Lately, whenever I turn on my iPod, it's to listen to one of three things:
We'll go through them one at a time.
Adam Carolla's radio show can be downloaded automatically through iTunes, one segment at a time, commercial-free. His style of comedy is not for everyone, but I think he's a genius. Not only is he great at pointing out hypocrisy, like when he rants about how he hates the lottery, but he's also got a very inspirational rags-to-riches story, a community college dropout who fought his way into fame by working his ass off. There's a great LA Magazine article about him, with a quote I think about a lot. He said:
“It’s action that matters. If you don’t like your life, change it. You can change your life. You may feel the same, but if you change your behavior, you will be different.”
Ken Burns' jazz collection has served as a terrific introduction to the world of jazz for me. I've been reading about the genre lately, and intending to listen to more of it, but I didn't know quite where to start. It's intimidating to me, like Starbucks was before I figured out that "venti" meant "large". I'm sure that a year from now, I'll have a good sized collection, and I'll know what I'm talking about, but it's a scary new world to me at the moment.
Bill Simmons is my favorite sports writer, but he also has extraordinarily eclectic taste in music. Whenever he's written about music in the past, I almost always either don't agree with him, or don't know the bands he's talking about. However, he does brag that he always controls the iPod on long car rides with his family or friends, so maybe he's onto something. He mentioned in a column once that he'd put together a few iMixes on iTunes, and when I checked them out, I'd never seen any of the bands before. I was going for a long walk the other day, and downloaded one of them to try it out. It's actually pretty good, and it's not stuff I'd have ever heard otherwise.
I love Bill Simmons and I'll have to check out his imixes.
Posted by: Joe the Dog Lover | September 10, 2008 at 11:32 AM