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Archive for October 2007
What do Rick James, Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder and Prince have in common with French duo Justice? Watch this video and you’ll find out, in case you missed it on Jimmy Kimmel last night.
I won’t go on and on, today is my birthday and I’m feeling rather uppity. I share it with Ben Vereen, “Diamond” David Lee Roth, Thelonious Monk, Brett Favre, Mya, and a bunch of other people, good company all. The Radiohead album was a welcome present, but I’m going to celebrate with my favorite birthday song, too. Back when Bjork was a Sugarcube, they recorded the wonderful (and consistently timely) album Life’s Too Good. On it appeared this song which, if you’ve never heard The Sugarcubes, I would urge you to purchase and enjoy. This remix was done by Jesus & Mary Chain and appeared only on 12″ released by One Little Indian in 1988. Enjoy.
The question has been posed: “How does Radiohead plan to sit down when there are so many millions of people up their ass all at once on this one day?” The album In Rainbows has been universally praised, primarily as a return to form that everyone was hoping for from the band. The world of the internet is divided into the DD’s and the DC’s (the Did Download and the Don’t Cares), and it’s pretty clear as to whether you got what all the hype was about. Despite some minor difficulties (it was widely reported that some did not receive their download emails and that the servers were heavily strained), it has to be seen as a huge success. This reviewer, as previously reported, was completely taken aback. Literally, it’s the first record I’ve heard in a long time that I can’t stop listening to repeatedly. I have to wonder if it’s a trick, like a hypnosis technique layered into the record that makes me have to continue replaying it endlessly.
Now the hard road forward for everyone must begin. If you’re Radiohead, it’s going to be very difficult to top this feat; millions of people paying what they will to simultaneously download your album is a feat from which there is no turning back. This experiment in releasing is clearly going to prove a success on many levels. What would this success mean to the recording industry as a whole? Is this the beginning of self-run digital distribution by artists?
Radiohead has proven it can be done, though nobody knows precisely at what cost as of this writing. Will such ventures remain the cost-prohibitive rental agreements of the internet, or will the majors finally hear the siren’s call and make the sweeping changes this entire effort has forseen? With some bands selling their albums on jump drives and others moving to individualized ventures that allow them to maintain control, everyone is wondering what the final outcome will be.
But Radiohead must be smiling widely, knowing that people like me are sitting here noodling about their brave adventure, believing that not only have they seen and predicted the future, the future is right now merely because they said so.
Find an easy pillow, lads, and enjoy being in the catbird seat. Congratulations on making the great leap forward that everyone else was afraid to make.
With sincere thanks to Puddlegum for this brilliant observation that might have eluded some of you.
Ten years after OK Computer shocked the world, Radiohead is releasing In Rainbows on October 10 (10/10). Though no one was expecting the album to be released until 2008, Radiohead announced In Rainbows just ten days in advance. In Rainbows, which consists of ten letters, has ten tracks, and would be downloadable for a rumored ten servers.
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Hit up some coverage at these other fine blogs:
Nothing But Green Lights
Gorilla vs. Bear
donewaiting.com
Pampelmoose
In a world full of meritless claims to the reins of modern music’s royalty status, I was half-expecting Radiohead’s In Rainbows to come out and put me to sleep. On first listen, it’s clever, inventive, delicately pretentious in a non-abrasive or suffocating way, and seems to me their most consistent effort since Kid A. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi has me hooked as my instant favorite, followed by the track which follows it, All I Need — full of sick keyboard flashes, mellow droning and Thom Yorke’s flawless tenor over beats which cover the spectrum from straight ahead rock to hip-hop-esque. Faust Arp I need to hear again, but it reminds me of a Jeff Buckley song to be quite honest.
In any event, far from being the bore and toss I thought would end up in my inbox, it comes thru loud and clear as an immediately influential record whose depth I have just scratched the surface of. All I can say for certain is I plan to listen to it a great deal more.
Though they would not know or likely care one way or the other, it has made for a wonderful birthday present. Thank you, lads.
