Faking It

And Columbia producer Mitch Miller, back in 1958, told Dwight MacDonald for a New Yorker piece, “The kids don’t want recognized stars doing their music. They don’t want real professionals. They want faceless young people doing it in order to retain the feeling that it’s their own.”

When Did Rock’n’Roll Become “Authentic”?

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Snake Oil Sound

Sounds like (see what I did there?) Neil Young’s Pono Player is bullshit:

My test compared Pono files against Apple’s iTunes files, which come in 16-bit/256Kbps AAC format (more on formats below). That’s much better than the radically compressed MP3 files of 1998.

There’s another factor at play here, too: Pono is going to extraordinary lengths to acquire remastered versions of the songs in its catalog. “If we are looking for a popular master and find it has not been sampled at the highest rate, we try to access it and, with the cooperation of labels and artists, maximize the recapture at the highest resolution,” Neil Young wrote to me. “We reach out to the creators, if they are still with us, to include their knowledge in the mastering. Sometimes they will even supervise it. This is a long process, but we are providing the absolute best available and pushing for improvement in resolution for maximizing the labels/creators’ art whenever possible.”

Clearly, if Pono’s testing involved a remastered, high-resolution audio file going head-to-head with an original, crummy MP3 of the same song, you’d hear a difference.

The thing is, that’s not a fair test. The music we buy today from iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and similar online stores has much higher quality than low-res MP3 files. Why would you spend $400 on a new player and re-buy all of your music files if the result sounds no better than what’s on your phone already?

Fuck you, Neil.

via Daring Fireball

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Real Art is Transformation

Some people cover songs by other musicians and others transform the song into something completely new and different, yet also recognizable to the original. Joe Cocker did this with his version of the Beatles’ ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ he performed at Woodstock in 1969.
When I watch the video of Cocker I can feel the energy he put into it. He discarded the elements of the Beatles original version and supplanted them with pieces of his own identity and emotions. It’s a powerful performance.
Real art is transformation.

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Life is a series of algorithms…

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic on The Shazam Effect:

Culbertson wanted to check up on SoMo, an R&B singer from Denison, Texas, whom Culbertson had helped sign last year. Culbertson zoomed in on Victoria, Texas, a small city between Corpus Christi and Houston, where one of the radio stations had started playing a SoMo single called “Ride.” Although a town of just 63,000 won’t launch a national hit by itself, Culbertson was using Victoria as a sort of testing ground to determine whether the song would resonate with listeners. “ ’Ride,’ ” he told me, “is the No. 1 tagged song in Victoria.”

Pop music is a sentimental business, and predicting the next big thing has often meant being inside that crowded bar, watching a young band connect with the besotted, swaying throng. But now that new artists are more likely to make a name for themselves on Twitter than in a Nashville club, Culbertson is finding that the chair in front of his computer might be the best seat in the house.
It’s not that I don’t want talented artists to get recognized, but there’s no gestation period anymore. Artists immediately go from underground and undiscovered to Top 10 and played to death, over and over on TV and radio (and Spotify).

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Living Colour

From one of the best rock albums of the late ’80s.

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Blade Runner Ambient Deckard’s Apartment Sound for 12 Hours

Someone uploaded a seamless loop of the ambient sound from Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner to YouTube.
This would drive some people crazy to listen to.
Me? I like listening to ambient/lyricless music/sound whenever I’m working on something that requires serious thinking. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada are two albums I listen to all the time while I work/design/draw/think.
via DrewBot

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Vinyl Is Dead

Mr. White’s latest release, “Lazaretto” (Third Man/Columbia), opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart with 138,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and 40,000 of those sales were for its “ultra” vinyl edition. That is the biggest week for a vinyl album since SoundScan began tracking music sales in 1991; the last title to hold the record was Pearl Jam’s “Vitalogy,” which sold 34,000 copies on LP when it came out in 1994.
Ben Sisario, NYTimes.com
Keep stories like this in mind whenever you’re feeling the urge to declare something “dead”. Vinyl won’t ever beat digital download sales, but it’s far from dead.

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Do You Like Me

Trent Wolbe on Fugazi’s Ian Mackaye cataloging 15 years of their music:

There is a lot to be excited about in the ways we produce and consume music in 2014, but it’s often difficult to decipher where the music ends and the contextual media structures around it begin. The best thing about Fugazi, and the live series, is that the music is always the message. There are no Facebook or Twitter logos polluting its pages; no publicist blasting emails about how Dischord is revolutionizing music; no attempt to sell to a nostalgic market. For MacKaye, it remains a matter of completing a simple task demanded by a pile of tapes that captured a small slice of American history.
I listened to a good amount of Fugazi with my friends growing up in the ’90s. I’ll have to look at this mammoth catalog.

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When’s the last time you heard a funky diabetic?

From Spin:

A Tribe Called Quest will serve as the opening act for two shows on Kanye West’s fast-approaching Yeezus tour. That’s a noteworthy pairing in and of itself, but the upcoming gigs have taken on some extra heft now that Q-Tip has hinted they’ll be his group’s last-ever performances. “In August, ATCQ did our last show FOR Cali,” Tip tweeted on Wednesday (via Consequence of Sound). “It’s only right we do our FINAL 2 joints where we started… NYC.”
ATCQ opening for Kanye is like Led Zeppelin opening for Guns ‘n Roses.
I should be happy ATCQ is back together and on tour. And I am, it just feels weird.

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