YouTube As A Musical Instrument
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 30, 2009 by admin in Music
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009My wikiphiliac ways lead to the strange discovery that not only is YouTube a musical instrument, but Ohio is a piano.
Although clearly not as epic a project as the incredible Kutiman – who remixed hundreds of YouTube music clips to create mindblowing mashups – Audiogravity is still pretty cool. It’s just a bunch of YouTube clips embedded in a single page, but you can start and stop any of them at the same time for some simple atmospheric “jazz”. Created by Darren Solomon of New York musical collaborative Science for Girls
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part II
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 4, 2009 by admin in Music
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009Well, since your music probably sucks, you might as well plan on getting naked.
 If you play your cards right, you could end up as happily successful as this fellow! |
If you really have an interest in succeeding in pop music, there’s one way to avoid having to do many of the things we’ll suggest in this piece: be an absolutely f***ing brilliant songwriter with solid musicians to play your broadly accessible music. Then some top-notch management will find you, and your only battle after that will be not getting screwed by all the deals you’ll be offered. Since you almost certainly don’t have that particular set of attributes in your possession, ask yourself a few more questions about why you’re seeking to promote your music: Do you want to make a living at it? Are you convinced for some reason the world just needs to be exposed to your genius? Do you think you might have some reasonably marketable music, and wouldn’t mind getting paid for it? Have you been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard again? The fact is that even the established music industry has one of the highest failure rates of almost any business, and you’ll be entering one of the “noisiest” markets on the planet, alas, with a “naked” product. For some interesting thoughts about the new marketplace, check out Digital Music Can’t Be Marketed, which points out that you can’t really package and Read the rest of this entry »
80′s One Hit Wonders
[ 5 Comments ]Posted on July 23, 2009 by admin in Music
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009Was the music & fashion so bad because we did so many drugs, or did we do so many drugs because the music and fashion was so bad?
At last, the “Official” video for 88 Lines About 44 Women. Rather peculiar, and NGSFW* |
I’d completely forgotten about the 80′s song “88 Lines About 44 Women” by The Nails until the other day when the “Official” video (also at left, NGSFW*) appeared on YouTube. I guess it isn’t so odd I’d forget about it; as much as I loved the song back then, I now remember clearly the drug-addled morning that I first heard it. I had just awakened in the San Francisco apartment of some woman I’d met the night before and she thought it really funny to play it under the circumstances. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if there were so many one-hit wonders in the 80′s simply because people were doing so many drugs that they couldn’t remember the bands’ names from release to release. I know that I, for one, remember very little of lasting value from the years 1983-1990, and given our hairstyles, clothing, and musical preferences, probably prefer it this way! But I thought it would be fun to try to recall – without using the Internet or VH-1 as a memory aid – a list of these tunes. By the way, compiling this list made me realize that there’s a previously un-named micro-genre in here somewhere that’s epitomized by tunes like Trio’s Da Da Da, The Flying Lizards’ Money (That’s What I Want), and The Nails’ song featured above. I hereby christen this genre “Clock Rock”. Remember me if that catches on. The list is below, feel free to share your own in the comments…
You May Already Be A Wiener
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 21, 2009 by admin in Holidays
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009It’s National Hot Dog Month, but frankly, I think PETA’s winning the PR battle with their suggestion to put something different between your buns
 Lettuce pause for a moment to ponder PETA’s tofu tube steak suggestions |
Whenever someone asks me if there are any foods I don’t eat, I always forget to mention hot dogs, because, er, frankly, I don’t think of them as food. Although I’ll eat one once in awhile, I put them in the same category as Twinkies or a McMeal Deal: a thing I will chew and taste and swallow if there’s no actual organic matter around. But ignore my foodie pretensions. This is America, and it’s National Hot Dog Month, for cryin’ out loud. So grab a white bread bun, some French’s mustard, and stick a wiener in your mouth. To make sure you’re doing it up right, download a copy of the 2009 Hot Dog Month Planning Guide (6.1MB PDF), and to satisfy your appetite for tube steak knowledge, grab a copy of Frank Facts About Hot Dogs while you’re at it. They use appetizing phrases like “meat trimmings”, “stainless steel choppers blend the meat”, and “processed intestines” to further seduce you. And did you know that Americans will eat about 2 billion hot dogs this month? If we did our math correctly, those hot dogs laid end-to-end would reach 189,393 miles, which is about 4/5 of the way to the moon. So, while July 22 is National Hot Dog Day, I think the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council needs to hire a new PR firm. Although they had enough savvy to create a Facebook Fan Page and a YouTube channel PETA already seems to have stolen their thunder by protesting on Capitol Hill July 16. And since we’ve given so much time to wieners and dogs today, let’s give equal time to breasts and monkeys with the Breasts Not Animal Tests game. I scored 33,375 points, but the breasts just came too fast at the end. Got any interesting hot dog or sausage links to share?
Jazzy Japanese Pop Band Sour’s New Video Is Fan-Powered
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 3, 2009 by admin in Music
Friday, July 3rd, 2009The clever new video for Sour’s song Hibi no Neiro, from their new EP Water Flavor is performed entirely by fans on web cams.
Whenever I feel like I’ve pretty much seen the Internet and am ready to cancel my membership, something charming comes along and reminds me what I’m doing here. Not too long ago it was Kutiman, the Israeli guy who took hundreds of amateur music tutorial videos from YouTube and mashed them up into amazingly listenable new music. This time it’s the Japanese band Sour, whose music is just some mellow, sparse, jazzy pop that sounds sort of like if a few Japanese guys studied at Berklee and couldn’t decide who they liked more, Chet Baker or Charlie Hunter. The video at left (for their song Hibi no Neiro) was produced completely using their fans, carefully choreographed on web cams to make a whimsical little video that perfectly matches the thoughtful but upbeat tune. They have a few other playful and clever videos on YouTube, including Omokage no saki which uses simple stop-animation, and Hangetsu, which uses some clever shadow puppetry. I was going to research them a little more and write about them, when I realized the bio information on their site summed it up perfectly:
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