Tag Archives: happy earholes

We ARE the media

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I may have overdosed on Amanda Palmer, you guys. Unfortunately, most people I’ve mentioned her to don’t know who she is, so let me illuminate your lives for a minute. Because that’s why we’re both here, right? (Warning: there is much more link clickety fun than normal in this blog post. Just do it. It’s worth your time. Mostly.)

Back in the day, Amanda Palmer was the lead singer for The Dresden Dolls. She went solo and then ditched her record label. Somewhere in there is when I started listening to her, right around the time she released a badass album of Radiohead covers all played on the ukulele. That’s right. That’s what I said. Radiohead covers. On the ukulele. A whole album of them. Because that’s how one rolls with no evil corporate scumfucks looking over one’s shoulder. Art for art’s sake. Anyway, she’s just a great big tornado of weird fun and I love everything about her.

The reason that I bring her up now is that she’s been in the center of a wee little media frenzy with this new album, Theatre Is Evil. This is like the history of New Media in three acts, for real. What happened was that she crowdfunded the money for the album on Kickstarter, raising way more than she asked for (the goal was $100K and they ended up with $1.2 million). That’s what happens when your fans love the shit out of you and you make perfectly reasonable requests that will have awesome artistic repercussions. So, she made the album and, in addition to regular cds and itunes and all that blah blah, she released it on her website on a pay-what-you-can basis. I paid ten bucks for mine, even though I’m broke and could’ve gotten it for free. Because it’s her music and she worked her balls off to make it and she can do whatever the hell she wants with it! Once you take a record label out of the equation, anyway, and there’s no one telling anyone else what to do. Ever. (Frankly, I doubt very many people tell this woman “no.”)

So when she and her band started their tour they crowdsourced some musicians to go onstage with them. Now, here’s where the bullshit starts to get thick. I, personally, think this is a fucking fantastic plan. Why pay to haul an orchestra’s worth of people and equipment around the world when you can find a few people in each town to play with you, save on travel costs, and give some of your musically-inclined fanbase such an awesome opportunity? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s brilliant. Saves money and gives a bunch of people a huge happy. I love it. But apparently some musician’s union asshats had a problem with it because she was bucking the system. Demeaning everything they’ve worked for as a union and whatnot. Which, I mean, I see their point, too, but it’s not like she hired professional musicians and then refused to pay them. These folks were all enthusiastic volunteers who were aware of the terms when they signed up. (I should clarify that since this nonsense got some media attention, she and her team of minions have revised their budget so now they are paying everyone who comes to play, even though they never asked her to.)

And then, like a ninja, she sneaks onto the Billboard charts (as of this writing, she was sitting at number ten). With a crowdfunded album! With no record label! Which is a pretty incredible thing. Probably the first time all three of those circumstances have come together, although I can’t say that unequivocally. We kindasorta had this conversation when Radiohead released In Rainbows and gave it away. And then we noticeably didn’t have this conversation when Nine Inch Nails did the same thing with The Slip, which I thought was weird. Maybe it’s just being made into a big deal now because the interwebs is becoming exponentially more important each year. Evolution is speeding up. The singularity is getting closer and closer. And although the music industry was among the first to feel it, they’re turning into the whining toddler of the group, that annoying one that won’t leave without howling its fool head off. And folks like Palmer are the thorn in their side, telling them to their faces that they’re wrong. Good on her.

Now, we all know that I’m not a particularly adept music reviewer, but I am great at analogies and will say this: Theatre Is Evil fucking rocks. It’s like if The Cure and Concrete Blonde had a baby who was raised in a traveling burlesque show by Tori Amos and Ben Folds and grew up to be smoking hot and eyebrowless. I definitely like some songs more than others. I have listened to those songs about a thousand times. And I’ve listened to the whole album about ten times in the three days I’ve had it, and I’m just now able to get through the damn thing without crying. I even took the afternoon off yesterday and learned Ukulele Anthem on my uke. (Side note: at this point I feel obligated to mention that you shouldn’t pronounce it “you-kuh-lay-lee” but “ooh-koo-lay-lay,” because if I don’t my mother will yell at me.)

Also, there are a couple of really awesome videos for these songs. Like this one. And this one. That stop-motion ink-crawly weirdness is just so fucking cool. And that’s not CG; it was all practical. This kind of shit makes you remember when video was important, and think maybe it could be again. Most of that money that they repurposed for paying the musicians is coming out of the video budget, though, so I don’t know how much more fun visual stuff we’ll see for this album. Thanks for that, media/musician peer pressure. I really do miss that combo of visual and musical art that was so prevalent in the age of music videos. But Palmer also commissioned a bunch of folks to help her make an art book to go with the album (which I think was part of the higher-level Kickstarter package), so maybe that idea will catch on and we’ll have a new and exciting way to do music-slash-art stuff in this wretched post-video era.

