DNTTA Playlist for May 27, 2016

Artist - Song - Album (Label)  * indicates Canadian Content 

Listen to Do Not Touch This Amp every Friday 8-9 PM Pacific at www.thex.ca 

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Learning - Guns Around Here* - Kant (Independent)
Pop Will Eat Itself - Games Without Frontiers - Peace Together (Island)
Bateau Noir - Hexagramme* - Bateau Noir (Independent)
Pang Attack - Sea of Fire* - Dreamer's Drug (Independent)
Sleepkit - Cosmic Almanac* - Champion Weekend (Independent)
Babeours - Real Pain* - Too Hype to Be Mellow (Independent)
Holgans - Winterling* - Holgans are Dead (Shaking Box)
Freak Heat Waves - Liquid Honey* - Bonnie's State of Mind (Hockey Dad)
Sol Hess and the Sympatiks - Away from the Heat* - The Things We Know (P572)
Phern - Moving Boxes* - Excavator (Fixture)
Humanities - Come Outside* - Humanities (100 Eyes)
Tuft - Sheep - Look Look (Independent)

The Radiohead Problem

I'm spurred to write after a conversation with an old friend. His daughter is entranced with the work of Jane Siberry and has actually contacted her over Facebook. Turns out Jane Siberry has gone the route of offering her music up online in a “pay what you want” model, and my friend said his faith in humanity was renewed seeing people pay more than their share for her music, even after she'd been out of the spotlight for a while. Admittedly, Siberry's music has gotten more abstract and experimental since her days of Top 40 hits with “Mimi on the Beach” and “One More Colour”, seeing her branching out into classical and spoken word pieces. It's nice to see her work still being appreciated, especially given her more experimental track lately.

That got me thinking about the model of selling of music in today's environment, and of copyrights in a digital age. I don't tend to think about how music is sold or distributed online much outside my job, since I have a more old-school ideal when I buy music, preferring a physical CD over anything else. I realize I'm a bit of a relic in today's age, with teenagers and 20-somethings (even 30-somethings) entirely consuming their music digitally, online or downloaded into their computers or phones. Heck, I'm probably out of date even with my iPod now. How does the digital model work for a musician in today's music business?

Jane Siberry's approach is what's been come to be known as “the Radiohead model”. Though Radiohead weren't the first musical artists to try a “pay what you want” model, they were the first high profile act to try it. With their album In Rainbows, released digitally in October 2007, actually made the band more money than a physical release would have. They released the album in the intent to challenge the singles-oriented style of commercial radio and allow all their fans to experience the music at the same time, and prevent a leak of the material before a physical version could be sold. This resulted in less actual album sales at the time of release and more money coming into the band. Interestingly, the album hit #1 in sales in the UK and US once it was available for sale physically, after two months of the music being available, their fans bought the album anyway. Radiohead has continued this model up til current day, with their latest album, A Moon Shaped Pool, released digitally first.

With Radiohead, they have the privilege of being a critically acclaimed band with a devoted fan following. Much like Jane Siberry, who has her own fan base, but obviously much smaller in size to Radiohead's, there are always going to be fans to buy her music, whatever format it's released on.

It's a style issue mostly. There are some musicians who just want their music heard and will release it for free, seeing any money that comes their way as a bonus. But, more often than not, a musician wants to be paid for what they produce. Ideally, I think most artists would love to just produce music as their main source of income and give up on the “day jobs”. As a writer, I know that's the ideal for me. Also, as a producer of “art” of a sort, I also want to be paid for the material I produce, and have control over how it's used. My news articles I've published professionally, I have been paid for. My poetry, I know I'd be pretty pissed off if it was used by anyone or published anywhere without my permission and without attribution. I have the right to control how my work is used and consumed.

Enter Dave Lowery.

