All politics is not local
-
I write about ESRI in this blog on occasion - most recently, in March 2016.
And ESRI just made the news again - not a local news outlet, and not a geo
news...
By day, I perform strategic marketing duties for...well, as of August 2020, for nobody. By night, I manage the Empoprises blogging empire, as well as various portals in Ingress and other games. Formerly known as Ontario Emperor (Ontario California, not Ontario Canada). LCMS Lutheran. Former member of Radio Shack Battery Club. Motorola Yellow Badge recipient. Top 10% of LinkedIn users.
One of my favorite songs while I was growing up was Flash and the Pan's "Walking in the Rain." I couldn't find the original version on YouTube, but I did find Grace Jones' version.
If you're only familiar with Jones' version, the original is like Jones, only with less emotion.
Well, exactly three months after that September 25, 2008 post, some kind soul uploaded a sort-of video of Flash and the Pan's "Walking in the Rain." I say "sort of" because the video consists of someone putting a record on a turntable and playing it. Actually, come of think of it, perhaps that's the original video for the song.
Well, now you can listen (and watch) and judge for yourself.
From the album Flash and the Pan, by the band Flash and the Pan. Product link below, FCC disclosure applies.
Technically this isn't a music post, but it certainly applies to music.
If you know me, you know that I love to scrobble things in last.fm. In fact, at one point I was bugging Josh Haley because a ffundercats podcast didn't have proper ID3 tags, which meant that I couldn't scrobble it. The podcasts now have ID3 tags, so last.fm can record whenever you listen to a ffundercats podcast.
I was doing some non-musical work-related research, and I ran across a page on the Oracle website that included a two-year old podcast recorded by one of my co-workers. (This podcast was recorded back when we were still employees of Motorola.) I first clicked on the link for the podcast, which opened a QuickTime tab in my browser.
Well, that didn't suit me, so I downloaded the mp3 file and played it in Windows Media Player to match with my last.fm scrobbling configuration. So I scrobbled the track, which is listed in last.fm as follows:
Note that the listed "artist" for this track is Oracle. So I went to see what last.fm had to say about the company, and this is what I found:
Oracle is the name of several artists including a well-respected progressive/power metal band formed in the 1980’s.
1.) ‘’‘Oracle’‘’ was notable as a collaborative musical venture between Minimal Compact’s Malka Spigel & Samy Birnbach and Wire’s Colin Newman. The project spanned the years 1988-1993 and mostly took place in Brussels. Ony one album ‘’‘Tree’‘’ was released retrospectively (in 1994) on Colin & Malka’s Swim ~ label. The majority of the work remains unreleased.
There was another Florida band called Oracle who managed to release one album in the early nineties, solidly rooted in 80’s American power metal in mold of Liege Lord or early Queensryche. Hardly a popular style of music at the time, particularly in the US (hence the release on a European label), As Darkness Reigns is a fine album for the genre. Brothers Kent and Brent Smedley have recently resurrected Oracle and are playing again, now under the name Odyssey. Brent also plays for a band called Tempest Reign.
2.) Drum and Bass DJ / Murder in America (M.I.A)
And it goes on and on like this, with (as I type this) five different bands, none of which include any band members named Larry Ellison, Charles Phillips, or Safra Catz.
Now this is not the only case in which a band name in last.fm refers to more than one band. And there are famous examples of bands who had to change their original names in certain markets - take the so-called English Beat, which had to add "English" to its name for North American releases to reduce confusion with the American band the Beat (now known as Paul Collins' Beat).
Confused yet?
And these are the instances in which two bands used the same name by accident. The whole issue of a band appropriating another band's name on purpose is an entirely different issue.
P.S. In the band Oracle, you know that Larry would be the lead vocalist, but who would get the guitar solos - Charles or Safra?
In the olden days, if you wanted to buy music from a band, you would go down to your record store and see what it had to offer. When you got there, you'd see that if you wanted to get some Elton John music, you could buy an LP such as Rock of the Westies, or perhaps a single such as "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." But you couldn't march into the record store and say, "I just want to buy the song 'Roy Rogers,' but I don't want to buy the rest of the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album."