Anyway, check out Amanda Palmer. She blogs (and somehow, inexplicably, overuses the word “kerfluffle”) at amandapalmer.net (where you can also buy the new album), and is @amandapalmer on Twitter. Basically, she’s awesome wrapped in art dipped in punk. You can’t beat that.

PS – I tried really, really hard not to mention this, but she’s married to Neil Gaiman, and we know how much I lovelovelove him. And while that has absolutely nothing to do with her music or her art, this is one of the sweetest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Ever get slapped in the face with a metaphorical glove by a librarian?

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This may not be a typically nerdy post. I’m way out of my comfort zone here. But I’ve been issued a challenge from which I am loathe to back away, hands up in surrender.

Lemme ‘splain.

I have this friend who, for the sake of anonymity we’ll call…what? Something totally wacky…”Matthew”. So, Matthew and I have a particularly snarky friendship, built mostly on a mutual love of books, music, and sarcasm. He’s both nerdier and cooler than me at the same time. It’s really weird. Dude wears a tweed librarian jacket with the leather patches on the elbows with no irony whatsoever (although to be fair, he is in fact a librarian).

Anyway, what’s the point? A couple of years ago he gave me a CD. Many, actually, and most of them I love. I’ve found a lot of great music through old Matthew (Of Montreal, The Roots, The Decemberists, TV on the Radio, Pavement, Godspeed You! Black Emperor). But this particular CD was meant to be a part of my musical education in hip-hop.

And I never listened to it.

Oh! Fail! Slacker friend!

I know, I know. I’m horrible. So then I see that this artist (GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan) is working on an album with Neil deGrasse Tyson, my very favorite astrophysicist (check out his podcast, StarTalk Radio, for sciency goodness). A Wu-Tang/astrophysics mashup! How cool is that? I, of course, immediately posted a link about it on Matthew’s Facebook page. To which he said, and I quote:

Him – I’d be more excited if I thought for an instant that you ever listened to that copy of Liquid Swords.
Me – Alright, fine. I’ll go listen to it.
Him – I’m not so much angry as I am disappointed. Also, I expect a full report. ON YOUR BLOG.
Me – Deal.

So I did. I’ve listened to it all the way through about four times. And I’ve got to say, honestly and truly, at this point I have nothing interesting to say about it. I really tried. There were great beats. And I love that they used the dialogue from Shogun Assassin. I’m still trying to figure out the last song (the angle on it: pro-church? Or not?). I’ll definitely listen to it again. You’ve got to chew on hip hop for a while, until you can really get into all the words. I do, anyway. But I wasn’t as captivated by it as I’d hoped to be. This puts me in a somewhat awkward position. I’m very rarely at such a loss for words. I can’t seem to even bullshit my way through this one. Fail again. I made myself sad.

Because I’m more interested in why I didn’t find it interesting. I do like hip hop. I don’t have a lot of it in my collection, sure, but what I like I really like. I think hip hop is really fascinating. It’s pure wordplay, extremely clever and difficult poetry (of course I find the dorkiest way possible to talk about this, looking at it like a fucking Lit major – it’s all I’ve got, guys, take it or leave it). But hip hop is a kind of liminal language, isn’t it? Like any other subculture, the language and its use define the boundaries of the group. One doesn’t have to be indoctrinated into the culture to enjoy it, but I always feel like I’m missing some basic understanding of what’s going on. Not the music, but of the culture, which are probably more inextricably bound than any other kind of music. But that’s a completely neophyte opinion. See? This is pointless. I can barely talk in a straight line about hip hop. I even called in backup. I tried to have this conversation with my personal Tyler Durden. Her insight was that a big part of the enjoyment of hip hop and hip hop culture (for lack of a better term) is the participation of the audience in the outrageous bluster of the artist, which I find both preposterous and accurate. This could quickly turn into a dangerous slippery slope into anthropology, though, and frankly I’m ill-equipped. But someone should do it. Get on that, internet, I’d love to read it.

So, what have we learned? I really like my comfort bubble. It’s warm and soft and they play heavy metal. And I should think more carefully before guaranteeing that I’ll put my intellectual experimental failures in print. Thanks for that, Matthew. Achievement unlocked.

Meanwhile, if you’re a hip hop fan you should listen to this: Saul Williams – Telegram

Logic! Science! Atheism! Pianos?

