Well this is interesting. Radiohead announced last evening on the band’s blog that they will be releasing a new album, In Rainbows, in ten days (presumably self-released,) initially for sale only through the website inrainbows.com. The record will be available on vinyl and via variable-priced digital download
The only CD version (so far announced) will be sold with the vinyl package:
THIS CONSISTS OF THE NEW ALBUM, IN RAINBOWS, ON CD
AND ON 2 X 12 INCH HEAVYWEIGHT VINYL RECORDS.
A SECOND, ENHANCED CD CONTAINS MORE NEW SONGS, ALONG WITH DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS AND ARTWORK.
THE DISCBOX ALSO INCLUDES ARTWORK AND LYRIC BOOKLETS.
ALL ARE ENCASED IN A HARDBACK BOOK AND SLIPCASE.
While the digital download of the album will be variably priced, with the buyer choosing how much they want to pay for it. Really.
The stunning thing about this move is that while others have experimented with this sort of thing, none with Radiohead’s clout or continued cultural relevance have–the best analogue would be Prince’s ill-fated move to self-released albums in the ’90s, years before distribution of media online was practical to most music fans, and years after his cultural and musical peak. It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out–the music distribution model I’ve been most impressed with in recent years is the “buy the vinyl, get a free mp3 download” approach that indies such as Touch & Go have been experimenting with. The model acknowledges both the fetish-object appeal of vinyl (which still inspires a generation-transcending collector’s devotion that CD’s never enjoyed) while letting listeners also enjoy the music far more conveniently on their iPods–without having to re-buy an album they already own, or Bittorrent something they legally own in another format.
What will be interesting to see is how much Radiohead’s clout will affect sales and the industry as a whole–since there are no metrics for this sort of thing, the dinosaurs at the major labels and the RIAA will likely declare it a failure outright, but even if the band sells less units on vinyl and makes less gross income from variable-priced downloads, their net income could even out with what they would make by foisting a traditionally-distributed CD at an ever-shrinking market. The RIAA will no doubt declare it a failure regardless of the outcome, just as the anti-industry hordes will declare it a triumph, and only Radiohead and their accountants will really know for sure, after looking at sales, production costs, reduced distribution and marketing costs, and tour ticket sales. But whatever the turnout may be, this clearly marks a turning point for the industry, as the band is uniquely positioned with the cultural and economic clout to land a severely disruptive blow at the industry status quo.
The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis is a 1987 documentary by Bill Moyers about the Iran-Contra arms that provides some fascinating context and insight on the current Republican regime and the early days of the neocon agenda. The warnings that Moyers was sounding two decades ago about the Republican party’s systematic disregard and undermining of the constitution are stunningly prescient:
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Download the entire documentary for free at Google Video.
From the description page:
This is the full length 90 min. version of Bill Moyer’s 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive … all
In the various music-related roles that I have encompassed over the past few years (musician, bandleader, freelance writer, publicist, show promoter and blogger) I have spent a fair amount of time browsing band websites and reached a critical mass navigating band sites that are ugly, anti-functional, slow-loading and profoundly frustrating to the people they are presumably trying to impress.
Here are some simple observations that I’m presenting as axiomatic. Granted, a lot of them display my subjective preferences about web functionality, but the simple fact is that many of these simple mistakes drive away fans, writers, editors, label people, etc
If there’s one group I never envy it would be teachers–I can think of few more underpaid individuals who are at the mercy of the alarmism that grips parents in aggregate. A group whose livelihoods depend on ill-defined and constantly shifting standards of what is deemed acceptable by community standards. It makes for odd, confounding political decisions by school administrations and fear-mongering by individuals often ill-suited to rear children much less have a major impact on community standards.
Bear in mind this case described in the New Haven Register:
GUILFORD
It seems like there’s three acceptable ways to approach old-time string band music nowadays: either play wanktastic academic jam-band bluegrass for the dreadies, affect a pissed-off punk-grass posture, or play it so straight that any sense of life is effectively drained out of musical forms that once celebrated the earthly, the visceral, the emotional and the carnal–hence the term “folk” music. (Let’s not talk about the faux-hillbilly schtick approach, which should have been dead and buried about fourteen years ago.)
I’ve never had much time for the first option, as I openly despise anything reeking of “jam” band music, and the third option feels too much like a classical recital to get any enjoyment out of. Increasingly, I’ve grown bored with the punk-grass phenomenon.
That’s why I appreciate San Francisco’s Crooked Jades as much as I do–not all of their music appeals to me, but frontman Jeff Kazor makes a strong effort to unearth truly obscurantist threads of American folk music, the bizarre strands that have disappeared in the decades as ideas of folk, string-band music and bluegrass have been codified and rendered painfully dull. Here’s an excerpt from a feature I did on the band for the Metro Santa Cruz a couple years back:
“People want the form frozen in time, but when you do that it becomes stagnant,” says Kazor. “We’re artists sensitive to the world and the environment, and it’s impossible to stay in a bubble to what’s going on in the world.”
To this end, the band aims for an eclecticism in its music that has been largely forgotten by the strict bluegrass traditionalists and old-time revivalists. Kazor points back to the original world music folk forms that influenced the development of old-time music, and aims to reconnect it to European and African traditions that disappeared from the form as it cemented itself into the very strict formalism of bluegrass.
“Some people may feel that there is too much of an edge to the Crooked Jades. … We’re really into restoring all that lost music. It seems bluegrass straightened it out and made it more accessible,” Kazor explains. “The band is really all about restoring what has been lost.”
The Jades are all over the place, and sometimes can test your patience, but at least they’re leaping high and reaching for some truly unique and original art, unlike most of their ilk who fail to breathe any new life or sense of relevance into music forms that desperately need new, revolutionary lifeblood. The Crooked Jades are great because they’re revolutionary, but not in a slavish, obvious way–they’re tweaking the form, ripping it asunder, and rediscovering much of what has been lost in modern folk.
You could make a strong argument that bro-speak is the lingua franca of young American males. I once thought it was primarily a west coast thing–in beach towns like Santa Cruz, “bro” is used for exclamation, punctuation, and to fill any dead air. Then I moved to Chicago to find that yes, people in the midwest aren’t past using a well-placed “bro” here or there. Over the past couple of weeks, the bro meme has been seemingly everywhere, first with the Onion article Bro, You’re a God Among Bros and now with the unavoidable and stomach-churning Internet meme “Don’t Tase Me Bro.”
The quote refers to Andrew Meyer, who was tasered and arrested on Monday at the University of Florida when he refused to stop asking speaker John Kerry a series of pointed questions about the 2004 election, using Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse for a playbook. When police apprehended him, Meyer freaked out and the Police reacted extremely. Unlike the Onion piece above, there’s not much funny in this, even though many are playing it for laughs:
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Mark Glaser at PBS’ generally-excellent media blog Mediashift breaks down the two major camps in the debate over the print-to-digital transition. He makes the distinction of older readers who still prefer the tactile appeal of print (among other factors) and younger readers who prefer the networked, get-it-anywhere-for-free qualities of Internet content. He’s not wrong about the shift–it’s certainly happening–but I still can’t shake the feeling that print is going through what economists euphemistically call a “correction”, not a slow death.
He makes a point made often in these discussions about youth’s content-consuming habits:
…the younger set finds what they want through social networks and be-friending their favorite bands on MySpace. The digital natives don
Paul M Davis