The etymology of an all-too popular and surprisingly insidious pop-culture phrase, explored by the new blog (and like ours, a Sekimori design), Gotham Resistance.

Burning Man Festival gets sued--after man attending festival gets burned.

No, really!

(And at the other extreme of Mother Nature's thermostat, "Buffalo State College hosts the national teach-in on Global Warming Situations today -- a day the local temperature bottomed out at minus 6 degrees.")

Mime was money for Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma at the presidential inauguration, and similarly, lip-syncing is good enough for Jennifer Hudson to get the job done singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl.

As I wrote in November about Bruce Springsteen:

To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Over at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Hollywood" salon, Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine (who, like myself, grew up in New Jersey in the middle of Springsteen mania) makes it official--and asks, "did Janet Jackson's nipple really condemn us to a lifetime of Super Sunday misery?"

To be fair it's the Super Bowl halftime show--whether it's Up With People or a corporate dinosaur rock star, it's supposed to be miserable. But at least Up With People was honest in its own relentless polyester cheer. Springsteen will be singing to 66,000 people who have paid thousands of dollars to be in attendance, and tens of millions watching the game in their warm suburban homes in Dolby Digital Surround Sound on 52-inch rear projection HDTVs about how Dickensian the nihilistic purgatorial Hell the American existence is. Gillespie adds:

I will say this much in anticipation of the composer of "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" performing this weekend: I grew up in Monmouth County, New Jersey, which contains both Springsteen's hometown (Freehold) and his early haunt (Asbury Park), so I can't stand him in the same way that only a New Yorker can really, really hate the Yankees. I think that even his biggest fans will admit that his output over the past 25 years or so would make even Beethoven nostalgic for the first few albums. Springsteen is in that elite group of rock stars who have objectively sucked two, three, or even four times longer than they were ever any good (are you listening Sting, David Bowie, R.E.M., Patti Smith?). That, and in the video for "Glory Days," he had the worst fake baseball throwing arm since Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees. Which is saying something.

Watching Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl--and before him, rock mummies like Tom Petty and Rolling Stones--let's just say I'd rather go straight to the Bodies exhibition, where at least no one is pretending that the corpses on display aren't actually dead.

But then, as Mark Steyn notes, (quoting from another "Big Hollywood" essay), "for half-a-century now rock has very successfully been 'both establishment and anti-establishment'":

In fact, "a rebellious underdog distributed by the status quo" is the very definition of rock: All those fellows calling for revolution while contracted to Capitol, Columbia, EMI., Warner Bros - the exact same companies running the music biz back in the days when Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby were where the big bucks were. A few years ago the Warner Megabehemoth Globocorp launched a rap label called "Maverick", and nobody laughed.

Rockers attending the Obama inauguration are like visiting royalty at a Bourbon or Habsburg wedding. By the way, over the years I've met kings, princesses, dukes and all the rest, and none of 'em were as hung up on precedence as the aristorockracy. A decade or so back, Sting had to issue a formal apology because at one of his big save-the-rainforest banquets at his country pile he committed the ghastly social faux pas of seating Jools Holland (of the band Squeeze) next to some no-name session musician. In Britain, these guys all live in stately homes, and any of their number who makes it to 50 without choking on his own vomit or being found face down in the swimming pool gets knighted - Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Paul McCartney, etc. Obama's pal Bono has a knighthood. You say you want a revolution? Sorry I'm having tea with the Prince of Wales that day.

Or apologizing to your fan base on the left for--gasp!--selling records in Wal-Mart.

Not that there's anything wrong with that--though of course, as Billy Joel said to John Cougar Mellancamp when the latter man was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, "You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

No matter how many tens of millions they stuff into your bank account.

Wow, talk about phoning it in: the music by Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma for President Obama's inauguration was prerecorded, apparently because of the weather conditions:

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday's ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president's swearing in (which had problems of its own).

"Truly, weather just made it impossible," Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. "No one's trying to fool anybody. This isn't a matter of Milli Vanilli," Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

Ms. Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

The network said it sent a note to pool members saying that the use of recordings in the musical numbers was possible. Inaugural musical performances are routinely recorded ahead of time for just such an eventuality, Ms. Florman said. The Marine Band and choruses, which performed throughout the ceremony, did not use a recording, she said.

"It's not something we would announce, but it's not something we would try to hide," Ms. Florman said. "Frankly, it would never have occurred to me to announce it."

No, of course not. Tom Blumer dubs it "Faked But Accurate"; Ann Althouse capsulizes the postmodern surrealism of the day:

So we were listening to recorded music when the clock hit noon, the constitutional moment for the President to be sworn in! Then, he was sworn in and that might have been fake and there was a second of that too.

Glenn Reynolds asks, "A Milli Vanilli Start To The Obama Presidency?" But Bob Owens notes that the Milli-ing--and even the Vanilli-ing--started quite some time ago.

Someone on Fleet Street is a lad insane, as "Agent Bedhead" writes, if they think David Bowie(!) set in motion our current financial maelstrom.

Personally, I blame these cracked actors.

(Via Colorado's thin white vodka-swilling duke.)

Update: Problem solved--evidently, "Kate Moss Will Fix That Dreadful 'David Bowie Recession'". Let's dance!

in his last week in power, in order to ensure that the nation's capital actually survive the transition process, President Bush had declared DC a disaster area. Between the inclement weather, the lack of indoor plumbing, the minimum of functional outdoor plumbing, and hundreds of thousands of pop music-loving anti-war protesters, last Thursday, I wrote that the inauguration sounded like "a repeat of Woodstock, except with Geritol the drug of choice instead of LSD, and many fewer cool bands."

CNN's John Roberts, the architect of CNN's infamous "Wright-Free Zone" last year, agrees. As Newsbusters puts it, "CNN's John Roberts Dubs Inaugural Crowds 'Barack-stock'":

CNN's CAROL COSTELLO: You know, usually, you have a little bit of a problem getting people to agree to be on television, but not yesterday. People were begging to be on TV. They wanted their thoughts recorded. They were very much aware that history was being made, and they wanted to be a part of it in whatever way they could.

JOHN ROBERTS: It really was 'Barack-stock' -- peace, love, and history.

COSTELLO: It really was.

Well far out, man! The lead act was pretty amazing, but did you catch Country Joe Biden And The Sea Kittens? Crosby, Stills And Rahm? Clinton Clearwater Revival? And how 'bout that oldies act, Thomas Jefferson Airplane!

Seriously though, it did seem like there was plenty of featherweight pop culture and more than a few bad trips yesterday as well. Hopefully the administration will recover from their dalliance with nostalgie de la boue and actually govern like grownups. The legacy media's long strange acid trip of the last election cycle may have been too much for them to overcome, though.

Update: While CNN's Roberts declared yesterday to be "peace, love, and history", Michael Medved notes that "President Obama explicitly and forcefully distanced himself from the far-left 'peace activists' who provided his drive for the presidency with much of its initial energy and urgency."

Tony Woodlief:

It was revealing that one of the speeches most worthy of note, from the incomparable Forest Whitaker, was essentially a selection from William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech, an uplifting affirmation of art and truth that is at the same time a denunciation of the worst of post-modernism and relativism. What we have forgotten, as unwittingly attested by the voices at this concert (excepting Mr. Obama, of course, who is a first-rate speaker), is that actors are not, in a classical Aristotelian sense, artists. They are skilled, to be sure, but they are empty vessels, to be fitted to parts as suits the real artists, the writers and photographers, the costumers and make-up specialists. This is not to deny the accidental beauty of Marisa Tomei or Jamie Foxx, or the emotive skill of Denzel Washington. But something is strangely out of whack when speeches are to be delivered at the foot of Lincoln, on ground hallowed by King, and the deliverers we choose are none of them thinkers or writers.

It was a concert, to be sure, and one can hardly expect, in today's entertainment-focused America, a crowd of onlookers to prefer Dana Goia to Jack Black's goofball-turned-briefly-serious speechifying. Who needs some stuffy poet, after all, when you have available the artistic genius behind Shallow Hal? Sure, John Irving wrote a couple of books good enough to become movies, but we've got the star of Snakes on a Plane, for crying out loud! Besides, reading is for elitists.

The reality, of course, is that most actors today are nothing without smoldering looks and other people's words, and so each in turn took the stage to read the words of their intellectual betters. Perhaps this is the way of art in a highly specialized economy--if even Christian rock stars these days have to be sexually appealing, then surely we can't cast stones at average Americans who prefer their speeches to be given by beautiful people.

As Woodlief writes, "It's a gentler kind of reflection we seek these days, not an inward look at what is good and evil within this country, within each of us, but instead a reflection that is all glitter and shine, delivered by beautiful people who have distinguished themselves by an ability to show us what we want to see."

This headline sounds like it could have been written in 1993:

Music industry urged to embrace the Internet

Not that they took that advice in 1993, of course.

In early November, I wrote:

To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Allahpundit notes the ranks of the Establishment have suddenly swelled:

One of the amusements of the Obama years will be watching the counterculture transition from inveighing against The Man to trying to get The Man reelected.

Too bad though that there doesn't appear to be an opposition party whose leaders have enough brains to capitalize on this.

Some thoughts on "the primal tribal imperative that underlies the relentless scapegoating of our 43rd president by his political adversaries" from Sisu Willis.

Related: On the other hand, "Welcome back from the Wilderness of Despair and Oppression, kids."

Behold the delicately filigreed philosophical wisdom of "Courtney Love, Anti-Semitic Trainwreck."

(Via a mellow enharshened Kathy Shaidle: "I finally have to start hating Courtney Love.")

In "Bruce Springsteen: One-Hundred Percent Republican" over at "Big Hollywood", Evan Sayet believes that the Boss may be suffering from a case of false consciousness:

The "culture war" that we hear so much about is, to borrow Thomas Sowell's phrase, a "conflict of visions." Visions, Sowell explains, go deeper than mere policy - in fact they are the font of where we stand on the issues - and they are founded on some of the most basic and fundamental beliefs the individual holds about the nature of man and, in turn, the role and purpose of government, family, religion and all other influential forces that society has evolved. Sowell called the conflicting visions the "Constrained" and the "Unconstrained" and offered Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith as primary examples of the visions in conflict. More contemporary examples are John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, the former holding the "unconstrained" vision (which I call here the Neo-Liberal view), the latter the "constrained," or, in my term, Conservative take. Just to be clear, yes, I'm saying that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

I'm not sure if I agree with that--though I'd be willing to say that Bruce is a reactionary, but not a Republican.

One of the reasons why the working class heroes and heroines that populate Bruce's albums never seem to transcend their problems is that they can't transcend their environment. To do so, some would have to leave their jobs in the factories, assembly lines and garages where all of Springsteen's characters seems to work and--gasp--put on a tie. Maybe even trade-in the '69 Chevy for an SUV or minivan. And take some responsibility for their situation, rather than decrying dark, unseen forces just offscreen. And singing about that is nowhere near as dramatic as the sturm und drang of Springsteen's shtick.

Instead, the post Springsteen of the Born To Run album and beyond, the Springsteen who became a mouthpiece for the politics of Jon Landau, his manager, is just as nihilistic as the John Lennon of "Imagine", except his characters have really do have "no possessions"--unlike Lennon's eight-figure net worth. But on the plus side, the E Street Band sure sounds a lot better, lacking both Plastic and Ono.

"What Do Frank Zappa, Vaclav Havel, and iTunes Have in Common?"

A.K.A., The Great Planet-Smashing Gig In The Sky. In any case, it's your must-see video of the day--assuming you haven't seen it already. As Allahpundit writes, "Further proof that there's nothing 'Dark Side of the Moon' can't be synced to."

"Italian guitarist stabbed, allegedly for 'sounding evil'."

Wow, I really wish I had seen this 2007 clip from McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, before I shot my "Red Queen's Race" video over the weekend.

As P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters notes, Pruitt does a terrific Baghdad Bob impersonation--but only before invoking his heartfelt commitment to "philosophers and rock 'n' roll songs. Sometimes it's one and the same as with Lenny Kravitz's song from a few years ago, 'Dig In.'"

Reuters reports that Iran is cracking down on "satanic" clothing--Satanic in this meaning, "tight trousers and high boots."

I guess from the Imams' point of view, Nancy Sinatra is the Anti-Christ. Or maybe Suzi Quatro.

More Reuters:

Some analysts say the authorities fear such open acts of defiance against the Islamic Republic's values could escalate if they go unchecked. This worries them when Iran is under pressure from the West over its disputed nuclear work, they say.

"Some individuals, not knowing what culture they are imitating, put on clothing that was designed by the enemies of this country," Rahmani said.

"The enemies of this country are trying to divert our youth and breed them the way they want and deprive them of a healthy life," he added.

Rahmani did not say how the offenders would be punished. Usual penalties are a warning or a fine.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has in the past suggested Iran's enemies may try to stage a "soft" or "velvet" revolution by infiltrating corrupt culture or ideas.

I'd love to see Iran have its own Velvet Revolution--it certainly worked well in another corrupt culture well that was well worth infiltrating.

One of the better articles that Slate has run was Stephen Metcalf's 2005 profile of Bruce Springsteen, which (I think quite accurately) named manager Jon Landis as Bruce's downfall, transforming him from a funky regional act to a commercial superstar--and punitive establishment bore:

For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce's every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex-Rolling Stone critic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

Well, Bruce Springsteen was Jon Landau's future. Over the next couple of years, Landau insinuated himself into Bruce's artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen's producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protege's head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor. At the same time that he intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him. Rock music was transcendent, Landau believed, because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde. The White Album and Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had robbed rock of its power, which lay buried in the pre-Beatles era with Del Shannon and the Ronettes. Bruce's musical vocabulary accordingly shrank. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, gone were the West Side Story-esque jazz suites of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. In their place were tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs. Springsteen's image similarly transformed. On the cover of Darkness, he looks strangely like the sallower cousin of Pacino's Sonny Wortzik, the already quite sallow anti-hero of Dog Day Afternoon. The message was clear: Springsteen himself was one of the unbeautiful losers, flitting along the ghostly fringes of suburban respectability.

Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He's a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You're either in or you're out. This has solidified Bruce's standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it's killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers--they're not saying Bruuuce, they're booing--Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than "the new Dylan," as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we've reached a strange juncture. About America's last rock star, it's either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain.

Springsteen used his power with his base to become something safe and respectable, the left's answer to Pat Boone. He's the definitive establishment rock star--it's no coincidence that Springsteen's most visible when it's an election year and there's a Democratic president to elect.

Bruce's fame, as Metcalf noted above, derives from repetition and predictability. Because, as Kyle Smith notes, no matter who's in office, when Bruce is at the local football stadium or hockey arena, it's always Darkness On The Edge Of Town:

There is a bracing consistency in Springsteenian gloom, from the Ford years ("The street's on fire, a real death waltz") to Carter's ("Lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy") to Reagan's ("This old world is rough, it's just getting rougher") to the first Bush's ("Ain't no mercy on the streets of this town, ain't no bread from heavenly skies") to Clinton's ("Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away on the streets of Philadelphia?") to the second Bush's ("Woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of gray"). If the Boss has a motto, it has always been this: No hope, no change, no way.

But as Kyle asks, what happens when one of show business's most famously punitive liberals can't blame America first for a change?

(Incidentally, after a surprisingly long absence, note that the text of Kyle's blog is back online.)

Back in December of 1979, 11 people died when attempting to rush into Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium to see the rock group The Who. The following week, Time magazine surprised many by running a cover story that absolved the group of virtually all blame in the incident. The cover dubbed the band "Rock's Outer Limits", and the accompanying story focused on their success as musical artists, rather than the tragedy in Ohio. (And I'd be the last person to argue that in 1979, near the height of their power as musicians, they weren't an awesome group, especially live.)

But unlike a rock group beloved in the eyes of most boomers, the discount chain Wal-Mart doesn't garner the same sort of good will amongst journalists. Responding to the incident on Black Friday when one of their employees died when the doors were opened to allow the first mob of shoppers into the Long Island store at 5:00 AM, a New York Times went out with the following absurd headline: "A Shopping Guernica Captures the Moment."

Evidently, New York Times economics reporter Peter Goodman (or perhaps his editor, depending upon who wrote the headline) fancies himself as the next Picasso. So who are the Nazis in his mind? The management at Wal-Mart who, somewhat like Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium 30 years ago failed to have adequate security and preparations for the onslaught of a crowd, or the shoppers who crushed the unfortunate sales clerk? The article, found via Newsbusters doesn't say.

I'd excuse a high school or sophomoric college newspaper journalist making such an overwrought analogy. But if the New York Times and its writers and editors can't see the difference between an unfortunate shopping incident and the Spanish Civil War, one wonders what what value the newspaper has as an information source to be trusted by their readers.

Update 12/2/08: Wow--who knew this little post would receive so much traffic? Welcome Instapundit and Five Feet Of Fury readers, and even those die-hard defenders of the establishment at Sadly No.

One Cincinnati-based reader emailed in:

The New York Times has become the WKRP of journalism. The hyperbole you noted in your blog is symmetrical to Les Nessman's comparison of the eternally hilarious turkey drop to the Hindenburg disaster. Except WKRP was supposed to be funny.

Eric McErlain of the Off Wing Opinion sports blog noted that I may have mixed my Queen City stadium names:

Just a short note -- the Who concert was held at Riverfront Coliseum, not Riverfront Stadium. It's a big difference, as the former is an indoor arena with a much smaller capacity, while the latter was an open air baseball stadium.

Fair enough.

More: Another reader emails in:

The article's author does not use the word Guernica in the article. It was apparently the brainchild of one of their brilliant editors who does not know the difference between Guernica and Pamplona, which is what he was obviously trying to refer to.

So perhaps the Gray Lady was trying to run with the bulls, rather than attempting a Homage To Catalonia.

The Van Morrison, Pope Benedict XVI connection revealed!

(More on the Vatican and another '60s rocker, here.)

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here at WKRP Ed Driscoll.com:

Related: Jules Crittenden has a reassuring list of "Things To Be Thankful For In A Troubled World", and Jennifer Rubin proffers "Ten Reasons for Conservatives to Be Thankful."

Slate has a little fun with CNN's latest technological gimcrack:

Exit question: Did David Bowie's "TVC-15" single from the mid-1970s predict this latest video development?

Update: Welcome InstaReaders! Meanwhile, Hot Air's Allahpundit enharshens CNN's mellow: "Heart-ache: CNN holograms not really holograms."

Just to follow-up on the Springsteen post below, nowadays, the only time I read about Bruce touring is every four years during a presidential campaign, when he hits the road as a well-paid (at least from the gate receipts) adjunct of the DNC. To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Well, there are a few who come close--and what they say about themselves illustrates the duality of corporate rock perfectly. As Diana West wrote in The Death of the Grown-Up last year:

When U2's Bono promises Grammy night fans "to keep f----ing up the mainstream," as critic Mark Steyn has noted, Bono fails to see--or admit--that he is the mainstream, a bonanza to corporate stockholders and well fit to perform at the official, ribbon-cutting opening of a presidential library in Little Rock.

I recently came across a similar moment in Wikipedia's profile of Billy Joel. (No, I don't know how I ended up there, either, but pop culture ephemera is what Wikipedia does best):

On March 10, 2008, Joel inducted his friend John Mellencamp into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony that took place at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. During his induction speech for Mellencamp, Joel said:

"Don't let this club membership change you, John. Stay ornery, stay mean. We need you to be pissed off, and restless, because no matter what they tell us - we know, this country is going to hell in a handcart. This country's been hijacked. You know it and I know it. People are worried. People are scared, and people are angry. People need to hear a voice like yours that's out there to echo the discontent that's out there in the heartland. They need to hear stories about it. [Audience applauds] They need to hear stories about frustration, alienation and desperation. They need to know that somewhere out there somebody feels the way that they do, in the small towns and in the big cities. They need to hear it. And it doesn't matter if they hear it on a jukebox, in the local gin mill, or in a goddamn truck commercial, because they ain't gonna hear it on the radio anymore. They don't care how they hear it, as long as they hear it good and loud and clear the way you've always been saying it all along. You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

But of course: no matter how many TV commercials, supermarket Muzak systems or football stadium loudspeakers play your music, no matter how many millions of albums you've sold or millions you've earned, "You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

That's right! Stick it to the man--even if he's yourself!

Back in April, during the Pleistocene primary season, seemingly one million years ago, I wrote:

Sadly, as Slate of all publications once noted, Bruce's second manager, Jon Landau, who went from Rolling Stone critic to rock Svengali, took that Springsteen away from us, transforming Bruce in his formative years from an exciting quirky apolitical musician to just another leftwing product on the showbiz assembly line.

(And speaking of Slate, nice of them to create a fun anti-Obama ad, which will have a little traction even after this week's PA primary has passed.

With Jake Tapper breathlessly writing about The Boss supporting the World's Biggest Celebrity, even as his bicoastal Keystone State gaffes are in the news yet again, who knew how timely it would be at the very end of the campaign:




Related: More on Springsteen and friends in the following post.

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we visit industrious Outer Party Member Winston Smith hard at work in the Ministry of Truth, and look at how history can be turned on a dime, including:

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

This is the 19th edition of our ongoing Silicon Graffiti videoblog series, which began in January of this year; click here for all of the previous editions.

"Joe Biden's RAVE Act of 2002 was a terrible blow against dance-generated alternative energy."

Sky News: "Singer Bette Midler Quits Touring To Help Save The Planet."

Glad to see that at least one celebrity has taken my advice after Al Gore's Live Earth concert last year:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

As Daltry told the The Sun, "I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel". Each concert will require massive transportation efforts involving jet planes and tractor-trailers, hundreds of thousands of watts of electricity to power the lighting and sound gear, and the deforestation required to print at least couple of hundred thousand souvenir programs (and many more no doubt, for sale afterwards). And heck, just think of all of the methane emissions coming from the stadiums' rest rooms, where, no matter how much the audience promises, the Sheryl Crow Rule is incredibly difficult to enforce.

But in the minds of its participants, a cause like Live Earth is worth it. But a generic, everyday, run of the mill concert shouldn't be. So go out with a bang, rock stars--and then, don't be hypocritical puritans; take the sort of pledge that even the Goracle won't.

More news regarding energy and an even bigger celebrity, here.

The legacy of the post-breakup Beatles comes full circle--the terrorists whom Yoko Ono publicly admires have told Paul McCartney, as Allahpundit puts it, "Play Israel and we'll kill you."

(Fellow 1960s Britpop vet Cat Stevens could not be reached for comment.)

Considering how the media exploited Katrina "to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq" to "damage Bush politically for a long, long time" as Mickey Kaus wrote in September 2005, there's a fascinating sense of schadenfreude in this story. In late summer of 2005 Kanye West was first dubbed by Time magazine as "the smartest man in pop music" and two weeks later then blurted into an open microphone during a fundraiser telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina on NBC that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Today, West was arrested at LAX:

Hip-hop star Kanye West has been arrested in Los Angeles on charges of felony vandalism after a heated confrontation with photographers at the city's international airport.

West was taken into custody at LAX airport on Thursday after a photographer's camera was reportedly smashed to the ground during the struggle.

According to celebrity website TMZ.com, a still photographer was attempting to take pictures of the rapper at the American Airlines terminal when he was confronted by the star.

According to a TMZ videographer, "West rushed the (photographer) and grabbed his camera. A struggle ensued and the still guy was screaming, 'Police, help!'"

The website reports West took the camera and threw it to the ground, breaking it into pieces.

The videographer reportedly approached West with his camera rolling when the rapper's bodyguard walked up to him, demanding he hand over the camera.

West's assistant allegedly intervened, grabbing the equipment and smashing it to the ground.

West was reportedly stopped by police before reaching security checkpoints in an attempt to board his plane after the confrontation.

He was allegedly restrained by authorities during the initial police investigation, when he discovered the incident had been recorded, shouting, "Give me the f**king videotape."

West and his assistant are being held on $20,000 bail.

Video here.

Incidentally, "Give me the f**king videotape" seems to be quite a timely catchphrase at the moment.

While the new McCain ad highlighting yesterday's gaffe from Obama is pretty good, and I commend the speed with which it was crafted and uploaded to YouTube, the late-August video from Team McCain (embedded above) is just devastating. It's crafted with lurid psychedelic colors, filled with ancient 1960s peace symbols, and linking Obama with Boy George, David Bowie, Amy Winehouse, the late drag queen Divine, 1970s Greenwich Village cult singer Klaus Nomi, and other international musicians and celebrities. Really potent raw red meat for conservatives. Though I imagine the left might not be too sanguine with some of th....

...Oh wait, it's not from McCain? It's a pro-Obama message? Who can tell these days?!

Hey, remember a month ago when leftwing Hollywood puritans blew a gasket over a movie using the word "retard?"

Nahh, neither can I.

Update: And neither could Christian Toto, who also heard the Tinseltown crickets chirping in response response to the latest outbreak of the R-word.

This BBC article, which starts breathlessly, "Hollywood is on the verge of breaking into an entirely new virtual world", really isn't all that surprising; Arthur C. Clarke was writing about "synthetic thespians" over 20 years ago.

Though why not start with musicians first? The MTV/YouTube small-screen format has to be a lot more visually forgiving than a 40-feet movie screen, and an all digital, all synthetic singer seems like a logical progression from today's formula pop stars, as I wrote four years ago for Tech Central Station.

As Richard Miniter recently wrote, "In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles", and that hectoring puritanism has seeped into its celebrity culture in a massive scale.

