Breaking: Matt reads entire article, prefers headline

Wired: Anti-Emo Riots Break out Across Mexico

"They're organizing to defend their right to be emo,"

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So apparently 'emo' in Mexico means something totally different than the rest of the saturated. I can guess the common themes: Whining to parents about allowance, bad to brutal haircuts, poor taste in music. Hi ho.

To be honest, I feel really terrible for those kids. If you're going to take a stand, at least have a decent soundtrack. I seriously doubt any of them are going to immolate themselves, or even know how to put on a real protest. And I am definitely not referring to Protest the Hero.

Speaking of heroes:



^ What a real protest looks like

Like a Virgin

I've never been to the Virgin Festival, and this year's lineup will not be enticing me out into the herd.

"Billie Jean" inspired website aside, I can't help but feel that Toronto Rock City would be better off if the Canadian bands weren't relegated to "lowest common font-size" status. But, I get it, I really do. This is Sir Branson exporting his nation's "culture" around the world, attempting to plant the seeds of Brit-pop everywhere the festival goes. There is one problem...

Close one eye and cover the part of the image that says 'Bloc Party', and the part that says '2008'. By now, of course, you've already forgotten the names of the bands along the bottom.

Now. What year is it?

Yep.

1998.

Meme Generation

Buzz Feed: Rick Astley Gets Rick Rolled

I pretty much missed the boat on this one... But thanks to BuzzFeed, I can now add 'Rick Rolled' to my vocabulary, then promptly forget its meaning.

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Links:

Main Offender - Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (#1 Billboard Hot 100 March 12-19 1988)

Wanting to miss... a bunch of things

From The Onion: Next Generation To Take A Pass On Aerosmith

Evil always finds a way... Nice try, Generation Z. Good luck with Flava Flav, though.

Totally Wired

A couple good music ones on Wired.com today:

Sony/BMG Supports Unlimited Music, Says Profits Rose 15 Percent

&

Perils of Joining the iPod Nation

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And from 1981, here's The Fall with "Totally Wired"




And, here's one of the greatest songs ever, given the usual chaotic treatment by the band.... "Cruiser's Creek"

Handsome Future

Kick ass song. Apparently Everlast is doing Canadian-indie video cameos. Overall, not a bad video, considering the budget.

Handsome Furs - "Cannot Get Started"



Here's something else that's pretty sweet, and has been in high rotation for me lately. Not this video in particular, but the track from the album, All Hour Cymbals. This cut is missing a bit without the chorus of children as on the album, but it still holds up well as a song.
It's quite possible this video was actually made in 1981 and sent into the future... it might be hard to persuade people otherwise.

Yeasayer - "2080"



Why is it you never find someone who looks like they'd be singing that falsetto?

Crimson Ping

Halo 26, aka "Ghosts Vol. I-IV" is a step towards what albums will look like in the future. The evil, fist-fucking crossover virus once known as Nine Inch Nails has mutated into something far more deadly.

The album, released under Creative Commons, forces the listener to pick up the scattered pieces and somehow stitch them together, whether it's re-arranging the multitrack files to create your own remix, or just putting all the sleepy-time songs on the same mixtape. Musically, it's a chaotic mix of every slice of NIN thus far, plus a wide range of instruments never before heard on one of Mr. Reznor's albums. If I didn't know any better, which I do, I'd say Trent is slyly setting himself up for a trip into prog territory... timpani? real bells? Adrian Belew even returns to the fold for a few tracks. You heard it here first! Maybe NIN will take King Crimson along for their recently announced tour...

Links:

Ghosts review [TinyMixTapes]

Meathead Perspective (A hilarious, satirical take on NIN)

Simian Puppet Show

Here's a so-so video for a great song, Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe"

You can always replace a Fender... but a Gibson is heaven sent

Recently, I interviewed Toronto singer-songwriter Seb Agnello for VoicePrint, Canada's Broadcast Reading Service.
Seb just released his ninth solo album, "Take Your Lumps", which he wrote, recorded, and produced while performing most of the instruments.

Among the cuts is a track co-written with "The Iceman", power-popper Bob Segarini - "Me & God", an autobiographical tale about a guy and his guitar.

Here's the show, which aired on March 16.

Links:

Turtle Shell Music - Seb Agnello

Here's a video from the "Take Your Lumps" CD release party of "Me & God"

You make me like charity

Onion A.V. Club: We care a lot: 14 overblown charity/advocacy songs besides "We are the World"

Underlying Band Aid's sense of self-importance, though, is the song's basic ignorance: Ethiopia, a country that's more than 50 percent Christian, probably doesn't need to be schooled about Christmas by Boy George, Lisa Stansfield, and whoever the hell Sugababes are.

I had no idea some of these existed... especially Hammer rapping over a Dr. Dre beat, immediately followed up by Eazy E.