Dave Lowery you best know as the head man for the legendary alt-rock band Camper VanBeethoven, then later with Cracker, who had a couple of minor hits, “Low” and “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)”. Lowery has been an outspoken critic of the royalties being paid to musicians for online play, and a critic of how the mainstream record companies compensate musicians for their material. In the radio world, a musician gets paid every time a song is played on the radio, depending on the format of the station playing it. Usually it's not much a play, but if your song is on the Top 40, it's getting played every day over thousands of stations across North America, that adds up very quickly. So, if you're Beyonce and the legion of writers that write her music, you get paid thousands of dollars every day, day in day out. If you're someone like Dave Lowery, you're paid less, but you still get paid. And Dave Lowery is saying that artists are even worse off than they were under a non-internet, non-digital music industry.

Consider the traditional radio model. A radio station has the right to broadcast anything with a proper copyright on it. That is, music that is commercially available to be bought can be played on radio, so, no bootleg material, nothing released that didn't have the consent of the people that own the music. Consent involves the musician (though in most cases in major labels, the musicians don't actually own the rights to their own music, their label and management does), the managers of the musicians, the song writers, the record label: all of these entities must be considered and, often, paid for what they do. Then, if you want to put this on another medium, say, have a stream of your radio station, then there are streaming fees to pay. If you want to put it on YouTube, then there's fees there too. If you want to transfer it from another medium, say from your CD to your iPod, there's a tariff paid for that. And, if you change mediums, it negates what you can play too. For example, you can't broadcast a song from a YouTube video on terrestrial radio without violating copyright. Then there's the digital platforms, like iTunes or Spotify, they have their own set of copyright regulators, software developers and CEOs that need to get paid. And there are laws like this in every country, so you gotta pay in Canada, in the UK, in the US, in Australia and every other country music is being played. As Lowery points out, the percentage that Apple gets from a song play is often 30%, and all they do is provide the music to the consumer. If you're not Beyonce, you get pennies at the end of the day for your hard work and creativity, and that's if you're lucky enough to even get played on commercial radio! If you don't want to play music that sounds like Beyonce, or Nickelback, or Sam Hunt, you get screwed over.

It's a Catch 22 for any up and coming artist. Do you keep making music that you like in order to keep some artistic integrity and hope people buy it? Or do you make something more palatable to commercial radio and earn some money so you can eat at the end of the day? If you stay on the integrity path, sure, there might be something at the end of the rainbow for you, like Radiohead. They were able to leverage their fanbase and critical acclaim to get themselves off the major labels, make music they liked and still earn a living as a musician. Most artists won't be that lucky. What's a musician to do? Offer up their music for free in the hopes someone hears them and to get their sound out there? Or offer it up for some money so they can see something back for their hard work, knowing that most people are going to look at it and wonder, “Why should I pay for music I can get for free off a bit-torrent?” Hipsters will put you down for earning money from your art, telling you that you've sold out. Is there something noble about starving for art? Like the construction worker, the fast food employee, the bus driver, they all have to go home and eat at the end of the day. Does it matter that the musician is making something that isn't immediately visible and valued as a table, a trip in a bus or a hamburger?

What's the solution then? Without big name advocates on the musicians end to change how music is distributed so more money ends up in their hands, there's not a good end to this. Some platforms are helping, like Bandcamp, CD Baby, and others. But, as Lowery states in his much read essay “Meet the Old Boss, Worse Than the New Boss”, that still puts a barrier between you, the person who wants to listen to the music, and the musician themselves. You have to be on Facebook to get more traffic towards you as an artist. And Facebook gets a cut. You'd be crazy not to put your material on YouTube, then YouTube gets a cut (and possibly even some copyright leverage for themselves). There's places like Art of the Song, offering up more than a pittance to the musicians, but it's a hard slog. The system is rigged against the musician.

There's also what I call the “Gutenberg's printing press” problem. Back when all written material was actually written by people, back when not everyone could read and the only people who really did were scribes in monasteries, those that owned the ability to produce something could control how that something was produced. When Gutenberg produced the first movable type, it created an explosion in printed work being distributed to the people and an upswing in literacy. The printed word became less labour-intensive, more material could be produced, a wider variety of material could be produced (ie, things that weren't Bibles) and more people could produce it for cheaper. As it got even more cheaper, then more people could print and more material can be distributed. Take that up into the current age, where essential EVERYBODY has a printing press. I've got a computer and I've got a blog. I can write what I want and publish it on my blog and everyone can see it. But, how many people actually read my blog anyway? It's great that everyone has a voice, but that doesn't mean my voice is being listened to, or that it's important. In fact, more often than not, what I have to say isn't important, save for a handful of people who care what I have to say. If I want more people to pay attention, then I've got to invest in getting my name up in search engine queues, pay for marketing teams to get my name into the hands of influential people or count on my readers to share links on whatever social feeds they have. That costs money and time that I don't have.

