perfidy

The MIT Student Newspaper has an interview with everyone's favorite music industry pimp, Jack Valenti. It seems that Jack is not too solid on the whole concept of "Fair use."

Now! Newly updated and revised, 4/21!

Blender magazine's new issue contains the latest volley in an increasingly tiresome but still lively debate: the 50 worst songs ever. According to this USA Today coverage, the Blender top ten are

1. We Built This City Starship 1985
2. Achy Breaky Heart, Billy Ray Cyrus,1992
3. Everybody Have Fun Tonight, Wang Chung, 1986
4. Rollin', Limp Bizkit, 2000
5. Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice, 1990
6. The Heart of Rock & Roll, Huey Lewis & The News, 1984
7. Don't Worry, Be Happy , Bobby McFerrin, 1988
8. Party All the Time, Eddie Murphy, 1985
9. American Life, Madonna, 2003
10. Ebony and Ivory, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, 1982

Man... I wish I could find absolute fault with this list, but that's hard to do given the eminent suckitude of each song in the top ten. "We Built This City" is indeed a worthy contender for the title of worst song ever. Nonetheless I personally have a hard time finding "City" worse than, say, Extreme's "More Than Words," Aqua's "Barbie Girl" (reportedly also on the list), or the entire recorded output of Supertramp.

I wonder what metric they used to put this list together? Well, I have some proposals! (Read on: there's a few dick jokes, some graphic revenge fantasies, and some deeply ridiculous angry conviction)

[wik] BTD Greg has his own list up, and no overlap with mine. Just shows to go ya how much bad music there is out there.

The USA-Today piece notes that novelty songs, or songs that aspire to nothing more than shlock, don't rate as "worst ever" because they don't aspire to anything more. I can agree with that. So, no "Who Let The Dogs Out" or "Macarena."

But how do we decide that Madonna's excrescent "American Life," released just last year, is worse than the Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" or Debbie Boone's "You Light Up My Life," which have more than half a century of sick-making between them? I argue that long-livedness should play a part. I seriously doubt that Madonna's "American Life" will ever surface again, but on any given night, at any bar in the more thinly populated areas of the USA, you stand an awfully good chance of enduring "Achy Breaky Heart."

Then, how do you decide what's worse between an established artist who makes a shitty single (e.g. Madonna's "American Life," Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire," Stevie Wonder/Macca "Ebony/Ivory"), otherwise innocuous artists who have an unlooked-for chart hit with a horrible song (Bobby McFerrin, "Don't Worry, Be Happy," Wang Chung, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight") and artists who seem to exist only to fester (Limp Bizkit ("Nookie" aside), Billy Ray Cyrus, Starship)? Madonna, Stevie and Paul all have towering achievements to their name, and in my opinion, one bad song from them-- no matter how shit-your-pants embarrassing it may be-- is still better than any song from shlockmeister supremes like Jefferson Airplane's third incarnation, Journey, or Debbie Boone. The flukes are the wild cards: competent bar bands like Huey Lewis who succeed beyond their talent, one-hit-wonders like Wang Chung, and arthouse mediocrities like Bobby McFerrin.

So. We can leave Madonna, Stevie Wonder, and Paul McCartney aside, no matter how I may personally feel about "Ob-la-di."

I would also axe the merely incompetent. So: goodbye Eddie Murphy. Ditto the merely innocuous who punch above their weight. Goodbye Huey Lewis.

Now that I have cleared the field of all but the most serious of contenders, here is my personal, highly idiosyncratic, and dyspeptically jaundiced list of the ten worst songs of all time.

1) Debbie Boone. "You Light Up My Life." Apart from lovesick thirteen-year-olds Christian girls crying into their heart shaped pillows at four-color Tiger Beat centerfolds of Leif Garrett (and the housewives they grew up to be) nobody can honestly claim this song is anything but an affront to all that is good, decent, and holy. More than anything else in the history of the world, this song's fanbase are an absolutely persuasive argument in favor of a rigorous program of enforced eugenics.

2) Billy Ray Cyrus. "Achy Breaky Heart." Made the mullet and dancing in formation fashionable once again. Hey Billy! Those were my people you did that to! My people, the good, honest upright briarhoppers, hillbillies, and piney-barrens homesteaders of the world who, if they only had a chance would groove to AC/DC and Steve Earle, but now wear big stupid hats and listen to your progeny. Cyrus is also to be blamed for collateral damage: the line-dancing craze, the meteoric rise of so-called "country" music machine-tooled for the minivan set, and making pasty drug-taking sons of bitches like Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and my main man George Jones into pop-culture footnotes for the entire decade of the 1990s.

3) REM. "Shiny Happy People." The same band that crafted such monuments of messy genius as "Radio Free Europe" and "Belong" stumbled bad. I can't find much to say about this song except that I hate it. The worst part (for me) is that it's still a staple of the Adult-Album-Alternative radio I tend to listen to, and therefore I am subjected to this overmedicated pap far more often than is healthy for the members of REM. Someday vengeance will be mine.

4) .38 Special. "Rockin' Into The Night." The Blender list wisely chose to cut out the "low-hanging fruit" of the awful music of the 70's, but some offenses are too egregious to bear. Three years after the punk revolution broke, .38 Special still felt fine about putting out a song whose chorus ran "Rocking into the night, rocking into the night." So... you gonna rock into the night or something? The single most boneheaded of all butt-rock songs, first among a thick field of worthy contenders.