But now, in the wonderful twenty-first century world of downloadable music, you DO have more control over what you buy. In fact, you could go to your favorite online music store and buy "Roy Rogers" and Flash and the Pan's "Walking in the Rain" and Pink Floyd's "Us and Them."
[Pink Floyd's] latest record deal, signed with EMI before legal downloads came along, said individual songs must not be sold without the band's permission.
They argued that the same rule should apply to digital sales as well as CDs.
EMI disagreed but a judge has sided with Pink Floyd.
Why would Pink Floyd want to enforce such a clause? Because they had a vision about how their music should be heard, and their vision is not a three-minute vision:
In court, Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt said the contract contained a clause to "preserve the artistic integrity of the albums".
He said the contract meant EMI were "not entitled to exploit recording by online distribution or by any other means other than the original album, without the consent of Pink Floyd".
The band largely avoided releasing singles during their career, instead preferring fans to listen to entire albums such as Dark Side of the Moon, which has sold more than 35 million copies around the world.
OK, perhaps there is some financial motivation there also - perhaps the band will earn more if people are forced to buy the entire album rather than just buying, say, "Money." But since I've been listening to Dark Side of the Moon fairly frequently as of late, I can understand the artistic reasons why the band would prefer that the album be judged as a whole.
But Pink Floyd isn't the only artist who holds this position. The BBC cites Garth Brooks and AC/DC as two other artists who insist that albums should be downloadable in toto only. MediaMemo cites a couple of other artists who insisted on this - for a time:
And just because the band has won the ruling doesn’t mean that’s going to stop–its entirely possible, for instance, that a check of a certain size could allay the band’s concerns. Other album-only holdouts like Metallica and Radiohead eventually held their noses and allowed their stuff to be sold by the song on iTunes, too.
Yet it's important to note that we, the consumers, effectively have no say in the matter. We cannot download our own mix of one part Pink, one part Garth, and one part Bon - something that would cost about $3 at current prices could end up costing more like $30, since you'd have to buy three entire albums instead of three single songs.
Now some people can consistently reproduce the same sound over and over, and we love them for it, and we don't expect them to do anything else. I don't think I want to hear George Thorogood behind a synthesizer, for example.
The advantage of us old folks is that we are familiar with the fine art of playing music at different speeds. 33 1/3, 45, 78 - name a speed and we'll play it.
Well, if TotallySoundsLike is to be believed, Rick James must have been playing his Michael Nesmith records really fast. Listen.
Well, frankly I wouldn't take Steve Strong home to mother either.
Well, I don't know if this is viral yet, but I've seen it twice, and I'm usually slow in picking things up, so if I've seen it twice then it must be viral.
Let's start with the Tall Ships, who have their own Facebook page. The Tall Ships are a band that I kinda sorta discovered via last.fm - I had listened to a Dryve song, and the drummer of that former band, Keith Andrew, shared his new band, the Tall Ships, with me. So anyways, on Friday the Tall Ships posted an update to the aforementioned Facebook page that concluded as follows:
We're thinking of covering this song. Steve pretty much has the vocal down...
However, since the title of the video was Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой, I couldn't really figure out who did it.
I didn't think much of it - the Tall Ships are on an eastern European record label (Minority Records from Prague), so I figured that was just some idiosyncracy.
Until a Texan chimed in.
Specifically, Josh Haley, well-known among FriendFeed circles as one of the two Ffundercats. Josh, like Keith Andrew, has a musical bent, and is known for his ukelele playing and his remixes.
Well, Josh shared a video with the comment
You can't possibly post a video more awesome than this.
And, although it was a different link, it ended up being the same video.
This one labeled the song as "Trololo," but that probably isn't an official title.
I ran Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой through Google Translate and got the translation "I am very glad, because I'm finally back home." Well, with that big grin on his face, I hope he's glad.
I initially couldn't find anything about the video, other than a bunch of blog posts linking to some occurrence of the video with a brief comment about how awesome it is. While much of the activity seems to have erupted in late February, and the Tall Ships' version was uploaded to YouTube in November, I did find something on mail.ru that seems to be from October 2009. But even that site listed the video as "Miscellaneous."
