Sunday Bloody Sunday: News & Assorted Gibberish

Hello! How are you all doing this week? I promise there will be no hockey discussion in this column, although I do have to say that I did get a decent response to my rambling on about the Bertuzzi incident. So expect some more warblings about the NHL as the playoffs are just around the corner.

Right now, I’m just sitting here waiting for this icy/cold weather to clear up and finally let Spring come in and shine. Since I’m sitting here cooped up in my basement, that means I was hard at work this week (maybe), which means it’s time for…

Da News

– In a turn of events that I can’t really find the words to accurately gauge just how pissed off I am, the EU approved a controversial anti-piracy law that would allow ‘organizations’ the chance to get search and seizure injunctions filed against anyone whom they suspect has violated the rights to their intellectual property. What this effectively does is reduces to the police to agents working for the European equivalent of the RIAA. Under the power of this new law, local police can raid the homes and offices of any intellectual property pirates, search their financial records and freeze their bank accounts. All of this, simply by being SUSPECTED of violating intellectual property laws.

The fact that the EU feels that these sorts of steps are necessary to halt piracy is absolutely scary. What I’m getting out of this now is that the multinationals who have the payroll and expertise to conduct their own investigations, and now have the local authorities act as intermediaries for their dirty work. Nevermind the fact that investigations of copyright violators here in North America have been fraught with peril (witness the 80 year old something grandma getting sued for having downloaded gigs of gangsta rap, or the white collar Caucasian guy who got nailed for having downloaded a bunch of Spanish music for quick ‘n dirty examples…), I’m surprised that people aren’t rioting in the streets over this.

Well, that might be a little strong, but how would you feel if some asshole came knocking on your door and told you that hey, we’re going to help ourselves to whatever we want, plus shut down your bank account, simply because we THINK you might be breaking the law. I’d be outraged, as should anyone who gets this bullshit fed to them over in Europe.

The sooner that the music industry realizes that it is NOT going to stamp out piracy, the sooner they can start focusing on ways of trying to deal with the problem, as opposed to trying to kill it. Idiots, the lot of them.

– Keeping with the theme of piracy and p2p junk, a Romanian programmer is suing Kazaa for rights to the software, as well as approximately $25 million in compensation from Sharman Networks, the owners of the declining in popularity file sharing program. Fabian Toader claims that he was working freelance for Kazaa back in 2000, who then sold the software to Sharman for a pretty penny. Funnily enough, Mr. Toader now lives in Redmond, WA, as a programmer for Microsoft. Someone claiming to be a representative for Sharman Networks, one W. Blackbeard, said, in keeping with the ‘pirate’ image the company has worked so hard to cultivate, that they don’t recognize the legal authority ” ‘o anynae one, ‘n the first scurvy encrusted land lubber who thinks a tryin’ tae impose law on us, will be sorry!”

– As reported last week in SBS, Chris Martin, of the band ColdDRONEplay, was contributing vocals to a cover of a Buzzcocks tune for inclusion of an upcoming soundtrack for some stupid ass movie that certainly isn’t worth my energies finding out the title of. To further show that there is indeed a God that exists up in that swirling nether over top our heads, and that this God is NOT a happy God, but rather a vengeful, spiteful God, I’m sad to report that John “I’m More Vanilla Than Lifehouse” Mayer is covering Radiohead, for inclusion on a ‘bonus’ EP that will be packaged with his most recent offering of meaningless dribble and coma inducing nonsense. I’d say “may God have mercy on our souls”, but, y’know…

– Canadian songwriter Hawksley Workman had to end his tour short this week due to suffering some damage to his ear while at a show in Paris. In a post to his mailing list, Hawksley regretted having to cancel the rest of his European tour, although it looks as though his Canadian tour will be coming off without a hitch.

– Buckethead, the dude who looks like Slash working at KFC, has parted ways with Guns ‘N Roses, saying that he has become fed up with the band’s inability to tour and/or make a f*cking record. The fact that it took Buckethead approximately 8 years to realize this should also bear mentioning, as that’s how long the ‘long awaited’ GNR disc, Chinese Democracy, has been in development. As an aside, the production costs for Chinese Democracy alone have gone well over the ten million dollars mark. Couple that little tidbit with the disgusting amount of plastic surgery Axl has had done on himself over the years, and I think we might just have ourselves a new ‘craaaaaazy’ celebrity to be smitten over once Courtney finally overdoses and/or kills herself and Jacko is locked away in an insane asylum.

