Link to news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110114/od_nm/us_canada_song_odd.
Cartoon from this week’s edition of Libertarian Enterprise.
January 17, 2011
Smith and May illustrate the CBSC decision
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January 13, 2011
Offensensitivity, the Canadian disease
Banned on the radio in Canada, but still (for the moment) legal on the internet:
Update, 14 January: I’ve been informed that this video isn’t playing for some, and it’s not working for me now either. I guess it’s another one of those content licensing issues. So I guess I’ll have to make this change:
Banned on the radio in Canada, but still (for the moment) legal on the internet. Banned on the radio in Canada, AND on the internet.
December 27, 2010
Bargain of the year on classical music
By way of Gerard Vanderleun, here’s perhaps the biggest bargain in classical music I’ve ever seen (iTunes store link):
That’s 316 classical music tracks. As one of the comments said “That’s pretty much ‘buy one album’, get 30 free.”
December 8, 2010
Repost: “What was I doing when I heard . . .”
Another year, another opportunity for some people to indulge in over-the-top, mawkish, ostentatious grief for someone the vast majority never actually met:
A post up at American Digest recounts what Gerard was doing when he heard that John Lennon had been shot. It’s a good posting: go read it.
What I was doing was a lot less interesting and profound: I was driving from Mississauga to Montreal that morning, and all I could get on the AM radio in the truck was endless playings of “Imagine” and other Lennon tunes I didn’t like to start with. To make it worse, I was going to be spending two weeks in Montreal (I don’t speak French), hanging off the side of an apartment building (I’m really not good with heights), learning how to install a master-antenna TV system. I certainly had enough worries of my own to occupy my thoughts.
I was born in 1960. By the time I started paying attention to popular music, the Beatles were about as current to me as the Monkees (and, truth to tell, I kinda preferred the latter, if only for the TV show reruns). John Lennon was some bearded weirdo with a whacky wife and they both spouted the sort of rhetoric that left me feeling that they really didn’t like the west at all. I was sorry that he was dead, but the wholesale public mourning struck me as being just plain over-the-top.
In retrospect, it was rather like the outpouring of public grief when Princess Diana got herself killed: unseemly, inappropriate, lavishly exhibitionistic displays of emotion. Perhaps I’m just not very sympathetic, at heart, but all it seemed to lack was ululations and slashing of cheeks to be a true primitive, tribal ceremony. I didn’t have the stones to say “Grow up” out loud, but that was what I thought then.
Originally posted on 8 December, 2004.
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December 1, 2010
“London Calling” to come to the big screen
Fans of The Clash, your film is in production:
The creation of classic album London Calling by punk band The Clash is to form the basis of a new music biopic.
Former Clash members Paul Simonon and Mick Jones will executive produce the film, named after the 1979 record.
Playwright Jez Butterworth will pen the script, which will tell how producer Guy Stevens worked with the band to create their most celebrated disc.
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November 21, 2010
November 13, 2010
Some music just doesn’t belong in commercials
By way of @muskrat_john (John Kovalic), who wrote “Love the Pogues. Love my Subaru Forrester. Saw Forrester commercial use Pogues song. Surprisingly, I died a little inside.”:
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November 8, 2010
October 29, 2010
“When I was taking dope, I was fully convinced that my body is my temple”
The longevity of Keith Richards is a point of bafflement for drug warriors and rock groupies alike:
The Rolling Stone’s autobiography reveals a lifetime of substance abuse. Why on earth hasn’t it killed him?
His name is synonymous with rock ‘n’ roll excess, his memoirs detail a lifetime spent ingesting a Herculean quantity of illegal drugs and he only gave up cocaine, aged 62, after he split his head open falling from a tree while foraging for coconuts.
At 66, Keith Richards’ continued survival is a source of widespread bafflement.
According to addiction expert Dr Robert Lefever, director of the Promis recovery centre in Richards’ native Kent, there is only one possible explanation for his longevity: “He must have the constitution of an ox.”
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October 9, 2010
I always wondered about “Christian Rock”
If Insane Clown Posse has now outed themselves as Christian rockers, does that mean that Pat Boone was actually recruiting for Satan?
Milwaukee. A bad and quite eerie part of town. This happens to be the very block where the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and ate 17 people in the 1980s. Now, from all around, thousands of young men and women, wearing scary clown face paint, are descending upon a disused indoor swimming pool that has been transformed into a music venue. They are juggalos, fans of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the rap duo known as Insane Clown Posse.
At first glance, it might not be obvious why I’m so excited about meeting them. You might dismiss them as just unbelievably misogynist and aggressive, and it is true that their lyrics are indeed incredibly offensive.
[. . .]
ICP have been going for 20 years, always wearing clown make-up, which looks slightly lumpy because it’s painted over their goatees. They’ve been banned from performing in various cities where juggalos have been implicated in murders and gang violence. ICP have a fearsome reputation, fostered by news reports showing teenagers in juggalo T-shirts arrested for stabbing strangers and lyrics like “Barrels in your mouth/bullets to your head/The back of your neck’s all over the shed/Boomshacka boom chop chop bang.”
