Posted by: Ryan Allen on September 25, 2008 at 8:00 am
By Paul Serilla
Today, the world gets its first look at a product that some people who probably know little about “business” or “music” are calling, ahem, the “SAVIOR OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS” (dun-dun-du-dah!).
But in case you haven’t heard, we’ll fill you in: MySpace, partnering with Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, is launching MySpace Music: an iTunes-esque music service that will offer DRM-free downloads, ringtones, concert tickets, t-shirts and other merchandise for us all to lap up with saliva-dripping tongues. And yes, that MySpace — the Fox/News Corp.-owned social networking phenom that is ironically part of the same Interweb that was, until recently, seen as only stabbing the music industry repeatedly in the face.
What MySpace is purporting to offer may sound familiar to users who frequent similarly minded services like Pandora, Last.FM, and subscription services like Rhapsody, but it also could end up being a fair step beyond those services in the evolution of music supported by advertising.
MySpace is, of course, already a big deal in popular music. To date, they have something in the neighborhood of 600,000 artists signed up, giving the tens-of-millions of MySpace users Read more
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Tags: Fall Out Boy, Last.FM, MySpace, MySpace Music, Pandora, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Wilco
Posted by: Ryan Allen on September 17, 2008 at 10:48 am
Unless you’ve been sequestered at summer camp, you know that Detroit bands have put out some stellar records of late. For those of us in Washtenaw County, it’s sweet to see Ann Arbor keeping pace.
“I’ve been here seventeen years and what’s been going on just in the last two years is the real thing.” So says recording engineer Jim Roll about the current state of music west of I-275. And we’re not going to argue. From his Ann Arbor-based studio, Roll has had a front-row seat, recording many of the best local releases over the past year. Several more are on deck for the fall. His studio is booked solid for months purely on word of mouth, mutual interest and a crop of record-ready acts. “I think I would go nuts if I had to record bad bands, but I’ve just got one after another coming through that are Read more
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Tags: Black Jake & the Carnies, Breathe Owl Breathe, Chris Bathgate, Frontier Ruckus, Jim Roll, Matt Jones, Misty Lynn & the Big Beautiful, Siksik Nation
Posted by: Ryan Allen on August 29, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Before “Power Pop Day” is officially over, we thought it might be cool to point you in the direction of some new kids on the block, who not only swipe moves and give nods to the power pop greats of yesteryear, but are also paving the road to the genre’s bright future. Also, we know that p-pop kind of gets a bad rap, mostly for being a little bit lame, and a lot bit cheesy. What we tried to bring you here are people doing something a little different with the formula than just ripping off the Knack and putting a Rickenbacker guitar on the cover of their album.
So with that said, here’s some links, YouTube clips, and Read more
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Tags: A-Sides, Bears, Julie Ocean, Office, Pale Hollow, power pop, Pretty and Nice, Starling Electric, The Golden Dogs, The New Motels, Title Tracks
Posted by: Ryan Allen on August 19, 2008 at 10:12 am
By Paul Serilla
An open and frank discussion of music has not always been encouraged in this country. Back in the day, if you had a sound opinion, you kept it to yourself for fear the Newspaper Guild would knock you around or the Mimeograph Alliance of America would execute the “full-mulberry” on your friends and loved ones. Still, the slightly more emboldened types of the era might dare jot their thoughts in code and leave them tucked between the wooden slats of a park bench for a fellow “music cipher” to discover. We’d still probably be engaging in this practice today had the technique not been discovered and stamped out in the 19th century.
Pittsburgh, PA’s George Washington Johnson was one of the most prominent of these proto-bloggers. However, when Johnson mistook a gentleman (who happened to be a local Justice of the Peace) switching his monocle from the left eye to the right as the secret sign of the cipher, he inadvertently called attention to the practice and unfortunately sowed the seeds of his own demise. After Federal Marshals decoded his simple substitution code three days following his capture, he was hung for illegally attempting to invoke the First Amendment. A true “people’s critic” to the end, his finals words were, “I’d rather hear horseshit blown out of trombones than suffer through another rendition of John Philip Sousa’s equally crappy ‘Liberty Bell March’.”
As is often the case with critics, it is said that the composer had the last laugh. Though no primary evidence exists, rumors persist that Sousa himself led his famous band through a pants-less version of the “Liberty Bell March” over Johnson’s unmarked Allegheny grave every July until his death in 1932.
As the twentieth century began, so did the widespread use of recorded music — first as a promotional tool for sheet music and live performance, then later a product unto itself. Still, widespread discussion of music by non-professionals remained underground. To keep a step ahead of the fuzz, the opinionated got two Dixie cups and a long piece of string, walked one of the cups over to a friend’s house and then walked back Read more
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Posted by: Ryan Allen on August 6, 2008 at 9:00 am
By Paul Serilla
Much has been said about Lollapalooza, so we’ll save you a lot of sweaty (though fully enriched with electrolytes) details of set lists and stage banter. But we will say that it’s a pretty well oiled machine; logistically speaking it is something to behold. While it feels like a bare minimum that acts go on when scheduled, trash gets picked up, Porta Johns aren’t overwhelmed, decent food is available for $5 or $10, and the beer flows freely through manageable lines from open to close, it’s still impressive and adds immensely to any attempt to enjoy the festivities.
In a scant few years, it feels like Lollapalooza has taken on the persona of its permanent home in the Windy City of Chicago. Lolla has a pleasant pulse with Gen-X-er’s in Threadless shirts and punks mingling with a few of the NPR tote-bag set; folks who certainly could be their parents. If you were to raise a complaint, you’d probably point towards a shadow of the old Midwest homogeneity cast over the proceedings, but it’s not overwhelming.
