I’ve said it before more than once, but I’ll say it again: The Onion AV club consistently puts out some of the best pop culture writing on the internet. Their interviews are particularly insightful, and this one is no exception.
I’ve said it before more than once, but I’ll say it again: The Onion AV club consistently puts out some of the best pop culture writing on the internet. Their interviews are particularly insightful, and this one is no exception.
Steve Albini, famed, fiercely independent record producer of such bands as Nirvana, The Pixies, etc, did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over at Reddit. The whole thing is worth reading, but I thought that his answer to a question about piracy and how it’s affected music is worth sharing:
I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it’s good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn’t like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that’s nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.
The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I’ll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example. There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.
Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic.
Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.
Pretty interesting. I think he’s onto something.
A great piece about rediscovering the art of listening to music, an art that, under assault from earbuds, MP3s, and shitty laptop speakers, seems to be dying. Michael Chabon writes:
I’m no audiophile; I want to say that right off. I have no idea what impedance is, or how to set the levels of an equalizer with any confidence or panache, and I still find infantile amusement in saying the word “woofer.” But it struck me all at once that the sound quality of the music I’d been listening to so heavily, with the indirect attentiveness I give music when I’m writing, was thin, brittle; all sheen and no depth. It was tinny, tiny, and pallid. It sounded like shit, in fact; and not only did it sound like shit, but it had been sounding like shit for years. Shit in the kitchen, playing from a big hard drive attached to an old PowerBook, through a couple of small, flush-mounted wall speakers. Shit, in the minivan and the Prius, patched from an iPod through factory-installed speakers greased over with a scurf of children and their miasmas. Shit, through the endless, vaguely rattling series of earbuds—that nauseating term, with its suggestion of Van Goghesque mutilations—accompanying me on morning runs and onto airplanes. The digitized music itself “compressed,” “lossy,” reduced to a state of parity with whatever system I consigned it to.
If you love music, it’s worth a few bucks to invest in some decent headphones or speakers. Preferably both. Your ears will thank you.
Good Old War’s Come Back As Rain
It’s 2012 — why do I still buy music on CDs?
1. Included Physical Backup
I sleep more easily knowing that most of the music I’ve purchased can be restored from a physical medium no matter what crazy shit happens to my computer or other devices. Backing up something I’ve bought on the iTunes store requires me to do something. With a CD, the backup has already been done for me.
2. Better Audio Quality
Though Apple has improved the bitrate of its AAC downloads to 256 kbs, a CD is still (relatively-speaking) loss-less and thus a better starting point for making copies for the car, friends, etc. A CD is also going to sound better on a car stereo than MP3 or AAC files.
3. Memorable Packaging
In the era of vinyl records, album art and packaging was a big deal. Bands produced elaborate designs to support the art of the music. Really, the package itself became a part of the art. Happily, this is still often the case, and I think that the phenomenon will continue as an incentive to get people like me to keep buying physical media.
The photos in the post below (and linked here) are of Good Old War’s Come Back As Rain record, which just came out today. The album is fucking incredible, and so is the packaging. I hope that the photos do it justice.
Note the included set of mini-prints of photographs, on the back of which one finds song lyrics.
Wonderful.
Sometimes, it’s still worth it to buy a CD.
Holy shit.
Speaking of things I missed, the link above is to a post written by Tom Gates, The Format’s former manager, about the band’s breakup. He wrote it in 2009, exactly a year after Sam Means called to break the news to him.
Recalling the crazy reality of managing a band that got dropped from their major label and recorded an album that didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding, he writes:
[T]hese two guys (and their band of merry men) would work nonstop, doing almost anything that I asked them to do (the bad examples are hilarious and, given my ego, must appear in their stories and not mine). We opted to release their second record with only the help of the company that I worked for, a concept which is now gaining popularity but seemed like assisted suicide at the time. We tricked out the internet, trying almost anything that was invented in any given week, with the band’s newfound freedom allowing us to out-maneuver the clumsy beasts that are known as Major Record Labels (not without making some hilarious errors in judgment along the way). Nate answered the same ten questions about 5,000 times, in twenty languages. Sam minded to the business, phoning daily to keep tabs on finances and projections.
In short, we kicked some serious ass and, in my opinion, created our own luck using the technology that confused most other contemporary recording artists. Our ship may have looked beautiful from the outside but inside all of the passengers were screaming the same thing as we hurled along into uncharted space.