If you're a musician, today's computers have essentially given you your own “printing press”. You can get an open source sound editing program like Audacity, and with a bit of technical expertise, start recording music in your bedroom. Get a Bandcamp page and your music is on the web. Then the same problem arises. Who's listening? Every musician is doing exactly what you are doing. And the consumer has been conditioned to think that music isn't something you pay for, it's something you grab off of the web for free.

There's no magic fix for this problem. But more people like Dave Lowery are needed to make any sort of change in how artists are paid for what they do. It's going to take a lot of folks on the calibre of Jay-Z to go to bat for the little guy. And folks like the poseur in the coffee shop snidely running down a band for “selling out” aren't helping. Neil Young's dubious digital music player isn't helping. Kids not willing to pay a decent sum for a song (or, god forbid, an actual album), or coughing up 50% of their dollar to Spotify to listen to a song aren't helping. The only advice I have is, if you like a musician, then FUCKING BUY THE FUCKING MUSIC. Don't copy it. Buy the fucking album. It's the only way an artist can feed themselves, even if most of your money is going to someone other than the artist.

DNTTA Playlist for May 20, 2016

Artist - Song - Album (Label)  * indicates Canadian Content 

Listen to Do Not Touch This Amp every Friday 8-9 PM Pacific at www.thex.ca 

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Diana - Foreign Installation* - Perpetual Surrender (Paper Bag)
Boxed In - Subtle Knife - Boxed In (Nettwerk)
Galerie Stratique - Anxiete Lyrique* - Reves de Beton (Independen)
Popleon - Sobre et en colere* - Insomniaq (Independent)
Haelos - Earth Not Above - Full Circle (Matador)
Liima - Amerika - ii (4AD)
Operators - Mission Creep* - Blue Wave (Last Gang)
Tim Hecker - Music of the Air* - Love Streams (Paper Bag)
LAL - Tiny Mirrors* - Find Safety (Coax)
Squarepusher - Kontenjaz - Damogen Furies (Warp)
Fake Tears - 14 Stories* - Nightshifting (Mint)

Earshot review: Brian Eno - The Ship

It was my honour to be selected to review the new Brian Eno album. I'm a huge fan!

The review

Covers Courageous #8: Burning Sensations - "Pablo Picasso"

Third Thursday of the month will continue my Covers Courageous/Forgotten Music Series. Seeing as I've been listening to the Repo Man soundtrack this past week, it seems appropriate I talk about one of the covers there, and the larger story of the movie proper.

There are two covers on the Repo Man soundtrack, Burning Sensations' cover of the Modern Lovers' “Pablo Picasso” and The Plugz' Mexi-punk version of the classic “Secret Agent Man”. We'll take a look at the first cover today.

I've heard Repo Man described as the first movie that really understood punk rock. After re-watching it recently, I think this is a good description of the movie, though the movie really isn't necessarily about punk, but the social aspects that allowed punk to form. Repo Man is a difficult movie. It's a cult classic, in that, it's obtuse and artistic, and not exactly clear on what it means. Overall, the plot is about Otto (played by a very young Emilio Estevez), a disaffected and confrontational teenage suburban punk who is bouncing from job to job and not thinking about much else. After being tricked by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) to help him “steal” a car, Otto becomes a repo man. Against this backdrop, an aimless and broken scientist is driving a 1964 Chevy Malibu from Los Alamos, NM to southern California, and the car carries a neutron bomb in it's trunk. The scientist, played by Fox Harris, winds into California, with a strange group of government agents on his tail, trying to get the car back for the government (or some other shadowy agency), a group of UFO enthusiasts, thinking the truck carries the body of four dead aliens, and the repo agencies, who have $20,000 bounty on the car.

