Hard News: Rough times in the trade
223 Responses
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Danielle, in reply to
R Kelly is... an empty vessel
If someone doesn't make a urine-based joke here I will be very disappointed.
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But how can we possibly take the piss from an empty vessel?
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Matthew Littlewood, in reply to
It was interesting that Adam Curtis chose Burial to score All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. If Burial and their peers are in fact the music of theirtimes, then we;d have to conclude these are pretty creepy times.
The last Burial album reminded me a lot of Tricky's Maxinquaye. Both records are filled with portent, and have a hushed, paranoid and even tearful quality, but, musically and lyrically, Maxinquaye seems to be able to express itself in more direct if embittered terms, Burial's music is one of intimation and fragmentation,
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Matthew Littlewood, in reply to
It's quite odd. On one hand, dubstep really has opened up new vistas. On the other, it's about 90% shit. As a friend pointed out to me yesterday, most of the people leering it up to dubstep in the clubs are the kind of people who'd have been partying to Limp Bizkit a few years ago.
Indeed, it's similar to the fact that Pendulum's main fanbase seems to be bogans and metalheads, if the crowds who stormed to see them at the Big Day Out were any indication. Maybe it's something to do with the thudding brutality of a lot of dubstep.
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recordari, in reply to
Adele is bustling and authentic and can’t just be read at a glance.
Yes, authentic seems to be a good word for what she has done to date, even with the power house behind her now.
Must get the album on the iPod so the girls can stop singing Jessie J and Katy Perry.
"It's not about the price tag, but if you say 'ka-ching ka-ching' again, you'll loose your pocket money".
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Back on topic... turd-polishing goes online, and there's mention of the Devlin incident.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
The CEO of the Bad News Burial Service is called Coffin. You can't make this shit up.
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Adding to the ebook-reading experience. Not sure about the printed cube idea, but progress bars and creation process meta-data appeal. Same with margin notes by other readers. All those possibilities for critics/fans to embed value into the same reading vehicle. Would need to add micropayments platform like Flattr to share returns.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Lousy biology, limiting the boundaries of popular music again
Ya, beat-matching software has made me realize what a difficult task it is to define the beat of music, and yet we do it unconsciously with ease. It's like hearing words in speech, something computers still struggle with. I guess we forget just how much music we've heard. Also, we probably don't realize quite how specifically designed for the human ear that music is.
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recordari, in reply to
Back on topic... turd-polishing goes online, and there's mention of the Devlin incident.
And more here.
"We also use article spinning - a technique which works on the principle that Google likes unique content; taking an article and rotating alternative keywords to create dozens of unique articles
[with hyperlinks] ... which are then placed on article sites around the web."I feel so much better. And Internet New Zealand director Rhys Coffin says;
"There's lots of dirty little secrets involved in getting websites ranked," he admits. But he says he draws the line at spam-bots...
Small mercies.
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Matthew Littlewood, in reply to
Been meaning to. I suppose Jarod Lanier would regard Adele as a revival act, but she’s also very novel. The Guardian named “Team Adele” at number one in its Music Power List recently.
XL Recordings is a really interesting label. It started out as a label for 12” dance records in the late 80s in partnership with Martin Mills’ Beggar’s Banquet, but is now home to an amazing, genre-defying roster: Adele, MIA, the Xx, Beck, Dizzee Rascal, Gorillaz, Devendra Banhart, etc, etc. They were where Radiohead took In Rainbows for a commercial release. Label boss Richard Russell is responsible for Gil Scott Heron’s final recordings.
Their roots as a dance label show up in the way they’ve opened up a whole new side to Adele’s recordings by encouraging remixing. The stems of her tracks seem to be available to nearly anyone who wants them. As you note, I’m generally more into those than the original recordings. And they vary hugely.
In the recent series of Later With Jools Holland, there’s a fascinating contrast in a show that features both her and R Kelly (and also, for that matter, James Blake and Metronomy).
R Kelly is horrible on the show – an empty vessel. Adele is bustling and authentic and can’t just be read at a glance.
Anyway, she got on her way in 2007 with a three-song demo on MySpace (which got the attention of XL) – and this BBC performance of ‘Hometown Glory’, as a 19 year-old (uploaded to YouTube by digital agency Urban-Unsigned), which is still striking, 18 million views late
Adele's success story has had some level of industry sanction early on in the piece, however- she was a graduate at the now all-pervasive BRIT School, which is a sort-of RADA for aspiring British pop stars- so chances are, she would have got connections eventually. Indeed the BRIT school's influence on the British pop charts in the last decade or so, is probably worth a proper investigation in itself.
I really admire XL Recordings. Much like Domino, a label they share some similarities with, musically and aesthetically, they seem to have a real idea of what the "indies" should be about these days, and it helps that their roster is genuinely very strong. Certainly, anything new released on either label is usually worth checking out. Those last two Gil Scott Heron records were particularly striking.
Both XL and Domino seem to have it "worked out", although I don't know enough about the industry to know whether this is actually the case.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
Those last two Gil Scott Heron records were particularly striking.
Ironically I understand from a music journalist buddy in the UK that GSH was less than happy with I'm New Here, which was mostly magically cobbled together from over two years of sessions by Richard Russell. He played almost nothing off it live AFAIK.
It rather confused US mainstream writers at the time of release too as I recall. They didn't seem to know what the hell to make of all those odd noises.
I'm with you though - few records moved me as much last year (and despite Lanier and now Reynolds, I thought 2010 was a hell of a year for new and innovative music)
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recordari, in reply to
I'm New Here
Jamie XX Remix still streaming via the Guardian. Nice soundtrack for a Monday morning.
