“Today is not much skilled craftsmen capable of creating a truly awful cover for a vinyl disc. This art, alas, almost lost. When we look to come down to us … Well, I’m sick of this stylized idiocy.” Jaroslav Sviridov went through LP Cover Lover and picked his favourites: 1, 2, 3. (NSFW for deeply unstylish exposed breasts.) This never gets old.
The last song of the last night, “My Pal” by the Drones with Joel Silbersher, on video.
And, of course, the 7:30 Report. Now, I remember Hamish Fitzsimmons as my mate the Perth bass player who I swapped my 6-UVS T-shirt for a Mustang! Beer Makes You Smart shirt … just the man you want on this story.
The ABC in its infinite wisdom has started broadcasting its first run of the BBC’s Seven Ages Of Rock in the Silly Season, with episode one “The Birth Of Rock” shown last week and unfortunately not available on iView. However I was fortunate enough to catch it when broadcast.
Focussing on the explosion of Blues-based Rock from 1963-1970, “The Birth Of Rock” was a rocknerd’s delight, featuring rare performance footage, new and archive interviews with Keith Richards, Roger Daltrey, Ginger Baker etc. and insights from British rock writers including Charles Shaar Murray. I look forward to watching the rest of the series.
From Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content: If bands were dates.
Update: And more.
Royal Mail has issued a stamp set that commemorates ten classic rock album covers ranging from The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed to Coldplay’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head.
The stamps were launched on the 7th of January by Jimmy Page, and Led Zeppelin’s “IV” is included in the ten chosen from thousands by Royal Mail for the imagery of their covers rather than the music on the albums themselves.
PUBLIC ENEMA, The Hit Parade, Thursday (N! News) — James Blunt’s Back To Bedlam was the UK’s biggest-selling album of the 2000s, objectively establishing the final death of pop music after fifty years.
The 2000s were the decade of falling record sales, plummeting profits for the six five four major labels, a number one single requiring only a few thousand downloads as opposed to a hundred thousand physical records twenty-five years earlier and a race to the bottom by the music industry to come up with something, anything, so horrifyingly insipid and stupid as to destroy instantly the mind of anyone exposed to it, like a saccharine Cthulhu, in the quest to find a sufficiently common lowest denominator.
From unexpected drama to shocking performances, MTV’s 2009 Video Music Awards managed once again to raise eyebrows and get people talking. What most people missed, however, were the occult meanings encoded in the VMAs. The TV event was in fact a large scale occult ceremony, complete with an initiation, a prayer and even a blood sacrifice. Vigilant Citizen looks at the symbolism used during the show. Cheers to Annette for alerting me to this vital information.
I got a new MP3 player for Christmas from Arkady. It’s a cheap shitty ChiPod — S1 chipset-based. I actually asked specifically for a cheap shitty S1-based ChiPod because they play Oggs and I happen to have a shitload here. (Doesn’t say in the manual they do, ‘cos supporting Ogg means Thomson charge you ten times the price for the MP3 licence. So they just snuck it in anyway.) Pink, 4 gig, looks like a fake Nano 4G, torturous interface. JUST WHAT I ALWAYS WANTED!
With SkullCandy Ink’d headphones. Apparently these are “hep” with the “kids.” They just happen to be pretty good for ten quid (seven on Amazon). Left and right aren’t marked, as is apparently the fashion these days (telling left and right isn’t “fab” or “bling” or whatever the “emo” term is). But if you’re too cheap for Sennheisers or Etymotics, they’ll do very nicely, thank you.
‘Pod is filled with This Kind Of Punishment, ’80s New Zealand indie on Xpressway. 1, 2, 3. Never say I never give you anything.
Redcountess blessed me with What Would Keith Richards Do? (”Everything.”)
Oh, and my mother gave me Christian Rock. I don’t dare play this thing in case it causes a vortex of suck consuming all in its wake.
So. How was your haul?
Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax are confirmed to share the stage at the Sonisphere festivals in Poland and the Czech Republic next Northern Summer.
Anthrax and Slayer are also confirmed for the UK Sonisphere festival, but with the headliners already announced as being Iron Maiden and Rammstein it is unlikely that the “Big Four” pioneers of Thrash will all play at Knebworth. However earlybird ticket buyers for the UK festival will get a free ticket for the Poland show.
Julian Lennon and co-songwriter James Scott Cook will donate a percentage of profits from a song on Lennon’s new EP to the Lupus Foundation of America and St Thomas’ Lupus Trust.
Titled Lucy, the song is about Lennon’s childhood friend Lucy Vodden, the alleged inspiration for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, who suffered from Lupus for many years before dying in September this year. Cook had a grandmother, also called Lucy, who also died from Lupus.
Spotted by Redcountess, Martin Newell’s 1992 rock’n'roll Christmas lyrics. I particularly liked “Hip King Wenceslas.”
Andy Updegrove is a computer standards lawyer. This is about as far from rocknerdery as you get. But I deeply appreciated his piece from 2005 on the Hammond B-3 Organ and how it has “has received recognition as an instrument in its own right — something even Stradivarius failed to achieve.”
We’ve all poked fun at him over the years, but one of Rock’n'Roll’s veterans with a big heart, Ronnie James Dio is battling the early stages of stomach cancer in The Mayo Clinic.
If you feel so inclined you can send Ronnie a get well card or email to help him throw the horns at the big C.
There is a social networking campaign to stop Simon Cowell achieving another Christmas no. 1 spot this year with one of his overblown ersatz productions.