Singing in the video is Edward Anatolevich Hill, a Soviet-era vocalist once celebrated as the “Honored Artist of the USSR” in 1968 and “People’s Artist of the USSR” in 1974.
Because Edward’s performance was poorly lipsynched (albeit to his own vocal track) and entirely composed of mouth music without any lyrics, the song was perceived by some westerners as highly eccentric.
According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People's Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii....
The song he is interpreting, "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home," is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words...[V]okaliz was a well established genre, one that seems close in certain respects to pantomime.
I found the Russian Wikipedia page here. Now I can't read Russian, but I can read enough to know that Hill is still alive. And when I ran the article through Google Translate, I unearthed this little tidbit:
Since 1997 involved with his son in a joint project with the rock group Prepinaki.
I searched for the rock group Препинаки and found this page, which I again translated:
In 1996, Prepinaki "have created a joint project with his ideological father (another father! See the spiritual father), People's Artist of the RSFSR Edward Gil - Gil and Sons. As stated in a press release, "the creative task of the project - rethinking the heritage of the Soviet stage 60's - 70-ies." Project "Gil and Sons" recorded in 1997 album "There's song in a circle" and continues to tour.
As for Prepinaki's style, here's what the page said:
The band's style drifted between new wave and bossa-nova, and now represents a unique fusion of dance rhythms of different ages and continents: the traditional pop music, especially disco, Soviet music, hot Latin rhythms.
However, most people who see the original "I am very glad, because I'm finally back home" video aren't thinking about the deeper meaning of vokaliz style; most are thinking about bad lip-syncing. I'm fascinated by the fact that the two people from whom I first learned about the video both happened to be musicians.
Does this mean that when the music stars gather as hip joints, they'll demand that the deejay put "Trololo" on the video screens?
Or does this mean that vokaliz itself will suddenly sweep the English-speaking music world?
P.S. Hill's last.fm page is here and includes a biography but sadly no music. last.fm does list a December 29, 2009 concert, but apparently it was cancelled.
I was involved in a Facebook conversation about such antiquated concepts as LPs, and in the course of the conversation I referenced my August 12, 2008 post about the Akon song "Lonely." The post includes the following text:
Universal Music has provided the video on YouTube. However, embedding is disabled, so you'll have to go here to see it.
But when I follow the link that I provided in the original post, YouTube presents the message
I mentioned VEVO previously in this blog (in the context of YouTube's 2009 disagreements in Britain and Germany), but I haven't really talked about the WHY of VEVO. Luckily, Mashable posted something in December 2009 that made up for the shortcomings of my coverage:
VEVO will host most of YouTube (YouTube)’s music videos (85 percent of them, actually), including ones from EMI, Sony Music and Universal....
VEVO will manage all ad sales
- The music video site is focusing on getting rid of duplicate videos. If you have ever browsed YouTube, you’ll find that many music videos do, in fact, have duplicates.
- VEVO will not launch with HD. That will come out next year.
- Now this is awesome: VEVO includes synchronized and integrated lyrics.
But YouTube and the music companies didn't create VEVO out of an altruistic desire to provide synchronized and integrated lyrics to the people. No, the key words here are "duplicate videos" and "ad sales." Basically, the idea is to centralize videos in a central location so that YouTube and the music companies can control the ad revenue.
And there is also a vevo.com website. However, I don't know if I am allowed to register with it, since YouTube has seen it to permanently disable my account without explanation.
By using the Site, you represent, warrant and covenant that (a) you are 13 years of age or older and (i) reside in the United States of America, its territories and possessions (the “U.S.”) or (ii) reside in Canada and, if you are a minor, you have obtained your parent or guardian’s consent to use the Site in accordance with these Terms of Use; (b) your use of the Site does not violate any applicable law, rule or regulation; and (c) all registration information you submit is truthful and accurate and you shall maintain and promptly update the accuracy of such information. If you provide information that is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, or VEVO suspects that such information is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, VEVO has the right to suspend or terminate your registration (in whole or in part) and refuse any and all current or future use of the Site (or any portion thereof), in its sole discretion. If you reside in Canada, you further acknowledge and agree that the Site is operated exclusively from, and is being provided solely in accordance with, the laws of the United States. The laws of the United States may differ from those of Canada. Please ensure that you are comfortable with these differences before accessing and using the Site.