Revision 1: So, the more I think about it, the more bummed out I am about the sound quality of the files. I know, I know…not everyone can hear the difference, but because I can it’s bugging me. Some of the songs, like Nude, muffle and almost feed back slightly even when I re-adjust my levels. The problem with digital delivery is that it’s hard to please everyone. At the very least, the album is good.
Revision 2: It will probably sound like a random revelation, but I’m fascinated by how many thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of people will have purchased and downloaded this record by day’s end. Now if we could just get those same people to get out and vote (those who have the right to vote, of course), think of the changes that could happen.
You can’t keep a good band down, and British Sea Power are back with a much-awaited new release to prove that. Already a great critical success, largely on the strength of 2005’s much-loved Open Season, BSP have taken two careful years to craft a series of over-achieving, thoroughly kick-ass rock and roll songs that left me wanting to hear more. The Krankenhaus? EP is the precursor to February’s full-length, entitled Do You Like Rock Music?, and if anything it’s a delightful teaser as to what we can expect come late winter. There is an obvious, profound Pixies influence on these six songs, ranging from self-evaluation to self-parody to straight-ahead rock and roll.
But enough of my slobber, here’s a track for you to check out. Enjoy.
Listen to British Sea Power - Atom
Krankenhaus? EP is available now from iTunes by clicking here. Do You Like Rock Music? will be available in February of 2008.
I admit that I’ve been a Radiohead fan for a long time. I’ve seen their concerts, bought their records, and maybe even had a poster on my wall at some point. Who can remember?
In any event, I have been watching with great interest (like everyone else) the forthcoming release of Radiohead’s In Rainbows on October 10th. I find it amazing that people are considering it some defining moment in pop culture, that a band of Radiohead’s stature and power is willing to release their album and allow you, the listener, to “pay what you like” for it. It’s too late to turn back the clock on this project: the bomb drops tonight at Midnight.
If this plan happens to unfold in the way Radiohead would like, they will be expecting to, and will actually, get people purchasing the album multiple times in multiple formats. The download that comes out will be 160kbps, good enough for people to hear the record but not good enough for people who consider themselves audiophiles to be satisfied. This assures that a percentage of the people who hear the record will re-buy it in a different format that suits their own image of themselves as a music listener — vinyl or cd.
This isn’t some earth-shattering concept if you’re Radiohead. They have a solid, loyal, inter-generational and international fan base who will gladly follow their lead. It’s very smart business, taking control of the pre-release culture and giving people exactly what they want and merely passing the virtual hat.
But at the end of the day, it seems like this can have a damaging after-current on the thousands of struggling indie acts out there whose records are traded, against their will, on P2P networks and torrent sites every day. Pundits will call this impact “The Radiohead Effect” in years to come, depending, of course, on the outcome. A band like Radiohead can afford to place no value whatsoever on their work and sell it for whatever anyone will pay. Thousands of independent artists, most of whom have never been afforded the opportunity to have their work promoted with enormous financial backing during the major label era as Radiohead did, would unlikely be able to afford this luxury.
In reality, it’s all just a very clever way of marketing to thousands of fans who would already pay any amount to have a new Radiohead album. To some degree, it’s a test of the social consciousness of music fans; but mostly it’s a great way for Radiohead to remind us all that no matter whether or not you like their music, you will never be allowed to forget how important and influential they are on modern music. It’s inarguable: Radiohead is one of, if not the, most loved and most enjoyed bands of the 20th and 21st centuries.
I hope that kind of self-important pretension is worth the price of admission.
Conspiracy Theories
The first one is that the lower-quality 160kbps release is to combat the oft-maligned OiNK’s requirements that downloads from their site must be of 192kbps quality or higher. I tend to agree that this makes sense, but at the end of the day it’s just about creating multiple revenue streams.
The next one is about their delivery methods. Those who order the record receive an email from W.A.S.T.E. with their confirmation details. To the uninformed or those literature-starved keyboard jockeys, W.A.S.T.E. comes from the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon and is, according to Wikipedia, “an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire. I think this means if you want to understand, you should probably buy the book.
This column will be updated further as information warrants.