– In another move that’s making me wonder if the only reason this shit is happening is because it’s an election year, the video for the tune ‘Mexican Wine’ by Fountains Of Wayne has been censored by MTV. A scene in the video shows two 10 year old girls saying that they’re going to perform ‘Mexican Wine’ by Fountains of Wayne. In the new version of the video, all evidence of the girls saying the words ‘Mexican wine’ are omitted. I guess since these 10 year olds weren’t making out with each other, like say, Tatu, or were using rapists, murderers, drug offenders and other criminals in their video for some glorified ego stroke like Metallica, this video by Fountains of Wayne was far too racy for their tastes. Gimme a break.

– A New York based ISP, Bway.net, is offering to secure your internet from the prying eyes of the RIAA. AnonDSL, as the company is calling it, is a no logging, dynamic IP DSL service. What this essentially means is that it’s impossible for companies such as the RIAA to try and track down users through their IP addresses. What might’ve been your IP address yesterday might now be Farmer Joe’s IP address being used right now. I hope Bway.net has some way of stopping people who might be attracted to this service who have malicious intentions, as otherwise this looks to be a fairly attractive service for those who are keen on wanting to continue with their file sharing…and only goes to re-assert my point made at the top of Da News, which is that people are going to download no matter what the RIAA, CIA, FBI, FCC, FDA, etc try to do about it.

– As was reported on Friday by Aaron, 50 Cent has been embraced by GLAAD for his homophobic comments in a recent Playboy interview. The only thing I have further to say on it is that I think it’s HILARIOUS that GLAAD’s media manager, C. Riley Snorton, asked 50 out on a date for GLAAD’s upcoming awards gala. Now, I have absolutely nothing against homosexuals, but one would have to question the wisdom of asking out a guy who has been known to carry guns to a gay awards ceremony after said gun toting dude made a bunch of homophobic comments in an interview. First that whole fiasco with Billy & Chuck and now this. Seriously GLAAD, find yourself some better representation.

– The tracklisting for Kill Bill Vol 2 was released earlier this week. Included on this would be more RZA, as well as a Johnny Cash tune. Check it:
“A Few Words From the Bride,” Uma Thurman
“Goodnight Moon,” Shivaree
“Il Tramonto,” Ennio Morricone
“Can’t Hardly Stand It,” Charlie Feathers
“Tu Mir,” Lole Y Manuel
“Summertime Killer,” Luis Bacalov
“The Chase,” Alan Reeves, Phil Steele and Philip Brigham
“The Legend of Pai Mei,” David Carradine and Uma Thurman
“L’arena,” Ennio Morricone
“A Satisfied Mind,” Johnny Cash
“A Silhouette of Doom,” Ennio Morricone
“About Her,” Malcolm McLaren
“Truly and Utterly Bill,” David Carradine and Uma Thurman
“Malaguena Salerosa,” Chingon
“Urami Bushi,” Meiko Kaji

– No book pimp this week as I didn’t find anything even remotely interesting in my travels through the Intra-web. Instead, I’ll direct you towards a DVD that has earned the Seth Monroe Seal Of Approval ™. Uncovered – The Whole Truth About The Iraq War is a fairly well researched, well put together documentary that doesn’t have much of any Michael Moore theatrics in it. Instead, the focus is put on the people who were actually a part of this process, or have a sort of an inkling as to what they’re talking about. Good stuffs, and a good enough a time as any to check it out, considering the anniversary of the War In Iraq was yesterday.

Anti-Pop: Sha Na Na Na Na Na…

– Okay, so I completely omitted any mention of Jeff in last week’s column, which is a HORRIBLE faux pas on my behalf…regardless of the fact that his column wasn’t actually up at that point, I still should’ve said something. Especially when he has me going over RVD in his hybrid pimp/tribute to Wrestlemania section last week. Check it out to see how well Mr. YOU fares against Spike Dudley, as well as who the mystery opponent was that Aaron faced off against in the squared circle. In addition to that, Jeff’s got his column up and running this week, and he’s talking about everyone’s favorite dumbass celebrity, Courtney Love.

– Matthew Michaels delves into the current controversy surrounding Howard Stern and the FCC. . Excellent read and absolutely worth your attention this week.