Fortunately, whenever such Hollywood hypocrisy occurs, the opportunity for satire is rife, and Cracked.com riotously pushes back with "The 7 Most Retarded Ways Celebrities Have Tried to Go Green." I can't argue at all with their number one choice; I would have found a way to work this item into the list somewhere as well though.

(Found via Dirty Harry, and definitely one for Orrin Judd's "All Comedy Is Conservative" files.)

The Onion: "Study: Watching Under Four Hours Of TV Impairs Ability To Mock Pop Culture."

Scott Whitlock writes, "The hosts and correspondents on Thursday's 'Good Morning America' did not hold back in expressing their displeasure over a new John McCain ad that depicts Barack Obama as a celebrity and compares him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton":

Co-host Diane Sawyer hyperbolically derided the spot as a "political nuclear attack" and asserted that the campaign is taking "a strange new turn."

GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo seemed equally flummoxed. He opened the show by asserting, "Some odd campaign news today. There's a round of new campaign commercials that really have us scratching our heads here." A bewildered Sawyer agreed: "What sort of committee meeting do you have where you say, 'Let's use Britney!' 'Let's use Paris!' Yes, that'll be a blow!" In a second segment, former Clinton aide-turned journalist George Stephanopoulos claimed the commercial could be seen as "angry, cranky, too negative" and McCain himself might be viewed as "a bit of a whiner given the fact that most polls that he is behind."

At one point, Sawyer queried, "Will it read as sour grapes and boomerang?" The entire tone of the morning show's coverage seemed desperately out of touch. It seems obvious that McCain was attempting to, in a not-so subtle way, depict the Obama campaign as superficial and not ready for prime time. And since the Arizona senator must deal with a media who both fawns and defends Obama, how can such attack ads be surprising?

You know you're over the target when you start receiving flak. The local San Jose CBS station led with the story last night; their teaser ad also hyped it as if it was some sort of out-of-bounds attack. But the danger of a politician acting like a rock star is that he sets himself up to be treated like one by his opponent. Jann Wenner's wildest fantasies to the contrary, we don't elect rock stars, we just buy their records.

Related: Leave Barack Alone! And Robert Stacy McCain has some thoughts that are worth reading as well:

If Obama starts sliding in the polls, he's going to be like a guy at the steering wheel of a vanload of backseat drivers, with the MSM geniuses endlessly second-guessing his every move, and the likes of Keith Olbermann and David Gregory wondering aloud what the hell is wrong with his campaign. There is nothing more beautiful to behold than the sight of Conventional Wisdom crumbling at it's first collision with reality.

Robert notes that "The grumbling from the MSM's backseat drivers has already begun."

Meanwhile, Rachel Lucas blames "beer goggles", and Confederate Yankee explores the inevitable result of too much drinking: the next day's hangover.

Back in 2004, Mark Steyn noted that the famously hard-partying John Kerry had his sensitive troubadour side as well:

The time: last month; the place: MTV. The interviewer asks: ''Well, we know that you were into rock 'n' roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?''

''Oh sure. I follow and I'm interested,'' says John Kerry. ''I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important . . . I'm still listening because I know that it's a reflection of the street and it's a reflection of life.''

Steyn dubbed Kerry's "America's first flip-flopper hip-hopper"--sad to say, he's not the last.

Fans of Mike Myer's Dieter character and his techno-Brechtian goof Sprockets will get a chuckle out of this, but as Allahpundit notes, I'm not sure how well it will play back in the Sudetenland Peoria:

The Obama Berlin speech versus "We Are The World"--see if you can identify which line comes from which!

(And the latter certainly worked out well for all concerned, of course.)

Godzilla Versus Rodan; the Cowboys versus the Steelers; Ali versus Frazier; Coke versus Pepsi; Springfield versus Shelbyville: life in the arena is a harsh one. Fortunately Kyle Smith is there to referee the celebrity caged death match between two middle-aged angst-ridden rockers each perpetually trapped in 1975:

It does not happen often, but once in a while the urge comes upon me: I want to rock.

So I went to see Billy Joel at Shea Stadium.

Also, I went with my mom, who could not rock if you handed her a bottle of Jack, a Stratocaster and a live bat while blasting "The Immigrant Song."

You may argue that Billy's rock credentials are suspect, too. But Joel, who played the last two concerts ever at Shea, and Bruce Springsteen, who arrives at Giants Stadium next week for three shows, are two middle-aged gents who would like us to believe that they rock. Who is correct? Let's break it down.

Read the rest.

Eric Idle's proto-Spinal Tap Beatles parody TV movie in 1978:

In the midst of all this public bickering, "Let it Rot" was released as a film, an album, and a lawsuit. In 1970, Dirk sued Stig, Nasty, and Barry; Barry sued Dirk, Nasty, and Stig; Nasty sued Barry, Dirk, and Stig; and Stig sued himself accidentally.

Newsmax, today: "Rangel to File Ethics Complaint--Against Himself."

Kyle Smith writes:

Though my brilliant colleague Billy Heller writes most of the headlines in the Post's Pulse section, including yesterday's "Grinner Takes All," I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I wrote the hed for tomorrow's review of the supergay new musical "Mamma Mia": ABBA-DABBA-DOO!

Seriously, this movie is a quantum leap forward in gay technology. It is to previous incarnations of gay what the Apollo space program was to the bicycle. Lou Lumenick predicts it will do $30 million this weekend, though there is a slightly more interesting movie opening against it. Is this a much gayer country than I previously suspected? Is "Mamma Mia" the gay Batman? The Flighty Knight?

Wouldn't that be a violation of the Wertham Act of 1954?

Back in 2006, I wrote, "Baby We Were Born To Run--From The Wall"--but Reuters has put an entirely new spin on that headline! Betsy Newmark spots everybody's favorite wire service praising Bruce Springsteen's efforts in the twilight of the Cold War, with the headline, "Did the Boss help bring down the Berlin Wall?"

Frankly, this revisionism of the Cold War by the MSM cannot stand. We were told by no less an authoritative source as the BBC that a former actor who envisioned himself going on to bigger and greater things ended the Cold War, without firing a shot in the process. As he once wistfully told a German reporter, "I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie."

And so do we.

While Charles Johnson has spotted a serious example of fauxtography, and is thus only receiving belated, grudging acknowledgment from the Jurassic media, Ann Althouse looks at fauxtography's lighter side, and asks, "Why is it so hard for a magazine to shoot a decent celebrity cover?":

Some shocking examples of uglification here. My theory is that magazine editors want professional models and are annoyed to by the fact that celebrity faces on the cover help circulation so much that they can no longer do what their aesthetic sensibilities tell them is right. Thwarted, the wreak their revenge. It's passive aggression.

And speaking of fauxtography's lighter side, one of the house bloggers at Yahoo's music blog spots "Jennifer Hudson's Slim Chance" and asks, "Is it just me, or does Jennifer Hudson look, um, DIFFERENT on her debut album's cover?"

"Memoir says Madonna's true love is herself."

John Nolte, on his Dirty Harry's Place film blog, spots Roger Ebert making quite an interesting analogy in his latest review, which revisits Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Triumph of the Will:

Try to imagine another film where hundreds of thousands gathered. Where all focus was on one or a few figures on a distant stage. Where those figures were the object of adulation. The film, of course, is the rock documentary “Woodstock” (1970). But consider how Michael Wadleigh, that film’s director, approached the formal challenge of his work. He begins with the preparations for this massive concert. He shows arrivals coming by car, bus, bicycle, foot. He show the arrangements to feed them. He makes the Port-O-San Man, serving the portable toilets, into a folk hero. …

By contrast, Riefenstahl’s camera is oblivious to one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nuremberg rally, which is how it was organized. Yes, there are overhead shots of vast fields of tents, laid out with mathematical precision. But how did the thousands eat, relieve themselves, prepare their uniforms and weapons and mass up to begin their march through town? We see overhead shots of tens of thousands of Nazis in rigid formation, not a single figure missing, not a single person walking to the sidelines. How long did they have to stand before their moment in the sun? Where did they go and what did they do after marching past Hitler? In a sense, Riefenstahl has told the least interesting part of the story.

Wow, who knew that the famously leftwing Roger Ebert was such a fan of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism?!

But such a comparison is ultimately futile: Freddie Mercury and Queen weren't even bandmates when Woodstock occurred in 1969, and they were history's first fascist rock and roll group--just ask Rolling Stone.

When I first started playing guitar, I remember reading a sort of dual-interview published in 1982 in the now sadly-deceased Musician magazine between Robert Fripp of King Crimson (a pretty amazing guitarist in his own right) and John McLaughlin, who, as I've written before, I think can safely be considered amongst the greatest guitarists alive:

McLaughlin: I don't meditate or fast or anything, but I reflect on the ramifications of what I do. For example, there's a relationship between two chords that you've known, that I've known, for a long time, and only recently do I begin to discover this more intimate relationship, what it means. Even though I've looked at these chords from every possible viewpoint, I'm looking for a way that maybe exists up there, but I don't know where it is. Then, a little while ago, I discovered it, it just arrived. So the work that we do, I don't think we benefit from it until later. But once we have colors and palette, the richer the palette is, the richer the music can be.

Fripp: That D major chord which changed you from a pianist to a guitarist, what color would that be for you?

McLaughlin: What color...? (pause) I think it could be green.

Fripp: Exactly what I would've said...

McLaughlin: It's got to be yellow and some blue.

Fripp: A major for me is yellow and A minor inclines toward white, which is my C major. Graham Bond said it was red.

McLaughlin: C major, red? No, E major, I would say, is red.

Fripp: E major for me is very blue, a kind of royal blue, and when you get to E minor it becomes more of a night blue, with kind of stars...

McLaughlin: That's very interesting...

Fripp: G is very greenish, but not quite.

I've long thought that this passage was simply musical hyperbole, but perhaps its an example of a condition that Oliver Sacks describes as "synesthesia".

(I wonder if Jan Hammer "suffers" from that...?)

Much like his lyrics, Dave Matthews puts a typically goofy ironic spin on what numerous conservatives--and even some musicians--said last year: "The whole joke of Live Earth was how wasteful it was":

The May 29 edition of Rolling Stone looks ahead to the summer concert season, and the rock-music mag is praising the Dave Matthews Band for their use of biodiesel for buses and "biodegradable goods for catering." But this exchange was interesting, about Al Gore's "Live Earth" concerts.

ROLLING STONE: Some people argue that the live experience is sort of inherently "un-green."

DAVE MATTHEWS: There’s no doubt that it is. The whole joke of Live Earth was how wasteful it was. But the idea that touring will end is sad. I’d like to think that the traveling minstrel is not a thing of the past, but the methods of travel have to be improved.

As I wrote last year, right around this time:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

Or as Glenn Reynolds said at the time, "I'll start acting as if it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis."

Ann Althouse discusses her favorite driving songs here. One of my favorites--at least as long as our overseas betters actually allow us to drive--is this:

Given the song's stately, rolling feel, it's not a coincidence that its working title was "Driving To Kashmir".

I once dubbed Pink Floyd's Roger Waters the Pat Buchanan of British rock: both, in retrospect, would have been quite OK with appeasing Nazi Germany; both are anti-Israel. But Julia Gorin has an excellent suggestion (and yes I'm very late to this) for Waters' next destination on his bringing "The Wall To The Wall" tours.

Of course, I could see why Rogers wouldn't want to Meddle there, not when his prospective audience would likely shout "One Of These Days, I'm Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces!" The Final Cut would then be followed by the Great Gig In The Sky, unless Waters plans to Run Like Hell after the gig.

OK, I'll stop now, before Brain Damage occurs...

So many on the left seemed perpetually trapped in the past, usually in the 1930s, '60s, or the 1970s, but recently, Jonah Goldberg spotted the slightly more recent epoch that has made Barack Obama so bitter:

There’s always been a certain cultural lag time to Barack and Michelle Obama, a kitschiness that’s hard to pinpoint. But I think I’ve got it: They’re self-hating yuppies straight out of the 1980s, which were to the Obamas what the 1960s were to the Clintons.

For those too young to remember, “yuppie” was shorthand for young urban professionals — think Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in the TV series “Family Ties” — who allegedly represented the collapse of ’60s values and the triumph of ’80s greed. Yuppies sold their souls for a BMW and a condo.

Ironically, the biggest complaints about yuppie materialism came from self-loathing liberal yuppies — like the Obamas.

The Obamas still seem stuck in that time warp, clinging to ’80s-style resentments and political assumptions. Michelle Obama is never so eloquent as when she’s complaining about the burden of student loans for her two Ivy League degrees and covering the high cost of summer camp and piano lessons for her kids on her family’s half-million-dollars-a-year income.

“Don’t go into corporate America,” she exhorted low-income working mothers in Ohio in February, even though she is a highly compensated hospital executive. She admits to being consumed with “a constant sense of guilt” over having to balance work, politics, and family. “It’s guilt, feeling guilty all the time.”

It’s telling that for the Clintons, JFK defined politics, but for Obama, Ronald Reagan is the role model. Last year, Obama admitted to admiring the Gipper’s “transformative” leadership (though not his policies). Indeed, not only did Reagan restore confidence in the nation while reducing confidence in government, he put a stake in the heart of the “Vietnam syndrome” and the blame-America-first ethos of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution moved the country durably to the right — so much so that even Democrats saw the writing on the wall. Obama wants to erase that writing.

And as Abe Greenwald of Commentary writes, so does someone else with a Brilliant Disguise, whose artistic career peaked just before the decade the Gipper made:

It’s true that Obama speaks to the America Springsteen usually writes about. But I’m not sure what he’s referring to in this description. Springsteen’s America is a soot-covered wasteland of junked cars, violent townies, shotgun weddings, racist cops, closed factories, and endless unemployment lines. If you think Obama was tough on small town mentalities, consider the lyrics of Springsteen’s “Born to Run”:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

* * *

When, in 1980, Springsteen wrote...

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown company
But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care

...who could blame him? It was less than a year after Jimmy Carter had gone on television and made a speech diagnosing the country as clinically depressed and spiritually bankrupt:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

Springsteen took the nation’s pulse and wrote about it. The problem is that his sense of America–forged during the Carter years–has not changed since. Sure, he came out with an inspirational post-9/11 album. But that came and went as fast as Yasir Arafat’s blood donation to the victims.

Springsteen said in his Obama letter: “After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken.” But it’s hard to imagine what exactly he wants to reclaim. The last time Springsteen’s lyrics reflected any consistent sense of romance and adventure in connection with America was during the Nixon years. Personally, I’d love to see him make music like that again. But somehow I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at.

Sadly, as Slate of all publications once noted, Bruce's second manager, Jon Landau, who went from Rolling Stone critic to rock Svengali, took that Springsteen away from us, transforming Bruce in his formative years from an exciting quirky apolitical musician to just another leftwing product on the showbiz assembly line.

(And speaking of Slate, nice of them to create a fun anti-Obama ad, which will have a little traction even after this week's PA primary has passed.)

Proof that your 1970s-era leather jacketed populist hero to the working man persona may be looking a bit threadbare these days--when you actually say with a straight face, “I’ve found enormous sustenance from Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd”.

Update: Bruuuuuuce! is Reason #4 of the 20 Reasons Why Frank Martin Is Bitter. And I'm even more bitter than he is over Reason #17:

17. I now own 'Blade Runner' in 5 different DVD formats.

Heck, in addition to owning multiple DVD copies, and writing about the movie for Pajamas, I've owned it on VHS, and two different laser disc versions. And reading in Billboard around 1987 that there was this new company called Voyager with something called a "Criterion Collection" that had released Blade Runner as a letterboxed laser disc (back when letterboxing was new and controversial!) and was planning to release a letterboxed 2001: A Space Odyssey later that year is why I bought my first laser disc player.

I mean, you go into these small colonies near Clavius and the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly and, like a lot of small earth colonies in the Sol Sector, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to laser discs, DVDs, or (via Lileks) space age prunes...

Matthew Sheffield writes, "If you've always thought her music was hackneyed and dull now you may have another reason to dislike Alicia Keys: she's apparently a racist conspiracymonger", as this AP report highlights (ellipses in Matthew's post):

There's another side to Alicia Keys: conspiracy theorist. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other."[...]

Keys, 27, said she's read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck "to symbolize strength, power and killing 'em dead," according to an interview in the magazine's May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

Another of her theories: That the bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled "by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing." [...]

Though she's known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton "had the outlets our musicians have today, it'd be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself," she said.

Matthew adds, "All this nonsense really should come as a surprise to Keys's mother, Teresa Augello, who is white. Is this just a phase? In any case, it's hard to see how a white entertainer or a religious-oriented entertainer making statements like this and it not doing significant harm to their career."

She's not alone of course; Keys' remarks regarding her profession sound much like those expressed by Rev. Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who featured prominently in several recent articles over on the main Pajamas site this past week, including this one:

“In a very small part of my presentation, I referenced a meeting I had with Rabbi’s and other community leaders. A Rabbi stated in that meeting that the close relationship between the African American and Jewish communities had been disconnected after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. I further referenced in my speech that my response to the Rabbi was that the Black Power Movement emerged after the assassination of Dr. King and it was a direct response to the negative characterizations of African Americans through the silver screen, TV and the music industry, industries that are influenced by many in the Jewish community. I then stated to the Rabbis that the Black Power Movement was our effort to define for ourselves our own identity rather than be defined by anyone else. I then indicated in my presentation that I told the Rabbis’ that before a genuine coalition could be rebuilt between our communities, there would have to be dialogue and efforts made to deal with the negative characterizations of African Americans.”

But Keys' and Lee's conspiratorial ravings ignore a crucial element of the success of "Gangsta" rap: nobody twisted the arms of performers to record those records, or to strike thugish poses in videos and magazine covers to promote them, or consumers to purchase them. As Mark Steyn wrote last month regarding another prominent conspiracy theorist:

The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years [as Obama had].

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Rather than conspiracy theories about "the government and the media" as Keys believes, the latter "influenced by many in the Jewish community" as Lee believes, and the former fermenting "genocide against people of color" as Wright believes, where are the calls for personal responsibility, by three people who are all voices of influence in their respective circles?

(Onion video originally found here.)

I've been a bit surprised to see ascots appearing in my latest Brooks Brothers catalogs; I think it's still a look that's far too affected, even for me, but Betsy Newmark wonders if we aren't seeing the aura of a penumbra of its comeback:

According to USA Today, we are seeing glimmerings of a comeback of the ascot. A handful of guys in the public eye are wearing them. The most public practitioner is American Idol contestant, Michael Johns. While I really like Johns and he's my favorite on Idol, I hope he starts to resist such advice from the Idol stylist as this:

And yet: American Idol contender Michael Johns sang a bluesy number last week while wearing a pink-and-purple Alexander McQueen ascot, chosen by Idol stylist Miles Siggins. The contestants need "a recognizable brand, and I was thinking dandy rocker," says Siggins, who has picked out a vintage ascot for Johns to wear this week.

"Dandy rocker?" You gotta be kidding.

Please, please, stop that. America does not need a dandy rocker.

With the unfortunate death of Robert Palmer in 2003, doesn't Bryan Ferry currently have the absolute lock on that job description? (At least as frontman--Charlie Watts is often the best dressed drummer since Tony Williams.)

Jonah Goldberg goes F-Spotting:

I don't know why I didn't think of this before. Behold a new sport for readers. Send me your examples of people just using "fascist" to describe things they don't like. For example, Kevin Costner in Bull Durham: “Quit trying to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring and besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. They’re more democratic.”

Here's an oldie-but-a-goodie from 1979 by music critic and veteran Bruce Springsteen hagiographer Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone magazine:

Whatever its claims, Queen isn't here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, "We Will Rock You," is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band.

As an audience member (and Queen was my first rock concert, as I recall, with Billy Squier opening), I would not have presumed to have rocked Queen. It seems reasonable to assume that when one plunked down money to see Queen, one presumed that they would be the core element of the experience which would be doing the rocking during the concert. How that made Freddie Mercury and company fascist, I cannot fathom, but like the man said...

Incidentally, in 1992, Rolling Stone magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary with a lavish party at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, a restaurant whose interior was designed by Philip Johnson.

In the Weekly Standard, Sonny Bunch writes that Martin Scorsese's Shine A Light, his Rolling Stones concert movie, is no Last Waltz. Cold comfort for those of us who also thought the latter was more than a little overrated--or to be more charitable, hasn't been well served by the passage of time.

(Speaking of which, don't miss Bunch calling the modern sixty-something Stones "leather Muppets"! And for a great Rolling Stones concert movie, you can't go wrong with the classics.)

Ace spots this amusing Reuters item:

If you are male and a Led Zeppelin fan, chances are you may be leaning toward voting Republican in the U.S. presidential election, according to a survey of rock radio fans released on Wednesday.

Gosh, never saw that one coming!

One of these two people is 96 years old. Or maybe both...

While New York DJ "Murray The K" may have claimed the title of "The Fifth Beatle" at the height of Beatlemania in a shameless act of self-promotion, in reality, if any man could claim the title, it was Neil Aspinall, who died recently at age 66, according to the Telegraph:

One of his last tasks as their eminence grise had been to remaster the group's back catalogue for legal downloading on the internet. Aspinall's involvement with the Beatles dated from 1960 when the group's original drummer, Pete Best, asked him to become their driver.

Although he protested when Best (his best friend) was replaced by Ringo Starr, he remained with the band, and when a brawny Cavern Club bouncer called Mal Evans was taken on in 1963 to hump their instruments in and out of their battered Commer van, Aspinall found himself in the role of personal assistant.
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As such, he became the Beatles' gatekeeper, guardian of their privacy, security, secrets, and eventually the group's fortunes, over which, as managing director of Apple from January 1968, he exercised a shrewd stewardship. A quietly-spoken but tough negotiator, he was credited with having - single-handedly - turned the Beatles into the world's highest-earning band and, by extension, one of its biggest brands.

In the mid-1960s, at the height of Beatlemania, Aspinall's responsibilities as the group's road manager extended far beyond checking their equipment, stage costumes, meals, venues and accommodation: with Mal Evans, he judiciously vetted the groupies, and saw to the day-to-day needs of the Beatles themselves as they were shuttled from plane to limousine to hotel. "It was an unattractive life," he admitted, "and it went on for years. But at least I could go out. They were trapped." He even stood in for George Harrison, when the guitarist was ill, at a camera rehearsal for the band's first appearance on American television.

Aspinall's role changed dramatically with the death of the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, in August 1967, and he effectively took the group over, although he apparently turned down a formal offer of the job from John Lennon. According to one account, the Beatles' musical guru George Martin was unhappy at the idea of Aspinall replacing the public-school-educated Epstein because he lacked the social qualifications needed to speak to the executives at their recording company EMI.

As the group disintegrated, and the members eventually went their separate ways, Aspinall remained a trusted father figure to the famous foursome. Even when they were not speaking to each other he - as the honest broker - remained on good terms with all four.

His role post-Beatles became increasingly entrepreneurial: in 1995 he persuaded Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr to collaborate on three Anthology albums and the accompanying television documentary, which took him five years to compile. It was Aspinall's concept that led to the release in 2000 of the Beatles' greatest hits album, Beatles 1, which has since sold 30 million copies.

There's a direct line from Beatlemania to the most pretentious and overwrought aspects of the 1960s, but there's also hours and hours of brilliant music as well, and short of George Martin, who was recording and actively shaping the Beatles' output, Aspinall had the best seat in the house to watch its production.

New York Post film critic Kyle Smith comes clean:

I worshiped at the Church of Manilow for many years. He is a part of me. I can no more disown him than I can unload my LPs of ABBA’s “Super Trouper” or “The Best of Andy Gibb.” However, I respectfully request that you please not hold any facts against me and start talking about something else.

No word yet on what Obama's grandmother thought of him.

Tom Stoppard describes 1968 as "The year of the posturing rebel". Or as John Lennon confessed a decade later:

"I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts."

Fascinating though, that the 1960s and '70s, a period that was rife with poseurs such as Lennon, is still influencing us to this day. You can see it in music, in the form of ersatz nostalgia acts such as Lenny Kravitz and Sheryl Crow, who dress in period costume (sort of the tie-dyed equivalent of greasers like Sha Na Na in leather jackets and D.A.s in 1975, or a big band that same year still playing in tan dinner jackets and bow ties). Or much more dangerously, in a politics that still takes it rhetoric from a period now four decades in the past, whether it's John Kerry in 2004, or Rev. Wright in 2008.

But then, when starting from zero, one is always tempted to stay trapped in Year One.

This sounds like a Tiger Beat questionnaire from the Bizzaro universe: Which Beatle's wife you think Hillary would be reveals your true personality!

"Okay, but don't start arguing Hillary's Barbara Bach."

This just in: "Do NOT get Mark Steyn started on 'Show Boat'".

I've had the riffs from this moody Eric Clapton/Michael Kamen soundtrack piece rumbling through my head all weekend. Now it's your turn:

UPI breathlessly reports that "Hearing rap music can spontaneously activate pre-existing awareness of sexist beliefs, North Carolina State University researchers determined."

All together now: I need a study to tell me this?

