For any American Indabans on the site, happy Independence Day!  For those of you who don't know, on July 4th, 1776, American declared independence from Great Britain and we've been flying solo ever since (very solo lately, sadly).  So, enjoy the long weekend and enjoy this Randy Newman song written during the Cold War but just as applicable today.  We may not be having the best time in this country right now, but we can at least have a sense of humor about it, right?  A sense of humor is important, surely, but what's more important is that a few hundred years ago a lot of brave men fought so that we could stop spelling it 'humour.' 

Great news for my mom and anyone else who grew up loving The Beatles, a lost interview has been discovered in a garage.  From the BBC...

For 44 years a canister of film had been stored in a damp garage in South London; unopened, unloved and almost thrown away. But, finally, somebody took a look inside - and realised they had unearthed a piece of pop history. This is the story of a lost Beatles interview - which is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday for the first time since it was originally recorded.

The nine-minute interview took place in the studios of Scottish Television on Thursday, 30 April, 1964. It was thought to have been recorded on a tele-cine machine in London, and stored in a can, now rusted with the passing of decades. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the fragile film has survived at all.

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From Joe S.'s Blog

There is a meme called RickRoll going around the video posting sites which is about posting video with people lip synching to Rick Astley songs. A meme (pronounced /miːm/) consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.  A recent on called "2 Girls, 1 Cup" highlights the depths which people will stoop to have their 15 minutes of noteriety. I wouldn't suggest looking for it because the premise is just gross.

Some believe the Rick Astley one was inspired by this episode from The Family Guy where Brian "performs" his magic on "Never Gonna Give You Up".

Enjoy!

BitTorrent, the service that allows you to illegally download, well, anything could get a young man in quite a heap of trouble.  From an article on ArsTechnica...

The MPAA has won a jury conviction for criminal copyright infringement, opening the doors to many more cases like it in the future. A federal jury convicted 26-year-old Daniel Dove for both felony copyright infringement as well as conspiracy, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday. Dove, the last remaining administrator of EliteTorrents.com who did not plead guilty, now faces up to 10 years in prison.

The case goes all the way back to 2005, when investigators raided EliteTorrents and shut the site down with the help of the MPAA. At the time, EliteTorrents was one of the most popular Bit Torrent trackers around and had gained notoriety for making available prerelease movies like Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Search warrants were served on 10 people in the US and the site admins immediately faced criminal charges.

FULL ARTICLE

I post this here not to debate the merits of jailing someone for leaking copyrighted material, but to warn anyone out there - and, let's face it, there are a lot - to be careful what uploads you make available through services like BitTorrent.  Good thing Indaba is 100% legal! 

Here is Jay-Z starting his set at Glastonbury over the weekend with, of all songs, "Wonderwall" by Oasis.  The rap great sort-of sings along to the actual track and seems to have a good time in the process.  It's refreshing to know that no matter how talented Jay-Z may be as a rapper, businessman and entrepreneur, he and a drunk-me sing this song essentially the same way.

A journalist at The Independent has declared the live album dead!  Say it aint so!

Well, apparently it is.  It's no secret that the live album as an art form is not what it used to be.  As the author notes, back in the day a live album could send a relatively unknown musician into the stratosphere of stardom (See: Peter Frampton).  These days though, we rarely see a live album that isn't accompanied by a live DVD.  And, as the author also notes, these live DVDs rarely have the magic of a show when you take the images away.  Thank God for the Internet!

It is time to say farewell to some of the greatest albums ever made, albums that made careers, defined genres, and celebrated the raw power of music. Because the live album, once a rite of passage for every act of substance, is dead.

Yes, some bands may still make live albums: Muse, in particular, have released three live sets in a career of just four studio albums, but they are the exception. And just as there is no such thing as radio with pictures – it becomes television – then the live DVD is different from the live album. The visuals overwhelm the music, the spectacle takes over, and the sound loses its primacy.

Read the Full Article

New York Magazine - not to be confused with the more literary New Yorker magazine - has a great article on the remnants of the punk scene on New York's St. Marks Place (a street in the East Village area of New York City, for you out-of-towners).  The article follows a few punk kids around for a few days and offers a fascinating look at a culture that had already died and has only been resurrected by those searching for the dead one. 