What the film has to do with punk is both the excellent soundtrack and the actors in the film. Otto also has a “partner in crime” with Kevin (Zander Schloss, a later member of The Circle Jerks, who appear on the soundtrack) who gets fired with Otto from his last job, and his “gang” of sometimes friends, Duke, Debbie and Archie. While Otto becomes a repo man, sort of an outlaw style of work that jibes with his punk leanings, Kevin continues to try to fit in and work a conventional job, giving up on his punk dreams and buying into regular society, selling out, as it were. The gang continues to commit crimes, armed robbery and car theft (which gets Archie vapourized by the neutron bomb in the trunk, and Duke shot by a store owner). Why are they like this? It's because of the bomb.

I remember growing up in the 80s, with the shadow of nuclear war looming over the entire decade. Punk came out of the disaffection of British youth in the late 70s, with the economy tanking and the old white male still firmly in charge, there was little to do but lay around, drink, take drugs and commit minor crimes. Punk was, at it's heart, a reaction to society: nihilistic, political and artistic. The Sex Pistols were one of the more nihilist bands, the Clash one of the more political, and all of the band were artistic. The Pistols took their cues from Malcolm McLaren, the owner of the Sex boutique, which catered to bored urban youth with too much time on their hands. By the time the punk movement jumped over the Atlantic to New York, it was bands like The Ramones (clad in leather and eschewing the 60s greaser look and sound), Blondie (fronted by Debbie Harry and looking like a punk/disco/reggae merger), Television and the Voidoids (with Richard Hell sporting torn jeans put together by safety pins, due to poverty, not fashion) leading the charge. The nihilism was palpably less, but the art was there. Then, on the west coast of the US, where Repo Man is set, we had The Dead Kennedys, a viciously political band with a penchant for injecting nasty, sarcastic humour into their music. Here is where the Repo Man connection comes in. While the Kennedys aren't on the soundtrack, their way of thinking is all over the movie.

So, we've got a snotty youth with nothing to live for. There's no American Dream, it's been trampled into nothingness by a depressed economy and horrible minimum wage jobs. Reagan is in the White House, Thatcher in power in the UK. And there's the threat of nuclear war, epitomized by the Malibu careering through the Los Angeles streets with a neutron bomb ready to go off in the trunk. And the neutron bomb itself, it's a weapon that just kills people, leaving buildings standing. As the Dead Kennedys so succinctly put it in their song Kill the Poor, what's to stop those in power from using this weapon on a city, wiping out the population, then just marching in and taking over the factories, homes and businesses, and just stop worrying about the poor? There's little wonder teenagers are so nihilistic. There's also little wonder why Otto find his new job so exciting. He's getting paid to commit crimes, drink, take drugs and shoot guns, and getting paid pretty well to do it.

By the end of the film, Otto had come into possession of the Malibu completely by change, locked the car up in the impound yard, then gets set upon by the government and the UFO cultists, plus a television evangelist and Scientologists. His friends are gone or dead, his colleagues bewildered and no one understanding what's exactly going on. Otto and mechanic Miller (played brilliantly by a bleary-eyed Tracey Walter) end up being the only people able to get near the now glowing green car, which is shooting off electrical sparks. Miller takes the wheel (despite not knowing how to drive) and invites Otto into the passenger's seat, the car lifts into the air and flies around Los Angeles before taking off into space. It's only those who are the misfits of society, the oddballs and the outsiders, the people who appreciate the absurdities of life that are able to confront the odd convergence of chance that the car with the bomb in truck represents that can approach it.

The Modern Lovers fit semi-tangentally into all of this. Jonathan Richman, the main force behind the band, serves as a footnote to the punk movement, always hovering around the edges of punk, but never really being part of it. Richman was a hanger-on of the Velvet Underground in the early 70s. The Modern Lovers formed in Boston and included Jerry Harrison (who went on to join the Talking Heads), David Robinson (of The Cars), John Felice (who formed The Real Kids) and Ernie Brooks (who worked with David Johansen of the New York Dolls). The Lovers' first recorded material was produced by John Cale of the Velvet Underground. Richman left the band in 73 and moved to California, joined the Berserkley label, and produced the Modern Lovers' only album in 1977, which influenced UK, New York and Californian bands. The Sex Pistols covered Richman's best known song “Road Runner” for their strange film, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.

