Hungry Weird Beatles

Everybody knows Sergeant Pepper and She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah.  The band is so mainstream that it got its own Rock Band game.  But The Beatles have an avant-garde side that still remains hidden to the casual fan, a good trick considering their ubiquity.  The vaults are piled high with bizarre recordings that are frankly better off left there.

In this episode, I introduce some of The Beatles’ strangest recordings – both as a band and as solo artists.  Some of these are pretty great, others are just about unlistenable.  As an impressionable youth, I took the time to listen to these – and now my suffering and fanaticism will be your quick & dirty guide to the Fab Four’s weird side.  Perhaps it was simply that no one could tell them No?

Included here: rare alternate takes from The Beatles in-studio, Paul’s techno and ambient recordings, John & Yoko’s feedback and screeching (apologies in advance), George’s electronica.  No Ringo, though.  He just wasn’t that weird.

Show starts about two minutes into the file.

SET LIST

The Beatles / Paul McCartney – Plastic Beetle
The Beatles – Only A Northern Song
The Beatles – And Your Bird Can Sing
The Beatles – The Inner Light
The Beach Boys – Vegetables
Paul McCartney talks about Carnival Of Light
The Beatles – Helter Skelter (Take 2)
The Beatles – What’s The New Mary Jane (Take 5)
The Residents – Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life

George Harrison – Party Seacombe
George Harrison – He’s So Fine
The Crystals – My Sweet Lord
George Harrison – The Pirate Song
John Lennon & Yoko Ono – “Life With The Lions” concentrate
John Lennon & Yoko Ono – “Wedding Album” excerpt
Yoko Ono – Why
Paul & Linda McCartney – Too Many People
Percy “Thrills” Thrillington – Too Many People
The Fireman – Transpiritual Stomp
The Fireman – Palo Verde
Twin Freaks – What’s That You’re Doing
Twin Freaks – Long Haired Lady (Reprise)

PhonoFun is a show that only plays music recorded before 1950.  While that will probably conjure up visions of greats like Django Reinhardt, Billie Holliday, Benny Goodman and all that, Cormac ventures further afield.   The recording era before 1950 also brought a wave of field recordings of traditional forms of music, many of which have been lost as globalization eats our cultural roots.  Not only will you find jazz & pop hits here from before World War II, but also incredible psychedelic sides from Turkey, Bali and beyond.

If you enjoy this, be sure to check out Cormac’s regular show Phonographic Funhouse, Sundays at 6pm Pacific on FCCFree Radio.

Artists featured include THE DIRTBOMBS, the late great JAY REATARD, THEE OH SEES, NOBUNNY (pictured), BASS DRUM OF DEATH and many more.  (There’s plenty of time for “many more” when the average track duration is roughly 1:48.)  Plus hear the answer to the eternal question, “What the heck is garage rock?”

Ben Folds – Rockin’ The Suburbs
Bass Drum Of Death – Get Found
Bass Drum Of Death – Heart Attack Kid
The Charming Snakes – Ammunition
The Charming Snakes – Teenage Kut Out
The Exploding Hearts – Throwaway Style
The Exploding Hearts – Shattered (You Left Me)
The Marvelous Darlings – I Don’t Want To Go The Part
The Marvelous Darlings – The Only Ones For Miles
Nodzzz – I Don’t Wanna (Smoke Marijuana)
Nodzzz – Is She There
Nobunny – Motorhead With Me
Nobunny – Gone For Good
White Wires – Pretty Girl
Peach Kelli Pop – Do The Eggroll
The Okmonics – I’m On My Own
The Okmonics – Not That Good
Jeff The Brotherhood – Growing
The Unwed Teenage Mothers – No One Wants To
The Unwed Teenage Mothers – Change Your Mind
Super Wild Horses – Fifteen
The Dirtbombs – Brand New Game
The Dirtbombs – Wreck My Flow
Thee Oh Sees – Maria Stacks
Thee Oh Sees – Friends Defined
Mystery Girls – I Took The Poison
Jay Reatard – My Family
Knoxville Girls – Butcher Knife
Reigning Sound – You’re So Strange
The Undertones – Teenage Kicks

This episode profiles Gil Scott-Heron, the legendary poet-author-raconteur-musician who passed away last month.  Scott-Heron’s poetry and music were enormously influential on hiphop, in particular for his reputation as a sardonic proclaimer of truth with a funky, funky soul.

In two hours, I introduce a few of his best-known recordings, showcase some of the 1960s Black Revolutionary rhetoric that gave rise to his sound and touch upon the contemporary artists who call themselves his followers.

Gil Scott-Heron – B Movie
The Last Poets – On The Subway
Gil Scott-Heron – New York City
Dick Gregory – “Shoveling Snow”
Gil Scott-Heron – Winter In America
Bill Withers – Grandma’s Hands
Curtis Mayfield – Mr. Welfare Man
Malcolm X – “Democracy Is Hypocrisy”
Gil Scott-Heron – Whitey’s On The Moon
Willie Hutch – Brothers Gonna Work It Out
Malcolm X – “The House Negro And The Field Negro”
Gil Scott-Heron – Home Is Where The Hatred Is
Kanye West ft Common – My Way Home
Gil Scott-Heron – The Klan

Gil Scott-Heron – The Bottle
Stokely Carmichael – “We Ain’t Goin’”
Gil Scott-Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Gil Scott-Heron – South Carolina (Barnwell)
Linton Kwesi Johnson – Reality Poem
H. Rap Brown – Speech after Huey Newton’s arrest, 1968
Public Enemy – Pollywanacraka
Gil Scott-Heron – Shut ‘Um Down
Common – The 6th Sense (ft Bilal)
Atmosphere – Yesterday
Kanye West – Who Will Survive In America?
Spacek – Daughter
Gil Scott-Heron – Me And The Devil
Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX – I’ll Take Care Of You

Ben has been collecting Dylan bootlegs for over a quarter-century – and sometimes in particularly adventurous circumstances. His passion, for example, got him involved with a man named Groucho who picked him up at the BART station, sold him contraband, and was subsequently caught.

We also discuss bootlegs in general, a black market born in the late ’60s from a very few key black market releases by legacy artists’ to become a commonplace method for breaking new artists today.

We certainly hope this show doesn’t have the effect that Ben’s Captain Beefheart profile had after we aired it last Fall.

Dink’s Song
Quit Your Lowdown Ways
That’s Alright Mama
Moonshiner
That’s Alright Mama / Sally Free And Easy
Farewell, Angelina
She’s Your Lover Now
Visions Of Johanna
This Wheel’s On Fire
I Can’t Make It Alone
Big River (Takes 1 & 2)
Rock Me Mama
Going Going Gone
Abandoned Love (live)
Every Grain Of Sand (demo)
Series Of Dreams
You Belong To Me
Like A Rolling Stone (London, 1966)

Here are some quick, dirty and sort of ridiculous rules for finding your way through the hundreds of CDs released under his name:

1. You don’t really own a music collection until you have Kind Of Blue.
2. Only buy albums on Columbia Records.
   1. If you must buy a Miles Davis album that’s not on Columbia, there should be a verb in the title like Workin‘ or Relaxin‘.  Otherwise, forget it.
3. All the Gil Evans albums are good, but Sketches Of Spain should be your first priority, Quiet Nights the last.
4. Columbia studio albums with John Coltrane are all must-haves.  The live ones weren’t released at the time and often there is good reason.
5. Take studio albums over live albums.  The live albums are tough listens, not recorded with the same fidelity and – particularly in the 1960s – Miles & band were more in the mode of tearing down their ‘hits’ rather than playing them straight.
6. With the exception of Bitches Brew, prefer albums with a photograph on the cover.  All the ones with paintings and cartoons are something of an acquired taste.

A suggested starter kit:

• The First Great Quartet – Milestones and Kind Of Blue
• With Gil Evans – Sketches Of Spain
• The Second Great Quartet – E.S.P. and Nefertiti
• Electric – In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew

A-Trak at the 2010 Movement Festival / Flickr: dailybeatz

This week’s show features a preview of the artists appearing at this weekend’s Movement Festival in Detroit’s Hart Plaza.  Since 2000, the festival (under an ever-changing array of names, managers and corporate sponsor headliners) takes place every Memorial Day in the very cradle of American techno.  It has grown to be America’s most important electronic music event.  Well, electronic music event that says it’s an “electronic music event” unlike say Burning Man or Coachella which are pretty core, too, but aren’t really “electronic music events” per se.

To go through the highlights of this year’s roster, I am joined in studio by DJ Bunnystyle and Dr. Sleep from the fine indie/dance show Dots & Loops.  In the course of two hours, we go through this year’s lineup highlights and prove once again that a “techno festival” has a wider variety of artists and styles than that rubric would imply.  Not just techno, but classic disco, pop, and some ugly dubstep sounds that will probably make you throw up.

This year’s festival will stream at ResidentAdvisor.net.  You may also enjoy this Carl Craig profile from the Detroit Free Press by San Francisco’s own Timmmii.

SET LIST
69 (Carl Craig) – Rush
Deniz Kurtell w/ Jada – The L Word
Flying Lotus – Do The Astral Plane
Little Dragon – Looking Glass
Soulclap – Rock The Boat
Venetian Snares – Masadnik Galamb
Felix Da Housecat – Ready 2 Wear
DJ Harvey (mixer) – Doc Severinsen – Be With You
Monolake – CarbonHudson Mohawk – Fuse
Paul Kalkbrenner – Platscher
Ricardo Villalobos – bahaha hahi
Com Truise – Pyragony
Cashmere – Percolator

SET LIST

The Damned – I Just Can’t Be Happy Today
The Specials – Man At C & A
Nick Drake – Pink Moon
ABC7 Report on Family Radio
Curtis Mayfield – If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going (interrupted, sorry)
Prince – The Cross
Bob Dylan – When He Returns
The Beastie Boys – So Whatcha Want
XTC – This World Over
Harold Camping speaks out on giving refunds
The Clash – The Sound Of Sinners
Cabaret Voltaire – Sluggin Fer Jesus
Uncle Tupelo – Atomic Power
Lowell Blanchard and the Valley Trio – Jesus Hits Like An Atom Bomb

Jon Stewart says The Rapture = Free Clothes
The Smiths – Ask
Barbara Lewis – Baby I’m Yours
Super Furry Animals – It’s Not The End Of The World?
Barry McGuire – Eve Of Destruction
Flux Of Pink Indians – Tube Disasters
The Stranglers – Second Coming
Slayer – Jesus Saves
Rianovosti New – “North Korea threatens’sacred’ nuclear war”
Tom Waits – Earth Dies Screaming
Randy Newman – Political Science
Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around
Kate Bush – Breathing
Sonic Youth – Do You Believe In Rapture?
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Death Is Not The End

Podcast temporarily offline

Standing at the crossroads of incendiary racial politics, American history, and a revolution in music’s means of production and distribution, Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back remains an absolute must-hear almost a quarter century since its original release.  In this episode, I delve deep into its sonic roots and how this team of untrained musicians rallied from its desultory debut album to become one of rock’s most important, hardest-to-imitate artists.

SET LIST

James Brown – Funky Drummer
Clyde Stubblefield interview, 2008
The J.B.’s – The Grunt (Parts 1 & 2)
Bobby Byrd – I Know You Got Soul
Run-D.M.C. – Hard Times
Beastie Boys – Hold It Now, Hit It
Public Enemy – Timebomb
Eric B & Rakim – I Know You Got Soul
Public Enemy – Rebel Without A Pause

Public Enemy – Bring The Noise
RZA on Chuck D
Chuck D on Flavor Flav
Public Enemy – Cold Lampin’ With Flavor
Hank Shocklee on finding his sound
Public Enemy – Night Of The Living Baseheads
Hank Shocklee and Chuck D on record collecting
Bobby Byrd – Hot Pants – I’m Coming, Coming, Coming
Bar-Kays – Son Of Shaft
Public Enemy – Caught, Can We Get A Witness?
Hank Shocklee on the Public Enemy sound
Isaac Hayes – Hyperbolicsyllablecsesquedalymistic
Public Enemy – Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos

Show starts about five minutes into the file

Haile Selassie rocking the mic

This episode was recorded on Grounation Day, the 45th anniversary of Ethiopian King Haile Selassie’s visit to Jamaica and one of the most important dates in Rastafarianism.  To mark the occasion, I feature great rasta-themed reggae and dub from Studio One, Trojan Records and beyond, including hits from bedrock Jamaican artists like BURNING SPEAR, DENNIS BROWN, THE CONGOS and many more.  Plus I try to explain Rastafarian belief and fail miserably.

SET LIST

Burning Spear – Marcus Garvey
The Congos – Fisherman
Desmond Dekker – Israelites
Augustus Pablo – East Of The River Nile
Cedric Im Brooks – Give Rasta Glory
Linval Thompson – Jah Jah Dreader Than Dread (extended)
Freddie McGregor – Africa Here I Come
Albert Griffiths – Roots Natty
Junior Bytes – A Place Called Africa
Johnny Osbourne – Sing Jah Stylee
Black Uhuru – The Whole World Is Africa

King Tubby – King Tubby Dub
The Skatalites – Herb Man Dub
George Dudley – Gates Of Zion
Dennis Brown – Wolfs And Leopards (extended)
Bob Marley & The Wailers – Small Axe
Sugar Minott – River Jordan
Johnny Clarke & U-Roy – Every Knee Shall Bow
Lee “Scratch” Perry – Jungle Lion
Max Romeo – War Ina Babylon
Lone Ranger – Natty Chalwa
Gladiators – Jah Jah Go Before Us
Serge Gainsbourg – Lola Rastaquaire
Jacob Miller – Westbound Train

For 1981′s 30th anniversary, this episode digs deep into its key releases and journeys through its indie landscape. It’s such a tough year to sum up that I’m sure I’ll need to do a Part 2 sometime later this year.

SET LIST

The Specials – Ghost Town (edit)
The Go-Go’s – Our Lips Are Sealed
Pete Shelley – Homosapien
The Human League – Love Action (I Believe In Love)
The Clash – The Leader
Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Strict Time
The dB’s – Black And White
R.E.M. – Radio Free Europe (original)
X – We’re Desperate
Black Uhuru – Youth Of Eglington
Tom Tom Club – Genius Of Love
Prince – Do Me, Baby

Kraftwerk – Computer Love
“1981 primitive Internet report on KRON”
New Order – Ceremony
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – She’s Leaving
Echo & The Bunnymen – With A Hip
The Cure – Primary
ESG – You Can’t Be Funky
The B-52′s – Dirty Back Road
Yoko Ono – Walking On Thin Ice
Gang Of Four – To Hell With Poverty! (Peel Sessions)
Dead Kennedys – Police Truck
Negativland – Dearmary
Grandmaster Flash – The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel

In this episode, I profile Prefab Sprout and Paddy McAloon, an artist with so much fine unreleased material that he makes Tupac and Nick Drake look like pikers.  Beset by health problems, it’s anybody’s guess whether we’ll ever have more music again from this very fine songwriter.  In the meantime, if you’ve never heard this band and have a yen for 80s music, Steely Dan, indie in the mode of Death Cab For Cutie or Sufjan Stevens, twee pop, Stephen Sondheim and all points in between, you are in for a real treat.

For more information on Prefab and tons of revealing interviews with Paddy, unofficial fan site PrefabSprout.net has a wealth of material.  There is no official web presence for the Sprouts at this time.

SET LIST (all by Prefab Sprout except as noted)

Desire As (Acoustic Version)
Radio Love
Cue Fanfare
Bonny
Goodbye Lucille #1 (Johnny Johnny)
He’ll Have To Go
Appetite (Acoustic Version)
The World Awake
Talking Scarlet
The King Of Rock’n Roll

Hey Manhattan!
Sondre Lerche – Nightingales
We Let The Stars Go
Moon Dog
The Sound Of Crying
Kylie Minogue – If You Don’t Love Me
God Watch Over You
A Prisoner Of The Past
Jimmy Nail – I’m A Troubled Man
Donna Summer
Nero The Zero
Cars And Girls

In addition to stalwarts BRATMOBILE, BIKINI KILL, and SLEATER-KINNEY, the RNRN will play selections from some of the bands who set the stage for the female-fueled rebellion like X-RAY SPEX, the SLITS, YOKO ONO, the RUNAWAYS, and many others.  Revolution Grrrl Style Now!!!

After the splintering effect of punk, the music itself hit a wall; punk had the attitude but not the chops to take pop to the next level.  Post-Punk was founded on questioning the tropes of baby boomer rock and roll.  Why does the guitar lead?  Can we write songs without jamming?  Can we ban love and relationships as subject matter?  Do we have to know how to play these things?  Do we have to tune up?  (Yes, please.)  Must a song be verse-chorus-verse?  In the end will this still recognizabley ‘pop’?

Not every attempt was successful – not by a long shot – but what shook out of this quick flashpoint era of roughly 1979-1983 is an enormously rich treasure trove of experimental music and sound.  Come along for a quick tour.

If you would like to read more about this genre, Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up And Start All Over Again is highly recommended.

SET LIST
Gang Of Four – At Home He’s A Tourist (Peel Session)
Gang Of Four – What We All Want
Gang Of Four – Damaged Goods
Gang Of Four – Anthrax
Gang Of Four – I Can’t Forget Your Lovely Face
The Mekons – Never Been In A Riot
The Mekons – The Curse
The Fall – How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’
The Fall – I Fell Voxish
Public Image, Ltd. – Swan Lake / Death Disco
LiLiPUT – U
LiLiPUT – You

James White & The Blacks – Contort Yourself (August Darnell Mix)
The Slits – So Tough
Wire – Ex-Lion Tamer
Joy Division – Transmission
Human League – Being Boiled
Tuxedomoon – New Machine
Devo – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
Young Marble Giants – Final Day
XTC – This Is Pop? (BBC Session)
This Heat – 24 Track Loop
Talking Heads – The Big Country
Siouxsie & The Banshees – Israel
Scritti Politti – The Sweetest Girl (edit)
The Art Of Noise – Beat Box

Not quite post-punk, not quite glam, not quite hair band. Duran Duran is its own genre.

With this episode, I make the ultimate Valentine’s Day sacrifice.  My show. My credibility.    Hang on, I meant to say Gift. Yes!  A Valentine’s Day Gift of course!

For two hours, my wife’s all-time favorite band Duran Duran is the subject of this week’s episode.  As always in my artist profiles, I begin with a bunch of roots and influences to set the landscape.  Then – believe it or not – I’ve got a ton of rarities, alternate mixes and other Duran-related stuff that might just surprise you.  The wife joined me in studio to keep me in line.

You know, guys (and I do mean guys since their fan base has got to about 96% female), they aren’t that bad when you dig beneath the big hair.  Honest.  Tune in tonight to find out why.

In this episode, I explore the cover song through the good graces of my colleagues at The Chemung County Enlightenment Society, a global ragtag group of music dorks that tried to do the impossible last year: narrow down their favorite covers to just 10 each, then post to a shared folder.  This show dives deep into that folder and finds treasures both weird and wonderful.

The post title, by the way, is a quote from Pete Seeger.

