The Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge that I wrote about a few weeks ago is almost over, and that means you only have a few days to help support the Notes for Class Challenge, an effort to help fund music education programs that have been proposed by the teachers who will be overseeing them.

As I mentioned earlier, I'll be personally matching 10% of all donations -- the incredibly generous readers of my site have already contributed over two thousand dollars, supporting music education programs for nearly 1700 kids. It's pretty astounding, but we're not that far away from nearly doubling the number of students we can help. Take a look at efforts like the Music Bingo proposal in North Carolina: If just a few more of you donate, my matching donation for the Challenge will help us sponsor a project that helps 1000 more students.

I've been blogging over 8 years now, and in all that time, I've never personally endorsed a campaign like this or committed to matching donations in this way. So I hope any of you who've found the writing I've done on my blog over the years to be useful or valuable will take a few minutes to make a donation. For reference, the over 6,700 posts on this blog (and my old Daily Links blog), along with the comments that have responded to them, add up to over 1.2 million words. That's the equivalent of 20 or so printed books, so if you wanted to pay just $1 per book-length section of blog inanity, you could easily justify a $20 donation.

And, if four more of you donate to the Notes for Class Challenge before October 31, I'll also create some new sections on my site to make it easier to find the stuff you'd actually want to read. Make me proud, people!

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I've gotten a lot of really good questions (and some fantastically generous donations!) about the Donors Choose blogger challenge I wrote about yesterday, but by far the most common is "what should I do?" There are a lot of options, so let me make it easy: Let's help kids on the South Side of Chicago.

Help Us Listen to the Music is a great example of how you can participate. A teacher at Cassell Elementary school writes:

In the upcoming year I would like to have a music listening center in the classroom where students could go and listen to music of various genres, styles, and composers. Eventually this music listening center will include classical music, Jazz, world music, early childhood music, and electronic music. While at the music listening center, students would analyze and describe music, identify instruments, recognize musical elements in music, and complete other listening activities.

All you've gotta do is chip in a few bucks. Throw in the five bucks you were going to spend at Starbucks today, or chip in $25 bucks to buy a couple of CDs. And as I mentioned yesterday, I'll personally match 10% of whatever you donate -- if ten of you pony up $30, we'll have this proposal covered and kids from kindergarten up to 8th grade will be making their first steps towards learning music appreciation and music theory.

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Speaking of Timberlake, that brings us inevitably to Timbaland. After the fawning over Rick Rubin in the New York Times, it's amazing that there hasn't been a similarly high-profile profile of the best producer working in pop music today.

Until then, this piece from The Wire should do nicely, even though it's nine (!) years old. The article comes courtesy of Sasha-Frere Jones, both for blogging its reappearance online and for writing it in the first place.

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We just finished watching HBO's broadcast of Justin Timberlake's FutureSex tour, which I (unsurprisingly) quite enjoyed. It seems like he's done a good bit since his last tour to incorporate his strong live band and his rapidly improving chops on guitar and keyboards to integrate real musicianship into the show.

Those were the primary things I wanted to see more of four years ago, when I wrote about his live show at the Roseland here in NYC. If you liked that post, you might also enjoy "SexyBack": Pop for indie rock MP3 blogs.

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Most everybody who knows me well knows that I've been a fan of Prince for pretty much my entire life. So when casual fans or non-fans hear that Prince is playing the halftime show at the Superbowl this year, they ask me, "What's up with that guy?" or "Is his name still a symbol?"

So I figured I'd put together a quick primer on Prince, at least what he's been up to since he was at his most prominent back in the 80s.

• Prince's name is Prince. Legally, it always has been, but he did go by the symbol (which is usually typed out as "O(+>") from 1993 until 2000. But his public name is now again the same as his legal name.

• Though he's not commercially or culturally dominant like he once used to be, Prince is not a has-been, either artistically or on the charts. His "3121" album last year debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, and followed the success of his Musicology tour and album in 2004, which had a great run on the charts and grossed over $90 million dollars as the most lucrative tour of the year. And his single, "Song of the Heart" from the "Happy Feet" soundtrack won a Golden Globe for best original song just the other day.

• 3121 is also his most consistently interesting and listenable album in years, so if you have his greatest-hits box set with b-sides or the recent, excellent "Ultimate" collection, it's a good place to start. Oh, and buy "Sign O' The Times", if you don't have it. There's just no excuse not to.

• Overall, Prince has had dozens of top 10 singles, he's released over 20 albums with almost all of them going at least platinum, he's made 3 or 4 films with nearly 50% of them watchable, and even as he nears 50 years old there just aren't any live acts that are better than him. Maybe, now that he's slowed down a bit, somebody who's at their prime can be as good in concert as Prince. But since James is dead, nobody can beat him.

