Music
Should NME become a freesheet?
An interesting suggestion from No Rock’n'Roll Fun as NME unveils the seventy-third redesign this year:
Maybe the logical thing to do would be to abandon charging - perhaps except for subscribers, who could pay to ensure their supply - and try to build the readership that way. It might make more long-term sense than another relaunch every six months.
The full post takes an in-depth look at the NME’s latest new look. The verdict isn’t exactly a massive thumbs-up.
Kill Your Friends: good on music, sub-American Psycho story
John Niven’s book, Kill Your Friends, is set in the music business at the height of Britpop. Niven knows what he’s talking about - he was an A&R man at the height of Britpop - and his protagonist’s rants about the music business, consumers and the general bovine stupidity of artists clearly come from experience. Pity the opening quote, Hunter S Thompson’s “cruel and shallow money trench” is a misquote (HST was talking about the TV business).
Here’s the book blurb:
It’s not dog-eat-dog around here…it’s dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known. Meet Steven Stelfox. London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where ‘no one knows anything’ and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public - ‘Yeah, those animals’. Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox, blithely criss-crosses the globe (’New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn’) searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.
But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.”Kill Your Friends” is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.
As a satire on the music industry, Kill Your Friends is pretty much peerless. (Real) A&R stupidity is mercilessly skewered, artists of all stripes get it in the neck and one particular rant, a Trainspotting-esque monologue about bands who want record deals, should be printed in 72-point type and nailed to the wall of every rehearsal room in the world. Some of the fictional artists are clearly drawn from real ones, like the self-indulgent drum’n'bass superstar and the band producing sub-Radiohead whiney nonsense, and many of the music business characters appear to be thinly disguised versions or composites of real-life characters.
As a novel, though, it isn’t great. Niven’s going for an American Psycho thing here, but American Psycho did it much better. You can’t help but think Niven should have written a memoir rather than a novel.
Don’t all rush to HMV at once, now
From the press release pile:
Finnish operatic rock supergroup, Northern Kings, release their debut album, Reborn, in the UK on Monday 16th June, on Warner Music, and the single ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ will be released in the UK as a digital download and limited edition CD on 12th June.
Reborn, which has achieved gold status in Finland, features symphonic orchestral rock interpretations of eighties classics ranging from Brothers in Arms, Ashes to Ashes, Sledgehammer, Hello, I Just Died In Your Arms, We Don’t Need Another Hero, plus Radiohead’s 1993 song Creep.
Here’s the full track listing.
Don’t Stop Believin’
We Don’t Need Another Hero
Broken Wings
Rebel Yell
Ashes To Ashes
Fallen On Hard Times
I Just Died In Your Arms
Sledgehammer
Don’t Bring Me Down
In The Air Tonight
Creep
Hello
Brothers In Arms
Comes with music. And stupidly large bills
Is Nokia’s Comes With Music deal one of the dumbest digital music deals ever struck? Could be!
The deal, which enables the phone firm to give users unlimited music downloads, could cost Nokia a fortune.
The Register has learned that Nokia must pay the wholesale per-unit rate for downloads over a certain ceiling - believed to be 35 songs per user.
Morrissey, racism and the NME
No, not that story. This one.
It seems that Morrissey has stepped in to save the Rock Against Racism event after the NME, which was sponsoring the gig, pulled out. So Moz is saving anti-racists from the NME. Blimey.
Elsewhere, Metallica appear to be considering “doing a Radiohead” and embracing downloaders rather than suing them.
It’s a funny old world.
Hey, musicians - it’s time for the machines to take over
If you thought Autotune was clever, this will blow your mind.
Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.
[Via Metafilter]
Insanely expensive speaker cable isn’t any better than a coat hanger
There’s a nice post on Consumerist about those expensive high-end speaker cables that will apparently transform your stereo’s sound:
Seven different songs were played, each time heard with the speaker hooked up to Monster Cables, and the other time, hooked up to coat hanger wire. Nobody could determine which was the Monster Cable and which was the coat hanger. The kicker? None of the subjects even knew that coat hangers were going to be used.
As one of the commenters notes, the only time you really need heavy duty audio cables is when you’re jumping around on stage playing an instrument. Then, ultra-cheap cables are a false economy.
Eels: where’s the bass?
We went to see Eels in Glasgow last night, and while the gig itself was great there were two big problems for me. The first was the “support”, and the second was the giant bass-shaped hole in the loud stuff.
Support first. Like any self-respecting Eels fan I watched the BBC documentary “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives” (about E’s dad) when it broadcast, and because I was somewhat the worse for wear at the time I watched it again a few days later. So it was a bit gutting to discover that the gig would be preceded by - yes! - “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives” in full. Projected onto a billowing curtain that was too far forward for the first six rows to see it. I think for a UK tour at least, showing the programme was a bad call.
And then, the bass. Once again Eels are touring without a bassist, and while that’s obviously not a problem when they do stripped-down stuff it leaves a gaping bass-sized hole whenever the drums get going. Purely personal preference, I know, but I find bass-less music sounds really tinny and anaemic.
Good gig despite all that, though.
E from Eels writes a letter to The Queen
Her Majesty The Queen
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AAJanuary 31st 2008
Your Majesty,
My name is Mark Oliver Everett. My friends call me “E”. I am the singer in an American rock band called Eels. We will be playing a show at your Royal Festival Hall on the evening of February 25th and I would like to extend an invitation for you to attend our performance. We have played the Festival Hall several times and I’ve noticed that your royal box is usually empty. I’d like to change that. We have also played your Queen Elizabeth and Royal Albert Halls. I don’t think you were at those shows either.
I recently saw the movie ‘The Queen’ and while I know that wasn’t actually you in the film, it made me think that I would like you as a person. I’d like you to be one of the people who call me “E”. If you’re free February 25th, please come down to the show. It’s sold out, but I would be happy to put you on the guest list. I also have a new book, ‘Things The Grandchildren Should Know’, and two new compact disc and DVD collections, ‘Meet The Eels’ and ‘Useless Trinkets’. I think you’d enjoy them and I’d be happy to give you complimentary copies of each, which I will even sign for you after the show.
If you’re busy, I understand. But if you can free up your calendar, we’d love to see you there. Thank you for your time, Your Majesty.
Sincerely,
Mark Oliver Everett
aka E
DVD Jon strikes again
Fed up with DRM and file format compatibility hassles? The entertainment industry’s favourite chap, DVD Jon, may have the answer: DoubleTwist.
As CNet reports, DoubleTwist is “a free desktop client that essentially allows any kind of music, photo, or video file to be shared between a long list of portable media players, and through Web-based social networks.”
The idea, according to DoubleTwist founder and CEO Monique Farantzos, is that media files should be more like e-mail. It shouldn’t matter what service you create the file in, or on what type of hardware, it all should work together seamlessly, she says.
The PC version is available now, and a Mac version’s in development.