve not really done much with my page as I post most of my thoughts up here. If I’m honest I still don’t really see the purpose of adding millions of friends and then never speaking to them, BUT I’ve now found an excellent use for the site.

By changing my profile to a Band profile, I’ve uploaded some of my songs that I recorded with Ben and Dave and you can listen to them online! If you’re a MySpace guru, drop me a line to help me edit, design and utilise the page better.