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the American Spectator, James Bowman writes, with tongue only slightly in cheek:

The New York Times obituary of Robert Goulet reminded us that "in 1961, The New York Daily News Magazine called him ‘just the man to help stamp out rock ’n’ roll.’" Alas, as the obituarist for The Times added — could it be just a touch wistfully? — "it was an impossible assignment." By 1967, when The American Spectator first saw the light of day in Bloomington, Indiana, most people of the generation of the Spectator’s editors — and your correspondent — would probably have forgotten that in that dim and distant past of six years previous anyone had even wanted to stamp out rock ‘n’ roll. By that time, the parents who had complained about the suggestiveness of Elvis Presley’s stage performances had much bigger problems to worry about. Yet for 40 years the magazine has offered the hospitality of its pages to those who would write the minority report out of the sixties, including even a few would-be Savanarolas who, however belatedly, might still be up for a campaign to stamp out rock ‘n’ roll.

It's actually doing a pretty good job at the moment of finishing the job that Bob started:

Amy Winehouse, Herbie Hancock and Kanye West didn't provide quite enough drama to enthrall television viewers. Preliminary estimates indicate the Grammy Awards telecast was watched by 17.5 million people.

Nielsen Media Research said Monday that would make it the third least- watched Grammy Awards ever if later estimates confirm those numbers.

Viewership is down from the 20 million people who watched last year. The 2006 awards, with 17 million viewers, is the Grammy low point. The show had 17.3 million viewers in 1995.

The industry can't blame this on sales lost to downloading, as we note each year when the typically dreadful postmortem arrives.

Compare. Contrast. Weep.

(Via the vast Manolo empire.)

"While in Berlin for the release of a new documentary he helped produce, music legend Neil Young shocked reporters Friday with the revelation that music cannot change the world."

That painful moment when youthful naivete gives way to wisdom, made even more difficult when you're 62 years old.

The ironically eponymous star of the Beatles' "Sexie Sadie" from the White Album moves on to the next plane of existence, at age 91.

As the Times of London aptly quips, "Never mind the fundamentalists, here’s Morrissey":

Iran is still suspicious of pop music. Last summer police raided an underground festival in an orchard near the town of Karaj to stop what they called a “provocative, satanic concert”. More than 200 people were arrested.

If the event does go ahead, Morrissey will have to play to an audience segregated by gender. Women would be allowed only if they stayed in roped-off areas and wore modest clothing, including headscarves. All song lyrics would be vetted. Female backing vocalists and mixed dancing in the aisles would be outlawed and beer, of course, would be banned.

I guess that's as good a definition for the current meaning of progressive rock as anything.

Here are two more tracks to add to the CD edition of SCTV's classic Stairways To Heaven album:

Update: Here's an even cooler DIY mash-up.

Back in early 2006, Australia's John Birmingham profiled Tim Blair, amongst others, in his look at conservative comedy:

Blair, the closest antipodean analogue of O'Rourke, is a declared political warrior, with no interest in fairness, unlike traditional satirists such as Patrick Cook or Mike Carlton who are even-handed in their choice of targets. A Blair column is predictable insofar as you know who is going to get whacked - exactly the same people who took a beating in that morning's Miranda Devine op-ed piece. But unlike Devine, Blair consistently rewards attention with little hash cookies of humour such as his obsession with AC/DC's bagpipe player. Does he tour? Does he have groupies? Are they called bag ladies?

He does indeed tour--and gets down with his bad, Utilikilted self!

(Get well soon, Tim!)

Amy Winehouse, this year's answer to the self-destructiveness of Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, merged with the frightening visage of Patti Smith at her most emaciated, is "headed for rehab the same day The Sun newspaper ran on its Web site a video of her allegedly smoking a crack pipe."

Tremendous passage from the late Michael Kelly, found via Cold Fury:

Sinatra, as every obit observed, was the first true modern pop idol, inspiring in the 1940s the sort of mass adulation that was to become a familiar phenomenon in the '50s and '60s. One man, strolling onto the set at precisely the right moment in the youth of the Entertainment Age, made himself the prototype of the age's essential figure: the iconic celebrity. The iconic celebrity is the result of the central confusion of the age, which is that people possessed of creative or artistic gifts are somehow teachers-role models-in matters of personal conduct. The iconic celebrity is idolized-and obsessively studied and massively imitated-not merely for the creation of art but for the creation of public self, for the confection of affect and biography that the artist projects onto the national screen.

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.

In America, B.F., there was no cool. There was smart (as in the smart set), and urbane, and sophisticated, and fast and hip; but these things were not the same as cool. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca or Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels. He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square. He fights a lot, generally on the side of the underdog. He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. He is on the side of the law, except when the law is crooked. He is not taken in by jingoism but he is himself a patriot; when there is a war, he goes to it. He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian. He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying. He confronts his enemies openly and fairly, even if he might lose. He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue. He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.

The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn't get mad; it got even. Cool didn't go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool's philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.

Quite a legacy. On the other hand, he sure could sing.

One of the observations that Diana West made in The Death of the Grown-Up is how much of the heavy lifting in the birth of modern culture--with all its pluses and minuses--occurred in the 1950s, though the 1960s gets all the credit.

But while Sinatra was indeed a harbinger of things to come, he was also very much a man of his times. In Gay Talese's epochal 1966 "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" article for Esquire, you can actually see the cool style of Sinatra’s highpoint ebb into the sunset, and the aesthetic of the late sixties being born, when Sinatra encounters legendarily cranky sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison.

And as Mark Steyn wrote recently, by the following decade dispatches between the two cultures--the post-war showbiz culture and the anti-war culture of mud--were even chillier:

One reason why the Oscar shows of the early Seventies are such a hoot compared to the butt-numbing snoozeroos of today is the tension and sniping between the John Wayne/Bob Hope/Frank Sinatra set and the hipster crowd reading out telegrams from the Viet Cong. Back then, being anti-war meant taking a side. In today’s Hollywood, being anti-war is the only side.

Which means, through the paradigm of The Manchurian Candidate and even programmers like Von Ryan's Express, plus his support of JFK and RWR, we can look back at Sinatra as a remarkably patriotic, all-American guy, in spite of himself, his myriad excesses, and nihilistic cool.

Maybe it was simply that while Sinatra was indeed cool, he never succumbed to its successor pose: irony. Which, in retrospect, may have saved him from himself, unlike those who followed in his wake.

Update: Welcome Libertas and Jules Crittenden readers!

Err, don't bet on it--at least in its current form:

IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Meanwhile, over at Blogingheads.tv, Michael Hirschorn of VH-1 and Jon Fine of Business Week bemoan what they call "The last days of the rock star".

A fascinating subtext of their conversation is that both are unhappy over the media's continuing fragmentation, as the Long Tail grows longer. In Hirschorn's case, it's awfully ironic: In the decade before the World Wide Web began riding on top of the Internet in the early 1990s, cable television was the Long Tail of the 1980s, as narrowly-themed channels such as his own VH-1 began to demassify the Big Three television networks, ending their 35 year uncontested run.

Back in the mid-1970s, Jimmy Page told an interviewer that "I always thought the good thing about guitar was that they didn't teach it in school." In other words, for Page, and his fellow British guitarists growing up in the late 1950s, rock and roll and the blues were genres you had to be dedicated enough to learn on your own.

Found via Bloggingheads, David Brooks writes that "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's longtime rhythm guitarist (and eventually, owner of the Bada Bing Club) would like to see that changed:

It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. [Gee, not Springsteen, as well?--Ed] He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

Education used to do this as well. Not so much, anymore.

But back to the main point of Brooks and Miami Steve. Jazz was essentially frozen in amber as a creative force once Lincoln Center hired Wynton Marsalis to be its "Musical Director of Jazz." Miami Steve wants to do the same thing to rock. And it's not like education isn't already dominated by Present Tense Culture.

(Or, for another way to look at Brooks' column: this just into the New York Times: Pop culture is fractured and demassified, something that Alvin Toffler predicted 28 years ago.)

Sure John McCain may have picked up this key Hollywood celebrity endorsement, but how can he top the sheer animal power of this?

Err, in this case, Old PowerPoint Presentations. Found via Galley Slaves, it's Rap Music, the spreadsheets:

(And yes, there's a language alert, but that probably goes without saying.)

Drudge has the early line on the Led Zeppelin comeback gig:

LED ZEPPELIN FIRST REVIEW...

...can still rock the house!

Set List...

WHOLE LOTTA HERB TEA...

Some photos here. But is it a one-off night on the tiles, or the precursor to an extended tour of the houses of the holy?

Update: Video added above; elsewhere, the New York Times loves them some Zeppelin. Not sure how that will fly at the New Criterion, though.

Back in October, I visited the Arlington, Texas Guitar Show. I finally had a chance to come up for air from the PJM Political audio stuff to finish the short video I shot and edited of the action in the main showroom. (And yes, that's me playing assorted electric and acoustic guitars on the backing track):

In case you missed it, yesterday's show on XM satellite radio's POTUS '08 channel is available for downloading here. Pretty nifty line-up, too:

Join host Bill Bradley for thoughts on yesterday's GOP YouTube/CNN debate, plus:

Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee interview Sen. Fred Thompson regarding the future of America's War On Terror.

Should Thompson not get the nomination, Ed Morrissey and Duane Patterson (producer of The Hugh Hewitt Show) discuss his chances as a GOP vice presidential nominee.

Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith discuss the upcoming Supreme Court case involving the Second Amendment with Robert Levy of the CATO Institute.

Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV on the role of YouTube and viral online video in the 2008 presidential election.

Produced by Ed Driscoll.

For extended versions of each of today's segments, and the video of the Thompson interview don't miss this week's PJM Political "Director's Cut Interviews."

For podcasting techies wondering what I used to record the segments with Liz and Scott, and the previous segments from the last two weeks' shows all recorded earlier this month from Blog World in Las Vegas, I simply used my trusty Samson Zoom H4 Handy Recorder (which has a pair of pro-style XLR jacks, visible in the photo that accompanies the Videomaker review), a pair of Shure SM58 mics, and a pair of tabletop mic stands. The Zoom recorder uses an SD card, and an 2-gig sized card provides about two hours of audio, which can quickly be ported over to a PC's hard drive and then into your DAW program of choice for editing and mixdown.

I threw them all into a suitcase before heading to Vegas just as a lark, but I was astounded at how clean the audio was, even with the roar of Vegas Convention Center crowd all around, which is why I ended up doing so many interviews there. The trick, I think, is the Shure SM58s. There's a reason why so many rock groups use them on-stage and on live recordings--their cardioid input pattern makes them great at focusing the loudest sounds (which normally should be the person talking/singing/playing into them) and de-emphasizing the background noise.

Mark Steyn looks at Japan's demographic woes, beginning with a quote from the BBC:

Japan has the world's highest proportion of elderly people. More than 20% of the population are now over the age of 65. By 2050, that figure is expected to rise to about 40%.

Mark writes:

I wouldn't want to be a Japanese teen circa 2020 in a Lawrence Welkified society. But maybe by then the robots will be hot enough to be pop singers and movie stars.

As I wrote a few years ago for Tech Central Station, as far as the technology to create Max Headroom-style pop stars, it really is only a matter of time.

I've been getting numerous visitors today searching on "Deborah Santana"; they've been going to my post with a photograph of Carlos Santana and his wife Deborah at the 2006 Oscars, with Carlos in his dinner jacket and uber-reactionary Che T-shirt, and now I know why: they're declaring their marriage splitsville.

For those who are interested, here are the details from the San Jose Mercury of their divorce announcement.

Err, "except those plastic discs", writes Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail in a good follow-up to our earlier post here.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn't in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows--or stops--Hollywood's efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I'll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It's a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there's no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it's near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there's complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It's been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM's request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There's little doubt that as broadband speeds increase--and they will--video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don't think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming increasingly easier for savvy online retailers to implement.

Oh, what album did I buy? This.

No, really! Fooling around with Roland's new VG-99 guitar modeling system and its built-in recreation of their classic original GR-300 guitar synthesizer got me in the mood to hear 1984's version of "The Future of Guitar." (Would that that future came true, as compared to what passes for pop music on the radio today.) And speaking of the VG-99, if you're a guitar aficionado, you may enjoy my review of Roland's latest guitar modeling system, which I knocked out for Blogcritics over the weekend.

When I reviewed Chris Anderson's The Long Tail for Tech Central Station in 2005, I picked a musical genre with an enormous catalog but less than blockbuster front-end sales as an example to demonstrate how the Internet is changing retailing:

Back in October of last year, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine created a powerful meme -- the concept of "The long tail". His article discussed how e-tailers such as Amazon and Netflix are changing how we think about inventories of books, DVDs and CDs; and how pop culture is transformed by making available not only obscure titles that would otherwise consume valuable space in a physical store, but also all of an artist's back catalog.

For example, your local Borders is likely to have, say, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Porgy and Bess, and a few of his other titles available on CD. Amazon has virtually every CD that he's played on that's currently in print (or available used) as well as almost every disc released by his myriad sidemen. (And if some of their albums aren't available on CD, they're likely to pop up in LP form on eBay from time to time.)

La Shawn Barber writes that even more than jazz, classical music is benefitting from this development:

You may not find a wide selection of classical music at the local Tower Records (do they still operate brick-and-mortar stores?), but in the digital world, the pickings are plentiful, as are online discussions about classical music. The Internet fuels the long tail of retail, which in turn favors niche industries and products, independent artists (filmmakers, musicians), classical music labels, etc...And anyone using a computer has immediate access to at least 30-second samples of music in that thousand-year back catalogue.

The forces driving the long tail are the “democratization” of the tools of production and distribution, and better filters (search engines, recommendations, rating systems, etc.). The long tail itself has “democratized” classical music, making it more accessible and less intimidating for us regular folks.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds examines another online trend: "There are now more World of Warcraft players in America than farmers."

Leroy Jenkins could not be reached for comment.

Just heading back from Dallas, where I spent the past weekend conducting research into antique electrically-powered sound-pattern creation devices such as this:

Back in a bit with more.

This could be fun:

Well, I certainly had a good laugh today at Universal's expense. How in the world can the studio expect truthfulness from a just greenlighted Kurt Cobain biopic when Courtney Love will exec produce with attorney Howard Weitzman? You know, and I know, but they don't seem to care, that this movie is gonna get crucified by critics, audiences and Nirvana fans just by involving Courtney, who owns her dead hubbie's life rights.

On the other hand, how could it be any worse than this recent cinematic musical abortion?

Jonah Goldberg's latest op-ed dovetails rather nicely into Kurt & Courtney's entertrainwreck life story:

For years, conservatives criticized the likes of Madonna for proselytizing commercialized decadence, and conservatives routinely came out the losers. The press, generally being liberal, disliked the perceived censorial uptightness of conservative “culture warriors.” The press, also being professionally and personally infatuated with celebrity, instinctively defended stars over the meanies, because stars boost ratings and get you into glamorous parties. The meanies stay home with their kids.

But here’s the thing: Conservatives were right about Madonna, and even Madonna has partially admitted as much. The problem is that Madonna — like Hilton and Anderson — is irrelevant. These celebrities can afford their sins or, if you prefer, their mistakes because they’re rich and famous. Madonna told one interviewer that she’s never changed a diaper. How many “working moms” can say that?

What matters is the signal such people send.

Forget the question of “bad” versus “good” for a second. These people got rich by glamorizing behaviors and values normal people simply cannot afford. The working-class teenage girl who tries to follow in Madonna’s or Paris’s or Pam’s footsteps isn’t going to follow them into the pages of People magazine. She’s going to follow those footsteps straight off a cliff. And yet, the bad guy in our culture is the person who says so.

I don’t want to restore Puritanism. But would it really be so terrible if more people pointed out that prostituting yourself over a poker debt and then marrying the John isn’t merely unromantic, it’s not even something to brag about?

Read the whole thing.

Naturally, with CNN this weekend having reanimated half of the fossilized "No Nukes" brigade from their cryogenic suspension since 1980, Chris Matthews on MSNBC tracks down the rest of the team.

Further proof of the trend that Blair's Law documents: "The ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force."

Coming up next after this brief commercial timeout: Strawberry Alarm Clock's take on drilling In ANWR.

I've read a lot--and posted my fair share--of material on the graying of television's audience. But I had no idea how bad the problem had truly become. In the late 1980s, television tried to keep my parents' generation glued to the tube by recycling oldsters such as Raymond Burr, Andy Griffith, Telly Savalas, and the blue-haired cast of The Golden Girls.

But as Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason notes, times change, and new eras call for new nostalgia:

Writing for CNN today, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and Harvey Wasserman share some thoughts about nuclear power (Note: Don't think about that last sentence too hard. You'll hurt your head or bring on the apocalypse or something). They're worried that the siren song of cheap, clean energy will seduce us once again, when we should be rightfully seduced only by Bonnie's dulcet tones.

This line in the CNN piece is a remarkably dual-edged sword:

These "new" reactors are the same as the old ones, with a few bells and whistles, and a proven 50-year track record of catastrophic failure.

Indeed, and it's brave of the "Troubadour-American Community", as James Lileks dubbed them on Thursday's Hugh Hewitt show, to admit their own shortcomings. (Audio here, which foreshadows the geriatric rockers' CNN piece rather well.)

Fortunately, nuclear engineers are a bit more introspective.

The word of the day: can you say "entertrainwreck" boys and girls? I knew that you could!

It’s refreshing to know that even during troubled times, prison-tat enthusiast and consummate entertrainwreck Amy Winehouse still takes time to coordinate her ill-chosen foundation garments with her cherry flavored phallic symbols.

Click over for shudder-inducing photograph.

Exit Question: is Amy in the midst of "The Odyssey Years" that David Brooks writes about today?

In his essay today, Roger L. Simon mentions listening to Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool in the late 1950s. One of the ironies of someone like Winehouse, who no doubt believes she's absolutely on the cutting edge (probably in more ways than one) of pop culture is that she's affecting a style that was done 50 years ago by artists like Miles and on the distaff side of '50s jazz, Billie Holiday. And even while attempting self-immolation via various and sundry white powders, they made infinitely better music, to boot.

Found via Tim Blair, Malcolm Farr writes that far too many rock musicians became "bogged down with superficial heroin chic", including "God" himself:

Eric Clapton might have contributed more to the world than wonderful music had he been candid earlier about the stupidity and indignity of heroin use.

Instead of seeing old "Slow Hand" looking cool on stage or imagining him that way while listening to records, youngsters might have learned the reality.

And that was that Clapton, during his heroin addiction, was massively constipated.

Clapton was chokkers, as he reveals in his just-released autobiography.

Writing of his heroin daze with the overdose-doomed beauty Alice Ormsby-Gore, he says: "We lived on chocolate and junk food. Heroin completely took away my libido and I became chronically constipated."

Eric wasn't God, as the graffiti painted on the London Underground insisted. He was clogged.

Bluesman Robert Johnson went down to the crossroads to make a deal with the Devil for superhuman guitar powers. Clapton would have sold his soul for a decent bowel movement.

There is nothing glamorous in any addiction, as the current crop of idiots using ice demonstrates daily. But many Australians still haven't got the message on heroin. Otherwise Afghanistan's poppies would be used in vases instead of drug factories.

Reading biographies of the great jazz artists of the 1950s, it's astonishing how many of them were addicted to smack, back when Clapton, Jimmy Page, Lou Reed, and the Beatles were still in grade school. But then, to Start From Zero is to believe that there's no history in the world to learn from.

Lock up your daughters Geritol, the world's most dangerous oldest punk rock band are coming to your town!

Meanwhile, Woody Allen, the director whose best film dates from this same immediate post-Bicentennial period tells an interviewer:

I'm not a perfectionist. I like to do a film every year and throw a lot of stuff up on the wall; what sticks, sticks, and what doesn't, doesn't. I don't like to make a big production of every film and dine out on the successes and brood over the failures. I just like to make them, take the money and move on with my life.

That sad thing is, just like his movies, he's not joking.

(One potential benefit to New Yorkers and their daughters: Woody's threatening to permanently spend his dotage in Europe. Hey, it's worked for Polanski!)

The punchlines are endless; fire at will, boys!

"Madonna: I'm an 'ambassador for Judaism'".

Update: "Rock & roll, we know, is sexually charged music that tends to trivialize whatever it touches, even as it has largely replaced Shakespeare and the Bible as our cultural shorthand." No doubt, Esther's ambassadorial duties will help fill the gap!

(And speaking of filling gaps...)

Glenn Reynolds notes, "In the New York Times: Global warming is Jane Fonda's fault. Well, yeah", as the Times identifies The Fonda Effect:

“The China Syndrome” opened on March 16, 1979. With the no-nukes protest movement in full swing, the movie was attacked by the nuclear industry as an irresponsible act of leftist fear-mongering. Twelve days later, an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in south-central Pennsylvania.

Michael Douglas, a producer and co-star of the film — he played Fonda’s cameraman — watched the T.M.I. accident play out on the real TV news, which interspersed live shots from Pennsylvania with eerily similar scenes from “The China Syndrome.” While Fonda was firmly anti-nuke before making the film, Douglas wasn’t so dogmatic. Now he was converted on the spot. “It was a religious awakening,” he recalled in a recent phone interview. “I felt it was God’s hand.”

Fonda, meanwhile, became a full-fledged crusader. In a retrospective interview on the DVD edition of “The China Syndrome,” she notes with satisfaction that the film helped persuade at least two other men — the father of her then-husband, Tom Hayden, and her future husband, Ted Turner — to turn anti-nuke.

Proving that Pete Townshend was more right than he could have possibly known in 1980:

I’m for nuclear power, but I haven’t told anyone because I am still hoping to f*** Jane Fonda, like everybody dreams of doing who’s involved in the No Nuke movement.

Me? Like the cast of The Pepsi Syndrome, I'll stick with Barbarella.

Update: Welcome readers of the Professor, who in linking to our post, adds that "Pete Townshend's perspicacity...may explain why the anti-nuclear movement isn't doing as well as it was in the 1970s." But the anti-energy movement as a whole isn't suffering all that much, as Noel Sheppard notes, bringing things full circle with the present day.

Related: The dreaded Pepsi Syndrome seems to be attacking Blue Crab Boulevard's nuclear reactor, even as we speak.

"Has MTV Lost Its Appeal?"

I'd say it was all downhill from here.

Just to add to my post earlier today on middlebrow culture, Pavarotti was a tremendously charismatic ambassador between the world of his craft and pop culture. As these icons from the era of mass media fade away, the shared culture becomes that much more fractured and coarse.

While William F. Buckley's slogan was the original rallying cry for post-War conservatives, as Jonah Goldberg and Radley Balko have each noted, it's become the unconscious catchphrase of the post-JFK left, who've lost confidence in both themselves and western civilization as a whole.

Standing athwart history is the thread that ties together two otherwise very different stories in this Roger Friedman article. As the lead discusses, Leonardo DiCaprio's environmental religious beliefs are designed primarily to greatly hinder the expansion of technology and business (presumably not his, of course, but no critic will ever ask him that, lest he be dropped from the Hollywood gravy train).

And at the tail-end of Friedman's article, woe betide the man who seeks to modernize Manhattan, he notes:

New Yorkers don't like it when you mess with our history.

Donald Trump, for example, went into the record books when he secretly destroyed the front doors of Bonwit Teller to make room for Trump Tower in 1990.

New York University is reviled by some alumni as it has devoured Greenwich Village and stamped it with concrete and glass. Killing The Bottom Line nightclub was the cherry on the top of that sundae.

Last week, CBGB's founder Hilly Kristal died at age 75 from lung cancer. But last year, a person named Muzzy Rosenblatt and a group called the Bowery Residents Committee cracked Kristal when they determined to close the legendary Lower East Side rock club and replace it with something more profitable. Appropriately, they still haven't found a tenant. Rosenblatt and friends must be so proud.

Iggy Pop threw up there once in 1977--it must be worth saving!

Two new articles explore the death of middlebrow culture in America. First up, Mark Steyn reviews Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built, which Steyn describes as "A music book that's not muzak":

"You can't receive all your inspiration from listening to old records," writes Wilfrid Sheed. "It's like receiving your fresh air in cans."

I know what he means. Today, in 2007, we understand that It Had To Be You and The Way You Look Tonight and My Funny Valentine are great songs. They've been declared to be so, over and over. But I wonder if we'd have figured it out at the time. If you happened to be in a dance pavilion in 1924 foxtrotting with your baby and the band played It Had To Be You and you'd never heard it before, would it have sounded any better than the other hits of the day? Better than There's Yes! Yes! In Your Eyes or Oh Gee, Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, I'm in Love or Say it With a Ukulele, which was a pretty cool instrument eight decades back.

Speaking of 1924, when Puccini died that year, I don't suppose opera buffs around the world declared: "Okay, that's it. Game over." It's not always immediately clear that an art form has crossed a line, from something living and breathing to "fresh air in cans" -- a beautifully climate-controlled mausoleum. As terrific as it is to have the canon of the "Golden Age," it's not the same as having it happening right now, all around you, in unlimited supply. It's 1937, and you go to see some rinky-dink musical comedy called Babes in Arms and it's some stupid plot you can't even remember 10 minutes after the show, but every 10 minutes somebody sings My Funny Valentine, or Where or When, or The Lady is a Tramp, or I Wish I Were in Love Again, and they're all new: nobody's ever sung them before.

Flashforward to the present, as Terry Teachout explores the difficult job that Alan Gilbert, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic has in store, as symphony audiences become grayer and grayer:

Even if he proves to be a conductor comparable in quality to Bernstein, there is no possibility whatsoever that he will become as famous as Bernstein.

Why is this so? Because our predominantly popular culture has withdrawn its attention from classical music. The means by which a classical musician could once become famous thus no longer exist. Major labels no longer record this music except sporadically, just as the national media no longer cover it with any frequency.