5) Starlight Vocal Band. "Afternoon Delight." Although part of that terrible era Blender wisely ignored, this song's recent resurgence via an inexplicable retro-fondness for the worst parts of the 1970s and films like "PCU" and "Good Will Hunting" renders it eligible for the list. Of all the songs ever recorded about sweet love in the afternoon, this is the only one that makes me wish I could cut off my own penis in protest. Or maybe cut the penises off the Starlight Vocal Band's male members. That's a healthier way to think of this.

6) Marcy Playground. "Sex And Candy."
7) Live. "Lighting Crashes."

These two picks represent all the worst aspects of the Alternative movement of the 1990s. "Sex and Candy" is simply the very worst song I have personally ever heard, though it seems to be quite the popular item among millions and millions of my peers. A more rational mind would conclude that they are right and I am wrong, but that's what they said about Jesus before they nailed him to a tree, and look how far it got him! I hereby announce the establishment of a new religion: the Church of Fuck Marcy Playground.

As for Live, they make it on here because they took a great song with a lovely hook and sound and threw lyrics over top of it that include the line, "The placenta falls to the floor." Nice, guys. Next!

8) The Doors. "Hello, I Love You." Somehow Jim Morrison, in between drunkenly waving his dick around and acting all pretty, got himself rated a poet. A poet! "Hello, I love you/ won't you tell me your name. / Hello, I love you/ let me jump in your game." A poet! "Hello Mother. I want to fuck you." A poet! "There's a killer on the road/ his brain is squirming like a toad /Take a long holiday/ let your children play." A poet! "Hello, I Love You" is the sound of the most overrated band of all time pushing Four Roses and calling it Champagne. Makes me want to dig up Jim Morrison's corpse just so I can pee on it while singing "Riders on the Storm."

9) "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" Rod Stewart. The great, the inimitable Rod the Mod burned up an entire career's goodwill with this turd. Worse, this song represented a nadir from which Stewart would never recover, a huge loss to the world's sleazy rock well-being. Nothing more to say, except that the Revolting Cocks cover of the tune is priceless, with an extra verse about the nameless couple realizing they have to buy a rubber and some KY.

10) This space intentionally left blank in honor of all the thousands of songs I'd like to include but can't, ten being a conveniently round number and all. Pat Boone. Jazz guys trying rock. Jess Roden's godawful version of "On Broadway" (Doors trivia: Roden was on the band's short list to replace Jim Morrison when Jim took the dirt nap. Why the hell are the Doors so famous?). Alicia Bridges' "I Love the Nightlife," the song that proved that if disco wasn't dead, it was shooting dirty heroin in a Chelsea bathroom with a shotgun in its mouth. Candelbox's lone hit. There are so many, many, more, but I will leave you now with just three words: "Cold." "As." "Ice."

[alsø wik] Allison, commenting at Begging to Differ, notes that Lee Greenwood's "Proud To Be An American" just might be the worst song of all time. Fie on me for forgetting! She's right.

Number 11 with a bullet) Lee Greenwood. "God Bless the U.S.A." The anthem of knee-jerk patriotic Rotarians everywhere. No other song in the world has done so much to make me not only ashamed to be American for the three minutes it's playing, but to wish fervently for a Chomskyite hairshirt-wearing America-hating putsch JUST SO I never have to hear that trash again. Or, I could just go cut off Lee Greenwood's penis, for all the good it would do.

To follow up on my recent post arguing that downloading isn't what's killing the music business, I point you to this CNN article which notes that 2003 was the worst year for recorded music sales since the advent of the compact disc.

As usual, there's a stunningly ill-informed piece of disinformation in there that calls the entire thing into question.

Total sales of singles, including cassettes and vinyl, which have dipped significantly since the Internet file-sharing and CD-burning craze began in the late 1990s, fell 18.7 percent in value terms between 2002 and 2003.

What? This line, which was undoubtedly fed to some stringer by an industry flack, seems to suggest that the decline in the singles market was the result of cannibalization of single sales by downloading. Well, guess what? Labels have been phasing out the single for years, and sales are down for two reasons: there's few singles out there to buy; and consumers are out of the habit of buying singles because-- ungh!-- there's few singles out there to buy. Downloading doesn't enter into it! Now, if singles had taken a dive after 2001, when Napster broke big, there'd be something to this. But when I went into the industry in early 2000, singles were less than an afterthought already. And trust me, the labels have many better things to bitch about then limp singles sales.

If CNN can't even get its facts straight about simple matters of causality and chronology, then they're no better than Drudge, who scoops the hell out of them daily anyway.

[wik] If I have time in the next day or two, I have a couple brilliant ideas as to why the music industry is in a tailspin, and it's probably not what you think.

Back when I worked in the music biz, we used to joke when times got desperate. Toward the end of my time at one company, when it was clear that the revenue stream had become a brackish drip, the marketing people came up with a bunch of naked pleas we thought would be funny to use as marketing taglines: "Wave/Particle Records: Catalog Sales Are Down." "Wave/Particle Records: Hey... We Gotta Eat Too."

