Archive for the 'Music' Category
In Germany the Zappa estate is suing the Arf Society– producers of Zappanale, a three day tribute festival that features cover bands and “Zappa-esque rock”– for trademark infringement. Spiegel Online sums up the paradox:
Mother of Intervention: Zappa Festival Defends Itself from … Zappa - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News:
In the end, it all depends on how you define Frank Zappa. Either the outspoken rock legend was a beacon of freedom and independence belonging to all who hoped for a better political future free from pervasive government interference or he was an awe-inspiringly multifaceted musician whose unique sound and one-of-a-kind presentation is what keeps people listening today.
I’ve never been a rabid fan of Nine Inch Nails, but have been periodically intrigued by Trent Reznor’s music and output. His latest project, Ghosts I-IV, however, turned me into a true fan. Taking Radiohead’s cue, Reznor stuck a big digitized middle finger into the face of the recording industry by releasing this incredible 36 instrumental track album on his own. You have the option of downloading it for free, paying $5 or buying limited release boutique items. I paid the five bucks and I have to say it is the best music value I have ever gotten for coffee and bagel money. It’s also available on Amazon.
As a listening experience the record is like an open ended film soundtrack, as series of sketches, fragments, and movements. You hear riffs and bits from across NIN’s musical spectrum, but the album is mostly atmospheric and less didactic or scary like a lot of NIN’s music. There’s a little Sonic Youth, Radiohead, Tom Waits and clips from yet-to-be made films. This has to be one of the best iPod bubble albums in existence. I mean it.
Now you can upload your own video to the “Ghost Film Festival,” a really cool way to generate user feedback for the album (check out Reznor’s statement about it in the above video clip).
From the NYT:
Mr. Reznor also afforded fans freedom in another way. The band decided to offer the music with a Creative Commons license, a new type of intellectual-property copyright. It allows creators to reserve certain rights and, in effect, authorize various unpaid uses of their products. In this instance the band is allowing virtually any noncommercial use of its music. The band is also testing a tiered pricing system that could add a new wrinkle to the conventional wisdom on how to attract fans in the music business, in which a slump in sales has prompted Wal-Mart and other retailers to pressure record companies to cut their wholesale prices.
Maybe he’d be happier if he considered collective intelligence.
“A Song Alone”
By Neil Young
No one song can change the world. But that doesn’t mean its time to stop singing.
Somewhere on Earth a scientist is alone working. No one knows what he or she is thinking. The secret is just within reach. If I knew that answer I would be singing the song.This is the Age of innovation. Hope matters. But not hope alone. In the age of innovation, the people’s fuel must be found. That is the biggest challenge. Who is up to the challenge? Who is searching today? All day. All night. Every hour that goes by. I know I am.
My friends write to me don’t give up. I am not giving up. I know this is the time for change. But I know that it’s not a song. Maybe it was. But it isn’t now. It’s an action, an accomplishment, a revelation, a new way. I am searching for the people’s fuel. Will I find it? Yes. I think so. I don’t know why I may have been chosen to help enable a discovery of this magnitude. I know I can only write a song about it when I find it. Until then I can write a song about the search or spend all my time looking. But a song alone will not change the world. Even so, I will keep on singing.
OK, let’s get one thing straight, the RIAA represents the true counterculture. They have their heads so far up their paradigmatic arse that they are now promoting shrill profiling that equates music piracy sd being a gateway to terrorism. With this kind of logic, half the population will end up in Guantanamo Bay. See the video linked below and pity the fools.
RIAA: Murderers, Terrorists, And Other Criminal Minds May Be Graduating To Pirating Music:
Yesterday the RIAA-produced video In Trial, which covers the societal dangers of music piracy, made its way out to torrent sites, and among its contents are instructions on how to get RIAA investigators qualified as expert witnesses, a guide to identifying pirated CDs, and the above bit, about the links between people who profit from pirated music and people who deal weapons, populate terror cells, and murder their fellow man for sport. Surely I’m not the only person who thinks that this particular bit on the “kill ‘em all” impulses of miscreants dealing in fifth-generation copies of Graduation would hit home a little more effectively if it were accompanied by a bangin’ soundtrack?
Technorati Tags: RIAA
Charles Baudelairer’s character of the flaneur has been celebrated and vastly discussed as the archetype of Modern Media Man: he grazes the sights and sounds of the new urbanity, a casual consumer of the senses. He is somewhat disengaged, his focus meanders and samples. As a “Bourgeois dilettante,” he’s a no where man. While the flaneur has come to symbolize the rise of media in the 19th century, I also see him reasserting himself in today’s ads, mostly in the guise of the 20-something tech economy knowledge worker. Usually he drives a (new) car, letting his electronics extend his senses for him while he consumes the landscape like any other media experience. So rather than a pedestrian wandering the city, the new flaneur is guided by GPS and a smart phone that makes his appointments (he may even have an outsourced personal assistant in India handling ticket reservations and other mundane activities for him). So rather than roam the sensations, his technological devices browse for him.