* * *

If we want to see a revival of the middlebrow culture of the pre-Vietnam era, in which most middle-class Americans who were not immersed in the fine arts were nonetheless aware and respectful of them and frequently made an effort to engage with them through the mass media, then high-culture artists will have to learn how to use today’s mass media in the same way and to the same ends.

Should we attempt to revive the old middlebrow culture? After all, there is a serious case to be made for not doing so: the case, in brief, for artistic elitism. The critic Clement Greenberg put it best in the pages of Commentary a half-century ago when he claimed that “it is middlebrow, not lowbrow, culture that does most nowadays to cut the social ground from under high culture.2 Greenberg's point is still arguable—but there is no getting around the fact that if you care about the continuing fate of symphony orchestras, museums, ballet, opera, and theater companies, and all the other costly institutions that were the pillars of American high culture in the 20th century, you must accept that these elitist enterprises cannot survive without the wholehearted support of a non-elite democratic public that believes in their significance.

Leonard Bernstein and Beverly Sills apprehended this, and did something about it. Perhaps more than any other American classical musicians of their generation, they did their best to communicate to ordinary middle-class Americans the notion that the fruits of high culture are accessible to all who make a good-faith effort to understand them. While that may not be strictly or wholly true, it is largely true—and an ennobling idea. I would not be greatly surprised if Sills in particular is remembered for delivering this message long after the specifics of her performing career are forgotten.

Alas, the message has to a considerable extent been forgotten by the orchestra that Bernstein led. To be sure, the New York Philharmonic, like all American orchestras, works hard at cultivating new audiences—but since Bernstein’s time, its efforts in this direction have rarely involved its music directors. Neither Kurt Masur nor Lorin Maazel made any serious attempt to reach beyond the purview of their regular duties to communicate the significance of classical music to a mass audience. Like most conductors of their generation, they saw their job as purely musical, and took for granted that its value would be appreciated by the larger community they served.

Alan Gilbert will not have that luxury. Instead, he must start from scratch. He must realize, first of all, that mere exposure to the masterpieces of Western classical music does not ensure immediate recognition and acceptance of their greatness—least of all when those doing the exposing make it clear that they expect young audiences to like what they are hearing, on pain of being dismissed as stupid.

This condescending attitude is part of the “entitlement mentality” that has long prevented our high-culture institutions from coming fully to grips with the problem of audience development. Too many classical musicians still think that they deserve the support of the public, not that they have to earn it. One of the signal virtues of America’s middlebrow culture was that for the most part it steered clear of this mentality. Its spokesmen—Bernstein foremost among them—believed devoutly in their responsibility to preach the gospel of art to all men in all conditions, and did so with an effectiveness that our generation can only envy.

And Bernstein didn't have to contend with this:

The school superintendent in Amherst put the kibosh on "West Side Story" as the annual high-school senior musical after a handful of complaints claiming that the work was racist in its portrayal of Puerto Ricans. (In fact, this modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet story is the most beautiful anti-racism work in American musical theater.) "Political correctness," writes Mr. Keller, "is the signature cultural statement of the ruling elites, undermining their moral authority and driving a wedge between them and the working class far more effectively than any right-wing demagogue could hope for."

Ironically though, when PC in America was in its infancy, Bernstein was perfectly willing to dynamite traditional mass culture, when it suited the political fashion of the time.

At age 88, with the terminal moment approaching with ever-increasing speed, Pete Seeger has second thoughts.

For Seeger, it's too little, and more importantly far, far too late, but at least he's attempting to square his record somewhat by publicly admitting that he was wrong--twice--on the most important moral questions of the 20th century.

Update: "Better late than never, but Jesus, is this late".

Heh. Indeed.

"Ono blasts eco-friendly cars":

Yoko Ono will never use an environmentally friendly car--because they are not as comfortable as her Bentley. The wife of late Beatle John Lennon has snubbed the Hybrid car--which is popular with Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz and Leonardo Di Caprio for its low pollution levels - in favour of travelling in luxury. She says, "Can someone make Hybrid cars as comfortable as a Bentley, please?"

Say, whatever happened to "imagine no possessions"? [It died right around the same time as "nothing to kill or die for"--Ed]

I think it's because I'm just back from Vegas and have no brain cells left, that this seemed pretty funny. Though Phil Collins sure went overboard with the hair transplants, huh?

Less percussive blogging to resume shortly.

Wow, I am so retroactively ahead of the curve on this one!

As I've written before, the past 25 years have seen a quiet revolution in home music recording, that's right in line with the growth of other "Army of Davids" technologies that dramatically empower individuals. In 1982, the breakthrough product that made home recording possible was the cassette four-track recorder. These weren't one half of the eight-track deck that you had in your '77 Chevy Vega; they used an ordinary stereo audio cassette, but played that cassette in only one direction, so that there were now four individual, synchronized tracks to record on. You could put a drum machine (another newly designed product) on one track, a bass guitar on another, an electric guitar on the third and a vocal on the fourth, and voila! Instant DIY song. (Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album was home-brewed using a cassette four-track machine.)

But most musicians wanted to do more than that--and these days, companies such as Boston-based Cakewalk offer products that give the average home musician as many tracks as his PC's memory and hard drive will hold. Not to mention PC-based software synthesizers that are also infinitely more flexible than their 1980s counterparts. George Martin and Quincy Jones cost a lot more to hire, but the same basic technology they use in their recording studios is increasingly accessible to those recording home.

Having launched in 1987, Cakewalk are currently celebrating their 20th year of business, and my interview with Greg Hendershott, Cakewalk's CEO, is an attempt to bridge the gap between those early days and now. Ideally, it will make a good overview to those new to PC-based recording, but dying to dip their toes into the water. It's 20 minutes long, 18.7 MB in size, and can be downloaded here, or via our Apple i-Tunes page. (No iPod required; virtually any PC can download and play an MP3.)

Oh wait, that's the catch phrase from Death of a Salesman, not to mention the headline to every one of Arthur Miller's obits. But Mickey Kaus notes that People magazine (which had then only recently been spun-off from the march of Time) paid little attention in 1977 to Elvis's death--exactly two paragraphs' worth in the issue that followed his demise. (Or return to the mothership, depending upon your personal epistemological beliefs in the after-Elvis-world):

Elvis was no longer a big deal in some circles, but he was in other, well-populated sectors. This scenario--the media elites not caring about Elvis, but then why are all those people going to Memphis?--reinforces the point that the culture of celebrity is an organic, populist (and pre-Diana) phenomenon and not a recent, top-down corporate trick.

Some things never change: as I wrote back in 2004, the elite media also paid short shrift to a quite similar outpouring of grief after Dale Earnhardt's death in a Nascar accident in early 2001, from what must be something of a shared fan base, and both being considerably drawn from those living in what we now call the Red States.

But then, that will happen when you have a one-size-fits-all legacy media attempting to cover an increasingly diverse country primarily from offices in New York and L.A. (And as can be seen by the above two examples, failing pretty badly.)

Linking to a recent Time magazine article on the--it can't happen soon enough--death of rap, James Hudnall writes:

Now, I like some old school hip hop, back when artists actually used their own music and weren’t sampling and remixing everything. But I feel sad that the culture that gave us jazz, the blues, R&B, and soul music could provide this abortive fetus of a genre.

I concur!

By the way, Time magazine notes:

The growth spurt was fueled by sensationalism. Tupac Shakur shot at police, was convicted of sexual abuse and ultimately was murdered in Las Vegas. But Shakur both alive and dead has also sold more than 20 million records. Death Row Records, which released much of Shakur's material, was run by ex-con Suge Knight and dogged by rumors of money laundering. But between 1992 and 1998, the label churned out 11 multiplatinum albums. Gangsta rappers reveled in their outlaw mystique, crafting ultra-violent tales of drive-bys and stick-ups designed to shock and enthrall their primary audience--white suburban teenagers. "Hip-hop seemed dangerous; it seemed angry," says Richard Nickels, who manages the hip-hop band the Roots. "Kurt Cobain killed himself, and rock seemed weak. But then you had these black guys who came out and had guns. It was exciting to white kids."

Hip-hop now faces a generation that takes gangsta rap as just another mundane marker in the cultural scenery. "It's collapsing because they can no longer fool the white kids," says Nickels. "There's only so much redundancy anyone can take."

Some can take a Pinch more than others, of course.

Power Line reflects on the former, Mojo Nixon on the latter:

Meanwhile, England's Telegraph has a snapshot of boomer narcissism and the urge to "Start From Zero" defined:

"Before Elvis, there was nothing," said John Lennon

And Ten Years After (to coin a phrase), we could imagine there was no heaven--and back then, it was easy, if you tried.

In a move not seen since the mid-1970s when Jimmy Page and Keith Richards were flying high--in more ways than one--on their bands' private planes, "Madonna Shocks Aeroplane Passengers With Mid-Air Vitamin Jab" screams this Evening Standard headline:

Madonna is reported to have started injecting herself with vitamins to boost her energy levels.

The singer, who turns 49 on Thursday, is said to have surprised passengers on a recent flight from New York to London by injecting herself with a vitamin shot in her arm.

Nutritionists said that such a drastic practice could have potentially harmful long-term effects on her health.

The singer is said to have refused food on the seven-hour flight and only drank bottled water.

And she calls herself an environmentalist.

(Incidentally, even by Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 standards, those are some scary arms that Madonna's shooting into!)

Update: And speaking of injections...

Needless to say, Carlos Santana is far from the only dinosaur rock star who wears his love for murderous communist stooges on the sleeve of his T-shirt:

On March 26, 2005, on the Washington, DC local PBS station WETA Channel 26, while watching "Viewer Favorites," I was shocked to see singer Eric Burton - formerly of the group "The Animals" - wearing a Che Guevara shirt while performing on that show.

As a Cuban American, as a writer and a filmmaker, I am acquainted with the Che as a mass murderer who executed, without trial, many Cubans at La Cabana fortress in Havana as well as in the Sierra Maestra Mountains before 1959.

It is shocking that an educational public television station is not aware of Che's criminal record and let pass such an insensitive and offensive display of disrespect to Che's victims and the Cuban American community in the U.S. If Mr. Burton had worn a Hitler or a swastika printed shirt, he wouldn't have been presented - rightfully so - in order not to offend the Jewish victims and Holocaust survivors.

No PBS station would dare to show a performer wearing Ku-Klux-Klan apparel, a pro-David Duke or anti-Arab, anti-Islam, anti-Mexican, anti-Chinese or any other minority group in the U.S. It would have been simply edited out without any regard to what its creator intended.

Unfortunately, those considerations do not apply concerning the Cuban American community. Apparently everybody has carte blanche to offend and defame us without impunity in all print media, radio and TV as well as academia. Moreover, I believe there is even encouragement for bashing and scorning Cuban Americans.

But, stupid me, I decided to contact WETA. On March 29, I wrote an open letter complaining and requesting an apology from Sheryl Lahti, the Director of Audience Services at that PBS station with copies to Michael Pack and John Prizer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As of this writing I haven't received reply from Ms. Lahti or anyone else from WETA or PBS.

A Cuban American advocate for Democracy and Human Rights in Cuba from New York City who read my letter at LaurenceJarvikOnline http://laurencejarvikonline.blogspot.com, on April 4 wrote complaining about the Eric Burton blunder. The next day he got an email from Danielle Dunbar (ddunbar@weta.com), WETA's Audience Service Coordinator.

She wrote, "Thank you for watching WETA and for taking the time to write to us about one of the performers you saw in 'My Music: The 60s Generation.' While I am sorry to hear that you object to a portion of the program, I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

"While WETA airs the fundraising special, we did not produce the program. The show was produced by TJL Productions and distributed by PBS. TJL Productions is solely responsible for its content. Nonetheless, as a public broadcaster that produces, broadcasts and values a wide range of programs that cover a divergent range of topics, it would be inappropriate for WETA to engage in such censorship. While you may dislike images of a particular subject, others may respond favorably to the same image. It is not our intent or role to suppress or promote either view, but to present the program as the show's creator intended.

Really?

Reuters: "Study finds kids justify illegal downloads".

As Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago, "I need a study to tell me this?"

Actually, Etheridge is a step up for ABC. I remember when they employed an up-and-coming child actor during the 2000 election as The New Ted Koppel.

Pinch-hitting for Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, Dean Barnett asked Mark Steyn about John Cougar Mellencamp's recent appearance on Comedy Central's Colbert Report, "where he had a particularly muscular response he had in mind to al Qaeda and 9/11, didn’t he?" Steyn replied:

[Mellencamp] got rather annoyed at the idea that being a pacifist means you’re a wimp. And he challenged Stephen Colbert to I think it was an arm wrestling match as evidence that in fact real men are pacifists. He’d argued that the proper response to 9/11 would have been to do nothing, to have said okay, look, man, you’ve blown a huge smoking hole in the center of New York. But we’re bigger than that, so we’re not going to do anything. And he argued, he was in effect attempting to argue that that was really the manly response. And a lot of these rockers get very twitchy when, as Stephen Colbert did, that you put it to them that this is a rather kind of feeble response when somebody does that to you. And his response, his rather curious attitude then was to offer to arm wrestle Stephen Colbert into the ground. I would have liked to have seen how that would have gone.

Probably about as well as this threatened pacifistic rumble from a few years ago.

Cougar has written several songs that do a reasonable job mining territory long since explored (to death) by Bruce Springsteen. But talk shows really aren't his best medium, it seems.

Elton John bypasses merely a ban on dihydrogen monoxide (though who knows, he'd probably be for outlawing that as well) and goes straight to the ultimate ban of all.

He wouldn't be alone, of course--here's somebody who would sympathize. Elton's rant also dovetails nicely with a piece I wrote for Tech Central Station a few years ago.

Mark Steyn's Song of the Week is The Doors' "Light My Fire", which Mark notes was covered by everybody, back in the day:

It set the summer on fire four decades back. The single was edited down to under three minutes, but the disk jockeys played the original seven-minute album track anyway, from the Doors' eponymous album The Doors. And within a few years it was established as one of those iconic long-form works - "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Stairway To Heaven", "A Day In The Life", "Like A Rolling Stone", etc - that are regarded as the acme of rock. The crude formula seems to be: Length + psychedelic lyric = art. "Light My Fire" comes in at big hit sound 35 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs of all time, and places similarly on other lists of all-time blockbusters. But "Light My Fire" can't be confined to the long-form psychedelia category. For one thing, unlike "Bohemian Rhapsody", it's one of the most "covered" songs of the last 40 years. Once upon a time, that was the natural expectation of a song: it would have seemed extraordinarily reductive to say, okay, some guy's already sung "It Had To Be You" or "The Way You Look Tonight", we better find something else to do. Yet, in an age of singer-songwriters, the idea of a song being particular to one artist became an iron law and deviations therefrom were regarded as "covers", the very term indicating something less than an authentic experience. "Light My Fire" must rank as one of the most covered covers of the rock era, and oddly enough it was taken up by the same kind of singers who, a decade earlier, would have been singing standards: the easy listening crowd, the MOR set, the Europop VIP loungers. Who does "Light My Fire"? Everybody. Jose Feliciano. Astrud Gilberto. Jack Jones. Les Brown and his Band of Renown. Trini Lopez, Nancy Sinatra, Al Green, Minnie Riperton, Helmut Zacharias, Etta James, Woody Herman, Mae West, Johnny Mathis, Charo, Horst Jankowski, Edmundo Ros and his Orchestra, Ted Heath and his Orchestra, the Enoch Light Singers, the Burbank Philharmonic... As Mitteleuropean groovers like to say, "Gekommen auf baby, beleuchten sie mein feuer!"

My favorite "cool" version is by Julie London, who's so blase about the whole business you get the feeling you could be rubbing sticks together all night and never get anywhere near to lighting her fire, notwithstanding the orchestral nudges she's getting from the flutes and bongos. And my favorite live version is not the Doors in Boston but Shirley Bassey at the Royal Albert Hall in London a few years ago. Dame Shirl first sang it on her album Something back in 1970, and, while I'm not saying that inside every iconic psychedelic rock track is a faintly camp easy-listening classic trying to break out, for a select few of them that's certainly the case.

Unlike the Summer of Love, the very early days of Blogcritics were only five years ago, not forty. But as I wrote back in August of 2002, in Out of the Cool, Stephanie Stein Crease’s 2002 biography of Gil Evans, she notes that the opening riff from Gil Evans’ “Jambangle” from his 1957 album, Gil Evans & Ten, was the basisfor the chord changes for “Light My Fire”. Once you hear Evans’ song, it’s unmistakable, and you can hear the first 60 seconds here.

Maybe in a way, it kind of makes sense for someone more traditional like Julie London to cover “Light My Fire”, if only to complete the circle.

In his nifty "D.I.Y." song from 1978, Peter Gabriel sang the praises of Do It Yourself:

When things get so big, I don't trust them at all

You want some control -- you've got to keep it small

But that was a long time ago. These days, Peter sounds much less entrepreneurial--as does one-time uber-entrepreneur Richard Branson:

Nelson Mandela celebrates his 89th birthday tomorrow in Johannesburg, launching a humanitarian campaign along with former President Jimmy Carter, ex-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other “elders” of the global village. The initiative stems from an idea by British entrepreneur Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel to create a world council of elders to tackle issues such as conflict, AIDS and global warming.

Peter Seeger wouldn't complain much about Gabriel and Branson's "idea", of course. But for everyone else, it's obvious that the old days of "Don't trust anybody over 30" have sure gone out the window, now that the average superstar rock musician is typically quite an elder himself.

Update: "I for one welcome our new geriatric overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted blog commenter, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground Metamucil caves."

In this week's Blog Week In Review podcast, Austin Bay gets Jeff Goldstein and Neo-Neocon's thoughts on Live Earth: "Rockstars For Whatever".

And speaking of Live Earth, Tim Blair writes that the party to fight global cooling continues!

The PR firm that represents Fretlight contacted me last month and asked if I wanted to write a review of the Fretlight guitar teaching system. When their CEO showed up with a guitar in his hands yesterday to demonstrate, I thought it would also be a great excuse to shoot some video:

Kids! Meet the man who gave your parents the 1960s. It's not a pretty story.

Investors' Business Daily declares Al Gore, NBC, and its parent company GE "Birds Of A Feather":

NBC and GE have other interests in hyping climate change. Let's not forget GE is the parent of NBC and stands to make a wad of cash from selling alternative energy products from wind turbines to solar panels to those compact fluorescent bulbs containing mercury.

So when Gore prances on stage to demand we stop building coal-fired plants, that's music to GE's corporate ears.

NBC's Ann Curry certainly thinks global warming is a political issue. During prime-time coverage, she almost got down on her knees to beg the jolly green giant to run for the White House.

Interviewing Gore from the site of the concert in New Jersey, Curry gushed:

"A lot of people want me to ask you tonight if you're running for president. And I know what you're answer is gonna be, believe me. I gotta ask you though. After fueling this grass-roots movement, if you become convinced that without you there will not be the political will in the White House to fight global warming to the level that is required, because the clock is ticking, would you answer the call? Would you answer the call, yes or no?"

Certainly Gore thinks global warming is a political issue, appearing earlier this year before Democrat-controlled House and Senate committees pleading for action. During his opening statement before the House, he famously said: "The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor."

After Gore's testimony, a better course of action would have been to ask for a second opinion.

When a conservative appears on talk radio, liberals cry for the Fairness Doctrine. Seventy-five free hours for Archbishop Gore's Church of Climate Change? Not a peep.

On the other hand, having tested the marketplace of ideas with a former vice president, the news anchor of Today and a few dozen wrinkly rock stars, it's significant to note that the marketplace simply yawned in response. That seems the fairest reply of all.

Fox News' Roger Friedman writes that Sony is counting on a new Bruce Springsteen album this fall as its corporate savor:

For Bruce, a new album would be the first E Street Band release since "The Rising," his magnificent recording about 9/11. That album sold better than any previous Springsteen albums and picked up a number of Grammy nominations. Springsteen lost the award for best album to Norah Jones' debut, if you recall.

If you never tried it, pick up "The Rising" or download some of its amazing tracks like "Empty Sky" or "You're Missing."

The latter song, which had a serious message, could also be the theme song at Sony these days.

Quite a few people are missing — and they're not coming back. I'm told that layoffs are continuing, with several departments in publicity and marketing gutted.

When I mentioned this to a Sony higher-up the other day, the person replied: "You are the last one writing about the record business. Don't you realize it's over?"

Springteen will be 58 in September, and as his modern visage in the otherwise exceptional 30th anniversary Burn To Run DVD/CD package illustrates, looks increasingly silly in the Fonzie-style leather jackets, motorcycle boots and t-shirts of his mid-'70s heyday.

Is the recording industry truly "over" as Friedman quotes his Sony source? Historically, it's always been an industry that's been obsessed with youth and entertainment. But Don Surber writes that just like Springsteen himself, the recording industry as a whole now finds itself with a talent pool that's both increasingly shrill sounding in its emphasis on activism over entertainment, and also increasingly long in the tooth.

In "Dead On Arrival", Jonah Goldberg writes the postmortem for Live Earth:

"If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down. Come on, mother-[bleepers]!” Madonna railed from the stage at London's Live Earth concert Saturday. “If you want to save the planet, let me see you jump!”

You just can't beat that. What else could capture the canned juvenilia of a 48-year-old centimillionaire — who owns nine homes and has a “carbon footprint” nearly 100 times larger than the norm — hectoring a bunch of well-off, aging hipsters to show their Earth-love by jumping up and down like children? I suppose she could have said, “Now put your right foot in / Take your right foot out / Right foot in / Then you shake it all about…. That's what climate change is all about.”

Actually, I think the “Hokey Pokey” makes more sense.

But, hey, I don’t want to bash Live Earth, which is not to be confused with Live Aid (1985, dedicated to eradicating African famine) or Live 8 (2005, promising to relieve African nations’ debts). So with the African continent so well-fed — and debt-free! — who can blame the Celebrity Concern Industry for moving on to its next big success?

The avowed point of Live Earth was to ... can you guess? That’s right: raise awareness about global warming. Considering the energy required to put on the show, the nine Live Earth concerts doubtlessly raised more CO2 than awareness. NBC’s three-hour televised version got trounced by “Cops” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Moreover, surely most of the people who attended or tuned in already knew about global warming before they saw the video tutorial about Ed Begley Jr.’s eco-friendly home and sanctimony-powered go-cart.

Still, if fans had somehow missed the global-warming story entirely, imagine how befuddled they must have felt while listening to Dave Matthews sing the glories of cloth diapers. And, assuming they didn’t hit the mute button when Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova came to the stage, one wonders what any climate-change ingenues might have made of her remarks. The model, who nearly was killed in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami, explained that she “didn’t feel hate toward nature” because of the tsunami. “I felt nature was screaming for help.”

Maybe Petra was simply trying to fly under radar with a subversive Iowahawk reference...

Mister, you're a braver man than I.

Update: "Can global warming be stopped by an out-of-breath, middle-aged, super-rich narcissist in a leotard and high heels?" George Galloway was at Live Earth? Who knew!

Ouch: "I wonder how much NBC paid 'Live Earth' to come in last in the ratings?"

At least in the ratings department, where 75 percent of America has tuned out of both shows.

Or is Live Earth simply the return of World Jump Day? Maybe, as Madonna told her audience, "If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down!”

I'd say that was the most logical statement uttered by anyone during the show, if Chris Rock hadn't been there:

U.S. comedian Chris Rock expressed the kind of disbelief shared by many on the day that Live Earth would make a lasting difference, even if he was only joking:

"I pray that this event ends global warming the same way that Live Aid ended world hunger," he said in London.

Mission Accomplished!

In any case, as Glenn Reynolds comments, "I'll start acting as if it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis."

Update: Bipartisan consensus reached! Hugh Hewitt and Willie Brown concur on Live Earth and what it bodes for Gore's political future.

Another: America and England: Two nations seperated by a common disinterest in yesterday's concert.

"Al Gore Appears On Live Earth Tokyo Stage As A Hologram". Triumph could not be reached for comment.

Much more at Hot Air, whose name describes the concert--aka, “Private Jets For Climate Change” perfectly.

And speaking of which, Newsbusters has some thoughts on the private jet-setting Jann Wenner.

Update: "Mostly Mild Weather Greets Live Earth Global Warming Concert Goers. Backstage, the Red Hot Chili Peppers get puritanically scolded (what else did they expect?) for using their red hot private jet.

More: "Whither the Gores’ war on sex, drugs, and rock and roll?"

If, as Gore once claimed, a traffic accident involving Al III was the singular moment that transformed him into the scourge of the automobile industry, I wonder if we can blame today's proceedings at Live Earth entirely on Al being dissed by Courtney Love and desperately trying to recover his leftwing pop culture streed cred. But then, this isn't the first industry that Al's been forgainst.

Related: Is this all a sign that global warming has “jumped the shark”?

Update: Indeed it has.

James Lileks writes that "Prince’s new perfume debuts tomorrow":

It 's called “3121,” which is either some mystical secret message or his ATM PIN. It’s billed as “xquiste” and “xotic,” and it’s probably as xpensive (hah! See what I did there?) as the rest of the perfumes on the market. Americans spend $2.8 billion on fragrances per year, which seems a little low. That’s about 3,953 bottles.

