Canada Invades US – With Indie Music
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 14, 2009 by admin in Music
Monday, September 14th, 2009While we’ve been busy trembling in fear of terrorists and calling our new president a socialist (is that actually an insult?) Canada has been busy invading our country. With a bunch of awesome indie music.
The New Pornographers’ Myriad Harbour may end up being my favorite video of 2008 |
It’s somehow telling that there’s only one derogatory name for Canadians, and even that one’s pretty friendly sounding. I mean, who could get mad about being called a Canuck? I’ve been marveling for a while at the explosion of indie bands over the past several years, whether from the American scene, the Balkans, Japan, Iceland, or even in the form of surprisingly un-incongruous German Reggae. It’s almost impossible to keep up! And thanks to our kind & sensible friends north of the border, now I have even more to catch up with. I hadn’t noticed until recently how many bands creeping onto my playlist were Canadian: Arcade Fire
Mexican Pop Star Makes Sony Walk Their Own Gangplank
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on September 8, 2009 by admin in Music
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009Pretty soon the RIAA is going to have to change its name to the Argh!IAA
Sony, the company that tries to infect our computers with spyware & malware, that sues its customers to the tune of 2 million dollars for piracy, that has been investigated themselves for software piracy, and that is guilty by association of corrupting our judicial system, has gotten a tiny taste of their own medicine. Like me, you may not have heard of Mexican mega popstar Alejandro Fernández before, but today he’s sort of a hero. It seems that while Sony was in the process of screwing him out an entire album, he turned the tables by having police raid their Mexico City offices to seize thousands of his CD’s, audio masters, and artwork. Sony’s PR people seem to be getting less easily rattled these days; although they expressed that they were “shocked” at the multimillion dollar settlement in their favor when suing a customer for piracy, they apparently are only “surprised and disappointed” by the recent raid. Personally, I think we should all show our support by buying some Alejandro Fernández songs
XX’s Extra X Has Made Me An Ex-X Hater
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on September 3, 2009 by admin in Music
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009All Ian wanted to do was say he really likes XX’s first release, but no-OO-oo. First he has to ramble on for 224 words about the history of bands with X in their name.
These kids are so shy that they don’t stop mumbling and get to the good stuff until about 0:55 |
I wish bands would stop resorting to using “X” in their name. For me it all started with X in the 70′s. My friends and I were all busy cutting ourselves, wearing second-hand clothes, getting weird haircuts, and listening to weird music, when all of the sudden people started calling us “Punk”. It wasn’t long after that that there were all these “punk bands” running around, acting all punk and stuff. One of the first in the states was, of course, “X”. In spite of (or maybe because of?) their solid musicianship, I remember distinctly thinking they sucked, and seemed incredibly contrived. Punk Lifestyle Rule Number 1: You can’t call yourself punk and actually be punk at the same time. It’s sort of like Groucho’s line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have people like him as a member. I mean c’mon, these alleged rebel misfits actually received an “Official Certificate of Recognition” from the City of Los Angeles for their music. We also would always confuse X with Generation X, until Billy Idol left the band and started his solo career. Which has turned out well
New Release From Swiss Band Yello Due October 2, 2009
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 17, 2009 by admin in Music
Monday, August 17th, 2009You may know of them because of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Twix commercials, but Yello has been around since the late 70′s.
Some of you may only know of the band Yello
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star Part III
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 11, 2009 by admin in Music
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009Why Your Band Doesn’t Need A Web Site
 We’re still not sure why you’d want to pursue this. |
Two different musicians asked me recently if a couple thousand dollars was a reasonable quote for a basic web site. I said “Absolutely” and then immediately added “but don’t do it”. Interestingly, both were asking for my expertise (I do have a little) but neither were asking me to do the work. Musicians are cheap bastards. I should know, I’m a recovering musician. So why did I tell them not to bother? Because almost everything you would want a web site to do for your band – streaming music, streaming video, user interaction, downloads, etc – is available as a free service elsewhere, with widgets that you can easily embed not only in a very simple site of your own, but in the billions of pages that are the Internet as well. Ask yourself the rather silly (but oft-overlooked) question: Do I want to spend a bunch of money building a destination site of my own and stuggling with SEO to get people to see it, or do I want my music on my site, several other massively trafficked music sites, and thousands of Facebook, Friendfeed, and other Social Networking pages? So the great thing is that whereas this wasn’t really possible even a year ago, there are a slew of sites now that make this absurdly simple. The embedded player from SoundCloud that’s featured below took about five minutes from account setup to embedding to create. For the record, it’s some soundtrackish dreck I did a few years ago for a benefit CD for Kenya-based Amara Conservation. But we’re not showcasing the music, we’re showcasing SoundCloud. They’re just one player in an emerging scene that is sort of like “YouTube” for audio. Below are some of the other key players.