Tom Jones and The Cardigans

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIIIRE

Nina live!

Nina sings! She has the voice of an angel:

It’s kind of shaky, ’cause I couldn’t figure out the least awkward place to hold my camera, being in the front row and all. It turns out that using a camera is awkward no matter what. Oh well.

I’ve been dying to see Nina Persson with The Cardigans for about five or six years. But they’re not really together anymore, so I had to settle for her solo project, A Camp, in which she is accompanied by Niclas Frisk on guitar and her husband, Nathan Larson (the dude with the black hair and goatee), on bass guitar. Nothing like a rocking band with a female vocalist to melt your face and your heart, respectively. I was really proud of myself for thinking of that.

This concert was excellent. The music was superb, and Nina possesses an intense vocal beauty. Plus I was in the front row. Plus I got a cool t-shirt. PLUS I got my ticket signed. Awesome.

Revelation about lasy singers in indie rock: they wear weird clothes.

Preparing to see Nina in May

“Losing a Friend” (live) by The Cardigans:

“You’re the Storm” by The Cardigans:

Just bought tickets

Just bought tickets to see A Camp on 6 May 2009 at King’s College Student Union. It’s been my dream to see Nina Persson in person for a many years. Although I would prefer The Cardigans because they are more rockin’, I can settle for A Camp. This may be my only chance to see Nina.

Tags are good, folders are bad

Organization by means of folders is bad for most things because it requires me to determine a hierarchy of categories, to determine the relationship among objects. Also, a traditional hierarchy only allows for an object to exist in only one place, i.e. with only one path which defines it.

Organization by means of tags is good because the organization is an emergent property, an epiphenomenon of the system based purely on semantic relationships, the “semantic network” of the system. Also, tags allow objects to have multiple “connotations”, if you will.

For example, last.fm successfully uses tags (well, I guess it’s the users of last.fm who assign tags) to help determine the relationship among artists, songs, albums, etc. In this way, The Cardigans can be tagged with “pop”, “rock”, “female vocalists”, “swedish”, “alternative”, etc. When tags are proposed by a sufficiently large (and sufficiently diverse) population, an artist’s place in the world can be more fully understood. To categorize The Cardigans under “pop/rock”, like CD stores do, is not only inaccurate but also insufficient. Once there is a great enough volume of tags, i.e. meta-information (information about artists, songs, etc.), the weighted semantic network of the system shows how closely related the tags we have chosen are.

Semantic networks are beautiful.

More beautiful, singing ladies

Following from a previous post concerning beautiful ladies with wonderful voices, I thought I would post a couple videos featuring another of my favorite lady singers (and yes I’ve stolen Tommy’s habit of calling females “ladies”).

This lady is Nina Persson, lead singer of The Cardigans, a very Swedish band. By the way, Swedish equals beautiful. The Cardigans are like this:

Oddly enough, it is very difficult to find a video of the Cardigans live that doesn’t look like it was shot by a retarded monkey.

Here’s a couple of interesting videos of Nina Persson solo. This first one is a pretty faithful cover of Whole Lotta Love, with Led Zeppelin just chilling out in the front row.

And this one is even weirder, an arrangement of Desafinado on some MTV program.