There was a time when people applied cologne with a paint roller; you’d get in an elevator behind someone drenched in Giorgio, and your eyes watered like Salieri listening to something Mozart dashed off on his lunch hour. There was something so proudly corrupt about that smell. It was like the aroma given off by a bonfire of costumes worn on “Dynasty.” It went out of style, as they all do; when I was tending bar in a college joint, half the guys appeared to have exchanged their blood for Drakkar Noir, and now that’s out. I’m not opposed to scents, and I’m partial to a little Bay Rum in the winter; smells like you’ve just come from an old-style barbershop where the men read Esquire and speak in terse, Hemmingway-esque sentences. But I never finish a bottle of anything. Don’t know anyone who has, either.

When I was going to school, Polo was the big cologne; I remember guys who would bathe in it if they had a hot date that night. I like a lot of Ralph Lauren's duds, but I could easily do without smelling his cologne again.

Like America's Investor's Business Daily, England's Daily Mail is equally none-too-thrilled about Live Earth:

A Daily Mail investigation has revealed that far from saving the planet, the extravaganza will generate a huge fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army.

The most conservative assessment of the flights being taken by its superstars is that they are flying an extraordinary 222,623.63 miles between them to get to the various concerts - nearly nine times the circumference of the world. The true environmental cost, as they transport their technicians, dancers and support staff, is likely to be far higher.

The total carbon footprint of the event, taking into account the artists' and spectators' travel to the concert, and the energy consumption on the day, is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com, who specialises in such calculations.

Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces ten tonnes in a year.

The concert will also generate some 1,025 tonnes of waste at the concert stadiums - much of which will go directly into landfill sites.

Moreover, the pop stars headlining the concerts are the absolute antithesis of the message they promote - with Madonna leading the pack of the worst individual rock star polluters in the world.

"Live Earth is encouraging 'citizens of the world' to take small steps: share a car, plant a shrub, turn off a light or hang out washing rather than use a dryer."

But feel free to light up the football stadium, plug-in 500,000 watts of amplification, and buy boxcars full of CDs and acres worth of playbills.

Related thoughts at Pajamas HQ.

Investor's Business Daily notes that "one of most monumental acts of hypocrisy in memory" will be occurring tomorrow:

For years, fear mongers have been telling us carbon dioxide emissions caused by our use of energy have created a greenhouse effect that's warming the planet at a rapid and dangerous rate. Yet these people are not the least bit concerned about the amount of carbon and useless hot air that will be spewed into the heavens as a direct result of Live Earth.

The energy needed to power the site of just one venue — there will be at least seven — will be enormous. Matt Helders, the perspicacious drummer for the English rock group Arctic Monkeys, which will not be playing at any of the sites, noted that the stage lighting alone will burn "enough power for 10 houses."

The stars can't be expected to walk or bike to the venues, so there's all the jetting around, and it adds up. On their last world tour, Live Earth participant Red Hot Chili Peppers belched 220 tons of CO2 into the skies from their private jet over six months, according to the London Daily Mail. That's more than 20 times what an average person in the developed world will emit in a year.

And don't forget all the gas-guzzling trucks needed to transport the equipment and fume-exhaling buses that idle stage-side, keeping the rock heroes cool as they await their moments in the sun.

Then there's all the garbage that will be generated by the admiring crowds. Two years ago, the Live 8 concert in London produced 150 tons of trash, which had to be picked up and hauled away by vehicles that burn carbon-based fuel.

Oh, and did we mention that General Motors, a multinational company that builds those greenhouse gas-belching contraptions that worry the environmentalists so much, is a sponsor on NBC's overwrought coverage?

Despite its colossal carbon footprint, Live Earth will be "carbon neutral," organizers say. Whom are they trying to kid? Buying carbon credits, which is how organizers will excuse the unrestrained jet travel, is a swindle. Paying businesses to use the carbon emission credits they never would have needed and claiming that it will cut emissions is fraudulent.

But then so is the global warming scare — a fact not even Live Earth's biggest stars shine brightly enough to obscure.

I can't argue with that; of course, it's not like the concerts' original namesake accomplished its goals, either.

Billboard and Reuters report that "The global recorded music market fell for the seventh consecutive year in 2006, and the slide is accelerating in 2007":

Sales fell 5% year-over-year to $19.6 billion, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a London-based group that represents the major record labels.

Against a backdrop of shrinking CD sales and piracy, the value of physical music shipments tumbled 11% to $17.5 billion last year, the IFPI reported in its Recording Industry in Numbers 2007 study. Digital shipments through mobile services and the 500-plus recognized online music services jumped 85% to $2.1 billion.

The results "reflect an industry in transition," IFPI chairman and CEO John Kennedy said.

"We hoped that the decline in physical sales would be offset by the increase in digital sales, giving us the 'holy grail.' But while digital sales have grown as expected, physical sales have fallen by more than expected," he said.

"Unfortunately, this trend has continued in 2007," he added. "Physical sales continue to drop at a faster pace than we had hoped for, particularly in the U.S. (down 7.3%) and now also in the U.K. (off 6.7%) -- a market that had shown incredible resilience."

The lion's share of blame, Kennedy said, should be leveled at piracy, which he described as the biggest problem the industry faces.

Actually, the biggest problem the recording industry faces, much like Detroit in the 1970s, is that its new product by and large--to borrow one of James Lileks' favorite words--is krrrepp.

Related: "Hollywood's Big Summer Turns Ho-Hum", though Transformers could still save the day. But just as last year's Pirates of the Caribbean sequel salvaged another forgettable year, isn't betting much of the summer's success on just one or two pontential mega-blockbusters quite a risky way to do business?

And for the Old Media trifecta: "NBC Chief Tries To Halt The Exodus".

Happy Fourth of July!

And for some music to further set the mood, here's the Ed Driscoll Orchestra (aka Sonar and Reason) perfoming the "Washington Post March".

(On Monday, a friend sent me this link and asked me to make a loop of the WaPo March for the NRA's float in the Morgan Hill Fourth of July Parade; after routing all of the MIDI tracks through the synthesizers in Reason, and some reverb, I'd like to think it at least sounds a bit better than the version on the site.)

"Beverly Sills, the singer who did both during a storied career that spanned the swing and disco eras, died Monday night in her New York City home. She was 78", E! News reports.

(H/T: Maggie's Farm, which has a clip of Sills in The Barber of Seville.)

Update: Much more on Sills from Orrin Judd, who dubs her "the Un-Diva".

The National Association of Manufacturers' blog links to Die Welt, Germany's Hamburg-based national daily:

Continued weak demand for the singing saviors of climate change
With the worldwide "Live Earth" concert on July 7, Hamburg wants to protect the climate and take its place next to other metropolitan venues such as London, Tokyo and Sydney. But only half of the tickets have been sold. Hamburg tourist officials are giving away the tickets in promotional packages.

Won't that simply encourage binge tourism?

As far as the American segment of the Gaia-destroying shows, Tim Blair writes that their organizers' distinct anti-New Jersey bias is hard to avoid.

Tim Blair writes:

I’ve been trying to come up with a violently destructive Gaia-raping stunt for us to participate in on Live Earth day, but it is literally impossible for even several thousand non-millionaires to match Live Earth’s own level of eco-vandalism while remaining within their means and the law.

We’ve been out-carboned by Big Environmentalism. There’s simply no way we can come close to matching the colossal carbon output of Gore and his musical mates.

And NBC is essentially sending a modern day Martha Quinn to breathlessly VJ the concert. If the legacy networks were truly objective, wouldn't they want someone to report from an even slightly contrarian position just to create the penumbra of the aura of the emanation of resembling being fair and/or balanced?

Speaking of MTV, astonishingly, Kurt Loder, the longtime MTV commentator and former Rolling Stone journalist actually says something negative about a Michael Moore movie! I thought these things didn't happen in New York since Pauline Kael went off to the great press junket in the sky.

According to Rolling Stone, CD sales are in rough shape this year:

Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far — and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" surveys the wreckage and wonders why Rolling Stone is willing to blame everything but the low overall quality of major label music itself.

And speaking of which, England's Telegraph spots a genre of the music industry whose sales have plumetted at double the rate of the overall CD market:

In 2006, rap sold 59.1 million albums, down 21 per cent from 2005. Not one rap album made the American top 10 sellers of the year - a list headed by the saccharine tunes of the soundtrack to Disney's made-for-television High School Musical. The bad boys of rap are now trailing the cowboys of country and the headbangers of heavy metal.

Since rap's apotheosis five years ago, when Eminem's album The Eminem Show topped the American charts with 7.6 million sales, no rapper has come close to emulating his success.

Rap has been deserted by many white fans and middle-class blacks, apparently tiring of the "gangsta" attitude to women, racism, violence and bling - the gold rings and medallions that have made hip-hop a byword for -vulgarity.

"The public has made a choice. They're saying, 'We do not want the nonsense that we see and hear on radio, and we are not putting our money there'," said KRS-One, a rap legend from the Bronx. "Rap music is being boycotted by the American public because of the images that we are putting forward."

If the mid-to-late 20th century is any guide, popular music in general, and black music in particular seems to undergo major self-immolations every few decades on a regular basis. In the 1940s, Miles, Dizzy, Bird and Charlie Christian used their Manhattan nightclubs as a laboratory to invent bebop, eventually killing the swing orchestras dead in their tracks. While bebop and its offshoots produced some brilliant music, by and large, it wasn't a genre you could easily dance to. Which is why, as Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote in 2000's If It Ain't Got That Swing, the teenagers of the 1950s found an alternative: rock and roll. A few years later, Berry Gordy's Motown borrowed from the assembly lines--not Detroit's, but Hollywood's--and adapted Tinseltown's studio system approach to music, and produced hit after hit.

One of the reasons why both bebop and rock succeeded was that it required less musicians than the large swing orchestras. And somewhat similar to the demise of swing jazz, the singers, producers, tunesmiths and studio musicians of 1960s Motown and its '70s offshoots such as Philadelphia’s soul studios--and of course, disco--were replaced by rap's turntables, drum machines and sampling.

But rap took off over 25 years ago (with a sneak preview provided in 1970 by the Last Poets' cameo on the soundtrack of 1970's Performance), and that genre has also played itself out. I don't know what comes next, but I'd like to see a move back to quality songwriting, melodies and musicianship--and infinitely less misogyny. Of course, like the film industry and network TV, it may just be that popular music as a commercial force is another holdover from the era of mass media, and going forward will face increasing difficulties competing in the era of the Long Tail.

In any case, with rap, rock and pop all deep in the doldrums, I'm quite happy to roll my own, as it were.

Mark Steyn writes:

Far away at the back of my mind, I still remember the Rushdie of the 1980s - reflexively leftist, anti-Thatcher, the works. The old line – a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged - goes tenfold for him. He’s not just a liberal mugged by reality; he’s a liberal whom reality has spent the last 13 years trying to kill.

Long off the Peace Train, The Artist Formerly Known As Cat is very much up for the job.

Don Surber writes:

The British princes join that American prince, Albert Gore, in saving the planet by living life to the hilt, spewing carbon dioxide and various pollutants into the atmosphere in order to save the planet from global cooling.

I am fully prepared to do my part in this battle as well with as much binge travel as possible.

And I'm not alone: thousands of jet setters, not to mention dozens of THE HOTTEST ROCK STARS! will also Fight The Cooling come next month.

Motley Crue sues their manager for--wait for it!--harming their image:

In the lawsuit, filed today in Los Angeles County Superior Court, the four founding members of the band (Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee) through Motley Crue Inc., claim manager Carl Stubner and Sanctuary Management Group gave them bad business advice and attempted to "divert revenue from [the band] and redirect it to themselves.

Furthermore, the suit claims, Stubner forced Tommy Lee to "to become engaged in 'reality' projects that were bad career moves for Lee, harming [Sixx, Mars, Neil and Lee], the Motley Crue brand and Lee's own image." The suit calls the low-rated NBC show "Tommy Lee Goes to College" a "critical disappointment and a ratings disaster," adding it painted Lee as "incoherent, lazy and incompetent" and made him "look like a laughing stock who could not carry a drum beat." The suit also claims Lee's participation on "Rock Star: Supernova" "diminished the public's interest in Lee and their overall perception of his musical talents."

Wouldn't the Crue and their lawyers have been better off simply suing the government for their slice of heavy metal disability insurance?

In other Life Imitates Spinal Tap news, 15 year olds everywhere are, even as we speak, thinking that this is the Coolest...Guitar...Ever.

Technorati has been running a series of ads from MSN promoting all of the HOT ARTISTS performing at Al Gore's Live Earth concert next month. Here's a sample:

Needless to say, MSN's copywriter has raised some inconvenient questions which beg explanation.

If the goal of the concert is to stop the global warming that's coming before global cooling returns from the depths of the 1970s, do we really want all of that hotness concentrated in one area? Wouldn't cool artists be better than hot artists? Couldn't too much concentrated hotness burn a hole in the ozone layer over the Meadowlands? Maybe all of that hotness has actually caused global warming.

You never heard about global warming when Sinatra and Dino were playing Vegas and Miles Davis was Kind of Blue, did you? I rest my case. Especially since it's becoming too hot, and I need to put it down.

Further thoughts on those HOT ARTISTS! from the always cool Tim Blair.

As I've written before, "Nostalgie de la boue" is a French phrase for "nostalgia for the mud". This site explains the meaning of the phrase:

"Nostalgie de la boue" means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered "lower" than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home. I have been submerged in such ideas since I was born and am just getting my head out of the waters. My parents romanticized Hungarian folk culture — my father photographed and published peasant architecture, my mother wore folk dresses, my uncle and father promoted native handicrafts in the weaving workshops they organized in the 1930's. I went much further in romanticizing the seemingly most unromantic Aztecs, leaping across an ocean, a continent and five centuries in revalidation.

On the other hand, these reprimitivized folks seem to be taking their nostalgia for the mud just a little too seriously.

The fine line between stupid and clever just narrowed considerably, as Roger Tullgren, 42, of Hässleholm, Sweden, "is now the first person in his native country to receive disability benefits due to, of all things, his addiction(?) to heavy metal music".

James Lileks writes:

An open letter to the nice young idealists who’ve decided to stand outside the supermarket and ask leading, guilt-inducing questions to people who just want to get some MILK, for heaven’s sake: let’s make a deal. I will listen to your concerns. I will nod politely while you make your points. Then I get to talk to you about my totally unrelated pet issue for an equal amount of time, during which you will be unable to ask anyone else to take your brochures or sign your petitions. And since you’re there every day, we can do this every day. Fair?

I only bring this up because today was the 19th time you’ve asked if I had a minute to help the environment. I do, but it’s not this one. I need milk. Sorry.

Fortunately, early next month, the government will be rounding all such supermarket pests up and deposting them here. Sadly, their timeout--and ours--will only be for a day.

Jules Crittenden writes that Gaia's more than happy to fight back against those who try to immanentize the eschaton.

(I'm about to tempt Gaia's wrath myself, as I'm flying--unfortunately not on one of Al or Laurie's Gulfstreams--to Los Angeles this weekend.)

No, not the pundit--the guitarist. Over at Blogcritics, Michael J. West writes:

It’s for that reason that I suggest (not propose, but suggest; this one needs far more examination before it can really be a solid theory) that John McLaughlin is the real key figure of jazz fusion. He and Miles stand toe-to-toe in that sub-genre's pantheon: Miles, the man with the vision, and McLaughlin, the only one who knows how to execute it.

Since the death of Segovia, I think you could easily make the case that McLaughlin is the world's greatest living guitarist, in terms of both breathtaking technique and all of the musical genres he's dared to survey. But I'd argue (and in fact already did so back in 2003) that McLaughlin's greatest moment with Miles Davis wasn't the much more celebrated Bitches Brew, but the next album the two men would record together, the blazing (and most definitely rocking) A Tribute To Jack Johnson.

(For McLaughlin in a much more tranquil vein, check out the above clip from the mid-1980s with his then wife, pianist Katia Labeque, which I've been looking for an excuse to post for a while now.)

In the New York Sun, Ronald Radosh explores the early days of Pete Seeger:

The film's most egregious moment comes when it tells us that Mr. Seeger joined the Communist Party in 1939, and drifted out of it a decade later. It relates how in 1941 he joined the first folk music group, the Almanac Singers, which sang for the labor movement and the CIO. Next the film mentions that Mr. Seeger entered the Army during World War II, another sign of his patriotism.

Nowhere does this documentary describe the Almanac Singers' very first album, "Songs for John Doe." As readers of this newspaper know, in August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed a pact and became allies. Overnight the communists took a 180-degree turn and became advocates of peace, arguing that Nazi Germany, which the USSR had opposed before 1939, was a benign power, and that the only threat to the world came from imperial Britain and FDR's America, which was on the verge of fascism. Those who wanted to intervene against Hitler were servants of Republic Steel and the oil cartels.

In the "John Doe" album, Mr. Seeger accused FDR of being a warmongering fascist working for J.P. Morgan. He sang, "I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won't be safe till everybody's dead." Another song, to the tune of " Cripple Creek" and the sound of Mr. Seeger's galloping banjo, said, "Franklin D., Franklin D., You ain't a-gonna send us across the sea," and " Wendell Willkie and Franklin D., both agree on killing me."

The film does not tell us what happened in 1941, when — two months after "John Doe" was released — Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. As good communists, Mr. Seeger and his Almanac comrades withdrew the album from circulation, and asked those who had bought copies to return them. A little later, the Almanacs released a new album, with Mr. Seeger singing "Dear Mr. President," in which he acknowledges they didn't always agree in the past, but now says he is going to "turn in his banjo for something that makes more noise," i.e., a machine gun. As he says in the film, we had to put aside causes like unionism and civil rights to unite against Hitler.

Fellow useful idiots to Stalin such as Dalton Trumbo and Charlie Chaplin would make similar pivots at the same moment; it's even possible to observe 180-degree pivots today if you look carefully enough.

Update: Orrin Judd puts it succinctly: "A few good tunes for nursery school kids don't make up for being an agent of a murderous enemy power".

Sorry--just reading this headline through Rosie-colored glasses.

One of the themes of Virginia Postrel's terrific The Future And Its Enemies is that for many, top-down control of markets can seem awfully reassuring. There are still lots of people who preferred the simplicity of the days when AT&T was synonymous with telephone, because of how simple and universal it made things. But never mind that rates for a long-distance call were much, much more expensive before AT&T was broken up. Similarly, many people long for the days when men wore suits when flying, even though an airlines ticket cost a heckuva lot more before the industry was deregulated to the casual masses.

As Glenn Reynolds writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (and at least for a time, a frequent contributor to Pajamas Media, ironically enough) waxes nostalgic for the days of mass media:

Keen's thesis is that talent is rare and that worthwhile products - whether we're talking about news reporting, music composition or filmmaking - can be produced only if that talent is nurtured at great length and filtered to a great extent. Only a long and expensive process of refinement can dispose of the common dross and produce the pure gold of quality work.

This argument would be more impressive if the "quality work" from the big media organizations he describes were, well, golden. Keen references Bach and the Beatles as examples of quality music, but when he complains about the music industry's current travails he doesn't note that today's record industry isn't giving us Bach and the Beatles - it's giving us Britney. Likewise, he blames Internet piracy for declining movie attendance when the cause appears to be elsewhere: a recent Zogby poll found that people are going to the movies less often because they think the films stink and, in a more literal way, so do the theaters.

Likewise, Keen decries the decline of the news business, invoking Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, without mentioning that today's top newscasters include Dan "Forged Documents" Rather, Katie Couric and Geraldo Rivera. A lesser breed, by any standard. Keen even complains about declining radio listenership leading to financial problems for Clear Channel broadcasting - a chain many people regard as having ruined radio in America through its imposition of rigid formatting and too many commercials. What Keen sees as a tragedy, many will see as just desserts.

And that's the story of Keen's elites overall. The Golden Age of mass culture didn't end just because the Internet let people do their own thing. It ended because people looked at the low - and steadily declining - quality of mass-marketed television, radio, news, films, and music and concluded that they could do better. And they are often right, not necessarily because the amateur productions are so terrific (though sometimes they are), but because the big media productions are so often dreadful.

Like U.S. car companies in the 1970s, the television networks, movie and record studios, newspapers, and radio stations grew comfortable in their protected positions, and forgot how (or just didn't bother) to make good products. Now their market shares are declining, as people find substitutes. And while people in the 1970s had to look to Japan or Germany for substitute cars, they have only to look to the Internet for substitute sources of news and entertainment - sources that are often, Keen's assertions notwithstanding, just as good as their traditional versions. (Amateur embedded bloggers such as Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Bill Roggio or Bill Ardolino, for example, are producing some of the very best reporting from Iraq, supported by ads on their blogs and donations from their readers, not by big media organizations.)

Remember when films like Rollerball and Network hyped the dangers of a world controlled by a handful of big corporations? That's exactly the mid-20th century mass media model that Keen prefers.

Sturgeon's Law is an absolute in the sense that if, as Theodore Sturgeon quipped, "Ninety percent of everything is crud", then today's explosion of information and entertainment on the 'Net produces an exponentially greater amount of crud then the mid-20th century, when there were only three television networks, a handful of movie and TV studios and record labels, and only one or two newspapers per big city. So it is that much more difficult to mine the gold from the dross. But I'd rather have many more news and entertainment choices to pick from then less, (plus the option of creating in these genres myself) particularly when today's legacy medias, despite more competition than ever before, continue to underperform.

Che Guevara: "He’s the ultimate symbol of radical chic but was Che Guevara really a homophobic, racist square who personally ordered the jailing and executions of innocent men, women and children?"

Che detested rock and roll and railed against “long hairs,” “lazy youths,” and homosexuals. At one point, he wrote that the young must always “listen carefully - and with the utmost respect – to the advice of their elders who held governmental authority.”

Read the whole thing, then someone tell Carlos Santana!

And man, their lead singer has put on a few pounds since his glory days!

Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard writes, "an editor for Australia’s The Age, Melanie Griffin, published an absolutely delicious article Sunday slamming the upcoming 'Live Earth' concerts about to be thrown in the name of global warming alarmism". I don't want to reprint Noel's whole post, so here are just a sample of the questions that Griffin asks:

What if all those rock groups donated serious cash to a fund that subsidised alternative energy sources?

What if everyone stayed home?

What if all 2 billion turned off the TV and did something unplugged for once?

As Sheppard writes:

Yes, Melanie, what if?

Of course, the Global Warmingest-in-Chief wouldn’t be able to take to the stage to cheering international crowds that way. And, in the end, although our media refuse to recognize it, that’s what it’s all about.

Indeed it is.

While Tim Blair is out test driving his latest ride, I'm putting a different sort of machine through its paces. I'll let you know when the review is online or on dead tree.

Roger Daltry's not buying into the hype of the puritanical "Live Earth" concerts to help raise Al Gore’s stature, and ideally amongst the left, help to dramatically slow the economy by attempting to force Kyoto-style anti-business regulations down the throats of the US government:

JUST when it looked like every rock star on the planet was jumping aboard AL GORE's green bandwagon, there’s a backlash already underway.

THE WHO's ROGER DALTRY has blasted the big Wembley gig Gore is organising to raise awareness of global warming.

The huge concert - which features performances from the likes of MADONNA and RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - is taking place at Wembley on July 7 and in other countries around the world.

But Roger, who played with U2 at Live Aid and Live8, reckons the whole thing is a waste of time.

Speaking exclusively to Bizarre, Roger said: "Bo***cks to that! The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert.

"I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel.

"We have problems with global warming, but the questions and the answers are so huge I don't know what a rock concert's ever going to do to help.

"Everybody on this planet at the moment, unless they are living in the deepest rainforest in Brazil, knows about climate change.”

The rocker, who used to sing about my g-generation, added: "My answer is to burn all the f***ing oil as quick as possible and then the politicians will have to find a solution.”

(Via Instapundit.)

This will never happen of course, but I'd love to see an interviewer ask the participants at Gore Aid to take a pledge involving their touring and personal lifestyles, similar to the one that Gore himself recently rejected:

An interesting event took place during soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore’s visit to Congress on Wednesday. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) asked the former Vice President to take a pledge that he would not use more energy in his personal residence than the average American, and Gore refused (video available here).

As reported at the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works website: "Senator Inhofe showed Gore a film frame from 'An Inconvenient Truth' where it asks viewers: 'Are you ready to change the way you live?'”

On the playground, one would call this “Put up or Shut up.” Do you think Gore put up? The press release deliciously continued:

“There are hundreds of thousands of people who adore you and would follow your example by reducing their energy usage if you did. Don’t give us the run-around on carbon offsets or the gimmicks the wealthy do,” Senator Inhofe told Gore.

“Are you willing to make a commitment here today by taking this pledge to consume no more energy for use in your residence than the average American household by one year from today?” Senator Inhofe asked.

Senator Inhofe then presented Vice President Gore with the following "Personal Energy Ethics Pledge:

As a believer:

that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;

that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;

that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and

that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;

I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by March 21, 2008.

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

As Daltry told the The Sun, "I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel". Each concert will require massive transportation efforts involving jet planes and tractor-trailers, hundreds of thousands of watts of electricity to power the lighting and sound gear, and the deforestation required to print at least couple of hundred thousand souvenir programs (and many more no doubt, for sale afterwards). And heck, just think of all of the methane emissions coming from the stadiums' rest rooms, where, no matter how much the audience promises, the Sheryl Crow Rule is incredibly difficult to enforce.

But in the minds of its participants, a cause like Live Earth is worth it. But a generic, everyday, run of the mill concert shouldn't be. So go out with a bang, rock stars--and then, don't be hypocritical puritans; take the sort of pledge that even the Goracle won't.

Certainly more than the New York Times does, at least.

