Category: Music

Currently playing song: “Steve I Always Knew” by Mark Eitzel on The Invisible Man.

Doc: More on what’s fucked about radio. Doc lays the blame for the sorry state of commercial radio at the feet of radio’s business model, which treats the listener as secondary to pleasing the advertiser.

This is another reason I grew to dislike Ziff Davis magazines. After a while, I realized that the stuff in between the ads felt like an ad too, for things I couldn’t afford to buy.
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Jenny Levine: “Doesn’t the RIAA have something better to do than pay legislators to pass laws that will ultimately harm its members?”
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Craig Pfeifer gives away the secret—the secret site that is supposedly only accessible if you buy the new Counting Crows cd, that is. Man, it’s good to know developers, even if they are straying into Sklyarov territory. 🙂

He’s wrong about the content, though. On Monday they posted a link to a song from a show they did in Irving Plaza, NY, and they claim they’ll update every week…
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…but John Vanderslice won’t be if you go to his concerts. There’s one in Seattle at the Crocodile Cafe on Saturday. Highly recommended. I’ve only heard one track off his newest, Life and Death of an American Fourtracker, and am looking forward to hearing more. (His last album, Time Travel is Lonely, was amazing–I still can’t get the title track out of my head.)
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Currently playing song: “Glass Enclosure” by Bud Powell on The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings (Disc 2).

I never cease to be amazed at how quickly a song can take you back. I loaded the changer this morning with a mix of new CDs and ones that had been in storage for two years. The first song to come up? REM’s “World Leader Pretend” from 1989’s Green. Instantly it’s fall in Newport News, September 1989. I’m a senior in high school, newly confident about my place in the world and arguing about REM with my friends Rob and Matt at Patrick Henry Mall.

Incidentally, it appears that Chris Heschong is World Leader Pretend, according to Google.
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Currently playing song: “I’m Waiting For The Man” by Velvet Underground on The Velvet Underground and Nico.

Anyone know what’s up with this web site: http://www.jamminz90.com? They’re calling for a boycott of Clear Channel stations. They seem to have found my old pointer to the Washington Post article on Clear Channel and cite it as support. Yay, I’m a support point for a boycott.

Doc Searls sez that the iRock should let you select any channel on the FM band. I have one of those. It cost about $20 at Best Buy, and is called the SoundFeeder.

As always, though there’s a trade off between features and ease of use. This thing has a four position switch, to let you select between four ranges of FM frequencies, and a dial to let you tune precisely within that range. Or sort of precisely—it’s not really precision engineered or anything, and sometimes the signal drifts a little.

Driving on a long trip can be an exercise in patience. As you drive in and out of range of different stations, the frequency you chose on the SoundFeeder will inevitably get interference. Then you have to find an empty spot on your tuner and fiddle with the SoundFeeder again until the signal comes in—using the two controls without taking your eyes off the road is pretty tricky.
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Currently playing song: “I’m Waiting For The Man” by Velvet Underground on The Velvet Underground and Nico.

Aversion: Sleater-Kinney Announces Tour. Including two shows in Seattle. I’ve only been waiting for a few years to see them live. This should be good.
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Doc Searls really nails what’s wrong with the entertainment industry, aka “the star-making machinery,” and why it’s pulling every string it can to ensure that the web doesn’t walk on its turf, even if it means killing the web:

The entertainment industry is fundamentally about making stars. It isn’t just about entertaining people, except as an effect of the star system, which serves to entertain mass quantities of people. It’s about packaging celebrity as a product, causing appetites for it, and delivering mass quantities of stuff made appealing by it, for as long as any variety of it might last. And doing it over and over and over again.

Nothing wrong with that, by the way. Just something wrong with nothing but that.

Which is why the CARP/LOC ruling is so awful and wrong. It’s about maintaining the incumbent star-making machinery that starts with the recording industry and works its way through commercial broadcasting, mass market advertising, arena performance events and cross-promotion through the whole mess of it.

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It’s a beautiful morning here in Boston. I’m lingering over the New York Times and other items in my Radio aggregator, drinking tea, making an omelet, listening to The Juliet Letters.

True confession: I loved this album when it came out. I couldn’t stop playing it. Today I know there’s something a little too arch about the performance, a little too forced in the compromise between pop songwriting and string quartet writing. But still I love the album: the somber wordless opening “Deliver Us,” the melancholic “For Other Eyes,” the gleefully wicked “I Almost Had a Weakness,” the wistful “Who Do You Think You Are?” Perfect early morning reflection music.
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Washington Post: Mega Hurts: Clear Channel’s Big Radio Ways Are Getting a Lot of Static These Days (via Slashdot). Apparently Clear Channel’s relentless homogenization of US radio is causing some other people than me to turn off that station. Or maybe it’s just the hideous advertising slump.

In some cities, the company’s radio stations attract as much as half the audience and advertising dollars… If a pending deal to buy a competitor in Charlottesville is approved, Clear Channel would control more than 90 percent of that city’s radio market, according to analyst Mark Fratrik of BIAfn Inc.

But if Clear Channel is a colossus, it’s a colossus under the gun.

The company lost money every quarter last year, piling up an annual loss of $1.1 billion. Clear Channel also is shouldering $8 billion in debt — the legacy of its deal-a-minute expansion spree. With a long advertising slump afoot, the company’s stock is selling at about half its peak price of two years ago.