SET LIST

Justin Townes Earle – Can’t Hardly Wait (The Replacements)
Adriana Calcanhotto & Daniel Jobim – Music / Impressive Instant (Madonna)
Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Funky Stuff (Kool & The Gang)
Cibo Matto – About A Girl (Nirvana)
The Raincoats – Lola (The Kinks)
Cat Power – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (The Rolling Stones)
Mark Eitzel – No Easy Way Down (Dusty Springfield)
The Flying Lizards – Sex Machine (James Brown)
Lb – Superbad (James Brown)
Katzenjammers – Cars (Gary Numan)
The Dirtbombs – Livin’ For The City (Stevie Wonder)
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – What’s Goin’ On / Mercy Mercy Me (Marvin Gaye)
The Slits – I Heard It Through The Grapevine (Marvin Gaye)
Stevie Wonder – We Can Work It Out (The Beatles)

Vince Guaraldi & Bola Sete – I’m A Loser (The Beatles)
Tito Puente Orchestra – The Simpsons
Senor Coconut – Beat It (Michael Jackson)
Toots & The Maytals – Let Down (Radiohead)
Steel Vibrations – The Hustle (Van McCoy)
Cowboy Junkies – Ooh Las Vegas (Gram Parsons)
Johnny Cash – Rowboat (Beck)
The Specials – Maggie’s Farm (Bob Dylan)
The Bad Plus – Film (Aphex Twin)
Rickie Lee Jones – Show Biz Kids (Steely Dan)
Ken Boothe – Ain’t No Sunshine (Bill Withers)
Taken By Trees – My Boys (Animal Collective)
Van Morrison – I Believe To My Soul (Ray Charles)
Nina Simone – Just Like A Woman (Bob Dylan)

Tim Armstrong – best known for his work with Berkeley’s Rancid – is 0ne of the biggest-selling and most influential figures in pop-punk over the last 15 years.  He has been a key member of Operation Ivy, Rancid, Lars Frederiksen & The Bastards and The Transplants, among others.  As a producer and songwriter, he’s been a hit machine for artists better known as popsters than punkers, like Pink and Gwen Stefani. All that and he operates his own record label, too.

SonicBoom takes through Armstrong’s work – everything from cassette-only demos to hit singles – and calls out his Tim Armstrong favorites.

Show starts about two minutes into the MP3.

FIRST HOUR
Operation Ivy – Uncertain (1987 demo)
Operation Ivy – Officer
Operation Ivy – Bankshot
Operation Ivy – I Got No
Operation Ivy – Bad Town
Operation Ivy – Unity
Operation Ivy – Unity (demo version)
Downfall – As One
Downfall – Step In Line
Dance Hall Crashers – DHC
Dance Hall Crashers – Keep On Running
Rancid – Adina
Rancid – Get Out Of My Way
Rancid – Unwritten Rules
Rancid – Holiday Sunrise
Rancid – Radio
Rancid – Salvation

Happy birthday! Great hair!

This week’s episode celebrates the shared birthday of two American originals with pretty darn awesome hair: Amihr “?uestlove” Thompson of The Roots and filmmaker-musician-painter-webmaster-iconoclast David Lynch.

In the first hour,  I showcase great hip-hop and R&B from The Roots.  One of the best and busiest bands going today, The Roots do a magnificent job of rolling together the last 40 years of R&B history with a modern hip-hop sensibility.  And they’re mighty fine players, too.

Stay tuned for the second hour when I hit the reset button and feature music from the films, works and weird worlds of David Lynch.  Fans of his films know that the sound design and Lynch’s musical sensibility are a foundation of what makes his cinematic world so unique.  Plus we’ll take a listen at his new career in electronica.

How’s that for adventurous programming, yeah?

FIRST HOUR – THE ROOTS
Sacrifice
Stay Cool
I Will Not Apologize
The Great Pretender
WAOK Role Call
Here I Come
You Got Me (ft Erykah Badu)
The Day
Criminal
Thought @ Work
Wake Up Everybody (w/ John Legend)
Now Or Never

SECOND HOUR – DAVID LYNCH
Angelo Badalamenti – Theme From Blue Velvet
Ketty Lester – Love Letter
Angelo Badalament- The Bookhouse Boys
Thought Gang – A Real Indication
David Lynch talks about the iPhone
David Bowie – I’m Deranged
Angelo Badalamenti – Fats Revisited
David Lynch – Good Day Today
David Lynch – “Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit”
Jimmy Scott – Sycamore Trees
Angelo Badalamenti – Country Waltz
David Lynch – “Angelo Badalamenti”
Angelo Badalamenti – Red Bats With Teeth
Julee Cruise – Falling
Roy Orbison – In Dreams
Tuxedomoon – In Heaven

James Murphy, the driving force behind LCD, will be the first to tell you that he’s standing on the shoulders of giants – everyone from Harry Nillson to Giorgio Moroder.  In this show, I roll through a lot of the bands that Murphy is influenced by, borrows from and pays homage to in his music.  Which is a really a music nerd way of saying: I’m playing punky disco and it’s hella fun.

Image 'borrowed' from Eater.com

Continuing on from last week’s show that concentrated on last year’s best in R&B, Dance and Jazz, tonight I’ll run through some of the year’s best indie & rock.  (Actually, since the server ate last week’s Part 1 show, I repeat a couple of artists and genres in the interest of playing catch-up.)

If you’ve been looking to catch up with some of 2010′s hidden treasures, there are a lot of goodies in here, everything from a My Bloody Valentine/Beach Boys mash (not really) to the years’s best Michael Jackson imitation to a slew of 80s revivalists.

FIRST HOUR

The Besnard Lakes – Chicago Train
jj – And Now
Deerhunter – Coronado
Lindstrom & Christabelle – Can’t Stop Now
LCD Soundsystem – One Touch
Beach Fossils – Golden Age
Harlem – Gay Human Bones
Best Coast – Boyfriend
The Drums – Best Friend
Wild Nothing – O, Lilac
Twin Shadow – Shooting Holes
Janelle Monae – Cold War

SECOND HOUR
Steve Mason – Boys Outside
Teenage Fanclub – Baby Lee
Yahzarah – Why Dontcha Call Me No More
Hot Chip – Take It In (Osborne Remix)
Four Tet – Love Cry
Owen Pallett – Red Sun No. 5
A Sunny Day In Glasgow – How Does Somebody Say When They Like You?
Christian Scott – The Eraser
Sharon Van Etten – One Day
The Tallest Man On Earth – King Of Spain
Elvis Presley – It’s Now Or Never

There’s only one way to properly deal with it – and that’s just to draw a circle around a few favorite things and say simply “This is dope.”  

In this episode I take you through a few of my favorite things that got me through this very strange year.  For the most part, I avoid the acknowledged great stuff that every critic is going to write up, like LCD Soundsystem, Kanye West and Arcade Fire.  I love them too, but you can hear that stuff elsewhere.  Instead check out this podcast for some great unearthed gems from the worlds of R&B,, jazz, and electronica.  Next week I’ll go deep into indie and a few select other genres.

Due to a server error at FCCFree, the podcast for this episode is not available.

FIRST HOUR – R&B
The Roots ft. Phonte & Dice Raw – Now Or Never
Yahzarah – Come Back As A Flower
Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings – I Learned The Hard Way
Big Boi ft. Big Rube – General Patton
Janelle Monae ft. Big Boi – Tightrope
R. Kelly – Love Letter
Erykah Badu – Window Seat
Drake ft. The Dream – Shut It Down
Cee Lo Green – Wildflower
Jamie Lidell – Enough Is Enough
John Legend & The Roots – Wake Up Everybody

SECOND HOUR – ELECTRONICA & JAZZ
Hot Chip – Take It In (Osborrne Remix)
Underworld – Always Loved A Film
Shit Robot – Take ‘Em Up
Caribou – Sun
Tony Allen – Nina Lowo
Christian Scott – The Eraser
Vijay Iyer – Human Nature
Brad Mehldau – Don’t Be Sad

Put on a sweater, fire up the yule log and, um, grab a twist-off capped bottle of wine and settle in for two hours of seasonal music featuring guest DJ Susie Smith.

So here – the night after the close of the 2010 (AD) Festival Of Lights – there’s no reason to stop the music now. This podcast covers Jewish contributions to the pop music canon – along with a few hangers-on.

SET LIST

Beastie Boys – Right Right Now Now
Ben Kweller – Walk On Me
The Clash – Lost In The Supermarket
Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins – The Charging Sky
Bangles – Going Down To Liverpool
Amy Winehouse – Tears Dry On Their Own
Dionne Warwick – Are You There With Another Girl? (Bacharach/David)
Jefferson Airplane – 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds
Elastica – How He Wrote Elastica Man
Lou Reed – NYC Man
Raspberries – Go All The Way
Van Halen – Janie’s Crying
Ike Turner & His Kings Of Rhythm – The Rooster
Elvis Presley – Trouble (Leiber/Stoller)

Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot – Bonnie and Clyde
Ramones – Beat On The Brat
Sleater-Kinney – I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone
Bob Dylan – My Wife’s Home Town
Yo La Tengo – I Wanna Be Your Lover
Yo La Tengo – Periodically Triple Or Double
3rd Bass – Pop Goes The Weasel
Drake – Light Up
KISS – Strutter
Randy Newman – It’s Money That I Love
Marianne Faithfull – Why d’Ya Do It?
Charlotte Gainsbourg – The Songs That We Sing
William Shatner – That’s Me Trying
Bill Frisell – Kochot
Terry Hall & Mushtaq – Ten Eleven

Back from my Thanksgiving-forced hiatus, you are not going to believe this show’s topic.  After two weeks in a row mired in the 60s with Phil Spector and Neil Young, you could never have seen this one coming: The Beginner’s Guide To Wu-Tang Clan.

According to the unofficial website Wu-International, Clan members have been directly involved in over 300 albums since their début in 1993.  Their empire also extends to books, video games, fashion and chess.  (Seriously!)  I’ve always admired their sound but never really knew where to start .  Surely this is one of the biggest-selling and most influential ‘underground’ acts the world has seen.

With no true mainstream radio smashes since 1993 and literally hundreds of records in their catalog, you need an expert to know where to begin.  Lighting the way and joining me in studio was DJ Bass 77 of The Bass-ment, leader of FCCFree’s old skool hip hop show that airs Tuesdays at 10pm.  He took us through the history of the Wu, the influential production style of its sound leader The RZA, introduced us to a few of the strong personalities in the group and their solo work, and gave his personal view on where to start digging.

Meanwhile, Wu was right up the block at Mezzanine kicking off their nationwide tour as we started the show.  This was the next best thing to being at the show – that is, if you were standing next to the chatty guys while the band played only their greatest hits.

Most notoriously, Neil started compiling a ‘Decade II’ in 1987 to follow up on the hit Decade compilation from 1977.  This project then morphed into the Neil Young Archives.  For years, this thing was dogged by rumors about its format, its length, what it would contain, when it was coming out…  It went on so long that fans gave up that it would ever happen and started compiling their own versions (like Neil Young Archives Be Damned) of what they thought it would be.

When the announcement finally came in 2008 that the archives were finally coming – for real this time – for many it was still an ‘I’ll believe when I see it.’  It was meant to be five 8-CD sets (or 5 DVDs – or something) with the first covering only the period up to 1972 – basically enough to cover his genesis as an artist and lead up to his most popular album, Harvest.  Sure enough, it was delayed again to mid-2009.  And Neil, in typically curmudgeonly fashion, said the primary reason it was happening now was because he finally found a format on which he liked hearing his music played: Blu-Ray.  Yes, he actually told us to all go out and buy PlayStation 3′s so we could listen to his demos from 40+ years ago.

I’ve never actually had the opportunity to play with the $350 – yes, $350 – Blu-Ray set, but from all accounts it stretches the very idea of musical autobiography to an apotheosis.  Each song gets its own file drawer full of related ephemera and trivia while easter eggs, hidden tracks and video highlights explicating his career abound.  The sound quality, of course, is supposed to be unbelievably clear.  Even more exciting, it’s a living, breathing archive with songs and video added at Neil’s will over the internet and unlocked with each buyer’s exclusive code.  Truly a redefinition of what an artist’s archive can be and how it can offer an immersive experience for serious fans.

Then the news broke last week that a fire had broken out at Neil Young’s San Carlos warehouse filled with his guitars, memorabilia and classic cars.  The Neil Young Nation held its collective breath.  Details were scarce, but television coverage showed workers scurrying out of a blackened prefab metal warehouse with film canisters and who knows what else.  Were the Archives OK?  Did this damage or kill the project?  For an artist who has consistently had mortality and aging as key concerns in their work, to have their Archives burned the same week as their 65th birthday (as it was for Neil), this awful event must have really hit home.

Fan site Thrasher’s Wheat assures us that everything is OK and the tapes are kept elsewhere, but really, who’s to know what’s truth or fiction here?  Let’s just all stand by and keep our fingers crossed for the next edition, which is supposed to take the story through 1981 and include four previously unreleased albums.

Strangely enough, there’s been far more coverage of Neil’s LincVolt, a pet project to entirely adapt a custom car to run on biofuel.  After rumors that the car had started the fire, a clarification came – from of all places – the newspaper of record that the LincVolt survived.  The dream of a hybridized classic car lives for another day!

While we wait for Volume 2, this week’s episode of my radio show is devoted to an exploration of the Archive released so far.  Honestly, it makes for a somewhat monochromatic show but if you’re a Neil Young fan who is daunted by the price tag or just the simple task of diving in, you’ll want to check this out.

This podcast originally aired on 11/11, Nigel Tufnel’s favorite day.  We can truly say that this day goes to 11 – a couple of times.

And there’s only one way to properly celebrate 11/11:  Get Loud.

In this episode, I pay tribute to the man who brought the LOUD to pop music: Phil Spector.  His Wall Of Sound was both smart marketing and a revolution in how records were made.  The songs were pretty good, too.  Then he started hanging with The Beatles and things just got weirder from there.  Really weird.

SET LIST (all produced or co-written by Spector unless otherwise noted)

This edition of The Entroporium features two hours of politically-themed anger and sadness – all the way from The Carter Family to Marvin Gaye to Lou Reed to Sufjan Stevens – with some words of wisdom from GW Bush and Noam Chomsky.

(Bottleneck Cafe ran a little over, so my show starts about four minutes into the file.  The sound’s too hot until 8 minutes in.  Sorry!)FIRST HOUR

Turn down the lights, open a window, let the cold wind blow in, put the children to bed, and get under the sheets… This episode of The Entroporium contains two hours of the most terrifying music you will ever hear.

Listen tonight, then download the podcast file to scare the neighborhood trick-or-treaters on Halloween night.

FIRST HOUR
Tuxedomoon – James Whale
The Residents – Hello Skinny
Geto Boys – My Mind Is Playing Tricks On Me
The Stranglers – In The Shadows
“Old Woman All Skin and Bones”
Johnny Cash – Delia’s Gone
Charles Manson – Mechanical Man
Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch – Death Valley ’69
The Cramps – Fever
Jackie Morningstar – Rockin’ In The Graveyard
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Death To Everyone
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – One February Friday
Bjork – Where Is The Line?
Bloodrock – DOA

SECOND HOUR
The Stranglers – Waltzinblack
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Henry Lee
Throbbing Gristle – Hamburger Lady
The Specials – Ghost Town (edit)
Matmos – Roses and Teeth For Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Damned – Twisted Nerve
Dead Kennedys – The Prey
The Cure – Subway Song
Pink Floyd – Careful With That Axe, Eugene
The Residents – We Are The World
Fennesz Sakamoto – Abyss
Doc Watson – Omie Wise
Tuxedomoon – Midnite Stroll

If you only know Blondie from the songs played on commercial radio and VH1, you do not know this band. Starting as an updated punky take on the 60s Girl Group sound and following a slow launch trajectory that took three albums before success kicked in, the band veered off into more adventurous music after it became popular.  But was this a good thing?

Check out this two-hour career retrospective, including influences, hits, and rarities.  This show has live tracks, alternate takes and even a flashback from Debbie’s hippie days.  Plus a tribute to Ari Up of The Slits, who passed away this Wednesday.

The show starts about 1:10 into the podcast file.

FIRST HOUR
The Slits – Newtown (for Ari Up, RIP)
The Castaways – Liar, Liar
The Ramones – I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend
The Wind In The Willows – Djini Judy
Blondie – Out In The Streets
Blondie – A Girl Should Know Better
Blondie – X Offender (Private Stock Original Version)
Blondie – In The Flesh
Blondie – Man Overboard
Blondie – Rip Her To Shreds
Blondie – (I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear
Blondie – I Didn’t Have The Nerve To Say No
Blondie – Poets Problem
Blondie – Hanging On The Telephone (Live)
Blondie – Picture This

SECOND HOUR
Blondie – Once I Had A Love (aka The Disco Song)
Blondie – Heart Of Glass
Blondie – Dreaming
Blondie – Die Young Stay Pretty (Live on BBC)
Blondie – Heroes (Live)
The Paragons – The Tide Is High
Blondie – Live It Up
Blondie – Rapture (Extended Disco Mix) (excerpt)
Go Home Productions – Rapture Riders
Debbie Harry – Backfired
Blondie – For Your Eyes Only
Blondie – Maria

In the second hour, I continue on the 60s R&B theme and fight a losing battle against my mixing board software.  The show starts about two minutes in to the file.

FIRST HOUR – SOLOMON BURKE TRIBUTE
Just Out Of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)
If You Need Me
Stupidity
Cry To Me
Home In Your Heart
Got To Get You Off My Mind
Down In The Valley
None Of Us Are Free (w/ Blind Boys Of Alabama)
He’ll Have To Go
Valley Of Tears (w/ Gillian Welch)
Maggie’s Farm
The Judgement
Nothing’s Impossible
Don’t Give Up On Me

SECOND HOUR
Soul Clan – That’s How It Feels
James Carr – Pouring Water On A Drowning Man
Rufus Thomas – Itch and Scratch (Part 1)
Eddie Bo – The Thang (Part 2)
The Gaturs – Cold Bear
Betty Everett – You’re No Good
The Velvelettes – Needle In A Haystack
The Flirtations – Nothing But A Heartache
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage
San & Dave – I Thank You
Solomon Burke – Get Out My Life Woman
Dyke & The Blazers – We Got More Soul
Ray Charles – In The Heat Of The Night
Lowell Fulson – Tramp
Solomon Burke – Proud Mary
The Isley Brothers – This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You)

Spend two hours with the master of indie rock, Uncle Bob!  In celebration of the Guided By Voices reunion show that came to town earlier this week as part of the mini-tour following their appearance at Matador 21, this podcast episode is wholly dedicated to the music of Robert Pollard, the band’s leader and mastermind.

While the tour’s set list is dominated by old favorites from the band’s ‘classic period’ from 1994-98, my mission was to spotlight other lesser-known parts of his catalogue – pretty easy to do for an artist who puts out as many as eight albums a year, does all his own cover art and produces a zine!  Spend a couple of hours with The Entroporium and catch up with the remarkable output of this great artist working at the intersection of Britpop, American indie, classic rock and post-punk – two minutes at a time.

My apologies for the dropouts on this one.  I think it’s back to the drawing board with my on-board mixer software.

Tell me that wouldn't be scary to a 3-year old!

One bright Berkeley summer afternoon in 1970, my Dad’s friend Henry brought over a brand new stack of records to try out in the hi-fi.  (How great is that: people went to a record store, picked out hot new titles and made music discovery a social event!) Out of that pile appeared of the scariest things I’d ever seen: a double-album with a cover painting of angry witches, naked people, distorted body parts, lightning… This was no childrens book illustration.

