Music video and interview.
I can’t pretend to get this or even like it, but by fuck I’m glad it’s out there. I gather Plan B is fairly popular and signed to Warners but who cares, it’s about time music that kids listen to got political again.
(Although I do kinda like it.)
Back in the day I bought a CD single by Jonathan Fire*Eater which included the track The City Never Sleeps. I liked this a lot and it lodged nicely in my brain in that way songs do. I’d assumed it was one of Mr Fire*Eater’s own compositions so I was quite surprised when a Nancy Sinatra version popped out of the musicosphere at me.
Apparently it was the b-side to These Boots… which dates it as 1966. But there’s also a version by The Shacklefords on YouTube also dated 1966.
It’s not as good but it’s definitely the same song, and from the same year. How odd that seems now.
The Nancy track came to me from the Songs The Fall Taught Us compilation although be warned their version, done for a 1995 John Peel session, is pretty terrible.
I put some money into CASH Music, a Kickstarter project, last night. The tagline is “what WordPress did for bloggers, we’re doing for musicians” and that doesn’t just mean free versions of the current crop of tools out there. It means taking the “if no-one owns it everyone owns it” ethos of free software and building something that can’t be sold to Sony at the end of the day.
I do feel sorry for musicians. Music was the fuel of a lot of what we call the Internet Revolution because it was easy to digitise and because people wanted to share it. Music is the lubricant of culture which is why it generates absurd amounts of money for the corporations that control it. Yet musicians, the people who actually make the stuff, have been consistently screwed since the mechanisation of music and probable before. This is an attempt to make the Internet work for them like it was supposed to.
The other thing that excites me about this is it rejects the toxic venture capitalist model which fuelled the social media boom with oddles of free money and will soon be demanding it’s money back. Sure, it’s neat that Tumblr can be all free and stuff but at some point they’re going to have to sell up, probably to exactly the same corporations they were supposed to be an alternative to. And just look at how sustainable selling Flickr to Yahoo turned out to be. Imagine if it had been turned into a non-profit. (I’ve been toying with a campaign to get the founder to abandon their game and buy back Flickr but it’s not really fair since Flick was an accidental byproduct of a game in the first place.)
So yeah, lots of practical good things and lots of ideologically sound things. Well worth $25 for a t-shirt.
via Steve Lawson.
Rather enjoyed this video for St Vincent‘s Cheerleader even though it’s a complete appropriation of Ron Mueck‘s work. I guess it just adds enough not to be an annoying ripoff. Nice tune too.
via Clusterflock
Cutest family cover version evar.
via Stellar
One from the archives. I downloaded Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds in 2005 but just stumbled upon it in the unrated depths of my iTunes library. I was delighted to find it stands up to another listen (actually, I suspect my tastes have caught up with it in places) so since you probably didn’t see it the first time, and it’s still online, here’s a recommendation.
I love the self-deprecation of the title. This isn’t just fucking with the classics for the sake of it.
Pet sounds is an album that everyone should own, study, cherish, and enjoy. Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds is an open-ended experiment conducted out of reverence, curiosity, and awareness of the sobering fact that you can’t improve upon perfection.
There’s also a nice Metafilter thread.
When Fiona and I were dating I would irritate the shit out of her by playing Parry Gripp songs over and over in the hope that one of them would become “our song”. And she’s stuck with me for nearly three years so far so go figure.
Anyway, Mr Gripp just popped back into my sphere with this glory. The lyrics alone are pure poetry even without the music.
Last week Mr Phoenix commented that the Goodbye video was “intensely stalkerish”. This video, accompanying music by Amon Tobin, is even moreso, like someone watched Hardware and thought it was dead romantic.
via Craig Earp
Appears to be a Japanese funk band called Zainichi Funk.
Liking this on a number of levels.
From a really enjoyable New Yorker profile:
Thinking that an office job might be a good thing to try, she did a six-month stint at Wieden+Kennedy—the modish Portland ad agency responsible for Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. [..] But working at an ad agency proved alienating, she said, because of the way “the work mimics art.” She added, “Music, to me, is an earnest populist endeavor and this was a cynical populist one.”
The distinction between earnest and cynical is an important one, I think.
(Click on the tree for 200mb of seasons chiptunes)
A few months back Brian Duffy, Birmingham’s greatest artist (and no mistake), gave a talk at TEDx Aldeburgh followed by a brief performance by his Modified Toy Orchestra. The full video is now online. The version of Black Star they finish with is quite something.
via MTO member Graham Rose
John Twells closes down his Xela musical persona with a final album which you can stream/download for free.
He explains why:
This was a project that for better or for worse lived and died in the muddy puddles outside the Arboretum, and in the 50p bin on the VHS stall at Bescot Market. It doesn’t have any relevance here in Massachusetts, and that’s why I’m bringing things to a close.
John Coulthart informs us of a lovely phenomena in the recorded music industry – the album cover parody cover. A visual version of the cover version, if you like.
Some covers inspire more parodies than others. One of my favourites is the perennial inspiration provided by Whipped Cream & Other Delights, Herb Alpert’s hugely popular 1965 album whose cover by Peter Whorf Graphics may now be more well-known than the music it packaged.
There are more in John’s post and even more on this page.
John was promoted to post this on hearing of a new book, Covered, which looks at the phenomena in much more detail. Here’s Covered’s cover featuring cover covers.
All Together Now – Everything the Beatles ever did. by ramjac
Sequenced so they all end at the same time. It’s quite glorious stuff. via Waxy
Show Me The Place by leonardcohen
More info at CBC Radio 2. via @cybrum
I’ve been a huge fan of George and Jonathan since their first album The Best Music came out last year. It fits into my 8-bit Computer Games niche interest and has all the usual evil nostalgia and irony hooks to drag you down, but there’s something else going on. It’s like the music from Sonic The Hedgehog freed from the constraints of the MegaDrive and polished up for the big stage with love and ambition.
It’s also immense fun.
The new album, Beautiful Lifestyle, dropped this week and it’s extraordinarily complementary to the first. I’ve had it on all day and I’m loving it. Expect to hear it, and their Christmas album, at next month’s 8bit Lounge. (Each of those links takes you to a page where you can listen to the album in full.)
I was having a discussion this weekend about bands who don’t live up to their controversial names. Fucked Up are a strange case as while they’re agressive enough to justify the name they’re actually not that fucked up. There’s an incredible control and delineation in what they do, especially with the current album David Comes To Life which is one of my favourites of this year.
This video is a lot of fun. Watch it.