Friday, June 30, 2006

Sleater-Kinney - the End of the Road Sleater-Kinney is breaking up. The website says it's an "indefinite hiatus," but I know a euphemism when I read it. They're done. Corin Tucker will move to widely acclaimed and occasionally misunderstood solo albums. Carrie will throw down as a guest artist on albums by Pearl Jam, the Gossip, and the Queens of the Stone Age. Janet Weiss will still play with Quasi, and some other group will have the good sense to sweep her up. She may be the only drummer strong enough to replace Matt Cameron, should he ever leave Pearl Jam. Sleater-Kinney is breaking up. They released the most unexpected and devastating record of their career, the one that makes everything else look like an elementary school project. Then they folded up the tent. I'm left with a new sense of sadness every time I hear the blowtorch opening of "The Fox" or the vicious interplay of "Entertain." This was the last album by this band. This was the one that killed them. I've been comforting myself with overload. I've been watching clips of them on the Henry Rollins show and live segments off the website. I'm listening to two live concerts from 2005 posted here (and my sincere gratitude goes out to the host. The cover of "Fortunate Son" is a gem, and the retooled versions of old songs are remarkable.) I've been reading their biography off the website, the birth I missed, even though I'm out in the land of evergreens and coffee. I didn't pick up on S-K until "The Hot Rock," and I didn't really hear them until "All Hands on the Bad One." And then I was hooked. I explored their catalog backwards, only recently hearing their remarkable debut album. I've only seen them once, during the AHOABO tour, playing a 1/3-full Key Arena and blowing the lid off it. It's a week of transition here at Casa Bluesky, and it only hit me yesterday. This is the last week I'll be home with Oliver full time. Next week, Mrs. B comes home, and hopefully, I'll be working somewhere, either temping it or suddenly seizing a full-time gig. We have today and tomorrow, and then it's over. I'll talk more about this in a later posting. (I'm not ready yet.) So what I'm doing today is project all of my emotions of loss and sadness about ending my stay-at-home tenure into my sadness about losing Sleater-Kinney. That's the only explanation for why I started getting weepy halfway through the (weird, foresty, blurry) video for "Entertain." That's gotta be it. I saw something online that suggested that Le Tigre might be breaking up, too. If that's true, I'm just gonna fall apart. 9:54:20 AM    Speak up!  []

