I don’t know what happened here. I’m not proud of these photos or myself, I got way too excited for La Dispute and became my usual obnoxious drunk self! That being said, We Fight Tigers are awesome guys, Le pré où je suis mort were brilliant and La Dispute make me want to cry and explode. Everyone listen to those bands. If you don’t like them, you’re wrong.
If you’re a fan of anything artistic or licenced and a user of the internet, then you know that licence vendors are in the throes of an everlasting seizure about what to do regarding content and the Internet. At the moment, we’re in lockdown mode. If a video hasn’t been licenced for your country, forget watching it. If Universal doesn’t think your country exists, I hope you don’t like music. Do you think that any self-respecting artist wants to keep their content away from customers? Not on your life. Artists are egotistical individuals, and they feed off credit and profit equally.
Amongst the many positive things you could say about the internet, the fact that it’s made country boundaries borderline irrelevant is probably my favourite. You can communicate directly with someone from anywhere, and where they live doesn’t come into it (unless they live in China). In fact, the only people obsessing over what country you’re in are people who flat-out don’t get it, or are stuck in an age where it actually mattered. Licencers are pretty much top offender on this one. They have a product that doesn’t require any delivery charges, can be consumed pretty much anywhere that has a computer and a phone line and yet it’s still more difficult for me to watch the latest season of Heroes when it first airs than it is for me to buy a teacup from the other side of the world. It ain’t right.
Why is it taking so long for the recording industries of the world to capitalise on the Internet as a distribution platform. Not a week goes by when I don’t hear that some company is in dispute with Apple over performance rights for song demos, or Spotify because they’re broadcasting music that isn’t licenced for a specific country (does that even make sense anymore?!). It seems that they’re happier to chase down and try to punish the few than they would be squeezing money out of the many!
The main reason for this came from the BBC’s commentary of Oinkgate (it’s a pattern, and I’m sticking to it!). I learned something I didn’t know about the site’s “owner” – that he has/had around $300,000 sat in PayPal accounts. The upkeep for a site of that popularity isn’t going to be cheap, so the fact that he was able to accumulate that amount of money and keep the site going is indicative of an ability to profit from this model (as an aside, if the owner of Oink was the scumbag, ripoff merchant he’s being painted as, there wouldn’t be $300,000 sat in PayPal account – it’d be sat on his drive. The fact that he didn’t spend the money indicates to me that he was either undecided on what to do with it, or was rainy-day saving it. Well, it’s raining pretty hard on him right now! If I’d donated any money to Oink, I’d be absolutely fine with it going towards his legal costs!). So, what we have here is a website with a (supposed…) subscription model and 100,000 users max, netting the owner of the site $3 per user profit. If you can’t see where I’m going with this already, you may as well close the window now. All you need on top of that is track previews to see if what you’re downloading is actually worth the money and you’ve got yourself a profiting business.
Now I realise that this sounds almost identical to Spotify, but with one important inclusion for me – the fact that my money got me something quantifiable. Spotify charges a lot of money (an amount that I’d be happy to pay for a good download subscription service, by the way) for what you get, and I think they’d give you more if they weren’t being constantly hounded by record companies to stay within their anachronistic constraints!
In conclusion, recording industries of the world, stop fighting the people you rely on for money. If you’re really about maximising profits, try giving us something that we actually want, for a reasonable price, for a change. You’re never going to stamp out piracy, but when you try to make things harder for the pirates, you’re actually making it harder for the people who legitimately acquire your product (see DRM, region encoding, copy protection, serial numbers, the list goes on…). If you need some help getting something started, I hear Alan Ellis, 26 is pretty good at this sort of thing.
Let me say that our mission here at this time is about to come to a close in the next few days. We came from distant space, even what some might call somewhat of another dimension, and we are about to return from whence we came. It requires, if you move into that evolutionary kingdom, that you leave behind everything of human ways, human behavior, human ignorance, human misinformation. If I would title this tape, it would be ‘Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled’
I will almost definitely write more words here later. Not feeling it right now. Not to put too fine a point on it; ASIWYFA are awesome, and the rest pale into insignificance. I had to stop taking photos in the first song because I thought they were going to trash my camera!
The busking in Brighton was awesome yesterday. Such a mix of instruments and genres, but my favourite was this guy. I like to think that he can’t play violin unless he’s tightrope walking. For all you know, that’s true.
