Alex Ross Shout Out! Awesome.

I will say, I was SHOCKED, shocked I say, to discover that Martin and the gang like The Girls.

You and the Monarch, baby.

I'm name-checked in Alex Ross's New Yorker blog. Go me! [link]

Cool bean, Jon!

Oh, and exciting news about the move, Corwood. Congratulations to you both. I know you won't let Melville down when you're teaching.

Exciting new worlds of barbecue unfold before you.

Wow, Hayden -- exciting news!

Google shuts down music blogs without warning

These sites, hosted by Google's Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.

High Hat editor Bill Ham quoted in the WSJ: [link]

Dumb Labels, Laws (Not Google) To Blame for Music Blog Deletions

...

But the biggest problem here is that the laws and organizations affecting music copyright don’t make any sense when applied to music blogs. Labels often give bloggers permission to post a given track, but that doesn’t stop their representatives from issuing takedown notices for those same songs, as Bill Lipold of I Rock Cleveland noted in Google forums on Wednesday and Thursday.

Lipold told Wired.com that Mute Records gave him permission to post the XX Teens’ song “Darlin” on his blog, for instance. Like most music bloggers, he intentionally breaks older links to songs to avoid running up expensive bandwidth bills by deleting MP3s older than two months. That didn’t stop the apparently automated enforcement system of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) from alerting Google to this supposed case of copyright infringement.

You’re reading this right: Five years of Lipold’s labor of love was deleted, in part, because he posted a track with full permission of a label, and the track apparently wasn’t even online by the time the IFPI filed its complaint.

“If at any point during the process a human being actually clicked on the link and looked for the infringing content, then they would have realized it wasn’t there,” said Lipold. “Unfortunately, the bot the IFPI uses to flag piracy isn’t that smart… This bot makes a report for security at the IFPI and they forward the whole list on to Google. Google seems to accept their list as is, no questions asked.”

The thing is, Google doesn’t have a choice.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether music blogs are good or bad for the music industry, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forces Google to take these actions — otherwise, it would lose the protection of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” clause and could be found liable for any copyright infringement on its blogging networks.

Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch to guest curate All Tomorrow's Parties 2010, initial lineups announced

I have been poking around youtube, and am wondering (because I like it) if there is a name for the vocal quality that Pink and Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse and every gospel singer out there share that sort of sounds like they are doubling themselves or singing chords or something. Is that a technique or just how they sound?

Pink singing trouble acoustically: [link]

Well, I don't think it's melisma.

I have heard that black gospel singing (which is what the other singers are copying to some degree) involves a combination of head voice and chest voice that's uncommon.

Maybe somebody who knew more about singing (Dana?) could shed some light.