Terrifying as that was, Henry insisted on putting this one on the turntable first – and out came formless electric jams full of scary-sounding instruments.  To a wee one brought up on The Beatles, CSN, and Prokofiev’s child-friendly Peter & The Wolf, this was a too radical departure.   (Bass clarinets sound particularly scary to small children, usually representing evil or mischief in cartoon scores.  Having Peter’s friendly grandfather voiced by a bassoon probably did enough to dissuade kids from enjoying classical music as the rest of the score did to attract them.)

I was so upset that I burst into tears, raced to my bedroom, slammed the door and refused to come out the rest of the day.  As far as I can remember, this was the only time I pulled a stunt like that.

The record in question was of course Miles Davis’s supposed landmark Bitches Brew – an album that I continued to despise and fear for many, many years afterwards.  I knew that this was supposed to be one of those canonical works that we music geeks are supposed to celebrate, uphold and nod knowingly about in mixed company.  And so like any good rock critic wannabe, I dutifully pulled it out every 10 years or so and give it another go.  First as a teen, then in college, then in my early professional years: Nope, this one just wasn’t working for me.

It barely sounded like a band playing together, much less playing a song.  Every time I let the needle drop or spun up the CD, I could only visualize a bunch of stoned guys with thousand-yard stares sitting in a circle each taking turns going Ba-Da-Dop!  Ba-Da-Dop! Ba-Da-Dop! and around and around and around for… oh my god 20+ minutes per track.  This from a time when crafting a double-album was a symbol of deep Artistic Importance – like ummmm Tommy or The White Album – that You Must Sit Through This And Inhabit This Artist-Constructed World.  Ugh, forget about it.  (Well, actually, I could get with “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down” on Side 4, which sounded most like a traditional if hella funky jazz piece, but still.)

Far, far from the jazz supper clubs...

I don’t know why this album offended me so deeply.  Surely it was related to that traumatic day, but I had never really had problems like this with funk or soul before or since.  Dissonance and strange sounds were not the issue.    I always insisted that Dad put on the Jimi Hendrix side of the Woodstock album over his objections.  The Beatles certainly had their share of avant-garde moments.  My GE record player was primarily fed by psychedelic rejects from my Dad’s collection, like Iron Butterfly and Their Satanic Majesties Request.  Dissonance and strange sounds were not the problem.  And Miles became a favorite of mine in college (stereotypically), especially Bitches Brew‘s sonic cousins, Nefertiti and In A Silent Way.

Finally this year with all the ecstatic re-re-reviews attendant upon yet another re-re-release of Bitches Brew for its 40th anniversary (replete, again, with remastering and extra tracks), I decided to give it another try.  This time it came in loud and clear.  Colors unlike any I’d heard from any other band, the thrill of shared discovery and freedom, great performances and riffs – it’s all there, all the things you would want and expect from a pop-culture masterpiece.  Sounding utterly like anything that came before it – in still-acoustic-dominated ‘jazz,’ anyway – it’s clear why this blew so many minds in 1970 and still continues to today.

Why hadn’t I been able to hear it before?  If you’re like me and have had a hard time finding your way into the Bitches Brew colossus, the key may be to skip the 20-minute opener “Pharaoh’s Dance,” which in LP terms takes up the entirety of Side 1. Instead crank up the title track from ‘Side 2,’ which provides a far friendlier and dynamic entry point.  Also, for the electronica fan or super-technical listener, it may be instructive to head over to one of the Miles obsessive sites that pore over how the tracks were constructed from loops and fragments – which one could interpret as having created the world’s best known and biggest selling example of musique concrete (with the probable exception of The Beatles’ “Revolution 9″).

It took 40 years, but Bitches Brew turned out to be worth the wait.

As a taster for this weekend’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, I hosted local stars of honky-tonk country and western swing Emily Bonn & The Vivants live in studio.  A full set by Emily and her band, plus a sampling of some of the great artists that will be featured out in Golden Gate Park, October 1-3 2010.

Formerly of the late lamented Whoreshoes, Emily Bonn & The Vivants perform original foot stompin’ tunes about riots, hollers and hopping train cars.  The Vivants play their own brand of American roots music, shining up dusty melodies with modern arrangements.

The bass is a little heavy through The Vivants’ first two songs, but I get it down to a manageable level in the third.

SET LIST
Elvis Costello & The Sugarcanes – Femme Fatale
Dave Alvin – King Of California
Gillian Welch – Only One and Only
Nick Lowe – Let’s Stay In And Make Love

Emily Bonn & The Vivants (live in studio) - Riot At The Rite Spot, Georgia Johnny, Jockey Full Of Bourbon, Big Apple, Will You Miss Me, RC Cola

T-Bone Burnett – Shake Yourself Loose
Emmylou Harris – Boulder To Birmingham
Patty Griffin – Stolen Car

Emily Bonn & The Vivants (live in studio)  - Long Hot Summer Day, Accidental Stomp, Gospel Ship, I Saw The Light

Patti Smith – Dancing Barefoot
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings – 100 Days, 100 Nights
Clinch Mountain Boys & The Stanley Brothers – Loving You Too Well
Flatt & Scrubbs & Foggy Mountain Boys – Salty Dog Blues
Steve Earle – Hardin Wouldn’t Run
Rosanne Cash – Black Cadillac
Randy Newman – God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind)

The Captain thinking about how to make his music more appealing to the ladies

“I’d always thought music was too formal, and I thought ‘Well, I’ll get into this and fix it.’” – Captain Beefheart

This show is fully dedicated to a profile of one of rock’s strangest, most enigmatic and most divisive bands: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band.  Who was this guy, why did he make such strange sounds, did he really turn his band into a cult – and why should we care?  Beefheart scholar Benjamin Griffin brings in his collection of some of the Captain’s greatest and rarest recordings.

The show starts about 2:40 into the file.

SET LIST

Diddy Wah Diddy
Abba Zaba
Yellow Brick Road
Somebody In My Home (live)
Tarot Plane (excerpt)
Safe As Milk
Frownland
“Fast and Bulbous”
China Pig
The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)
Steal Softly
Old Fart At Play
Nowadays A Woman’s Gotta Have A Man
Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles
Big Eyed Beans From Venus
Golden Birdies
Bongo Fury
The Floppy Boot Stomp
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Ice Cream For Crow
Veteran’s Day Poppy

The show kicks in about 2 minutes after the start of the file.

FIRST HOUR
Gyedu Blay Ambolley & The Steneboofs – Simigwado
The Sahara All Stars of Jos – Take Your Soul
The Semi Colon – Nekwaha Semi Colon
Lisandro Meza – Shacalao
Tony Allen & His African Messengers – No Discrimination
Honoré Avolonto Et L’orchestre Black Santiango – Dou Dagbé Wé
El Rego et Ses Commandos – Se Na Min
Joni Haastrup – Greetings
Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra – Big Man

SECOND HOUR
Fela Ransome-Kuti & The Africa 70 – Who’re You
Ify Jerry Crusade – Everybody Likes Something Good
K. Frimpong & His Cubano Fiestas – Me Yee Owu Den
King Sunny Ade – Tolongo
Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics – Blue Nile
Peter King – African Dialects
The Funkees – Ole
The Funkees – Dancing Time
Fela Ransome-Kuti & The Africa 70 – Gentleman

This artist would become one of the '70s coolest, most self-assured artists. Looks like a deer in the headlights here, though, yeah?

I will readily admit that I’ve made some errors in my first two broadcasts. Tonight I’ll demonstrate that some of our greatest artists were not immune to Rookie Mistakes, either.

Maybe it was the wrong song, maybe it was the wrong producer, maybe they were desperate, maybe they just plain weren’t ready yet.  In any case, their first record(s) kinda sucked before they recovered to become the legends you know and love.  Includes not-so-hot tracks by folks like The Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Madonna and many more.

…and because it was a schadenfreude show, this is my very roughest podcast.  The show doesn’t kick until a full 9 minutes after the start of the file.  Booooo.   Set list after the jump.

FIRST HOUR
Tony Sheridan w. The Silver Beatles – My Bonnie
The Beatles – Three Cool Cats
The Rolling Stones – Come On
Chuck Berry – Come On
The Rolling Stones – Stray Cat Blues
Ray Charles – Roll With My Baby
Ray Charles – Drown In My Own Tears
Aretha Franklin – Rock A Bye Baby (With A Dixie Melody)
Aretha Franklin – (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone
Bob Dylan – Mixed Up Confusion
Bob Dylan – It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
Beach Boys – Surfin’
Beach Boys – Here Today

SECOND HOUR
Bob Marley & The Wailers – And I Love Her
Bob Marley & The Wailers – Small Axe
Davy Jones & The Lower Third – You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving
David Bowie – The Laughing Gnome
David Bowie – Space Oddity (1980 version)
Kraftwerk – Ruckzuck
Kraftwerk – Radioactivity (The Mix)
Public Enemy – Public Enemy No. 1
Public Enemy – Night Of The Living Baseheads
Madonna – Everybody
Madonna – What It Feels Like For A Girl
Pulp – Turkey Momma Mambo
Pulp – The Trees

Pamela Z - Photo by Lori Eanes (lori@lorieanes.com)

Pamela Z and Matt Davignon were in studio to discuss the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and preview some of its featured artists, including Alessandro Cortini (ex-Nine Inch Nails), Joseph Hammer, Stephan Mathieu, MKM and John Chowning.  The second hour also features tracks from Massive Attack with Gui Boratto, Autechre and more.

SFEMF ran Thursday, September 9 through Saturday, September 11 at the Brava Theater with a satellite show on Friday the 10th at the DeYoung Museum.

The show starts about 4:30 into the file.

This was my first show on FCCFree Radio.  A few technical errors here & there, but I’ll stand by this one.

In celebration of today, August 19, the first full 24 hours of legal weddings for all, it’s The Marriage Show! Pull a loved one close for two hours of tunes and more about love, devotion and gettin’ hitched.

Wait, this show got delayed until 8/26? And marriage equality is off until at least December? Damn it, I’m doing the show anyway!!!

The show starts about five minutes into the full file! (Don’t let the heavy metal fool you.)  The set list is after the jump.
FIRST HOUR

Magnetic Fields – It’s Only Time
The Intruders – We’ll Be United
Dionne Warwick – This Girl’s In Love With You
Teenage Fanclub – Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From
XTC – Big Day
Nas – Getting Married
Smiley Lewis – The Bells Are Ringing
The Orioles – Crying In The Chapel
The Platters – With This Ring
The Isley Brothers – My Love Is Your Love (Forever)
David Bowie – Be My Wife
Antony & The Johnsons – Be My Husband
The Ronettes – Baby I Love You

SECOND HOUR

Marvin Gaye – Time To Get It Together
Tim Easton – I Would Have Married You
Wanda Sykes on Gay Marriage
Frank Sinatra – Love & Marriage
The Velvet Underground – I Found A Reason
The Stone Roses – This Is The One
Bob & Marcia – Really Together
The Ebonys – It’s Forever
Cassandra Wilson – Harvest Moon
The Muppets – Kermit & Miss Piggy Get Married
Jim O’Rourke – Close To You

Cute non-threatening boys vs independent single mom. Guess who wins?

As American Idol winds down its season tonight and bids adieu to its most formidable long-running participant, this is a great opportunity to put the spotlight on the show and what it can teach us about social media. AI actually predates what we’ve come to think of as social media by several years, but its overwhelming success is founded on many of the same principles that govern brand marketers every day.

Every week the viewers of American Idol comprise the world’s largest product development focus group. While it’s easy to focus on it as a Survivor-style game show, it can easily be forgotten that AI’s real purpose each season is to discover and groom a new pop artist for the show’s owner, which just happens to be an entertainment conglomerate. Sure, the judges will try to guide audience response, but AI fans can name numerous occasions when the vote didn’t go the way the judges wanted

The audience’s buy-in is another peculiar element of the show.  By encouraging participation, the audience has an emotional stake in the winning product before it even launches. What marketer wouldn’t love that?  The product (in the form of a pop singer’s debut album) arrives mere months after the show’s finale with little risk to the record company, certainly compared to sending out A&R people meant to guess what The Next Big Thing might be.

There are also inherent danger in letting the audience take control.  For me, the ost frustrating aspect of reality competition shows is the lack of clear rules to the game.  Without standards or ideals to apply, the audience – and sometimes the judges – can become confused over what exactly they are judging, especially for something as qualitative as ‘pop stardom quotient.’

The result can be a mess: sometimes ingenious in its preferences (Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood), other times selecting dud winners that offered only short-term satisfaction (Ruben Studdard, Taylor Hicks).  It’s the noisy American polity celebrated by DeToqueville writ large.

That’s appropriate for something called American Idol.  Is it right for your product?

Malcolm Maclaren fronting hip-hop culture

While most of the obituaries for Malcolm McLaren will rightfully center on his time as manager of The Sex Pistols, this was just the first of his successes in revolutionary pop music.  Upon its release in 1983, Duck Rock‘s distillation of Soweto, South Bronx and proto-electronica sounded like nothing on earth and everything on it at the same time.  Nowadays it sounds almost ridiculously dated.  The primitive turntablism sounds like something your 4-year old could do when you hand him your iPhone to distract him for a while.  The raps are impossibly old skool, practically “moon” and “june” rhyming.  Even the selection of African sources seems downright quaint as the recent crate-digging revolution led by Soundway and others continues to dig up impossibly modern-sounding treasures from the 70s.

To truly appreciate how insanely alien Duck Rock felt at the time, you need to place your ears in its historical context.

The idea of creating cut-up music and rhythms from records and charismatically, charmingly rhyme-chanting over them was still very new.  Rap and hip-hop were still barely more than rumors to most of the country.  Even as a teenager in relatively open & urban Berkeley, the hip-hop hits that bled out into our mainstream were more like novelty acts.  Grandmaster Flash was on auto-repeat in the school cafeteria, while Tom Tom Club and Blondie had fluke hits that played on hip-hop styles without actually committing to them.  But that was about it.  The great Def Jam/Run-DMC/Beastie Boys explosion of 1984 was still yet to come.

I would never go so far as to say Malcolm McLaren discovered African music, but for the 80s generation Duck Rock represented its introduction into their consciousness.  South Africa and apartheid were only just entering mainstream conversation in America.  None of the great boycotts had started.  Nelson Mandela was still in jail – and wasn’t he some kind of terrorist or something?  All we knew about him we learned about from The Special AKA.  Stevie Ray Vaughn and friends had not yet declaimed “I ain’t gonna play Sun City!”  Most critically to the success of Duck Rock, African music simply hadn’t made it over yet.  After the political convulsions of the late 1970s, Africa’s music industry was essentially gone.  Graceland wasn’t even a gleam in Paul Simon’s eye.  The Indestructible Beat Of Soweto was not on anyone’s radar, except perhaps Robert Christgau’s.

Finally, Duck Rock believe it or not is a critical early entry into the creation of the synth-y pop sound that dominated pop in the 80s and is a focus of today’s 80s revivalism.  Producer Trevor Horn was fresh off the successes of a couple of the best sounding and most influential post-punk synth-pop productions, ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love and Into Battle With The Art Of Noise, and yet to move on to the monolithic and silly manifesto-ism of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome.  It’s difficult to give the sense now of how new and modern Horn’s production style felt in the early 80s, especially coming out of a long period starting with punk where amateurism was so key to the aesthetic.  Crucially, the Horn style sounded great on Walkman headphones in the early days of personal stereos when little else did.  And whether on purpose or not, Duck Rock brought together several burgeoning genres – African, electronica, sampling and hip-hop – that sounded great on cheap portable headphones, even better when moving in virtual isolation through an urban environment – still a novelty in those days.

I think it also bears noting that there was – and should be – considerable controversy over the provenance of the songs. Connecting the dots between township jive and US inner city radio seemed pretty clever at the time and still gives a nice message that we’re all connected, baby.  But there’s also real reason to be uncomfortable with that message, especially in light of the songwriting credits that give all the rights to “Horn/McLaren.”  One listen and you’ll see strong reason to doubt that they really had much to do with songwriting.  While it’s true in the early days of sampling that credits were a bit less… stringent, the co-opting of others’ artistry – in particular from distressed urban areas around the world – reeks of the worst of cultural imperialism.   This is another crucial way that Duck Rock is a product of its time even as it stretched out ears into the future.

(Come to think of it, Malcolm had done something similar with another music project six years earlier.)

The performers and set spill into every corner of the theater and virtually – no, in actuality – beg for audience engagement and participation throughout.  There is even a moment in the first act in which Fela invites the crowd to storm the stage.  This moment passes quickly and is done so subtly that I think most people, including the theater-savvy group with whom I attended the show, can easily miss it.  It’s clearly a charged moment for the performers, though, as they need to wait a moment to see if the audience will respond – but also be able to play through seamlessly to keep potential awkwardness to a minimum.  The musicians keeps riffing and if nobody moves the show goes on.

At the intermission, I asked one of the ushers if the weekend night crowds respond differently.  Oh yeah, some of the audiences are there to paaarty.  My Sunday afternoon brethren were a quieter bunch for sure.  What a performing challenge for the actors & dancers in a tightly choreographed show to have such an unpredictable element built into the show!

Another way that Fela! tries to break through the traditional Broadway audience dynamic is through an insert in the program inviting audience members to drink throughout the show.  The bar in the rear stays open and you are explicitly told its OK to have beverages at your seat.  In the spirit of the show – and, well, because I can’t imagine going to a rock concert without a tasty adult beverage – I made my way to the back bar towards the end of Act I.  Not only was I the only one in the theater to do so but the bartender seemed totally baffled by my presence, ignoring me even though I was her sole customer.

I don’t blame the audience for being confused.  The marketing on the web and around town still follows the formula of most Broadway musicals; it won this many Tonys, blah blah blah.  It makes me wonder how the show has decided to target its potential customers.  Would it be better getting the startled tourists and traditional theatergoers who have been taught to sit there and passively enjoy the show; or make outreach to younger audiences – or even traditionally more participatory groups like those found in gospel churches.  (Perhaps I’m so far away from this target that I can’t see the campaign?) As John Lennon legendarily said when he performed for royalty, “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”

So two lessons to take away.  First, no matter how much a show gives permission, it takes a lot to get an audience out of generations of ingrained viewing habits.  It’s hard to imagine a show with more energy, intelligence and pure uplift than Fela! – and still the crowd stayed seated until the curtain call.  (Me and my friend hooted for an encore, which only seemed to confuse our section-mates.  Isn’t that what you do after the set ends?)  Second, if you’re going to see Fela!, try for a weekend night!

• Discount tickets for Fela!
• “By the end of this transporting production, you feel you have been dancing with the stars.  And I mean astral bodies, not dime-a-dozen celebrities.” – New York Times

Rocky Becker has been a barber for nearly 50 years. He attributes his success and longevity to keeping it simple. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

The words every man dreads hearing: “You’re getting a little thin up there.”  And with that – no fanfare, no drama, no time for a neurotic outbreak – my barber Daniel snipped off the strands of my faux combover.  ”It’s 2010,” he went on.  ”Time for a fresh start.”