We're first taught about the various kinds of punks you'll find hanging out on St. Marks at any point during the summer: gutter punks, MySpace punks, hippy punks, etc.  All are essentially homeless (well, all the real ones, anyway), spending their nights squatting and their days drinking and doing drugs.  At one point in the story, one punk is arrested for smoking weed and the big concern among his friends after he's hauled away to jail is the fact that he was the only one who knew where the punk show was that night.  As the article points out, all these wayward kids descend on St. Marks looking for the famous filth and squalor that made the street famous among punks in the 80's.  Of course, now there's a Chipotle on St. Marks and that scene is as dead as Sid and Nancy.  However, the sheer number of punks coming to the street looking for that scene have created it all over again. 

Of course, underneath the clothes, tats and binging, is the music.  The punks interviewed in the article all claim a love of the music, but it seems secondary to their enjoyment of drugs and alcohol.  Perhaps the author of the article chose not to focus on the music or perhaps it isn't really that important to them, and the idea of the scene is a larger concern.  Who knows?  Then again, punk was never really about the music.  Sid Vicious couldn't even play bass, after all. 

Anyway, go read about one of the strangest scenes in the country: Punks Like Them. 

Happy Monday, everyone.  It's a fresh week and we're ready to argue.  Last week we talked about bands either rushing a release to satisfy fans and bands holding music for years, endlessly tinkering and tweaking, before releasing an album.  This week, let's continue to talk about bands, but this time the less famous kind.  For many years, playing in and seeing various amateur bands, I observed two awful kinds of bandmates: busy drummers and busy bass players.  A lot of drummers and bassists in amateur band forget that their charge is to enhance the music being played, not to play over the rest of the band.  Busy drummers provide endless fills while barely creating a beat for the rest of the band to follow along with.  Busy bass players inject what should be simple, solid bass lines with slap accents or runs up and down the fret board.  I imagine that every busy drummer thinks he's Keith Moon and every busy bass player thinks he's Flea.  Of course, Moon and Flea played in bands where their wild style enhanced the songs; no these kids.  So, which is worse: a drummer who doesn't know when to just play a simple beat or a bass player who can't control his desire to be the lead guitarist?  Leave you answer in the comments...

Though I write for them occasionally, Metro - the free daily newspaper distributed on the New York Subway - isn't really a great paper for music news.  However, today they ran a nice article taking a look at the various mixtape-influenced sites on the Internet.  They discussed three sites in particular - seeqpod, muxtape and fuzz - giving each a short description and highlighting their various pros and cons.  Now, I'm friends with Muxtape creator, Justin Oullette, so, naturally, I tend to think his is the best out there, but Metro does present some downsides to the super-simple design and functionality.  It is difficult to find specific songs since the site is so personalized and it can be tough to gauge what tunes might be on a given muxtape thanks to fanciful names.

Seeqpod, on the other hand, is all about searching.  It hunts the Internet for the songs you tell it to find.  I think perhaps the author of this article has a rather loose definition of "mixtape" though, since seeqpod is more of a music search engine along the lines of G2P or TheHypeMachine.  Fuzz is somewhere between the two. I'm sure, too, that they left many sites off the list, a testament to how fun the idea of online mixtapes are. 

Anyway, go give the article a read if this at all interests you and play with each site to find the one - or none - best suited to your needs.  By the way, you can catch my Muxtape at Streeter.Muxtape.com.  Have a great weekend, everyone and, no matter how you do it, listen to more music. 

From Joe S.'s blog (second great post this week, Joe!)

Sexy Subtlety

Call me old fashioned (or just dull) but is anyone else tired of the lack of subtlety in today's popular music?

I spend a lot of time with my teens. I'm pretty open about their tastes and interests. A recent road trip gave opportunity to listen to and talk about music. Due to the overwhelming popularity of Lil' Wayne's song Lollipop we listened to it regularly about once every 40 minutes.

The radio plays the clean version yet anyone with even a limited imagination can figure out what this song is about. I began thinking of what was sexy and interesting about music as I was growing up. My mind immediately went to Marvin Gaye. Admittedly I'm a fan, but in this context his "subtlety" amazes me. Now back then it was anything but subtle but it was classy. Well, you've got real class and then you've got Lil' Wayne.

So what am I trying to say here...well to be blunt, most rap and hip hop (which used to be culturally relevant) are mostly now only fluff and braggadocio over killer beats. It's feels cheap and egocentric exactly like sex without the foreplay.

Where Marvin Gaye is candles, wine and a hottub... Lollipop is four minutes of strip, rip and that's it!

In the immortal words of David Bowie - "Wam bamb thank you mame".

This video set is a comparison of Sexual Healing and the uncensored version of Lollipop. And just to recover I've added a live performances of Let's Get It On and I Want You.

Enjoy!