Friday, April 14, 2006

Friday 5 + 5: Music Notes + What This is Not P.S. To my old blog readers: the 5 + 5 thing is a new tradition of sorts I've started on the new blog. Be nice to me. It's a way to force myself to post at least once a week.) New records sneak up on me. I don't know why. It should be fairly obvious that bands who release albums in 2004 or 2005 are obligated to follow with a new release sometime around this year. This rule doesn't always apply (David Gilmour took two decades between solo releases), but it generally works. So why, then, was I stunned when I heard about the new Drive-by Truckers release, "A Blessing and a Curse?" They were due. Their last record came out in mid-2004. What's the shock? Ditto for Public Enemy's new release. PE, actually, has been recording like gangbusters, but every time I hear of a new album, I'm taken by surprise. Their new record, Rebirth of a Nation, is a fascinating project. The entire album's lyrics are written by Paris, who made my "Best of the '90s" list with his landmark "The Devil Made Me Do It." (Then he got the CIA on his back when he released "Bush Killa" about the first George Bush.) I'm not sure it always works, but it's sure an interesting concept. So, I'm going to attempt to prepare myself for the new releases from a few artists that I love. These are the records I'm most looking forward to... eventually: 5 Albums Worth Looking Forward to: 1. Sleater-Kinney's follow-up to "The Woods." This is what I said about their last record: This will be one of the albums they talk about in twenty years, along with "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" and "Kid A" and the other great albums of the early 21st century. This is an unbelievably great album. Stop reading this. Go get it. Go! For their last record, they moved to a studio on the East Coast, hired Dave Fridmann, and blew up the original mold of S-K. The guitars were explosive, the vocals were full-on ferocious, and everything sounded grittier and sloppier. It was great. Here's hoping they can pull more surprises next time. 2. Hem's next studio record. I loved their first two albums, "Rabbitsongs" and "Eveningland." Their latest record, "No Word from Tom," is a collection of live tracks, odd covers, and unreleased tracks. The covers are intriguing, but in the live songs, you can hear that the band has found its heart as an actual band. Sally Ellyson's mystical voice sounds steadier and more grounded now, and the band spins new melodies and new takes on already-familiar tracks. "Eveningland" was a more confident record than the first, and the next album may be something amazing. 3. Kanye West's follow-up to "Late Registration." "The College Dropout" was brilliant. "Late Registration" was the multi-platinum hiphop record of the year. What's he going to do next? 4. The Go! Team's next record. Their first record was a revelation of frantic guitar, multilayered samples, and radical-cheerleader vocals. Can't wait to see what's up their sleeve next time. 5. Anything new, anything at all, by MF Doom. Yeah, I'm hooked. I have no idea what he's talking about half the time, but his flow is hypnotic and his musical choices are always surprising. After the madly inspired "Mouse and the Mask" collaboration with DJ Dangermouse, he is quite literally capable of doing anything. Just because I've always wanted to do this, I'm now going to answer the inevitable question. The concept of a Friday 5 + 5 list is my own invention. Friday 5 + 5 is not a tribute to: 1. Faith, the evil slayer on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," who often said "five by five" as an expression that all was well. 2. Chuck Woolery, who went to commercials on "Love Connection" by saying he'd be back in "two and two." 3. David Letterman's top ten lists. 4. Any am radio station that does traffic and weather on the fives. 5. The numerologically significant 5. Although I was born in May (5th month) on the 25th day (5 X 5), and you can add up the numbers of the year I was born to get 25 (still 5 x 5.) But no, it's not that. 8:31:41 PM    Speak up!  []

Sunday, February 19, 2006

The War Against Music The music industry's acting like a bunch of thugs.  In New York, Patti Santangelo, a mother who's being sued for illegal file-sharing, has decided to fight back.  The RIAA has offered to settle her suit for a few thousand dollars, but she's not taking the offer.  Instead, she's gone public with her fight, and managed to raise enough cash from online supporters to hire a proper lawyer.  (Go to www.fightgoliath.com to help the cause.)  She is the first victim of a RIAA scaresuit to  aggressively fight the RIAA's legal onslaught.  But now it's getting ugly.  The RIAA has apparently decided to go after her children - not directly, but by digging up personal information it plans to unveil in open court.  What kind of personal information?  It's not specified in the article, but imagine your own personal history as it can be seen on the internet.  Your Google searches.  Your entries on bulletin boards.  Every recipe, every photograph, every news item you've ever clicked on, shared in court for all to see.  Now imagine you're a teenager, in the festering stew of hormones, peer pressure, and terror that we all remember too well.   This is character assassination and the threat of public humiliation wielded as a weapon.  The RIAA lawsuits are an amazing spectacle of the (big) music industry trying to burn down their fan base.  They're ignoring the obvious problem (most music on the airwaves and in the mall record stores sucks) and have decided that downloading and filesharing are causing the decline in record sales.   Music labels are finally starting to splinter off from the monolith:  Nettwerk, home to Barenaked Ladies, Sarah MacLachlan, and Bluesky favorite Hem, has decided to join a Texas man also fighting back against the RIAA.  Nettwerk is paying the legal expenses of David Greubel, who is being sued for allegedly sharing the music of Nettwerk artist Avril Lavigne, among other tracks.  Nettwerk executive Terry McBride is speaking out against the "crazy" behavior of the RIAA.  "The fan is the future. Suing the fan is like shooting yourself in the foot." Sharing music creates buzz, which makes artists.  Witness the Arctic Monkeys, England's latest phenomenon, a literal file-sharing success story.  The band's word-of-mouth groundswell of support is impossible to imagine without file-sharing, and the semi-old-fashioned way of sharing music, via home-burned CDs. But we live in an era where the wild-eyed RIAA lawyers are saying that the simple act of burning your own CDs onto your own computer to use on your own MP3 player may be illegal.   This is no longer about protecting artists' rights.  The lawyers are running amok, and they have lost their ability to be reasonable.  They have lost the right to pretend that they representing anything good and decent about music.  They represent nothing more than dollar signs.  What ever happens next in this war, one can only think that the Goliath will get what it truly deserves.  4:03:40 PM    Speak up!  []

