Category: Music

Aversion: Sleater-Kinney Announces Tour. Including two shows in Seattle. I’ve only been waiting for a few years to see them live. This should be good.
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Doc Searls really nails what’s wrong with the entertainment industry, aka “the star-making machinery,” and why it’s pulling every string it can to ensure that the web doesn’t walk on its turf, even if it means killing the web:

The entertainment industry is fundamentally about making stars. It isn’t just about entertaining people, except as an effect of the star system, which serves to entertain mass quantities of people. It’s about packaging celebrity as a product, causing appetites for it, and delivering mass quantities of stuff made appealing by it, for as long as any variety of it might last. And doing it over and over and over again.

Nothing wrong with that, by the way. Just something wrong with nothing but that.

Which is why the CARP/LOC ruling is so awful and wrong. It’s about maintaining the incumbent star-making machinery that starts with the recording industry and works its way through commercial broadcasting, mass market advertising, arena performance events and cross-promotion through the whole mess of it.

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It’s a beautiful morning here in Boston. I’m lingering over the New York Times and other items in my Radio aggregator, drinking tea, making an omelet, listening to The Juliet Letters.

True confession: I loved this album when it came out. I couldn’t stop playing it. Today I know there’s something a little too arch about the performance, a little too forced in the compromise between pop songwriting and string quartet writing. But still I love the album: the somber wordless opening “Deliver Us,” the melancholic “For Other Eyes,” the gleefully wicked “I Almost Had a Weakness,” the wistful “Who Do You Think You Are?” Perfect early morning reflection music.
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Washington Post: Mega Hurts: Clear Channel’s Big Radio Ways Are Getting a Lot of Static These Days (via Slashdot). Apparently Clear Channel’s relentless homogenization of US radio is causing some other people than me to turn off that station. Or maybe it’s just the hideous advertising slump.

In some cities, the company’s radio stations attract as much as half the audience and advertising dollars… If a pending deal to buy a competitor in Charlottesville is approved, Clear Channel would control more than 90 percent of that city’s radio market, according to analyst Mark Fratrik of BIAfn Inc.

But if Clear Channel is a colossus, it’s a colossus under the gun.

The company lost money every quarter last year, piling up an annual loss of $1.1 billion. Clear Channel also is shouldering $8 billion in debt — the legacy of its deal-a-minute expansion spree. With a long advertising slump afoot, the company’s stock is selling at about half its peak price of two years ago.

Currently playing song: “Fight Against Drug Abuse – Public Service Announcement” by James Brown. Cause drugs are super bad, super bad, super bad, super bad…

While I’m on the subject, I have to apologize for saying that And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead’s “Relative Ways” “sounds a whole lot like really good Sonic Youth.” That’s not nearly specific enough. The intro and 4/4 / 3/4 guitar hook sounds pretty specifically exactly like the 5/4 middle section of “Wildflower Soul,” while the verse melody is highly derivative of “Teen Age Riot” (from Daydream Nation). Just wanted to clear that up.

Appears that Sonic Youth have tapped enfant terrible Jim O’Rourke to join the band permanently. As I haven’t cared much for anything O’Rourke has done, solo or otherwise, since the demise of Gastr Del Sol, I wonder what the result will be. I do know that I thought “NYC Ghosts & Flowers” (the first full album to feature O’Rourke) was pretty lame compared to its predecessors.
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Currently playing song: “Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway(again)” by Wilco on Summerteeth.

Currently playing song: “Kid A” by Radiohead on Kid A.

Rolling Stone: Sleater-Kinney Wrap “One Beat”. Um, finally. I’ve been waiting for the new album since before I started business school.
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Currently playing song: “Relative Ways” by And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead on Source Tags and Codes. Sadly, while this song sounds a whole lot like really good Sonic Youth a la A Million Leaves or Washing Machine, the rest of the album sounds a whole lot like… a lot of other bands. I might think better of it after another listen.

Today, as pointed out in this Slashdot article, has been designated Internet Radio Day of Silence to protest the CARP ruling on additional royalties for streaming music over the Internet. There’s a detailed description on why this is A Bad Thing at the DNA Lounge.

Unfortunately no one seems to have told my favorite Seattle station, KEXP, who are still streaming their broadcast.
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Just got back from the 2002 Earth Fest at the Hatch Shell in Boston. Johnny A, Garbage, Lisa Loeb, Midnight Oil, and Bonnie Raitt. I’m a bit sunburned and dehydrated, but happy.

Garbage played a short set, maybe seven songs, but rocked pretty well. Lisa Loeb seemed to play on forever. I’m sort of a fan, but I had to agree when my friend Carie said to me, “She tries to sound really happy, but she’s got all these Alanis Morrisette lyrics.” “Yeah,” I said, “She’s like what if Alanis went to Mt. Holyoke.”

Midnight Oil rocked my world. I had forgotten that there was a period of time, starting around 1987 or 1988, when I listened to this band quite a lot. The CDs are long gone but the band is still going strong. One of our friends, a banker-to-be from Europe, was enjoying the show. He confessed, “I used to be really into this band, but then I used to be a Communist too.”

I was too tired to take in much Bonnie Raitt; when I found myself almost falling asleep I decided it was time to head back. Good show, though, and well worth the money I didn’t pay for it (yeah, it was a free show!).

Currently playing song: “Hot rock” by Sleater-Kinney on The Hot Rock.

Happiness is a new Elvis Costello record and finally having Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in my hands. EC: return to form. So far, with the exception of the song with samples, sounds a lot like “Brutal Youth.” Wilco: it’s a miracle the album came out at all, what with all the mess around its release. More later. Must listen, must listen.