"Fantastic Mr. Fox"

The other day I watched a film from a few years ago that I had never gotten around to seeing while it was in theaters. It's called Fantastic Mr. Fox, and it was directed by Wes Anderson in 2009. I remember reading the book that the movie is based on by Roald Dahl when I was a kid, and I definitely had flashbacks to it while watching the film.

The movie is about a fox who starts a rivalry with three local farmers by stealing their food. The farmers come together to get back at him, and when the entire town is in danger, Mr. Fox must create a master plan to save the town. It was created using stop-motion animation, which involves taking 24 pictures for every second of film time. It's a painstaking process, but the results are truly extraordinary.

Sound recording is another thing that interests me, especially when it comes to animated movies. I learned from watching behind-the-scenes videos that the cast and crew went to a farm to record a lot of the dialogue to be sure it sounded authentic. I thought this was a brilliant idea, and Wes Anderson is kind of a genius.

Giving Rap a Chance (the Rapper)

My boyfriend and I do not enjoy the same types of music. He like post-punk, rap, indie, and alternative music and I listen to mostly pop, electronic, and dance. Deciding what to listen to in the car is often a struggle.

One of us looks like this.

And the other looks like this.

Or vice versa.

A couple weeks ago, he was raving about a new album entitle Surf by Donnie Trumpet and The Social Experiment. The group consists of Donnie Trumpet, a.k.a. Nico Segal, trumpeter, bandleader, producer and sometimes percussionist; keyboardist and producer Peter "Peter Cottontale" Wilkins; producer and engineer Nate Fox; drummer Greg "Stix" Landfair Jr.; and, most famously, Chancellor "Chance The Rapper" Bennett. The album is totally free to download and NPR wrote a very nice article about a song off the album called "Familiar." 

The Social Experiment on the cover of Fader magazine.

I finally decided to give Chance and the gang a ~chance~ (I'm hilarious) and listened to the entire album all the way through. Then I listened to it again. Then I decided I like it. It's not the kind of angry, in-your-face rap that I often hear on stations like Power 105.1 or Hot 97; it's jazzy, layered, and the lyrics are smart and optimistic. 

The cover art for Surf.

One song I am loving off Surf is "Wanna Be Cool" which features singers Jeremih, Chance the Rapper, and Kyle. The entire track is about how not being cool makes you cool and how you don't need to be rich to be happy. One part of Kyle's verse goes: "You'll be aware, it's easy, and it's so important / being cool shouldn't cost a fortune / Baby got her jeans from goodwill / but I bet that ass look good still." 

Another cool thing that Donnie Trumpets and The Social Experiment (other than put the entire album out for FREE) was not reveal the features on each track. Beside each track under "Artist" it just says "Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment." Now you can look up who is featured on each track, but when people downloaded the album and listened to it for the first time, they didn't know another artist was going to come into a song until they actually did. I really like this element of surprise and I think it definitely adds something to the album as a work of art. 

Download the album and give it a listen--it doesn't cost you anything--and feel free to check out the music video for "Sunday Candy" below. 

Radio for the Win

Every year my communications school splits to play each other in the TV versus radio softball game. We make tee shirts. We yell mean things at each other. And radio always loses. This is because it takes a lot more people to produce a TV show than a radio show, so TV has a bigger, more powerful team; yet, I always play for radio.

Today I learned that Apple announced a new service: AppleMusic. They gave us iTunes and iPods, but on June 30, 2015, Apple is going to change the game once again. In a couple weeks, Apple will launch a worldwide 24/7 live radio station called Beats1. Drake even made a cameo at the Keynote in Cupertino California to announce and show his support of the new service.

Drake

Legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe will takeover the Los Angeles branch of the station, Ebro Darden, the former Vice President of Programming at New York's WQHT Hot 97 will takeover the New York branch, and Julie Adenuga, a relatively new, and increasingly popular voice from the UK will make contributions from London, England.

Ebro Darden, Zane Lowe, and Julie Adenuga

This announcement got me very excited today because I am extremely passionate about radio, and most of the time, I like it a lot more than television production. However, it is not as popular as TV, and there are not as many jobs available because people can work in radio for a very long time. (For example, Howard Stern). A worldwide radio station that operates 24/7 would mean that--if successful--there would hopefully be many jobs available. As a twenty-year-old student, this is something I have to be constantly thinking about. 

AppleMusic and Beats1 could be a big win for radio. A huge win. It's very interesting to watch how radio evolves over time to compete with other forms of media. I think its resilience is the reason I'll always be on team radio at the softball game--even though I know we're probably going to lose.