Friday, February 17, 2006

Fair Warning I try to be respectful of my son's delicate eardrums. I use the fader on our car stereo to play the music through the front speakers, and I usually keep it pretty low. After all, he's just a baby. However, there's always a risk that I'll be playing the radio, and a song will come on the radio that throws my restraint out the window. One of those loud songs, the ones that make you sing at the top of your lungs, break out your best driving dance moves (all head, wrists, and shoulders), and turn up the volume before you realize you've done it. If one of those songs comes on the radio, I cannot take responsibilty for my actions. Oliver's just going to pull his little fuzzy hat over his ears until it's over. This is the list, so far. Others may be added later, depending on the quality of Seattle radio. Sly and the Family Stone - "Dance to the Music," "Stand!" "Thank You," "I Want to Take You Higher" (not including any version with will.i.am on it) T. Rex - "20th Century Boy." "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" Led Zeppelin - "Kashmir, " "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," "Communication Breakdown," "Whole Lotta Love" Edited to add:  "Misty Mountain Hop."  Because, oh my God.  That song just kills. My Morning Jacket - "What a Wonderful Man." "Gideon" Pearl Jam - "Do the Evolution," "Glorified G," "W.M.A.,""Not for You," "Given to Fly," "Go" (Note: I live in Seattle, so hearing PJ on the radio is a real risk.) Neil Young - "Like a Hurricane," "Rockin' in the Free World" (electric) Derek and the Dominos - "Bell Bottom Blues," "Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?" "Layla" (not Eric Clapton's wet teabag acoustic version) Santana - "Soul Sacrifice," "No One to Depend On" Cream - "Crossroads," "I Feel Free" Beatles - Everything, but especially "Paperback Writer," Revolution," "She Said She Said," "Helter Skelter," "Rain," and if they ever played it, "It's All Too Much" U2 - Everything, but especially "Vertigo," "Bullet the Blue Sky," "Elevation," "Love and Peace or Else," and, if they ever played it, "Gloria" Run-DMC - "It's Tricky" or anything else from "Raising Hell" Chaka Khan - "I Feel 4 U," "Ain't Nobody" Prince - "Let's Go Crazy," "When Doves Cry," "Alphabet St.," and if anyone ever played it, "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" 7:51:23 PM    Speak up!  []

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Boycott Sony and Their Love Monkey "Love Monkey" is a front. Sure, I almost got sucked in, too.  The premise called to me - a young hipster who founds his own record label.  It sounded tempting.  And one of the real life indie tastemakers, Nic Harcourt, was signed on as music supervisor.   This might be worth looking into, says I to myself.  But oh, no.  Hell no.  The beast that is "Love Monkey" will never illuminate my tv screen.  Why?  Because it's a goddamn front.  A shill.  A scam.  Newsweek said "there's nothing else like it on tv," and they didn't know the half of it.  In the ultimate example of cross-pollination and secret product placement, Sony BMG is calling the musical shots at "Love Monkey."  As Thomas Bartlett pointed out on Audiofile, they're promoting their own artists through the show, putting up their new acts to be the new signees at the new "indie" record label.  So all of those people who are supposedly new and unsigned and being "discovered" by Mr. Indie Hipster Lovemonkey are really part of the giant monstrosity that is SonyBMG.  I'm sure there are those who might defend the creators of this commercial chimera.  It's a show about rock bands, they might whine.  How are you supposed to find good bands now without the help of a label?  Oh, let's see.  "Square Pegs" was able to get Devo on their show and the Waitresses to do their theme song back in the day - they sure weren't owned by any goddamn music label.  Shows like "The O.C.," "Joan of Arcadia," and "Gilmore Girls" are able to come up with lots of good, compelling, occasionally indie artists, and they aren't owned by any goddamn music labels.  (I'm willing to believe that there's a little bit of product placement fees going on there, but I can overlook that.  It's a difference of degree.  The above-mentioned shows exists as shows first, and have music as an incidental part of the show.  LoveMonkey is looking to be a music promotion machine disguised as a tv show.)  Y'all might remember that I've got a bit of antipathy towards Sony for hating their customers.  They hate their customers so much that they planted rootkits surreptitiously on millions of CDs to keep them from doing things with "their" CDs that Sony didn't want them to do.  The rootkits have destroyed computers, allowed viruses to seep in, pissed off the world in general and set Sony up for lawsuits by the score.  So now unsuspecting millions are going to watch what they think is a tv show, but it turns out to only be an infomercial for the SonyBMG beast.  Don't be taken in. Fuck Sony.  If you end up watching it, then you only have yourself to blame.  You've been had.  You've been took.  You been hoodwinked.  Bamboozled.  Led astray.  Run amok.  8:59:12 AM    Speak up!  []

