Mirror.co.uk: Interview: Iron Maiden: “That’s one of the reasons we’re now bigger than ever,” smiles Bruce, “whereas a lot of bands and people in general worry about what others think of them and change accordingly.” “We don’t because we’ve never really cared what others think. We always thought that if people don’t like it, that’s tough – we’ll just have to do it for a smaller audience. But the opposite has proved the case.”
Mark Morford, at SFGate, in April, wrote a lyrical, powerful piece about music the Earth itself is generating: “In other words, you love loud punk? Metal? Jazz? Deep house? Saint-Saens with a glass of Pinot in the tub? Sure you do. That’s because somewhere, somehow, deep in your very cells and bones and DNA, it links you back to source, to the Earth’s own vibration, the pulse of the cosmos. Oh yes it does. To tap your foot and sway your body to that weird new Portishead tune is, in effect, to sway it to the roar of the universe. I mean, obviously.”
As he mentions, scientists have been debating the source (or sources) of the ‘hum’ for a long time, a sampling:
Mark Morford says this is the kind of thing, in our day to day driven world, we don’t take a moment to stop and ponder: “This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.”
He’s right. My friends shake their heads at me sometimes and tease me for being a bit of a “hippie” for pondering this stuff. But it’s these kinds of mysteries that take my heart to flight, sing to me, and lighten my step as I think about the wonderful world we live in.
Inspired by Bill’s list, here are some of my favorites, in no particular order, because I can no longer put together a short list, and most possibly influenced by my last few posts…
I Believe In Miracles – The Ramones – Brain Drain – video
Jumpin’ Jack Flash – The Rolling Stones – Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! – video
Love Song – Tesla – The Great Radio Controversy – video (a video of a Philadelphia concert Richelle and me missed over ten years ago).
and matt good sings
youre gonna get what you deserve
and not a penny less
bible says its easier for a camel to get thru the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven.
because we are attached to the wrong things.
and we’re such liars. saying we’re a christian nation
we dont read the bible and we ignore everything in it when its read to us.
then bitch when someone tells us that we’re not going to heaven.
youre not going to heaven because you hate everything pure on earth
youre not going to heaven because you reject good right here
youre not going to heaven because you dont value love
and heaven is love incarnate. so fuck your whines and fuck your earthly goals.
money is not the way. pretty boy quarterbacks arent the way
dumb blonde beauty queens are not the way.
george bush ryan seacrest maroon five dave matthews
…Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far — and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.
The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it’s too late. “The record business is over,” says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. “The labels have wonderful assets — they just can’t make any money off them.” One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: “Here we have a business that’s dying. There won’t be any major labels pretty soon.”
…More record executives now seem to understand that their problems are structural: The Internet appears to be the most consequential technological shift for the business of selling music since the 1920s, when phonograph records replaced sheet music as the industry’s profit center. “We have to collectively understand that times have changed,” says Lyor Cohen, CEO of Warner Music Group USA. In June, Warner announced a deal with the Web site Lala.com that will allow consumers to stream much of its catalog for free, in hopes that they will then pay for downloads. It’s the latest of recent major-label moves that would have been unthinkable a few years back…
I suspect Fred misses the good old days when listening to music was the thing, itself. As opposed to something you do while you’re doing something else. These days everything is compressed. Time. Music. Fun. Back in the day, we’d put Frampton Comes Alive on the turntable, sit back and just enjoy the sound. Same with the Allman’s At Fillmore East, and the best one of all- Europe ’72. We’d read the album covers and the liner notes. We never felt hurried, like we should be doing something else.
Our record collections were tangible. We could browse through them like books. The joy of picking out a record, taking it out of the sleeve and putting it on the turntable was a ritual to our passion.
And a huge kick in the head is the news that Rick Rubin is now a co-President at Columbia Records.
“That’s the magic of the business,” he said. “It’s all doom and gloom, but then you go to a Gossip show or hear Neil in the studio and you remember that too many people make and love music for it to ever die. It will never be over. The music will outlast us all.”
Rick Rubin has been a force in music that has influenced me for the last twenty years. He’s now producing Metallica’s latest and hopefully will return them to greatness. Can any one ‘save’ the music industry? No. But it can be re-invented. And Rubin can play a major role.
As Dave Rogers puts it for Paul Potts, that opera singer that Rubin was gushing about, “the love of the art preceded the opportunity to exploit it, commercially” – that’s something Rubin has always understood. His pursuit of Hip-Hop, Metal, or Roots Rock (the Black Crowes) acts before they were mainstream always made him stand out. His search for the pure soul of an artist, whether it be Neil Diamond or Johnny Cash, exemplifies it.
Rick Rubin being Co-President of Columbia does mark me as old however. He and the music he’s promoted, are no longer on the fringes of the mainstream, and now he’s part of the machine.
cuz even the donnas had to form their own label. dropped by atlantic after “fall behind me” only made a few suits rich, the donnas are doing their own thing now, shunning their donna c, donna s., schtict and now using their real names, the donnas rocked the world famous viper room last night for their album release party of Bitchin’, which drops today.
Oh dear. Two weeks is nowhere near enough time to master a challenging new technique. Our fast-paced culture of instant gratification leads many people to expect to totally kick ass at new skills within an extremely short time. If they can’t manage, they think they either don’t have the “talent” for it or that they must be doing something horribly wrong.
Some skills just take time to develop. And beware: there are plenty of guitarists out there who will lie about grossly underestimate the amount of time and effort they need to master a given technique, just so they will appear more “talented.” This is total bovine excrement. So cut yourself some slack, realize that any skill takes time to develop, and don’t compare your own progress with other people’s.