Burning Sensations were as short lived as the Modern Lovers, producing just two proper albums before breaking up. Their style was slightly related to punk, feeling more on the garage end of things, but they had the “melting pot” feel of southern California punk: the mash up of punk, garage and Latin. Their one and only minor hit was “Belly of the Whale”, which was an early MTV staple,. They cover “Pablo Picasso” on the Repo Man soundtrack, with meshes well with the film. The tune is a dadaist classic, looking at obtuse Spanish painter Pablo Picasso cruising around in an El Dorado picking up women, and saying that Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. The film's message of randomness comes to a head in this song and it's the perfect centrepiece for the movie and the soundtrack.

DNTTA Playlist for May 13, 2016

Artist - Song - Album (Label)  * indicates Canadian Content 

Listen to Do Not Touch This Amp every Friday 8-9 PM Pacific at www.thex.ca 

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Frontline Assembly - Force Fed* - Caustic Grip (Roadrunner)
Hidden Hierarchies - Not Mine* - Hidden Hierarchies (Independent)
Lola Dutronic - Trying Not to Think About You* - Lost in Translation (Independent)
Note to Future Self - Quantum Age* - Technopoly (Independent)
ttwwrrss - Novospassky* - ttwwrrss_3 (Maisonneuve)
Robert T - Cyberfeeder* - Spectrum (Port Vanderlay)
Paranerd - Wockx* - Writ EP (Port Vanderlay)
Black Marble - A Great Design - A Different Arrangement (Hardly Art)
Gazelle Twin - Phobia - Out of Body EP (Last Gang)
Jerk in a Can - Big Crime Baby* - Big Crime Baby (Independent)
Hot Chip - Over And Over - The Warning (Astralwerks)
Nadjiwan - Defend* - Listen to Our Heartbeat (Independent)

Canadian Indy Band Round Up, May 2016

So much for my schedule, I had my post all typed up yesterday, then went to sleep and forgot to post it. Better late than never right?

Every 2nd Thursday is going to be Canadian week on the blog. I'll be highlighting some great new Canadian music, or focusing on an obscure band from the past.

Three new bands I've been enjoying lately:

The Zorgs:

From Winnipeg, Manitoba, The Zorgs have a sound that mixes the classic 60s style of garage and psychedelic rock with a more modern noisy style. They just released their 2nd album, Chew On It, in April on the Transistor 66 label.

https://the-zorgs.bandcamp.com/


Note to Future Self:

Toronto's Note to Future Self is a band in grand tradition of the single studio musician churning out oddball electronic music. Technopoly is the second album out under this name. It's got a nice burbling, spacy electronic vibe.

https://notetofutureself.bandcamp.com/

Jerk in the Can

Jerk in the Can are a weird rock/electronic band from Vancouver. Their style mixes spacy, droning electronics with disaffected, noisy rock. They just put out their debut album, Big Crime Baby.

http://jerkinthecan.com/ 

DNTTA Playlist for May 6, 2016

Artist - Song - Album (Label)  * indicates Canadian Content 

Listen to Do Not Touch This Amp every Friday 8-9 PM Pacific at www.thex.ca 

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Weed - Puncture* - Running Back (Lefse)
Black Mountain - Mothers of the Sun* - IV (Jagjaguwar)
Waingro - Mt. Hood* - Mt. Hood (Independent)
Pale Eyes - Britl Binary* - Worth the Sorrow (Independent)
Dralms - Pillars and Pyre* - Shook (Boompa)
Flannel Mouth - Pleading Insane - The Prisoner's Cinema (Independent)
Art Bergmann - Live it Up* - The Apostate (Weewerk)
As If - Sabbath* - As If (Shake!)
Winners Aftershave - Glittering Heap - Desperate to Please (Independent)
The Zorgs - Moneypenny* - Chew On it (Transistor 66)
Wooden Wives - Figureheads* - Weirdest Tuesday 2 (Baffled Octopi)
Circle Jerks - Coup D'Etat - Repo Man Soundtrack (MCA)

Video Playlist #4: Bands Within Bands

In an attempt to write more, I'll now be publishing new material every Thursday night. plus your regular randomly posted crap...

