Win me, woo me, wed me
{ Christopher Shultis plays an amplified cactus while reciting an excerpt from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake | Haverford | Watch the video | Thanks Tom }
music category
Honey I know, I know, I know times are changing
On Tuesday an independent magazine backed by private equity owners succumbed to the punishing ad market and announced it would cease publication immediately. It was, as things go in publishing these days, a fairly routine story.
Routine except the magazine had an 800,000 circulation, was founded by the music impresario Quincy Jones and had an alluring name that came to be synonymous with hip-hop and R&B: Vibe.
Plenty of magazines have been felled by the punishing economics of print publishing, but few left the footprint that Vibe did after just 16 years. Founded with a test issue in 1992 by Time Warner and commencing regular issues in 1993, Vibe was a magazine about hip-hop, R&B and urban youth culture that brought luxe design values and major-league photography and writing to the music that dominated and shaped American pop culture in the late 1990s.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
The San Francisco Chronicle just finished a 144-day retrospective of its first 144 years. It was fascinating and fun, but it also begged a question: why celebrate 144 years? Why not wait for 150? Is there some special, local significance to 144?
No. It’s just that the Chronicle may not survive to 150.
Am I eternal or an eternalist?
Michael Jackson fans are committing suicide.
“Let me tell you about the time I interviewed Michael Jackson.”
Jackson episode of ‘The Simpsons’ to air on Sunday.
Michael Jackson White by Paul McCarthy.
Quincy Jones on Michael Jackson.
List of the world’s best-selling albums. #1 Michael Jackson’s Thriller, over 100 million copies. #2 AC/DC’s Back in Black, 45 million copies…
If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see
In 1969-1970, Iggy Pop and his seminal proto-punk band the Stooges lived together outside Detroit in a house they nicknamed “Fun House.” (They also named an album for it.) Besides writing and recording music, they were injecting massive amounts of drugs, mostly heroin. When setting up a hit, the Stooges would squirt the blood out of their syringes and shoot it all over the walls and ceilings. After a while, enough blood had accumulated on the apartment’s walls to create a sort-of degraded smack addict’s Jackson Pollock mural. Ron Asheton, the only Stooge member who was not a junkie and who lived elsewhere, described it “…a lot of times there would be fresh stuff. Then it would dry on to the table or on the floor…”
I saw you last night, out moving round, with your new turf
Eminem stormed out of the awards ceremony after Baron Cohen, in the role of the main character from his new movie, “Bruno,” landed on his lap after a flying mishap, leaving the audience wondering if the rapper really was furious or if it was a stunt. The Detroit rapper told website RapRadar.com that…
Had a ‘caine filled Kool with my man Rush Rush
With CD sales dropping fast, it is not hard to imagine how the major music labels could benefit from the growth of Web start-ups like Imeem. The company’s service lets people listen to songs, discover new artists and share their favorites with friends. And in return, Imeem owes the labels licensing fees for use of the music.
But two months ago, Imeem’s founder, Dalton Caldwell, was ready to pull the plug. While 26 million people a month were using the service, Imeem owed millions of dollars to the music labels, and income from advertising was nowhere close to covering expenses. “It reached a point where it was not even clear it was worth doing any more,” Mr. Caldwell said.
Then the ground shifted. This month, Warner Music Group forgave Imeem’s debt, and both Warner and Universal Music agreed to relax the terms of their licensing deals with the site. That allowed Imeem to raise more money from investors and plan for a profitable future.
Imeem’s amnesty is one sign that a new accommodation is being forged between Web music start-ups and the companies on which they are almost wholly dependent, the major music labels. The recording industry is considering an all-digital future in which it needs popular Web services like Imeem, both as sources of revenue and as supplements to older channels of promotion like radio and MTV.