The Verizon VCast ad featuring Led Zeppelin (screen grab above, link below) brings the flaneur back to the street, but this time he wanders a hybrid reality of magical dimensions. The music is not only a soundtrack but describes every scene change he encounters. Meanwhile Led Zep memorabilia and clues are planted through out his sojourn connecting the physicality with his media space, giving “Physical Graffiti” a literal existence. He no longer meanders the city but a videogame. The outside is in, the inside is out.
I have to admit that this character makes me really mad. He’s young, good looking, self-assured, disengaged, clueless and apparently rich enough to live in Manhattan. He doesn’t really give a crap about Led Zeppelin because if he did he’d be banging his head to John Bonham’s beats. He’s so self-absosorbed he’s probably thinking about how his $60 American Apparel T-shirt will get him laid. Led Zep belongs to the throngs of insecure, sexually dysfunctional, pimple-faced youth. This is spin the bottle make-out music, not Bourgeois dilettante, phone status, ring-tone accessory bullshit. Sheesh. This cheap commercialization is far too casual for me to bear.
(Article link (you may have to register to view it).
Technorati Tags: Led Zeppelin, puppy, VCast
First of all, OUCH! I haven’t seen MTV in years so I was a little taken aback when its news intro literally blows-up on my monitor. Talk about over-stimulation! Anyhow, the segment looks at the implosion of the record biz from a corporate perspective (geez, if they had only listened to us over the years they would not have been blind-sided). Still, I’m happy that major labels are finally biting it big time (we hope). They should get hip fast: evolve or die. And stop suing your customers! I thought PR is the one thing they could sell to artists.
FYI: Douglas Rushkoff’s take on the situation is that the record companies benefitted from a little bubble that resulted from people trading vinyl for CDs. As we move into an economy of affects (emotions, relationships, ephemerality) all they have to go on now is bad blood. Bad move.
Technorati Tags: MTV
This video is part one of a three part ad series. You can view them all here.
Call me an old codger, but this ad campaign for Rock Band completely misses the point of rock. But then again, maybe I’m living in a garage band fantasy world in which the desire to play rock (or in my case, punk) is driven by rebellion and self expression. In the punk days (damn, I sound really old now), we followed the Sniffin’ Glue dictum: “Here’s a chord, here’s another chord. Now go form a band.” These days you can do it on a laptop. But the ad reluctantly hits the right note: the band members are so ironic and distant, they couldn’t give a crap about the music anyway. What bores.
(For a good commentary on how the game’s producers failed to vibe with Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein on her marketing tips, read AdFreak here.)
Playing in a band in high school saved my life. But playing in a virtual band in a videogame? I don’t get it. Especially about the fantasy part in which you fly around in a private jet, ride in limos and play stadiums. What a shitty, drug induced lifestyle (OK, when you are 20 it’s fun, I admit). I know that not all have access to garages, so OK, maybe there is a market for kids who can’t find a way to make some real frakken noise, the kind that you feel in your bones and makes your ears ring. Argh. Music is so safe now.
Rock Band is as silly as the reality TV show, Rock Star: Supervova (you can read my snarky expose here). I quoteth myself:
I suppose this is the ultimate lesson about cultural innovation. You can only try so hard to manufacture a sensibility (and certainly there is money to be made in doing so), but anyone with any real radar for “authenticity” knows that such things are not simply invented for a television audience. That’s too risky. Unfortunately we have lived too long with the genius and avant-garde myth ”that somehow there is a “new” idea that can be created by an innovative artist/dreamer who shifts the culture into a new direction and receives fame and fortune in exchange. But the Pollocks and Warhols have since passed this earthly realm, and the mad cultural innovator has been relegated to the tabloids where drug addicted super models and their boyfriends remain the last bastion of cool. If only we could capture such lightening in a bottle.
I have a side project, My Country of Illusion, which has been ongoing for about ten years with my music and artistic collaborator, Barnmaster Scud. Last summer T.Foley from the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM invited us to be guest artists for the day. Her students made this fun little video for the track, “Dreaming America,” from our album, American Dream Life.
If I weren’t busy being born, there were two places I wish I had been in 1966: London’s UFO club watching Pink Floyd or at Warhol’s Factory watching the Velvet Underground. I digress from the normal thread here, but if you have 16 minutes, you may enjoy this little trip to I wish we were there from Peter Whitehead’s 1967 documentary of the London scene, Tonight Let’s All Make Love In London, featuring Pink Floyd. Makes you want to time travel to the ’60s all over again.
Technorati Tags: Pink Floyd
The first concrete analysis of Radiohead’s innovative pay-what-you-like plan for latest album In Rainbows shows thirty-eight percent of those who downloaded the title indeed chose to pay something, while 62 percent kept their change in their pocket. ComScore (NSDQ: SCOR) data (via release) shows 1.2 million people visited the site in the first 29 days of October (it was launched at the start of the month).
