C'mon DJ, bring that back!

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Living in Columbia, you get used to being a few years behind the trends that sweep bigger cities up North or out West before filtering down to the sleepy South. However, Apple's iPod has permeated tech-savvy America's consciousness so thoroughly that the device's trademark white earbuds are a recognizable commodity among those in the know even in South Carolina's capital city.

In the same way Sony's Walkman revolutionized the way people interact with their music away from car stereos and home hi-fi sets, the iPod has made it easier than ever to carry an entire collection of digital music in your back pocket. This, in turn, has paved the way for enterprising music lovers to share more of the tunes they loved with others - a fad called "iPod jacking" found users of the ubiquitous player plugging into another's device to sample whatever they might be playing, revealing something about the owner's personality and perhaps introducing the listener to something new.

Apple has sold nearly 15 million of the little white and silver digital music players and made enough of an impact on popular culture that Forbes magazine recently called it "a true cultural and social phenomenon" because of the product's influence on people's behavior and even on business through the countless accessories the iPod has spawned.
It's no small wonder then that having thousands of songs at your fingertips (an estimated 5000 can fit on the 20 gigabyte model) would mean iPod owners would eventually get together to play music for one another. New York DJs realized that instead of lugging around heavy and cumbersome crates of records, they could simply take an iPod or laptop and run it through a digital mixer, letting them carry a broader selection of music with less hassle. Some venues in the Big Apple and similarly progressive cities let patrons bring in their own iPods to take turns playing the music.

While Columbia certainly lacks some of the cultural variety found in bigger towns, the presence of USC means there is a constant influx of new ideas from all over the nation and the world rotating in and out of our city. Combine the forward-thinking sensibilities of a university town with USC's own source for independent music, WUSC, and you have a critical mass for musical experimentation.

Former WUSC Public Affairs Director Ashley Solesbee saw a perfect opportunity to try something new when her summer employers at the Art Bar in the Vista challenged her to find a way to boost Friday sales. With the help of WUSC alum Peter Adolphson, who recently returned from law school in New York, Solesbee has helped to launch iPop, Columbia's first sustained effort at iPod-based DJ'ing.

Adolphson said that following 9/11, the New York club scene changed profoundly as traditional techno-based venues closed, and the revival of 1980s New Wave-based indie music found its way into hipster joints. Bringing the idea of digital DJ'ing back to Columbia with him from New York, Adolphson did a brief stint at Rust, whose regular crowd was less than amiable to the variety of music he plays than the diverse one that populates Art Bar on a given weekend.

"The thing we liked about (the name) iPop is how huge iPods are now," she said. She also said past efforts to do iPod DJ'ing in Columbia had failed because of a lack of promotion, which iPop is avoiding with the help of its own MySpace site and individual promotion of each week's event.

Adolphson does "a dance-rock format. He's very talented and puts lots of effort into it," Solesbee said.

Cross-promoting his iPop appearances through his Friday alumni show on WUSC, Adolphson said "we're not afraid to play 80s songs" along with current music, and the ultimate goal is to "play music that people don't normally hear in Columbia." For now, the goal is to bring in a solid base of WUSC listeners, eventually expanding the audience by influx of students for fall semester.

Though Adolphson has exclusively handled the DJ'ing duties, the plan is to "expand it to other WUSC DJ's," said Adolphson.

And I will try to fix you

'X&Y' by Coldplay
Three and 1/2 of five stars

Chris Martin, Coldplay's frontman, has a monkey on his back. Following the release of his band's sophomore effort, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" in 2002, Martin met and married actress Gwyneth Paltrow, and the couple had a child. In a profession that still clings to the clichéd idea that angst produces the best art, critics saw signs of the worst weakness a musician can confess to - domestic bliss. "X&Y" is not only Coldplay's third full-length album then - it is a test for a band long brushed off as banal since its breakthrough hit "Yellow" from 2000's release "Parachutes."

The UK's music press has long been fond of saddling any band that shows a sliver of promise with the weight of being the next Beatles or Oasis, hoping their domestic fledglings will usher in another era of invasion-like fervor about British music. Coldplay has labored under this mantle with the obligatory U2 references ever since their discovery, and it seems to have gone to their admittedly self-conscious noggins. Instead of doing what a great band does and break new musical ground, the men of Coldplay seem contented to simply be a second-rate cover band of the best in British music, both now and then, subsuming the punk-revivalist guitar attack of Bloc Party and fusing it with Bono's swelling arena overtures.

This is not to say "X&Y" is not a good album. On the contrary, there is hardly anything to object to in the band's trademark formulaic build-up on songs like the album's opener "Square One." This inoffensiveness of sound is sure to net Coldplay big Sound Scan numbers for album sales, as "X&Y" will appeal to rock and adult alternative fans alike. If nothing else, the album's brilliance is in its carefully wrought production, which clearly has in mind Coldplay's live arena show where the big money is made off T-shirts and spinning turnstiles.

Martin seems to have traded the vulnerability that made his earlier songwriting more approachable for a shot at universal appeal, all the while scaling back the acoustic guitar and piano approach that was notable in earlier albums. "X&Y" trades off between up-tempo rockers and ballads in predictable fashion that would make a manic-depressive proud. "Fix You" is a notable example, with Martin straining his voice to a near whisper in a bid for the upper register, getting lost in the wash of organs and piped-in strings and evoking the indie albums that made a breakthrough last year thanks to Fox's "The O.C."

"X&Y" is a summer album, plain and simple, with notes of the British rock icons of the past that hopefully mean Coldplay will mature into something more complex in the future.