Apart from the bro-on-bro violence/foreplay that reportedly caused Rage Against the Machine to halt their set in an attempt to get their fans to do what they told them, the festival was largely well mannered and free of the large scale distractions; ones that make for good war stories, but are pretty irritating in the moment of the heat.
While we weren’t as laid back as the festival-mandated hacky-sack players, we made little attempt to race from one end to the other just to notch yet another band on our belts. We were even accused by some fellow concertgoers via text of being on our couches back home. Of course, as our only contact with Read more
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Tags: Foals, Lollapalooza, Radiohead, The Gutter Twins, Wilco
Posted by: Johnny Loftus on August 5, 2008 at 10:12 am
Thoughts on Lollapalooza 2008
By Johnny Loftus
Kanye West’s ego should be Barack Obama’s running mate. The candidate never showed Sunday night, or on any other night of Lollapalooza 2008. But in a lively, often captivating, and occasionally surreal set that closed out the concert’s final evening, West used the outsized wattage of his own ego to power a performance that pulsed on multiple levels. He appealed to casual fans, which most of the festivalgoers at this designed-for-mass-consumption event were all weekend, with athletic, high-volume versions of hits like “Gold Digger” and “Stronger,” the latter’s Daft Punkian underpinnings also serving as his opening vamp and a nod to Lolla 2008. He appealed to his hometown, with shouts to the South, West, and North sides and numerous allusions to “Chi-town,” “Summer in the city,” “Lolla,” and even “Lake Michigan.” And he appealed to the curious and the critical with a micromanaged, likely multi-million dollar production that used precision timing and the high technology that glares at the core of so many of West’s songs to manufacture our perception of him in 2-D, even as he performed with the kind of singular fury that much of contemporary hip-hop can’t seem to muster anymore. “Me” is the driver of every Kanye song. But on Sunday night he was Read more
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Tags: Barack Obama, Battles, DJ Momjeans, Kanye West, Mark Ronson, Rage Against the Machine
Posted by: Ryan Allen on July 23, 2008 at 9:00 am
In a short time, Ann Arbor’s Quite Scientific established itself as the go-to label for Michigan’s blossoming orchestral, indie-folk scene. With releases from Canada and Chris Bathgate and upcoming salvos from Frontier Ruckus, Maryland’s Cotton Jones Basket Ride and Philadelphia’s Hezekiah Jones, Qui Sci continues to spread the gospel while broadening its reach. Run by affable brothers Brian and Jeremy Peters and Justin Spindler, the Qui Sci boys not only Read more
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Posted by: Johnny Loftus on July 22, 2008 at 9:00 am
Talk about class. Cut Copy, who you may or may not have read us trying to make out with after they blew our minds at South by Southwest, was late to their Sunday evening time slot at the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival. Travel issues involving Australia and O’Hare Airport. Sudden darling King Kahn tried to rally the disappointed crowd with an impromptu set of covers , but Bradford Cox didn’t seem into it, and Jay Reatard appeared on stage only to moon the crowd. We made our way toward the exits as the strains of Spoon’s sophisti-pop oomph’d and ahh’d from across the field. (It was “I Turn My Camera On.”) A line of porta-johns blocked our view of where Copy was to have played, so we didn’t see them when they first replaced their replacements on stage. But we heard half of “Future” and all of “Hearts on Fire,” and then those dudes thanked us for listening, as if we were the ones who’d Read more
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Tags: Atlas Sound, Cut Copy, Ghostface Killah, Pitchfork Music Festival, Spiritualize
Posted by: Ryan Allen on July 6, 2008 at 11:02 pm
In case you spent most of the weekend not reading, and instead stuffing your face and rocking out at this this year’s CityFest, you may have missed the Jack White-penned poem about and for Detroit, published in the Detroit Free Press (read it here). Below, our newest scribe Paul Serilla weighs in on “Courageous Dream’s Concern” — the words written by Detroit’s most famous defected star.
>>>
Somehow over the last few years, we’ve become very confused about Jack White’s opinions of his home town. Clearly, the mistake was ours — like most problems or issues with Monseigneur Jack, it’s ridiculous to just assume he was ever in the wrong. But thanks to the literary PR wizards at the Detroit Free Press (it’s a bundle of paper you obtain by putting a bunch of quarters into a box with a glass window that’s chained to a diner or conversely pay a pre-teen boy to throw at your house before dawn — ask your grandpa) we now have a clarification of Jack’s feelings about “the D.”
These feelings it turns out, could only be fully and truly expressed in prose — of course with a nice introductory note by Rothbury apologist Brian McCollum (we’re really pissed we didn’t drive five hours to see Dave Mathews in the woods — that dude never tours). You see, it wasn’t that Jack Read more
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Tags: Courageous Dream's Concern, Detroit Free Press, Jack White, The Raconteurs, The White Stripes
Posted by: Ryan Allen on June 26, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Jeff Howitt — founder of Loco Gnosis Records, and lead singer of Detroit rock weirdos Duende! — is crazy. Or maybe crazy isn’t the right word. Perhaps “passionate” is a better fit. Either way, the sporadic, stream-of-consciousness style answers he gave to our questions about him, his label, and his involvement Read more
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Tags: Blue Moon in June, CAID, Deastro, Drew Bardo, Duende!, Dutch Pink, Jeff Howitt, Loco Gnosis, Mick Bassett and the Marthas, Oscillating Fan Club, Pinkeye, Red China, Satori Circus, Silverghost, Stare Into The Sun, Wildcatting, Woodman
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