A lot of these people really should know better.

Run, epileptic, run

Gnarls Barkley enlist Justin Timberlake to help give kids around the world epileptic seizures.

I paid myself today

From Wired blog: NIN album generates $1.6 Million in its first week

According to the band, 800,000 transactions generated $1.6 million in sales revenue... despite the fact that the 36-song version of the album is widely available on torrent sites.

---
Trent's gambit pays off, after testing the waters last year with the Saul Williams release. This is a major coup for an artist recently released from a major label deal. Unfortunately, what will get lost in the discussion is the fact that Reznor needed the major label machine to build up the massive fan base which subsequently went quite rabid, consuming everything in its sight.

When the album was released Sunday night (probably a first), the servers crashed within a few hours, leaving many people, this pseudo-journalist included, unable to order the complete package, and being forced to settle for volume I of the four volume set.

It's available for free right now! The other three volumes, however, you must pay for.

Congratulations, Mr. Reznor, on proving that ubiquitous, massively popular artists with international fan bases tuned in to the Internets and the Apple II can succeed in today's volatile music market.

Links:

NIN: Ghosts

Post-ironic meltdown

This is the kind of video that makes you wonder why you even woke up this morning.

Iggy & the Stooges perform at the RnR Hall of Fame ceremony. Two Madonna songs - "Burning Up", and "Ray of Light". Iggy's collaboration with Sum 41 was rock-scum-bottom for me, but this... this is something else. The Hall had a load of fucking balls asking these guys to play when they haven't even been inducted. I can only imagine Iggy heading off stage straight into his SUV back to his mansion and champagne. In the good old days, he would have been cutting his chest open with broken glass, pissing all over the stage and audience, and making lewd and lascivious comments at Madonna. The headline would have been excellent - "Godfather of Punk woos Queen of Pop".

If only.

Train wreck alert:



This is possibly... possibly... the worst thing you will see, hear, or witness all year. If you didn't think rock was dead, this video should be the final toss of dirt upon the final nail in the coffin upon the 50th bludgeon after a fall from 30,000 feet.

The world of popular music has officially imploded on itself. All is lost.

I must now go wash my eyes. My soul needs cleansing.

Akon fucks up. Big time.

"Wanna Be Starting Something 2008".

Jackson comes out of a decency-imposed retirement to drop a fresh, steaming turd in the collective beverages of the 104 million people who bought Thriller the first time around. This alleged song totally destroys the urgent, paranoid, club-busting feel of the original, neuters the track, and leaves it lying in the alley writhing in agony hoping stray dogs will come out and tear it to bits... just to put it out of its misery.

Kanye West on Billie Jean: Why bother? No new vocal from Michael, but some of Kanye's trademark "Uhhn"'s, and that same kick drum sample he uses on every one of his tracks were just what this song needed. If Kanye wanted to be taken seriously, he should have skipped this project.

will.i.am on Girl is Mine: Actually... not so bad! I hate the original version about as much as you can hate a song, so Mr. Adams, Jr. does the right thing and finally puts this one out of its misery. If this is where Jackson's next album is coming from, it might be bearable to human ears. My prediction on that one: three plays before the autonomous response of hurling is produced.

Do yourself a favour and avoid Thriller 25 at all costs. There is no reason for this album to exist, whatsoever.
What? What's that? Yes... I suppose, millions of dollars of debt... previous dismal "comeback" attempts... right. Guess there are a few reasons why this has to exist... none of them good.

Your grandmother deciding to trade up from that dial-up connection

From Blender via Wired blog:
20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time

[Edison] hated jazz: “I always play jazz records backwards,” he sniffed. “They sound better that way.” So after releasing the world’s first jazz recording—Collins and Harlan’s “That Funny Jas Band From Dixieland”—the company spurned the craze in favor of waltzes and foxtrots. Edison Records folded in October 1929.

Edison: inventor of the light bulb, founder of one of the evilest corporations ever, and hater of jas music. I wonder how he would feel about his patents paving the way to record and play back hip hop music? Note that Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan were very, very white.

Here's Collins & Harlan, with "That Funny Jas Band From Dixieland", over at archive.org

Mounties get their man

CBC News: Music to their ears: Artists pleased alleged music bootlegger shut down

RCMP investigators raided the Winnipeg-based shop of Audiomaxxx.com on Wednesday and seized 200,000 CDs and DVDs as well as computers, label-making machines and burning towers capable of copying 11,500 discs a day.

This seizure is a staggering amount of bootlegged goods! The article says that this alleged pirater and his cronies are responsible for 1/3 of all the bootleg material in Toronto. That's a busy little office. I guess the people who buy this stuff don't realize that you can get this stuff online, more or less for free. The deal must have been too good to refuse. I mean, colour printers can work serious wonders these days.
So the moral of the story is that crime doesn't pay... and neither does working in the music industry.