The companies I worked for were not, and never will be, big-time labels with multiple chart topping releases. When the entire music industry suffered at the dawn of the new millennium, we suffered too. Broadly speaking, when industry-wide sales were off 11% one year to another, we could count on a dip too. It never seemed right to me to blame downloading for our woes. It stands to reason that the most-downloaded tracks, and therefore the albums most ostensibly affected by the loss of revenue that downloading might suggest, are blockbusters, not critical darlings or cult hits selling fewer than 50,000 copies (that's three orders of MAGNITUDE lower than a big #1 hit record sells). The records I worked were obscurities, not teenybopper rages, and even if they were being downloaded, it was not at any appreciable clip. And yet, everyone's sales dipped in lockstep.

(Interesting side note... it's actually a little disheartening to log on to KaZaA looking to see if anyone is sharing copies of the record you just spent six months working on, only to find that nobody is.)

Now there's actual Facts and Research to back up my gut hunch about downloads. A new working paper from two professors of business, titled "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales,' has concluded that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates."

Professors Koleman Strumpf and Felix Oberholzer-Gee took a 17-week sampling of downloads made from the major filesharing networks, corrected for a galaxy of variables, and mapped the popularity of downloads to the Billboard sales charts and SoundScan data for a given week. Their findings: in the worst cases, downloading may cannibalize one in every 500 record sales, and for most releases it's more like 1 in 5000. Not exactly the stuff of industry holocausts.Although I'm not much of econometrician, and can't speak to the math, their conclusions are sound and reasonable based on the methods they used.

Predictibly, the RIAA is firing back (see this NY Times piece). Unfortunately for them, they're bad shots, pooh-poohing the notion that statistical sampling can be an accurate indicator of an entire population. Unfortunately for us, most people don't know or understand that.

Amy Weiss, an industry spokeswoman, expressed incredulity at what she deemed an "incomprehensible" study, and she ridiculed the notion that a relatively small sample of downloads could shed light on the universe of activity.

The industry response, titled "Downloading Hurts Sales," concludes: "If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34 million units; 2003, 33 million units?"

Critics of the industry's stance have long suggested that other factors might be contributing to the drop in sales, including a slow economy, fewer new releases and a consolidation of radio networks that has resulted in less variety on the airwaves. Some market experts have also suggested that record sales in the 1990's might have been abnormally high as people bought CD's to replace their vinyl record collections.

That last bit there is the nut of the matter. The 1990s were the decade in which the first and possibly the last generation to treat recorded music as a major entertainment commodity went back to buy all the Beatles and Stones albums on CD. While they were at the store, maybe they stuck around to pick up the Stone Roses too. Those days are gone, and the that one change, along with other certain structural changes in how records are distributed, have hosed the deal for good.

The Times article makes another good point. Each album downloaded doesn't necessarily represent a lost sale. The burns I have in my collection are of records that I wasn't going to buy anyway, at any price.

Go read the paper-- it's long and mathy, but I can't find much to complain about. The numbers are there. Downloading represents a continued consumer interest in music, and if the labels cannot understand the difference between paying $0 for an album and paying $18, tough. The RIAA are a bunch of dupes, and it's too bad for them they, and the labels they purport to represent, can't understand that demand is not a given, profits are not a right, and that if they shit their own bed, it's they who have to sleep there.

Salon is running a fascinating interview with Walter Yetnikoff, grade-A bastard and architect of CBS/Sony records in the 1970s-1990s.

Best known for being, what's the phrase, a colossal prick, Yetnikoff in his retirement is heavily involved in addiction-treatment programs (both himself and as a volunteer and donor), social services, and various charities in and around New York City. He's still a prick, an opinionated jerk with an opinion on every question you didn't bother to ask, but somehow, fascinatingly, he's at peace with himself as well.

Go read! Amazing stuff about him, the music industry, and why Paul Simon is a waste of space.

Via Drudge, this gem:

"I'm fascinated by Rap and Hip-Hop" said Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry during an MTV Choose or Loose forum. Offering up a heavy dose of street credibility, Kerry defended gangsta rap, freedom of speech and the realities of street life.

The Boston-born heir by marriage to the Heinz Ketchup fortune, offered his perspective on rap music as the voice of the streets.

"I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important."

Middle aged white candidates should just not go there. Ever.

When's the last time you heard a fun hip-hop record? And I mean a fun serious hip-hop record, as opposed to a stupid-fun record such as the kind Will Smith pukes out every time he makes a new movie. I can hardly remember. I've bought a pretty good amount of hip-hop over the years, and apart from affable lunatics like Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, or Ludacris, hip-hop is way too concerned with being all hawd n shit. Since I'm a white 29-year-old college administrator who enjoys science fiction and not getting shot, I can't really relate. Usually, it irritates me.

Well, a little while back I posted a late-night rave about Chicago wonderboy Kanye West, who has been all over the radio recently with several hits he has produced or performed. I bought his debut, "The College Dropout," and it's great. It might be the best hip-hop record I've bought in a decade, and it's definitely the most fun I've had since De La Soul put out "3 Feet High and Rising" fifteen years ago (fifteen years!).

West's stock in trade is to boost a sample from an old soul record-- the Jackson 5, Chacka Khan-- and layer it with live instruments, warm-sounding drums, and his own half-distracted verbal style. Not a great flow stylist, West's strength is in his witty rhymes. His lyrics are sharp, funny, and insightful, galaxies beyond the merely competent thuggin' peddled by the likes of 50 Cent. Best of all, although West is signed to Rock-a-fella, uber-hustler Jay-Z's company, there's barely a 'ho in sight, and not a single person gets shot.

