Rate Your Music (or RYM) is an online collaborative metadata database of musical and non-musical releases and films which can be catalogued, rated and reviewed by users. The top rated album on the RYM charts is currently Radiohead’s OK Computer, while the bottom rated album is BrokeNCYDE’s I’m Not A Fan, But The Kids Like It. (More from Wikipedia)
There are actually a lot of websites out there that talk about Blair 1523: It might be surprising to some that a search of the band name in quotes brings up 18,100 hits on Google. The first page of Google hits has a YouTube video of “Fantasy of Folk”, the Bomp! Mailorder site where the “last copies” of the CD can still be purchased plus another listing on Amazon.com, the mention of the band in my Wikipedia article on the Outcasts, the Allmusic review and the Julian Cope blog mentioned above, a listing on last.fm that actually has some information and even a photo of Blair 1523, and more barren listings on mtv.com, Discogs, and Rate Your Music. Further Google pages bring up other barebones listings – the one on Ticketmaster that offers concert tickets and tour schedules for a band that broke up 20 years ago is particularly hilarious – and other places to buy the CD and rate the music and see the lyrics and download “free” MP3’s (Napster lives!).
(September 2013)
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Instrumental rock music is common in the surf world, but there were instrumental rock bands that predated the surf craze. One is the past UARB the Piltdown Men. But the most popular instrumental rock band of all time is unquestionably the Ventures. Still, surf rock and rock instrumentals are indelibly linked these days. The website Rate Your Music shows a list of the Top 50 Surf Rock Instrumentals as rated by visitors to their site; they include 4 tracks by the Ventures and 7 by the British band the Shadows.
(December 2014)
