Yay I'm not the only grown-up (ish) person who loves Fall Out Boy!
I quite enjoy them myself!!
"The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'"
shrift, that song broke my Windows XP. It is too long for it to handle. I can't do ANYTHING with it in Windows. Rename, move, delete, anything. The other song that did it is by Of Montreal:
"Upon Settling On The Frozen Island, Lecithin Presents Claude And Coquelicot With His Animal Creations For Them To Approve Or Reject (The Rejected Inventions Walk Towards The Reverse Magnetitizer)"
For those who may have similar musical tastes to me, here are some music recs from the Oakland Art and Soul Festival.
Short version: Audrye Sessions, the Lovemakers, Great Northern.
Worst song lyrics evah!: [link]
This one is "good":
Young, black and famous
With money hangin'
Out the anus
But i dunno - there must be worse lyrics out there....
Long-ass article in the NYT about the record industry. [link]
Mostly about Rick Rubin (who I think is most famous for starting Def Jam) working for Columbia.
The mighty music business is in free fall — it has lost control of radio; retail outlets like Tower Records have shut down; MTV rarely broadcasts music videos; and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple. "The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content," David Geffen, the legendary music mogul, told me recently. "Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it's no longer about making music, it's all about how to sell music. And there's no clear answer about how to fix that problem. But I still believe that the top priority at any record company has to be coming up with great music. And for that reason, Sony was very smart to hire Rick."
...
"Until very recently," Rubin told me over lunch at Hugo's, a health-conscious restaurant in Hollywood, "there were a handful of channels in the music business that the gatekeepers controlled. They were radio, Tower Records, MTV, certain mainstream press like Rolling Stone. That's how people found out about new things. Every record company in the industry was built to work that model. There was a time when if you had something that wasn't so good, through muscle and lack of other choices, you could push that not very good product through those channels. And that's how the music business functioned for 50 years. Well, the world has changed. And the industry has not."
But then Rubin starts going on about the subscription model being the industry's salvation. I think most people still want to
own
their music, you know?
I bookmarked that article to read later, but you know I have been reasonably happy with the subscription model. The only irritating bit is the constant negotiation going on behind the scenes that means that my Black Crowes are available one week and not the next. But other than that, as much of a music fan as I am, I seem to be perfectly content between XM & Napster.
But then Rubin starts going on about the subscription model being the industry's salvation.
That's the point in the article where it lost its credibility for me.
I think that the industry wants subscriptions so badly, because it's the only business model that allows them to stay in business.
As Fake Steve Jobs put it:
Here's the back story. The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution. They’ve got big warehouses and they control the shipment of little plastic boxes that happen to have music in them.
The guys running the labels are pretty stupid -- most are just dirtbags who started out as band managers or promoters -- but now at long last they are kinda sorta finally vaguely getting clued in to the fact that both parts of their business model are fucked. Their loan-sharking business is being eliminated by low-cost digital recording technology that lets people make an album for very little money. And by letting us build the online music store they've taken themselves out of the distribution business. In the days of vinyl and then CDs, the labels managed to control the value chain by having loads of retailers in a highly fragmented market, and playing them off each other. In the digital world they've got us. And that's it.
Miranda July's playlist for the NY times
A sample:
4) Sycamore, Bill Callahan. Another one from Bill Callahan (aka Smog). This whole new album from him make me cry. I’ve spent so many years counting on him for dark songs and then suddenly - joy. Right. Things could just be ok. It is with this realization that I get a little tearful.
Miranda July's playlist for the NY times
Do I have room for another seekret girlfriend?
Do I have room for another seekret girlfriend?
Go and defend her on the NY Times blog! Some dill weed just called her pretentious.
What an ass.
I snarked at him. I wonder if it'll be approved.