It was true.   One always wonders about the guy who has that one strand of hair carefully arranged over an obviously bald head.  How does he do that?  How does he face his loved ones when he gets wet?  Isn’t he worried it might be windy today?  For the last year, I was well down the road to becoming one of those guys.

What I learned over the last few years is that nobody plans for a combover.  They’re insidious.  They are the product of years of attrition, denial, compensation and the simple refusal to adapt to new ways of brushing your hair.

There’s something comforting about the No BS treatment at traditional men’s barber shops, a fading breed, run for the most part by old guys who have been doing nothing but giving no-BS quick & dirty haircuts for eons.  San Francisco has a couple of fancy locations – Mister and The Barber Lounge – which say they are barber shops but are in reality more like ultra-masculine salons.  More memorable, though, is Original Palace Barber Shop at 2nd and Mission.  Basically a bunch of chairs pushed together in a mound of the eccentric absentee owner’s garbage (must be seen to be believed), Original Palace is staffed by a crew of several 50+ men, all foreign with indeterminate nationalities, and one terribly unlucky woman. Never a wait and never out of there in more than 20 minutes.

My local barber shop is the simply-named Montclair Barber Shop.  Its proprietor, Rocky Becker, a near-silent character I see all the time on Mountain Boulevard smoking and sucking down coffee, was recently profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle.   To be in Rocky’s chair is to be transported somewhere into the early 1970s.  He’s got his Raiders calendar, a few shots of his Harley – and that’s all you get to see because after 5 minutes you are done, $20 and a pile of hair lighter. Not the greatest haircut, but that’s not what you were there for – nothing some pomade and an encore in four weeks can’t fix.

The Chronicle was principally interested in the shop because of its longtime relationship with Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, who’s been getting his hair cut by Rocky for 49 years.  The Raiders of the 70s were known for their hard partying, rebellious personae and straight-up intimidation of their opponents.  ”Just win, baby” was their mantra. And of course they were one of the most successful franchises, a regular visitor to the playoffs and winner of three Super Bowls.  Al Davis is one of the founders of the modern NFL, one of the world’s great business growth stories, and a member of its Hall Of Fame.

Davis may not be loved, but the media and Raider Nation remains entranced by the Davis mystique.  They are fascinated by Davis for never changing, a throwback – and for almost 40 years one of the cleverest, most influential men in football.  They also lay his lack of success in the last decade – the Raiders now officially own the worst 7-year run in NFL history – for never changing.  ”He still likes to maintain his look,” Becker told the Chronicle. “You’ve got to maintain what you have. Al’s a big believer in that.”

Change is hard work.   Sometimes it needs to be tough love, other times it’s letting someone or something just go to town on you.  You gotta cut off those old strands flying in the wind and move on.

Hurrah for traditional barber shops!  Thank you for letting me stay the same as long as I could and then making me change when it was the right thing to do.  Long may you wave.

One of the key reasons to register with Lala is the right to stream music that you own to any computer: a great service and potentially world-beating if you can make it happen on portable devices as well.  (‘Ownership’ is defined as having a copy, regardless of how you might have acquired it.)  The catch – and it’s a big one – is that you have to download a program from Lala that reads your MP3 library and uploads ID information from each of your files.  If you have a large library, it’s an absurdly long process – I gave up in an hour with less than 5% of my collection read.  Even for a modestly-sized library, the upload routine is still odious, time-consuming and puts the onus on the user to do too much work.

(Aside: Why is this legal now for Lala but when the original MP3.com had a similar service back in the early years of the decade it was immediately sued out of existence?  That was even worse for the user; you had to download software and then insert all of your CDs for identification. At least in that model you had to prove you actually owned a physical – and presumably ‘real’ – CD. Puzzling.)

Apple, however, via its Genius feature in iTunes already knows what MP3s are in its users’ collections, which means it could be just a flip of a switch to allow users access to their music anywhere on any connected device.  If the purchase price really is as little as $17mm (as Techcrunch reported today), this is a total bargain to bring down one of the chief barriers to quick leadership in the “Stream Music Everywhere” market – not to mention avoiding all the negotiations Apple would have needed to go through with the copyright holders.

Pandora, Mog, Spotify, Last,fm and everyone else in the market may have just been trumped.  Lala’s current feature set added to iTunes takes Apple from nowhere to everywhere in single update for software that’s already ubiquitous. Small wonder that today’s gossip sees Pandora running like hell to expand its business into the car stereo market.

Essentially what the crowd and the speakers agreed on was that there is something negated from the reading experience when you move from a book, which is singularly dedicated to the content at hand, to an electronic device, a more promiscuous format for lack of a better term.  Think for example – as Hornby did – of the difference in experience between playing a record and selecting an album to play on an iPod.

Even as a Kindle user, I’ll be the first to agree that consuming content on a Kindle is a much different experience than from reading an actual physical book.  In my mind, carrying a book around is the last stand for analog content; I long ago came to think of music and movies as files or folders, but until recently I had never thought that way about books.  In a discussion led by Eggers, the founder of an imprint that publishes some of the world’s most physically beautiful books, there is bound to be some bias towards the aesthetic experience of buying, holding and reading a book.

The most striking thing about the Kindle Bestseller list about it is its utter dominance by serial fiction – the stuff you find in supermarkets by popular authors like Janet Evanovich, Richard North Patterson and so forth, plus right-wing screeds by the likes of Glenn Beck and cohorts.  What the [ahem] cultural elites fail to understand about these books – the actual physical books – is that they are produced to be the very worst of aesthetic experiences in publishing: poorly bound, grey-papered budget paperbacks.  For devotees of these kinds of books, the Kindle actually represents an enormous step up from what they’re given today.  It’s not for nothing that Goodwills and St Vincent De Pauls are piled high with mass-market paperbacks selling for a dime each.  Nobody wants these when they’re done and there’s no meaningful secondary market.  They’re consumed and then they’re trash.

So when a San Francisco crowd starts booing a delivery device for popular fiction because it’s some kind of lowering of their standard of what a book should be, I can’t help but compare it to the same ‘cultural elitism’ that makes it impossible for them to understand the appeal of a George Bush, Fox News, or any mysteriously popular icon of so-called Red State America. E-readers are the most democratic of devices, moving the words and ideas in books out of their hallowed packaging and leveling them for all readers.  As Hornby himself discussed, there’s nothing wrong with having books be easy to read and fun for all; it’s the very cornerstone of his considerable success both as novelist and frequent Hollywood adaptee.

There will always be a market for books so long as people crave them as a key aesthetic element of their reading experience. Boutique houses like McSweeney’s may be well prepared where publishing is going: beautiful editions for those who need that experience, just as there continues to be a market for vinyl records for a certain kind of collector.  But “Democracy In America,” the kind you find in supermarkets, will increasingly go electronic.  Deal with it.

Shuffle play has its place, but I still love to listen to albums start to finish, letting the artist present their music in their own context.  After playing around a bit last week with Smart Playlists, I’m pleased to offer this post on filling your iPod/iPhone with random albums.  Doing this has brought up a lot of forgotten favorites and released space on my portable device from newer albums that I liked, was tired of but couldn’t bring myself to delete.  It’s entirely refreshed my whole portable listening experience by digging out records I haven’t thought about in years.

Here is an easy step-by-step for getting it done:

1)    In the Control Menu, set Shuffle to “by Album”

2)    Create a new Playlist Folder for your iPod or iPhone.  (For the rest of this post, I’m just going to call it an iPod, OK?)

3)    Create a regular Playlist for your “Musts,” the albums that you still feel like you absolutely must have handy – or perhaps albums you’ve recently acquired.

4)    Drag your Musts into that list and note at the bottom of the iTunes screen how much hard drive space they take up.

5)    This is the critical step. Create a Smart Playlist.  Use the three setting shown in the illustration below:Artist contains [press Space Bar once], Media Kind is Music (to keep out pesky Audiobooks and Podcasts) and Playlist is not [the name of your Musts Playlist], which prevents duplicates.  Use the “Limit” line at the bottom to be however many GBs are remaining on your iPod after you subtract the amount of space reserved for your Musts from Step 4 plus anything else you keep on your iPod (Podcasts, Photos, Videos, etc).  You can add on more lines to fine-tune it for your needs by adding lines like “Last Played is more than 90 days ago,” excluding certain artists or genres, or whatever you fancy.

6)    Now plug in your iPod and select it from the left sidebar.  On the Music tab, select Sync Music: Selected Playlists and deselect the “Automatically fill free space with songs” button.  Down below select the Folder that has your Musts and Random playlists.

7)    Sync and be happily surprised next time you’re out & about with your iPod.

You likely wound up with a few dud albums on your Random Smart Playlist.  Use the Grid View to delete it.  The list will automatically refill to your level of GBs.  Sync again and you’re set.

An important note about maintaining your Random Smart Playlist:  Because you are filling with Albums to some level of GBs, you will inevitably have an incomplete album at the bottom of the playlist.  My suggestion is tonever sort the random playlist in List View.  That way you can always go into List View to delete those fragments from the bottom of the list.  If you don’t do this, after refilling your Random Playlist you will wind up with a number of incomplete albums, obviously an undesirable situation.  Of course you can always Go Nuclear and delete everything in your Random Smart Playlist to refill from scratch, too.  Happy listening!

Sell Out was The Who’s fourth LP and the band’s first attempt at a full-length concept album.  The schtick was that the album was really a radio show complete with interruptions for station IDs and commercials.  (This also made for a clever way to gloss over the production problem of the album’s schizophrenic body of songs – everything from Beach Boys pop to proto-metal.)  Underlining the “sell out” concept, many of the ads were for brands they loved with the hopes that Premier Drums and [ahem] Jaguar would shower the boys in the band with free product.

The album’s conceptual centerpiece is the track where it all comes together.  “Odorono” sounds like a sweet if overdone Byrds-y pop track with a curious narrative about a female singer’s big debut.  It’s not until the last line of the song that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that the whole 2+ minute song is an advert for deodorant.

Listen: The Who – The Who Sell Out

Of course that’s all performed as a sly joke.  But recent events have brought product placement in pop songs into the spotlight as a legitimate brand-builder.  Most notably Chris Brown’s “Forever” was revealed to be a jingle for Wrigley Doublemint Gum only after the track had already launched into the Top 10.  (Perhaps we should have noticed earlier because of the chorus: “Double your pleasure/double your fun”). “Forever” also shows in the most dramatic way possible the pitfalls and opportunities inherent in latching your brand to a pop song.  As anyone who has passed through a supermarket checkout lane in the last five months would have seen, Brown’s reputation is now tattered following a domestic violence incident with his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, and Wrigley subsequently pulled his spots out of rotation.

Out of the blue, “Forever” was hijacked by a viral video that has become one of 2009’s biggest hits, “JK Wedding Entrance Dance,” now standing at over 25 million views and providing Brown’s song an unexpected return to the iTunes Top 10 singles chart.  Reflecting on how the private lives of artists impact their professional output is often a fool’s game, so we should probably look past using a love song by a convicted girlfriend-beater for a wedding.  But one wonders if Jill & Kevin were aware how much of a role Wrigley played at their (now very public) nuptials and how much free publicity they would be giving the gum.  (Or do they work for Wrigley?  Nowthat would be brand dedication: product placement at your wedding.)  One thing’s for sure: Google noticed – and turned “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” into a case study for monetizing YouTube content.

Def Jam, meanwhile, is taking a different tack by reminding publishers that its products often have many more eyeballs than famous magazine and web brands.  To that end, Mariah Carey’s new album will include a 34-page mini-Elle magazine – while Elle will feature a 14-page spread about the album.  “We sell millions of records, so you should advertise with us,’ ” said Antonio “L.A.” Reid, IDJ’s chairman. “My artists have substantial circulation–when you sell 2 million, 5 million, 8 million, that’s a lot of eyeballs. Most magazines aren’t as successful as those records.” And, he might add, hit records have a lot more shelf life.  Just ask Chris Brown.  Or The Who.

One big surprise right off the bat is the loss of Amazon’s Recommendations engine. My Kindle account is linked to my main account, where I have literally ten years of purchase and browse history stored.  My Kindle recommendations appear on the Kindle Store home page, as can be seen in the picture at right.  At best, I would regard these as ‘generic’ recommendations that have little to do with what I’ve ordered either in the past or over the Kindle. I also have 25 books stored in my “Save For Later” tab as well as a number of samples I’ve ordered.  Many of these are books about media & marketing, yet not one single business book recommendation.  Clearly these aren’t playing into the recommendation intelligence.

The Kindle Top Sellers proves to be pretty much useless as well as a discovery engine.  As you can see in the screen shot, the Top Sellers are a pretty weird bunch with little relation to today’s accepted Bestseller lists like those in the USA Today or New York Times.  What’s going on here?  With the exception of the Glenn Beck book, all of these are free.  While this certainly shows the power of price elasticity in the store (and again supports Chris Anderson’s Free, dammit), it also supports my earlier point: if you make it fun & easy to shop, people will buy books in droves – even titles they might not want that much. Sherlock Holmes making the Kindle Top Sellers list shows that people will ‘buy’ pretty much anything if it’s free.  At minimum, you’d hope that Amazon could separate out backlist or classics from the true contemporary bestsellers.

This goes to show an easy fix that should go on each line – there’s no easy access to price information! I have to open a link to each book to find out what I’m going to pay.  While the Kindle is advertised as having most books at $9.99, I can tell you after a few months of ownership that most of the books I’ve been interested in – many of which are true Bestsellers – are not $9.99.  I’d be curious to see a price distribution graph if anyone’s done the work.

The Sample Chapters program is half-baked. Their easy availability ois a great idea but in practice gives unsatisfactory results with no apparent rational oversight of content selection.  On Amazon proper, you can select a “random page” in most books just as you would in a bookstore; when you pick up a physical book to browse it, you naturally open to the middle not the Foreword.   All of the Sample Chapters I’ve received have been just the Forewords, not the ‘guts’ of the book, which is what I’m really interested in.  Worse, in many cases half or more of the sample is just the credits at the front of the book!

Finally there’s no linking from reviews and other sources, a longtime basic function of hyperlinking which Amazon supports with its open affiliates program.  Every Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review in search of ideas for things to read.  You’d think that the NYT on Kindle could at least have links into the store.  Even if that’s not feasible, there could at least be a menu on the home page (or even within) for “Recently Reviewed” by newspaper or magazine.  Instead I’m left to search, with each click making it a little less likely that I’ll make a purchase.  And then of course there’s the issue – key for all E-books – of whether all books will even be available when they’re reviewed.

All of these are solvable problems.  If even one of these can be fixed, I predict a huge increase in the vitality of the Kindle.  One wonders if these will be better addressed in the upcoming competitive devices from PlasticLogic and others – and if Amazon’s strength online will be an Achilles heel for its E-books business.

Baseball-dedicated magazines have been around since time immemorial and – like every other magazine segment – they aren’t exactly killing it these days.  Baseball Digest, founded in 1942, recently downshifted to an 8x schedule from monthly, while the baseball-heavy Sporting News showed a 39% decline in ad pages for the first half of 2009.  The biggest players in sports magazines, Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine, saw ad pages down 28% and 31% respectively in Q1 2009.  (Curiously SI for Kids is one of only 11 magazinesthat showed an ad page increase so far this year.)

MLB Insiders Club would need to bring something different to the table in order to succeed and what it promises is attractive: “Behind The Scenes looks into the clubhouse and front office of MLB teams” and “MLB Insiders Club Fantasy League Tips!”  First off, it’s surprising to hear that a major league would directly support fantasy leagues.  It would be a lucrative opportunity for a major sport league to get involved in fantasy leagues, but it’s also tantamount to supporting gambling – which has a history, especially in baseball, of being the worst crime a player or manager can commit.  One wonders if the MLB Powers That Be is aware that an official licensed product of this tacit endorsement.

As for “Behind The Scenes,” a review on Baseball Reflection reveals that the magazine practically begs for user-generated content.  The official license may get some access, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee more or better; the premiere issue features an interview with Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, but he’s probably MLB’s most open GM, frequently giving long interviews to blogs like Athletics Nation.  And if UGC is the majority of content, you can be pretty sure the fans mailing it in don’t have any special access.

MLB Insiders Club is published by North American Media Group, a company that specializes in niche media with a few key licenses, including the Professional Golf Association and History Channel.  In addition to magazines, it also pumps out expensive coffee table books.  So for $24/year, you get some indeterminate number of baseball magazines (they don’t say whether its monthly or what) and the opportunity to buy more books (or as the come-on says “Preview Great Books and DVD’s”).  Ouch.

Baseball’s marketing and media sophistication continue to be disappointing and well behind its rivals for attention in the NBA and NFL.  Few of MLB’s teams or players are involved in social networking, while Shaquille O’Neal is the world’s ninth most-followed twitterer (as of this writing) and the NFL has so many tweeters that it had to conjure a “No tweeting during games” policy.  When these other leagues and their team are putting together their communications strategies, they are way past trying to sell magazines to their best customers. With overall attendance down nearly 6% so far this year, MLB needs to do something to make itself more compelling – more necessary – to its fans.  A clever coordinated social networking policy would be an inexpensive, low-risk way to go, especially in light of the vitality of fantasy baseball – one of the original pre-Internet social networks.

More on point: yesterday the Giants E-mailed me an offer for $5 tickets for next week’s Pirates series for my “vote for Pablo.”  Now that’s something I can use.

Wallace’s philosophical bent – he cares deeply about Choice and Distraction in an era with too much of both -  is the source of running plots and discussions throughout IJ.  This led me to seek out some of his other more casual writing, which in turn me brought me to this commencement address posted on Scribd.  These are wise words, worth reflecting on in our media-saturated age.

(PS For those who are not in on Infinite Jest, 2009 is Y.D.A.U. because in the IJ-world, the US President has sold off calendar sponsorships to  pay off the debt from a toxic waste disaster that destroyed four New England states, which are then expatriated to Canada.   ‘Subsidized time’ pays off the lost tax revenue from those states.  This is but a passing story in a book full of shaggy dogs.  If that tickles you even a little, consider picking up a copy.)

Click on the “Toggle Full Screen” button at right for a better view:
David Foster Wallace Kenyon Address

The ‘hold-back’strategy is ridiculous and totally ignores how most readers actually use their books.  While E-Books only represent a small slice of total sales today (but growing fast), there’s little question that somebody willing to shell out $200-300 for a ‘reading device’ is likely to be a passionate reader.  As one of those, I would surmise that many of the sales on E-Readers are actually incremental to publishers’ income, keeping people like me away from used book stores and libraries.  That’s where the E-Books goldmine is for publishers: not in keeping existing sales but in diverting money away from long-standing secondary and ‘free’ markets.  While its true that publishers get a nice arbitrage gain from the de facto DRM of a first-edition hardback (tough to reproduce cheaply, tough to read freely in its reproductive form), that gain can in turn be picked up by the reader upon completing the book by selling it or trading it.  An E-Book edition is essentially non-transferable.  I pay less – and perhaps the publisher makes less – but its fungibility also destroys its secondary market value.

Take, for example, my current reading: Infinite Jest.  It’s been fifteen years since it was first published, so there are plenty of used copies out there for around $10 and libraries consistently stock it, while a new copy runs $16.  Because of its ease of delivery and portability, I elected to get the $10 Kindle edition with the publisher getting some profit and no incremental printing costs.  Had I purchased a used copy, I would likely have resold it later for half-price – meaning no profit for the publisher, virtual cost of only $5 to me and $10 profit to the used book store (for selling it twice at 50% profit).  So where is the advantage to the publisher in holding it back?  It’s simply ceded its ability to profit off of its back catalog.

