tunequest

From the soundtrack Singles (1992) This song is among the earliest in The Smashing Pumpkins catalog, recorded in 1992 for the motion picture soundtrack Singles. The film takes place in Seattle and heralds the coming of that city's grunge music, using the local scene as a persistent backdrop the personal and professional turmoil of a bunch of twenty-somethings. Allusions and references to the burgeoning scene abound within the movie. Soundgarden ...

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When I began the original tunequest in February of last year, I had ~6000 songs in my iTunes library that had a play count of zero. Part of that list consisted of old CDs that just hadn't been played since they were digitized. A good number of them were the result of over-zealous music collection and exploration. That was one of the reasons I decided to undertake the endeavor ...

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Over the years, I've come to understand Pearl Jam's 1998 album Yield as perhaps the group's finest recording. There's not a single bad note on its entire length and it is one of but a handful of records in my library with nothing but 4- or 5-star ratings. At the time of its release, rock music was steadily being displaced in my mind with college-era explorations of the electronic and ...

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Back before all this digital music and internet mumbo jumbo, finding a live recording of a band's performance was a tricky proposition. You basically had to stumble upon one by knowing someone who was in a bootlegging circle and was willing to make a cassette copy (leaving you with a reduced quality duplicate). Alternately, you could have searched the racks at used music stores to find a quasi-legal, imported ...

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On the evening of March 9, 1994 I attended my first and only Pearl Jam concert at the Pensacola Civic Center in, you guessed it, Pensacola Florida (where PJ guitarist Mike McCready happens to have been born). I was a freshman in high school at the scampy young age of 15 and, having just discovered the full breadth of grunge six months before, I reveled in the notion that ...

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so all the pearl jam i've been listening to lately is leading to a kind of renaissance for the group as far as i'm concerned. my fandom was huge in high school, basically through the release of no code. i was involved with some tape trading over the internet and regularly participated on an early mailing list dedicated to the band (which i had to telnet to tallahassee freenet in ...

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As if to prove my previous post for me, the tunequest-pod offered me these selections today (in order): pearl jam-live at the fox theatre in atlanta (which i skipped because i had just heard a live show yesterday) vince guaraldi's oh good grief (a decent jazz album) sonic youth experimental jet set trash and no star (my first sonic youth ...

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my ipod loves it some sonic youth. and beck. and pearl jam.one of the recurring subplots here at tunequest has been the tracking the seemingly non-randomness of the selections my ipod chooses to play and lately it's starting to draw my aggravation. you see, part of my goals for  tunequest is to get to know some of the vast swaths of under-appreciated tunes resting in my library. so i ...

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Mudhoney's My Brother the Cow, I think, is a fitting bookend to the "grunge" era. And though I didn't get into Mudhoney until the waning days of the movement, in retrospect it seems as though it was the most quintessentially grunge of all the big bands to come out of Seattle during that time. Nirvana was more pop friendly; Pearl Jam leaned toward hard rock; Alice in Chains and ...

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