Friday, January 20, 2006

Google Humor (I'm not talking about that Justice Department subpeona that Google's resisting. Because that shit ain't funny.) You know how, if you're looking for multiple words in a search, Google will show the text from a website that contains those words? Usually, they excise huge portions of text in order to show the searched words. Someone was doing a search and found my blog, and Google showed the following excerpt.  Note: the first part of this refers to Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, which makes it even funnier. ... The lyrics are up to Jeff's standard of excellence: paranoid, wistful, wishful poems ... "I don't know what you heard about me...but I'm a motherfuckin' PIMP." 6:31:51 AM    Speak up!  []

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Hey, Boycott Sony! Still! Again! There's been entirely too much news about the Sony DRM debacle for my l'il old blog to cover. Also, BoingBoing, Rolling Stone, and the MSM have been doing a fine job of covering the fiasco. But here's the basics. Boycott Sony. They're evil and have no respect for music fans. Even if you didn't buy a Sony CD with the rootkit on it, you're still in trouble. There's another DRM scheme on other CDs, including My Morning Jacket's Z, that will install itself on your computer even if you hit "decline" when asked if you want to install it. (Because "no" means "yes.") Sony was incredibly slow in even admitting they had a problem, even as viruses were taking advantage of the secret rootkit to launch on thousands of computers. At its worst, Sony BMG's president Thomas Hesse offered the amazingly tone-deaf comment, "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"At first, they claimed to have an uninstaller available which didn't really uninstall the software. Then they started offering replacement CDs - um, hello, you poisoned my computer? I really don't think I want another CD from you. Finally, they made MP3s available to those who bought the poison CDs, MP3s which are doubtlessly being traded all up and down the Internet as revenge. MMJ (and other bands) have been nice enough to short-circuit Sony's neanderthal reaction by offering their own solution. They're sending fans burned, unprotected copies of the offending CDs. (Speaking of unprotected MP3s, ATO Records - which is owned/distributed by Sony - has just started making their catalog available on EMusic as mp3s with no DRM protection whatsoever. Highlights include two Patty Griffin albums and Mike Doughty's latest, as well as his previous releases. Coincidence?) The backlash is large, vast, and growing. Libraries are refusing to buy Sony discs. Lawsuits are flying at a breathtaking pace. Summary? Digital rights management doesn't work. In the old days, you bought a record or a cassette and it was free - you could tape it, make mix tapes or whatever, and you owned all of it. Now Sony (and others!) are trying to put ridiculous limitations on HOW you own the music you buy. Their latest scheme only exposes the fallacy of needing customers and yet not trusting them. Sony still deserves to be punished for their assault on their customer base. Don't buy Sony CDs for presents - if you must have some of these artists, download the songs from iTunes or EMusic. At least that way, you know what you're getting. 5:06:54 PM    Speak up!  []