Now I know for sure how I want my car stereo to sound. Yes, I just took a big leap and got a decent deck installed a couple of weeks ago. But just one week ago I stood 10 feet away from KMFDM and their enormous speakers concussing my torso with The Ultra Heavy Beat. It was a Thursday night, another day of work the next morning, not feeling highly motivated to rock out, only there out of duty and guilt from missing their show a couple of years before, they’re getting old and probably just milking the retro tour scene. No. Sascha and Lucia have a stunning, super-human presence on stage. The two guitar dudes flanking the stage brought and brazenly brandished the Rock (not Dwayne The Rock). And the acoustic drums decimated any idea that they’d be weaker than juiced up electronic beats. I woke up out of a lull in life right there. I remembered how much of a kick I got out of all the KMFDM records, how much I loved standing right in front of erupting loudspeakers (with tissue crammed in my ears for protection), and I started to get little twitches for wanting to hop, and dare I say at my age, thrash around into other people. Continue reading
Bad Hair Day
I talked before about the role of the producer in being a back-seat driver, steering the band off to the back roads and sometimes over a washed out bridge. Now that I think about it, U2 were led off into neverland when Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois stepped in and produced Joshua Tree. Since I’ve listened to some Brian Eno records now I realize that Joshua Tree is just another Brian Eno record with some Irish guys along for the ride. I love that record, but I see it as a case of the producers steering from the back seat. On a side note, knee jerk reaction, I bought the reissue of The Jesus And Mary Chain record ‘Automatic’ (with all the obsessive extras). In the ‘creepy stalker’ edition liner notes I read about how around that time the JAMC almost intersected with Daniel Lanois as a producer. I quote JAMC quoting Lanois, “oh we won’t do it in a recording studio, we’ll rent a big church somewhere…” JAMC responded, “we were thinking of getting in drum machines…” and they say ‘that was the end of working with Daniel Lanois.’ Continue reading
Aping The Original
I remember first hearing about Beck (Hansen) while I was at school loitering around the campus computer nerd club. You know that song, “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me.” That struck me as really awkward, assuming Beck was literally some kind of mental case and was just briefly making it big as a pitiful target for ridicule. I’m not saying I could make that assessment from a position of critical authority, spending my days holed up in the basement of a science building. I felt a little ashamed hearing him on the radio, thinking it was a catchy, sarcastic joke. After the novelty and the juvenile laughs I thought for sure that would be the last we would hear from him. Though not long after, the surreal blossoming of his talent and personality dispelled any notion that he had been putting on an imbecile act. He was creeping up on us a genius free spirit. Continue reading
Physical Copy? No Thanks.
Evidently as a direct result of my story about waiting countless agonizing days after purchasing a physical CD from Amazon before I could first listen to the contents, Amazon made good by enacting AutoRip. When I checked in on my Cloud Player I found an extra 20 records I had bought in my entire history with Amazon.com, and that includes a few I had forgotten about. That’s a really nice gesture and it may save me a step or two in the future in getting the tracks synced to my iPod. From what I have read the MP3s are 256 kbps, which is far above average. However, I’m still feeling inclined to write a letter directly to Amazon to plead for some kind of option to get albums in lossless (FLAC) format, along a pdf of the full cover art and liner notes. There’s a lot of personality and even hidden surprises tucked within the clever scribbles and cryptic notes of the little album booklet. I’d pay if they would just hold onto the physical disc so I don’t have to keep it here in a junk pile, unopened.
Tattoos Versus Sinister Accounting
How can I send a meaningful message back out to a band to show how much I appreciate what they’ve done? How can both the content providers and myself get a fair deal? There’s so much talk and blame about online piracy where record companies and artists are directly losing revenue while the consumers have clunky access to the content. I’ve been talking a bit about an Annie Lennox record lately, and it serves well to contemplate what I can do to vote with my wallet without feeling like I just paid into a legion of corporate intermediaries that are not the artist. When I bought a copy of “Diva” at Walmart for $5 plus tax I can’t imagine that even 1 cent made it back to England. I honestly would feel the same if I had bought a $5 or even $10 digital download from Amazon or iTunes, or a $15 CD from my local fye or Best Buy retailer. Nevermind if I had bought it used. I assume that the revenue of even a fully priced, legitimate retail record will dry out like the Colorado River trickling into Mexico. Continue reading