It’s Not Easy Being A Mashup Addict
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 28, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009It Can Leave You All At Once Sweatin’ Like a Farm Animal, and Cool as a Daisy
Radiohead Meets Dave Brubeck |
The other day a friend turned me onto this Pulp Fiction Audio Mix mashup, which reminded me that it’s not easy being a mashup addict. For a long time I complained about how musicians were getting lazy and building whole songs around a single sample (like Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz Deja Vu ), and now I’m whining because I can’t find sample-based material fast enough! I’m not even always sure what I’m looking for; the word “mashup” wasn’t in the OED last time I checked. My favorites are probably the purely musical ones like the the rather brilliant Dave Brubeck/Radiohead clip featured at left, or this Beatles/Kinks/LCD Soundsystem clip, but this medium is pretty broad. Consider the early 90′s EBN mashups like Rock This Base or the more recent Golden Age of Video by Ricardo Autobahn. Both mix the audio and video of multiple sources to pretty good effect. I’m still probably most impressed with artists like YouTube remixing genius Kutiman for his sheer devotion to musicality, but face it. Even William Shatner explaining why Kirk climbs a mountain has some merit, as does a meme-remashing like Christian Bale takes David to the Dentist or the utterly insane Sweatin’ Like a Farm Animal, Cool as a Daisy. If mashups are a totally new concept for you, check out our previous pieces on the topic. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s More To Muse Than A Radiohead Cover Band
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on October 6, 2009 by admin in Music
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009If you’ve dismissed Muse as a Radiohead clone like I did, give them another try. Just don’t bother listening to them as mp3′s on your iPod.
I made the mistake back in 2003 of glossing over the band Muse because of their shameless Radiohead-ness. At the time, listening to Muse when Radiohead existed felt like listening to Coldplay when there’s a U2 around. Except I actually like Radiohead. All of which, in spite of being the perception of the music press in general, is incredibly unfair. In a way I’m glad I glossed over Muse like did, because after finally exhausting all the Radiohead in existence, it’s like there’s a back-catalogue to explore. Except when you finally give Muse a chance, you realize there are layers and layers and layers, and the comparison to Radiohead becomes incredibly inaccurate. My re-Muse-ment began when I saw the video for their new tune Uprising featured here (which seems, alas, to only be available at MTV.com. Apologies in advance for the commercials). In spite of the tune’s over-the-top “anthem for the common man” theme, I found myself nodding along with it, and ended up watching the video for Supermassive Black Hole from their 2006 release Black Holes And Revelations
Is The Age of Stupid Stupid?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on September 21, 2009 by admin in Clean & Green, Popular Media
Monday, September 21st, 2009Today is the global premiere of The Age of Stupid, a dystopian eco-film that the New York Times is calling a sterner and more alarming polemic than An Inconvenient Truth. But is it based on solid science?
In spite of being almost foolishly utopian in nature (I genuinely like to believe humans will come to their senses, commingle, and create a beautiful single race blended from all of the current allegedly separate ones) I still loves me a good dystopian film now and then. Which is why I’m disappointed that I’ll probably miss the special global premiere of The Age of Stupid today. In spite of some complaints from the more level-headed members of the progressive scientific community that the film’s heavy-handed assertions about the end of the world as we know it are poorly supported by science, it looks like a thought-provoking film. It’s also getting decent reviews from sources like Wired and the NYT. The clip featured here, for instance, provides an amusing and brief history of war, which, as the clip points out, is always over resources. They move quickly through war for animals, war for water, war for “shiny things”, war for fertile land, war for “nutmeg slice and tea”, and finally diamonds, slaves and oil. The global premiere of the film – which takes place today and tomorrow – will feature a “green carpet” solar-powered cinema tent in New York, and will be linked by satellite to 442 cinemas across the USA (find a theater here) and to more than 200 cinemas abroad. Special guests include the likes of Kofi Annan and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. The film was put together by Franny Armstrong, director of McLibel
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part I
[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 29, 2009 by admin in Music
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009A few of the music industry’s most successful artists share how.
 Are you sure you wanna go down this road? |
Music won’t leave me alone. Not that I mind; I’ve been in love with music since I was about four, when my mom managed a music store and would bring home demo models of pianos and dual-keyboard Hammonds with beatboxes built into them. As a teen, I had an Arp Axxe synthesizer before most people knew what a synthesizer was. In the early 80′s I had a good-looking but tragically Human League-like band, and in 1989 was convinced by a very savvy manager to turn down a major label deal. At that point I put music on the backburner as a career, doing occasional soundtrack drivel (well, maybe my stuff’s not that bad) through the nineties, until 2005 when I came close to jumping into the fray of on-line music distribution by expanding my web business. Recently, I’ve been hired to research and plan some marketing for a couple of artists (including Ann Arbor’s Khalid Hanifi), and among other things, was blown away by this 2007 article (which I somehow missed at the time) in which Columbia Records’ Rick Rubin actually says out loud that the traditional music business model is toast. More interestingly though, I’ve been impressed by the wealth of information shared by artists who’ve been very successful with the new business model, much of which can be distilled down to one simple idea: forget unit sales and Read the rest of this entry »
Best of Bootie 2008
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 11, 2009 by admin in Music
Sunday, January 11th, 2009You need no other mashup collection
With a title like Best of Bootie 2008, you might think I’m promoting some kind of rapper chick porn, but the fact is that after hours of (sometimes excruciating) listening, I can comfortably say that this is the absolute best selection of mashups (which we’ve previously discussed here) of 2008. There are a LOT of people doing mashups these days, and many of them, though conceptually clever, are almost unlistenable (like Eminelton, for instance), or in other cases they’ll be alright except for the fact that the “mashup artist” gets a little lazy with polishing up the final product to make sure that things are rhythmically tight and not harmonically incongruent. Not a problem with Best of Bootie’s selection – not only are all the tracks exceptionally well-remixed, they’ve even put them in a very listenable sequence. You could pretty much toss this on at any party and not have to think about it again. Some faves of mine include (all direct mp3 links): Overdub’s mix Come As The Starlight (Nirvana vs. The Supermen Lovers) manages to make Kurt Cobain sound like a motown classic; Totom’s track Every Kind Of Creep (Radiohead vs. Robert Palmer) turns “Creep” into the jazz song it always secretly was anyway, and DJ Y Alias JY’s Duffy Train Running (Duffy vs. Doobie Brothers) somehow actually makes both artists sound better. Here’s a little preview of “Come As The Starlight” for you:
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