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Hooray for a post that’s not a downer! Fucking finally, right?

If any of you are my friends on Facebook, you’ve probably noticed the obscene number of Tim Minchin videos that I’ve posted in the last six months or so. (Did you watch them? Weren’t they great?) I may have mentioned him on the blog before. I think it was in my comedy post. Maybe just in the Pointless List box. Anyway, we all know I love comedy. And I love music. But somewhere in the middle there’s a weird cross-section of people who can do both. At the same time. These people are mutants. Hilarious mutants (and really, if you’re going to have mutants, those are the best kind to have, aren’t they?).

The reason I love Tim Minchin is that he’s fucking smart. Perhaps not in a typically booksmart way (no offense, there’s just no other way to say that), but in an important-subject-matter, Bill Hicksian sensibility kind of way. Intelligent, logical humor. Which is hard to do. Harder still to do whilst banging away on a grand piano, singing really complicated lyrics in a sort of baroque jacket with tails, the entire time maintaining an irresistible redheaded Australian adorableness. Logic plus adorable plus funny equals smart-girl bait. Oh, also barefoot. Barefoot smart-girl bait.

He’s one of those comedians that you either love or hate, as is usually the case when someone tries to base an entire career on making people laugh at controversial issues instead of being all profound and serious about them. Religion comes up a lot in his work, as well as other spiritual or ethereal (read: not provable) belief systems. He’s a staunch atheist, and consistently comes back to the point that logic and science should trump blind faith based on nothing. For the record, I’m not an atheist (you can stop having a panic attack, Mom). But I am pretty devoutly pro-logic and pro-free-thought. I have no issues with other people’s beliefs or faith, so long as they can find their peace or happiness or whatever in a quiet, unobtrusive, keep-it-to-yourself kind of way. Just because you think you’re right doesn’t automatically mean that I’m wrong, does it? I’d like to think it doesn’t. Live and let live. You keep your Jesus magic, and I’ll keep my space aliens and theory of evolution and we’ll just agree to disagree and continue to go about our business and love each other unconditionally and unabashedly in spite of our differences. Ok? Ok.

Hello, weird digression. Where did you come from? I should stay on topic.

The problem with combining any kind of social commentary with comedy (or music, for that matter), is that so often people can’t overlook the medium for the sake of the message. Like people who don’t listen to heavy metal or hip hop saying that it’s a bad influence on their kids. Or that all risqué photography is porn. Or that graffiti isn’t art. (“Stay on topic, Vanessa.” Ok.) Probably the best relevant example of this is Minchin’s The Pope Song, which is about the Pope (the last one, not the Nazi Emperor Palpatine-looking one we have now) covering up for priests who sexually abused children. In two minutes he manages to say the word “fuck” 92 times (by my count, could be wrong). Outstanding. Brilliant. Tremendous. The word itself doesn’t offend me in the least. Fuck fuckity fuckfuck. I can listen past it, right? Past the fact that “fuck” is just another word, to get to the point of the other lyrics, which are quite clever, considering that not much actually rhymes with “fuck.” It’s like a test. A battle of wits. And at the end you’re either offended on a shallow level by mere language, or you’ve understood the satirical juxtaposition of a word that shouldn’t be offensive (but so often is) with words that are seemingly more benign but illustrate something far more disturbing.

That last sentence got a little out of control. Just listen to the damn song and you’ll see what I mean.

Politics aside, Minchin is an excellent pianist and a great singer (you’d think that would go without saying, but in the world of musical comedy a lot of people are funny or technically talented but not both). Apparently he doesn’t read music or write his stuff down. Which I find both impressive and annoying. I’m trying to learn his song Not Perfect on the ukulele. But when I went to look for the chords there were about 800 different versions because everybody who ever put one on the internet had to figure it out for themselves. Also, piano to guitar to ukulele is a bizarre little game of Telephone to play with chords. But it turned out ok, I think I’ve figured it out. (Now I just have to learn to sing. Duck and cover folks, this is not going to be pretty.) He’s super versatile, too. An incomplete list:

Satire (for lack of a better word) – Fuck the Poor, Woody Allen Jesus, Prejudice
Straightforward social commentary – Fat Children, Canvas Bags, Peace Anthem for Palestine
Love songs – If I Didn’t Have You, White Wine in the Sun, Drowned, You Grew On Me
Ridiculousness – Cheese, So Fucking Rock, Doctor Who theme song (performed on a keytar while wearing a Prince Charles mask – yes, I’m serious)
Beat poetry (for real) – Storm, Mitsubishi Colt
Musicals – Won an Olivier Award for his lyrics and music for the stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda

That should keep you busy on the old YouTube for a bit. Mwahahahaaa. I’ve imposed my timesuck upon you. You’re welcome (unless you’re easily offended, in which case: don’t blame me, you clicked on that shit of your own free will). Tim Minchin’s blog and tour/merch/news/etc info are at timminchin.com. I’ll leave you with this one, because it’s my absolute favorite (insert obligatory “I’m not a pirate, all rights belong to the artist” blah blah – I couldn’t get it to embed, you’ll have to click on it, sorry): Tim Minchin – Rock and Roll Nerd

If you get addicted, it’s not my fault.