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I found this piece on XL Recordings so positively uplifiting in it's 'we make the music we want to make, and if anyone else likes it, that's a bonus' vibe that I stuck a hardcopy on the fridge at home.
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Matthew Littlewood, in reply to
Ironically I understand from a music journalist buddy in the UK that GSH was less than happy with I’m New Here, which was mostly magically cobbled together from over two years of sessions by Richard Russell. He played almost nothing off it live AFAIK.
That’s interesting. Of the two records, it’s certainly the most “conventional” and liable to fit into the whole “rehabilitation” narrative, ala Johnny Cash’s (overrated and occasionally horribly mawkish, albeit with the occasional striking moment) American Recordings series, but I think it’s pretty succesful on its own terms. Certainly his Smog cover which gives the record its title is just suffused with decades of baggage and genuine regret, yet somehow carries it lightly enough to be quietly moving.
We’re Still Here on the other hand, is something else entirely- Gil Scott Heron is more or less the ghost in the machine, it’s often very sinister stuff. Yet it’s often imbued with a genuine sense of hope, or at least a sense that there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Certainly, I would’ve loved to hear him do more music with Jamie “xx” Smith. He seems to find something essential and modern in his voice. An unlikely triumph.
Admittedly, neither record trumps say, Winter in America or Pieces of A Man (What could? Those records are just perfect.), but it was heartening that after all those years in the wilderness, he was somehow finding his way back. His most recent interviews were genuinely heartening- a man who at least made some piece with himself, no matter how difficult that might have been.
And now we’re way off topic…
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Russell Brown, in reply to
You got to watch this 1996 BBC doco about Gil Scott Heron, in four parts on YouTube -- it really nails how much he brought when he turned up in the late 60s.. Part 1:
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recordari, in reply to
I stuck a hardcopy on the fridge at home.
This is definitely fridge worthy.
Doesn't he want the company to grow? He shakes his head. "We get offered 200,000 unsolicited demos a year and yet only sign about one artist a year. We're basically saying no to everything, lots of big artists as well. You need an element of fearlessness to do that. It's basically an anti-business philosophy."
Perhaps one Adele a year would be enough for most people.
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Adele does a Tiny Desk Concert.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
It's quite odd. On one hand, dubstep really has opened up new vistas. On the other, it's about 90% shit.
It's called Sturgeon's Law, as defined by the OED:
A humorous aphorism which maintains that most of any body of published material, knowledge, etc., or (more generally) of everything is worthless: based on a statement by Sturgeon (see quot. 1957), usually later cited as ‘90 per cent of everything is crap’.Typically used of a specific medium, genre, etc., originally and esp. science fiction, and now freq. also of information to be found on the Internet.
The aphorism was apparently first formulated in 1951 or 1952 at a lecture at New York University (letter to the O.E.D. from Fruma Klass, the wife of science fiction writer Phil Klass (‘William Tenn’), 5 Dec. 2001), and popularized at the 1953 WorldCon science fiction convention (see J. Gunn in N.Y. Rev. Sci. Fiction (1995) Sept. 20).
[1957 T. Sturgeon in Venture Sci. Fiction Sept. 49 On that hangs Sturgeon's revelation. It came to him that s f is indeed ninety-percent crud, but that also—Eureka!—ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things—cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like.]
1960 P. Schuyler Miller in Astounding Sci. Fact & Fiction 162/2 Theodore Sturgeon once attacked it from the other side with what has become known as Sturgeon's Law: ‘Ninety per cent of everything is crud.’ The remaining ten per cent is what we call ‘good’ and ten per cent of that—one story in a hundred—is ‘really good’.
And, sadly. it's funny because it's true. Crap.
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BenWilson, in reply to
And, sadly. it's funny because it's true. Crap.
Actually, it's also 90% crap, by definition. If it wasn't, the law would be false. But the residual 10% is beautifully insightful. If we define good as the top 10% then of course 90% isn't good. However, when saying something is 90% crap, it isn't always just in comparison to the other things that are in the same category. You could say that 90% of Hollywood movies are crap compared to indie film. Then you're not making a mostly redundant comment, but rather you're saying that indie is better than Hollywood. But these contextualizations are very often left out.
Furthermore, whilst the percentage of crap might be constant (or increasing IMHO), the percentage of crap that we allow ourselves to be subjected to can change. Hence my view that I have listened to a lot more crap recently, than as a youth. When there was only one decent music video show on for an hour every week, they mostly played only the good stuff. Now, I often have it on for hours at a time, and the unoriginal shite that plays is amazing. But I just tune out for most of that, and only when something good comes on do I find my feet tapping again.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Just picturing you tapping your foot. Do you bob your head too?
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recordari, in reply to
And, sadly. it’s funny because it’s true. Crap.
There’s also no accounting for taste. I mean, this seems to take no account of taste.
Just take the Wham Whim for example.
<thricethreadmerge>
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Russell Brown, in reply to
And, sadly. it's funny because it's true. Crap.
Exception: rocksteady reggae.
Granted, it's a relatively small body of work. But it's nearly all gorgeous.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Just picturing you tapping your foot. Do you bob your head too?
Of course, level of body involvement totally dictated by how much I'm into it. From barely noticeable movement to wild gyration.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Ben:
I think Sturgeon was snarkily defending science fiction against genre snobbery. I read a LOT, from highbrow lit to low trash, and when I graduated from uni I made a vow that unless there was a cheque or academic credit on the horizon, I’d never force myself to read a bad book out of duty. (Which is an often unacknowledged virtue of public libraries.) Yes, there’s an awful lot of crappy SF/fantasy out there. But there’s also an awful lot of bad “literature” out there too. You can find shitloads of rubbish everywhere, and the only way to avoid that is to retire to a sensory deprivation tank and never come out.
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