djchameleon

I've been meaning to start up a journal for quite some time now but I didn't realize which direction I wanted to head in.
Trollheart you gets no credit for me starting this journal. The point system seems a bit ridiculous but if you are having fun keeping track and
others are having fun with it then it's no place for me to talk I suppose. I have to admit that I don't feel like I'm the best writer but since I do need practice this will be good for me to keep up as well as some other projects I have going at the moment.


This journal is going to evolve over time and different subsections will pop up when I feel like they would fit in or when it's time for me to discuss certain things.


It all began when I was just a wee lad(around the age of 10) that wanted to fit in. This required having something interesting to talk about along with ice breakers so it dawned on me that I tend to listen to rock and hip hop so If I wanted to gain white friends in class all I had to do was talk about the rock music that I was into. Of course a large majority of it came from listening to the radio and watching mtv but I still loved rock regardless of my shallow source. The alt rock radio station WRRV was my safe haven that kept me up to date with bands that I loved at the time. Music was my weapon of choice to break through the walls of any clique I wanted to socialize with. The feeling of being able to blend into any group and get along with them fine enough based off of sharing common interests music-wise was exhilarating.


Making online friends came just as easily while wielding my weapon. My innate ability to group songs into certain themes got me a little gig of being a "producer" for an online dj at hurricane radio. I use the term producer quite liberally but basically when he wasn't taking requests, I would set up his playlists and break them down into similar themes. Some of his listeners found out that he had someone else creating his playlists that they loved so much and begged me to become my own dj. Taking my history into consideration is why I was knighted DJChameleon. Similar to a chameleon blending into his environments to survive is how my childhood was spent socially. After hurricane radio fell apart, DJSlinky and myself decided to start up our own station: Fo' Sho' Radio. DJ Angelbaby is the one that actually came up with the name. Angel was a sweet girl from St. Louis.

I will touch on the rise and inevitable fall of Fo' Sho' Radio in a future post.

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Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

djchameleon

Around Musicbanter I'm constantly told that I have shit taste in music and my taste in music doesn't meet up to MB standards. I'll never forget that pretentious ass statement. I'm really open to giving anything a chance and taking it all in. Listening to music that I've never heard before and forming an opinion on it based off of how it sounds to me is what I've been doing for so long. The laziness bug bites me quite often and the way that I tend to find new music outside of MB is by pulling up the Zune Marketplace(Yes, shut up I bought a Zune because I'm anti-apple) and looking through the new releases. I will snatch up albums from artists that either I vaguely know or taking the shallow route and judging an album by its cover as a potential to listen to. Before coming to Musicbanter, I used to pride myself on the ability to figure out which tracks would be hits on the radio and telling my friends that they should listen to certain songs. What happens next is that I turn them onto the catchy tracks and it ends up being selected as a single for the masses. The thing that would infuriate me is when certain gems off of an album wouldn't be selected as a single when it has such great potential to be a hit. Every now and then I will turn on MTV and the same Alt Rock station from my youth along with a top 40 station to see what the masses are listening to since I'm not a regular radio listener anymore. The two genres that I listen to most of the time as you may know is Hip Hop and I'm really stuck on 90s Alt Rock so I will listen to some singles from bands that I used to like during that time. I will take more time to discuss the different genre phases that I went through but that's a whole other entry.



I admit that in my youth I was a heavy singles listener. I didn't fully transition to an album listener until a few years before joining Musicbanter. Skimming through albums and taking only the singles that I wanted out of it and adding them to a whole playlist was my life back then. Most of them would be hits but a few would be tracks that appealed to me. Even after becoming an album listener I still tend to pick and choose which songs that I end up liking which will be repeated ad naseum. I have no real issues with single listeners since I used to be one. I feel like they tend to get a lot of hate though mostly because they get associated with the mainstream and listen to radio stations. Oh no the horror, people actually listen to the radio and enjoy what they are hearing, off with their fucking heads. I noticed that I was around MB too long when I would utter such pretentious statements out loud around friends irl like "Oh, I don't listen to the radio.", "Oh, you've never heard about (insert band/artist) it must be because they are struggling to make it and want to stay true to their roots. They haven't sold out to get radioplay." "You don't like Radiohead, I don't think I can be friends with you anymore." Joking about the last one but yeah I really had to reign in my pretentious ways that rubbed off on me from being around this place too much.

Yes yes, I will eventually get to talking about specific artists but these intro type posts I feel are important things that I have on my mind and need to be said.

__________________

Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Gavin B.

Look forward to your journal. I'm another member of the Zune insurgency who detests Apple after a long history of buying their inferior products and waging war with their arrogant tech reps who behave like spoiled rock stars. I currently own an 80 meg Zune and a 120 meg Zune and listen to most of my digital files on those two devices.

I previously owned an iPod shuffle that was a piece of junk and it wouldn't even synch half the songs in my digital music collection. After dozens of phone calls to Apple customer assistance techs who treated me like a moron and couldn't solve the problem, I smashed the iPod against the wall and jumped on it until it was in tiny pieces. Then I went out a bought a Zune player and I've been using Zune for five years and haven't had any problems.

I was sad to hear that Microsoft has stopped manufacturing the Zune product line because Microsoft can't compete in a marketplace where Apple sells 90% of the digital music devices.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

djchameleon

Yeah, the one I have is an 80 gig and I wanted to get a 120 gig one day. I still might. I think it's perfectly fine to pass up on the HD version though because they took off the ability to get games I think. I didn't even like having games on my 80 gig because it would drain the battery so quickly.

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Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Powerstars

Good work so far. Looking forward to the FoShoRadio bit.

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Blarobbarg

Glad you started this, Cham. You've always been one of my favorite members to chat with, it'll be good to see some of your thoughts and stories.

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Trollheart

Welcome to the world of journals, DJ! Looks good so far: like the passport photo!

Not sure why you're dissing my points system: took a long time to set that up and I think it's the fairest way I can do it. Mind you, I won't derail your journal by talking about that, but if you have any better ideas feel free to PM me on it. I spent a lot of time working on it to make sure it was fair and that those who have been here the longest were on the same basic level as startups like you.

Just post as much and as interesting as you can and you may find yourself scaling the dizzy heights to successville!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Anteater

Interestingly enough, I never was a singles or albums listener all the way up to high school. Never really gave a **** about what was on radio and I didn't really have that much of a grasp on why albums were interesting either. And then I discovered progressive rock as a freshman: turned me into an albums guy almost overnight, and then other genres became fair game after that.

For me, music is an investment in more ways than one. You figure out what genres really push your good buttons at some point so that's where you really put your energy, focus, etc. People tend to specialize whether they're aware of it or not.

However, there's still a bit more to it. One of the biggest differences between singles and album-oriented people is like when you go to the ocean: you'll have people who might walk along the beach and sunbathe, and then you'll get fewer folks (but still a lot) who rush out there and snorkel/dive. Some people want to explore greater depths and some people are content with admiring the surface from afar. Like anything else, some folks care more about music on the whole than others do.

Looking forward to following this journal though DJ. Keep up the good work!

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Anteater's 21 Fav Albums Of 2020

Anteater's Daily Tune Roulette

djchameleon

Thanks for all the support guys. I have a few interesting topics to discuss that I just need to flesh out more before posting.

I know you put a lot of work into it and it's appreciated. When you first came out with the system, I really didn't see the why it was needed in the first place but it's a good idea and other people really like it. I'm neutral towards it now. It doesn't bother me one way or the other.

Pretty damn good analogy.

__________________

Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Scarlett O'Hara

Great to see you have a journal DJ, I'm interested to see what you discuss.

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