Category: Music (Page 5 of 6)

…is much more fun when it’s about music, not news. But it’s a hot day:

Maurice Gibb dead at 53

NBC President Andrew Lack to replace Tommy Mottola at Sony (analysis)

Pete Townshend arrested on child pornography suspicion (although it doesn’t sound like much)

And the biggie: ‘Mullet Rock’ compilation shaping up. I’m (mildly) embarrassed to admit I like a lot of these songs.

Yes, rock fan, all those capitalized words in the “Lord of the Rings” movie reviews today sound familiar for a reason: Led Zeppelin used them in song.

“Twas in the Darkest depths of Mordor I met a girl so fair,

But Gollum and the Evil One crept up and slipped away with her”

—Ramble On

Whenever something affects me negatively, no matter what it is, I am going to blame it on music piracy.

Kurt Cobain in a 1992 diary entry: “Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend.”

The TiVo of stereos. Store music as you listen to it, including LPs and radio broadcasts. I want. (via Powazek)

Labels to Net radio: die now. Because the truth is that the music industry makes more money off the generic fan than the aficionado.

Wise small- and mid-size labels should independently eschew the new fees, returning them to broadcasters and encouraging their music is played online. One can only hope.

I tapped into rock critic Robert Christgau’s Web site this morning and promptly immersed myself in a wealth of music opinion.

This site is a discerning music fan’s nirvana: more than 11,000 reviews, all of them short, many of them cranky, some admitting to an artist’s talent and charm, but not without a hint of surprise. Taken as a unit, they expose Christgau in full: this is a man who’s listened to far too much music and become jaded by his own abundance, yet he eagerly awaits the next time the music captivates him. Quietly, I long for his aural excess.

I read a handful of reviews and gleefully propelled myself into his space. Now I am drowning in the delight of my own internal jukebox, replaying my favorite songs in my head, while jumping from artist to artist on Christgau’s site, looking for the moments where his opinions match mine and we have fallen in love with the same album.

I am reminded of the true joy of music criticism: In the past tense, it serves as a stamp of approval, a chance to validate the odd purchases and personal pleasures. I’ve never gotten my friends to bebop along with Taj Mahal’s “Cakewalk into Town,” but when a critic writes exactly what I feel, I can say, Yeah, Christgau, man, you get it. For a music fan’s ultimate, unspoken yearning, beyond the pleasures of the music itself, is the affirmation of smart selection.

Slowly but surely, the music business is wading into an era of thorough upheaval. Is it good? We’ll find out in a few years; this is probably just the beginning. What’s interesting is its effects across the board.

On the music side, news that Sony and Universal are making it cheaper to download music online shows the beginning of what should ultimately be a full embrace of technology. In the long run, smart, straightforward copy protection and reasonable prices will revolutionize music. Why not pay eight bucks for a downloaded album, or $16 in stores? Sounds like a fair deal each way, trading slick production and goodies for in-home convenience. Price it right, and people won’t balk at the cost. Some will continue to steal, the same way people swap bootleg videotapes now, but the industry will soldier on.

What these Web-savvy, wired consumers mean for print media and attention spans is another issue entirely, and one that fueled Rolling Stone’s appointing a veteran of FHM as its new editor. Realigning coverage toward booze and babes isn’t such a stretch for RS, but it probably isn’t going to feel good to its more literate readers. Then again, the argument could be made that Rolling Stone should get out of covering starving babies in Africa and stick to music and entertainment anyway. Even though RS did spawn “Fast Food Nation” and other notable contemporary literary works, readerships change over time, and Rolling Stone is acknowledging and embracing that change.

Fantastic Michael Wolff column in New York Magazine this week: The music industry is becoming the book business.

Q. How can you turn $55 into $80 without trying?

A. Buy tickets through Ticketmaster.com.

I’ll spare the usual rant, but just FYI: A pair of $27.50 concert tickets are going to cost me $40 apiece (before shipping costs) when I buy them later today. Who’da thought I’d long for the days of the $3.50 convenience charge?