This is one of the central mysteries of Kindle Store availability to date.  It features plenty of hot new titles, but the back catalog titles is still mysteriously empty with many major authors most famous works; Roth, Mailer, Pynchon, Heller and Updike just for starters.  Wouldn’t a great cut-rate selection be a great source of found profit with barely any incremental cost?  I understand there may be unanticipated contractual issues (a la last year’s Writer’s Strike over web royalties), but the longer they wait, the more the price will drive towards Zero (as it did for the music industry and iTunes).  Already sites like ebooksbay.org are popping up with ‘free’ back titles.  (I found a fully convertible PDF copy of Gravity’s Rainbow last weekend.  There goes a lost sale.)

On this very same day by coincidence, Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future Of A Radical Price was released for free on Kindle and immediately shot up to #1 on the Kindle sales chart.  I’ll leave his argument for other bloggers, but in Anderson’s eyes, he’s able to do this because he (and presumably his publisher and agent and c.) can use it as a platform to make money other ways: speaking fees, leverage at his job, increased opportunities generally.  This is also the direction the music industry has taken with its ‘360-degree’ contracts for its biggest artists; Live Nation taking a cut of all of an artist’s revenue streams, from ticket sales to licensing.  The book publishing industry needs to figure out its ‘Freemium’ strategy quickly.  As a post on Mashable points out this morning, not all Free business models are created equally.  People will pay (as I have done with IJ) for convenience or added value.  What can book publishers bring to the table?  Figuring this out quickly before E-Readers become commonplace – look for them to spread like wildfire among textbook-toting students – is absolutely urgent for an industry that’s lived off the same industrial-based business model for hundreds of years.

One of the things I most looked forward to in my Kindle was the magazine store.� For a fraction of the cover price in most cases, the full text of a magazine is quickly and seamlessly downloaded to your Kindle.� If you order a subscription, each new issue supposedly turns up automatically upon publishing.

For publishers, you�d think this would be a great deal: distribute a copy with no physical costs, satisfy your hungriest readers, allow inexpensive sampling and get a few more eyeballs on the advertising.� (Disclosure: I have no idea what Amazon�s deal points are with publishers.)

In its actual use, however, the Kindle Store seems to be doing everything possible to frighten away new potential readers.� The Kindle Store, from which every issue is sold, is a neglected sad piece of real estate that does little to provoke buying.

First, KS forgets the basics of single copy sales: featuring what�s actually in an issue.� Instead of that week�s cover lines and an illustration, you get a narrative of what the magazine�s history and its mission statement.� So instead of buying Newsweek with this review and that think piece and such-and-such�s guest column, you�re faced with a black box.

The review system doesn�t help either.� It appears to be entirely unmoderated.� I found one one-star review that said I love the magazine but I�m canceling to save money.� How is that a review of issue content?

On such a small screen, of course I don�t expect the full featured infographics that are the one true unimpeachable USP of magazines, but I was surprised to get no illustrations whatsoever. The New York Times is able to provide photo lead-ins for its Kindle-formatted issues, why can�t The Atlantic?

Finally, the pricing structure is bizarre.� A single issue of Newsweek at 49 cents is an awesome bargain.� But The Atlantic charges a monthly fee even though it does not publish monthly; it�s a 10x.� Worst of all, the just-added Economist has a single issue price of $5.49, which pretty much says Stay Away, Do Not Buy Me in the competitive arena of the Store.� I�d also saw the discrepancy makes its competitors also look like it does not value its content highly enough since there are no ad impressions attached at this point.� I appreciate that the pricing is probably set by the publishers, but some iTunes-style guiding hand could help a lot here.

I know the Kindle DX is supposed to amending many of these issues with its larger screen and greater graphic capabilities, but expecting me to pay $480 to get a better magazine delivery system is just not going to happen.� In the meantime, Amazon should spend a little time in the Kindle Store making the magazines and newspapers a little more enticing.� You know, with marketing.

Though we do miss him a little, it�s also something of a relief to have moved on from one of my proxies for unemployment depression. I suspect from the picture below that he might miss me a little, too, but I�m calling this a happy ending for us and a great new beginning for Walter.

This is Walter as I found him wandering alone in the Oakland hills.
The photo on the left was taken just minutes after I managed to coax him on leash.
Weight: 13.5 pounds

Two weeks later – neutered, eye surgery, haircut, two squares a day and a little love.
Weight: 15.1 pounds

How ’bout that?

I still stumble across the Contact entries of departed friends and family in my phone and my various electronic address books.  To delete them feels disrespectful, but honestly when will I need these again? When is it OK to unfriend the dead?

Dolla was one of Twitter's hottest topics on May 19. "Hmmm, how can we monetize that?"

All of this unpleasantness brings me to this post’s real topic. Especially in the face of 8.9% unemployment, there has been considerable discussion lately over online reputation management. Sure, we know not to put up pictures of partying and other hijinks. But the ultimate uncomfortable social network question faces all of us participants: blogging and micro-blogging our private lives and thoughts, registered and active on any number of social network sites, what happens to all this stuff when you die?(And remember, death never comes at a convenient time.)

This is no small problem for media companies and people actively involved in self-branding and promotion. The rapper Dolla, who was murdered earlier this week, had just opened a Twitter account and posted his first tweets. His MySpace page (56,000+ friends) has no mention of his passing except RIP notes from his fan base, while a couple of telephone promotions still feature his voice hyping his latest single. (Try dialing (678) 500-8475 to hear Dolla speak from beyond the grave.) This is no small problem for his record company, which is still presumably going to try to shift a few units of his upcoming album.  The sheer volume of tweets after the news got out should be encouraging to those who still want to make dollas off Dolla.

Vote for Nick!

Major League Baseball has a terrific series of unified web sites packed with all the information you could ever want (assuming you’re not a Baseball Prospectus type). When Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart was suddenly killed earlier this season, the folks who run the MLB web sites were faced with the task of stripping all his information respectfully from the network. Unfortunately there were a couple of embarrassing cases where his name was missed and remained on the site – most egregiously, as of May 19 on MLB’s official news site, Adenhart was still touted as an up-and-coming pitching prospect.

(MLB also made the curious decision to cease selling Adenart’s name on customized jerseys. Possibly respectful, but also cutting off an avenue for fans to pay tribute. In fairness, this also prevents using Adenhart as a political statement, having been killed by a drunk driver.’ Imagine a ballpark MADD/Adenhart protest and you can (possibly) understand that MLB would not want its brands involved.’ Beer is a pretty big sponsor of all things MLB.)

So what about the rest of us? Looking over at my links over on the right-hand sidebar, I have nine social media sites that I actively use and there are several others that I’ve abandoned without pulling down my pages. If I were to disappear tomorrow, what would be my legacy? My tweets? My blog? I would hope not, but the reality is this is the best evidence of my existence, especially to friends and others that I don’t see on a regular basis (which is, what, 75%+ of most folks’ Facebook friends?)’ And what should I do about it?

One company believes it has the answer.’ Deathswitch promises to send out an E-mail upon your death, which could include your passwords, final wishes or (most tantalizingly) the last word in an argument.’ A premium account would prompt as many as 30 different mails sent to your friends, enemies and other interested parties.

The simplest thing is to do what you should do for all your interests: make sure that your loved ones know what you want done with this stuff.  Recognizing that your reputation may be it when you leave ‘ and that your reputation may be founded entirely on your public life make taking care of your online presence an essential part of your tending to your legacy. And since the health of social media depends on pages of user-generated content creating advertising platforms – at least that’s what it is today – you may wish to consider if you want an ad on your electronic tombstone.

Further Reading

• Wikihow – How to Share Your Obituary with Your Online Friends
• Barefeet Studios – Death, Social Media, Personal Branding

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VqXqWJHHDU

And then things get even tougher when you lose one of the second of your two best players to a broken foot, as Yao Ming did in Game 3.� Although the Lakers lacked the killer instinct to put away the Rockets, even after a horrible 40-point beatdown in Game 5, the theories on offer in the Michael Lewis article did not seem possible to apply after that point.

One of the hottest topics in sports player management over the last decade has been whether the scientific approach to roster-building really creates competitive advantage.� I had hoped this series would bring some light to its relative chances at success in the NBA.� What it ultimately proved – again – is that the playoffs are still a crapshoot with any team having a 45% chance of winning on a given night, especially when emotions and injuries throw one team off its game.

Further reading: Why Don’t The A’s Win in October?� (or “Why Doesn’t Billy Beane’s S*** Work in the Playoffs?”)

My bet – or, as last as things move these days, this month’s bet – is that we’ll start to see a merging of the forms.

As Malcolm Gladwell writes in this week’s New Yorker, the biggest handicap that underdogs give themselves is engaging in competition on the terms of the stronger party.  An underdog’s chance of victory nearly triples if it finds a way to not play the game.  Right now newspapers – whether they admit it or not – find themselves the underdog for information distribution but still (so far) the best at obtaining information.  So why do they insist on sharing the same distribution models as their potential destroyers?

The New York Times' new reader uses AIR capabilities to flow text and show video. (Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

The New York Times is one of the best at this.  To my knowledge, it was the first with a dedicated iPhone application, it looks great on a Kindle, and its new Adobe AIR format is simply spectacular.  Still, as everyone knows, the Times is hurting and in talks with everyone from Google to Geffen to find a suitor.

So instead of wringing our hands about public trusts and eroding institutions, perhaps we should be asking of our Third Estate “What can you do to adapt?” Something basic to your business model that doesn’t play to the other guys’strength?  Here are a few I’ve thought about:

• Does it really need to be daily? If people are already receiving a stream of real-time news everywhere they go and at their desks, do newspapers need to be real-time, too?  Local ‘alternatives’ with a more magazine-like format and deeper stories like the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly are well positioned to take over many of the essential local functions of a newspaper – and with lower circulation, their ad rates are less prohibitive, meaning they get the bar, restaurant and nightlife ads that are essentially blocked from big dailies.  Reliance on major retailers to be your biggest advertisers is a recipe for death in an era where retail doors will close continuously, like, forever.  (But what about the recent SF/LA closure of The Onion?  I’ll address that in a minute.)
• Does the news need to lead? Every news site has a ‘Most Frequently Viewed’ or ‘Most Frequently E-Mailed’feature.� It’s very rare that the top stories, even on the most serious sites, are today’s news. (Or as SFist notes about the Huffington Post today:  Boobies.  Boobies. Boobies. Boobies. Boob.)  I would hate to see our locals ignore the news, but why couldn’t it be treated like a magazine cover  with offers of advice, news coverage, quizzes… Things that reel the reader in.Here are today’s SF Chronicle leads:
  * A stricter, drier Bay to Breakers
  * Craigslist cuts ‘erotic services’ section
  * If state cuts too deep, it loses stimulus funds
  * Senate testimony sheds light on alleged torture
  * Young boost diversity as population agesSeriously, not a single one of these lines would sell a magazine at the checkstand.  No editorial viewpoint expressed, no help offered – simply no answer to Why Buy?  Why not feature elements from throughout the paper?  ”Take your medicine, it’s good for you” doesn’t work for marketers in any other industry, including medicine.  Why is it the norm here?
• Does it need to be shaped like a newspaper? Why not a glossy cover?  Billions of magazines have done just fine that way.  In particular, I;m a fan of The Atlantic and The New Yorker’s newsstand strategy: a single compelling image with a flap violator that entices the reader to pick up the magazine and look inside.
• Can it be targeted better than “It’s local, it’s yours”? In printing ‘All The News That Fits’, newspapers lose the single biggest weapon a marketer has: the freedom to select an audience.  It’s wonderful that the Chronicle tries to express the region’s diversity and interests, but I think it’s fair to say that the news interests of, for example, a 70-year old woman in the Sunset and a 25-year old man in The Mission are very different.  So how come the same information in the same format is being sold to both?  Using copy splits, could different front pages go to different neighborhoods – and not just regional sections to outlying areas?
  It’s also worth noting that this could open up new revenue streams.  In my opinion, one of the seeds of the demise of The Onion in SF/LA is that it didn’t take the thinly-veiled prostitution ads that are easy money for the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly.  With CraigsList now discontinuing those same ads, that’s a lot of advertising cash set free.  Where will it go?Well, if you had a well-targeted newspaper that didn’t need to worry about offending its audience with certain content/ads, you just might be able to scoop it up.  So, yes, I’m imagining a world where Candy TS Outcalls replaces Macy’s.)
• Further, why is it serving so much of the area? In an era when advertisers pay more for the specificity of an audience, why is the San Francisco Chronicle the leading paper of Contra Costa County?  And Oakland?  And most of remote Northern California?  Surely some of these readers are more profitable than others.  And those that aren’t can get their news somewhere else.
• Does every copy need to have the same content? When I received the Sunday paper, the first thing I did every week was throw away 50% or more of it.  Why not allow a la carte sections?
• Is it automatic for its customers – and especially its best ones? Mark Cuban – who got me thinking about this originally and reels off another thousand or so ideas in his blog post on the subject – points out that his local paper was blowing one of the very basic elements of keeping him engaged: pricing policies.  Aside from receiving no volume discount, Cuban says that the billing policies discourage people from staying involved.  Why aren’t subscriptions annual = or far more?  In the core areas, closest to the printer and the most attractive identified customers, especially those that own their home and are less likely to move, why not offer 5 years, 10 years, even a lifetime subscription?
• Finally, what unique advantages can newspapers bring to ‘real-time’ media? Yes, there’s still an opportunity for symmetric warfare for newspapers.  My old colleague Sebastian Provencher at Praized Media recently blogged on just this with regard to the Yellow Pages, but it applies equally well to local papers.  His 2300-word post on real-time information flow between local merchants and customers should be required reading for local media outlets that seeks to make its revenue from being an intermediary in these relationships.  You should have a look, but I can boil it down to one tantalizing word: souq.

I’m curious for your thoughts on this since I know my few readers are newspaper lovers, too.  Don’t forget to comment!

I found this guy alone by a shade tree in a not-so-remote area of Anthony Chabot Regional Park.� Covered with bugs and filth, I took about 15 minutes to convince him that I could leash him.� I brought him back to the horse stables where he was immediately surrounded by children.� Patiently and tiredly, he let them pet him with hardly a trace of aggression. Now he’s here at my feet, a mellow slightly scared guy.

Thanks to the folks at Montclair Veterinary Hospital, he’ll be neutered on Tuesday and his cherry eyes will be repaired, all for free.� I’ll be fostering him until I figure out the right rescue agency.

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world. When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you’re it!

When I sat down to write this, I thought in terms of the albums that helped me learn how to listen, to form a critical opinion, or opened new worlds avenues & possibilities and so forth. By its nature, then, these 15 albums may not necessarily represent desert island discs, favorite artists, or even the best of a particular artist. In a couple of cases, I don’t even particularly enjoy the album any more though I can still catch the whiff of thrill I felt when I first heard it.

I started with about 50 albums and ruthlessly edited until only 15 remained. Most of the late scratches were albums where I felt that the one that made the final list already epitomized something in common between those albums; examples include Power Lies and Corruption edging out Seventeen Seconds and Remain In Light. (I didn’t say it made sense, I just said it was.)

And so, in rough chronological order:

THE ROLLING STONES, Their Satanic Majesties Request – It’s absurd and in points unlistenable, but to a 4-year old with a close-n-play it’s mysterious and full of whimsy, from the playful idolatrous cover art to the nonsense psychedelia of the songs. I would listen closely, scrutinizing every note cough mumble; it seemed so important to decode it. Though just a curiosity today, it has some of the Stones’ loveliest pop songs before they went on to become the raw, bluesy world-beating band they were over the next 10 years.
PS The remaster sounds amazing.

THE WHO, Tommy – It’s full of filler and the story is absurd, grotesque and more than a little offensive. For me, though, it unlocked the idea that rock could tell a story and that the different instruments could be expressive of character and ideas. On that basis, it beat the hell out of the “Young People’s Guide To The Orchestra” or “Peter & The Wolf.” And the playing still knocks me out. I’ll put Underture up against anything as one of the great instrumental performances.

THE BEATLES, The White Album (for this is what it should be called) –  This list would not be complete without any Beatles, a band that I devoured well into my teens. I don’t think is their best nor is it my favorite – it contains the very worst efforts by all four of them – but its very density makes it the one that I still find the most fascinating – a real songwriters’ battle royale. Oddly, I think my two favorite Beatles albums today may actually be solo albums: Ram and All Things Must Pass. (Bing! Snooty rock critic alert!)

PUBLIC IMAGE, LTD, Metal Box / Second Edition – How did we get there from here? Coming in a bit late for punk, this was my one of my first pick-ups of the genre. But really it couldn’t be further from punk; the trebly in-your-face pop-based guitars replaced by a dominant dubby danceable beats. It was scary and invigorating to hear something so released from pop form but still essentially fun to listen to. I’m sure this set me up for both techno and reggae as I discovered them later.

BRIAN ENO, Ambient 1: Music For Airports – I bought this off the in-store turntable at Leopold’s. (What strange self-absorbed 12-year old does that? [raises hand] That would be me.) But this album was freeing in so many ways. Free from composition & structure. Free from noise. Free from pop and conventional song structure. Yet it was peaceful and engaging. Plus it came with instructions for setting up your speakers properly.

GANG OF FOUR, Entertainment! – Even though the songs, polemics and unique performances are this album’s most obvious attributes, the affirmation I got from Gang Of Four came from what people – especially Greil Marcus – wrote and felt about them. I started reading Marcus in my parents’ copies of New West magazine while he was plowing through many of the same touchstones I was running into working at Universal Records in Berkeley. From this experience – and kudos to my mother the Art History major, too – I learned about art criticism and how it could add value to my experience to be a critical listener, question the narrator’s motivation and look for themes in the music that go beyond the obvious strands of plot. Who needed English class?

KRAFTWERK, Computer World – It seems so tame now in the face of the booming techno genre, but when this came out in 1981, absolutely nothing sounded like this. All synthetic and machinist, yet hinting at underlying humanity. It bespoke a world of machines whispering too each other constantly night day, sharing our secrets. I remember a day in 1993 temping for a bank when I realized that all the machines were secretly connected. The buzz of the wires suddenly seemed alive to me. Kraftwerk foresaw all that and more on this album. Plus, funky as all get out.

NEW ORDER, Power, Corruption & Lies – A transition out of the dark post-punk noise and stifled emotion back into passion and pop. Not to mention my cassette had Blue Monday tacked on as a bonus, the pinnacle sonic achievement of the whole early 80s era without doubt.

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS, Get Happy! (Part 2 here) – 20 perfect pop songs sung & played furiously by a drug-fueled genius with sparks flying out of his head every which way. Most importantly, though, Get Happy led me to explore the album’s true roots, the sounds of classic soul. I dove deeply and found a rich vein of Americana that still remains one of my easiest sources of joy.

MARVIN GAYE, Anthology – Which leads me here. Even singing silly love songs, was there ever a more compelling voice? I thought I could sing – I still think I can sing a bit – but this just humbles me. It humbles everyone! There was a night in freshman dorm when a friend and I got stoned and put on “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”  We were totally halted in what we were doing, compelled as the voice crashed in, forcing us to Stop and…just listen. I don’t think any other singer ever did that to me so convincingly.