– Aaron’s up to his usual tricks with his column this week. By usual tricks I mean providing us with a weekly update on little Jalen and nothing else showing off how he became 411 Music’s staff writer of the year as well as a 411 Mania Staff Writer of the Week. More Saved By The Bell references than you can shake a stick at as well. I’m sure by now you know what to do with the colored text that resides in this paragraph…

– Elliot was able to go and interview Something Corporate’s Josh Pardington earlier this week. This’d be a link to said interview. Check it out to see Pardington’s thought about the ‘e’ word, among other thiz-angs. Two interviews in two consecutive weeks. Not bad, not bad!

Anything else? No? Good. Let’s move on to the flipside of Anti-Pop, the place where I like to get lengthy about a particular topic and get even more long winded than usual…

Anti-Pop: B-Sides

– Interesting article surfaced on Wired’s website earlier this week. According to this story, claims from the industry that file sharing is hurting the industry as a whole are more and more being proven as bunk. I’m not going to regurgitate this particular link, as I feel I’m getting quite repetitive with all this industry bashing, although there is a particular quote in there that I want to draw attention to.

It “stopped being fun anymore, (becoming) 90 percent business, 10 percent fun,” he said. “This wasn’t a future I wanted to invest in.” – Carl Singmaster, former owner of Manifest Disc & Tapes.
Really, that more or less sums up my feelings about the music industry, and music retailers in particular. The store that I work at has undergone a bit of an image overhaul since I started working there 3 years ago. When I first started working there, my store would gladly take consignment contracts from local artists, who were struggling to try and find places to sell their shit, besides the gigs they’d play. We’d also do the odd in-store appearance for the more talented groups out there, as well as play whatever sort of music we’d like in the store, provided we had quantity and it wasn’t like ‘FUCKYOUFUCKYOUDIEDIEDIE’ type music.

Hell, we’d also do autograph sessions and performances for artists who were rather big. The Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan, Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart, the Tea Party, 54 40, Bootsauce, and David Usher, along with a fair number of other artists had performed in our store, and would contribute signed posters or autograph the walls in our backroom as being a sort of sign that ‘yeah, we were here’.

Fast forward to now, and the store I work for has become the musical equivalent of a f*cking McDonald’s. We’re supposed to greet customers with a f*cking SCRIPT. We follow a playlist that has to be followed to the letter, and is usually made up of shit that you hear everywhere else. A sample of what we had playing in the store when I was working yesterday?

Britney SpearsIn The Zone
Avril LavigneLet Go
Justin TimberlakeJustified
Rolling StonesForty Licks
Black Eyed PeasElephunk

Absolute garbage. This is what you expect to hear when you’re shopping at the Gap or the grocery store (with the exception of the Stones, but there’s a special reason as to why we had that title playing in store). You don’t go into a music store to listen to the same Top 40 pap that you hear everywhere else, you go into a music store to hear music. But of course, the company I work for has shit it’s collective pants because of filesharing and downloading (despite us making a comfortable profit in the four business years I’ve been working for this company), and it’s become more of a focus on making money and pushing the ‘safe bet’, than promoting the artists and material that doesn’t get as much of a focus elsewhere. Staff opinions are ignored or overlooked. So long as we’re selling Pink or whatever the Top 40 Du Jour is of the week, we’ll all live happily ever after.

Nevermind the fact that we have kids coming into our store asking about, say, the Von Bondies. A group that’s gotten a fair amount of press and is fairly popular. When their CD came out up here this week, you want to take a guess as to how many my particular store had brought in?

I mean, these guys are from Detroit and Jack White from the White Stripes knocked the piss out of one of them, there’s got to be a HUGE buzz on these guys, right?

Wrong. We brought in a whopping 3 copies of their CD, which sold out in the first few days of the album’s release.

But we’ve got 75 copies of In The Zone which, funnily enough, haven’t moved since about a week after Christmas or so. We also have about 150 copies of Sarah McLachlan’s latest, which, while not all that bad, isn’t really all that great, either, and sales have dwindled down to non-existant amounts. Nelly Furtado? Yeah, tons of her. Ja Rule’s Blood In My Eye? We only sold 12 of the stupid thing before we finally were able to send it back to the hellhole that spawned it…all 80something copies of them. It should also be noted that the people who are in charge of ordering at my store couldn’t do a damn thing about these CDs, as our head office, taking a page out of Communist Economic Techniques For Dummies, handles all the ordering for the ‘big’ artists. They assume that ordering a shitload of a particular CD will == sales. Not to sound like a broken record, but, WRONG.

