Jacob Bakkila could have made his own Twitter account to post gibberish to. But the point was to appropriate something people were already paying attention to. What we thought was marketing rediscovered as art has turned out to be art rediscovered as marketing.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Why 'Accidental Racist' Is Actually Just Racist (The Atlantic)
I wouldn't call up Talib Kweli to record a song about gang violence in L.A., and I wouldn't call up KRS-ONE to drop a verse on a love ballad. The only real reason to call up LL is that he is black and thus must have something insightful to say about the Confederate Flag. The assumption that there is no real difference among black people is exactly what racism is. Our differences, our right to our individuality, is what makes us human. The point of racism is to rob black people of that right.
KATU: SNL-affiliated 'Portlandia' filmed, premiered in NE Portland
The world premier of a new television series about our city was held Friday night at the Hollywood Theatre—just blocks away from where the set-up sketch for the series was filmed. This sketch was filmed at Northeast Portland's San Da Roda apartments (Note: As of Sunday the San Da Roda apartments are fully rented. Also note, with fair warning, the sketch shows a man in patriotic underwear.)
Jana Hunter: Last week I wrote a review of the new King Krule record…
I’m saying the current model for sharing and more importantly for publicizing music is detrimental. Here’s what happens: young musicians make okay records that show they’ve got something but haven’t yet figured out what. The music industry then sells the shit out of it while the music press hypes it equally to death.
Nitsuh Abebe: Jana Hunter, King Krule, and when musicians are "ready" for the public
I’d like to think that, once we mentally calm ourselves and remember that reading a lot about an artist for a couple months is not a very big deal, we can imagine and try to foster a music world where a teenager can make a small splash with an interesting new sound and then, perhaps, grow and develop across his or her career until that first record is the footnote or rarity that only hardcore fans seek out. Today’s climate doesn’t foster that sort of thing very well, but I don’t think the answer is for everyone to woodshed longer. The answer might be to place a lot less importance on the marketing cycle around a record’s release, and keep in mind how unimportant it might look a few years down the line. Given enough time, the narrative of the musician is always larger than whatever people said for a month about a single release.
Jeremy D. Larson: The Spirit of "Ramble Tamble" (Pitchfork)
At the risk of sounding insufferable, here’s my own personal God particle theory: Some of the best jams in indie rock sound like the breakdown of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s "Ramble Tamble."
Linda Holmes: Hey, Kid: Thoughts For The Young Oddballs We Need So Badly (NPR)
Learn the difference between feedback and criticism. Feedback is primarily for you; criticism (in the sense of "a movie critic" or "an arts critic") is primarily not. Criticism is part of an ongoing cultural conversation that's designed to make everybody smarter and better and more thoughtful and to advance the art form itself; it's done even when the creator of a piece is long dead. It's not really for you.
Feedback, on the other hand, is aimed at you to make you better, and that's the only kind of feedback worth paying attention to. If you can't listen to it and take it in without your hackles rising, you will never become good. Period, boom, g'bye.
It turns out … spoilers don’t spoil anything. In fact, a new study suggests that spoilers can actually increase our enjoyment of literature. Although we’ve long assumed that the suspense makes the story—we keep on reading because we don’t know what happens next—this new research suggests that the tension actually detracts from our enjoyment.
Greg Kaufmann: The Expert Testimony of Tianna Gaines-Turner (The Nation)
Gaines-Turner closes by saying that “millions of Americans just like me will work with you to help you with the answers to poverty that you seek.”
“We invite you to come to Philadelphia to see where and how we live, to come to our grocery stores, childcare centers, and elder homes, and to visit with my neighbors. And then we can talk like equals, and join in the idea of putting poverty in the past, of investing in helping American people do and be their best. It’s the patriotic thing to do.”
Anil Dash: Shushers: Wrong about movies. Wrong about the world.
So, what can shushers do about it? First, recognize that cultural prescriptivism always fails. Trying to inflict your norms on those whose actions arise from a sincere difference in background or experience is a fool’s errand.
Ralf Herrmann: The Pronunciation of European Typefaces
So you’re an expert in typography? But do you pronounce Frutiger’s typeface Univers like the English word “universe”? Then you got it wrong. Here are some popular European typefaces and their proper pronunciation in German, French and Italian.