The push to have blogs adopt a ‘Code of Conduct’, including content warnings for visitors, reminds me of the P.M.R.C. and the “Warning, Explicit Content” stickers that are smacked on on just about every album worthy to buy.
I wonder what Frank Zappa would have to say?
Watch the whole Frank Zappa video. Then read Tim O’Reilly’s post and comments about the proposed ‘Code of Conduct’. Then revisit the conversation taking place about it (more links later). The overtones are there.
Question… where can I find the blogosphere equivalent of the “Filthy Fifteen” so I can subscribe to their RSS feeds?
Update: Frank Paynter has a way forward that sounds right to me – and I think it can still be effective.
Jeff Jarvis: No twinkie badges here.; “This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone – they’ll do us the favor – can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But as Doc Searls has taught me, it’s not. It’s a place.
Shelley Powers: badges: I’ve seen as many vicious comments in men’s weblogs, as I’ve seen in women’s. I think the perceived ‘threat to all women’ supposedly inherent in weblogging has been exaggerated-not to our benefit, either.
Boing Boing: Blogger “code of conduct” trades freedom for politeness: Tim O’Reilly’s well-intentioned Blogger Code of Conduct is an attempt to come up with a voluntary set of behavioural norms that will keep blogs civil and honest. However, I was very uncomfortable with Tim’s draft, as it seemed to preclude real anonymity and invite censorship.
Dan Gillmor: In Blogosphere, Honor Should Rule: They’re creating a bit of a monster, as they discuss asking people to put logos on their work defining various categories of behavior. Who’d be the judge of it? The government? Libel lawyers? Uh, oh.
Nicholas Carr: Thanks, Tim and Jimbo!: In the future, blogs that can safely be ignored will be marked with a cute little badge..
Dave Winer: O’Reilly’s code of conduct: We all seem to be speaking with one voice today, this code of conduct idea is not a good one.
Robert Scoble: Code of conduct or not?: So, for now, I guess I’d have to wear the “anything goes” badge.
Seth Finkelstein: “Blogging Code of Conduct” – WHO ENFORCES IT?: I am simply shouting to the wind here out of frustration with the failure of blogging to provide any defense whatsoever: WHO ENFORCES THE CODE-OF-CONDUCT?
TNL.net: Blogger’s Code of Conduct: a Dissection: Because of such lapses and because I believe that “the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship,” I have to say that this code is not only a bad idea but one that should strenuously be rejected by members of the blogosphere.
“I think I’m still very concerned that saying you take responsibility for the comments on your blog means you actually take *legal* responsibility for them.
The only people who can take such responsibility are those with time on their hands – with money and resources.
Which leads to thinking that only those with money should enable comments on their blog.
Maybe I’m the only one concerned about this angle because I’m the rare exception of someone still in touch with poverty and being poor and folks that aren’t tech savy – in this discussion mainly filled with technologists and such.
I’m sorry but that and the addition of the badges make this feel like a form of self-segregation – just another way of identifying ‘us’ against whomever ‘them’ is.
Aggregators will be able to use such badging to further filter the Web, keeping other voices from its edges from being heard.
Having commenting policies makes a ton of sense. That’s obvious. But what this is evolving into….
I’m sorry, IMHO it’s reactive and needs a re-think.”
How we introduce our children to the culture that made us – us – is a complicated thing. It’s far harder then I thought it would be.
The Baby Boomers didn’t seem to fret that their culture, which glorified counter-culture, was the mainstream, while Gen-Xers were growing up. Reduced to a series of insidious marketing messages that taught us to spend our youthful energies consuming goods that made us look rebellious, and feel rebellious.
They hypocritically fretted over the lyrical content of Prince, W.A.S.P., and Metallica, when The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, laid it all down twenty years before. And it was broadcasted to Gen-X wherever we went.
It’s always do as I say, not as I do. Isn’t it?
We live in the age of niche media now. Broadcast doesn’t have that kind of access to our children it once had. Chances are my neighbors kids listen to different music then the neighbors next to them.
So we have decisions to make.
Right now it’s what is appropriate music for a baby?
Tonight I plan to learn the guitar to “This Little Light of Mine” and sing it for Emma. Inspired by last night’s re-broadcast of “When the Levees Broke”. Just an unbeliebable song on so many levels. I remember singing it in elementary school choir.
She loves The Ramones. “I Wanna Be Sedated” gets her feet moving and her face lights up as she laughs. And she likes Bon Jovi. Especially “It’s My Life”. You start singing the pre-chorus and you can see the look in her face waiting for the hook to kicks in. She loves the Annie soundtrack, especially “Dumb Dog”, and The Sound of Music soundtrack, especially “Do-Re-Mi”. The bigger the score, the louder the chorus, the better.
Who am I to argue with a smile and a laugh like hers?
Behold the dulcet tones of Metallica, my sweet little cherub-rockers!
Out are the roaring guitars, pummeling drums and howling lyrics such as “pounding out aggression / turns into obsession / cannot kill the battery / cannot kill the family.” In: glockenspiel, Mellotron, vibraphone and chimes.
If you listen closely enough, you might even hear the people behind the “Rockabye Baby” series laughing. They’re totally in on the joke, which they plan on repeating often: Albums of lullabyzed Radiohead and Coldplay songs are also out today — never mind that some of Coldplay’s originals are already soporific. And many more will follow — from Tool and Pink Floyd, both due next month, to Nirvana, the Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins and Queens of the Stone Age.
“I’m laughing the whole time; it’s all tongue-in-cheek,” says Michael Armstrong, who is producing and performing the albums — a process that involves extracting the lyrics and musical teeth from the songs.
It’s not a joke really. Is it? And no – I’m not buying this crap.
still looks like 
to me.