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.

A still from Sweatin’ Like a Farm Animal, Cool as a Daisy:

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. I was sunk at this point, as I decided to dig back into my music collection. Starting with 2003′s Absolution, I almost wrote them off again. The first track – Apocalypse Please – is so Radiohead-esque that I was sure my resistance was legit. But I slowly realized it was actually just a good way to ease into their broader sound. By the time I got to Sing For Absolution, I was sunk. If you compared this tune to anything, I’d say it sounds like Freddie Mercury joined Depeche mode and got remixed by Trent Reznor. I’m not going to prattle on here, Muse has been written about plenty, but if, like me, you’ve written Muse off in the past, give them another spin. There’s a lot more there than Radiohead. And I’d add that if you’re going to listen to their stuff as crappy mp3′s on your iPod, DON’T BOTHER. Almost all their stuff demands the dynamic range that mp3′s simply don’t have. And it sounds best blasting out of your speakers at a volume that annoys the neighbors and renders conversation impossible.

After you buy the CD on Amazon….

Try to find me a copy of the limited edition box set for Christmas:

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 and founder of 10:10, a UK non-profit. It was crowd-funded by 220 people who donated between £500 and £35,000 each.

Pete Postlethwaite is the only actor in the drama/documentary. He plays “The Archivist”; the last person alive in the devastated world of 2055, who shares archived video from now, and asks “why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance”?

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 make money on everything else. Here are a few interesting reads, if you’re an artist looking for some direction:

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails posted this informative piece in the NIN forums, in which he suggests using Amazon Fulfillment, TuneCore, TopSpin Media, and MySpace Music. More importantly though, he talks about giving music away to collect user info, because “music is free”, and it’s better to have the public getting it from you than from a Bittorrent.

Wired presented an interesting pair of articles a while back; in this one, David Byrne does a very thorough job of outlining six business models that range from what he calls the “360/Equity Deal” (the kind of deal Madonna makes) to the “Self-distribution Model”, including lots of real-world stats and some amusing interview streams with people like Brian Eno and Mac McCaughan from Merge Records along the way. In this one, Byrne and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke talk about the “real value of music”, and the results of Radiohead’s bold move to release In Rainbows as a “pay-what-you-will” digital download. In case you never heard the figures, roughly 40 percent of fans paid for it at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million.

The links shared here are easy-to-find resources; in part 2 I’ll share some much more up-to-the-minute information about some of the specific approaches I’m applying to the projects I’m working on.