What’s the point of all of this? Well, aside from pointing out that the bigger music retailers are going down the same route as the record companies have been (putting all of their eggs in one basket on ‘one hit wonders’ whose stars are starting to wane, and not attempting to develop and esthablish any credible artists that can provide them with long term sustainability), the thing they seem to be forgetting about is that you’re a MUSIC store first. You’re not a music STORE. Promotions for free Avril Lavigne tampons or Ozzy Osborne cupcake holders aren’t what bring people in to your store and sells you records. It’s good music and providing people with a chance to get into something that they’ve never had the opportunity to discover before.

So if you’re in Best Buy, or Future Shop or a Virgin Megastore or wherever it is you go for your music, complain when you’ve heard ‘Toxic’ for the 8th time in your 30 minute visit to the store. Complain when you deal with an idiot clerk who couldn’t tell you the difference between The Band and The Music. Let them know you don’t care for bullshit like this. Maybe they’ll realize that running a store that’s centered around one of the Arts like a f*cking Wal-Mart is bad for business.

Then again, millions of people are downloading gigs upon gigs worth of mp3s on the Internet as I’m writing this, in a bizarre sort of passive-aggressive protest, so maybe they won’t ‘get it’.

Sound Advice

Well, the ‘other artists featured’ plug at the bottom of this section is getting somewhat bloated, so I think I’m going to recap what’s already been featured in here and do some Spring Cleaning. Give you buggers who tuned in late a chance to check out some stuff you might’ve already by-passed and the such. For those of you who are ‘regulars’, I’ll be focusing on a new artist sometime next week, so don’t fret. With that said, here have been the half a dozen artists that’ve been featured in my column as of late.

03/14 – Reverie Sound Revue – Last week’s featured band. Indie Calgarian group that’s starting to make a name for themselves. Sounds like the Postal Service with a female singer. Really poppy, upbeat stuff. ( Website )

03/07 – Peanuts & Corn Records – Hip hop label coming at you from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Yeah, you read that correctly. Rappers from Winnipeg doing some politically charged stuff. The duo of fermented reptile are worth your attention, that’s for sure, although the material l’ve heard from the rest of the signees of the label has been pretty good. ( Website )

02/29 – Sarah Slean – A girl and her piano. Not Tori Amos, but a much cooler Canadian version. Favorite band is Radiohead and she will be one of my future ex-wives. Check out her cover of ‘Climbing Up The Walls’. ( Website )

02/22 – Sixty Stories – Girl fronted pop punk hailing once again from Winnipeg. The band is on hiatus right now due to post secondary educational needs, but their material is available for sampling and purchase. ( Website )

02/15 – Sam Roberts – Montreal borne singer/songwriter who has a little bit of the Beatles in him, and a WHOLE LOTTA ROCK. Can a patriotic Canadian find success as a musician? Apparently so. ( Website )

02/08 – Hawksley Workman – Eccentric poet, singer, dancer, multi-instrumentalist and god-knows-what-else. Is huge in Europe, and is bloody brillant if you’re looking for some good pop/rock tunes. Probably my favorite artist right now and would be the ONE artist out of the 6 listed here that I’d recommend over any of the others. ( Website )

Other Artists Featured In Sound Advice: None! Well, none that weren’t mentioned up above! Check back in 2 weeks to see something ‘new’ listed here. Har har!

If you want to see a band or artist featured here (preferably Canadian) e-mail me at trevor411music@hotmail.com with your suggestions or catch me on AIM as flinch311.

The End Is The Beginning Is The End

Well, that’s all she wrote from me this week, folks. HUGE week coming up this Tuesday in terms of new releases. Off the top of my head, there’s the new Broken Social Scene b-sides disc, the re-issues of Bowie’s 90s catalogue, the re-issue of Weezer’s ‘Blue’ album, the Vines’ new spin, NERD’s new one, plus new shit from Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, The Orb and Four Tet. All this new music coming out and of course I have absolutely zero money to spend on it.

Melchor will be in tomorrow and, as always, his column is worth taking a look at. In the immortal words of Porky Pig, ‘th-th-th-th-thaaaat’s all, folks!’