Neill Jameson: Low Fidelity: The Reality of the Record Business, circa 2013 (Decibel Magazine)
There’s a certain romance about record stores, an idea that the employees sit around and listen to music they love and meet and have intimate discourse with others who share their passion. Let’s end this horseshit idea.
Katie Ryder: White music fans are afraid of difference (Salon)
Within the context of the white twerk trend, the Postal Service fan reaction seems disturbing: We’d like our booty shaking, but when we ask for it, and also when we do it ourselves. An uninvited performance by a raw, aggressive MC like Big Freedia, on white music-goers’ home turf, and not on their own terms, was received as a whole different game: a confrontation.
Mark Richardson: Does Vinyl Really Sound Better? (Pitchfork)
One of the often overlooked facts about LP reproduction is that some people prefer it because it introduces distortion. The "warmth" that many people associate with LPs can generally be described as a bass sound that is less accurate. Reproducing bass on vinyl is a serious engineering challenge, but the upshot is that there's a lot of filtering and signal processing happening to make the bass on vinyl work. You take some of this signal processing, add additional vibrations and distortions generated by a poorly manufactured turntable, and you end up with bass that sounds "warmer" than a CD, maybe-- but also very different than what the artists were hearing in the control room.
Jessica Hopper: Why Won't Anyone Manage My Fledgling Music Career? (LA Weekly)
You have to show up for all the annoying hard work kind of stuff and just dig in, network, play shows that no one is at but make sure the four people who saw you remember your name when they leave. You gotta work all your angles and be a dude that people like helping, and that makes it that much easier and more likely opportunity will come to you.
Nathan Jurgenson: Temporary Social Media (Snapchat Blog)
Am I fetishizing the ephemeral, the present, the current moment? To a degree, yes. Social media is young, and I hope it grows out of this assumed permanence of our data. A corrective, an injection of ephemerality, is badly needed and overdue. The present doesn’t always need to be owned, held still and fixed; sometimes it might be best left alone to simply be what it is, letting more moments pass not undocumented and unshared, but just without enforced documentary boxes and categories with corresponding metrics filed away in growing databases. Instead, temporary social media treats the present as less like something that aspires to be curated into a museum but as something that can be unknown, unclassified, not put to work.
Michele Catalano: pressure cookers, backpacks and quinoa, oh my!
But my son’s reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husband’s search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters.
Jason DeBord: The Cure “The Great Circle Tour” at Neal S. Blaisdell Arena | Honolulu, Hawaii | 7/30/2013 (Concert Review) (Rock Subculture)
I was not familiar with Clones of the Queen prior to this show, and unfortunately didn’t have time to preview their work in recent weeks, so had no idea what to expect. In short, the Honolulu band was amazing. Really love their sound and they rock it live. The funny thing is that their singer, Ara, at one point deep into their set remarked that she was nervous. Honestly, I thought they really belonged up on that big stage and never would have known had she not talked about her experience while performing at the Arena.
John Berger: Review: The Cure Play Epic Blaisdell Show (Honolulu Pulse)
Hahaha:
Someone did Clones of the Queen a big favor by adding an opening act to the show. No disrespect to the local talent, as they’re certainly on their way to bigger things and it was a big night for them — but The Cure needed no help to fill a venue the size of Blaisdell Arena, or to give Hawaii an unforgettable milestone event.
Though he’s set up with a great foil in the form of the de rigeur vocoders that start the song, there’s something marvelously catchy and effective about Panda Bear’s halftime cadence on top of the mix. His words are chopped into single phonemes and doled out with a telegraphic dot-dash staggering that lines up strictly with the kick drum, as if someone had inserted a period after each phoneme: “ If. You. Lose. Your. Way. To. Night. That’s. How. You. Know. The. Ma. Gic’s. Right." Sorry to slobber here, but the layering of this oddly stilted utterance over the latticework of faster vocoded voices is a stroke of genius, and it’s the kind of trick that makes you listen to this song over and over, singing it to yourself while folding laundry, humming it en route to the corner store, slapping it onto mixtapes.
Peter Buffett: The Charitable-Industrial Complex (NYTimes.com)
Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.