In other words, No Irish Need Apply. Or anyone from most other countries in the world, for that matter.
But if we're going to talk about Akon, we have to talk about Bobby Vinton. Bobby's website includes tour dates; here's what it says for Vinton's future dates:
May 8, 2010 Bryant, IN Bearcreek Farms May 10 & 11, 2010 Oakbrook Terrace IL. Drury Lane Oakbrook June 12, 2010 Las Vegas, NV Cannery Casino & Hotel August 12, 2010 Plantsville CT, Aqua Turf Club The Flyer August 14, 2010 FOXWOOD Casino & Resort Connecticut August 26, 2010 Toronto, Canada Bandshell Park September 25, 2010 Manistee, MI Little River Casino & Resort November 12 & 13, 2020 Chandler AZ, Wild Horse Pass Resort & Casino
I'm assuming the last one is a typo, but maybe he IS booked for a show ten years from now.
P.S. for those who noticed the significance of the post title - yes, Devo has been "Fresh" on my mind. And doesn't "Akon" look a little bit like "Akron"?
Here's a video of Devo performing "Fresh" at SXSW 2009. It's not on VEVO.
I was still a kid when the Doors received national attention, and I was still a kid when Jim Morrison died. But death didn't end the Doors' career. As Rolling Stone put it,
Ironically, the group’s best years began in 1980, nine years after Morrison’s death. With the release of the Danny Sugerman–Jerry Hopkins biography of Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, sales of the Doors’ music and the already large Jim Morrison cult — spurred by his many admirers and imitators in new-wave bands — grew even more. Record sales for 1980 alone topped all previous figures; as one ROLLING STONE magazine cover line put it: “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, He’s Dead.” And that was just the beginning.
Musician Steve Taylor went to Paris a few years after the Rolling Stone cover - Paris, the city where Jim Morrison died, and where he was buried. And he began thinking:
I went to Paris and visited Jim Morrison's grave. The experience made me think a lot about who Jim Morrison was and what he stood for. I was into The Doors' music and read a biography of Morrison called, No One Here Gets Out Alive. As I read the book, a picture emerged of Jim Morrison as someone who embraced the Rock-n-Roll myth, "It's better to burn out than to fade away."
We'll return to that myth later. But for now, let's return to Taylor:
I guess he thought of himself as somewhat of a "tortured artist" who not only believe that genius justifies cruelty but that genius and selfishness are inseparable. And that's really how he lived his life. He was very cruel to the people who were close to him, even the people who loved him. So this song is just my thought about going to the grave, almost a stream-of-consciousness lyric.
"Jim Morrison's Grave" asks the age-old question: Does artistry justify being a weasel? The last line of the song is, "The music covers like an evening mist/Like a watch still ticking on a dead man's wrist." Morrison left the world some intriguing music. As far as I'm concerned, that's not enough.
Taylor released the album I Predict 1990 (the same album that included "I Blew Up the Clinic Real Good"; see my previous post) and included the song "Jim Morrison's Grave." The video can be found on YouTube:
The scenes in the video depict the Morrison mania that gripped the world in the 1980s. And Taylor's word wasn't the last word on the subject. Rolling Stone on Jim Morrison's grave after the predicted 1990 had arrived:
The Morrison cult continues to grow, particularly among the young. In 1990 his graffiti-covered headstone was stolen; in 1993, on what would have been his 50th birthday, hundreds of mourners — many not even born before he died — traveled from around the world to pay tribute. Because of the destruction these visitors often wreak on the cemetery during their pilgrimages, many Parisians petitioned to move Morrison’s grave when its 30-year lease expired in 2001; French officials, however, opted to leave Morrison’s remains in their resting place.
But remember the line that Taylor quoted above, "It's better to burn out than to fade away"? The line, which appeared in a Neil Young song (actually two Neil Young songs), was subsequently quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note. In 1996, Taylor compared Cobain and Morrison:
[S]peaking of Kurt Cobain--who was, I think, far more honest and far less cruel--when anyone takes an unblinking look into the well, if they don't find living water, they'll find nothing but a black hole. I assume Kurt Cobain could only see the latter.
