Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to bob daktari,
Martin I guess I love music, and honesty, more than a spreadsheet
somewhere someone is screaming market share, market share and bugger the artists career path
But why would you hate an interesting and unusual pop record -- with an interesting and unusual marketing strategy -- when there's so much shitty soundalike pop music to hate? I'm quite aware of when her people are trying to put one over on me -- the "leak" of the 'Born To Die' video was hilarious -- but I'm happy to be along for the ride.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Heather from Auckland,
As I understand it, Apple is signficantly worse than Dell, HP etc. I base that on this report [pdf] by Chinese NGO the Institute of Public and Environmental affairs.
They looked at both the openness of these Western IT companies to investigation and their responsiveness to reports of environmental violations by their suppliers. Their investigation found that Apple was the most secretive and had the worst records on both environmental violations and worker safety of all the companies examined.
Without downplaying the serious pollution problems identified at the factories, it seems to have only looked at Apple's suppliers, and effectively regarded Foxconn, Wintek etc as suppliers only to Apple, when they're clearly not.
Where I think they do have a point is the part about disclosure. As I noted in the original post, supply-chain secrecy has been part of Apple's competitive business model. If they can't find a way past that, they'll have to be forced to by measures like the California law Paul Campbell mentions above.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
That young woman is the real deal - no tricks, no hype, just voice. Extraordinary.
One of the things that makes Adele work so well is that she takes risks -- sometimes she might not quite hit the note because she's busy singing the damn song.
By comparison, the world is now full of popsies auto-tuned to perfection, and it's boring.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to WH,
It’s been ten years since US journalist Eric Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation, the book that moved the plight of US meat packers into the public’s consciousness.
And yet, according to Human Rights Watch, nothing has changed. Isn't that a story?
I haven't been to the US for a while, but I've avoided eating chicken there since I read a Harper's story (predating Schlosser's book) on the plane over one time.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Are you suggesting that the New York Times, the paper of New York Times v Sullivan, is institutionally racist?
I’m pretty sure what he’s saying is that American media sources are choosing to focus on worker rights abuses in China while ignoring fairly severe problems on their home turf, even though both are equally newsworthy, and that this is not what you’d want out of a leading newspaper. There’s really not much subtext to it.
That’s what I’m saying. The context being that Apple and its glamorous products make a better story than the endemic abuses in the production of a domestic commodity foodstuff.
Although: I find it hard to see the 2002 Supreme Court decision that negated the human rights of undocumented workers as anything other than racist.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Lilith __,
This track is from Volume One; Volume Two is even better. Zooey writes most of the music herself. It’s very jaunty, which isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I’ve got a lot of enjoyment from their albums.
I'm not so sold on the albums overall, but 'This Is Not A Test' is a wonderful thing:
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to JacksonP,
Still, she should stick to the recorded world, or do a lot more practice, as her live stuff is truly awful, all things being treacle.
I don’t quite understand why they keep sticking her out there in bare-bones live TV settings to perform songs that are bloody difficult to carry off live without a production.
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Ah, now I really like this mash-up of 'Born To Die' with bit of Calvin Harris, Steve Aoki, and Afrojack. It's big and downtempo and heavy.
I think some dubstep remixers will have have a field day with the album.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Danielle,
I think maybe I suck?
Nah. The big Motown hits of the 60s nearly all made great use of compression – this little article called The Exciting Compressor explains the technique the house producers came up with to make the records sound extra-awesome:
With the Motown mix approach there were problems. If you wanted the lyrics to be heard you had to use a lot of compression on the vocal so that the the softer words could still be heard over the higher-level music. In addition you boosted the “presence range” (around 5 kHz) with an equalizer. The only problem with this is that it took the life & natural dynamics out of the vocal.
Lawrence Horn came up with a brilliant idea. He took the vocal and split the signal so that it when to 2 console channels. Before the vocal signal went to the second channel, it went through a compressor. Now he had two channels of the vocal – one compressed and one uncompressed. On the uncompressed vocal he added very little with the equalizer and he added the reverb. On the compressed channel, he compressed the h**l out of it and added a ton of high-frequency equalization. What he would do is bring up the “natural” channel to full level to get the basic natural sound on the vocal. On the other compressed and equalized channel, he brought this up just enough to add excitement and presence to the vocal sound.
The result was nothing less than amazing. In the mix the vocal sounded very natural and bright. None of the music ever “stepped on” the vocal and you could hear each and every syllable in the lyrics. The vocal never got lost.
But compression is used now on so many records that don’t need or benefit from it – Lucinda Williams, for goodness sake – and it’s just a way of making them louder. It’s basically just the same thing that makes TV ads sound so annoying.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to bob daktari,
I love and loathe video games, it is a great pop song… ruined, for me, by the marketing ride.
Leaves me wanting to smash one of those huge street posters of her in the face
But why? Why so angry?
For me its the Woon remix (this summers James Blake in my world) that really shows what is so exciting about “pop” and this particular right now and the strength I believe in the original song
That’s an extraordinary remix – it takes both the music and the lyrical theme places. (It’s here on the Hype Machine for anyone who doesn’t have it.)
Edit: It's also here as an easy download on Soundcloud.
I’m actually looking forward to remixes of several songs on the album – the hip hop bones are there to work with. I hope they make the parts of ‘Radio’ available to remixers – I’ve just driven home from our editorial meeting singing along to it again. It’s such an odd combination of elements.