PREFAB SPROUT, Two Wheels Good / Steve McQueen – I was 19 and scared of life, it’s about being 19 and scared of life. (A recent Pop Matters essay guesses that it’s secretly a failed concept album about masculinity.) And as pop songwriting goes, it’s perfection, on par with any you can think of. Light and deep at the same time, as all great pop trifles should be

MILES DAVIS, Kind Of Blue – It’s nothing but a cliche to say that this, the most popular jazz album of all time, opened me to the genre (see, for example, the stoner brother chapter of ‘Sometimes A Great Notion’). It’s embarrassing, like saying “I love reggae, yeah, I’ve got Bob Marley;s Legend and UB40. What, Bob Marley had other records? Sly & who?”  But you know what? Kind Of Blue is that good.
PS In A Silent Way was a late scratch for this list, but I thought Brian Eno and Miles Davis together did enough to fill the same intellectual spot on the list.

PUBLIC ENEMY, Fear Of A Black Planet – Taking the formula of tight James Brown beats and infringing chaos as far as it could go, this album brought down the curtain on the first great age of sampling and hip-hop. It’s a mess, but for sheer sonic inventiveness it’s a pinnacle of the form. Not to mention that in a time of great urban strife, Fear Of A Black Planet sounded like a sonic representation of the horrible crack epidemic striking at the cities I lived in and a bellwether for the shocking racial incidents to come in the next few years.

GUIDED BY VOICES, Bee Thousand – The album that launched me to a thousand shows, or so it seemed like. But really for me it was a return to rock after years & years away. Buried under the fuzz and half-baked ideas, a great classic rock band struggled to break free – which indeed was what happened when they performed live. In a renaissance period for American indie rock, this was the album that led me back to it.

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, Vrioon – There’s a weird moment during power cuts when the silence blooms and you realize how much static & white noise you are forced to live within, both from the environment and from within. This album expresses both the silence and the buzz – and does both with beauty and surprising emotiveness.

As a Golden State Warriors fan – and admittedly a fair-weather one – I could not have found the 2008-09 NBA season much duller or depressing. The play of this uninspired, oft-injured squad and its possibly insane coach drove me well away from following the team despite a raft of discount ticket offers. My inner Assistant General Manager, though, is entirely intrigued by the playoff series opening tomorrow night: the clearly-best-in-the-league Los Angeles Lakers against the Houston Rockets.

Shane Battier defending Kobe Bryant

This story starts back in February when the New York Times Magazine published “The No-Stats All-Star“ by Michael Lewis. One of my favorite writers for his ability to cross great business writing with incisive observation about sports and its hidden-in-plain-sight economy, Lewis had previously written on applying market theory in baseball (Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game) and football (The Blind Side: The Evolution Of A Game – excerpt).

The NYT article centered on the Houston Rockets and in particular Shane Battier, who is used as an example of how basketball statistics are enormously deceptive by only depicting production with the ball. As he’d done so well in his previous books, Lewis makes the argument that glamor statistics like points per game, rebounds and so forth don’t necessarily show how much a player actually helps its team earn what really counts: wins. The Rockets have put together a team of statisticians to develop metrics for what truly produces wins. With those metrics in hand, they targeted Battier, a well-regarded player who had some tough seasons with the woeful Memphis Grizzlies, but had a record otherwise of always playing with winners. I’ll leave the statistical discussion to Lewis’s article, which I highly recommend, but suffice it to say that the Rockets’ stats-based defensive theory is to learn where opposing players become the least efficient on the floor.

The story was published in February. Before Los Angeles played Houston on March 11th, master motivator Laker Coach Phil Bradley showed Kobe this passage:

The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard [Kobe] Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off.  ”The Lakers offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,” [Rockets General Manager] Morey says. “But if Shane is on him, it isn’t.”  A player Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest – and smartest – offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.

Sure enough, Kobe put up 37 points with 16 in the fourth quarter alone (albeit with Ron Artest guarding him, not Battier)  to lead the Lakers to a 102-96 come-from-behind win.

So now we get a week or two of this matchup. Not to denigrate the Rockets, which fields two other great defenders in Artest and Yao Ming, but this should be an interesting test of schemes versus skills and of statistical gambits versus the NBA’s most successful coach. If this goes the Rockets’ way, expect a sea change in the way NBA franchises run their teams in the very near future.

Personally, I’m rooting for the Rockets. In reading Lewis’s article, it was apparent that my hometown Warriors are definitely not users of any kind of statistical theory in evaluating its talent or running a game. Warriors forward Stephen Jackson was spotlighted for his bizarre tendency: [He] “is statistically better going to his right, but he loves to go to his left – and goes to his left almost twice as often.)”  Instead the Warriors rely on a well-loved ex-player to run its front office – with disastrous contracts thrown at players of ‘good character’ – and a coach who appears to run the team more on feeling, fear and witchcraft than good sense. Please, Warriors, take a note.

As anyone who follows media knows by now, magazines have been hit with a triple-witching the last few years: collapsing CPMs for even the most difficult-to-target audiences (in light of the targeting capabilities of the Internet) and plus collapsing advertising page sales; slackening demand; and rising distribution costs.

The big bellwether is now upon us.� Conde Nast, really the last of the big-spending believers in magazine, first quietly packed off Domino and a few other titles and, more dramatically, this week closed Portfolio, for which the company had reportedly spent over $100mm to launch.� (Portfolio was a poorly-timed entry – a well-written glamor magazine about business caught up in, well, now.� But it was also schizophrenic.� Despite being targeted at business elite, it was also weirdly basic; a column in the first issue, for example, explained how interest rates work[?!?!].)

While most attention has been paid to falling ad pages, it�s really the CPM problem that most fundamentally egs the question of whether the magazine industry will get anywhere close to its old business model ever again.� Publishers formerly charged $30-100 to reach a hard-to-reach passionate target � say, ukulele players � while now that CPM on AdWords is not just catastrophically lower but also available by auction.� In other words, not just the price is better; it�s the buying process, too, with better information creating a more efficient market.

So what for magazines to do?� The most obvious choice is simply to start charging readers, which is what many of the newsweeklies are now trying to do.� Any subscriber to Wired can see that they are getting their magazines at a steep unprofitable discount.� ($12 for 12 issues written, designed, printed and mailed?� Probably more like $30.� Printing and postage alone is probably well more than $1.25 per copy.� I�ve long said that Conde Nast magazines are one of the great bargains of American life, like home plumbing and the US mail.)

But the reality is that it�s going to be a very hard road to convince readers to pay after being trained into receiving content for free (the Internet) or near-free (magazines) for their entire lives, no matter how great the reporting or photography.� In the face of low demand, we�ll see massive changes in how these magazines work in the next few years � maybe months.

Another possible answer could come from the manufacturing side.� The biggest challenge with magazine business models as they stand stems from their battleship-turning nature.� It takes a long time to build circulation to get to a saleable advertising proposition; it takes an equally long time to deflate that unprofitable circulation when the ads dry up.� (This is why you’ll see big circ magazines like George suddenly disappear.)

HP recently debuted a service called MagCloud that could potentially democratize the industry by allowing easy creation of micro-targeted magazines � for example, not just for the ukulele player but for left-handed ukulele players living in the Midwest. A more nimble manufacturing process could allow more short-term plays; imagine for example �100 Days� magazine to follow the excitement around the new President, killing it just as readers start to tire of it.� Magazines may survive in fact by forgetting about brand-building and going after hot content.� In short, a return to the tabloid times of our Founding Fathers.�� More on this in a coming post.

Joba Chamberlain opens the second game ever at the new Yankee Stadium. Empty seats outnumber specators in the exclusive areas behind home plate and the dugouts. (Flickr / Fansherpa)

With all the fuss over the empty luxury seats at the new Yankee Stadium, I was mildly surprised to find something similar happening in my own backyard.  At Sunday’s A’s-Rays game at the Oakland Coliseum, all the ingredients for a great day at the ballyard were in place: sunny April weather, last year’s AL champions in town and a Sunday afternoon.  What we found instead was a micro-market in disarray.  As the credit markets teetered last October, the market for sports tickets has apparently fallen apart as well.

The first indication there was a problem was the total lack of online ticketing activity.  There were practically no offers on CraigsList, even from brokers, and none at all on eBay.  At the walk-up ticket booth, we found that we could buy any section in the house, including the Diamond Level.  This should simply never be the case. The Diamond Level is a very limited “VIP” area, maybe 60 seats tops, right behind the plate on the playing field level.  Seats go for $225 and include free food and drink service for the whole game.

Weirdest of all was the scene inside the stadium.  The A’s bifurcate each of the two seating levels – a minimum of two pricing levels in each deck.  In both decks, there was a cluster of people behind the plate, emptiness for several sections as the seating moved along the infield, another cluster in the sections where the new pricing tier begins, again fading to nothing.

The mystery is why shouldn’t the people forced out to the outfield be able to sit in these empty “mezzo-sections.”  The answer could come from a nimble dynamic pricing system at game time.  As airlines like Virgin and JetBlue have discovered with exit rows sold at check-in, why not ask fans as they arrive if they would like to purchase a better seat for an extra few dollars?  It would be an easy thing to equip ushers with Palm-style barcode and credit card machines like those carried by the clerks at The Apple Store.  Everybody gets the opportunity to move closer (or elect not to), getting rid of the weird empty spaces and (I’m assuming) presenting a better, more invigorating environment for the home team.  (I know they’re supposed to ignore the crowd, but ask any actor or musician if they’d rather play to a full orchestra than have the front rows empty and the crowd loosely dispersed.)

Meanwhile across the bay, the Giants are trying out a number of dynamic pricing policies.  First, the team partnered up with a firm to build elastic pricing around its unsold inventory for the least attractive games. Last week, though, came the real reckoning – and a big indication that the team is running scared about its attendance.  Ticket prices were dropped 40% for the Giants series this week against the Dodgers, traditionally the most attractive opponent.  Granted the team is trying to stir up interest for later in the year – it appears they’ll be competitive in a moderately challenging division – but to have to do this so early and against the team’s best natural rivarly is surprising.  One wonders how scared the Giants are about advance sales for the rest of the year.

In the Oakland A’s case, the lack of a fluid ticket market is framed by the fact that the Oakland Coliseum is a horrible dump, getting dumpier every day.  The tarps in the third deck look weathered and depressing, while the bathrooms, parking lot and facilities remain some of the worst for a major league sport.  Nevertheless the empty seat patterns – along with all the unsold display ad inventory throughout the stadium – are clear indications that baseball is not recession-proof.  There are easy ways to make profit from making markets more efficient.  Let’s see if the A’s and their brethren take up the challenge.

Quaker Oats, one of America�s great venerable supermarket products, staged a complete relaunch of its brand over the last two months.� The campaign has won kudos both for its general positivity in these otherwise dark times � sick of bailout-themed ads yet? � but also for the way that it reframes oats as a �power food.�� That is indeed a new, compelling USP for the brand and subtly introduces the idea of value as a �bang for the buck� food.�

A closer look shows something else: a new emphasis on �bang for the buck� marketing.� By bringing all of its product lines under a single campaign, however big or expensive, Quaker must be saving here, there and everywhere on its promotional and internal costs.� The most obvious way is the now-gone requirement to discretely support each of its panoply of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats, Quaker Quick Oats, Quaker Instant Oatmeal, Quaker Oatmeal Squares and on & on.� It also means potential reductions in tmarketing personnel, in-store marketing, graphic staff (fewer executions), agency support,�and so forth.� One wonders once the initial advertising launch blast is over with where the savings will go: into the product (reaching consumers) or simply as a hedge against falling revenue.��

Either way Quaker looks smart.� The company gets a new convincing USP out there, it cuts costs and � as James Surowiecki points out in this week�s New Yorker � finds a way to keep innovating and marketing in the throes of the recession.�

�a major study, by the Strategic Planning Institute, of corporate behavior during the past thirty years found that reducing ad spending during recessions did improve companies� return on capital. It also meant, though, that they grew less quickly in the years following recessions than more free-spending competitors did.

The Quaker Oats campaign may be a bellwether for the overall marketing economy. As long as we see only one campaign for all its many products � I count 30 currently on its web site � we�ll know that US brands are still in cost-cutting mode.� But when the company starts to support its individual brand lines again � especially though general advertising, not just couponing and in-store marketing � then we can surmise that it�s sufficiently confident that spending is rising again.�

A number of commentators have remarked that these CDs may represent the last great CD release, a tombstone for a dying format.� Based on Aerosmith�s phenomenal success with Guitar Hero, which made the band more money than any of their albums, the CDs are not the real reason we�ll be seeing this push.� In that case, why not just put out The Beatles Rock Band out this year and then create another major marketing push for the CDs (or DVDs or downloads or what have you) in 2010?

My hunch is that The Beatles currently available CDs � rushed on to the market with barely a remix in the late �80s � were too lo-fi as they stood to be released on to machines providing high-fidelity experience like Xbox 360�s or PlayStation 3�s.� All of my friends who play Rock Band-like games have their consoles hooked to their stereos, not just their tiny TV speakers.� And when played after the loud, bright, often surround mixes demanded by these environments, The Beatles recordings will sound at best mid-rangy and at their worst completely colorless.� Through 1966, all the vocals were on one channel, the instruments on the other, which means that all the new Stereo and Surround mixes to come will be 2009 inventions.

So as the sonic quality comes up to par, expect not just a Beatles marketing blitz, but perhaps a whole re-evaluation of their work and ability as musicians – not to mention, a huge online war between the purists who think the 2009 stereo remastering paints a mustache on Mona Lisa and others who feel like �we�re hearing The Beatles for the very first time.�� (Another rank unfairness against their brethren like the Rolling Stones and The Who, both of whom put out fantastic-sounding remasterings chock full of extras earlier this decade to little fanfare.)

Another prediction: expect new respect for Ringo�s contributions.

Wired

The only hook here is that (ostensibly) it’s about the music business.� It isn’t; no insights whatsoever into its demise.� Oh, sure, the suits don’t feel the soul of the product; executives playing out of position make poor decisions; changes in technology can overwhelm a company.� But this is news? Really, this is just a litany about working a crap office job — and you can go to a cocktail party and find that story any day.

So bad, it makes me not trust Wired‘s book reviews ever again.� Nice work, Wired.

Fresh skunk does not smell anything like the mildly unpleasant musk you occasionally pick up driving down the street. It is insanely intense. Imagine eating a large moist purple onion while standing next to a pile of burning tires and you’re about halfway there.

The tire smell is especially tricky; it seems more like an artificial chemical solvent than anything borne of nature. Because of the solvent reek, in our tizzy we made a bad mental leap: “it’s not skunk, she’s been maced by someone trying to break into the house!” Which led us to our a series of mistakes…

1. Do not bring the dog in the house
2. Do not pour water over the dog
3. Do not call the vet in a panic — they’ll tell you to come in because you sound panicked
4. Do not put the nearest set of clothes to go to the vet; these will now be trash
5. Do not put the dog in the car

The vet shooed us away as fast as they could and gave us the magic combination to get the stink off the dog (hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, Dawn). But by then the damage was done and the dog was the only thing left on the property that didn’t reek.

When we picked up the elements of the dog-cleaning kit from Safeway, the checkout clerk took one look at our haul and asked us if we had a dog that got hit by a skunk. How’d she know that? Attacks are so common in Oakland this time of year that the recipe was posted in the break room. They left that bit out of the disclosures when we moved over here.

The only place you’ll see this kind of guy today is on late night infomercials – or getting ready to call on a VC about his new web site.� In a big box retail world, it’s hard to imagine the Frisbee even making it past the buyer, much less becoming a large-enough hit that each home would have several.

In the first year, Wham-O sold as many as 40 million hoops; by 1960, 100 million, a mark no other toy had ever reached. After too many households had two or three of the hoops, the fad evaporated, leaving Wham-O marooned on a mountain of tubular plastic. Total profit: only $10,000, a result of business inexperience and millions of unsold hoops.

�We completely lost control,� Mr. Knerr told Forbes magazine in 1982.

The Hula Hoop financial debacle was unusual, however. The company had done, and would do, considerably better on products like the Frisbee, for which it bought the rights, streamlined and named. Brought to market in 1957, the Frisbee became a lasting diversion, and even the basis of competitive sports, some of which Wham-O invented.

Other Wham-O brainstorms included the exceedingly bouncy SuperBall, the Water Wiggly sprinkler, the Slip �N Slide water slide, the Limbo Game and Silly String, a seemingly endless stream of liquid that hardened after being expelled from an aerosol can, all too often in a child�s hair.

New York Times: Richard Knerr, 82, Craze Creator, Dies

Over a month ago, Amanda Stokes went missing about three blocks from my house.� Posters are up all over the neighborhood.

SFGate: Homicide police join search for Oakland woman missing since Nov. 25

Back in June, the Supreme Court issued its decision invoking Brown v Board Of Education to end racial quota systems in Louisville and Seattle public schools. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, legal support of diversity is a an assumptive underpinning of our lives that anyone born from 1965 forward has had to take for granted.The reaction dramatized what a swing this was:

As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his blistering dissent, this decision “upsets settled expectations, creates legal uncertainty, and threatens to produce considerable further litigation, aggravating race-related conflict.” Judge John Paul Stevens went further, noting the “cruel irony” in the majority opinion’s evocation of Brown v. the Board of Education as justification for its position, proclaiming that “it is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”

Regardless of whether you think this decision good or bad, it’s still a fascinating twist in our recent history, and that twist is the subject of Jeffrey Toobin’s new book The Nine: Inside The Secret World Of The Supreme Court. Using the same style Bob Woodward uses to mixed effect in his books — top to bottom sources speaking without attribution — Toobin paints a colorful, if incomplete feeling, view of the last 15 years of the Court’s life. The color comes from the obvious high level of access he had to certain of the Justices or their top staffers (especially O’Connor, Souter and Scalia) , while the incompleteness stems from the sense that other of the Justices were less willing to participlate (Thomas, Stevens, Roberts and Alito).

The book’s core thesis is that the Supreme Court, as one might fear, is led more by ideology than legal sense. Of course, this on its face is not surprising when any Court vote, with the same set of facts before it and high level of intellect applied, can lead to a wide variety of opinions on the same issue. The Nine‘s true value is in tracing the story of how the Court (and its people) moved from left to right on so many issues and basic tenets in the last few years, from reliable protector of certain attitudes about privacy, liberty and a certain style of government to something far less willing to support these assumptions in the years ahead. It also clearly demonstrates that the centrists still hold the true power in the Court, though because of the hyper-political climate around Court nominees, the number of centrists is declining over time.

Toobin misses the chance to be explicit about the biggest implication of the rise of the Roberts Court. This book is really about the dismantling of the last line of defense of the New Deal. It also could have used one last edit-rinse (at least four times we are told that Souter’s judicial heroes are Harlan and Hand), but it I’m pleased to report that he also clearly and efficiently explains the contentious legal issues behind recent key cases.

All in all, The Nine is a valuable read for anyone who wants to understand the often-eccentric people behind the Court and how the institution uses its power.