As a result, music labels are now striking more favorable terms with Web companies, and the start-ups have come to realize they cannot rely on Web ads to support themselves. For example, as part of its new plan, Imeem will try to push users into buying more T-shirts and concert tickets, and will soon add its own MP3 download store similar to iTunes, sharing revenue with the labels. (…)
Last fall, Lala, a Silicon Valley start-up, introduced a distinctive service that lets people listen to a song once at no charge. Then it costs 10 cents to stream that song repeatedly on the Web and up to 99 cents to download it. Lala executives credit the labels’ cooperation in the unusual licensing arrangement and say they are selling hundreds of thousands of songs a month. (…)
“Until we start seeing these guys living on their revenues, as opposed to their investment, we are not going to know how effective their business models are,” said Mike McGuire, an analyst at the research firm Gartner.
Limbo boppin good cause love is in the air
{ How four unassuming guys from NYU became everybody’s favorite New York band | NY mag | Grizzly Bear arranges its songs so carefully that they accrue intricate, hairline detail with no loss of momentum, but the group’s most obvious gift is the vocal. | New Yorker | Plus: Official site, Amazon.com, iTunes }
So I’m rockin all the rhymes and I’ll have another drink
On Oct. 24, 2001, The New York Times published a story about a quirky new portable music player made by a computer company that was small enough to fit in just about anyone’s front pocket.
The story appeared on page 8 of the newspaper’s business section. Not exactly prime real estate.
Analysts were bemused. The device had limited commercial potential, they said. After all, it was only compatible with less than 5 per cent of the computers in the United States. To the rest of the Windows crowd, “it doesn’t make any difference,” one observer opined.
Indeed, it was an inauspicious start for the iPod.
The day before the Times story appeared, Apple Inc. co-founder and chief executive officer Steve Jobs unveiled his creation and laid out his vision of the future to a gathering of technology journalists and analysts in California.
“Interestingly enough, in this whole new digital revolution, there is no market leader,” he told them. “No one has found the recipe yet for digital music. And we think not only can we find the recipe, but we think the Apple brand is going to be fantastic, because people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from … we’re introducing a product today that takes us exactly there, and that product is called iPod.”
And with that, Mr. Jobs pulled the white, rectangular device out of the front pocket of his jeans and held it up for the audience. Polite applause. Many looked like they didn’t get it.
That was just fine with Mr. Jobs. They’d understand soon enough.
‘Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.’ –Ronald Reagan
Music can be thought of as a form of emotional communication, with which the performer conveys an emotional state to the listener. This “language” is remarkably powerful - it can evoke strong emotions, and make your heart race or send tingles down your spine. And it is universal - the emotional content of a piece of music can be understood by anyone, regardless of cultural background.
Are the emotions evoked by piece of music similar to, and can they influence, other emotional experiences? The answer to these questions is unclear. But a new study, which has just been published in Neuroscience Letters, provides both behavioural and physiological evidence that the emotions evoked by music can be transferred to the sense of vision, and can influence how the emotions in facial expressions are perceived. (…)
In the first study, 30 participants were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts, each lasting 15 seconds. After each piece of music, the participants were shown a photograph of a face, expressing either a happy, sad, or neutral expression. The photographs were flashed on a screen for 1 second, after which the participants were asked to rate the emotion on a 7-piont scale, where 1 denotes extremely sad and 7 extremely happy. (…)
Happy faces primed by a happy piece of music were rated as happier than when primed by sad music.
drawing { Lori Earley }
You and the night and the music
My attitude toward music, when working, is very much what it used to be toward drugs. It wasn’t about what you “enjoyed,” it was about what could get you through.
When I stumbled out of my first marriage, I had a trunk full of amazing LPs, some with original Blue Note covers. All kinds of deep-end 3 a.m. junkie bat-cave music. Or so I, in my provincial ignorance, perceived it.
Whatever — this stuff kept me going because inside the wildness was a kind of beauty that didn’t exactly break your heart, but reminded you that you still had one, when the whole world was going very south, very fast.
Much of what I try to do on the page is create a state of mind: quite often the extreme and occasionally conflicting drive to stay alive and not kill yourself or anybody else in the process.