This has been on my mind for the last few hours, since it was only this afternoon that I opened my CD copy of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon."
On the surface, the album sounds like everything a self-respecting British punk would hate - odd time signatures ("Money"), extended synthesizer bits ("On the Run"), strange sound effects (pretty much the whole album), and self-referential lyrics ("Brain Damage").
But then again, while you can hang the "progressive" tag on Pink Floyd, Yes, and ELP (Palmer or Powell, take your pick), the term can apply to artists as widely varied as Brian Eno (whose work certainly moved in different directions later) and Elton John (yes, he's a pop star, but take a listen to some of the album tracks on "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and some of his other albums some time).
And it's not surprising to note that the editors of Wikipedia can't agree on who is prog-rock either. The section of the article entitled "Peak in popularity and decline" includes this note:
The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.
So forget about the article; let's go right to the fight, which gets into stuff like this:
Progressive Rock should have the following Sub-Genre pages:
* Canterbury * Crossover Progressive * Eclectic Progressive * Jazz Fusion * Krautrock * Neo-Progressive * New Prog ("nu-prog" would redirect to this page) * Progressivo Italiano * Proto-Progressive (or "Progressive Influences") * Psychedelic/Space Rock * RIO/Avant Progressive * Symphonic Progressive ("Art Rock" would redirect to this page) * Zeuhl
I would like to start with the cleanup of the Symphonic rock page (see the discussion on that page). I would like to re-name it Symphonic Progressive. If I can get exclusive use of the page, I would appreciate it. That way I won't be fighting other editors that want to tout their favorite bands -- most of them on the page are not truly Symphonic Progressive bands! Thanks.
Argh. Now I see why people stuck safety pins in their noses.
But I will say one thing, now that I formally own "Dark Side" - its fame is justified. So many great albums, even ones by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, are often just collections of very good songs. But "Dark Side" truly holds together as an album, with musical themes repeated throughout the tracks. Truly deserving of its oft-cited record of 741 weeks on Billboard's Top 200 chart, it is truly one of the great albums of all time.
So here are my promo links for your buying pleasure:
I was listening to Sam & Dave's "Soul Man" and had a heretical thought - namely, thet the Blues Brothers' cover version had something that the original version didn't have.
Namely, the backing vocals of Dan Aykroyd on the choruses.
You know..."SOUL man."
I've thought of Dan Aykroyd's musical resume a lot lately, and the remake of "We Are The World" reminded me that Aykroyd was one of those present at the original "We Are The World." In a sense it was an odd choice, because in that one recording studio you had the singer of "Thriller," the singer of "All Night Long," the singers of a number of classic hits...and the singer of "Rubber Biscuit."
Twosources state that Aykroyd was invited to the session to represent the film industry, but his contributions to the music industry are as significant as those of some of the others that were invited to the session that evening.
Of course, it's technically incorrect to say that Dan Aykroyd sang on the Blues Brothers albums...because Elwood Blues was actually the singer. To say that Dan Aykroyd was a member of the Blues Brothers is like saying that Bob Dylan was a member of the Traveling Wilburys.
Needless to say, "Rubber Biscuit" was not a Blues Brothers original. The song was originally performed by the Chips, and apparently was their only recording.
And there were a lot of songs that the Blues Brothers played and helped popularize. Which is great, or it's not great, depending upon your point of view. You see, the Blues Brothers share something in common with Pat Boone - a controversial history:
How do you solve a problem like The Blues Brothers? They’re the goofy novelty duo whose enduring popularity says a great deal about our country’s thorny racial history and the commercial cooption of great American art form. To people around the world the Blues Brothers have become the face of blues: the pale, pasty, Caucasian, half-Canadian face of a deep strain of black music. The Blues Brothers leave behind a deep and complicated legacy.
They helped popularize blues and gave crucial career boosts to an army of blues, soul and R&B legends by covering their songs and featuring them in The Blues Brothers and to a much lesser extent, The Blues Brothers 2000 yet it seems both sad and inevitable that millions of Blues Brothers fans would rather hear standards performed by a pair of enthusiastic white amateur chuckle-merchants than grizzled old black professionals.