I’ve never seen anyone playing a sitar in real life before. One day, I hope I’m as cool as this guy.
We love The Boxer Rebellion in this house. They don’t play the around here often enough – we’re used to being in Birmingham where they play pretty frequently. They’re one of the best-produced live bands I’ve ever seen so when I get wind that they’re playing, I make effort to get there. It’s difficult to make an associative recommendation of TBR because you should just like them. They don’t write catchy pop tunes, but each of their songs sticks in your head. They aren’t terribly brash or offensive, they’re just a great-sounding band who clearly love what they do. This is the important factor for me.
All this being said, whoever picks their support acts needs to lay off whatever it is they’re laying on. There’s no need to book shitty indie-by-numbers bands to make TBR sound better because they are always great. Nevertheless, tonight was a douzie.
First “act” took the form of Red Drapes (I’m not linking to their myspace as that will cement an association with them and I don’t want that), who were utterly awful. The whole band seemed totally bewildered by their surroundings and instruments in a way that didn’t work at all. I’ve seen live acts fight with their instruments before and it can be a really effective show, but the key is to have good songs as a contrast. It becomes ironic, which you can appreciate in context. Red Drapes play safe, boring songs which seem to be trying to piggyback the latent Kaiser Chiefs success of over-anunciated narrative and little discernible musical talent. The less said about it, the better (though I’ll probably say the most about them – it’s so much easier to belittle than to give praise!).
Next up were female-fronted Kaputt. Don’t think badly of me for making a deal out of the female member, because it’s unavoidable. It’s not very often I come across girl musicians who I would listen to more than once (I am personally obliged to mention the awesome Made out of Babies each time I talk about women in music) so I make a deal out of it. Kaputt will certainly not be everyone’s cup of tea; simple-concept songs with very few lyrics, chanted rather than sung with the occasional 80s-sounding keys and a guitarist who’s really just taking up space. A welcome swill of mouthwash to clear the nasty taste of Red Drapes (there’s a crude metaphor in there – watch me sidestep it gracefully).
Onto the raison d’être. I won’t ever be someone to say that anything is perfect, but TBR do their best to make that difficult for me. Because of their true indie upbringing, their live sound isn’t far removed from that of the studio. However, to watch them is to truly appreciate just how much they enjoy doing what they do and this is the reason to go. A band that is inexplicably always the bridesmaid (once supported by the now-far-too-successful Editors) has never seemed disheartened and continue to lose themselves on stage – the minutes of their set just disappears. Playing a great range of tracks from both of their studio albums and their great rapport with the crowd makes you forget that the air conditioning is leaking on you and you’re sweating horribly. It’s not often I will tell someone to listen to a band but, The Boxer Rebellion, you should. Go to their shows (they will be near you at some point, I almost guarantee it), buy their CDs and enjoy them.
(Sorry, Piers. One day I’ll come to a show and take only pictures of your dark-corner-hiding self!)
More photos of The Boxer Rebellion at The Joiners on May 15th 2009
I often find myself tweeting song lyrics or lines from movies or, well, lines from anything really. This normally receives one of two responses: “man I love that movie/song” or “what are you talking about?!”. #jsprrecs is here so that I can recommend stuff to people without being too cryptic (though they might involve some googling!)
Enjoy!
Finally got my new T3s today. They are utterly ridiculous. I need to give them more of a test, but they are the best quality ECH I’ve ever used. They even shaved down the plug so it wouldn’t interfere with my dermal.
When I read Stephen Fry’s very brief review of the T2s, I didn’t understand why it was so short – now I totally get it. They are just brilliant. I’ve used so many different sets of headphones before – these are the complete best.
They even come in a box that you can take 15m under water. Y’know, for when you go shallow-pool diving with your headphones but don’t want to take them out of the box because they’ll break.
This was played at our wedding. Whenever it comes on, I can’t help smiling.
We watch the season pull up its own stakes
And catch the last weekend of the last week
Before the gold and the glimmer have been replaced,
Another sun soaked season fades awayYou have stolen my heart
Invitation only, grand farewells
Crash the best one, of the best ones
Clear liquor and cloudy eyed, too early to say goodnightYou have stolen my heart
And from the ballroom floor we are in celebration
One good stretch before our hibernation
Our dreams assured and we all, will sleep wellYou have stolen
You have stolen my heartI watch you spin around in your highest heels
You are the best one, of the best ones
We all look like we feelYou have stolen my
You have stolen my heart