Tales of stolen CD cases

Who here hasn’t heard of, or hasn’t used Craigslist before? Well, apart from being the most important and active classified ad website out there, it’s also a place where you can find fairly hilarious stuff. They have a section called “The Best Of Craigslist” where you can encounter the most crazy / unusual ads posted by the most crazy / unusual people. The story I’m about to share with you was not found in the best-of page, but I’ll submit it shortly after I finish this post. It goes like this:

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backpack (to the guy who broke into my car and stole my backpack) (duluth and clark) (title of the ad)

First of all, thanks for not stealing anything else. I also respect that you got what you wanted without inflicting too much collateral damage. If you were drunk and doing it just for kicks, I rescind my expressions of respect.

There are cards in the pockets on which you’ll find my address. Please get in touch, or send me back my stuff. I’ll compensate you generously, you’ll be able to buy the same bag at least three times. All I really want back is my moleskine notebook, and my CD case and walkman. You can keep the rest. I don’t know if my bathing suit will fit you, but it’s brand-spanking new so you should go for a swim and break it in. The clothes and toiletry stuff is all yours too – who doesn’t need deodorant, toothbrush, etc? If you’re homeless you probably aren’t reading this but you needed my bag more than me, and you can gladly have it.

But! The Roots bag is pretty nice and all (it’s been to Jamaica and Turkey, it’s a pretty durable thing that’ll last you a long time) – but PLEASE DON’T just mindlessly discard everything in it. CD CASE especially, you’ll regret it hardcore. There’s a walkman and headphones; use them! I cherrypicked all of my all time FAVOURITES for the road home… and a lot of new shit that I have recently acquired/giving a shot. A preview

DYLAN – BLONDE ON BLONDE, HIGHWAY 61
I got this duo because it’s the ultimate roadtrip Dylan. A lot of people will argue that it’s the ultimate Dylan period. Some of the greatest lyrics, edit that, poetry I’ve ever encountered; the energy of Dylan fucking everybody over and doing his thing and doing it electric reaches it’s peak on these two albums. Has there ever been any side one track one that supersedes” like a rolling stone”? 11 min more heartbreakingly beautiful than “sad eyed lady of the lowlands”? I really don’t think so.

WILCO – YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT
It’s black. Listen to it.

VAN MORRISON – ASTRAL WEEKS
Van doesn’t simply have climaxes to his songs. He scales mountains and then teeters and sways from on high; he’s poured his heart and so much work into every song and you can tell, he was doing majestic orchestral “pop” long before arcade fire; brian wilson might have done it too but he ain’t got nothing on this irish poet

GZA – LIQUID SWORDS
Speaking of poetry – mah FIRST RAP ALBUM EVER. Bought it in Toronto and I’ve never looked back. Liquid GOLD. If you like, there’s some Jeru, and Ghostface, and Doom, and a bunch of other goodies too (Lil Wayne if you’re looking for some solid entertainment). Madlib also makes sweet beats, he takes you to bollywood as the beat konducta.

k there’s so much more that i’m forgetting (shit the original classics like the SMITHS, BAUHAUS, ELLIOTT SMITH),……….um enjoy, I’m gonna miss the hell out of it all

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This story brought back hardcore memories – the same happened to me a couple of years back. Someone broke into my car and stole a whole case full of CDs of my best collection. I was very, very sad. More so that most of my CDs were rare jazz releases that I have yet to download illegally. The culprit probably frisbied them against a wall or something…

Sniff.

ONDO’s music editing phone

Just found this video out of the blue:

My initial reaction was “is this some kind of joke”, and is goes to show that it isn’t, but that this product is a prototype created by a company called Pilotfish begging for some investor to back it up.

Now since I already started this post and embedded the video and everything, I guess the logical follow-up question here is: “would you use this”.

Well, hmmm, I really don’t know actually. Depends on how good those microphone sticks are. I think the whole party-mixing aspect of it is way to gadgety for that to work, but a portable social mixing device is an interesting concept.

Mruff?

Roar

Derek Paravicini Documentary – The musical Genius

“Derek Paravicini is completely blind and is severely learning impaired. He is 26, doesn’t know his left from right, and can barely count to ten.” Yet Derek is a complete musical genius. this is his story:

part 1 – part 2 – part 3 – part 4 – part 5

This documentary really got me hooked – do check it out.

How much do bands REALLY want it?

