DJ bio madlibs. Awesome. [via]
Currently browsing Posts Tagged “music”
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The day before MCA passed away, the Beastie Boys were hit with a lawsuit over samples used on Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique. Slate notes that Paul’s Boutique couldn’t be made today, which echoes the licensing math in the excellent book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling
I like the idea that the most fitting tribute to the life of Adam Yauch would be to fix the disaster that is copyright law once and for all.
Forget the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, where’s the Adam Yauch Right To Sample Act? We shouldn’t even have to fight for our right to sample.
Sasha Frere-Jones on MCA.
Rather than being perceived as the first draft of Ali G, the Beasties were taken at face value; many threads got tangled in one of hip-hop’s breakthrough moments. Rap is ridiculously profane and loopy and perfect and anybody can do it and you can use any music you want! Ok bye! And then, two years later, on “Paul’s Boutique,” they took the idea even further: maybe you could rap every word you knew over every record ever made. Sure, why not . And there was still this talk of beating people with aluminum bats and other alpha-male stuff that came from who knows where. Rap had now been coded by both friends and enemies as a violent form inspired by violence, a view which these three pacifists had unwittingly helped install.
And then it all changed, and Yauch was the first to take it all back. On 1994’s “Sure Shot ,” MCA pulled the plug on the characters that made them famous: “I wanna say a little something that’s long overdue, the disrespect to women has got to be through. To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends, I wanna offer my love and respect to the end.”
The Beastie Boys on New York public access in 1984. [via]
There used to be some great footage from the Paul’s Boutique release party on Vimeo, but it seems to have gone missing.
UPDATE: Found it!
Adam Yauch, aka MCA, died. It’s rare that a celebrity death actually elicits a genuine emotional response from me, but this one really sucks.
UPDATE: Coverage from the New York Times and Pitchfork.
David Stubbs dives into the Peel collection for The Quietus.
Had he lived to be 265, rather than, sadly, 65, he could not possibly hope to have given these albums the solid, several times over hearing their makers naively hoped he would. Possessing them, conscientiously filing and noting them was the thing. This has been reflected in the widespread slew of praise for the undertaking of putting up the collection. What an archive. What a national treasure. What a man.
Sasha Frere-Jones on the importance of Kraftwerk.
It turned out not only that anyone could make electronic music but that almost everyone wanted to. Kraftwerk is perhaps the only group that played the Ritz in 1981 that sounds entirely current today. Plenty of people saw the machines coming, but nobody else has listened as carefully to them, or documented their strengths as lovingly.
Collecting records doesn’t make you cool. [via]
Some of these knowledge-seekers are young and impressionable, and maybe due to their personal experiences of being a high school student in addition to thinking some 56-year-old store clerk is “cool,” they get the idea that rare = cool and popular = shitty. Maybe these little cocksuckers try to ape their way into a shorthand version of the supposedly “cool” knowledge they just had dropped on them by whatever tuberculoid weirdo they just pestered. Maybe they develop and exude what many internet commenters think of as a “hipster attitude,” without knowing why, exactly. Maybe this “hipster attitude” becomes so prevalent, due to the seemingly increased cultural importance of knowledge transmittal in the internet age, that it borders on oppressive.
The first 100 records from John Peel’s record collection are going online tomorrow at The Space. The project is aiming to archive all 25,000 LPs, 40,000 vinyl singles and “about a bajillion more CDs than Adele’s flogged.” Imagine in the CBC had been so committed to preserving their archive. [via]
(Speaking of which, I went down and dropped $200 on vinyl from the CBC Calgary archive and am supposed to write something about it for Avenue. I’ll get on that.)
Chuck Klosterman went to Creed and Nickelback concerts. On the same night.
I wanted to see Creed at New York’s intimate Beacon Theatre (performing their 1997 album My Own Prison in its entirety), followed by Nickelback in front of 18,000 people at Madison Square Garden.
Last Thursday, this dream was accomplished.