The Blues Brothers have been lionized as heroes and icons and demonized as cultural parasites.
For historical perspective, go here to see someone who demonizes Pat Boone. For a more balanced view, see Gary North:
Pat Boone's career is one of those fork-in-the-road stories. He launched his national career as a cover artist, serving as a kind of Pied Piper for America's middle-class white teenagers, gilding rock and roll's lily. Little Richard said that kids in 1956 had Pat Boone's records in the top drawer, where parents might find them, and his versions in the bottom drawer. I suspect that the truth is different. They bought one of Boone's versions, then bought Richard's, and put Boone's in the closet.
And
Rock and roll's parallel cultures did not last long. Teenagers found out about the artists and the original songs that were being covered.
Well, some did - and some didn't. Perhaps some people explored the history behind certain recordings by the Blues Brothers...and by Pat Boone...and by the Beatles...but there are probably many others who think "Money" is a Lennon-McCartney original.
But can the artists themselves be blamed for that?
I was listening to Rage Against the Machine's "Revolver" when I began musing on the Beatles album of the same title. And it suddenly occurred to me that someone who was just introduced to the Beatles album today might not realize the humor behind the title.
Yes, CDs (and cassettes) revolve just like old vinyl LPs did, but CDs revolve inside a closed case, so you don't necessarily notice the revolving. With an LP, it was very obvious that the record was revolving.
And, of course, when you're talking about digital downloads, the concept of revolving does not apply.
There are a number of stories about people or groups of people that do one thing and get huge success...and then do something completely different and have even huger success.
But there are still the people that think that things were great at the beginning, and went downhill from there.
I bet there are people who wish that the Fresh Prince had remained a rapper and never gotten involved in that television or movie junk.
Or who wish that Depeche Mode had just disbanded after Vince Clarke left the band.
The person who posted this video of "Work for Love" on YouTube made the following comment:
This is for all those who continue to believe Al's story that With Sympathy was the result of an over zealous production team at Arista. And for those, like myself, who are fond of the early Ministry sound. This and all the other material from that album(written by Mr. Al J.) was performed regularly throughout 82-84 before and after the studio recording. This is the opening song from the 7/20/83 show at First Avenue in Minneapolis, MN.
While I love "Work for Love," and the YouTube poster loves "Work for Love," not everyone agrees:
There are those artists who get a couple releases into their career before they feel the pressure from the suits at the label to “have a hit,” and then there are those artists who sell out right from the get-go.
Ministry certainly falls into the latter category and their debut longplayer smacks of blatant commerciality…blatant, misguided, and downright silly commerciality....
How else does one explain such tracks as “Work For Love” and “What He Say?” — the latter a laughably kitschy blend of synth-pop and, uh, world music…I think....
No wonder Jourgenson has spent the better part of three decades trying to live this one down, putting on one helluva “tough-guy” act in the process.
But as for me, I just can't get enough (geddit?) of that old song.
Hundreds of years ago, the only way to make music was to learn how to play a musical instrument, or to sing passably well. As time marched forward, various technological advances, ranging from programmable synthesizers to auto-tune (see previous post), have allowed people to create music without years upon years of study.
CES isn't usually a place for mulling existential questions, but here's a couple for you: What constitutes a musical instrument, and what does it mean to be a musician? I couldn't help wondering about that after seeing a demo of a prototype from Music Mastermind, a two-year-old Calabasas-based start-up founded by a former major-label executive and a Wall Street trader. MMM is developing a music-creation tool that erases the line between video games and composition. It enables people to create full-blown, professional-sounding songs by singing into a computer or specialized portable device, then using a software band to provide the backing track. And it does so with the look and feel of a video game.
After Healey attended a demo at CES, he reported:
It's obviously not the same as playing the notes yourself on real instruments with honest-to-goodness recording equipment, but it's close enough to be startling. That's why MMM's chief technical officer, Reza Rassool, calls the software "the first 21st century musical instrument."
MMM noted that this was not the first move to expand music-making. They cited karaoke as another example of the extension of music-making to the people.