Pay per pirate

Toronto Star: File-sharers should get ready to pay, say experts

"It's the ISPs who have to crack down, and they will, once they realize they can make money from the people who use the most bandwidth. The shift will be to subscription services costing (high bandwidth users) a fee, as much as $12 a month," Hughes predicts.

The U.S. music industry hasn't handed out a diamond award –for sales of 10 million – in the last four years because of peer-to-peer usage and other methods of free downloading.
- Chris Gillis, Internet piracy prevention company Mediadefender

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This rhetoric really becomes tiring after a while. Piracy certainly has something to do with the fact that the RIAA's products have been consistently worse and worse. The last album to be certified diamond in the states was Norah Jones' Come Away With Me. I'm not a big fan of Ms. Jones' music, but it would take some kind of dummy not to realize that a lot of people enjoy her music.

This guy's statement is patently false. The music industry has handed out diamond awards in the past few years. They just weren't released in the past four years. The Best of the Doors reached diamond last year. You put out a decent product, and people will pay for it, whether or not they can get it for free. And whether or not it came out in the last four years.

Mellon Collie re-imagined

I thought it might be interesting to see what it would be like to split the Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by heavier tunes versus the lullabies. Aside from putting "Zero" as the first track of the heavy disc, I pretty much kept the same sequence that appears across the album.

The vinyl edition of the album featured a much different track sequence from the CD edition altogether, taking advantage of the format's capabilities/limitations.

Here's my take. I came up with the titles all by myself. Best enjoyed by making a playlist from an mp3 rip.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness: Quiet

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Tonight, Tonight
To Forgive
Cupid de Locke
Take Me Down
Thirty-Three
In the Arms of Sleep
1979
Stumbleine
We Only Come Out At Night
Beautiful
Lily (My One and Only)
By Starlight
Farewell and Goodnight


Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness: Loud

Zero
Jellybelly
Here Is No Why
An Ode to No One
Love
Galapogos
Muzzle
Porcelina of the Vast Oceans
Where Boys Fear To Tread
Bodies
Tales of a Scorched Earth
Thru The Eyes of Ruby
X.Y.U.

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And from that album, here's one of the greatest videos of all time, "Tonight, Tonight".

The couple is played by Tom Kenny and Jill Talley, who just began appearing on Mr. Show right about this time.

Get ready to Ctrl-D

Pitchfork magazine will be launching Pitchfork TV on April 7th... this could be good. Or this could be a brutal train wreck. Either way, this should be interesting. Everyone knows train wrecks are fun to watch.

If it's done right, it could be all about rock docs, cool live indie shows, interviews and so forth. If it's done wrong, it'll be Vampire Weekend and other hype-bands-du-jour twice an hour. A fate worse than death.

RIAA: Lawsuite

Wired: Lawsuit Could Force RIAA to Reveal Secrets

If it turns out that the RIAA is paying its investigators (such as MediaSentry) a percentage of the settlements that result from their investigations, it is in even more trouble. That's illegal in many states, according to Ratoza, including New York.

Strange, you never knew

This is a track by Mazzy Star titled "Fade Into You", which hit the Billboard Modern Rock chart in 1994. Stylistically, the song isn't too far off from a Cowboy Junkies song, circa Trinity Sessions.

Friends... and lovers.

Gloria Loring and Carl Anderson served up an extra special helping of Ultra-cheeze with this 1986 soft-rock ballad, "Friends and Lovers". She was a soap star on Days of Our Lives... He was a Broadway veteran who also sang back up on one of the greatest albums of all time, Stevie Wonder's massive 1976 album, Songs In the Key of Life. It was a match made in heaven.

This is an American Bandstand performance. [Re-read sentence]
Too bad the person who uploaded the video didn't include the rest of the interview... I hate it when that happens. When Prince appeared, he mentioned that he could play over 100 instruments. I wonder how many instruments Carl and Gloria play.

The song was recently parodied on an episode of Family Guy. It was a very creepy sequence. Kind of like how you could never listen to "Singin' in the Rain" quite the same way after seeing Clockwork Orange.

Or, "Blowin' in the Wind" after Forrest Gump.

Or "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" as sung by Michael Bolton. [NSFW]

RIP Jeff Healey

Jeff Healey photo gallery [CBC.ca]

Angel Eyes music video [YouTube]

Punk waits for no one

Here's a great clip from Toronto counter-culture folk/punk group S.C.A.B. There's no date on this clip, but we can assume it was somewhere around 1981.



The lead singer/guitarist of S.C.A.B is Seb Agnello, former member of the Lords of London, who had a #1 hit on the CHUM chart back in 1967 with "Cornflakes and Ice Cream". Here's a promo clip for the b-side to that track, "Time Waits for No One". It's fun to see Canada's version of the Monkees living it up at an area playground.