My very first blog

Greetings. This would be the first official blog entry of Hed Rush. I am Jesse Ducker, and I am of Oakland, California. Like anyone out there in massive blogosphere, I’ll use this space to riff on whatever the hell I feel like. Chances are it will center around my main interests: music, movies, sports (especially the Oakland A’s, Golden State Warriors, and the San Francisco 49ers), and TV (mostly The Wire). Possibly even comic books, which I’ll be sharing with the other blog I’m busy not contributing to, The Prep Time Posse (shout out to the crew at preptimeposse.blogspot.com). Also, given my rather large music collection and my all-consuming passion for music in general, I may also use this place to post up an mp3 or three. But that will happen once I figure out how to use my trusty new USB turntable. That could take a while.

I’ll keep the first riff music related. I was fortunate enough to get a new iPod as a gift; one those really cool 160 gig models with the brand new software and everything. I’m probably one of the few people that wouldn’t be able to fit their whole collection on one of those suckers, especially with the help of the aforementioned USB turntable. I tend to micromanage my iPods. I don’t just synch it up with the iTunes: I’m really selective about what albums go on it; I make a ridiculous amount of playlists centered around genre, style, era, and geographic location. All of this tomfoolery means that it takes me two or three days to set up the sucker before I’m ready to listen to it. And I’ve had to set up this iPod twice in a week span, since I was forced to zero it out last weekend based on my own stupidity. It’s a time-consuming pain in the ass.

So as I’m going through my iTunes, selecting what goes on the iPod, I begin to realize there’s a grip of albums on my hardrive I haven’t bothered to listen to yet. Obscure, out-of-print stuff I’ve found on other blogs and music boards and the like. Like two albums by Black Heat (sort of obscure ’70s funk group), another by the Terrorists (an early ’90s political gangsta rap group from Houston) and another by the Kings of Pressure (um, I’m not really sure who they are. Wait, discogs.com tells me they’re a late ’80s Long Island rap group with ties to the Public Enemy. Huh, who knew?). Some of these albums I downloaded a year ago and still haven’t gotten around to listening to. So I start to listen to 15 plus hours worth of music to see if it is indeed iPod worthy.

As I’m making my decisions (Black Heat makes the cut, the Terrorist don’t. Still haven’t finished the Kings of Pressure album), and I start thinking about the nature of free, downloaded music. For a little over a calendar year, I’ve been accumulating mass amounts of music from these various places, like probably 40 gigs worth (and that’s being conservative) of stuff that I: a) once owned on tape, but can’t listen to anymore, ’cause, you know, who listens to tapes? b) Didn’t buy when it came out for lack of the money, knowledge, interest, or inclination. However, it can be argued that if you can download any music you what whenever you want, does the music itself become devalued? Do those first two Black Heat albums I got for free mean less to me than the Lupe Fiasco CD I bought at Best Buy for $9.99, even though the Black Heat albums are better?

I’d like to think not. For the music love it me, it stands to reason that even if the music is free, I can appreciate its artistic value as much as its lack of cost. And a quick perusal of songs I’ve listened to the most on my iTunes show most of the songs in my Top 10 most listened to are ones I didn’t spend money on. But still, the out-of-print albums I get the most excited about finding are the ones I once owned, rather than The Terrorists.

I know I’ve expended a lot of words to come to the conclusion of “I don’t know,” but it’s not easy to evaluate how much a piece of digital music means to you. Maybe I wouldn’t let that Kings of Pressure sit unlistened to on my hardive if I’d spend some cash to get it. But maybe I’m not inclined to listen to it because I suspect it’s probably not that great and I’d rather listen to the Sugarman 3 album that I bought over the weekend.

In the meantime, I’m just going to find contentment by listening to the second Kwame album. Boy, did that guy love polka dots…