(Via Instapundit. Besides, her post gives me an excuse to link to one of the great trash rock songs of the early days of MTV.)

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

Four days after suffering a stroke, Bo Diddley walked around the intensive-care unit at Creighton University Medical Center, and doctors were encouraged that the singer-songwriter-guitarist would be able to perform again, his manager said.

The 78-year-old Diddley told his audience that he wasn't feeling well during a show in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Saturday night. Diddley's manager, Margo Lewis, said she had the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer taken to the hospital by ambulance when he appeared disoriented at the Omaha airport on Sunday.

I saw Bo Diddley in Philadelphia (where this watch is still worth fifty dollars) in the mid-1980s, when he played in a small, funky bar during his endless touring. His namesake rhythm, the "Bo Diddley Beat", which is sort of “shave-and-a-haircut, two bits” played on an open-tuned electric guitar (typically one of Bo's funky box-shaped axes, the only thing remotely square about the man), is one of the great rock and roll rhythm patterns. It's been adapted by rockers following in Bo's wake as diverse as Buddy Holly (for "Not Fade Away") in the late 1950s, to the Pretenders during their original line-up's hip early days at the start of the 1980s. Their "Cuban Slide's" rhythm pattern is a near perfect example of Bo’s beat.

Here's hoping a swift, full recovery to the former boxer turned rock pioneer.

The redorkulated love child of John Denver and Bill Gates has a hit new song!

As Chris Anderson of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail explains, there's sad news out of Cincinnati: station manager Arthur "Big Guy" Carlson of AM radio's WKRP has finally lost his long-running feud with his mother, the station's owner. After nearly 30 years of the Carlsons' station in the Top 40 rock & roll format, WKRP is reverting back to generic Muzak.

"Manolo says, ayyyyyy! The Ellen DeGeneres is looking bad these days".

A topic discussed on video:

And on blogs.

Because it won't be in the legacy media.

Speaking of which, Don Imus could not be reached for comment.

Sheryl Crow is taking the path of least resistance and declaring her toilet paper manifesto to be a joke. I think that’s a wise move on her part, though the damage to her rep has already been done. Part of the problem is that zealots tend not to have a wild-‘n’-crazy madcap, whacky sense of humor. (See also: Gore, Al. I don’t recall Rachel Carlson or Paul Ehrlich being a big hit at the Improv or the Café Wah in the 1960s, either.)

Lileks declared her Friday cri-de-Cottonelle a satire, but anyone who’s uttered a quote such as this one isn’t, in all likelihood, the second coming of Terry Southern. As Malcolm Muggeridge noted as far back as the early 1960s, real life is becoming increasingly hard to satirize, and Crow’s remarks certainly dovetail nicely with earlier comments from her partner in eco-zealotry, the high-flying Laurie David.

Like I said yesterday, Crow’s timing was wonderful, even if her humor was so subtle it flew under many people’s radars. And fortunately, it’s done inestimable harm to the anti-toilet paper movement (and oh how these people must hate her right now).

And to that, we can only give thanks.

Update: More from the "is it a parody or isn't it" file: Remember kids, "Ham is not a toy, and that there are consequences for being nonchalant about where you put your sandwich".

I don't think it was her original intent, but a nation recovering from of a week of darkness has found much-needed comic relief in Sheryl Crow's remarks on Friday. And that's really all you can ask of--or should expect from--a Hollywood entertainer.

Byron York writes, "In light of the eyewitness' account, another way of saying it might be, how hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be jabbed in the chest by Sheryl Crow?"

I think after reading this, I'd want to run baby, run baby, run, myself. Possibly in one of these compact, economical, fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles.

Update: Don Surber has more fun with Crow's lyrics, and Jonah Goldberg ponders Sheryl's home cooking: "Who's up for some hand rolled sushi and then some steak tartare? I hear she makes it all herself".

Hey, if it makes you happy...

In a review of Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity In Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor appearing in England's self-proclaimed socialist New Statesman, Jeff Sharlet argues that "all pop musicians are fakes":

Leadbelly, Barker and Taylor reveal, was by necessity a master of "faking it", a sophisticated musician of cosmopolitan taste limited to a repertoire of "Negro" songs and told by his manager to perform in prison garb. That manager was John Lomax, one of the early 20th-century giants of what has come to be known as "roots music". "The music that was, for Lomax, the most authentic," write the authors, "the most black, the most free from 'white influence', was the most primitive." That doesn't mean Leadbelly was primitive, only that Lomax and, decades later, Cobain decided to believe that he was, the better to break the bonds of artificiality they felt modernity and celebrity imposed. Leadbelly was a tool. This shifty truth comes to us by way not of postmodernism, but of old-timey Marxist analysis. In 1937, the novelist Richard Wright, profiling Leadbelly for the Daily Worker, declared his coerced performances "one of the greatest cultural swindles in history".

But that's not quite right, either. Wright recognised Lomax's manipulation of Leadbelly (who later successfully sued Lomax), but he assumed there was a genuine Leadbelly behind the music, a real black expression minstrel-ised by the white man. In fact, many of Leadbelly's songs came from white folks, who'd learned them from black musicians, who'd composed them with African inflections as reinterpreted by white musicians eager to add "floating" rhythms to the marching beat of Scots-Irish reels. The strongest argument of Faking It is for the endless "miscegenation" of music. Great popular music is always a collage of cultures, while the quest for authenticity all too often functions as a means of policing racial boundaries.

Consider the case of Mississippi John Hurt, the subject of the book's longest and most powerful essay. First, there's his name: Mississippi was an add-on from the record company. Then there's his reputation as a patriarch of the Delta blues: Hurt wasn't from the Mississippi Delta and he insisted he wasn't a blues musician. And then there is the problem of his blackness, thought by the white fans who rediscovered him in the 1960s to be pure and profound ("Uncle Remus come to life," write the authors). When Hurt was "discovered" the first time, he was performing for black and white audiences backed by a white fiddler and a white guitar player who also happened to be the local sheriff. He recorded blues because the record company insisted he do so. Meanwhile, Jimmie Rodgers, a white musician who happened to be a bluesman, recorded what came to be known as "country" music because the blues were reserved by the market for black men. One more twist: when Harry Smith included two of Hurt's songs on his great Smithsonian Folk Anthology, most listeners mistook the black musician for a white hillbilly.

The term "folk" itself presents more problems. Until 1949, country music was simply "folk", as was much "black" music. Racism was the centrifuge that separated them: Henry Ford, for instance, poured money into a campaign to promote square-dancing as a form of authentic (read: white and Protestant) Americanism. One of the pioneering producers of "old-time" music in the early 20th century, Ralph Peer, later boasted: "I invented the hillbilly and n***** stuff."

The weakness of Faking It, otherwise a fascinating and nimble investigation of pop's paradoxes, is its failure to explore the political implications to which it so often points.

The leftwing readers of The New Statesman might not like the territory it explores, but that topic was covered extensively in this article on Pete Seeger by Howard Husock in a 2005 issue of City Journal, which dovetails surprisingly well with Sharlet's essay.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

The first cut of a roll of Charmin, I guess.

Sort of the podcast equivalent of his hilarious Interior Desecrations book, James Lileks sticks a sonic shiv into the dark heart of the 1970s and its most clichéd music in his latest "Diner": "Ooga; Shakka"

James Lileks posts photos of one the great moments of fifties swank, the original automobile compact disc player. It probably skipped and popped a whole lot more than the real CD players of today, but the original gets bonus points for style and creative, if impractical thinking:

It’s the Highway Hi-Fi. It’s a record player for your car. I repeat: a record player for your car. More details can be found here. (Warning: BYO Paragraph Breaks.) Also here. Ah, but what music would you play on such a miraculous device? Well: this would be an excellent time to try out our new music-playing widget, and provide the following tune for your driving pleasure. It's a selection from a record provided to Kresge stores: this is what they played over the speakers in the ceiling.

It makes me feel six years old again. There's not a day I hear 60s and 70s pop in the grocery store, and wish they'd bring this stuff back. Heck, half the shoppers would think it was ironic, which would make it all okay.

Having spent my teen years toiling in the family retail store, where my father insisted on Easy-Listening Muzak over the frequent protestations of his rock & roll crazed son, I find it more than a little ironic that today’s Muzak is…rock & roll.

But for unintential irony, it's hard to beat the notion that singers like Madonna, and Sheryl Crow with her cover of Yusuf Islam’s “The First Cut (of the Palestinian suicide bomber) Is The Deepest” think of themselves as épatering les bourgeois when their music is now fit to be non-offensive background tunes. Here’s a tip: when your songs are being played on the Muzak speakers by the pool and cabanas of the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, you’re no longer avant-garde. You’re officially the garde.

Similarly, I’m old enough to remember when rock musicians actually were edgy and dangerous, and not entirely play acting at it. Now they’re puritanical nags, ordering their listeners to cut down on CO2 emissions, even as they organize tours around private jets, limousines, and tractor-trailers full of HiWatt amps, PA systems and more stage rigging than any Broadway play. (And buttering up to the husband of a woman they once, briefly, reviled.)

Maybe stores should return to the Muzak of the past. It can’t contain any more hidden irony than today’s rockers.

I think I've linked to Tom Wolfe's Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities from 2006 before, but not the passage quoted below, which brilliantly ties together the original bohemians, and today's versions, and reminds us that while the clothes on their backs may change, the need to seek out status, or to invert it--or both--remains the same, ever after 150 years or so:

Status groups, [German sociologist Max Weber] contended, are the creators of all new styles of life. In his heyday, the turn of the 19th century, the most stylish new status sphere, no more than 30 years old, was known as la vie boheme, the bohemian life. The bohemians were artists plus the intellectuals and layabouts in their orbit. They did their best to stand bourgeois propriety on its head through rakish dishabille, louder music, more wine, great gouts of it, ostentatious cohabitation, and by flaunting their poverty as a virtue. And why? Because they all came from the bourgeoisie themselves originally and wanted nothing more desperately than to distinguish themselves from it. They seldom mentioned the upper class, Marx's owners of "the means of production." They seldom mentioned Marx's working class, except in sentimental appreciation of the workers' occasional show of rebelliousness. No, as the late Jean-Francois Revel said of mid-20th century French intellectuals, the bohemians' sole object was to separate themselves from the mob, the rabble, which today is known as the middle class.

I thought bohemia had been brought to its apogee in the 1960s, before my very eyes, by the hippies, originally known as acid heads, in reference to the drug LSD, with their Rapunzel hair down to the shoulder blades among the males and great tangled thickets of hair in the armpits of the women, all living in communes. The communes inevitably turned religious thanks to the hallucinations hippies experienced while on LSD and a whole array of other hallucinogens whose names no one can remember. Some head--short for acid head--would end up in the middle of Broadway, one of San Francisco's main drags, sitting cross-legged in the Lotus position, looking about, wide eyes glistening with beatification, shouting, "I'm in the pudding and I've met the manager! I'm in the pudding and I've met the manager!" Seldom had so many gone so far to feel aloof from the middle class.

But I was wrong. They were not the ones who raised rejection of the middle class to its final, Olympian level. For what were the hippies and their communes compared to the great bohemians of our time in the status sphere known as Hip Hop, with its black rappers and "posses" and groupies, its hordes of hangers-on--and its millions of followers and believers among the youth of America, white and black? The Hip Hop style of life turns bourgeois propriety inside out. It celebrates the status system of the Street, which is to say, the standards of juvenile male street gangs, so-called gangbangers. What matters is masculinity to burn and a disdain of authority. The rappers themselves always put on looks of sullen hostility for photographs. The hippies' clothes of yore look like no more than clown costumes next to the voluminous Hip Hop jeans with the crotch at knee level and the pants legs cascading into great puddles of fabric at the ankles, the T-shirts hanging outside the pants and just short of knee level and as much as a foot below their leather jackets or windbreakers, and the black bandannas known as do-rags around their heads. What were the hippies' LSD routs known as acid tests . . . compared to the Hip Hop stars' status tests that require shooting and assassinating one another periodically? How cool is that? One of my favorite sights in New York is that of a 14- or-15-year-old boy who has just descended from his family's $10 or $12 million apartment and is emerging onto the sidewalks of Park Avenue dressed Hip-Hop head to crotch, walking through a brass-filigreed door held open by a doorman in a uniform that looks like an Austrian army colonel's from 1870.

Of course, as David Brooks noted in Bobos In Paradise, we're living in an era where some degree of bohemianism is expected, is the societal norm. And while that trend is obviously most pronounced on the left, it's hard to escape its trappings in all aspects of American society. And that may not be a healthy development, in the long run.

"Keith Richards: 'I Snorted My Father'"

Sadly, after Tom Cruise's placenta eating quotes and Rosie's wild conspiracy theories, I half believe that "Keef" isn't just saying that to yank the media's collective chain.

Update (4/4/07): "Keith Richards’ manager and longtime friend denies the rock star snorted his father’s ashes". Add this one to the endless list of legendary Keith legends.

More news from England's Upper Class Idiotarian Of The Year competition. Aging rock star reminds us of his reactionary tendencies by pulling a clapped-out stunt that was essentially already done 15 years ago by another rocker with follicular issues:

Saturday, CNN Headline News ran a repeat of Glenn Beck’s March 27 episode, which showed footage of some of the images that ran behind Elton John during his elaborate 60th birthday bash at Madison Square Garden that included a burning church. This is the same man who said that religion promotes hatred and “it’s not very compassionate.” Beck discussed the very tolerant and “compassionate” concert:

On Sunday, he performed -- it`s the lord`s day -- at Madison Square Garden with this image running behind him. Yes, that would be a burning church. Now, I know you`re at home thinking, "Gee, Glenn, isn`t Elton John the guy who said he`d ban all religion because it turns people into hateful lemmings?" Yes, same guy.

Beck discussed the images with Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, who called the act a “hate crime.”

BECK: Tell me about the burning of the church on stage.

LAFFERTY: Well, you know, that`s against the law in America. That is a hate crime, a so-called hate crime. And, you know, although they want to use this upcoming hate crime law to silence pastors and Christians, but Elton doesn`t get it.

(CROSSTALK)

BECK: Hang on. There has got to be an attorney out there that says, "Oh, I`d like to file that as a hate crime." There`s got to be somebody out there that wants to take that on.

LAFFERTY: It`s hateful. But, you know, Glenn, a lot of us grew up liking Elton John.

BECK: I love him.

LAFFERTY: He`s no longer the Elton John that we knew. He`s a guy who has a personal agenda, who hates God, who hates Christians, who hates people of faith, and he`s going to use his money to spout this.

The traditional media that insist on selecting speech and images to label as intolerant, should at least be even-handed. Why haven’t they covered this example of religious intolerance or “hate speech,” particularly when it is perpetrated by a celebrity who frequently “speaks out” against hate speech and who is a vocal supporter of self-described anti-bigotry groups like Human Rights Campaign?

Let’s flip this around; if country artist Toby Keith displayed a burning mosque at a concert, it is highly unlikely that the media would be this indifferent. Comparing how the media treated the false story of the desecrated Koran at Guantanamo Bay perfectly illustrates the inequity in the portrayal of intolerance or hate speech.

The distinct disinterest in anti-Christian bias is evident in the media treatment of an incident which would be considered bigotry and perhaps hate speech if the image targeted any other religion or group.

Why, yes it is.

(To really sock it to the bourgeois, try saying this in front of hundreds of millions of viewers.)

"Now, before we get our freak on, we need to match up our beats": the circle is now complete; the recently deceased Larry "Bud" Melman's successor has been discovered.

In the "tradition" of Shatner and Nimoy, and perhaps inspiring future singing thespians like Don Johnson and David Hasselhoff, Jack Klugman and Tony Randall get down with their funkadelic vocalistic selves.

As Orrin Judd writes, "'You're So Vain' is a highlight, relatively speaking".

Hot on the Beatleboots of my podcast this morning featuring the author of The Unreleased Beatles, comes this clip, unearthed by John Podhoretz. Richard Lester's experimental film techniques and choreography have never been more radical!

Exit Question (as Allahpundit is wont to say): How superior will the surrealism in the above clip look when compared to this?

When the Beatles broke up in 1970, they left behind a treasure-trove of archives in the vaults of EMI records, many of which have yet to see the light of day. There are also countless hours of live recordings and movie footage from Let It Be, which is still locked away, despite a few false rumors to the contrary from time to time.

Late last year, rock journalist Richie Unterberger returned from an Indiana Jones-like exploration of those archives, and described their contents in book titled, The Unreleased Beatles. It was originally published by Backbeat Books, and is currently distributed by Hal Leonard, and available from Amazon.com.

Richie spoke with us recently in a 21-minute long, 19.3 MB podcast, which you can download here, or via our Apple iTunes page. Note that in both cases, no iPod is required; virtually any computer with a broadband connection and a soundcard can play an MP3 file.

And speaking of playing, since I somehow lost Paul and Ringo's phone numbers, that's me playing the guitars, bass and keys, along with some Acid Loops for the drums and synths, on the intro and outro music. I think I knocked out some fairly bitchin' (for me at least) lead licks on my Telecaster on the fade out, if I do say so myself.

Update: Also at Blogcritics, and Pajamas Media.

While the Apple-themed Hillary parody on YouTube promises that 2008 won't be like 1984, it certainly sounds like 2007 could be a lot like 1978 at the movie theater.

Case in point: What does this upcoming film remind you of?

In a perfect world, Sony would love to get behind Across The Universe because it's synergistic. Told mainly through numerous Beatles tunes performed by the characters, it takes advantage of that Sony/ATV music publishing catalog owned with Michael Jackson that boasts some 250 Fab Four songs.

My God, not this again.

Please, please make the 1970s end.

Please. Do it for the children. Or the environment. Or the environmentally-friendly children. Just make it stop!

Update: Of course, it's not like the sixties will ever end, either. I can't believe the teenage grief I gave my dad for listening to Crosby and Benny Goodman long after their shelf-life had expired. His Greatest Generation-minted sense of nostalgia for a rosier past had nothing on the boomers:

Bobby Seale is selling Black Panther posters. They're kind of ugly and black-and-white.

I can, however, vouch for his barbecue cookbook, Barbeque'n with Bobby. Say what you like, but the man knows his 'cue.

What would happen if Barbeque'n with Bobby met Che Guevara's Ceviche? Once you spit out the machine gun bullets and sclerotic Marxist rhetoric, that's some tasty eating!

J.R. Taylor looks at a surprisingly conservative-sounding Pete Townshend, circa 1980, and observes:

We got The Who’s Who Are You in 1978, and 1980’s Empty Glass was a great solo effort. All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes made for a fine follow-up in 1982. Let’s include 1977’s brilliant Rough Mix—where Townshend collaborated with Ronnie Lane—as part of the era. The Who released the underrated Face Dances in 1981, and then It’s Hard in 1982…and that last one had Townshend showing that he could stand to recharge his batteries.

As Taylor notes, "This was a good time to be a Pete Townshend fan".

Indeed it was--I really worshiped Townshend during that period, both with The Who (whom I saw at Philadelphia's old JFK stadium in 1982 during their first of what would eventually feel like semi-annual farewell tours) and on his own.

There's one more album of Townshend from that period that Taylor leaves off his list, and that's Townshend's Scoop, the first of an ongoing collection of his demos. Scoop was part of a very strong DIY ethic that was bubbling up in music during that period, both from the "anybody can play!" ethos of punk and new wave, and from the release of the affordable four-track cassette recorders. Townshend would eventually use these himself, along with much more sophisticated hardware. Four-track cassette recorders allowed a budding musician to "write" his own songs onto cassette by recording a drum machine (another early 1980s innovation) onto track one, bass onto track two, rhythm guitar onto track three and vocals and a lead instrument on track four. The tools available today are infinitely more sophisticated, but things had to start some place.

There's a music store poster from around 1983 promoting Scoop that I had framed to hang above my assorted tools of destruction a while back to remind me where I came from. Because virtually everything creative that I've done since flows in some way from that period, beginning with learning music and how to record it, and then figuring out that if I could be creative there, I could explore other media as well. And I suspect I'm not the only one blogging who had similar insights around that time.

Night of the (more or less) Living Keith.

Man I hope that moustache is a leftover from this project, and not a permanent part of Richards' embalmed appearance.

I was never a big fan of the rock group Boston, but lead guitarist-producer-technical wizard Tom Scholz's Rockman invention was absolutely brilliant--in the mid-1980s, it was the only way to record screaming lead guitar sounds and not wake the dead at 3:00 in the morning, and my four-track demos lived and died with it. But Ed Morrissey notes that Brad Delp, Boston's lead singer has passed away at the comparatively young age of 55, and has a fine memoriam.

The latest in Libertas' series of "Put Up Or Shut Up", an excellent guide to indy film/digital video making, is online, and deals with audio. There are loads of great tips, including this comment right at the start:

Sound matters more than picture. If the picture’s fuzzy, out of focus, or gone completely, it’s better than bad sound. Bad sound immediately takes you out of the film.

And speaking of location sound, I've been having lots of fun with this product, Samson's Zoom H4 portable digital recorder. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for the types of projects Libertas has been describing, but for location work for short video podcasts, it seems to do a pretty darn good job. The base of the recorder has a pair of XLR-inputs for use with professional mics. And for certain applications, it's small enough to hold on camera as a handheld mic itself, especially with the black foam cover over the two small condenser microphones located at the top of the unit. It records audio onto a Smart Card, which can simply be popped into the computer to import into your audio or video editing program afterwards.

It's also useful in the studio as well--I've been using it as a digital backup recorder for the Pajamas' Blog Week In Review audio podcasts, just in case.

When William Goldman said,"Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood", he probably had screenwriting on his mind, but Hollywood's songwriting isn't exactly going great guns either these days, as Mark Steyn notes:

What do these five songs have in common?

“The Way You Look Tonight”, “Thanks For The Memory”, “Over The Rainbow”, “When You Wish Upon A Star” and “White Christmas”.

Answer: They were all Academy Award-winning songs from the Best Song Oscar’s first decade.

And what do these five songs have in common?

“When You Believe”, “You’ll Be In My Heart”, “Into The West”, “Al Otro Lado del Rio” and “It”s Hard Out Here For A Pimp”.

Answer: They were all Academy Award-winning songs from the last decade.

Norma Desmond didn't know the half of it.

Reuters has an interesting piece on Esmee Denters, an 18-year old resident of Oosterbeck, who's become the Dutch "It Girl" of YouTube:

Nearly 20,000 fans have subscribed to her YouTube channel to receive automatic updates, with about 200 added a day, putting her at No. 22 on the all-time most-popular list.

Denters has since traveled to the United States and met a veritable who's who of the music industry's leading executives, from Jason Flom to Antonio "L.A." Reid to Tommy Motolla. She has recorded demo tracks with Kelly Rowland and is fielding TV deals with Sony Pictures Entertainment.

As Reuters notes, "The obvious logical next step, then, is a record label deal, right? Not so fast":

"We may decide not to get together with a label," Denters said via phone, waiting for a flight from Los Angeles to New York for another round of meetings and recording sessions. "We may try new stuff. I've already accomplished so much on my own, we'd like to see what we can do with that."

Artists like Denters, emerging from the realm of user-generated media, have learned to tap the viral power of the Internet to do what acts a generation ago could only dream of -- build a grassroots following numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort.

But being talented and building a fan base is only part of the equation. Artists who decide to go it alone must bear the full financial weight of the various aspects of a music career -- recording and production fees, distribution costs, marketing and promotion expenses and more.

These costs are falling in the digital age. Recording and production fees can be extraordinarily cheap, depending on the level of sophistication desired. Tech-savvy artists can further cut costs with a good laptop and ProTools.

Distribution can be done digitally through such firms as the Orchard or INgrooves, which take a flat percentage of each sale for their efforts. Physical sales can be handled by CD Baby at $4 a pop. There are a gaggle of online services designed to host commerce and promotional sites for unsigned acts as part of a "music social network," most notably PureVolume and Sellaband.com. Companies like Musictoday can serve as a one-stop shop for artists for Web site hosting and design, digital downloads, concert ticket sales, CD replication, fan club management, and merchandise sales and fulfillment.

For licensing, digital services like Rumblefish, PumpAudio and even some digital distribution firms like the Orchard promote their clients' work to advertising firms and film producers and charge only a percentage of the licensing fee in return. And since they've taken no recoupable advance, these artists get to keep all the proceeds.

In a TCS Daily piece back in 2003, I explored the war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, particularly in the music industry, where so much can be done by a talented DIY-artist. These days, all of the technology visible here in Peter Gabriel's 1980-era studio easily fits into a PC with a good high-end sound card.

Because it's so much harder to achieve great visuals rather than great sounds, it will be a while before things level out in the movie industry. But fortunately, Hollywood's doing an excellent job of lowering their own standards, while technology on the grass roots level continues to become more and more powerful.

Update: NRO's Peter Suderman looks at American Film Renaissance, one attempt to level the playing field. It's a very good piece, but I'm not sure if I entirely agree with him when he writes:

Hollywood rarely markets its movies as explicitly “liberal films,” and, as the pageantry of the Oscars shows, the films themselves can be almost an afterthought. No, the movie industry may consistently pull the lever for the bluest of the blue state candidates, but the color it cares for most is green.

But only to a certain point.

Peter Suderman writes:

Outside of a few independent artists, I don't typically care too much for rap and hip-hop. This Denver Post write-up, though, makes this PBS documentary about hip-hop and masculinity look pretty interesting. Certainly, there's a strong connection between rap culture and macho masculinity. Where else in modern pop culture is pure aggression so highly prized?

