Future Music

I was driving home from work and I popped my "Foreign Exchange" CD in to listen to... I just felt like some music after a long day. I usually listen to Michael Baisden in the afternoon but, I just wanted a nice relaxing drive today... no talking back to the radio and making other drivers think that I was schizophrenic.

I forgot how good this CD is... I've had it for about a year and only played it twice. My wife will say that was because it seemed like all I would play is Beyonce everytime you turned around. (If some of you recall, I wasn't even feeling her current CD, "I am Sasha Fierce" when it first came out. I guess it grew on me.)

I bought so much other music... John Legend, Raphael Saddiq, Anthony Hamilton, Ginuwine, Maxwell, Joe, Usher, and Solange just to name a few, that I guess I just forgot about "Foreign Exchange"... a lush set that contains, Neo-Soul, Jazz fusion, and Hip-Hop beats all rolled up into one.

For the past few weeks, like everybody else (I guess), I've been playing nothing but Michael Jackson 24/7 but, I've been thinking (yeah, I know... take the children inside and close the doors) about changing formats and making life easier on myself. Yes, I'm coming into the 21st century soon. I'm shopping around for an Ipod and I'm going to begin downloading a lot of my new music.

In yesterday's post I wrote about having a 1992 Chevy... that car had a casette player in it and when I wanted to listen to CDs, I had to use one of those adapters that looks like a cassette on one end and plugs into a discman on the other end. That was cool as long as you were driving tame but, turn a corner or hit a bump and your CD would skip. I can't tell you how many of my friends giggled when they were riding in my car back then.

Now, I have a 2008 Nissan Maxima with a CD player in it. I looked at that CD player and I thought to myself, with the rate that people are downloading music and using Ipods now, this CD player will look as archaic as the cassette player looked in my other car. So, I made up my mind when I gave one of my frat brothers, K.J., a ride the other day and he had his Ipod with him. He showed me that my car has a jack for an Ipod (something I already knew). When I took it for a test drive the day I was buying it, the salesman had his Ipod plugged into the jack. He grabbed it just before my wife and I pulled off. I actually thought it came with the car. -:) )

Anyway, K.J. had all these great funk tunes loaded on his ipod... Earth,Wind & Fire, Parliament-Funkadelic, Breakwater, Brass Construction, Ohio Players, Isley Brothers, and what have you. He downloaded all of that stuff and it sounded great as we cruised along.

My wife tells me that we just don't have the shelf space for any more CDs and she has stopped buying them. I don't think I will be downloading my old stuff but, I could see me downloading new music that was available. This leads me to another talking point. Is there really enough good music coming out to download? A lot of people aren't downloading whole albums anymore... just one or two new songs by an artist. What's up with that? Another blog post for another time, I suppose, but the current artists I named a few paragraphs up are making good music... music
worthy of a CD purchase or a download.