It's a hallmark of how different West is from the mainstream of (male) hip-hop stars that his first single is about, not getting shot, but being in a car accident. He recorded "Through the Wire" with his jaw wired shut, mumbling lyrics about liquid diets and seatbelts. It's a fantastic track, anchored by a chipmunk-speed sample of Chacka Khan's "Through The Fire," and features killer rhymes like, "I drink a Boost for breakfast, an Ensure for dessert/ Someone order pancakes I just sip the sizzurp." The only problem is that "Through The Wire," which is the star of the record and one of the best songs I've heard in years, is buried fifteen tracks deep on "The College Dropout."

But there's much more to the record than one single. Every song pops with ideas and talent, and-- a rare thing for a rap album-- the skits don't suck. Standout tracks include "We Don't Dare," with its kid's chorus of "Drug dealing just to get high/ stack your money til it gets sky high/ We never supposed to make it past 25/ Joke's on you we still alive/ We don't care what people say," the acoustic-guitar driven "All Falls Down," and "Get Em High," featuring Talib Kweli and Common. And when's the last time you heard a gospel version of "I'll Fly Away," or for that matter "Pomp and Circumstance," on a rap record? Musically and lyrically, nearly every track is a jaw-dropping tour de force.

However, all isn't perfect. West has traded the stock gunz and ho's imagery of hip-hop for a more nuanced and human view of the world, rapping about working shit jobs and cheating on his taxes. But for all the humor and insight, West has traded the hermetic world of gangbanging for one in which every road is a dead end and the ultimate reward for working is a tiny paycheck, a mountain of debt, and a boatload of envy and bitterness. From the title "The College Dropout" to the song "Space Ship," that compares "this grave shift" to a "slave ship," to the mock-yearbook liner notes which place West on the basketball team ("never played"), the debate team ("never won"), and dubs him "least likely to succeed," Kanye West attempts to examine the culture of failure that so many people (black, white, whatever) deal with every day. Great idea, sure, and one that's more constructive than the ten thousandth song about Courvoisier, but too often West ends up in a big pity-party.

Nowhere is this more apparent on the "School Spirit" skits, when West's character angrily defends getting his "Bachelors, then my Masters, then my Masters' Masters, then my doctoral.. Yeah i'm 52, so what, hate all you want, but I'm smart, I'm so smart, and I'm in school,and these guys are out here making money all these ways, and I'm spending mine to be smart. You know why? Because when I die, buddy, you know what's going to keep me warm? That right, those degrees."

Jeez. Sure, I felt that way back in grad school when I'd self-medicated myself a bit too much to keep from thinking about the pointlessness getting a terminal Masters in a field where a Ph.D. and a dollar will barely buy you a cup of coffee, but damn, dude, lighten the fuck up already. Social pathologies and shit. Cornel West. Henry Louis Gates.

I shouldn't get too wrapped up in the Philosophy of Kanye West, because it detracts from the point. Kanye West has made a magnificent, rewarding, deep, thoughtful, and mind-blowing hip-hop record that advances the state of the art several years into the future. In 2015 were's going to be listening to this like we listen to "A Nation of Millions..." or "Paul's Boutique" now, amazed at our luck for having it around.

This year marks the 50th birthday of the ubiquitous Fender Stratocaster.

The Shreveport Times gives some history, some Strat lore, and some basic engineering concepts associated with solid-body electrics that aren't entirely wrong but will suffice to annoy Johno. It's kinda too bad that Fender isn't as interested in this event for its own sake, as opposed to being an event for selling you stuff with "Fender 50th" logos on it, but I do dig 'em.

I bought an American Classic Strat (as opposed to what NDR termed a "NAFTA-Strat") ca 1995 and have played it exclusively ever since. It doesn't have the ass or tone of a fat Gibson product (nor the price of a Les Paul, Strat's chubbier, warmer cousin), nor the scream of any of your pointy metal models. A Strat does alot of stuff pretty OK though, widely known for good reason as a dependable model. The Times article calls it a "workhorse". Sort of the Ford pick-up truck of guitars I guess.

Happy 50th.

Phil Dennison has done a very brave and foolish thing: put a song by his band on the internet. They're called The Fragments, and they've written a damn good power-pop song. Go check it out!

Let me take you back to Ohio, December 1991. I was a senior in high school, and deeply into music. It was all the wrong music, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Jane's Addiction excepted, but music nonetheless. It was the era of hair metal, big ballads, and soaring, heroic guitar solos, and the radio was full of Warrant, Extreme, and other truly barrel-scraping dreck my memory refuses to give name to.

Then one day my friends and I started hearing this sound on the rock stations… crunchy and dumb, aggressive and sullen. Some band called Nirvana, and they were awesome.

I don't really want to mythologize it, but the genre of rock criticism-- the genre of rock itself-- kinda begs for it, so I might as well. I can’t quite describe what it was like for me. It was as if someone flipped a switch, and one day me and my friends were driving around in the Lust Bug or the Deathtrap Toyota listening to a tape of AC/DC or Pink Floyd and the next we were driving around obsessively combing the radio dial for that sound, that one song, named after a deodorant or something. For me at least, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was a total break with the past, a Big Bang replete with loud guitars. In five minutes flat, the horizons of my world unfolded a thousand times. Music was reborn, a million possibilities surged forth, and Rock and Fucking Roll wielded infinite glory and power.