The other day I wrote a post called “Where are you hiding your band’s email address“. While browsing through the web in search of bands’ email addresses I realized that many unknown or unsigned bands seem to conceal them in the most awkward places on their Myspaces, Facebook pages and websites, not to mention that most of the time their email addresses just aren’t available anywhere.

For some bands who say that they “want it” (as in “some form of success”) , this can seem pretty paradoxal.

One regular reader of our doggy blog posted a rather interesting comment that we felt would constitute a nice little post that goes along the lines of “How much do bands REALLY want it?”

It’s interesting to me, but sometimes I don’t think bands are even eager for promotion. For a while I was doing interviews for unsigned bands that I liked on an unsigned band website. Curiously, some bands would not respond for weeks to a request for an interview. Similarly, after agreeing, sometimes they would not respond to the questions I email them for perhaps months. Often I’d have to follow up with them to ask if they’d gotten a chance to look at the questions. Sometimes I’d have to email the initial questions again.

Arrogant rock star comes to mind, but I don’t think it’s arrogance. I think they’re just clueless half the time. Heck, they’re unsigned nobodies (albeit talented nobodies imho) if I was trying to get in touch with them. I just think they don’t understand that it’s not always about the music, that there’s a promotional element to getting their name out there.

There’s so much good music out there, and it’s so difficult to be heard above the throngs.

Bark?

What does “being a successful indie musician” mean nowadays?

For those of you who want to make your music a full-time job, and who are skeptical / wary of your success rate, maybe Hypebot’s list of artists that are growing and sustaining real careers without backup from a major label could help you take a step back and focus on what’s possible.

Check out Bruce Houghton’’s (Hypebot author) list and discussion here: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/06/dont-need-a-major-label.html

Bruce Warila posted on Music Think Tank some criteria he believes should be added to the list:

“- If previously signed to a major label (or an affiliate of a major) that previously obtained radio play for the artist, please disclose this.

- Success to me = each band member (or the artist) is consistently generating over $50,000 USD a year after all expenses are paid (including health insurance).  You can live on less, but if you are going to dedicate your youth to music, I would target $50K (at the very least) as a measure of financial ’success’.”

Although it’s quite obvious that success here has to do with a sustainable financial sucess (which is of course the backbone to having a “comfortable life” in our production-driven society), I find it just awkward to put a price on it.

I would definitely take off the list every artists who has been backed-up by a major label – then again it seems important to define exactly what “backed-up” means in this case because I know of a couple of bands who have distribution deals with some fat cats and who aren’t achieving financial stability – and I would replace a fixed net income by simply “musician who has been living off his music full-time for X number of years”. Here we stumble into another complication, because we must take into account that success, in the big schemes of thing, is not necessarily something temporary, or fixed in time, i.e. a band can be living off music full-time for 5 years and be successful at it but quit because a) they weren’t making enough money, b)they got sick of it, c)the band broke-up, or whatever reason. Success in my mind has more to do with being able to say “I’m doing this now, I’m loving it, and I don’t plan on quitting anytime soon“, regardless of income.

Bark?

Cassette tape art: The Clash

Once again some beautiful cassette tape art by Erika Iris Simmons (aka Iri5). Paul Simonon would be proud.

From Wikipedia, here’s the anecdote concerning this monster of an album cover: The album’s cover features a photograph of Simonon smashing his Fender Precision Bass (on display at the Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as of May 2009) against the stage at The Palladium in New York City on 21 September 1979 during the “Clash Take the Fifth” US tour. Pennie Smith, who photographed the band for the album, originally did not want the photograph to be used. She thought that it was too out of focus, but Strummer and graphic designer Ray Lowry thought it would make a good album cover. In 2002, Smith’s photograph was named the best rock and roll photograph of all time by Q magazine, commenting that “it captures the ultimate rock’n'roll moment – total loss of control”.

The cover artwork was designed by Lowry and was a homage to the design of Elvis Presley’s debut album. The cover was named the ninth best album cover of all time by Q magazine in 2001.

I vigorously encourage you to check out Iri5’s website at http://www.iri5.com.

Woof!

Google celebrates Igor’s b-day

I kind of didn’t notice this, but google’s logo yesterday was an homage to Igor Stravinsky’s birthday. Actually I did notice it but felt too lazy to look up the meaning of the colorful image. A shame procrastination lead me to symbolically miss-out on such an important day.

