I got some great feedback for my Bad Sign mix (that I'm working on implementing) so I've posted a mix of Certain Death as well.

It can be a little confusing for me deciding what's a technical decision and what's an artistic decision, but it's great to get some feedback from fresh ears.

Did you know that Vampires Are Alive?

(via onetonnemusic)

This is a great and very effective hip-hop anti-piracy PSA from 1992:

Also you may be wondering what MC Double Def DP is up to now.

Apparently Edward Furlong (the boy from Terminator 2) makes music.

These FCC complaints against Prince at the Super Bowl are fantastic:

It was obscene to show Prince, a HOMOSEXUAL person through a sheet, as to show his siluette while his guitar showed a very phalic symbol coming from his below-midriff section. I am very offended and I would preffer not to have showed it to my 4 children who love football. One of them has hoped to be a quarterback and now he will turn out gay. I am actually considering to check him for HIV. Thanks CBC for turning my son GAY.

Yes!

This Piracy Kills Music short film is pretty heavy on style:

It's a little short on facts though. I'm not sure I buy that there are less artists making a living off their music than pre-1999 (kinda seems like there are more artists than ever these days) and it also makes no mention of the plummetting costs of recording and distribution. (via Ursi's Blog)

As I was plodding along working on my album today I wound up reading a lot of posts about the death of the album (1, 2, 3).

I thought the album was dead when I started putting my music on the net years ago. I didn't even bother releasing an album until a few years later ("people just want to download mp3s!") but I was totally wrong.

I don't have much artistic or romantic attachment to albums but I do think there's a practical aspect to them. Assuming it's not one good song plus eleven songs of filler, I'd rather have 45 minutes of entertainment from an artist I enjoy than 3 minutes. It's the difference between watching one episode of a series versus the whole season.

But I don't see why it has to be exclusively albums or singles, it's the future now, they can co-exist! I think as budgets shrink, artists become more independent and audiences diversify and fragment, it's harder to decide or define what a worthy "single" is. That's what the filtration of the Internet is for, that's why file-sharing is awesome. The hits will bubble to the top.

Do you want each song to be focus-grouped before you get to hear it? An album's still a pretty good vehicle for putting out a batch of songs and seeing what spreads.

Jukka Forsten did this cool video for my song Fixing My Brain:

I like it, it's got a nice surreal feel to it.

Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints. Music composed by Esko Grundström.

Benny Davis performs a whole bunch of pop songs using the same four chords.

MC Frontalot and I attempted to kick out something approximating the jams this week for Songfight. Go check it out:

I think it turned out decent for like a two day thang.

I read the other day that the guy who wrote and played saxophone in the song Tequila and the fellow who wrote Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini had both passed away. What's more I read that the Polka Dot Bikini guy had lost the rights to his famous song and received nothing from the huge hit.

Today the story got way weirder:

On Tuesday, The Associated Press reported on the death of a 68-year-old man named Paul Van Valkenburgh of Ormond Beach, Fla., who claimed to have written the song under the name Paul Vance. The story cited the man's wife as the source for that claim.

But the music industry's real Paul Vance, a 76-year-old man from Coral Springs, Fla., is alive and well, and says the other Paul Vance appears to have made the whole thing up.

The Paul Vance who wrote the songs — and provided proof with royalty payments he is still receiving for the hit — said he has been inundated with calls from people who think he died.

What's more, the dead impostor's dead man's wife said she was "surprised" and "kind of devastated" at the news. Here's what I'm kind of devastated by:

The living Paul Vance estimated he has made several million dollars from the song, which was recorded by 16-year-old teen idol Brian Hyland, surged to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in August 1960 and has been pop culture staple ever since.

...

"It's a money machine," Vance said.

In other news: the Tequila guy is still dead.

There's a fascinating Wikipedia page on hip hop rivalries. I don't know where they get the energy. Also I enjoyed this Wikipedia warning:

The neutrality of this article or section may be compromised by "weasel words."

Weasel words? According to Wikipedia:

Weasel words are words or phrases that smuggle bias into seemingly supported statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources. Weasel words give the force of authority to a statement without letting the reader decide if the source of the opinion is reliable. If a statement can't stand on its own without weasel words, it lacks neutral point of view; either a source for the statement should be found, or the statement should be removed.

For example, "Montreal is the nicest city in the world," is a biased or normative statement. Application of a weasel word can give the illusion of neutral point of view: "Some people say Montreal is the nicest city in the world."

Good information.

Good thread on Ask Metafilter:

Songs about the end times: tell me about songs whose lyrics give a sense, either overt or oblique, of the world ending, civilization collapsing, etc.

88 replies and counting.

Jeff's got a beta of his new album The Weak Moment online. Sounding great.

Stompin' Tom Connors came to my small town tonight and boy were there a lot of cowboy hats in the huge crowd. A Canadian legend, rumor is it this could be his last tour so it was cool to see him. For you non-Canadians here's the origin of the nickname according to Wikipedia:

Connors' habit of stomping the heel of his boot to keep rhythm earned him the "Stompin' " nickname - first announced at the King George Tavern in Peterborough, Ontario. Various stories have circulated about the origin of the foot stomping, but it's generally accepted that he did this to keep a strong tempo for his guitar playing - especially in the noisy bars and beer joints where he frequently performed. After numerous complaints about damaged stage floors, Tom began to carry a piece of plywood that he stomped even more vigorously than before. The "stompin' " board has since become one of his trademarks. After stomping a hole in the wood, he would pick it up and show it to the audience (accompanied by a joke about the quality of the local lumber) before calling for a new one. It was reported that when asked about his "stompin' board", Tom replied, "it's just a stage I'm going through". Stompin' Tom periodically auctions off his stompin' boards for charity.

A friend bought a DVD at the show and on the cover it said it included a genuine piece of one of Tom's stompin' boards. Including a piece of plywood with your DVD, to me, is totally awesome.

Here's another demo I've been working on: Bad Sign. (And here's the forum thread.)

A Series of Tubes - Finally, a remix of Ted Stevens' retarded net neutrality speech. [via]

Here's Elvis totally high and boning up a performance:

Metafilter Music is online. It's a place for members of the Metafilter community to post their songs and of course anyone can listen in. There's all the usual Metafilter goodness we've come to expect: tagging, commenting, favorites and RSS feeds as well as additional features like playlists and podcast feeds. I really like the playlisting feature, it makes it easy to navigate the music on the site and fun to explore in a Flickr-like way. If the community remains enthusiastic about it, I think it'll be something special.