Music Discovery

Classic Redman episode approximately 25 years ago

I was thinking about this the other day. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s a lot of us were listening to music on our PCs with players like Winamp. You’d load up some MP3s from your hard drive, maybe find a random internet radio stream somewhere, and just let it play.

Half the fun was discovering stations from different parts of the world and hearing stuff you’d never normally come across.

It felt very different from how people listen to music now. There weren’t recommendation algorithms constantly trying to guess what you want to hear and there weren’t ads every few minutes. You just had a player and whatever music or station you decided to load.

These days everything seems to revolve around streaming platforms and algorithm-driven suggestions.

I actually started building a small Android music player recently inspired by that old Winamp-style setup. It plays local music files and lets you load radio streams in a really simple way without ads or tracking, and while working on it I realised how much that older way of listening kind of disappeared.

Kind of made me nostalgic for that whole era.

The bassline alone feels incredibly sludgy in the best way. It sounds so heavy and thick, like it is pulling you under, dragging through the inevitable "flood" the song builds around.

Layne Staley's voice delivers a perfect mix of vulnerability and grit that cuts right through. Paired with that bassline, everything sounds so dense and jampacked. It sounds like there's real weight behind every aspect of it.

One of those songs I knew I'd heard and loved before but could never track it down. When I started going through Alice in Chains' discography, almost the moment it played, I knew I finally found it. Definitely had a rush of excitement realizing I finally discovered it!

Hip Hop is traditionally 4/4 time for obvious reasons, but im wondering if there are any good examples of mcs/producers writing hip hop in different time signatures. There are probably some examples of 6/8 being used as it's probably the next most suitable time signature for hip hop but outside of that i cant say i've ever encountered other time signatures being used in 30 odd years of listening to the genre.