a gang mentality

Dayum. I've had beer dumped on me during an argument about The Strokes, and have almost been assaulted by a group of people who quite possibly could have been foreigners after loudly publicising my views about Bruce Springsteen's "Born In the USA," but shit, these girls roll hard.

jumping the ethnically heterogenous shark

I think it might be the former for the producers. Maybe they just learned about it in school.

It's a series of tubes, you see

SOMEONE SEND ME AN INTERNETS

free music (legal)

Man, that title is going to up my Google hits.

Anyway:

Universal Music, the world's largest music company, has agreed to back a new venture that will allow consumers to download songs for free and instead rely on advertising for its revenues.
The new service, known as SpiralFrog, represents a departure from the 99-cent per-song business model made popular by Apple's iTunes store. It will begin operations in December.

Howevs:

Regardless, out of the 194 news stories listed by Google News, not a single one of them mentions which format the service would use, or how it would be protected – a pretty big oversight in my opinion, considering how serious the 'competing formats' obstacle is in online music right now (especially for companies such as SpiralFrog, which distribute music that won't play on iPods).

It turns out that it will use WMA files, which do not play on iPods. So, ok, free music is great, and if it's legal, all the better. And you're going to get a ton of headlines with just the words "free music." But I've always been puzzled by the anti-iPod strategery that lots of competing online music stores are using. Napster, Rhapsody, AOL, SpiralFrog... they all use WMA (which is Microsoft's format) for their music, which doesn't play on iPods (unless you burn it to a cd, then re-rip it into a compatible format). iPods, though, have something like 75% of the market share for portable music players. How much business do these guys expect to get, realistically?

To me, iPods and iTunes (or the Russian site) are still the shit. iPods are still the coolest looking, and definitely have the most street cred. I mean, nobody leans over on the bus and says to you, "Hey man, that's a bad-ass iRiver T30," or, "Is that a new Samsung YP-F2JZW?" Is it a drag to pay like 99 cents for a song? Yeah, but it's also kind of a bargain. Plus, you can do whatever you want with it, really: burn it on cd, play it wirelessly in your house, play it on your iPod, whatevs. It seems completely ridiculous to me to have to visit a website every month just to re-up the DRM on my music, or to not be able to burn it on cd when I want. It comes down to the fact that you don't really own the music, you're just renting it. And you have to give it back.

Really? 58%? That's a lot.

WTF?

born under a bad blog

Here's a nice interview with Richard Hawley, whose album "Coles Corner" is superfantastic. If you haven't heard it, well, you should. It's a nice story, and he seems like a nice guy, too.

noice!

I'm not sure how or why, but Jay's rap came up during the fab beach weekend I had with Truck, X, and SmallCabbage. Here's the video. Uh, of the rap.


Noice!

(use the play button in the lower left to watch it here)

bleg

Hey, has anyone ever ordered anything used from Amazon? There's this CD I want, but it seems dumb to pay for a brand new copy when I could get it used for cheaper. Unless it's shady for some reason, like the shippers tend to send you CDs infected with like monkeypox or whatever.

Remember monkeypox?

i watch the clock a lot

I just got back from watching Wilco's Jeff Tweedy perform a solo acoustic show at the North Carolina Museum of Art. It's a nice natural ampitheater, and they float these wonderful lighted balloons that look like moons. It's a wonderful atmosphere, and it was a beautiful night for a show. Tweedy was sarcastic and a bit snippy at first, but seemed to warm up as the show went on. Man, that guy is a talent. What a songwriter. Hearing some of the songs from "A Ghost Is Born" performed acoustic was really a treat; they're so weird and amped up on the album that it's nice to hear kind of where they came from. He played "New Madrid," which was a special treat. (That's from the fantastic album "Anodyne," which, I can't belive you don't have that, John.) But the hightlight of the evening for me (and that's what this blog is all about), was "Blasting Fonda." It's a b-side to some song from "Being There," I think. But it's probably my favorite song he's written, and I've never heard it played live before at any of the multitude of Wilco shows I've seen before.