Excerpts at CNN

• How conservatives won the court back
• O’Connor led the court on abortion
• Bush v. Gore marks high court’s low point
• Court rewrites the law on gay rights
• 2008 election will define court’s future

I am a Sweeney Todd geek. I’m not entirely sure why I begged my parents to take me to the original Broadway production in 1979 with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, but I did and it was a major event in my life. That was the first time the power of theater was really brought home to me, even though I’d dallied in acting a bit. But that was just childish egotism… and this was art. Scary, loud art. I loved it.

Fast forward four years and my one of my best friends in high school was similarly impacted and has spent his life ever since following his dream of writing for the musical theater. This was, at the least, positive reinforcement that what I’d seen and felt was real. And Stephen Sondheim’s score for Sweeney Todd is now generally recognized as a pinnacle of the art form.

When the revival opened in New York in 2005, I tried to get to it on & off for nearly two years, finally seeing it a month before it closed in 2006. The sparse staging was everything I’d hoped for, with perhaps a greater commitment to playing up the base insanity of all the characters. Michael Cerveris, formerly of Bob Mould’s band, was a perfect Sweeney, physically scary and singing with gusto. Unfortunately Patti Lupone was off as Mrs. Lovett that night, but her understudy, Judy Kaye, later to own the part in the touring production, was suitable.

The revival came to ACT in San Francisco in 2007 and I had to go again. Twice. Suffice to say, I was not bored.

So I approached Tim Burton’s filmed version with Johnny Depp in the title role with trepidation. A non-singer, too young(?), too small(?). I was also afraid that Burton wound sand off all the edges and turn it into a goth-light entertainment: from mythic fury to fanciful fairy-tale.

The Good:

• Really, I never should have feared about Depp. He’s one of our greatest movie actors, and a huge part of that greatness comes from the physicality he brings to his roles. His physical and psychological intensity never wavers, his motivations coming across straight & true. In truth, he is not that different size- and age-wise from Len Cariou and George Hearn, who were the Sweeneys in the original 1979-80 NYC production.
• The play had to be cut a bit for length and they correctly got rid of the deadest bits — the numbers that skate by on the stage for their cleverness but add little to the story.
• Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall make great bad guys, though having seen Rickman in Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix earlier in the week made me think he was coasting a bit.
• The attention to detail on the sets & costumes is amazing. Just stunning.

The Bad:

• Helena Bonham Carter, on the other hand, is completely overmatched by the material. She doesn’t have the energy or the voice for the part. There’s also a critical component of insanity that’s gone missing from her performance. Mrs. Lovett, after all, is a woman who’s remained obsessed with a missing wannabe boyfriend for 25 years, and when he miraculously returns she starts disposing of corpses in the grossest possible way on his behalf. Carter, on the other hand, doesn’t communicate much more than “lovelorn.” It just doesn’t work.
• Similarly, the casting of the peripheral “good guys” is just awful. Anthony is a vigorous young sailor returned from years at sea; here he’s an Emo pretty boy that looks like he couldn’t lift anything, much less help raise a sail. Johanna barely registers at all. Weirdly, Tobias is converted from near-insane abused teen to peppy All-American do-gooder, straight out of Leave It To Beaver (plus a drinking problem). The last in particular makes the end of the story arc a tough sell.
• Much comment in the previews & reviews about the violence, but where’s the sex gone? Granted pedophilia isn’t something that sells a lot of tickets, but this is the core of The Judge’s evil, the motor for the whole plot. Rickman’s Judge simply becomes a “cruel dude” rather than the deranged figure that he is in the play. I guess the musical number where The Judge masturbates to the thought of his teenage ward would be a bit much for most audiences, but we’re already at an R rating with the violence. This just makes the producers look cowardly. (See also: The Golden Compass)

On the whole, though, I’m pleased that this great work is being brought to so many and that perhaps it will make potential audiences less averse to attending musicals.

The Original 1979 production

• See it on YouTube! George Hearn (the second Sweeney) and Angela Lansbury are featured. Recommended: “Sweeney Todd 05,” which includes Pretty Women and Epiphany
• New York Times review of the original 1979 production: “The musical and dramatic achievements of Stephen Sondheim’s black and bloody “Sweeney Todd” are so numerous and so clamorous that they trample and jam each other in that invisible but finite doorway that connects a stage and its audience; doing themselves some harm in the process.”

The 2005 revival and its touring offspring

• The score as it was meant to be heard: The 2005 revival with Michael Cerveris and Patti Lupone
• SFGate: Bloody Good Show (Background on the 2005 production and its appearance at ACT in 2007)
• SFGate: Review: ACT’s trimmed ‘Sweeney Todd’ holds its own

This is the Christmas window display at my old neighborhood toy store, Sweet Dreams.� It’s incredible that this store has survived 35+ years in the face of toy retailer consolidation, but this is a credit both to the store’s inventory policies (plastic franchise toys held to a minimum, lots of personality in displays and a top-notch childrens’ book section) and to the good shoppers of Berkeley.

It helps to have window displays with such character, too.� With the demise of the neighborhood merchant in favor of mass merchants, the fanciful window display is coming to be something of a lost art with Macy’s holding a monopoly on the public consciousness of what makes a great window.� (Kittens & puppies, apparently…)

This isn’t the greatest photo, but explaining a little detail here goes a long way.� This is a penguin’s kitchen.� On the fridge is a To-Do List that includes “Cooking” and “Make friends with polar bears.”� The big polar bear and penguin are slicing vegetables to go on the stove at left.� Penguins and bears of all ages frolic at the “kids tables” in the foreground.

Question: why does Google give the link to Toys R Us when I search for Sweet Dreams?� That’s a nasty prank.� And why a web site for Sweet Dreams’ sister candy store (not nearly as fun) and not the toy store?

Berkeley Daily Planet:� As Toys �R Us Downsizes, Local Toy Stores Thrive

This is not your typical after-work place.� The brands on offer taste utterly unlike your neighborhood bar’s outlay — and, critical to understand — these beers are strong.� The least alcoholic beer stood at 5.5% (10% more than a Budweiser) and the most topped out at a heavy-duty 11%.� That’s over 35% more alcohol content than the most effective malt liquors.� So don’t plan to stay for more than two drinks.� This is sipping stuff, not gulping.

And don’t count on any TV sports, either.� As overheard by the group at the end of the bar: “This is more like a wine bar.”� If it’s any indication of the environment, Thelonious Monk was playing and a lively argument was had by patrons over which drummer played on Monk’s Music, while a solo patron at the end of the bar powered through the Sunday crossword — on Wednesday.

The Trappist (Google map)
Reviewed on Yelp
Chowhound report

• iMac G3: Sold it to a friend while still under Applecare warranty. Hard drive went bad.
• Susie’s iBook 800: Major issues with the touchpad. CD stuck in the CD drive.
• Shawn’s iBook 1.33: Self-immolation.
• Shawn’s last iPod: At different times, replaced the battery, screen and hard drive. Frankenstein iPod! Then the screen died again… (I should mention that my current iPod, purchased a year ago, is still in fine shape.)

The moral of the story, dear readers, is if you have to have the Apple gear, go for the Applecare warranty. Which is another way of saying, the price on a new Apple laptop is really $169 higher than is posted.Another thing I learned is that there is a lively ebay market for Apple parts for dead machines. I’ve already scored $265 for the screen. Since the assembled working machine was worth $700, that means by the time I’m done selling off the bits that I’m going to get tantalizingly close to its full market value. Don’t trash that Apple! Sell it for parts!

Regardless, I approached his latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, with some trepidation. It was long, poorly reviewed and the subject was the inner life of freshman college students, something that a senior citizen in a dandy three-piece white suit was not obviously suited to handle. But a piece in The Atlantic put up a strong defense for the book and so I decided to give it a shot. It’s a tale of a too-perfect, too-unworldly girl from backwoods North Carolina who gets a full scholarship from a Stanford-like private university in Pennsylvania. The fish is out of the water. Hilarious hijinks ensue, potentially.

The first 200-odd pages were a joy. Wolfe is a master of the set piece, juggling the motivations of his characters and the cultural framework in which those motivations are formed in ways that are dizzying and exciting. Around the 400th page, any illusion had dissolved that there were any fully-formed characters as opposed to cardboard standees for Wolfe to make his finger-wagging points over & over about the “horrors” of college life. (The kids like to have sex! They like to drink! The ‘adults ‘ on campus have entirely different priorities from the students! Quelle horreur!) At that point, there is still another 300+ pages to go, including a long and discomfortingly tawdry piece on Charlotte’s deflowering at the hands of a too-bluntly evil fratboy, another 100 or so pages of Charlotte wandering around in a depressed daze and, well, a lot more. In the end, it’s just too much book for too little plot.

That would be OK if Wolfe’s usual sharply-observed commentary was evident, but he blows too many obvious details in the course of the book to give much credence to his more subtle and potentially more interesting observations. For example, the fictional university’s Finals Week takes place after Christmas and a college basketball game is seen in the fourth quarter. If he’d actually ever seen a college basketball game, surely he would know that there are not quarters, but halves. Couldn’t Wolfe (or any editor) have caught these silly mistakes? They are so jarringly Wrong that it throws the veracity of the rest of the book, already shaky given the setup, well beyond reasonable doubt.

From a marketing standpoint, it’s interesting that the cover of the paperback edition (pictured above) is designed to show Wolfe’s name, but not reveal the title of the book. Perhaps his publisher was trying to sidestep the critical bruising that the hardback took upon release, but really the cover stands as its own review. Tom Wolfe is a great essayist and this is a beautiful billboard for getting his name out there, but you can skip this book.

[Links]
“The Liberal Elite Hasn’t Got A Clue” – The Guardian, 11/1/04
Charlotte Simmons picks up Literary Review Bad Sex award – The Guardian, 12/14/04

As usual, the baseball playoffs took over my life for an unwelcome amount of time in early October. The A’s showed signs of going deep, but lucky for my free time — and for my wallet, since I was sitting on very expensive tickets for the World Series — they reverted to their usual playoff-choking form in the ALCS. With the team all but moved to distant Fremont by 2010, it was time to start disengaging anyway. I’ve got three more years to find a way to remain a  fan before the A’s move a full hour’s drive from my San Francisco abode.

In the meantime, I have these guys to help Bring The Dissent:
[youtube SlTvSUCCqPo]

Every last square inch of the parking lot was branded. There was no entertainment that didn’t have a logo on it, ranging from the obvious (Schwinn) to the ominous (Toyota Land Cruisers) to the downright bizarre (an inflatable jumpie — brought to you by US Air Force recruiters). There was nothing in the least edgy about this set-up, even though it was sold as the theoretical edge of American youth culture. Hardly anybody was drunk or otherwise messed-up. Having missed Burning Man the week before, I could only think that somehow I’d fallen into its evil doppelganger.

After the extremely loud BMX event ended, we were herded off into another corner of the lot to face a stage and a huge branded TV screen. After a few moments, opener Dilated Peoples appeared. Featuring a white guy, an dreaded Afro-American guy and an Asian-American DJ, the Peoples gave the impression that if they did not already exist, they would have been invented by a Dew Action Sports marketer for just such an occasion. With songs that stayed relentlessly on the positive tip, the crowd loved them, but I thought they were bland at gest. It didn’t help that that the DJ totally blew his obligatory spotlight scratching and then blamed it on the wind. They also made the opening act cardinal sin of running overtime, which seems particularly egregious for a hip-hop group that really should know exactly the length of every song they play. Song lengths aren’t going to vary performed in front of a programmed beat track.

After a brief delay, The Roots tookthe stage, all business, no chattiness. Opening with “Here I Come” off super-dope new album Game Theory, The Roots did not stop for their entire 50-minute set. They were tight, charismatic and entertaining, and are touring behind their strongest album in several years. But it was just too weird to hear these songs in this place.

I guess I have to give credit to The Roots for seizing the opportunity to go where the money and the audience are. This was the second time I’d seen them at a presumably poorly-paying festival situation, the first being when they played the “Other Stage” at Moby’s tour several years ago. (Remember Moby, anyone?) Nevertheless, it was surprising to see them doing their conscious-hip-hop-meets-The-Meters thing surrounded by logos and product placement and more logos. And they certainly got their message out to a diverse audience of kids in an environment that was non-threatening (if you find conspicuous consumption non-threatening). But if this is the future of concert-going — and mass-market entertainment in general — something has been lost. It’s not news that major music label artists are no longer counter-cultural, but until recently at least they tried to pretend.

But the kids at the show, many with their parents, did get to see a great live band doing edgy material in a safe, sober place — and that you can’t fault. Will they know quality & authenticity when they see it or does the uber-marekting context ultimately defeat it?

MP3: The Roots – Here I Come

The Onion AV Club interviews ?uestlove
Metacritic: Everybody Loves Game Theory (except the NYT)

http://entroporium.com/mp3/01%20On%20the%20Transmigration%20of%20souls.mp3

From Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul:

Ours is a time of connection. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted.

Foreign Policy: The Day Nothing Much Changed

[I]f you look closely at the trend lines since 9/11, what is remarkable is how little the world has changed. The forces of globalization continue unabated; indeed, if anything, they have accelerated. The issues of the day that we were debating on that morning in September are largely the same. Across broad measures of political, economic, and social data, the constants outweigh the variations. And, five years later, the United States’ foreign policy is marked by no greater strategic clarity than it had on Sept. 10, 2001…. Perhaps the truest thing that changed because of 9/11 was the way in which the Pentagon’s budget soared.

From In The Shadow Of No Towers by Art Spiegelman:

Martin Amis reminds us in The Guardian that the Iraq War may be but a distraction to the war in which we have been engaged:

Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven’t managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion… Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason… The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation – it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.

This is not a matter of simple alma mater loyalty; this is something I’ve done my whole life. Everything I learned about humility I learned from Cal football.

It wasn’t just me; it was the whole fan base. The oft-proferred line about Cal — at least when things were going poorly — was that its alumni would rather be proud (and beat Stanford) than become a so-called major program.

But this year looks different. Very different. Not only is Cal ranked in the Top Ten to start the season and opening its season at a bona fide "football school" (Tennessee), but ESPN analyst Lee Corso predicted Cal to win the national championship! This, dear readers, is crazy stuff. Cal hasn’t even got to the Rose Bowl since 1959, many years before my parents were thinking that sex was something they could do.

A national championship simply does not compute. It does not map to my self-image, to root for a team that can and will win. It used to be that I went to Memorial Stadium each week wondering how we’d find a way to lose. Now I have the neurosis of the winner — "Which game is the one where we slip and fall?" Instead of worrying about whether we’ll beat Stanford, my attention turns instead to "How much do we need to beat Portland State by to keep the East Coast writers from doubting the Bears? If we don’t win by 35 points, will it hurt our standing in the computer rankings?" I’m not certain that this is an improvement, fandom-wise.

There are cultural issues to think of, too. I’ve been very happy with the ramshackle stadium and the relatively low-key games. (Note the picture above; that’s the highly successful 1975 team upsetting USC at home. The stands in the background are pretty much empty.) I don’t want to be Texas with the world’s largest HDTV or the Florida teams with their absurd fan rivalries. Or, god forbid, USC with its traveling squad of weirdly mindless fans led by 5,000 band members playing one song over and over. (Cal fans have found ways to get back at idiot Trojans over the years.)

But unfortunately this is what it takes to be a top program in today’s major collegiate athletics. Today we stare into the abyss, sing our fight songs and hope we don’t lose our selfhood along the way.

UPDATE: So much for that.  Jake Curtis at SFGate still thinks Cal has room for hope.  One friend said that we had to break our "culture of losing" and then in the same breath said that we didn’t really want the national championship, just the Rose Bowl.  Sounds like a contradiction to me, but I guess that’s we’ll have to do to break up this culture one step at a time.

In the early 1950s, the California Division of Highways was loving its job. Combined with President Eisenhower’s push for the Federal Interstate system — partly for commerce and partly for Cold War homeland security — the nation’s freeway planners were give virtual free reign to plan whatever they wanted. Treating the nation’s communities as if they were networks of Fisher-Price toys scattered on their bedroom floor, the planners looked at every possible throughway and connection point as a place to run a freeway.

By 1959, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, Mayor Alioto and several neighborhood groups had turned back many of the most megalomaniacal plans, including turning Van Ness into an elevated freeway, running expressways along either side of Golden Gate Park, and wrapping a road through Fishermen’s Wharf to connect the Bay Bridge & Golden Gate Bridge. Nevertheless, it was too late to stop the Embarcadero Freeway, but the 1989 earthquake took care of that road at least.

SF vets like myself will attest that the City was indeed easier to get around with the Embarcadero Freeway and the on-ramp at Golden Gate & Gough, but I’m sure we’d all say also agree that what’s been gained by their removal — the return of the Embarcadero Promenade and Hayes Valley, respectively — is a trade we’d make any day. Almost as if The Wizard Of Oz himself ordained it, those areas went from depressing and grey to lively and technicolor within months of the removal of the oppressive elevated throughways.

Perhaps California’s new emissions law will all turn out to be ineffectual in the end. As the Chronicle points out today, if California is able to achieve the targets in this week’s legislation, the world’s carbon emissions will be reduced by only .5%. (California, the world’s 12th largest economy, makes 2% of Earth’s emissions; the state seeks to reduce by 25%.) The Law of Unintended Consequences always lurks; the dismantling of CDH’s original SF freeway plan may have done more to encourage urban sprawl in the Bay Area than to end it, thereby driving up California’s fuel usage and air pollution levels.

But try to imagine San Francisco today with all those freeways. It would not be worth living in or visiting. It would not be a great city.

So today I’m damn proud of my state for taking on a leadership role in the fight against Global Warming. And (dare I say it) I’m thrilled for the bravery of my term-limited Legislature and Governor to push through Green laws that could help make the world a better, healthier place, even though it could hurt the State’s economic growth in the short-term.

San Francisco CITYSCAPE – Freeway Revolt Map
BikeSummer – The Freeway Revolt

Thinking about the long-term and "victory," in a world more and more besieged by "Inconvenient Truths," does it really make sense to have the values inculcated by our presence to be so overtly comsumption-based? What local children are going to see all of our cool gadgets and huge cars and not want at least a chance to own those items? If we’re worried about the pressure on our oil economy that China poses now, just wait until the rest of the equitorlal world realizes that it can afford air conditioning in every building.

It’s not just democratic values our military ventures should bring to the developing world. It’s sustainable values, too.

Ars Technica – iPods at war
Also: Miltary.com: David Sears: American Stuff

Sunday, June 18^th was a glorious San Francisco summer day with nary a wisp of fog in sight, the perfect opening day for the city’s traditional free Stern Grove concert series. We showed up at 8am to grab prime seats, but the real action that morning was taking place in random bars around town as Brazil took the pitch against Australia. After the match ended, a workmanlike dismantling of the Socceroos, the Brazilian fans — and where did they all come from! who knew SF was so full of Brazilians! — made their way to the Grove to hear opening act Seu Jorge.

Yes, it was kismet. Brazil ruled the day. A glorious victory. A glorious day. Free outdoor Brazilian party music. The stars were aligned with that strange planet thing in the middle of Brazil’s weird flag. The Grove was rockin’, chock-full of sunning dancing Brazilian expats and their newfound empathizers.

But now it was time for the headliner. And Aimee Mann took the stage with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a bass player.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Aimee Mann and she was the reason I was there, but this was a bizarre piece of booking by the Stern Grove folks.

