Choreography about architecture.
Just rereading the Dave Graney interview I did in late 1992 for Party Fears. This was when no fucker cared about Dave Graney, after his indie hipness fronting the Moodists in the 1980s and his artier cowboy rock’n’roll in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
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I tried Last.fm around 2009 when I was applying for a job with them. The computer-generated personal radio station thing is amusing in its way. I can’t see myself wandering around with my phone using up my data plan on streaming music; it’ll be strictly a desktop, or rather laptop, thing.
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I admire old Bill for all sorts of things, none of which are his personality, murdering his wife, fucking up his son or misogyny so jawdropping he literally made it into an artform. I wonder what signifiers wearing a Burroughs shirt would have in 2016 as opposed to 1996 (“yeah yeah you’re hip go away”) or 1986 (“who?”).
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Amanda Petrusich at the New Yorker writes a ramble on the reissue market. It’s not clear, but she seems upset these previously-unavailable classics are available again, because they’re available again for the wrong reasons.
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John Herrman at The Awl laments the difficulties of the media in a world where they are no longer the gatekeepers of social knowledge.
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“Will I buy something? Pretty much not. If I see what I really want, I’ll buy the CD, or if I feel guilty, but physical records or even the CD things are just a nuisance. More and more things and piles of things, and guilt versus things, not having the things wins.”
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Recently I gave a presentation on The Philosophy of Music. Putting aside the definitional and ontological questions for a moment, perhaps the most troubling from a reviewer’s point of view was an epistemological one; what sort of knowledge does musical and lyrical content give us?
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Record companies complain the Internet will destroy music. Musicians complain that they can’t make a living any more. The unsympathetic public, feeling the squeeze themselves, tell them to get a proper job.
The problem isn’t piracy — it’s competition.
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It’s doomed, along with the CD in general. But then, albums have always sorta sucked.
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In the early 1990s, I tried very hard to become a serious Anthony Burgess fan. A Clockwork Orange is absolutely first-class and probably my favourite novel of all time.
However, all his other novels suck. All of them.
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This week, the cheap shitty MP3 player is filled with improvised noise. I have entirely too high a tolerance for this sort of thing if it’s the right genre, in this case early industrial — all those albums from the eighties released in limited editions of a few hundred for the Artist’s Shit market.
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Back in my day, we had to search the dial for radio that didn’t suck and search the city for the one record shop that didn’t suck. And pay money for music! On pieces of plastic!
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Imagine a post apocalyptic radio world, where there are multiple stations all sounding the same, acting the same – there is no choice, no variety, no difference anywhere across the country. Everything and everyone has been blended down to core stereotypes, and the people seem happy with this… and of course the advertisements, who can forget the advertisements.
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When the adolescent males have slammed, stagedived and pogoed their little hearts out to your fast ones, going up to four (or even five) chords (on acoustic, of course) with that big, slow “thump … tha-THUMP … thump … tha-THUMP” drum line will cement your cred as a truly great writer of truly moving songs and not just another spandex-clad, fretwanking attention-seeker searching the front row for male adulation and female lust dumb enough to lead to a night with you.
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After a few glasses of water to clear the slightly hung over feeling, I realised something that had been bothering me from last night. This is stupid, but I feel I have to respond to certain assertions made in the TISM song “BFW”. It has primarily to do with the idea of the artist vs producer divide which has emerged in the last twenty years. (Hey, the URL says Rock Nerd – you can’t have the rock without the nerd.)
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OK, those of you who had TISM’s ‘Kill Americans’ on high rotation for the past week – you do understand that it’s you being taken the piss out of, don’t you?
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The Conti may be gone, but the legend lives on. And, of course, there’s a darker side. This is a story about big men with short tempers and the small women they pick on…
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Melbourne’s Continental Cafe has been eulogised and tributes continue to flow in about this fine Melbourne venue as it moves towards closure. Yet Melbourne’s media is loathe to point out the Conti’s true culture. In today’s rarified, amphetamine-anger business atmosphere, there are few live venues around where the musicians not only get asked what they want to drink when they arrive, they’re either plied with joints before the show or offered one of the classic ten paper didgeridoos to finish the night. Soulman Rushdie offers this personal insight into a grand old gonzo institution…
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