I think there's more to it, though, especially amongst the middle and upper middle class suburban kids who've popularized rap and its various derivative subgenres. A lot of it has to do with the fact that, in an odd way, it's rebellion music. Now that rock has become the domain of aging boomers and sensitive emo nerds, rap one of the few musical genre that has any hint of danger left in it. Now, in its MTV form, pureed and watered down for mass consumption, it's not too dangerous—but it's got just enough edge to make it a little bit thrilling for ornery teenagers.

The way it produces that edge is, I think, what's so interesting. Yes, you can talk about the violence and misogyny of the lyrics, and no doubt, that material is there. But mostly what mainstream rap sells is a sort of self-obsessed, luxury hedonism. It's about guns and drugs, sure, but it's often just as much about clothes, sex, cars, money, and conquering rivals, as if what these guys really want is to be gun-toting, moneyed yuppies. It's that sort of flagrant narcissism, I suspect, that makes the rap image so appealing to its suburban and exurban fanbase.

Sounds like the final triumph of Sonny Crockett. (Or, on the flipside of the very same coin, Tony Montana.)

Always liked this song, a minor gem by Aimee Mann resurrected from long-lost MTV obscurity by YouTube, the infinite Internet repository for all things video:

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the L.A. Times has only just now realized the implications of the overt politicization of this year's Grammy awards:

After the liberals and their allies in the media spent days crowing and celebrating the Dixie Chicks’ big win and how it was a free speech victory, and political vindication, and blah blah blah — they’re now starting to wake up and realize they did the Chicks and themselves more damage than good. Because in their drunken hubris they’ve all but admitted the Grammy awards had nothing to do with the merits of the music and everything to do with politics. And that’s not only a black mark on the music industry, it also diminishes the Chicks’ victory, giving their critics even more fodder. Well, too little and too late, here comes the L.A. Times eager to undo some of it’s own damage.

The recent overt politicization of the Oscar awards (foreshadowed by this moment in the mid-1970s) was a significant milestone in the movie industry's quest towards irrelevancy as a mass medium that serves a wide swatch of the public on both sides of the political aisle. The recording industry seems awfully eager to follow in their footsteps.

As of the time of this post--and it could change at any moment--here's what's currently at the top of Wikipedia's profile of Beach Boys' lead singer Mike Love:

Michael Edward Love (born March 15, 1941 in Los Angeles, California) is an American singer and songwriter who was one of the lead singers and lyric writers of The Beach Boys. He formed the band along with Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and a school friend Al Jardine. He is an asshole.

He may or may not be, but it is amazing what slips through the cracks at "the open-sourced encyclopedia"; John Seigenthaler Sr. could not be reached for comment.

Update: Blink and you miss it! It appears to be gone now, but I did manage a screen capture before it vanished down the Memory Wikihole.

Glenn Reynolds recently wrote:

I find [Wikipedia] a decent place for casual reference when the subjects aren't politically charged, but much less useful when they are.

But even with something as innocuous and non-political a topic as this, it's a reminder that the Wiki page you're reading--and citing--on a particular topic can change literally from minute to minute.

John Cougar Mellencamp tells Charlie Rose that the U.S. should not have responded to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor--before launching into Oliver Stone-style conspiracy theories regarding JFK.

For Chevrolet, which currently employs Mellencamp as their representative spokesrocker, this yet again "News Of Fresh Disaster".

Update: Little Pink White Houses? John Hawkins writes that the sky's the limit for Mellencamp's political future after his appearance on Rose's show...

Between the politically-fueled Grammys, the death of Prozac-fueled Anna Nicole Smith, and the hydrogen and liquid oxygen-fueled past of Lisa Marie Nowak, the timing couldn't be better for the debut of GlossLip, the gossip-fueled blog of Dawn Olsen, wife of Blogcritics founder Eric Olsen. "Celebrity Gossip From Our Lips To Yours", is their slogan.

It's all off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush, to borrow from Sid Hudgens' old slogan.

(And if you simply can't get enough of Anna Nicole Smith's trainwreck life and death, don't miss this recent post by Cathy Seipp on "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Bimbo".)

The fact that this man didn't cop a Grammy last night says something very deep about the American psyche...

(Via The Anchoress. And yes, my riff above is a staggeringly obscure Miami Vice reference.)

Regarding the Dixie Chicks' Grammy wins last night, Lorie Byrd highlights this unintentionally hilarious quote by former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart:

I think people are paranoid," former Grateful Dead member Mickey Hart told Reuters. "I think that if they speak out, they think they're gonna get whacked by the government. It's pretty oppressive now. Look at the Dixie Chicks. They got whacked."

They did? Let's see: magazine covers, Grammy Awards, a documentary movie. As Mary Katharine Ham wrote about the Dixie Chicks last fall, "Man, it's rough being silenced".

They did lose a wide swatch of their fanbase of course; I'm certainly no expert on country music, but I'd say that Lorie's thoughts echo millions of her fellow country fans:

The Dixie Chicks did not get "whacked" by the government. If anyone "whacked" them it was their fans who like their music without political sermonizing, thank you very much. It was the country fans who chose in droves to stop buying their CDs and told DJ's they didn't want to hear them on the radio. Sorry, but George Bush can 't be blamed for this one.

As for being whacked, if five Grammy wins is being whacked, then I'll bet there will be some other singers hoping someone decides to whack on them a bit. I didn't watch the Grammy awards tonight, but was switching channels around 11 and kept the dial on CBS long enough to see the Dixie Chicks win for song of the year and for album of the year. I was a huge fan of their music back when they were a country act, before they became professional victims. When they said they didn't want those fans that are also fans of people like Reba McIntyre, they lost their country base, and me, for good.

What seems new though is the trend of celebrities attacking their own audiences--I thought that was strictly reserved for punk rockers, circa 1975. Or as I wrote last fall:

When entertainers were attacking President Reagan back in the 1980s, I don't remember them slagging their audiences as well. Maybe because it's not exactly the best way to build sympathy for your cause. And maybe because audiences didn't have the tools to fight back then.

Libertas adds:

They went from selling tens of million of records to less than 2 million. They went from #1 hits to not being able to crack the Top 20. They went from filling arenas to cancelling tour dates and having to play in Canada. They went from winning awards for their work to winning consolation prizes prizes for their politics.

And that is the consolation prize: the current career path of the Dixie Chicks equals that of anti-American and/or anti-Bush actors such as Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Danny DeVito, Alec Baldwin, et al. Those actors have given up the brass ring of superstardom on the level of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger during his pre-governator days, and Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise prior to their recent meltdowns. But they'll never be without work. In a town as reactionary as Hollywood, it literally pays to toe the company line.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: "Jonah, remember the words of ‘Thomas Jefferson’: Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, except when you dissent from the Dixie Chicks."

No post titled "The Final Countdown" would be complete without this infamous YouTube moment in which the singer--such as he is--sounds like he really is warbling the above title.

Wow, maybe it is 1968 all over again: Jack Webb is back, and this time, he's on the side of Truth, Justice, and the Techno-Rapping Way, baby!

Yet another marker on the road to the entirely synthetic pop star of the future.

Boy did I call this or what back in 2004?

Three of Miles Davis' greatest moments:

The very essense of cool--Kind of Blue's seminal "So What", with Miles and John Coltrane:

And from Porgy & Bess, "Summertime" and "Here Come De Honey Man", with Quincy Jones reviving Gil Evans' sublime arrangements:

This second clip was from 1991, only a few months before Miles passed away. Apparently it was a Herculean effort by Quincy Jones to get Miles to sign onboard to play his late-1950s music one last time, possibly knowing that the end was near, depending upon some of the conflicting reports by Miles' biographers. But in retrospect at least, the result is magnificent moment of closure for an incredible career that would eventually stray very, very far from its roots.

"Dinesh D'Souza might not like it...but this might be one way to see off Islamic fundamentalism".

I think I need more photos before I can fully get behind this. Maybe Reuters' recently fired photo editor might want to do some freelancing on this subject while he's looking for a permanent new gig.

For the past few months, I've been having a lot of fun playing with Roland's VG-88 guitar modeling system. It's a pedal board loaded with 260 different patches that a guitar player can dial through, much like a keyboard synthesizer player. Want your guitar to sound like a nylon string classical guitar? An acoustic or electric 12-string guitar? Jimmy Page's Les Paul? Eric Clapton's Stratocaster? A guitar synthesizer? All those tones are in there, and many more.

The product has been out for a while, but just for the heck of it, I knocked off a lengthy review for Blogcritics, which you can read by clicking here.

Coming soon from Gibson: the Jack Bauer Kiefer Sutherland signature electric guitar!

Related: "Less Than A Week 'Til Jack Is Back".

Britain's Independent dubs 2007 "The Year of the Comeback", with Indiana Jones and Stallone's Rocky reappearing at your local multiplex, and inside your nearest hockey arena, The Police, and the best-selling Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks line-up of Genesis. While it will be fun to see some of the old boys back in action, it's also a reminder of how the Long Tail has radically impacted mass culture. As Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago about American network TV and the proliferation of seemingly innumerable spin-offs of Law & Order, CSI, and other sclerotic video franchises:

The networks can't let go, because every time they cancel an established show, the viewers, particularly the younger ones, vanish. No one thinks it's worth investing in a new show. The rise in reality shows has been cited by many as a sign of creative exhaustion on the part of Hollywood

In an era where mass culture in toto has been fractured into dozens and dozens of niche markets, the same holds true for the movie and music world as well.

Back when I began learning how to play guitar in the fall of 1982, there were two guitar magazines: Guitar Player, and Guitar World. Guitar Player was more established; it started life in the late 1960s, first covering the psychedelic guitarists in its Bay Area backyard, then the Brit superstars of the 1970s (Clapton! Beck! Page! Frampton! Richards! Townshend! Et al.), but its heart seemed to be in the jazz world. A heroin and Jack Daniels-ravaged pipe cleaner-thin Jimmy Page with his Danelectro slung low bashing out “Kashmir” at 190 decibels may have been on its cover, but its heart was set on telling you how Howard Roberts fingered second inversion E flat 11th sharp suspended fourth chords at the sixth fret position.

Guitar World was (and is) Guitar Player’s upstart competitor, and it was looser, funkier. It loved rockers. It wasn’t trying to climb into the inner workings of the Tritone scale; it wanted to show you how to play the solo to “Stairway To Heaven”.

An early issue had Les Paul on the cover though, which had plenty of crossover value: my dad loved Les because he had played with Crosby; I loved Les because Page, Beck, Townshend and Keef all played his signature guitar.

As I may have mentioned before, back in 2002, after I interviewed Les myself in New York (for articles that appeared online in Blogcritics and Catholic Exchange and on dead tree in Vintage Guitar), I asked Les to autograph my battered copy of his 1983 Guitar World cover story, and he was delighted to do so. (Les will autograph anything--just search through eBay to see how many of his guitars he’s autographed over the years after his second Monday net set.) I made a color photocopy of that cover and framed it, as a reminder of the distance I travelled since when I began playing.

Flashforward to two weeks ago in Texas. While Nina and I were out Christmas shopping, we stopped in the Barnes & Noble in Waco, and I picked up the February issue of Guitar World. It’s out in December, so it has a Holiday-themed cover with Ozzy’s longtime gunslinger Zack Wylde on the cover dressed as Santa, and Billy Barty’s Mini-Me dressed as one his elves.

Oh, and it has three of my articles, which I wrote early this fall.

(Best. Christmas. Ever.)

There’s my history of Carvin, the San Diego-based guitar and amplifier builder, an interview with the fellows who designed and built this incredible Stratocaster variation, and a brief interview with actor Steven Seagal, who’s now dividing his time between Kung Fu-ing bad guys in the movies, and singing the blues. And owns something like 300 vintage guitars, including a superb “Black Beauty” Les Paul Custom from the mid-1950s, and at least two of the late Albert King’s Flying-Vs.

So if you see Santa and his favorite elf on the cover of Guitar World this month, look for me in there as well.

While I was shopping for Christmas gifts on Amazon, I gave myself a James Brown greatest hits CD--Foundations Of Funk: A Brand New Bag: 1964-1969, which documented Brown's revolution in R&B, creating a stripped down modal sound, much the same as Miles Davis had created in the jazz world just a few years prior. (MIles in turn would be inspired by Brown's funk on 1969's Bitches Brew.)

I was actually listening to James Brown on my iRiver MP3 player on Satuday, driving around Texas. So I was doubly astonished to read that he passed away today at age 73.

In 1980, Peter Gabriel somehow managed to combine just about all of the elements that would drive rock and pop music in the MTV era--and this was a couple of years before MTV was even born, of course. African polyrhythms, drum machines, gated drums, the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, sampling--it was all there on Gabriel's third and fourth album.

It was around that time that England's South Bank Show did an episode which documented Gabriel's lengthy efforts to map out and record that fourth album, Security. Since we occasionally discuss home recording here, these YouTube clips are pretty cool stuff, especially when you realize how far technology has advanced since then: the Fairlight that Gabriel demonstrates here (particularly in the second clip) cost something like $30,000 back then; today the PC by your desk has much more computing power, and with the right software and soundcard, can do anything it could. (And can generate all of its preset sounds.)

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I have a lengthy review of the latest incarnation of Cakewalk's Sonar PC-based multitrack recording program, over at Blogcritics.

Near the end of the piece, I tried to give a brief preview of the multimedia of the very near future: 64-bit computing. While Sonar 6 works great with good ol' Windows XP Professional, it's also compatible with the 64-bit version of Windows XP. One big, big advantage of 64-bit computing? Currently, Windows XP supports up to four gigs of RAM.

64-bit Windows supports a whopping 128-gigs of RAM, and the 64-bit computing in general apparently has a theoritical limit of 16 exabytes! (Insert bug-eyed emoticon here.)

Of course, 200 years from now when we're beaming people up and storing their data in the pattern buffers, we'll wonder how mankind got anything done with a pitiful 128-gigs of RAM. But for the next decade or so, that sounds like a potent future for home multimedia creation. Needless to say, though--Hollywood won't be happy.

The National Football League has long been known as a copycat league. When one team has enormous success, every aspect of its program is scrutinized by other NFL teams to see what worked, and what can be adapted to level the playing field.

After the 1985 Chicago Bears went 15-1 in the regular season and blew out the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX, their ultimate team weapon was exposed by several other teams in the late 1980s, who would utilize it themselves for its talismanic powers:

Behold! The really, really, really cheesy team rap video.

WARNING: The management of Ed Driscoll.com, Pajamas Media, the National Football League, Ditka's Steakhouse, and Refrigerator Perry are in no way responsible for the psychic damage that clicking on the above link and watching all three videos back to back can potentially cause. Proceed at your own risk!

One recent trend in the music software industry is the creation of development blogs, which, at their best, allow for interactivity with readers, describe new features of an upcoming product, and of course, build promotional interest before its launch.

Two recent development blogs have been for TC-Helicon's Harmony4 plug-in, which we reviewed in a lengthy post that was a recent Blogcritics' Editors' Pick of the Week, and Cakewalk's upcoming Project5 Version 2.5. We discussed an earlier version of Project5, here.

Cakewalk is also promoting their products via YouTube, such as this explanation of their Sonar recording program's ability to work with the 64-bit version of Windows, and its benefits:

As Hugh Hewitt discussed a couple of years ago in Blog, there's no reason why any industry couldn't adopt either of these promotional ideas to introduce new products to the marketplace--and there's no doubt, smarter companies will increasingly be doing just that.

Found via The Corner, Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting list of who has been the coolest man in the world over the last 70 years or so. Strangely enough he includes Keith Olbermann on his list. Maybe it's just me, but a barrage of spittle-flecked submoronic Godwin's Law violating monologues seems to violate all reasonable definitions of coolness, but other than that, it's an interesting, if frustrating list. I'd add the following names to it:

1959: Cary Grant, after making his most iconic film, North By Northwest, and still the very definition of suave at age 55.

1960: Miles Davis, who not only looked ultra-cool in his sharp Italian suits, but who ushered in The Birth of the Cool in the early 1950s, and was making his most enduring music as the 1950s ended: Porgy & Bess, Kind of Blue, and Sketches of Spain.

1964: Sean Connery at the height of Bondmania. What more need be said?

1968: Steve McQueen at the height of his stardom--the personification of cool.

1969: Joe Namath. He guaranteed it--and with the Jets' win brought instant parity between the upstart AFL and old school NFL. But he traded his coolness in on pantyhose and a motorcycle movie with Ann Margaret.

1972: Robert Evans, the man who pulled the strings behind The Godfather, from commissioning Mario Puzo to write the book for Paramount in the late 1960s, to hiring Francis Ford Coppola to direct the movie. Married to Ali MacGraw (until a year later, when she ran off with McQueen), and with enough clout--and chutzpah--to ask Henry Kissinger to stop by the Godfather premiere party for a photo-op on his way out of the country to negotiate the Vietnam War peace talks. And get it.

1973: Jimmy Page, whose band was both selling more concert tickets than the Rolling Stones, and who could--for a time--outplay most rock guitarists and look the coolest doing it. Like Evans and Miles, his time at the height of cool was brief, and drugs help would shorten each man's reign.

Needless to say, LaSalle's list is very incomplete. But it's a reasonable start.

Glenn Reynolds recommends a couple of hardware compressors for pumping up the volume of podcasts, and while those are both admirable products, I'd suggest a more software-based solution for PC-based recording: a mastering plug-in with a loudness maximizer, and first class noise reduction software.

The latter is, arguably, even more important than a compressor or the mastering software: I've heard a number of noisy podcasts, and in the months I've been doing the Pajamas Blog Week In Review podcast, I've done everything I can to tame that noise, which is inherent in telephone recordings. The Soundsoap Pro software samples the background noise of a recording, then filters it, and adds a noise gate to further reduce ambient sounds (such as hiss, hum, and ground loops) between audio. It's not going to make a telephone sound like a $3,000 condenser microphone, but it will go far towards enhancing the quality of any recording.

Some bleeding edge high-tech home music stuff over at Blogcritics, where I have a lengthy review of two harmonizer plug-ins for PC-based recording. The first is Audio Damage's Discord4, which recreates the classic Eventide H910 Harmonizer (remember Bowie's "Fame...fame...fame...fame...fame swirling up and down in pitch? That was the Eventide Harmonizer). The second is TC-Helicon's sophisticated Harmony4, which is specifically designed for vocals and create up to four independent lines of harmony from a single vocal.

That's the headline of this UPI article. Something tells me that British authorities aren't going to start here, however.

Ian Schwartz on the Dixie Chicks:

They insult their audience, insult the President, blame Free Republic, and still wonder why people don’t like them. Emily Robison chimed in and blamed–*gasp*–corporate America for ordering local music stations to stop playing their music. When will these dolts understand that they caused their own downfall? Not Christian “fundamentalist” Christians, not Free Republic, not corporate America.

So they want to consider themselves "transgressive", and attack the same targets that everyone else in Hollywood and the rest of show biz have attacked since Calvin Coolidge was president, and yet whine when they face a backlash?

This is an interesting new trend though: when entertainers were attacking President Reagan back in the 1980s, I don't remember them slagging their audiences as well. Maybe because it's not exactly the best way to build sympathy for your cause. And maybe because audiences didn't have the tools to fight back then.

Just ask Mary Mapes.

Update: Mary Katharine Ham adds, "They're so oppressed that they're getting segments on primetime cable news shows! Man, it's rough being silenced".

Heh, indeed^TM.

Hey, no fair stealing my shtick! But still, he's got a point:

EMI Music Chairman and Chief Executive Alain Levy Friday told an audience at the London Business School that the CD is dead, saying music companies will no longer be able to sell CDs without offering "value-added" material.

"The CD as it is right now is dead," Levy said, adding that 60% of consumers put CDs into home computers in order to transfer material to digital music players.

EMI Music is part of EMI Group PLC (EMI.LN).

But there remains a place for physical media, Levy said.

"You're not going to offer your mother-in-law iTunes downloads for Christmas," he said. "But we have to be much more innovative in the way we sell physical content."

Record companies will need to make CDs more attractive to the consumer, he said.

"By the beginning of next year, none of our content will come without any additional material," Levy said.

Actually, let's flip that around: how 'bout packaging some content with your additional material? There's a reason why awards shows such as the Grammys are perrenial ratings losers.

The great Chuck Berry turned 80 years old yesterday. And like another veteran music pioneer, you can still see him in concert.

I have a few articles online and on dead tree this month that you may enjoy.

Regarding the latter, I have a piece in the Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine on IPTV, a technology being leveraged by phone companies to become players in the arena previously reserved for cable and satellite providers. Initially, it's being sold as a cheaper alternative to digital cable and satellite. But the format's long-range potential could lead to dramatic shifts in how we watch TV. For one, expect to start seeing downloadable YouTube-style TV, err, on your TV. As well as much more narrowcasting video, and... well, read the article for more.

For DIY recording enthusiasts, in the October issue of England's Computer Music magazine, I have an article on step sequencers, arpeggiators, and other electronic instruments that allow you to play one note and get ten. Or 100. Note that in the US, this issue probably streets next month. At least the Borders' chain seems to have a 30 day delay between the issues' cover dates and when they appear in stores.

At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, both of those are strictly "dead tree", but we'll let you know if that changes. As for online material, speaking of DIY music, my podcast interview with The Man From Izotope on audio mastering is also online at Blogcritics. Along with a piece that could be titled, "An Orchestra Of Davids". It's a review of an impressive self-published book on programming orchestral arrangements from MIDI synthesizers.

Sad to say, no Vanessa Williams sightings in any of these pieces, though.

If you're conservative, they'd rather not have you in their audiences. In 2004, Linda Ronstadt famously admitted:

"It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."

Barbra Streisand concurs:

Streisand effortlessly crooned through a select repertoire of the hits she's amassed during her four-decade-plus career. But night's most riveting moment came during what was perhaps the only unscripted _ and truly uncomfortable _ episode in the three-hour show.

There was Streisand, enduring a smattering of very loud jeers as she and "George Bush" _ a celebrity impersonator _ muddled through a skit that portrayed the president as a bumbling idiot.

Though most of the crowd offered polite applause during the slightly humorous routine, it got a bit too long, especially for a few in the audience who just wanted to hear Streisand sing like she had been doing for the past hour.

"Come on, be polite!" the well-known liberal implored during the sketch as she and "Bush" exchanged zingers. But one heckler wouldn't let up. And finally, Streisand let him have it.

"Shut the (expletive) up!" Streisand bellowed, drawing wild applause. "Shut up if you can't take a joke!"

With that one F-word, the jeers ended. And the message was delivered _ no one gets away with trying to upstage Barbra Streisand, especially not in her hometown.

Once the outburst (which Streisand later apologized for) was over, Streisand noted that "the artist's role is to disturb," [Gee, imagine Sinatra, Crosby, or Nat Cole ever saying that--Ed] and delivered a message of tolerance before launching into a serenely beautiful rendition of "Somewhere."

Of course, to be fair, if you to go to a show performed by an entertainer with as rampant and public a case of BDS as Barbra has, and are surprised at her polemics, you really only have yourself to blame.

As with the Cinema of Self-Congratulation that Roger L. Simon explored yesterday, and the wish-fulfillment TV that Steven Den Beste discussed today, it's not like artists feel any sort of need to bridge the gap between a polarized public these days. At least Ronstadt came clean about how segregated she'd prefer her ideal audience to be.

(And as with Ronstadt's 2004 profile in The San Diego Union-Tribune, note how the gushing AP columnist simply ignores all of the contradictions in Streisand's messages. And admired her use of the F-Bomb.)

Woody Allen's first editor once wrote a book about his craft titled, When The Shooting Stops...The Cutting Begins. In the recording world, mastering is what begins when the mixing ends. The goal is to provide to the final gloss, sparkle, and punch to a recording, and when making a CD, ensure that all of the tracks are of uniform consistency, so that the listener doesn't encounter one track that's very thin, brittle and trebly, followed by another with loads of bottom, but no mids or high-end.

In the professional recording world, mastering is typically done in studios dedicated to the task, and because it's as much an art as a science, mastering engineers who've, err, mastered their craft are highly sought after professionals, which is why if you check the liner notes of your CDs, names like Bob Ludwig and George Marino pop up so often.

A few years ago, the Cambridge, Mass-based Izotope company created a high-end mastering plug-in for the computer recording world called Ozone, which I reviewed for Blogcritics back in April of 2004. Recently, I stopped by their booth at the Audio Engineering Society convention in San Francisco this weekend, and spoke with Izotope's Mark Ethier via telephone. While part of the conversation is dedicated specifically to Ozone, there should be enough of an introduction to audio mastering in general for someone new to the subject.

And speaking of which, Mark mentioned some publications that are well worth reading to anyone interested in PC-based recording: Izotope's own 64-page introduction to mastering, an excellent primer on the topic, which is available in PDF format by clicking here. Once you've thoroughly digested it, pick up a copy of Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science by Bob Katz, and/or Mixing And Mastering Audio Recordings By Bill Gibson. They're the master class in mastering. So to speak.

Click here to listen to my interview with Mark; or stop by our Apple iTunes page. In either case, no iPod is required, virtually any computer with a broadband connection can stream an MP3.

(And for more DIY-madness, that's me on guitar, bass, synth, and a bunch of Acid loops on the intro and outro bumper music--which was mastered in Ozone, along with the rest of the podcast.)

Just in time for Halloween, The Village Voice (who knew they had a sense of humor?!) has a tongue-in-cheek "harrowing look at Satanic motifs in the canon of Barbra Streisand".