Since most of my readers are geeks who like technology, and care about issues ranging from DRM to artist's rights to the tyrrany of the RIAA, there's some other things that might appeal to you about Prince's career. A short list of highlights:

• Prince has distributed much of his own music independently since 1994, and his major label deals since then have largely been promotion-and-distribution deals where he retained ownership of his master recordings.
• Prince is the first artist not signed to a major label to perform during the Superbowl halftime show, not counting accessory marching bands and child choirs.
• He's had a continuous presence on the web since 1995, and last year won a Webby for his work online
• There are a number of really great prince fansites like prince.org, though Prince's control freak tendencies have resulted in a lot of stupid legal threats towards them
• Prince distributed an online-only album back in 1997 with the liner notes available as a website
• Prince published an interactive CD-ROM in 1994, and it didn't totally suck
• He has distributed several albums' worth of material exclusively online through his own music label (though much of it was DRMed) as well as a number of videos and some really bad poetry
• Prince's webmaster maintained a now-defunct blog, largely ghostwritten by Prince, starting back in 2000.
• Prince and some of his studio staff used to actually join in on AOL chat room discussions with fans as late as 1995, talking about recording work in progress

I get excited about this stuff because I forget most people have never seen him play. (From a jaded reporter: "I've never been to a Prince press conference before, but after Thursday, I would recommend them to all my friends. In fact, I'd give it a 9 out of 10 because you can dance to it.") Anyway, I have a pretty exhaustive storehouse of otherwise-useless Prince knowledge, so feel free to ask any questions if you want in the comments.

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I don't think I've blogged about it on Vox before, but I'm a big fan of Alan Leeds and Eric Leeds... they've both been huge parts of my appreciation of music. Alan because of his helping run the business affairs of James Brown, Prince, George Clinton, Maxwell, D'Angelo, ?uestlove and others, and Eric because he was the sax player on my favorite records at a time when I had just been learning to play the saxophone.

Amazingly, Alan Leeds does not (yet) have a wikipedia profile, and Eric only has a stub of one. Because one of my older posts about him is one of the first results for Alan's name, I thought I'd collect some links in case maybe I get time later to write a post or even a (my first!) wikipedia article.

The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 1980-1991 (Jazz Perspectives)

• An interview with Alan about Miles Davis and Prince for the book "The Last Miles". It covers the end of Miles Davis' musical career, with a whole chapter on the various, largely fruitless, flirtations Prince and Miles had with working together.
• Eric Leeds interviews part one and part two, also for "The Last Miles"
• Alan Leed's blog at alanleeds.com, which seems to have been largely superceded by his MySpace profile, which is surprisingly active. Both show off what a great writer he is.
• A truly phenomenal community interview with Alan about his time with Prince on prince.org. Aside from Per Nilsen's books, it's one of the single best discussions about Prince's career from a serious artistic and cultural standpoint that anybody's done.
• An incredibly moving tribute to James Brown, all the more striking because it was written with a day of James' passing. Alan had met James Brown as a teenager, and that's a lot of history to wrap up into so few words.
• Somewhere in my archives or backups, I have an extended version of the liner notes Alan wrote for Prince's The Hits/The B-Sides mini-box-set. On one of Prince's first websites (he had one 11 years ago, and even had a blog 6 years ago), they had put up a longer version of the notes with some interesting additions -- especially interesting because Alan has won a Grammy for his liner notes for the James Brown "Star Time" set.
  

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I've liked Prince and his music pretty much my whole life, and for a while I was self-conscious about it. These days, pretty much everybody who knows me knows about me being a fan, though I still struggle to explain why.

Two recent YouTube finds might tell the story better than I can.

From New Year's Eve, 1987, one of (I think) only two times Prince and Miles Davis ever played on stage together. Vamping on the middle section of "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" from Sign O' The Times.

Prince&Miles Davis."It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night"

Prince."The Song of The Heart".Happy Feet (OST)

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Microsoft has just launched the Zune, which will be one of the most popular digital music players ever made, and could have been considered a wild success as a result. Instead, the device has been inevitably and irrevocably compared to Apple's iPod, and thus anything less than becoming a cultural icon will be considered failure. There are a couple of reasons why, and a number of lessons to be learned.

Back in January, I described a list of Dos and Don't for Beating the iPod and iTunes. You can refer back to it if you want the whole list, but here's some key points:

• Do: Be Rock and Roll.
• Don't: Try to teach kids about DRM.
• Do: Make something that breaks in, instead of breaking down.
• Don't: Forget about the rest of the world.
• Do: Let people make their own music.
• Don't: Try to fit in.
• Do: Make friends with Radio and TV.
• Don't: Forget about the geeks.
• Do: Invest in the experience.