Picture if you will the party that’s come before. And then Aimee took the stage:

Sa-aaaave Me
C’mon and Saaa-ya-ave Meeee

If it was a room, the air would’ve gone right out of it. All of the boisterous Brazilians looked utterly lost and defeated, like the hangover had hit 12 hours earlier than expected. Nobody could believe what they were hearing or seeing. Who was that skinny lady singing morose ballads? What happened to our party?

And from this incident, I surmised that Brazil may not be the unstoppable World Cup force that it’s reputation led us to believe. Just slow the tempo. Add a French model and a PlayStation. Voilà!

[Soundtrack]
Seu Jorge – Life On Mars
A whole lotta Aimee Mann MP3 blog links

I wonder whether this sort of thing is good for tourism. Either you praise San Francisco for its humorous artistic heart or Run For Your Life and Never Come Back! In any case, what I would have given to see the reactions of the people in The Apple Store.

More coverage: Laughing Squid » Zombies Invade San Francisco!

Oooooh I’ve been looking forward to this one. Il est temps pour Jacques Dutronc!

Even though he’s inexplicably passed over in Wikipedia’s “Music Of France” entry, Dutronc was one of France’s two or three most popular French-language acts of the 1960s. Married to Francoise Hardy and a collaborator of Serge Gainsbourg, his debut album “Le Cactus” was a million-seller in 1966 and his career took off from there.

He is often likened to Ray Davies for his ironic songs and name-checked as part of the roots of Freakbeat. According to Bardot A Go Go, which also fills in some biographical details and links to lyrics of his witty and sarcastic songs:

What makes Dutronc great for many non-French speakers is the driving psychedelic sound of his rockin’ tunes. The driving buzz saw guitar of Les gens sont fous les temps sont flous strips down The Kinks’ You Really Got Me riff to a bare one note minimum with maxi affect.

RFIMusique nails the allure of Jacques Dutronc:

The singer’s nonchalant stage persona and the ironic, almost insolent way in which he delivered his lyrics proved an instant hit with the French public who adored Dutronc’s openly provocative style. Dutronc’s sartorial elegance also made a great impact. In an age where most pop stars were growing hippy beards and dressing in Afghan coats and bell-bottom jeans, Dutronc’s tailored suits and chic silk ties were guaranteed to make him stand out from the crowd.

Wow, kinda like (the stereotype of) France! Check out a few of his hip-swingin’ tunes:

Jacques Dutronc – Les Gens Sont Fous, Les Temps Sont Flous.mp3
Jacques Dutronc – Les Cactus.mp3
Jacques Dutronc – J’ai Tout Lu, Tout Vu, Tout Bu.mp3

Slipcue has some recommendations for further listening.

Listening to his music, it’s easy to imagine Dutronc ogling mini-skirted young women who in turn flirt with semi-shaven semi-showered strangely-hip Frenchmen. You know, the 60s existential France of Godard and Delon. In fact, I think I can see it right here:

Jacques Dutronc – Mini Mini Mini video at YouTube

Ukraine, we have a personal problem. It’s a damn shame since I myself am of Ukrainian ancestry. But I don’t want to think about you.

Call Me Mickey has a bunch of Ukraine pop MP3s. I can’t be bothered.
A Google search on “Ukraine” brings up Google Ads for Russian brides in the right column. Classy!
Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent Everything Is Illuminated takes place in the Ukraine. Pogroms and Nazi collaboration are part of the story.

After yesterday’s unfortunate loss to France, it seems appropriate to show a sadder side of one of the Cup’s participants. Carlos Paredes, "The Man With A Thousand Fingers," was the master guitarist of Fado, a traditional Portugese music that has its roots in Moorish times. Alternately playful and mournful, Fado evokes the country’s strong relationship with the sea and its feudal past. Paredes himself was an exemplar of the form. The son of another Fado master, Artur Paredes, Paredes was himself something of a tragic figure: jailed in the 50s and 60s as a Communist sympathizer, and forced to spend the last eleven years of his life unable to play because of a nerve disorder. He passed away in 2004.

The first track is from Paredes’ debut album called, naturally, Guitarra Portuguesa. The second is from his 1990 collaboration with Charlie Haden, recorded shortly before Paredes’ disability ended his playing career.

Carlos Paredes – Divertimento.mp3
Carlos Paredes & Charlie Haden – Danca de Camponeses.mp3

Brazil is a country with two distinct musical sides. First, there’s the elegantly sensual Brazil of samba and Getz/Gilberto. As easy to love as this is, the lazy-day saxophone and breathy vocals of “The Girl From Ipanema” are practically a cliche of an early 1960s space-age bachelor pad; as great as the performance is, you still I can’t help thinking about wood paneling and cocktails from the living room wet bar. My friend Marc Time profiled Astrud Gilberto earlier this year and I will defer to his expertise in this matter.

Neverthless, the artists that have taken up this cause are still among Brazil’s most popular mainstream musicians. One that I’ve glommed on to recently is Marisa Monte. She’s has very few releases in the US, but is undoubtedly one of the country’s top sellers. With a subtle and deceptively straightforward delivery, Monte’s sudden flurries of expressiveness and her tasteful self-production make for some very tasty listening.

After being one of the country’s biggest acts since the early ’90s, Monte went into semi-retirement for the last five years and has now blasted out with two (count ‘em: two!) excellent new albums. The first track below is from the more accessible and fun album, Universo Ao Meu Redor, which counts David Byrne among its guest stars. Infinito Particular is a more quiet and emotive affair, seemingly dedicated to songs about motherhood, the underlying reason behind her recent creative dormancy. I guess this makes her the John Lennon of Brazil.

Marisa Monte – O Bonde Do Dom.mp3
Marisa Monte – Vilarejo.mp3
Several Marisa Monte videos here

…and then there is the funky, dirty, party Brazil. Or a bunch of guys yelling about sex (or sounding like they are) over stripped-down beats and simple sample. Diplo has been the biggest proponent of Favela Booty Beats, pushing out three mixes since 2004. (Yes, two years ago is eons in music blogosphere time. Remember Arular?) When most casual football watchers hear that the Brazilian team “dances” as they play, they’re probably thinking of music like Marisa Monte or Joao Gilberto. The nasty dirty secret of the squad, though, is that this is more like what they have on their mind.

MC Jack E Chocolate – Pavaroty.mp3 — yes, the great Pavarotti!

If you like this, Cokemachineglow hosts Diplo’s original Brazil Booty Beats mix, Favela On Blast. My friend Peter, an accomplished composer who uses notes and time signatures and fancy stuff like that, found himself totally paralyzed by his brush with Favela On Blast. “It’s like a car crash and I can’t turn away.” Yes, but can you dance to a car crash?

After the dominant performance in the Group Round and with “The Hand Of God” as personal cheerleader, I figured Argentina was a sure thing for the Final. But always beware playing the home side!

Astor Piazzolla was the master of 20th century tango and one of its great composers — touring, recording and composing ceaselessly for nearly 50 years before his death in 1992. He was about as close as you can get to a country having a National Musician; thankfully for Argentina and its musical reputation, Piazzolla was more Mozart than Salieri. (Or, to torture a simile, perhaps more Duke Ellington than Nelson Riddle.) Any description of Piazzolla’s music seems to have the phrase “not your Grandfather’s tango” attached, and really I have no idea what that means because I’m not sure I’ve heard much tango that’s not by Piazzolla. I think what’s being referred to was his triumph in getting tango out of the brothels and into concert halls & cafe society. I guess people don’t think much of their grandfather’s reputation.

Here are recordings of Piazzolla playing original compositions in two entirely different settings, the first with his nonet shortly before he passed away and the second a piece he commissioned for Kronos Quartet:

Astor Piazzolla – Milonga Del Angel.mp3
Kronos Quartet & Astor Piazzolla – Anxiety.mp3
Lots more Piazzolla and tango recordings are housed at piazzolla.org

Meanwhile, with Tango now the hoity-toity music of Argentina, Cumbia villera (“shantytown cumbia”) is now the dominant popular music form among the underclass. According to Wikipedia, “Many bands were propelled into fame when emerging football stars from the shantytowns (such as Carlos T?vez) proclaimed their allegiance” so I guess this is what you might have heard if you walked into the Argentine locker room before the game.

Imagine gangsta rap played with Casiotones on the latin rhythm setting just al little too slow setting. You can hear several examples and read about the genre (in Spanish) at this site. And, as always, seek on YouTube and ye shall find.

Ecuador is one of several countries that completely bedeviled me as I’ve assembled the World Cup World Tour over the last few weeks. I’ll just come right out and admit: On Ecuador, I got nothin’. Call Me Mickey has the right idea on this one, though: cop out! Christina Aguilera’s father is from Ecuador. Maybe, just maybe, she has retained dual citizenship for tax purposes. Maybe Xtina — via her tax contribution — is one of the world’s great contributors to preserving the Galapagos. Buy a Christina Aguilera album, save a turtle!

But seriously, Aguilera’s new single is surprisingly kick-ass. One of the best things about the mash-up revolution has been the willingness of producers to again sound like our pop music heritage. "Ain’t No Other Man" is less modern pop than it is a hyperactive re-casting of a traditional Girl Group song. My favorite part is the chorus, which gives a clear picture of three pop-princess Christina-alikes waving their fingers and moving their side-to-side hips in unison like a Motown girl group, flirtaciously beckoning "You’ve got style, you’ve got class…" It’s thrilling and winning. Thank goodness she got away from Linda Perry.

Christina Aguilera – Ain’t No Other Man.mp3

Los Brincos – Baila La Pulga.mp3
Los Salvajes – Las Ovejitas.mp3
These first two tracks are from Beat Espana, a compilation that a friend who used to live in Spain gave me. I’ve searched for information on this album, but come up absolutely nil. There are only three bands on the record– Los Brincos, Los Salvajes and Los Cheyennes — trading off tracks, one after the other. It sounds like 60s Merseybeat with the overriding problem that it’s pretty awful. I don’t mean Gerry-And-The-Pacemakers bad; I’m thinking more like Herman’s-Hermits bad.

No more proof of Beat Espana’s not-so-rightness is needed than this video of Los Brincos making a variety show lip-syncing appearance. The mop-topped band is performing a dull song called “Oh Mama.” Normally you’d think that a song called “Oh Mama” would be about some hot chick. (Think Prince singing “Hot Thing”; you need not actually hear the song to know what it sounds like.) No, “Oh Mama” is really about Mamas — thus, the band members are pushed around the set in baby carriages. By hot chicks. I’m not kidding. If you like a little Freudian conflict with your 60s pop, this is the video for you.

Mus – Al Debalu.mp3
Now this is more like it. Mus is another band about which I could find virtually nil. This track is taken from their second album El Naval. For those of you pining for another Mazzy Star album or the glory days of 4AD, this album is well worth your time to seek out. Understated and mysterious, you can check out more of their stuff at Epitonic.

Another country with music I know way too much about. Plus I work for Brits — – and I’ve got the challenge of trying to avoid rawther obvious use & abuse of Mojo’s recent “50 Best British Songs” list. Hmm, better step carefully here.

OK, how ’bout:

Fairport Convention – Come All Ye.mp3
XTC – Respectable Street.mp3
Peter Sellers – A Hard Day’s Night.mp3

Covered by these three songs: minstrelsy, “England’s green fields,” folk tradition, proto-prog, music hall, classism, comedy, post-war suburbia, Britpop Mark 1, art school, The frickin’ Beatles, guys who want to sound like the frickin’ Beatles, post-punk, post-punk pop, eccentrics that can’t tour because of stage fright.

Things missed: Manchester, Madchester, bedsit, immigration & imperial fallout, Britpop Mark 2, punk, prog proper, Victoria Beckham and her friends, Pop Idol, mods, rockers, The frickin’ Stone Roses.

Well, I tried. I’ll meet you at the Cemetry Gates.

All props to the plucky Socceroos! Italy is leading a charmed life.

Here is something I’ve been wanting to know for a long time. I lived in Los Angeles during the great mid-80s PR push for Australian pop; Australia was the Seattle/Montreal/Omaha of the moment. (Midnight Oil! Men At Work! InXS! Aaaaargh!) One of these new import bands — I believe it was Mental As Anything? — was offered by KROQ as a contest prize to come to your house do your yardwork if you won. I always loved the image of these guys getting off their tour bus at some San Fernando valley tract home and being ordered to cut the lawn and haul the trash by some 14-year old.

Was this real? Did the band actually show up? Were they hung over? Please if you know anything about this, I’m dying to know. Suffice to say, Mental As Anything did not make much of an impact in the US. (…and, wow, what an awful band name. I can only imagine the discussion in the record company board room: “We need a band like Men At Work!” “How about Mental As Anything?” “Never heard ‘em, but sign ‘em!” This did happen back in the day: A-Ha was signed because of the band’s photogenic looks without the record company ever having heard their music.)

The Church – Too Fast For You.mp3
Long before the wonderful but overplayed “Under The Milky Way,” The Church already had their sound and aesthetic down pat. They made several great records and are still putting out moody albums, but if you live in the US, you’d never know it.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (with Kylie Minogue) – Where The Wild Roses Grow.mp3
Extracted from the vaguely insane “Murder Ballads” album, this is easily one of the creepiest records I’ve heard, not least because in listening to it I’m forced to imagine Nick & Kylie’s love life.

The Saints – (I’m) Misunderstood.mp3
“(I’m) Stranded” was the hit — and possibly the finest single out of the first wave of punk, but it’s been profiled by World Cup bloggers elsewhere. At least I go with the “(I’m)” in the title by selecting this tune.

Two very different types of dance music compose my last entry covering a Group Round knockout:

Saban Bajramovic – Hanuma.mp3
Saban is known as the “World of Gypsy Music.” Why? Because Indira Gandhi dubbed him so! Yugoslavia’s leading artist in the 1960s, he has apparently gone missing after the former republic’s turbulent ’90s. “Legend also has it that Gypsies respect and love Tito the most, Saban second and then, after ten empty places, once again Saban.” More on Saban’s incredible story here.
UPDATE: Saban is still out there doing his thing. Here is an account of a performance last month in London: ROMA ROMA: Saban!

dZihan & Kamien – Stiff Jazz.mp3
d & K hail from Sarajevo, but moved to Vienna to study music after the hometown fell into a bit of chaos last decade; you may have heard something about this. Hmmm, that looks suspiciously like K&D. As well it should, as dZhihan & Kamien specialize in the same feckless yet pleasant and popular pseudo-jazz that their Austrian mates Kruder & Dorfmeister specialize in. I’m always torn whether to like this kind of music; it’s easy to enjoy and the playing is strong, but I tire of it as an indicator of Big-Money Cool at boutique hotels and high-end restaurants. I swear the W Hotel hasn’t changed the CD it plays at the bar in seven years, or since I first heard this genre as Business Manager for the ill-fated club-music magazine, Revolution.

Though they are allegedly embarassed by it, the biggest music in Poland these days is Disco Polo, a weird hybrid of vulgarized folk songs (Wikipedia’s definition, not mine) and the very worst in Eurodisco. An MP3 doesn’t quite get it across; you’ve got to see it for the full effect. Thus, I’m forced into posting my first video in the World Cup World Tour, “Jeste? Szalona PV” by Boys, apparently the biggest act in the genre. Yikes.

Boys – Jeste? Szalona PV

More fabulous Disco Polo videos here

Daphne Carr is the US’s biggest authority(!) on Disco Polo, having presented an paper on it at last year’s EMP Live. She wrote recently in The Village Voice about Brooklyn’s burgeoning Polish nightclub scene. If you’re looking for a big Disco Polo dance night, Greenpoint’s the spot.

Paraguay is surprisingly absent from the Internet. Hardly any pictures. No music. Wikipedia’s entry on "Music of Paraguay" mentions more reggaeton artists from Puerto Rico than anything native. The first few pages of a Google Images search on its capitol, Asuncion, returns a large proportion of pictures of a local Mormon temple. I am indebted to Call Me Mickey for finding something, anything.

Agustin Barrios – Los Indios Paraguayos.mp3

Random thoughts on a day of defeat:

Isn’t it appropriate that I have the US entry following the Saudi entry? We’ll follow those guys anywhere. (rimshot) I’ll be here all the week, don’t forget to tip the waitresses.

Rant coming: If people get so upset about American flag-burning, why is it OK to wear Old Glory as a bandana or a T-shirt or facepaint or a bikini top or a towel or…? I am always shocked when I see alleged patriots displaying old faded flags, flags touching the ground, faded flag bumper stickers, flags left out at night, unlit… It’s fundamentally wrong and easy to see & know that it’s wrong. When the military has elaborate routines about how the flag should be hung, folded and destroyed with honor, surely my fellow citizens should easily see that wadding up their faded American flag t-shirt and throwing it on the bedroom floor or drooling ice cream on it is disrespective and certainly not patriotic. Am I wrong in thinking that the people who are most likely to “wear the flag” are closely related or perhaps even the same people who get so upset over flag desecration? Shouldn’t proposed constitutional amendments banning flag-burning also cover bikinis?

Which is all just a way of working to this next thought: When I see people from other nations at the World Cup wearing their national colors, I usually think “Wow, that’s so great that they have such spirit.” On the other hand, if I see a bunch of Americans with stars and stripes painted on their faces or chests or whatever, I’m embarassed. Am I wrong to feel shame? Or would it be worse to be at the stadium and not proudly display the colors?

My colleague Simon over at My Name Is Betty, who has some pretty great World Cup music coverage going himself, heard this same complaint from me and responded “As for the people in national dress, you’re embarrassed? English national dress seems to be a shaved head and a beer gut, maybe a novelty hat. I’m fortunate to live in London though – my street alone has Ghanaian, Trinidadian, English, Australian, Portuguese, Italian and even Jamaican flags out, and it wouldn’t take me too long to gather the rest. It’s good fun, every four years doesn’t come often enough.” It must be nice to live in a place where immigrants are considered pluses.

I worked for a Frenchman for a number of years and he told me several times how amazing he thought it was that there so many flags displayed in America. I plead ignorance until we looked out at the view from North Beach and, sure enough, every building in downtown SF was flying the colors. It was shocking to really see this, and this was long before 9/11. It’s nice to be patriotic, sure, but it looked more neurotic than anything else, like the old saw that nothing is Cool that has to continually tell you it’s Cool.

And now to the task at hand. It’s completely ridiculous to try to sum up my home country’s rich musical tapestry in a couple of songs. Just think of the musical forms that are indigenous and original to the US: rap, jazz, surf, tin pan alley, musical theatre, blues, country… When I think of how my “World Cup World Tour” is trying to put this same straightjacket on 31 other countries, it brings home that I’ve taken on an enormous task with at best well-meaning chutzpah and at worst total arrogance. (And doesn’t that make me so quintessentially American?) But just to be clear, I’m not trying to sum up or size up countries or their musical output with just a couple of songs, but simply trying introduce a taste of the musical life that floats through each nation’s cultural aether. Hey, I can try, right?

So in that spirit, I offer for the United States its greatest living songwriter ruminating on natural disaster & cultural collision and two of its most rockin’ clown princes having a cultural collision and just being silly. Enjoy.

Bob Dylan – High Water (For Charley Patton).mp3
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion with Rufus Thomas – Chicken Dog.mp3

Insult to injury: There was no baseball on the night after the US-Ghana game.