Our fourth video playlist on esoteric topics, this one is bands that mention other bands in their songs. I found I could probably do this one with just Dead Milkmen songs! Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0QOmyo1JgZc9OcrqQsPvLUw_0OSue5mS

1) LCD Soundsystem - Losing My Edge (Can, Suicide, Daft Punk, The Beach Boys, Modern Lovers, Yaz, This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars, The Trojans, The Black Dice, Todd Terry, The Germs, Section 25, Althea and Donna, Sexual Harrassment, a-ha, Pere Ubu, Dorothy Ashby, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, The Human League, The Normal, Lou Reed, Scott Walker, Monks, Niagra,
Joy Division, Lower 48, The Association, Sun Ra, Scientists, Royal Trux, 10cc, Eric B. and Rakim, Index, Basic Channel, Soulsonic Force, Juan Atkins, David Axelrod, Electric Prunes, Gil Scott Heron, The Slits, Faust, Mantronix, Pharaoh Sanders, The Fire Engines, The Swans, The Soft Cell, THE SONICS)
2) LCD Soundsystem - Daft Punk is Playing at My House (Daft Punk)
3) House of Love - Beatles and the Stones (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones)
4) They Might Be Giants - We're The Replacements (The Replacements)
5) They Might Be Giants - Au Contraire (David Bowie, Bach)
6) Elvis Costello - This is Hell (John Coltrane)
7) Bruce Cockburn* - Last Night of the World (Superchunk, Friends of Dean Martinez)
8) Tom Tom Club - Genius of Love (George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Smokey Robinson, Bob Marley, Sly and Robbie, Kurtis Blow, James Brown)
9) Deep Purple - Smoke on the Water (Frank Zappa, The Mothers of Invention. The Rolling Stones)
10) Lard - 70s Rock Must Die (The Bee Gees, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Aerosmith)
11) Tacocat - Crimson Wave (The Cramps)
12) The Dead Milkmen - You'll Dance to Anything (Siouxsee and the Banshees, The Communards, Book of Love, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Public Image Ltd., Naked Truth)
13) The Dead Milkmen - The Thing That Only Eats Hippies (The Grateful Dead, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, David Crosby)
14) Mojo Nixon - Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Lovechild (Debbie Gibson, Rick Astley, Tiffany)
15) KMFDM - Sucks (KMFDM, Michael Jackson, Depeche Mode, Madonna, Kylie Minogue)
16) Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip - Thou Shalt Always Kill (Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Johnny Hart, Desmond Dekker, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Syd Barrett, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Beach Boys, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Crass, Minor Threat, The Cure, The Smiths, Nirvana, The Pixies, Oasis, Radiohead, Bloc Party, The Arctic Monkeys, Pheonix)

DNTTA Playlist for April 29, 2016

Artist - Song - Album (Label)  * indicates Canadian Content 

Listen to Do Not Touch This Amp every Friday 8-9 PM Pacific at www.thex.ca 

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The Besnard Lakes* - The Bray Road Beast - A Coliseum Complex Museum (Jagjaguwar)
Brad Shepik and Ron Samworth* - Nightbirds - Quartet 1991 (Songlines)
Gary Lucas' Fleisherei - Little Pal - Songs from Max Fleischer Cartoons (Cuneiform)
Spike Jones - Serenade to a Jerk - Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones (Catalyst)
Ed Palermo Big Band - Fifty-Fifty - One Child Left Behind (Cuneiform)
Ergo - As Tomorrow - As Subtle as Tomorrow (Cuneiform)
Bill Laurence - The Pines - Aftersun (Ground Up)
Avishai Cohen - Quiescence - Into the Silence (ECM)
Interstllr* - Is There Thunder - EP (Independent)
Nick Zubeck* - Bound By Time - Skydriving (Caldo Verde)