The Best Band No One's Heard of

I'm here today to talk about The Faint. No, this isn't a drug, although it can seem like it. Nope, this is my favorite band that no one's heard of. If you're into punk, electronica, hard rock, or any of the above, you might love this band as much as I do. They combine all of these aspects and create a genre of music that's both unique and entrancing. They use distorted bass, an array of synth, heavy guitar, and vocals that perfectly fit their genre. I say their genre because it really is theirs, no one else sounds like them.
The Faint is a quintet, they have Todd Fink as lead vocals (he even plays a couple chords on guitar every once in a while), his brother Clark Baechle on drums, bassist/guitarist Joel Petersen, guitarist/bassist Dapose, and his brother Jacob Thiele on synth. The Faint have 5 actual albums out (excluding remixes and singles). They had defined their sound by the first one so the music was just improving every album.The first album is called Media, unfortunately I don't have any music from this album on hand so I can't really explain it myself, if you have bit torrent downloaded, you can find it here.
Their second album, Blank-Wave Arcade, was released in 1999, in this album they really started expanding the possibilities of music they could create while still sounding like the same band. They really stat using the synthesizer to its full capabilities, they use clean and distorted guitar while broadening the versatility of the bass. Throughout the rest of their albums they will use snappy pop-rock drum grooves. Their next album's called Danse Macabre, I don't really know what it means but it sounds cool. IN this album they focus more on bass and synth, and not so much on the guitar. Their senior album's name is Wet From Birth, this was their last album under the Saddle Creek label. In this album they bring back their heavy electro guitar. After Wet from Birth, the started their own label; blank.wav after their second album. their final album, so far, is called Fasciinatiion, brings together all aspects of The Faint and creates some beautiful, beautiful music.
From more information on The Faint http://www.thefaint.com/#

"Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria" Respose

To say that it is not our fault does not relieve us of responsibility, however. We may not have polluted the air, but we need to take responsibility […] for cleaning it up. Each of us needs to look at our own behavior. Am I perpetuating the negative messages in our culture, or am I seeking to challenge them? If I have not been exposed to positive images of oppressed groups, am I seeking them out, expanding my own knowledge base? Am I acknowledging my own prejudices, thereby minimizing the impact they might have on my interactions with others? Unless we engage in these and other acts of reflection and reeducation, we easily repeat the process with our children. We teach what we were taught. The unexamined prejudices of the parents are passed on to the children. It is not our fault, but it is our responsibility to interrupt this cycle.

I found this was the most important paragraph in the excerpt. I annotated this by underlining the parts of the paragraph that seemed most important to me and wrote some of my responses to them. I thought that this paragraph was the most important because it summed up the entire excerpt well and delivered and important message. It says that everyone has prejudice, but we have the responsibility of erasing it. It says that we need to learn how to keep our prejudice from being expressed and passed on to our children. Most importantly it says that this isn't our fault; but we still need to get rid of it.

5th Generation Ipod Nano

In my introduction to music I talked about its portability. I fairly recently bought a new portable music player, the Fifth Generation Ipod Nano. It's awesome! Sixteen gigabytes of space in such a tiny package, and it has so many great features. There's an FM radio, a camcorder, the ability to watch movies, it even has a pedometer (tracks the number of steps you take through the motion detector). To top it all off, it has a screen more than twice as big as the original Nano.
I thought the radio was a cool little feature. It has all the FM radio channels and you have the ability to add radio channels to your favorites. The only problem is you really cant take it on the go. The reception is constantly changing, other than that it's a good thing to have on the Ipod. Although, I prefer my own music to the redundancy of the radio.
Now the camcorder, that's real innovation. It isn't complicated, it has no zoom, no color effects, or anything like that, but the tiny video camera has close to the same quality as the Flip Video (http://www.theflip.com/), which is a great little camcorder by the way. Apparently you can even upload the videos from your Ipod straight to Youtube, but I still haven't figured that out. My other concerns with this is that there's no way to delete the videos from the Ipod if you aren't content with the video. And the other concern is that there is no way to take pictures on it, that makes no sense. Disregarding its faults, I would say that the camcorder is the defining feature of the 5th gen. Nano.
The ability to watch movies has been on the Ipod for a while, but i still find it an awesome component of the new Ipod. Seeing as it's nothing new, I'm not going to elaborate on it more. Now the pedometer, that's a fresh of breath air. This thing is so cool. The motion censor on it senses when you take a step and then records it as long as the Ipod is on. You can set up monthly goals on it, you can go back and look at every day that you had the pedometer on. I have no problems or concerns with this attribute.
To sum this up, the 5th generation Ipod Nano is a great investment. There is a ton of room for all your music and videos. The multitude of new features keeps it interesting for a long time, there's even a speaker in it. I don;t get how they can fit so much into such a small package, but they did and i must say it's worth it for $190.
p.s. Sorry Mr. S. I totally forgot to post it before midnight, be merciful.