Microsoft has done a good job of achieving many of these goals, while still making an overall experience that's strangely unsatifying. To me, this is epitomized by one fact: There's a brown Zune.

In person, the device has a rich, warm color. The green tinge is innovative; I've never seen a consumer electronics device that tries for such a complicated, organic palette, and it's pulled off wonderfully. But instead of calling the color chocolate, or something else compelling and attractive, they named it brown, a color that has few positive associations except (possibly) UPS. Chocolate is desirable, and fuels passions. It's even a little bit sinful. Hell, you could play on the brown and green theme and call the color "tree".

But no, the color name is prosaic. And worse, it's a color combination that looks terrible on the web. There should be some kind of Photoshop Gizmodo filter where you can take a photo of a device and see how it'll look in a spy photo on a gadget blog -- that's where first impressions by early adopters and the press are going to be formed.

The failure of Brown represents a more profound problem with the Zune: A lack of vision. There's unquestionably a lot of talent and ambition evidenced in launching a product of this scope and breadth with a small team on a short timeframe. And the Zune team should be commended for pulling it off with such high quality. But the overriding feeling of the Zune is an almost pathological me-too-ism, as if the team weren't watching consumers or potential customers, but was too busy saying Hello From Seattle to those who were Made In Cupertino. Instead of aiming at the competition, the team should have been aiming for the lead.

There are lots of great things about the Zune, and I hope it does well. But my skepticism and frustration over the fact that they settled for being compared unfavorably to the iPod is best summarized by this commercial I've mocked up. It shows what I think Christmas morning will look like if you leave a Zune under the tree for the kids.

Brown Zune

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What's your musical horoscope?  (Put your music player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)  Inspired by Stephanie.

Hmm. I cheated a bit and told iTunes to make a 10-track party shuffle with my library. Here's what it thinks.

1. I Want Your Sex, Pt. 1 & 2 - George Michael (from "Faith)
   I am completely comfortable with this. Not everybody does it, but everybody should.
   
2. Kiss Lonely Goodbye - Stevie Wonder
   Meh. Not his best work. But not embarrassing bad Stevie.
3. P. Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up) - Parliament
   I feel like having this on the list is going to make people think I rigged it. But I didn't.
4. The Only One - Billy Bragg (from "Worker's Playtime")
   Even a weak song from Billy Bragg's best album is still pretty good.
5. Rebel of the Underground - Tupac
   This is Tupac when he was hanging out with Humpty Hump instead of Suge Knight. Not a great song, and I'm not a huge Tupac fan, but I have it because it's on a CD single that I liked.
6. Pavement Tracks (Goldtrix Dub Mix) - Annie Lennox
   I love Annie Lennox, and while I was trying to like her last album "Bare", I downloaded all the remixes of the single. They're not very good.
7. Lived in Splendor: Died in Chaos - Pop Will Eat Itself (from "Cure for Sanity")
   I love PWEI, but I basically never know the names of any of their songs. So I might love this song, or I might hate it, but I don't know without listening to it.
8. Wouldn't You Love Me? - Prince
   I don't think this song is actually Prince. I think it's a Prince-penned outtake from some protege. I don't remember because I have a lot of this kind of crap in my music collection, but I don't sync it onto my iPod so I never hear it. I also think the real name is "Wouldn't You Love To Love Me?"
9. Can't Be Sure - Sundays
   Doesn't everybody loves the Sundays? I am particularly fond of this song because Alaina put it on a mix she made for me when we were first dating, and it reminds me of how fun that was.
10. Let's Go Crazy (Dance Mix) - Prince
    This is the long version of the song that opens the movie "Purple Rain". It's so fucking ridiculously good, and the recent greatest hits release remastered this version so I can stop listening to crappy vinyl rips of the track. Dearly beloved...
    

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Starman - Invincible

1. Avoided Destiny offers MP3s of most Mario Bros themes, including the Starman/Invincibility theme. I'd been looking for this for some time, and The Mushroom Kingdom was surprisingly bereft.

2. Alaina has an Nike + iPod Nano Sport Kit, which I've written about a little bit and Alaina has covered as well.

3. I'd had no success converting any of the (many!) starman.mid files into acceptable approximations of the original theme. Mostly, these were recorded with piano set as the default instrument, and the result was some nasty jazz-ified versions of a classic theme.

4. With the availability of the Starman theme in MP3 format (see #1), the cycle is complete. It's now possible to set the Mario Invincibility theme as her Power Song. Expect incredible speed boosts.

Lance Armstrong talks Nike+iPod

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