I can't overstate how different (and how incredibly good) Nirvana sounded, but I can't for the life of me figure out why that is. I was already into what we called at the time "progressive music," and was passingly familiar with the history of Rock from "Hound Dog" to "Pretty Vacant, so it wasn't like punk was terra incognita. Neither was the Black Sabbath-meets-Ramones riffage that was the song's bedrock. So Nirvana didn't contain anything new, but the way it was all put together sounded perfect... like the future.

I'm starting to get that feeling again. I've been hearing Chicago-born hip-artist Kanye West's music everywhere, and I love it. I don't understand what’s so great about him, really. His debut single, "Through The Wire" (off his major-label debut “College Dropout”) shouldn't add up to anything special. I can think of half a dozen hip-hop songs in the last year that are as hooky, that have as much soul. So he used a sped-up Chacka Khan sample-- who cares? Wu Tang did that in 1994, and now everybody does. The rhyme is interesting, not a 'ho in sight, but Eminem was funnier on "Slim Shady" and more poignant on "Stan." Even the central gimmick of "Through The Wire," namely that he's rapping through a wired-shut jaw thanks to a car accident, is nothing compared to 50 Cent's rhymes about multiple gunshot wounds. What's the big deal?

West raps about mundane stuff. His records sound kind of like Jay-Z's, which makes sense considering he’s on Jay-Z’s label and produced some of the big guy’s hits. On the surface, Kanye West should be no more or less interesting than Aceyalone, Mr. Lif, or any one of a thousand quirky local MC's with plenty of talent but no spark of genius.

But for some reason he is different. Despite the protests of my cynical, rational, music-industry-veteran mind, "Through The Wire" is totally irresistible and utterly perfect. I can't get it out of my head. Friday night I stayed awake waiting for MTV to play the video. Yesterday morning I heard “Through The Wire” twice on the way to the grocery store, but only because I was looking for it. Later, Goodwife Two-Cents and I drove up to Maine, and the whole time I was changing the radio, pretending to be sick of Journey and Missy Elliott, but really hunting for that song again. Last night I saw him perform on a rerun of Chappelle's show, doing a song about working a steady job for shitty pay, opposite a live performance by rap superstars N.E.R.D. on Saturday Night Live, and Kanye West made Pharrell & Co. sound like a bunch of uptight posers in an airport karaoke bar. That hook! That bass! That flow! That sound! Holy shit!

I’m usually wrong about what America will like, but I’m positive about this one. Kanye West is modern hip-hop’s Nirvana moment. Something about his sound seems to be from the future, or at least a map of how to get there.

Nice place.

[wik] How white am I? I'm going to refer you to an article in Slate for some background on who Kanye West is.

[alsø wik] How white am I? When I link Kanye West:[other epochal event], I think "Teen Spirit," not "The Message," "Roxanne, Roxanne/Roxanne’s Revenge" or "My Adidas."

[alsø alsø wik] How white am I? I like Kanye West so much, I wrote an essay about it! On the internet! I'm so white I make Alan Greenspan look like Chuck D!

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] And yet, there's the bass playing thing. I can bring the funk when I come to play.

Ishkur has replaced his old and busted internet guide to electronica with a new and enslickened version. It made even me, a mid thirties blues and americana entusiast, long for the days when I used to go to the raves back in Ohio, before they got all corporate and shit. 
 

Before he gives us another musical masterpiece, and we all live to regret it. Oops! Too late! Junkie XL is back with RadioJXL. I bought the double CD ($13 at Tower, for the moment); I bought the online extras for $6.99. You should too.

Highlights so far are Broken (vocals by Feeder's Grant Harrison), and Tennis...really fantastic stuff if you're into the Electronica thing.

Just like Merrill Lynch, I'll rate this as a strong buy.

I picked up a pair of M-Audio BX-8 reference monitors for my home studio (Cakewalk Sonar, Propellerhead Reason, Spectrasonics Atmosphere, Echo Audio MiaMIDI), and rapidly encountered the terrible low fidelity of your average MP3 files. I have a ton of CDs, and I've carefully encoded using "recommended audiophile settings" with high bitrate MP3s, over the past couple of years. The new speakers have shown me that MP3 is crap.

What is NOT crap is AAC, Apple's format for iTunes and iPod. I've done encodings at the 160k bit rate, and they are dramatically better than the equivalent rate MP3s. Next stop is Ogg Vorbis, for another quality check. I like the ideas behind Ogg, but the fidelity just has to be there...

Readers may not know that our own Johno is a fairly badass bass player. Next time I'm around I think I want to hear the amplified version, instead of the thwacky sounds we should only hear after all the oil is gone and we're living off seal fat in igloos.

From the New York Times:

The entertainment industry's pursuit of tough new laws to protect copyrighted materials from online piracy is bad for business and for the economy, according to a report being released today by the Committee for Economic Development, a Washington policy group that has its roots in the business world.

While this may be unsurprising to some, it will certainly come as a shock to the RIAA, should they ever read the report. The article continues:

Until recently, those who opposed strong copyright protections have been characterized by the entertainment industry as a leftist fringe with no respect for the value of intellectual property.

"The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support," said Debora L. Spar, a professor at Harvard Business School. "It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace."

...The group called for a two-year moratorium on changes to copyright laws and regulations to allow for more public debate. "Our first concern should be to 'do no harm,' " the report said.

Sensible advice that.

Four years after being kicked to the curb by the label he founded-- Arista Records, superstud Clive Davis finds himself back in the saddle as head of the North American music operation of BMG, owner of Arista. His erstwhile successor, L.A. Reid, has been ousted by the accountants due to an inability to make money off multiplatinum acts such as Pink.

