Notes
Lanky Texan neo-soul crooner and underrated guitar warrior Boz Scaggs was a Steve Miller Band alumnus who jumped ship to probe silky R&B instead of gritty blues, the Miller Band's original milieu, and each of his early '70s solo albums polished the mix toward this triumphant zenith. Hindsight too often devalues Silk Degrees for its snug fit with the disco aesthetic that prevailed upon its mid-'70s release, and the style's rhythmic signatures do bubble up significantly, particularly on the best-known track, "Lowdown," which can't help but risk museum-piece status if only for its ubiquity on the radio. Yet Scaggs's lyric intelligence and the skintight playing of a studio band built around what would soon become Toto (!) makes this a modern classic, as noteworthy for its ballads ("We're All Alone," "Harbor Lights") as for its workouts ("Georgia," "Lido Shuffle"), and a typically smart cover choice in a great version of Allen Toussaint's "What Do You Want The Girl to Do." --Sam Sutherland
Entertainment
The entertainment industry has grown and evolved over the years with music and cinema taking a new form through the ages and so have the technologies that fuel it. Gone are the days of eight songs on a cassette and VCR players with merely two hours of entertainment recorded on a single video cassette. With the advent of computers came digital data storage and hence the birth of DVD/CDs.
Quiet a step back in matters of physical form as these new generation audio/video storage devices hold an uncanny resemblance to the records that preceded the cassette generation. DVDs and CDs today are an everyday household entertainment storage device which has come a long way since the first records and cassettes were distributed commercially.
Notable advantages of DVD/CDs have to begin with the amount of storage space available. These days its possible to burn multiple movies on a single DVD and as far as audio goes if its in a highly compressed format such as .mp3 a single CD can accommodate multiple music albums. These discs are easy to handle, light and portable with no moving devices unlike the tape generation however they are delicate and a scratch on the DVD/CD surface could cause a disruption in the information being read by the player.
DVD/CDs were initially invented to provide high quality audio/video data to a user with the ability to regulate its production however this soon fizzled away with daily household computers gaining the ability to burn data in such formats. The race to curb piracy through such means has not hit a roadblock and DVD/CDs keep evolving with newer encryption technologies in a bid to curb unchecked replication of data spawning newer technologies like Blu-ray discs which seems to be yet another milestone on an unending road of innovation.