All of which makes Violent J’s recent announcement really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this entire time secretly been evangelical Christians. They’ve only been pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God.
Did anyone ever guess that the next Great Awakening would be heralded by ICP?
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October 8, 2010
Do you recognize this astronaut?
Apparently, he’s so easily identified in this image that he’s suing the artist, her recording company, and the stock image firm:
An American astronaut is suing Dido, claiming the singer misappropriated his image on her most recent album. Bruce McCandless II was photographed on a spacewalk in 1984; a quarter of a century later, he found himself floating in the centre of Dido’s Safe Trip Home album cover. And he isn’t happy.
McCandless’s complaint, filed last week, names Sony Music, Getty Images and Dido as defendants, using the singer’s full name – Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong. However, because the Nasa astronaut does not own the rights to the photograph, he is not suing for copyright infringement. Instead, he claims his “persona” was used without permission to help sell Dido’s album.
I don’t know what his chances of success might be, but if Sony Music bought the image from Getty, then it’s Getty that should be the only defendant . . . it’s the stock photography company’s responsibility to ensure that all the images they sell are properly licensed and available to sell on. Downstream users shouldn’t be held responsible for the due diligence of the seller.
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September 22, 2010
September 12, 2010
Taking the term “Space Opera” too literally
Get your tickets now for the first opera to be performed entirely in Klingon:
Die-hard “Star Trek” fans may want to dust off their Klingon dictionaries and take a transporter to Europe for the debut of the first opera ever to be completely sung in the invented science fiction language.
The opera, called “u,” kicks off a three-day run at the Zeebelt Theater today in The Hague, Netherlands. The title “u” is the Klingon word for “universe” or “universal.”
Tickets for the performances were still available as of Friday morning, according to Reuters.
Klingon, which is spoken by members of the fictional “Star Trek” warrior race of the same name, has evolved into a significant pop culture phenomenon since the American science fiction TV series first hit the airwaves in the late 1960s.
Fans worldwide adopted the alien dialect and made it one of the most popular constructed languages, opera organizers said.
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September 6, 2010
Fifteen albums/fifteen minutes
I got tagged with this Facebook meme by David Stamper a little while ago, but I’m only now just getting around to addressing it. Here’s the description I was sent:
The rules: Do this if it’s fun. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums you choose.
So, because I’m too lazy to do it in Facebook, I’m doing it here (eventually, through the magic of Twitter, the link’ll appear in Facebook anyway). Roughly in chronological order:
- Rush, A Farewell to Kings
- Al Stewart, Past, Present & Future
- Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV
- The Alan Parsons Project, Tales of Mystery and Imagination
- Dire Straits, Dire Straits
- Kate Bush, Hounds of Love
- Neil Young, Live Rust
- Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
- King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King
- Kitaro, Silk Road
- Stan Rogers, Northwest Passage
- Dead Can Dance, The Serpent’s Egg
- The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace With God
- John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
- Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
I had to take it in chronological order to limit it to only fifteen, so no really recent stuff . . . but perhaps that’s fair as it’ll take time to show if more recent stuff will hold up to long-term listening. Not quite making it onto the list was Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis & Gil Evans.
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September 2, 2010
Farewell to “Farewell tours”, then?
The Pogues appear to have a bit of dissent going on:
The Pogues have announced a “farewell tour” for the UK, much to the consternation of their guitarist. Phil Chevron has blasted notices for the goodbye tour, calling it “a marketing ploy” by others in the band. “This claim does not come from me,” he wrote on the group’s website, “and I will neither be supporting it nor discussing it.”
The seven-date tour begins in Glasgow and ends on 21 December in Brixton, with reported Irish gigs earlier in the month. These concerts will close the band’s 28th year, and their ninth since frontman Shane MacGowan re-formed the folk-punk rabble-rousers. But despite the flier’s unequivocal “Farewell Christmas Tour” tag-line, the Pogues don’t exactly seem ready to say farewell.
Not long after Chevron’s grumpy post to the official message-board, bandmate Spider Stacy popped in with a clarification. “This is the last Christmas tour for the foreseeable future,” he wrote. “That’s not to say we won’t be showing up at festivals here and there or maybe even the odd gig around the UK and Ireland and certainly in Europe. But we’re tired of dragging our weary, freezing carcasses around these drowning islands every December, so we’re going to give it a rest before you get tired of it, too. Go and see the Libertines. They’re the best.”
Shows how much attention I’d been paying . . . I thought 1996’s “Pogue Mahone” was the last album they’d recorded, and that they’d pretty much stopped performing. Off to Wikipedia . . .
The Pogues is a band of mixed Irish and English background, playing traditional Irish music with influences from punk rock and folk, formed in 1982 and fronted by Shane MacGowan. The band reached international prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. MacGowan left the band in 1991 due to drinking problems but the band continued first with Joe Strummer and then with Spider Stacy on vocals before breaking up in 1996. The band reformed in 2001, and has been playing regularly ever since, most notably on the US East Coast every spring (bar 2010) and around the UK and Ireland every December. The group has yet to record any new music and according to Spider Stacy on Pogues.com has no inclination to do so.
That explains it nicely.
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