(How do you not make money off of Pink's second album? That shit was everywhere, and I guarantee you her contract is not that favorable to her own interests. L.A. screwed up bad.)

Look at my last post about Tower Records, then read the story about Davis and see if you can spot the trouble. Back? Ok.

What seems like good news for Clive now could turn out to be not so good for anyone else. The major labels are in the same trouble the major retailers are, which is why BMG and Sony are in talks to merge their music operations. Obviously Davis has been brought on board to guide the music unit through the merger, and about the time the whole thing comes crashing down he'll semi-retire with millions of dollars and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

"What", you say? I say this: Sony and BMG are merging their music wings out of desperation because recorded music has ended its fifty-year run of profitability. Sooner or later there will be one or two major labels releasing 90% of the high-charting albums in the US and all the interesting stuff will happen around the giants' feet. The majors will still put out Britney and No Doubt and P.Diddy, but the interesting stuff, the good music for music's sake will happen even more exclusively in basements and garages, shabby offices, and out of the trunks of cars. Music will become local, and scenes will communicate via the inter-web. The transition will be ugly: radio will suck worse, the RIAA will kick like a mule with the DT's, mainstream distribution channels will become closed to smaller-name labels and bands, and great artists will be dropped like a sack of hammers. But the outcome will be great: awesome music, there for the taking for cheap or free, if only you know where to find it.

GeekLethal has tipped me off that Tower Records will finally seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, having run out of time, credit, and willing buyers.

Tower is the victim of several forces: the overall decline in recorded-music sales over the past five years; an ill-timed expansion just as sales peaked; rumors of poor financial management; and an inability of management to respond to the changing marketplace. The sow is smaller, and Tower is now sucking hind teat. So to speak.

Some of you may remember that Tower faced bankruptcy a couple years ago and had to close a few of its trademark superstores. By selling off their Japanese division and closing some US branches, they managed to stay alive, but at a cost. I personally felt the loss acutely, because the Tower Records on the corner of Newbury and Massachusetts Avenue in Boston was my dealer of choice of deep-catalog jazz and world music.

And that's the crying shame. Alone among the big stores, Tower was dedicated to carrying extensive back catalogs and relatively obscure artists along with the Top-40 glitz. They always had a wide selection of Jimmy Smith recordings produced by Rudy van Gelder, for example, and usually had a number of Sun Ra's less orthodox offerings as well. Unglamorous music, but wonderful stuff I was happy to buy. Unfortunately for Tower, these days such diversity on the retail side simply means tying up more capital in slowly-moving stock and eventually it killed them. Nowadays it just doesn't pay to carry the weird stuff.

Paradoxically, the opposite may hold for record labels. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolutions points to the bloodbath currently happening in the classical-recording world. All the big labels are shuttering their classical units because the cost of producing yet another recording of Mahler only to sell four thousand copies has now become outrageous. And yet the small labels offering weird music (Boulez, Xenakis, Scriabin) thrive.

What does this all mean? As Cowen says, "Let's not confuse 'good for the suits' with 'good for the consumer.' Big chains like Tower may go the way of the dodo, but that just means the model is dying, not the business underneath.

I wouldn't even think of trying to compete in music writing with Johno, but as a long-time (suffering) fan of electronic music, I thought I might put together a list of notable stuff...you can't really go wrong with any of this.

1. Orbital - "Orbital 2". The "brown" CD. Classic mid-nineties, easily the most polished effort of its time, and therefore somewhat timeless. "there is a twist in space"

2. Tangerine Dream - "Poland". Get the import, 2 CD version. An absolute classic; a landmark political and musical event. One of the finest long-form electronic concerts ever.

3. Underworld - "dubnobasswithmyheadman". Spooky, weird, depressing, and brilliant. Later Underworld is more polished and even better, but this is a key recording and lead-in to what they became.

4. LFO - "Advance". Brilliant early, experimental recording. Ridiculously difficult to find, and proportionally fantastic. Found this when it was attached to the computer game "Hardwar"; it was one of the first games to have "serious" music with it.

5. Junkie XL - "Big Sounds of the Drags". One of the grooviest "dance" CDs ever. It's a bit of a bridge between listening music and dance, though -- tracks are danceable but just plain fantastic listening. Brilliant production.

6. Assemblage 23 - "Defiance". Good late-model melodic industrial...showing you where that genre has gone. Doesn't really stand up with the rest of this list, but is useful as a touchstone for this style.

7. Aphex Twin - "Selected Ambient Works 85-92". Xtal, oh xtal. Singular, beautiful, ethereal...and really the last thing by Richard James I actually liked. A landmark.

8. Alpinestars - "B.A.S.I.C.". The best new "retro" electronic out there...along with its followup "White Noise". Brand new music that has groovy analog shit in it.

9. Sasha - "Airdrawndagger". Hated it the first time I heard it, as I was expecting something different. Picked it up again 6 months later because I couuld still remember some of it, and I've loved it ever since. This is one of my highest recommendations on the list, and the first "DJ" CD I've really respected. Unless you count Tom Holkenberg (Junkie XL) as a DJ.

10. Morel - "Queen of the Highway". Enveloping, dark, groovy, and local. Just what the doctor ordered. Morel worked with Deep Dish, and the searing, unstoppable beat of this CD smooths out the harshness (in meaning, not tone) of the lyrics.