...Has the wrong date printed on it. Chalk up another magic moment to the Pat Buchanan of rock.

I probably haven't posted much home recording stuff lately, but I have a review of Korg's Digital Legacy Collection, which contains software versions of Korg's M1, the best selling digital synthesizer in history, and its successor, the Wavestation over at Blogcritics. You can click through to hear samples of the M1 in action.

Debbie Schlussel is none too thrilled with NBC's choice of singer to get the party started on its new flagship primetime NFL Sunday night show:

Hank Williams, Jr.'s (a/k/a "Bocephus") rendition of "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight (Are You Ready for Some Football?)" was so popular that the one season ABC tried to replace it with popular acts like Aerosmith and KISS, it didn't work.

But now, ABC's Monday Night Football is gone (to ESPN). So the premiere prime-time football event on broadcast TV is NBC's new Sunday Night Football. You'd think that NBC would pick something on the level of Hank, Jr.'s legendary theme song. But you would be wrong.

Instead, NBC--in a bad attempt to attract more female fans (and a good attempt to turn off the majority male fans)--has recruited pop star Pink to sing the Sunday Night Football theme. Worse, Pink is remaking '80s has-been Joan Jett's "I Hate Myself for Loving You" in to "Waiting All Day for Sunday Night." (Memo to NBC: Actually, real football fans are not waiting all day. They're watching games all Sunday afternoon on FOX and CBS.)

And you won't just have to hear Pink every Sunday Night, you'll have to watch her, too. Says a press release:

As Pink's voice serves as the signature welcome to viewers each Sunday Night, the accompanying video features Pink.

Pink as the new Hank Williams, Jr.? What's next: frosted-hair Ryan Secrest as drooling NFL sideline reporter-babe?

We predict her theme song fails and only lasts the season . . . if she's lucky. A better choice would have been someone male and masculine, like Toby Keith or Sammy Hagar, to sing some sort of football theme updated from "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight (Are You Ready For Some Football?)"

Thank God TiVO has a fast-forward button.

Mary Katherine Ham writes, "I Had a Feeling This Guy Was a Sweetheart".

Via Tim Blair, "The 50 worst Australian band names of all time".

(And yes, I know my headline is an awful, awful, pun. Totally INXS.)

Great moments in Drudge headline juxtapositions:

Bob Dylan says modern music is worthless...

TONY BENNETT: 'AMERICA IS CULTURALLY VOID'...

Or as Mickey Kaus asked this past weekend:

Why does the music they play in clothing stores sound so much better than the music they play on the radio?

Of course, if you don't like what you hear on the radio, you can always roll your own...

Related: Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame asks, "What do people really want in music?"

The John Locke Foundation's blog seems obsessed at the moment with, well, cringe-inducing lyrics from the last 30 years or so of pop songs.

Just keep scrolling--if you can take it.

Chris Anderson's post (see below) about digital movie making echoes many of the same points producer/guitarist Nile Rogers once noted about digital music making:

The old restrictions in technology forced us to do things right. It forced us to have to make decisions. It forced us to spiritually be so in tune with the other people that magic had to happen. It made you step up to the plate, whereas now, when I go to play on someone's record I feel uncomfortably free-and I almost hate that. I can actually play on a record all day long and do ten different solos and take all these different approaches to the rhythm and all this kind of stuff. And then the producer has to look at all this work like a film-they have to go back and edit and figure out which bits they want to use. Whereas in the old days, when a person hired me to work on a record, I had to get it right, right there. You had to play great, you had to be smokin', and there was no way that they could fix it and make it better.

When I played on Michael Jackson's last record, I knew what they were going to do, so I said, "Hey, Michael, here's like a billion ideas. I'm going to play all this cool s***, and you go off and do it." So I didn't have to write it, so to speak. I didn't have to give them the definitive, perfect, guitar part; I gave them lots of definitive, perfect guitar parts, and they decided which ones to use. That's weird to me. Once you're unlimited, you'll never play that same way--you'll just go on and on and on and on. It's like the ultimate jazz person's fantasy: "You to tell me I'm going to solo for the rest of my life, and you guys will think it's great?"

Having infinite options also means you don't have the pressure on you...

It's pressureless.

-which means that you won't necessarily work as hard as you would if you knew you had just two takes in 20 minutes to get it right.

You can't help it. You see, I grew up in the days of, time is money-as Madonna would say, "time is money, and the money is mine." And I like that, I love that.

You had a limitation of tracks, too. You were lucky if you had two tracks and you could do an alternative take.

You know what people do now when they want me to overdub on a record? They'll send an album with a mix, and I have like 22 open tracks of guitars I can put down. So now you are going to figure out what my part is.

And speaking of which, I have an article in the August issue of Nuts & Volts on Roland's GI-20 interface, titled "Shut Up And Play Your Computer!". The GI-20 allows any guitar with a Roland guitar synthesizer pickup to drive a myriad of software synthesizers via the PC's USB port, opening a realm that was heretofore almost entirely the exclusive province of keyboard players.

The article greatly expands on this Blogcritics piece from a few years ago. But I have no idea where they found the guy they photographed for the article...

Pajamas reports:

Governor Huckabee Pardons Keith Richards: “As the bass guitarist for an obscure rock band, Mike Huckabee is unlikely ever to have the pleasure of giving the downbeat to world-famous Keith Richards, lead guitarist for the legendary Rolling Stones. But, as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee can at least give Richards the satisfaction of knowing that the state of Arkansas no longer considers him a reckless driver. A pardon from Huckabee will apparently soon be on its way to Richards.”

You might think it this pardon was given because of Governor Huckabee’s love for rock and roll, but we think he was just being kind to the elderly.

Keith Richards' brain could not be reached for comment. But his favorite guitar could.

I have doubleheader podcast now online: first up is an interview with James Maguire, the author of Impresario: The Life And Times Of Ed Sullivan. It's followed by a second interview, with James Gavin, the author of Intimate Nights: The Golden Age Of New York Cabaret, whose cover features the great Bobby Short in his heyday. The theme that ties both interviews together is New York's heyday in the 1950s through the 1960s when Manhattan dominated show business and pop culture. Its a fun look at a period, which for better or worse, no longer exists, discussed by two authors who thoroughly know their subjects.

Click here to listen, or subscribe via our iTunes page; in either case, no iPod required--virtually any PC can play an MP3 file.

One of the last of the great walking acid casualties of rock finally fell this month, when the man who gave Pink Floyd their name and early sound, Syd Barrett, passed away at age 60. While Syd launched Pink Floyd, it was his replacement, David Gilmour, who shaped their sound and made it his own, as Tigerhawk writes:

While most music fans are familiar with Pink Floyd, few have ever heard of Barrett, the band's original front man and guitarist. He named the band, and really created the extreme psychedelic feel and aura surrounding it. He was central to Pink Floyd's breakthrough album, "Piper at the Gates of Dawn." As Barrett withdrew, suffering from apparent mental instability, the other bandmembers recruited David Gilmour, a childhood friend, first to supplement, and eventually replace Barrett.

His influence on Pink Floyd clearly continued, as Gilmour and Roger Waters developed the extraordinary "Dark Side of the Moon" in 1972 in part to wrestle with issues surrounding mental dysfunction. And the band's later, brilliant album "Wish You Were Here" was dedicated to Barrett, the song "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" intended as encouragement for their old leader. Many will undoubtedly reference that song today.

Who knows what demons drove Barrett into seclusion, and whether they were catalyzed by LSD, the pressure to write music, travel and perform incessantly? But he clearly broke down. Would Pink Floyd have achieved anything approaching its monumental success with Barrett and without Gilmour. I would say No.

I concur. But it's a shame to see a life discarded merely for a brief walk-on part.

I've written pretty extensively (particularly at Blogcritics) about my interest in home recording over the years. (It was also a door into other DIY activities, such as blogging, and it's no coincidence that Glenn Reynolds of An Army of Davids fame, Blogcritics' Eric Olsen, and several other bloggers also have a background in this area.) But home recording means generating material to record: songs take a fair amount of work to develop properly and nurture to their conclusion; it's easy to get stuck, and wind up staring at recording deck or computer monitor and doing nothing.

Karl Coryat, a consulting editor at Bass Player magazine, and the author of The Guerrilla Recording Handbook, and his co-author, Nicholas Dobson, have co-written a really fun book on breaking that logjam. Called The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook, it catalogs a whole host of methods of overcoming musical writer's block, whether you're writing your first song, or your 50th.

I interviewed them recently, and it made for an equally enjoyable 20-minute podcast. Click here to listen directly, and click here to subscribe via iTunes. Note that in both cases, no iPod is required; virtually any PC can play an MP3 file.

(Also posted at Blogcritics.)

Ian Schwartz asks, "Why Do The Dixie Chicks Hate America?". The answer (or at least the root causes of what is a surprisingly ancient and reactionary fashion now sclerotic, hard and covered with liver spots) is blowing in the wind...

See also this essay; scroll down for the history of another previously apolitical musician gone round the bend.

Update: Tammy Bruce writes:

since [Natalie Maines of the Dixies says] she "doesn't understand" patriotism, I have a short list of a few concepts which epitomize America and illustrate why we goofballs so love this country.

Read the rest.

Vintage Guitar magazine looks back nostalgically at the Supro Thunderbolt guitar amplifier, a tiny amp with a roaring sound, one that's all over Led Zeppelin's iconic first album.

It doesn't hurt that it co-stars Gabriel himself...

Futuramb Blog, published in Sweeden, uses my recent TCS Daily podcast interview with Alvin Toffler as a launching point on some thoughts about file sharing. He concludes:

And before you comment on this, yes I suspect that these thoughts are connected to Jeremy Rifkin’s book End of Work which I haven’t read (yet).

To paraphrase Pete Gent, don't bother kid, everybody gets unemployed in the end.

Recently arrived review copies:

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Chris has been formulating his thesis online before releasing it in book form; we wrote about what his meme means for the Blogosphere last year, and will have more on the topic in the not too distant future.

The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook by Karl Coryat & Nicholas Dobson. Is someone trying to tell me something?

Plug-In Power by Ashley Shepherd. Another book for home recording enthusiasts; a guide to all of the powerful sound-altering effects both built-into home recording programs, or available separately.

Led Zeppelin: A Story of a Band and Their Music: 1968-1980 by Keith Shadwick. I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions about specific tracks and albums (he really loathes In Through The Outdoor, which I thought was a remarkable album, particularly considering how far gone half the band was), but a good, authoritative look at the 1970's most influential band.

Getting ready for some Pajamarecording this afternoon, so blogging may be light. In the meantime, I leave you with the great Freddie King, who illustrates how the electric guitar should be played:

Back in November of 2004, I described how malleable technology makes music, building on concepts that Brian Eno discussed in the late 1970s. This somewhat droll twenty minute video does a nifty job of explaining how one six second 1969 drum loop on the b-side of a hit 45 ended up everywhere starting in the mid-1980s, from rap songs to Jeep Cherokee ads:

A strange confluence of events this week involving the favorite sons of the town that Mary Tyler Moore and Bud Grant made famous:

Bob Dylan turns 65, but still sings like a man at least twice his age!

Prince voted "Sexiest Vegetarian", leaving James Taranto to remark, "An Excellent Reason to Eat Meat"--no kidding.

James Lileks can't decide which Star Fleet spacecraft to name his new Honda minivan after.

What it all means no man can say, but it's safe to say that Someday, A Purple Rain Is Going To Fall on the Diner.

(And in the meantime, man, I hope I can get lamb on pita there...)

The Anchoress has some suggestions for Madonna, on how she could improve her rather worn-out stage act.

Update: The recipe for McDonald's Secret Sauce is still a closely-guarded secret, but the current formula for McRockStar isn't.

Related thoughts, here.

Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch has a theory about the balkanization of pop culture that I think is spot-on. I couldn't find the article discussing it (Lord knows I tried last night), but basically, it goes something like this: there's no one dominant pop culture anymore, it's been demassified, to borrow another societal critic's favorite word. If you take the average movie's domestic box office return, a $100,000,000 gross sounds impressive--until you realize that tickets average $10 a pop, which means that ten million people saw the movie. And 285 million Americans skipped it.

Case in point: The Da Vinci Code's weekend take: $77,073,388 means that 7.7 million people saw the movie on its opening weekend. But, according to James Maguire in his new book, Impresario, 60 million people tuned in to watch Elvis' debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. And that was in an era when the population was about 125 million less than it is today.

Which is why Mr. Nixon--er, Mojo Nixon that is--was right about Elvis.

Staring at the postmodern continental horror that is the Eurovision Song Contest, Manolo has just witnessed the end of the world as we know it, but he feels fine.

Having read numerous interviews with Keith Richards over the last 30 years or so, I've noticed that they come in two flavors. One in which the writer helpfully translates Keith's thoughts into a language that closely aproximates English. These interviews contain quotes that read like this:

Well, Mick thought that he could get a better sound on his vocals if he rerecorded them in an isolation booth. So we overdubbed them in L.A. at Sunset Sound, after recording the basic tracks at the Record Plant in New York.

Then there are those journalists who simply quote Keith verbatim, transcribing the cassette tape of an interview done at 4:00 in the morning, as the EMPTY! warnings begin to flash on Keith's bottle of Jack Daniels:

Mick...vocals...Sunshhhhet Shoundddd...Record Plant...New Yorkkkkk.....[thump]....ZZZZZZZZZ

Those last sounds were Keith nodding out after being awake for two weeks running.

However, in proof that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, does indeed produce all the effects of intoxication, Tim Blair interviews Keith Richards' brain--and unlike Keith's vocal cords, it's a delightfully articulate interviewee:

Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m Keith Richards’ brain. A brain of swollen pain, as you’ll be aware if you’ve picked up a newspaper in the past few weeks. For nigh on 63 years, I’ve avoided the unpleasantness of media scrutiny, until my human-form hostpod – Mr Richards, as you call him – recently decided to climb up a coconut tree. Well, technically, I suppose it was my decision; I’ll accept the blame for that. But it wasn’t my decision to fall out of the damn thing and land on me.

For that, I blame the inner ear. Do you know how long it took to send me a message that Keith was overbalancing? I’ll tell you: about 15 minutes. FIFTEEN MINUTES! By then we were already in the stupid ambulance on the way to hospital, cerebrospinal fluid sloshing everywhere, my whole supramarginal gyrus bruised to hell, and this high-level alert suddenly appears: “Dude! We’re tipping over!”

Oh, great work, inner ear. Of course, I’m programmed to react instantly when a big alert comes in, so I launch into an involuntary grab-something protocol that completely humiliates the poor medic inspecting Keith’s head. You haven’t heard such screams since the last time a 19-year-old woke up next to Mick. Two days ago, as it happens.

(Inner ear and I haven’t seen eye-to-eye – well, cerebellum to helicotrema – since the Great Rib-Busting Incident of 1998. True story: I’m completely occupied manipulating Keith’s arms and legs up a ladder in his library, carefully wrapping his fingers around the railings and making sure each foot is secure before taking the next step – please consider the material I’m working with here; this sort of exercise is like re-enacting the beach landing at Normandy, except with cats – when inner ear freaks out for no reason at all and BAM! We’re on the floor again. Third time that day.)

I wonder if Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, and William S. Burrough's brains were this charming and clearheaded? In the meantime, have your own brain process the rest.

And for a discussion about--though not with, Keith's favorite instrument, have a listen to my latest podcast.

My latest podcast is online; it's an interview with Nacho Baños, author of the superb book, The Blackguard: A Detailed History of the early Fender Telecaster, Years 1950-1954. As I wrote earlier this week:

In 1950, Leo Fender released his first Broadcaster electric guitar. Eventually renamed the Telecaster after a threatened lawsuit by Gretsch, which had a drum kit with that name, the Telecaster became one of the great electric guitars, played by all three of the Yardbirds' holy trinity of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, as well as Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, and Keith Richards.

What made the Telecaster so successful was its enduring simplicity: still made in all sorts of variations by Fender (here are the two I own--a mid-1980s reissue of the original early '50s model, and a 1997 B-Bender-equipped Tele), it's also an enormously popular kit guitar, because just about anybody with a screwdriver can knock together its basic shapes: the maple neck, ash body, single-ply black pickguard, and two single coil pickups. Played cleanly, The Tele's twangy tones define country music; plugged into a cranked amp, the Tele becomes the snarl heard on the first Led Zeppelin album and Exile On Main Street.

Nacho Banos is a Telecaster aficionado who lives in Spain. He's recently released The Blackguard, a magnificent hard cover coffee table book (complete with black slipcase) that covers the Tele's formative years from 1950 to 1954, when Leo Fender's first Broadcasters, "No-casters" and, finally, Telecasters rolled off his Fullerton, California assembly line.

These early Fenders now fetch tens of thousands of dollars from collectors, many of whom were at the Dallas Guitar Show a couple of weeks ago, which is where I first saw the Blackguard book, on display at its publisher's table, JK Lutherie. They recently sent me a review copy, and while this is a rather specialized subject and comes with a hefty price tag ($85), Tele fans will be knocked out by this book, which like Yasuhiko Iwanade's classic Beauty of the Burst, combines oodles of professional photography of classic vintage instruments, and an extensive technical appendage, explaining just what made these guitars tick from an engineering standpoint, and why they're so desirable 50 years after Leo's first babies were born.

This description of the book on Fender's Website sounds pretty accurate to me:

The book comes in an individual hard case, and features a beautiful color presentation, with more than 2,000 images of early Telecasters. About 50 guitars are disassembled and pictured in detail. Included are a few non-truss Esquires from early 1950, a large group of Broadcasters and Nocasters, and a good selection of ’51, ’52, ’53 and ’54 Esquires and Telecasters.

At 419 pages, The Blackguard is divided into five chapters, one for each year from 1950 to 1954, plus a final “nitty gritty” technical section in which every component of the Telecaster is pictured and explained in detail. Most secrets pertaining to the manufacturing techniques used for these parts are revealed here, supported by factory documentation, Leo Fender’s personal cost notes, patent prints, Radio-Tel inventory sheets, invoices and other historical documents.

Great pictures of legendary Blackguard players in action abound in the book—players including Redd Volkaert, Waylon Jennings, John Beland, Jim Weider, Bill Hullet, G.E. Smith, Keith Richards, Danny Gatton, Roy Buchanan, Jimmy Bryant, Bruce Springsteen, Arlen Roth, Vince Gill, Mike Stern, Marty Stuart and others. There are forewords by Volkaert, Weider, Beland and Ole Fuzzy, plus special contributions by Hullet and luthier David Eichelbaum.

Baños, a native of Spain, has been passionate about electric guitars since childhood. His father bought him his first real electric, a brand-new 1983 top-loader blonde Telecaster, an event that marked the starting point of an intense love affair with one of the first and best guitar designs. He discovered the magic feel, beautiful looks and unique sound of the early Blackguard Telecasters and started to develop a real passion for them.

Baños conceived of the book in 2001, and finished it after three painstaking years of work. He self-edited and self-published it, and all proceeds from its sale are being donated to Intermon Oxfam (www.oxfam.org/eng) to fund Aquaria, a water-supply development program for Ethiopia.

Rock and Roll as we know it wouldn't be possible without the electric guitar, and so much guitar history begins with the Fender Telecaster. If you're a fan of rock (or country for that matter), you'll certainly enjoy this one.

In 1950, Leo Fender released his first Broadcaster electric guitar. Eventually renamed the Telecaster after a threatened lawsuit by Gretsch, which had a drum kit with that name, the Telecaster became one of the great electric guitars, played by all three of the Yardbirds' holy trinity of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, as well as Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, and Keith Richards.

What made the Telecaster so successful was its enduring simplicity: still made in all sorts of variations by Fender (here are the two I own--a mid-1980s reissue of the original early '50s model, and a 1997 B-Bender-equipped Tele), it's also an enormously popular kit guitar, because just about anybody with a screwdriver can knock together its basic shapes: the maple neck, ash body, single-ply black pickguard, and two single coil pickups. Played cleanly, The Tele's twangy tones define country music; plugged into a cranked amp, the Tele becomes the snarl heard on the first Led Zeppelin album and Exile On Main Street.

Nacho Banos is a Telecaster aficionado who lives in Spain. He's recently released The Blackguard, a magnificent hard cover coffee table book (complete with black slipcase) that covers the Tele's formative years from 1950 to 1954, when Leo Fender's first Broadcasters, "No-casters" and, finally, Telecasters rolled off his Fullerton, California assembly line.

These early Fenders now fetch tens of thousands of dollars from collectors, many of whom were at the Dallas Guitar Show a couple of weeks ago, which is where I first saw the Blackguard book, on display at its publisher's table, JK Lutherie. They recently sent me a review copy, and while this is a rather specialized subject and comes with a hefty price tag ($85), Tele fans will be knocked out by this book, which like Yasuhiko Iwanade's classic Beauty of the Burst, combines oodles of professional photography of classic vintage instruments, and an extensive technical appendage, explaining just what made these guitars tick from an engineering standpoint, and why they're so desirable 50 years after Leo's first babies were born.

This description of the book on Fender's Website sounds pretty accurate to me:

The book comes in an individual hard case, and features a beautiful color presentation, with more than 2,000 images of early Telecasters. About 50 guitars are disassembled and pictured in detail. Included are a few non-truss Esquires from early 1950, a large group of Broadcasters and Nocasters, and a good selection of ’51, ’52, ’53 and ’54 Esquires and Telecasters.

At 419 pages, The Blackguard is divided into five chapters, one for each year from 1950 to 1954, plus a final “nitty gritty” technical section in which every component of the Telecaster is pictured and explained in detail. Most secrets pertaining to the manufacturing techniques used for these parts are revealed here, supported by factory documentation, Leo Fender’s personal cost notes, patent prints, Radio-Tel inventory sheets, invoices and other historical documents.

Great pictures of legendary Blackguard players in action abound in the book—players including Redd Volkaert, Waylon Jennings, John Beland, Jim Weider, Bill Hullet, G.E. Smith, Keith Richards, Danny Gatton, Roy Buchanan, Jimmy Bryant, Bruce Springsteen, Arlen Roth, Vince Gill, Mike Stern, Marty Stuart and others. There are forewords by Volkaert, Weider, Beland and Ole Fuzzy, plus special contributions by Hullet and luthier David Eichelbaum.

Baños, a native of Spain, has been passionate about electric guitars since childhood. His father bought him his first real electric, a brand-new 1983 top-loader blonde Telecaster, an event that marked the starting point of an intense love affair with one of the first and best guitar designs. He discovered the magic feel, beautiful looks and unique sound of the early Blackguard Telecasters and started to develop a real passion for them.

Baños conceived of the book in 2001, and finished it after three painstaking years of work. He self-edited and self-published it, and all proceeds from its sale are being donated to Intermon Oxfam (www.oxfam.org/eng) to fund Aquaria, a water-supply development program for Ethiopia.

Of course, one of the most visible Telecaster players is Keith Richards, Chuck Berry's adopted demon son. There are conflicting reports that his health has taken a turn for the worse after his recent, skull damaging fall vacationing in Fiji. Hopefully they're vastly overblown stories by a tabloid press out of control, as this would be an ignoble end to one of history's great hell raisers. Not to mention the man who made five string guitars hip.

Update: Just had a great phone call with the author, which will form the basis of my next podcast. Needless to say, I'll let you know when it's online.

Another Update: It's online--click here to listen.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit attends the first post-Katrina New Orleans Jazz Festival. Just keep scrolling.

Back from New Jersey; regular blogging to resume tomorrow.

AP reports that "a British judge ruled that Apple Computer Inc. is entitled to use the apple logo on its iTunes Music Store":

Apple Corps, the guardian of the Beatles' commercial interests, contended that the U.S. company's use of the logo on its popular online music store had broken a 1991 agreement in which each side agreed not to enter into the other's field of business.

But High Court Judge Anthony Mann disagreed, saying that the computer company's logo is used in association with the store — not the music — and so did not breach the agreement.

"I conclude that the use of the apple logo ... does not suggest a relevant connection with the creative work," Mann said in his written judgment. "I think that the use of the apple logo is a fair and reasonable use of the mark in connection with the service, which does not go further and unfairly or unreasonably suggest an additional association with the creative works themselves."

Though Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs said he was "glad to put this disagreement behind us," the dispute appears far from over. Neil Aspinall, the manager of Apple Corps, said his company would immediately take the case to Britain's Court of Appeal.

* * *

The 1991 agreement ended previous lengthy litigation over the logo. Apple Computer told the court that it paid Apple Corps $26.5 million as part of that out-of-court settlement, and in turn had received "a considerably expanded field of use." The terms of the deal were kept confidential at the time.

Always fun to see how aggressively two companies with utopian visions are willing to agressively duke it out in court. All you need is love--and an Apple Corps of lawyers and millions of dollars to pay their legal fees.

Ever wonder what it would look like if a bunch of Columbia B-School students decided to create a parody of the classic black & white music video of The Police's "Every Breath You Take", to parody their dean being turned down as Alan Greenspan's replacement?

No, of course you didn't. At least, I hope you never did. And neither did I.

But as Michelle Malkin notes, this is the "Best take-off of The Police’s 'Every Breath You Take.' Ever". In other words, just Press To Play.

(That's Paul McCartney--and nowhere near as good a video, either--Ed. Hey, same era....)

For those musicians in the audience--or those laypersons interested in home recording in general, I explain how I put the Pajamas Podcast theme song together, over at Pajamas Theater 3000.

Update (9/15/06): Post now found here.