Now whether you consider MMM's opponents as backwards-thinking Luddites or true musicians probably depends, at least in part, upon your personal music-making capabilities. Yet at the same time, I personally don't feel that MMM has really lowered the bar much more than auto-tune, karaoke, programmable synthesizers, and the like have already done. There's a wide spectrum of opinions on what is true music vs. what is fake - for example, I'm sure there's a very vocal minority of people who believe that music went to hell when Les Paul started electrifying guitars. And on the other hand, there are probably people who believe that no performance should ever be live, because of the possible errors that can occur during a live performance.
Christmas and my birthday occur at about the same time, so I need to come up with a bunch of gift ideas for family members. However, my gift ideas are often either boring (socks) or prohibitively expensive (a netbook). This year - whoops, I mean last year, since I'm talking about 2009 - I solved the problem by putting a lot of CDs on my wish list.
As a result, I ended up receiving five CDs over the holiday season. I just opened up the third CD (Air's Moon Safari, if you're curious) a few minutes ago, and I'm sick of the CD opening process.
By the time you get a CD opened, you're half convinced that the record companies would prefer that you not listen to the music. First you have to take off the wrapper, and then you have to peel off the really sticky wrapper that's on the top of the CD. Basically, it's a huge hassle.
But it isn't only the evil record industry that packages its products in an unusable manner. I'll continue this thought in a post on my business blog.
OK, let's talk about a music manager. Actually, a fake music manager. You see, Dave Madden played the manager on The Partridge Family. I was surfing one night and ended up at a Partridge Family website, which included a recent interview with Madden. He's had a varied career, and he told a story that was heartbreaking.
My manager had a little club in Beverly Hills called The Ye Little Club and he called me in one night. I had gone out and worked some Playboy Clubs and I was in town and he called me because the singer was sick and he wanted me to come and perform on a Saturday night. In the audience was a writer for Screen Gems named Jerry Davis and his wife, and Nat King Cole's manager and his wife. After the show, they called me over to their table and Nat Cole's manager asked if I would like to do an eight-week tour with Nat King Cole. And Nat was my favorite singer, so there was no problem there!
At this point, the interviewer said, "That must have been a treat!" But Madden replied:
Well, it would have been. What happened there was the date we were supposed to open the tour at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City was the day they buried him. I never even got to meet him. So that was that.
I live in Ontario, California, which doesn't exactly have the outdoor cafe and entertainment climate that you can find in other cities, such as San Francisco. In other places, you have singers and entertainers on the streets, and the government encourages it.
Some cities have even changed their regulations to encourage such activity. Take London, for example:
The licensed Underground busking scheme was launched in 2003 by London Underground. Before this busking was illegal and completely unregulated. Thanks to London Underground the scheme is now a licensed scheme and is popular with passengers
The quote about the 2003 legalization (whoops, legalisation) of busking was taken from the end of a London Underground Press Release, which also included the following:
From Monday 30 November buskers will be entertaining passengers on new Coca-Cola branded busking pitches across the Tube network.
Around 240 active buskers help brighten passengers' journeys by performing at 21 central Tube stations.
The licensed busking scheme currently includes 33 busking pitches, which are like mini-stages for musicians, however no busker will be required to sing or play on the Tube.
But BusinessWeek noted that the buskers do have one little teeny-tiny requirement to fulfill:
Coke also wants singers to perform its theme tune ‘Holidays Are Coming’ and other Christmas carols as part of the viral ad campaign.
As you can imagine, the buskers embraced this opportunity to sing a Coke jingle with wide open arms...oh, wait, they didn't.
Michael Ball, a 47-year-old jazz guitarist from Tulse Hill who has been busking for 25 years in Tube stations, said: "Not in a million years will I play some Coke jingle. Most buskers make half their annual income in December. Londoners are really up for it and generous at this time and we know what songs and music work. Do commuters really want to hear a corporate jingle from every busker? What a daft idea."
Coca-Cola's response?
"Coca-Cola is sponsoring busking on London Underground this Christmas but we are in too early a stage to confirm the details of the arrangement."
As Bill Cosby would say, "RIIIIIGHT." It's too early to confirm details of the arrangement of something that will happen less than 20 days from now, and for which Coca-Cola has already issued its own press release?