That'll get you started. Every CD on this list is utterly different from the others; they are all good representatives of their sub-genres...so buy, damn you!

Upon prodding from Nat at I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, who is an avowed and active partisan on behalf of Wesley Clark, I hereby endorse my choice for the next President of the United States, Ronnie James Dio. Dio is the only candidate to truly address the issues important to working-class America, and the only one truly qualified. To wit:

• Has experience managing large organizations
• Extensive public speaking and diplomacy experience
• The only candidate to know first-hand what drugs can do to our youth
• Slayed the dragon
• The only candidate who has had to put aside a political career to feed his family
• Can rock out and sing really fucking high

Visit his website, dioforamerica.com and see what he has to say on the issues.

• On health care: advocates universal healthcare to all: "No more forms and working shit jobs while sick"
• On gay marriage: "Rob Halford wants it, so it's cool with me."

I hereby cast my support behind the only candidate that can not only beat Bush, but vanquish him with silver sword in hand over a bitchen guitar solo from Vivien Campbell, Ronnie James Dio. 

In today's edition of Salon.com (brought to you by Jann Wenner: now with 30% more man-boob!), Joel Keller laments the death of that music-geek's model airplane, the mix tape.

I miss the way I used to make mixes. I'd sit in front of my tape deck, with a stack of CDs or records on one side of me, and a beverage (adult or otherwise) on the other, and spend a couple of hours or more finding just the right combination of songs to put on the tape. The levels would all match; loud songs got softened and soft songs got a boost. I would attempt to take the mix right to the end of the tape; I'd spend over an hour finding that perfect minute-and-a-half song or snippet that would fit musically with the rest of the mix.

All the while, I would be swigging the beverage, and listening to each song as if it was the first time I'd heard it, usually with head down and some appendage keeping time. After a side was done, I'd rewind, punch out the tab, put on a custom-made label, and go to bed knowing that I've made something that I or my friends were going to enjoy for years to come. . . . [obligatory paen to Nick Hornby/High Fidelity]

Compare the way I used to do my tape mixes with the way I do things now: I sit in front of my PC and either rip an entire CD to disk or download files from any of the legal services like iTunes or Musicmatch (in pre-litigation days, I will admit I downloaded the occasional song via Kazaa). I drag the song titles from my song list to the playlist window; I check to see if there are any abrupt endings or bad transitions, but I rarely listen to the songs all the way through. Once I'm satisfied, I pop in a CD-R, hit "record" and go to sleep. No muss, no fuss. And not nearly as much fun.

Many people who don't have the same passion for the mix as I do simply copy entire collections of MP3s to CD or onto their iPod, not caring what order the songs are in. "I can now rip or download the songs I want to MP3. Then I dump them onto one of my MP3 players. The way the process has improved for me is that I can just hit shuffle and not know what the order [of songs] is always going to be," says Jason Meurer, an engineer from New Jersey. He is one of the people who answered my e-mail queries regarding people's mixing methods. From the limited sample I received, I noticed that while a fair number of people still perform meticulous mixes, just as many play randomly from their massive MP3 collections. No one has made a mix tape in years.

As a practicing music geek with a physical cd collection that is bowing the floor of the room it's housed in, I can assure you Joel Keller is full of shit.
Let's start at the beginning: It's all well and good to invoke the hallowed name of Hornby when talking about the mix, but we need to be clear. Nick Hornby, in "High Fidelity," described a small and obsessive subculture with the same love and attention that David Halberstam gave to amateur rowing in "The Amateurs" or Jon Krakauer gave to hard-core mountain climbers in ""Into Thin Air." He never meant to universalize the experience or to claim that everyone must and should care that, for example, Stevie Ray Vaughn's "Crossfire" can't sit next to Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" in a mix because the keys the songs are in clash harmonically. It's all voluntary.

That's not to say the old days weren't great. I too have fond memories of sitting in a sea of recordings in front of a tape deck, working and reworking the running order and tweaking levels. However, doey eyed nostalgia for those days comes off the same as pining for the days before good software when you had to laboriously program your own very data-sorting functions on the Apple II ("In my day, a bubble sort took hours! And we liked it!). But we don't have to do it that way anymore unless we choose to.

Why conflate cds with just dumping music wherever it lands? Has Joel Keller never heard of Toast? Roxio Easy CD Platinum? Please! Life is better now that I can change and preview running orders on the fly. What took hours now takes... fewer hours.

Moreover, the CD is a much better avenue for a mix than the tape ever was. Despite the demise of the "side" as a concept (a damned shame), the 4 1/2'' square on the front of the cd case is a blank canvas, begging for original cover art. 80-minute cd's are easier to program than a 90-minute tape, and are not as prone to breakage under normal conditions as long tapes used to be. Hiss is reduced. Tape players are relatively rare nowadays. Finally, and I can't stress this enough, the ability to audio software to crossfade has revolutionized the art of the personal compilation.

Joel is correct that, strictly speaking, few mix tapes are made anymore, but that mere technicality is the only point he gets right. (Doesn't Salon have editors?)

The culture is still alive and well, and unkillable. If Joel Keller can't be bothered to crossfade, set levels, do a demo test-run to check the running order, edit for length, or even make sure that he hasn't put the Cure next to Joy Division (unless it's part of a whole series of mopey UK postpunk!), it's his fault. My wife hates it when I retreat into the office with an armful of cd's and an idea: it means I'll be in there for days, ordering and reordering my mix, dropping songs in and out, cutting one down to just the chorus, doing ad-hoc remixes, and trying my best to fill up 80 minutes with a mix that not only flows from one song to another but also has episodes (sides!), a thesis, and an overarching theme.