The creators of the campaign are asking people to buy Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name Of online from iTunes, Amazon etc. between December 13th and December 20th in order for it to qualify for the Christmas no. 1 spot.
“What kind of music do you like?”
Fuck. Who can answer a question like that? I HAVE FUCKING THOUSANDS OF ALBUMS, MOTHERFUCKER. IF YOU CAN FIND THE COMMONALITY OTHER THAN “THEY’RE IN THE SAME HOUSE,” YOU’VE JUST PRODUCED A NEW GRAND UNIFIED FUCKING THEORY OF MUSIC AND THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER CAN JUST FUCKING GIVE UP AND GO HOME LIKE THE N00B IT IS.
(And pissed off at myself that I haven’t come up with a glib small-talk answer to that question that I wouldn’t choke on saying out loud.)
What makes you RAAAGE so hard you want to throw the record player out the window?
You can’t figure that chord out, can you? Turns out there wasn’t just guitars in the studio, but a piano as well — as determined by mathematical analysis of the recording.
From NewsBiscuit: “Two decades after being given a C60 cassette of specially selected songs, Rachel Hannigan, a 38-year-old consultant from Knutsford, finally realised the collection of tortured alternative rock songs given to her by her chemistry lab partner James Barr was not just a compilation of some of his favourite songs that he thought she might like, but was intended as a declaration of love.”
A buncha MP3s just really doesn’t cut it. Who has time, for one thing?
Solid body electric guitars are only shaped like an acoustic for reasons of familiarity — get the neck right and you can do anything else. Unfortunately, there are those who fail to recognise the difference between “can” and “should.” The Lego one is way cool, though.
If you’re trying to be the peak body for musicians in the UK, it helps not to alienate anyone who can read. Supporting Lily Allen’s several strikes’ worth of copyright violations is a really bad start. I’d say its quite ovious.
My first thought was: “Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey will be more than a little annoyed.”
In the digital world, you can make anything anywhere and anyone can have copies without you losing yours. I would so download a car, and so would anyone. But traditional business models rely on scarcity.
The answer? Digital Personal Property! Which is certainly not Digital Rights Management or Digital Consumer Enhancement, no no. It’s an entirely different wrapper for physically and mathematically impossible snake oil.
As Penny Arcade put it about similar schemes elsewhere: “Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.”
iTunes beat into people’s heads that they could buy a single song instead of a CD of two good songs and lots of crappy filler. Song Parts gets down to the little bit of the song that’s actually the cool bit, and offers it to you for a few cents. (Not really.) WFMU gives it about a week to live.
Eric Harvey at Pitchfork posts a social history of the MP3. “It’s possible the past 10 years could become the first decade of pop music to be remembered by history for its musical technology rather than the actual music itself.” And I remember the early ’80s, when the cassette was going to change everything …
After screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year, Anvil! The Story of Anvil is to go on general release in Australia in September. Yesterday there was a special screening at the Nova in Carlton followed by a chat and Q&A with Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner from the band and the film’s director Sacha Gervasi, which I attended.
Releasing their first album independently in 1981 and cited as influences by Metallica, Slayer and others who went on to great success, Anvil were in the right place at the right time to capitalise on the resurgence of Heavy Metal worldwide in the 80s. However twenty years later, despite still releasing albums, they were forgotten by all but the most diehard fans and metal rocknerds. So what went wrong? That’s what Gervasi, an old fan of the band, wanted to find out. I found the film inspirational; while there are moments in the film which could have come straight out of This Is Spinal Tap and leave one cringing, at the film’s climax (a word one is hesitant to use when discussing Lips, infamous for his lewdness) the audience cheered, because unlike Spinal Tap, Anvil is made of real people.
The Performing Right Society has produced a really nice chart of the music universe. Everyone involved is on this diagram.
… except one group. Have a close look at the chart above — if you can’t spot who’s missing, p2pnet has the answer.
Rocknerd v2 is still in the hands of a domain squatter, but the front page as of 2007 is up from archive.org. Would you like to buy this small piece of Australian music history? I need to pull some of my articles over from v2 to here.
And the domain squatter who’s got rocknerd.com tried to sell it to me for US$97, which I frankly couldn’t be bothered with.
The archive of my Perth ’80s–’90s Perth indie rock zine Party Fears has been updated, with the addition of a PDF of #11 and a more detailed list of what’s in what issue on the index page.
Dan Arndt on Wikipedia has also been working on the Australian indie rock articles, with small assistance from me, and I need to dip into the trepidation-inducing two boxes of old photos again. What I really need to do is what everyone else seems to do: pay a few hundred quid for a Nikon CoolScan on eBay, do all my photos and sell it on again a year or two later.
Is Joy Division goth or post-punk? When played by hitting bits of metal, you may wonder. Best cover of “Transmission” ever, by steel band Steel Harmony for Manchester Procession last Sunday.
What is a Deadhead? How do they get that way? Why, dear God, WHY? Daniel Chamberlain attempts to answer this question.
He does note that “only by avoiding actual Deadheads was I able to become a Deadhead” and that his latent Deadheadism “causes my girlfriend to worry that at a certain point of saturation, she’ll come home from work to find me reeking of patchouli oil, clad in vibrant pajama bottoms and a tank top decorated with capering bears, my dilated pupils being the only reason I haven’t yet found something to juggle.” A deeply frightening cautionary tale.
Charles Arthur from the Guardian nails music industry bollocks to a wall. The article is worth reading (the data was quite interesting to gather), but this chart shows the smoking gun:
Now, that’s journalism.