The average price paid was $6 on a globalized basis but Americans were more generous, coughing up $8.05 - factor in the freeloaders, however, and it’s more like an average $2.26 on a worldwide basis and $3.23 from Americans. The most common amount offered was below $4, but 12 percent were willing to pay between $8 and $12, around the typical cost of an album from iTunes.
I don’t consider the In Rainbows experiment a failure. Of course most people will not pay anything because they are used to a different model. If more bands and artists start trying this, it may become more acceptable, and might even evolve into a social norm. Given the circumstances, I think the figures are actually high. I would expect fewer people to pay for the album. In the end it will average out for the band because standard loyalties are so low. Moreover, the band was clever to undermine the online file traders. In the end Radiohead got something for nothing.
Incidentally, I paid $6 for the download, so I made the average.
PS I have yet to see a single article or post about the album’s music. How does it stack up to other Radiohead recordings? I doubt they will ever again achieve something on the level of OK Computer, but this doesn’t mean anything since then is crappy or unlistenable. On the contrary, each album has its own space marking the emotional phase of the band. In Rainbows is a parent’s album, soft and melodious like a lullaby for a newborn or a global community about to enter a slumber. When I saw Radiohead in 2005 they were auditioning a lot of the new songs. At the time I was really disappointed because they sounded far too syrupy. Most were predicated on the vocals with little of the sonic landscape that makes Radiohead so attractive to me. I was pleasantly surprised that in the recordings a lot of that dense sonic layering is there, but never too much. It’s true In Rainbows has more ballads than past albums, but with delicate string ornamentation, the songs work quite nicely. Oh, and occasionally the album rocks hard. I am disappointed by the low bit rate of the downloads. Here and there I detect distortion and crackle on certain tones, but overall I can’t complain about my $6 worth of great music. I’m sure Radiohead spent millions making it.
Technorati Tags: In Rainbows, Radiohead
Don McLean’s “American Pie” has always been subject to great discussion, due to its deep symbolism and allegory about the turmoil of American society transitioning during the ’60s. This little film combines historical fact and images from the museum without walls (our collective media unconsciousness) to play along with the song as a kind of visual narration. This type of oral history story telling, though poetic in nature, reveals a lot more in eight minutes than a stack of books. Bravo!
From Wikipedia:
Asked what “American Pie” meant, McLean once replied, “It means I never have to work again.”[1] Later, he more seriously stated, “You will find many ‘interpretations’ of my lyrics but none of them by me…Sorry to leave you all on your own like this but long ago I realized that songwriters should make their statements and move on, maintaining a dignified silence.”
Technorati Tags: American Pie, Don McLean
By now you have probably heard the big news that Radiohead will be selling their new album through their Web site, and you will be able to set your own price. Yes that’s right. Shivers from the record industry are reverberating so strongly right now I expect an earthquake to register on the Technorati scale at any moment.
I agree that this is a beautiful thing, but I’d like to play devil’s advocate for a second, only because I’m trying to process this new concept. Isn’t it the initial strength of the record industry’s marketing that elevated Radiohead to the position that enables them to do this? Would “Creep” ever have ended up on MTV if they were just an obscure Internet band? It’s clear that unless a band sells 750,000 units, they are a loss to a major label record company (and a bummer because they have to pay the label back for all the money they fronted for their coke expenditures), so major labels have to do the one thing that indies cannot: exposure. And for a band like Radiohead, it has been on a global scale.
I know, I know the long tail changes this dynamic and bands will organically become famous, but bands do benefit from the marketing muscle that labels have. Personally the trade off isn’t worth it (that is, selling your soul to corporate record companies), but I just wanted to state the situation is not black and white. I don’t know if the swarm will find the next Radiohead, but I hope it does.
There are people more informed and smarter than me already commenting on this, so I suggest you click through the following link to get a more contextual understanding. Meanwhile, gods in the machine do exist!
With Trent Reznor also recently announcing that once Nine Inch Nails fulfill their Universal commitments, they will be selling their albums direct to fans from their websites, this signifies a sea-change in distribution methods by A-list artists. Of course this is not an option for every band, but if all the superstar-bands that actually benefited from the old system to get to where they are, are now subsequently deciding to go totally “indie” where are the major labels going to find the mega-revenues that used to subsidize the rest of the money-losing acts in their stable?
Technorati Tags: In Rainbows, Radiohead
I was sad to miss the recent show in NYC of mediacology pals Negativland, so to make up for it I found one of their cooler videos on YouTube. There are plenty more there, so if you are procrastinating today (as I am), please go and enter Negativland into their search engine and see what magically appears.
Technorati Tags: Negativland
The source of violence
I don’t think any artist gets a pass for misogyny or gratuitous violence (Quentin Tarantino included), but we should be skeptical when pundits or presidential candidates rail against gangsta rap or “hip hop” culture given the unchecked misdeeds of the US military and entertainment business. Generally I take those terms as code for “black culture,” so use your radar wisely during this election cycle. Meanwhile, in “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It” Ice Cube points the camera back at media hypocrisy.