‘Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.’
Wonderful, heartfelt writing about a band that will always have a special place in my heart.
Read it now.
I stumbled across this 2008 interview with Nate Ruess of The Format/Fun that I had never seen it before. In it, he briefly discusses why The Format broke up:
“Nothing too specific that I could think of. I would like to believe with everything I’ve been told that it was more a matter of being burnt out and not feeling like we could make another record together because we never had a free moment away from each other. It was nothing dramatic. Sam and I have never really fought before, so it was nothing like that. I think he wanted to do other things and I’ve always wanted to be in a band with Jack and Andrew, so it really worked out nicely.”
Nate also provides this interesting tidbit:
“I had the opportunity to keep The Format name, but it’s not The Format without Sam. And right now, I’m so excited to be part of something new.”
Definitely worth a read.
Great, in-depth article from the Seattle Post-Examiner.
I learned a lot. I had no idea, for example, that the band worked with Jeff Bhasker (a co-producer on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) on this album.
Inspiration is a strange thing. It can hit you quickly and surely, lifting your mind and your work to great heights in what feels like an instant. Or, more depressing, it can leave you and not come back for months.
Inspiration left me awhile ago. The lack of writing on here is a good indication of that, as is the lack of recorded music and uploaded photos. I don’t have a good explanation as to why I haven’t felt inspired other than the usual “winter doldrums” stuff that Minnesotans throw around.
Although I hate to admit it, a major part of it might also be how little great music I’ve heard lately. Until now, I haven’t realized how much music serves as a source of inspiration for me. As of last week, I had pretty much resigned myself to feeling, as I put it in a text to a friend, that “I’ll never care as much about music as I did back in high school.”
That might be still be true, but, for now, I’m inspired again.
Last night, I visited the website of the band fun, which is, if you aren’t in the know, the newer project of Nate Ruess of The Format. On the site, the video for a song “We Are Young” from their upcoming full-length plays automatically. The song has been out for months, but I’ve somehow managed to miss it.
That’s not quite true. In fact, I’d been avoiding it. The new music I’ve heard over the past I don’t know how long has been, for the most part, incredibly disappointing. Either it’s me or the bands I’ve loved who have changed. Whichever it is, most of what I’ve heard has sucked.
But this song is different.
With soaring harmonies, impossibly catchy lyrics, and a pulsing beat, it’s pure pop. But it’s best kind of pop. It’s the kind of song that makes you feel like anything is possible, at least for the four or so minutes it’s playing. And for the four minutes that follow when you play it again. And for the four minutes after that when you play it a third time. And so on.
Once again, I am excited and energized again about the idea of creating, and all it took was a stupid pop song to do it.
Maybe pop songs aren’t so stupid after all?
I finally picked up the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds on iTunes.
Critical reviews around the web are faintly positive.
My cover of Alexi Murdoch’s “All My Days.”
The AV Club consistently publishes some of the best writing on media I’ve found on the internet. In this piece, Noel Murray writes on the unique musical experience of headphone listening.
This passage was particularly good:
Headphones invite listeners to immerse, to hear sounds that that are barely audible through ordinary speakers. And, yes, it allows us to distance ourselves from the real world. When combined with actual interaction with the real world—taking a walk, for example—the disconnection adds another level of enjoyment. The music gets juxtaposed with whatever’s encountered along the way, serving as a soundtrack to the moment. And it’s all enhanced by the knowledge that at any moment, the reverie could be broken.
Like Murray, I often listen to music while walking about, whether it’s along the Mississippi river in St. Paul, through downtown Minneapolis, or . Some might say that I am cutting off myself from the world, but I think that I in fact end connecting more deeply to — and focusing better on — the things I see than if I wasn’t listening to music. For me, walking around in busy/loud environments outside is an exercise in distraction. Putting in the earbuds allows me to filter out the excess noise and focus instead on things I find interesting.
Murray also argues that listening to music with headphones offers a kind of freedom that no other listening medium can:
Turn the music up loud. It’s okay. Listen to profanity-laced hip-hop, or giddy showtunes, orThe Best Of Poco. No one will judge you. If you get hit by a car, at least you’ll die on your own terms, with a song to play you out.
Fucking right.