I did not do this because I particularly like or dislike either band. I did it because other people like and dislike them so much.
Will keeping the Beatles off streaming sites lead to people forgetting about them? [via]
Limiting an artist as influential and famous as the Beatles to a single digital distribution platform and method (pay to download) may seem like a good idea to title holders: It serves to standardize revenue and helps make it easier to maintain copyright control. But it’s also a mistake; not even the Beatles will be bigger than Jesus forever. They, just like every band, are capable of being forgotten. And they’re on their way.
In the age of Twitter, there’s no longer any room for the music snob. (For the record, I will keep judging you Rdio and Last.fm friends.)
Obscure knowledge was once a kind of currency. To get it, you had to be in the loop. You had to know the right people to learn about the right bands. You had to know the right record stores to hear those bands. The right record stores, like the right comic and book and video stores, were manned by knowledge guardians who scared the bejeezus out of us, so the act of going in to these stores felt kind of intrepid.
[…]
Populism is the new model of cool; elitists, rather than teeny-boppers or bandwagon-jumpers, are the new squares. There are now artists who sell out concerts while rarely getting played on commercial radio (the Weeknd or Tori Amos, for instance), and there are commercial radio artists whom no one in most people’s hipper circles has ever heard of because they listen exclusively to the Internet (Lady Antebellum, Jake Owen — pretty much all of so-called new country).
Trailer for Ice-T’s documentary Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap. (Though the title on the YouTube page says Ice Cube, which is kind of funny.) [via]
Is internet culture turning musicians into content producers?
The result feels like musicians threatening to become content-producers, churning out a steady stream of conversation topics and half-formed ideas without quality control. Being a part of a conversation feels as important as what’s actually said. That’s a sure route to obscurity, racing to appeal to the smaller and smaller audiences willing to follow at the real-time speed of Twitter and, especially, seapunk favorite Tumblr.
The New Yorker takes a look inside the great pop song machine.
How did this happen? How did mainstream rock, once the source of the catchiest hooks in popular music, become robotic, unimaginative, and predictable, while pop, always the soul of artifice, came to seem creative, experimental, and alive? Whereas rock is about the sound of a band playing together (even when its members aren’t actually together) and features virtuoso solos played on real instruments, today’s Top Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes. The music sounds sort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pah pah pah.
Indie music publishing’s Lana Del Rey problem.
What Del Rey illustrates is that indie cred, and indie values and credential checking is a useless exercise in this day and age — if indie was a private party, the bouncer has long since left the building.
This is the almost impossible to find Rick Rubin directed, Run-DMC starring 1988 film Tougher Than Leather in its entirety. YouTube has officially peaked. [via]
I’ve got a soft spot for The Carpenters because my mother listened to them all the time when I was young. These isolated Karen Carpenter vocal tracks are both fantastic and a bit sad.
“Just Passing Through” is a series of fairly mundane photos from the sites where famous rockstars died.
Jason Fry loads his nine-year-old son’s first MP3 player.
Whether he knew it or not, he’d made a cunning request. Like most fathers, I’m inclined to indulgence if I think it will make my kid more like me, and I immediately saw that an MP3 player was a chance to shape my son’s musical education from the beginning.
[...]
What really worried me was a more basic question: To truly love music, did you have to discover it as part of the normal and natural rebellion and establishment of your own identity? Did you have to be able to claim it as your own? Are things different now that fathers—particularly the Brooklyn variety—are more likely to stay MP3-playing, blog-browsing guys in hoodies than they are to become remote presences in wing-backed chairs?
Footage from the 1989 Paul’s Boutique release party. Amusing interview segment starts at about 15:30.
I used to put a great deal of effort into new music. Now I just listen to the new releases in Rdio each week, which is how I found Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die. I enjoyed it. But I knew nothing of the Lana Del Rey media storm. I assume that just shows how much attention I now pay to these things. Anyway, here’s the Sasha Frere-Jones primer that told me about everything I missed. I am now complete, I guess. I still like the album.
Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’ ”