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I suck at science. Ok, that’s not true. I suck at math, which in turn makes it difficult for me to do science-type stuff. But I like science. I just don’t get a lot of the technical how-to-get-shit-done bits. Sometimes I wish I understood it more so I didn’t feel like people have to dumb it down to talk to me about cool science stuff, especially when it’s something I think is really interesting. I hate that feeling. That being-the-reason-that-the-conversation-is-being-reduced-to-the-lowest-common-denominator kind of feeling. But it’s necessary in this case, in this realm. I know that’s a bit of a contradiction, but still. It is what it is.

Which is why I’m a huge Radiolab fan. If you don’t know Radiolab, unearth your NPR love from wherever it’s been hiding and go look that shit up because it’s freaking awesome. And then come back and read the rest of this. I’ll wait here.

Doo doo dooo…(That’s my “waiting patiently” whistle. Didn’t really come across, did it? Gotta work on that one. )

Freaking awesome, right? For those of you not playing along: Radiolab is a badass radio show out of New York (WNYC) hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. (They’ve got a sort of good cop/bad cop, deadpan guy/fall guy dynamic dynamic going on. Superfun.) Did I build it up enough at the beginning for you to know it’s about science? Because it’s about science. But they never say that it’s about science. I mean, you could say it’s about anything, really: philosophy, language, storytelling, the human experience, blah blah blah. But at the bottom of it all, it’s a show about the science that backs all those other things up. Which is odd, but I give them props for not being too niche or pigeonholey. Basically it’s radio theater (or theatre, if you prefer) meets documentary journalism. It sounds weird, I know. Hear me out.

On the show they take an interesting question or concept and look at it from a couple of different angles, not so much through technical bullshit (although there is a little of that just to get the listener up to speed), but through good storytelling. It’s the best possible way to get into the guts of these ideas, especially for laypeople, which I assume most listeners are. Because this stuff is really cool. And I wouldn’t have ever heard about it otherwise. If it were just people talking and oversimplifying it would sound like every other boring documentary out there. But I’m big enough to admit that when I don’t know much about something, making it fun makes it way more interesting. On a similar note, every episode of Radiolab gives me like ten more books to add to my list (which is a monstrous thing of OCD spreadsheet beauty, let me tell you).

Besides the happyfun learning time you get, Radiolab is extremely joyful to the earholes. Jad Abumrad is a musician, so there’s a sort of symphonic, through-composed feel to every episode (he’s also a winner of last year’s MacArthur Genius Grant – major street cred). Like I said, it’s basically radio theater. Little one-act plays, full to brimming with fantastic sound production – cool loopy stuff, great music, voice effects, etc. Supremely listenable. There’s definitely something to be said for relying on both economy of language and auditory artistry to get a point across (“auditory artistry” sounds like a horrible dubstep band, by the way, so if your horrible dubstep band needs a name please feel free to use that one). I think this combo is becoming a lost art in some ways. Besides your standard NPR fare (Prarie Home Companion, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, This American Life) and all those hateful political talk shows, there’s not much going on in the radiosphere these days. I will say as a caveat to that point, though, that there are some cool kind of retro-radio-show-style things happening on some fun podcasts that I’ve discovered lately (i.e., The Thrilling Adventure Hour). So maybe just the delivery mechanism for listeney awesomeness is changing, not the desire to make it.

Still, you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty ballsy to dedicate one’s self to radio at this point in the culture game. Before television ruined us as a nation, we could listen to a good old fashioned story and think up good old fashioned pictures in our good old fashioned brains. And so it was for a thousand thousand years. Now it’s almost gone. We live in a Twitter society, you know? Tiny bits of mental effluvium leak out of us all the time and we’re obsessed with absorbing the brain dribbles of others. Our attention span is about 140 characters. Which is sick and sad, but I feel like it’s an inevitable evil at this point, so just hang on tight to the sides of the handbasket and enjoy the ride to intellectual hell, ok?

Check out all the full-length episodes and a metric ton of short podcastlets at radiolab.org. You will not regret it.