Q.E.D.

Now. When Joel says,

Many people who don't have the same passion for the mix as I do simply copy entire collections of MP3s to CD or onto their iPod, not caring what order the songs. . . . "On the subways you see people with iPods. They have, what, a thousand songs on them. Ten thousand, even. They stare random-glared into oblivion. [R]obots with shitty music taste and too much money to spend on music-listening hardware and shoes, in that order," is how Sal Tuzzeo Jr., a music writer, describes the phenomenon. Fewer people who are connected to the music they listen to translates into a less critical and picky audience for the crapola that the record companies and radio stations promote. The quality of music overall goes downhill.

Where did I first read this argument? Oh right... Allan Bloom. I bet these tools haven't even read that chapter in "The Closing of the American Mind" where Bloom pukes out endless fatuous theories about the cultural deadness and "masturbatory fantasies" of Demon Rock and Roll, ultimately concluding,

As long as [kids these days] have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf."

Whatever. Any merit that Keller's lament might have is pretty much invalidated by mistakenly assuming that ooh, just everyone! gets off on music. Untrue: most people use music as a way to decorate the moment without much depth of thought. And that's fine. Pop music is meant to be enjoyed: the obsessions may be safely left to the geeks like Keller, who seems not to realize his geek nature. Sorry to break it to ya, this way, Poindexter.

I'm sorry. This article didn't really need a fisking, but it just makes me so...AAAAAUUUURGH! Go read something else, and sorry for wasting your time. I'm going to go listen to a Japanese import of a Flaming Lips concert from 1994 I bought off the internet.

[wik] Full disclosure: my wife still remembers to remind me of the unfortunate "Funkadelic" incident every time I start a mix. See, I spent three days with editing software trying to finesse a transition between Funkadelic's "(Not Just) Knee Deep" and De La Soul's "Me Myself & I," which used Funkadelic as the bedrock sample. Three days of me playing five seconds of music over and over again, tweaking the crossfade by milliseconds at a time. With no headphones. In a small apartment. I got in trouble.

Oh yeah, the mix tape isn't dead. It's just gone pro.

[alsø wik] Cross-posted in slightly different form at blogcritics.

Not to tread on the toes of our eminent musicologist Johno, but I think in his recent opus on the enduring value of the remix, he failed to note a significant argument for his position:

Lileks' YAAAAAARRRRHHHH!!! Remix

I bust a nut listening to this. If I needed proof beyond the fact that we blatantly ripped off the name of our blog from a bleat column that the man is a genius, this would be it. Heh. This also reinforces Johno's position on the imminent demise of the Dean insurgency. Indeed.

Many thanks to Greg over at BTD for bringing this to my attention. And shame on NPR for not giving the cite.

[wik] Here are some Chewbacca roars so you can compare and contrast.

[alsø wik] I especially like the harmonica bit.

[alsø alsø wik] I am especially glad that our very own Johno came up with this "wik" thingy, because I would have been too mortified to steal it from another blog.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Apparently, Former Senator Alan Simpson said of Dean, "He looked like a prairie dog on speed."

[see the løveli lakes...] And people were worried about McCain being unhinged...

Phil Dennison points to the news that producer Danger Mouse is planning to lay vocals from Jay-Z's "The Black Album" over the Beatles' "The White Album" to create "The Gray Album." Very reasonably, he asks, "Does anyone think that this will make either of these recordings objectively better? Has the world of commercial hip-hop become so creatively bankrupt and moribund that this is considered groundbreaking, or something? . . . This is creativity?"

Fair point. But while I agree that remixes tend to be bland and flabby affairs that add little of merit to the original, I think Phil is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

For example, the Flaming Lips recently remixed Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head," slowing down the original dance pap to a crawl, underlining an obsessive creepiness almost totally absent from the original except to the imaginative listener. Although this is only one example out of a mediocre ten thousand, it's great and revelatory stuff within the context of pop music.

Also, Phil conflates "remixes" with the more recent phenomenon of "vs. recordings." Although long-established in the reggae world (check out King Tubby vs. Sly & Robbie sometime-- magic!), where remixes are common, this is new to the pop world. Dropping Jay-Z onto a Beatles cut is a prime example of this practice.

I own a bootleg "vs." recording that truly does amplify the originals-- the vocals from Eminem's "Without Me" over the music bed from Led Zeppelin's instrumental, "The Crunge." Beyond just being funny or novel, Eminem's phrasing and particular flow, when slowed down to LZ's tempo, happen to complement and groove on the Zep track perfectly. I find the results mind-alteringly enjoyable.

Though I doubt the Jay-Z and Beatles matchup will rise to this level, I'm actually anxious to hear what Jay-Z's laconic, Joe-Frazier-like style will do over top of Across the Universe.

My point, I guess, is that the good name of the remix has been dragged so thoroughly through the mud that it's difficult to see the good in it. But the revolution is over: the studio is now a musical instrument in its own right, as are recordings. Not everyone has to agree that that way lies genius; reasonable people may differ. But I happen to think so, and if you want evidence, I urge you to get a copy of the Eminem/Led Zep and the Flaming Lips/Kylie Minogue as proof.