I got to thinking at one point about Bob Dylan. Granted, Dylan's been at this game a lot longer than Tweedy, but I think Tweedy's put out songs and albums that are of such a consistenly high quality, that you've just got to think that he's a singular talent. I read once that Dylan had criticised The Beatles (to their faces!) that they didn't pay enough attention to lyrics. The Beatles shot back that Dylan didn't pay enough attention to the music. I think this was before "Rubber Soul." So, fair shots on both sides, I think. But I think Tweedy consistently has highly poetic lyrics, and challenging music. A large part of it is due to the other Wilcos, obvs, but still, the guy has the ultimate say, and he's chosen to keep pushing boundaries of pop music. Which, pop's been around for 60 years now, and that he's still able to do something new is quite a feat, I think.


Y'ALL BE NICE TO THE CRACKHEADS

Yeah, I don't really get it either

Blaaahg radio

Our long national nightmare is over: there are finally new songs in the BlogRadio.

• Evan Dando- Purple Parallelogram. This song was written with Noel Gallagher of Oasis when they were partying their way across Europe together after Oasis blew up huge. Now, I know many people think Dando's a total waste, and that Oasis is worthless and probably always has been. But, I'm a yuuuuge fan of both. The Lemonheads "It's A Shame About Ray" is in my top 5 albums of all time, and, to this day, the only tattoo I've ever seriously considered getting is the Oasis logo. So, having Evan and Noel write a song together is pretty major for me, and even though this song is pretty much a throwaway, I still think it's totally brills. Just the bounciest, brightest, poppiest thing the human race could ever collectively imagine. I'm really bummed the sound is so piss-poor, but it's supergreat still.
  
• Lily Allen- Alfie. 'Member that track of hers I posted a while back? The one that (I think) used a sample from that calypso song they use at the end of "Beetlejuice?" Well, her album finally came out; it's a gold record already in Britain. This is the last track on the album, and the first time I listened to it, I actually laughed out loud when the beat drops at about :24. Just awesome.
  
• Sun Kil Moon- Neverending Math Equations. Ok, so, Sun Kil Moon is basically just one guy, and this song is one cut from his last album, which is composed entirely of covers of Modest Mouse songs. I don't care for Modest Mouse, personally. Never have. I mostly find them intensely annoying, even when they made an appearance on The O.C. But a lot of songwriters find their songs to be fucking incredible. Whatever. So, I was skeptical when my buddy Will gave me this record. And I'm still only lukewarm on it, but I actually like this song quite a bit. It made me curious, so I checked out the original version, and it was the same old bunch of tuneless yelps and pointlessly angular guitars. I think it helps that this guy can actually find a melody, and then sing it.
  
• The Juan McLean- Give Me Every Little Thing. Acutally a relatively older track, a single from 2003. This guy used to be in a punk band, but he got sick of the scene and now he makes dance music. It's produced by the DFA, who produce other indie-dancey bands like The Rapture, and half of the DFA is the uber-rad LCD Soundsystem. Pretty great. Oh, yeah, so this is from the one CD I bought from that stack of great used stuff at the record store? When I had my moral quandary? Now you can dance to the sounds of my ambivalence. So 2006.
  
• Camera Obscura- Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken. Great title. I think it may be in reference to "Say Anything." Anyway, I love this song. Truck's officemate came by my office the other day to chat, and caught me chair-dancing to this song. And then didn't even ask what I was listening to! And that's why we'll never be together. That, and she rags on my driving. That dog won't hunt, Monsignor.
  

WHO CARES LET'S ROCK CUZ THE PARTY DON'T STOP!!!

You gotta have your sound on for this one. BEST.


UPDATE: I've probably watched this thing 10 times already. So great! This is the epitome, the zenith, the very pinnacle of human creation on the innernerd. Oh, and have you seen the Cosby one? With the hippin' and the hoppin' and the bippin' and the boppin'?

jokes and jokes and jokes and jokes

A woman calls her boss one morning and tells him that she is staying home because she is not feeling well.

"What's the matter?" he asks.

"I have a case of Anal Glaucoma," she says in a weak voice.

He asks: "What the hell is Anal Glaucoma?"

She responds: "I can't see my ass coming into work today."