• WFMU Marathon

  Really good this year. The station seems to be getting back on track.

• J-pop vs. Metal: Full Site Edition

  I’ve been working on jpopvsmetal.com. Which was just the tumblr version of a running thing that taken various forms but I’m taking it up a notch. There’s no need to over-explain it. Or at all.

• Copyright issues: Unexpected

  I received an email that one of the Wub Machine auto-remixes I posted on Soundcloud was infringing copyright and was taken. This was to be expected. But it wasn’t from major label act Kyary Pamyu Pamyu or infamously litigious Greg Ginn, but my one of Herman Cain ad background music. It’s political! Not quite, even dumber. It was this guy who thinks he invented the wub wub thing (which is just a computer synth setting or whatever), or more likely his record label does, or most likely a computer algorithm just thought the songs matched enough. I will have more on that on the Hakujin blog when I get to it. I will probably just post all the remixes there and move on to something else cause I’m not dealing with that nonsense, dubstep is kinda done right?

• Google Reader: Not Dead Yet

  Oh boy, I have a bunch of notes here about some old blogs. I think it can wait until this thing dies for good. People are questioning the decision to kill Google Reader but it’s got to be an increasing strain on their system because of the way it worked. Most people do not even realize that the RSS for every dead blog is stored on their servers. It’s probably a healthy thing to clean out.

• Other things

  I watched the doc Life After People finally and the thing that struck me most was how it maybe could have been better but the people working on it must have been like, “fuck it, who cares, all this bullshit is turning into dust in 1000 years”.

  Comics artist Eddie Campbell has an interesting and totally depressing view on posterity, but he also thinks he’s not a comics artist. But he is.

  This article on Alan Moore vs. Hideki Anno is also interesting, and old. I was researching some stuff. More on that later maybe.

  The new David Byrne book How Music Works not only looks and feels great, it’s a pretty good read. Some of the chapters were straight from his blog, one of them was one of the first things I linked to on my old blog. That was a moment. Whatever. It’s not whatever it’s a great book. It’s soft and velvety smooth.

  This very long interview with Steve Albini and Tim Mid(g)yett of Silkworm makes an interesting point (of many) that indie bands of Silkworm’s level are like outsider artists. It seems like the 90s was maybe a period where it seemed like that wasn’t the case and it was all an illusion that there was some kind of common ground among all bands.

  So you’re going have to see the Silkworm doc if you haven’t.

  And read this great Robert Crumb interview on record collecting.

  And I missed that Camille Paglia was in Vice magazine a few months back. Doing the thing she does. I was not smart enough to get in her class at UARTS or whatever. (It fills up fast, I’m not bitter about it.)

• Bowie/Momus

  That new David Bowie song had a full-blown Momus reference. But you caught that.

• Amu making real videos again

  I mentioned how Namie Amuro doesn’t seem to care about making decent videos anymore (somewhere). But she is back with a new one. Somehow,
  one of the videos where she looks bored and nothing happens is nominated for MTV Japan video of the year. (None of the amazing Perfume videos were as you can see.) check it that video yourself. Oops, you probably can’t. The videos are blocked outside of Japan. I do not understand what it is they think they are doing. Taste aside, they put non-Japanese acts the whole world has seen in their awards, but actively prevent Japanese acts from going international themselves. I think there used to be some kind of business reasoning behind this, like they would lose money shipping CDs worldwide or something, but I dunno. I don’t get it.

• Momoiro Clover x Go! Team

  This happened over a year ago but I wasn’t paying attention at the time. Before this I had singled out Go! Team as the closest Western musical equivalent to groups like Morning Musume. I’m not even sure about that statement myself, but someone else must have thought so. (The audience apparently didn’t and the single bombed, but what can you do.)
  I’m just gonna end with this cause you gotta end somewhere.
  

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