From Tom Serive of The Guardian:

“The iconography is a little strange: there’s a firebird, a few floating note-heads, some not-very-pagan-looking flowers (a subtle homage to Les Noces?) and a caterpillar – I don’t actually know of any Stravinsky pieces about caterpillars, but I suppose that’s just a bit of Google-ised artistic license. Still, given how many people are going to see this today, it’s a big event for 20th-century music and its reception.”

Woof!

Where are you hiding your band’s email address?

I haven’t been very active on the blog these two past weeks. Greg and I have been fairly busy partnering up with Emergenza, that international battle-of-the-bands you probably might have heard of. We contacted them about a month ago asking if they would be interested in  trying out our Fanteraction service. I pitched the idea to one of the organizers, and he said they would give it a shot for the finals in Paris.

So about 3 weeks ago we focused our efforts on getting an “Emergenza profile” fired-up, discussing features with the organizers, handling many other logistical tasks, and making sure all the bands created accounts and filled-up their profiles.

Since the organizers kinda took way too much time to give us all of the bands’ emails (in order for us to invite them to the site and get certain technical formalities handled specifically for the Emergenza event), we decided to fetch those email addresses ourselves. Well I’ll be damned ’cause what I thought would be an easy one or two hour task (there were 24 band in total divided in two dates) took me twice that time. You see, I thought finding a band’s email address was easy thanks to basic searches on myspace and facebook. I discovered to my grand demise that many bands like to hide their emails – not hide in the sense “I’m afraid of spammers, so you’ll just have to myspace me”, rather hide as in “let’s see were the most incoherent place to hide my email would be, just because I don’t quite grasp the concept of being easily contacted”.

Because seriously, let’s face it, bands don’t really reply on myspace anymore. Well some do, but myspace has really become this virtual junk yard were bands barely even update their shows anymore. Maybe it’s not the case for you, or you, but I can confidently say that it’s the friggin’ case for tons of bands. Facebook generates a bit more reaction in terms of messages and replies, but not always. It seems to me that most bands believe that just by creating a fan page and creating a group for each show, they are mastering social media.

To get to the point of this post, put your band’s email, or primary band member’s email where you want people to see that you exist!

There is this one solo singer songwriter playing in the Emergenza Paris finals who has an active myspace, an active website, has apparently sent out press releases about his gigs, or has at least had some press coverage for his events, and who just doesn’t want people to email him. It’s crazy. This guy is in the top 200 charts in France, and by the way he promotes himself online you can see he’s screaming to get noticed, yet I can’t get a hold of his email address, at all, and of course he is not replying to my myspace message either.  I could be U2’s manager wanting to put him up as an opening act that I wouldn’t know how to reach him.

I just don’t get it.

Mruff

The Beatles’ Rock Band game intro

Beautiful cinematic illustration of the Beatles’ bio made for their Rock Band game edition.

Enoy!

Trent Reznor: the first case of “Twitterazzi syndrome”?

Mr Reznor is one of the last artists you could expect to put his web-based networking activities aside. He is one of the most influential and inspiring social gurus out there, and now he seems to have officially announced that he’s taking his leave from it all:

“I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me. All expected. I’m not as concerned about “breaking” your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am. The relationship between artist and fan is changing if you haven’t noticed, along with the way we consume and experience music and even communicate since the internet arrived.The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It’s tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. Example: on nin.com, there’s 3-4 different people that each send me between 50 – 100 message per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense. We can delete them, but they just sign back up and start again. Yes, we are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.”

Reading Reznor’s quote made me realize that being in his position reflects an awkward situation.

Bands or artists or whatever who are “unknown” and who enter the social media game will put in time and effort to get online exposure. Whether it be via Myspace, facebook, Twitter, Bebo, blogs and what not, networking not only takes time, but requires know-how, and a good deal of creativity. Seeing how every single platform has its own social-mechanisms, once you start getting into it you realize the amount of work it represents to start grasping just for an couple of extra “true fans”.

For some people, like Trent, the whole process is very natural, and social networks became popular after he did, so he just surfed a wave that suited him well.

Now he is taking a step back because he’s been chocked by “Twitterazzies” to the point where he just can’t take it any anymore. As in show-business, where an unknown actor or singer dreams of being harassed by photographers, the social-networking-inclined band or brand ravishes the idea of getting re-tweeted, mentioned, linked, pod-casted, blogged etc.

Trent Reznor’s statement just goes to show that, past a certain point, being too “social” just ain’t worth it.

Woof.