Afterthoughts of the EMP Pop Conference 2005, Go!

free t-shirts! 'have you got an xtra large?'

I'm emphasizing the panel on How To Rock Like A Black Feminist Rock Critic. This (and the Black Mass panel, which I will get to later in its own thread, specifically one piece in it) were definitely wrought with a combination of either emotion, frustration, fright, and/or humor.. They are the ones that "stood out" for me this year because while there have been so many great panels, these left a lot of really complex questions unanswered, and hence, leave me wanting to try to answer them as much as possible.

To be slightly serious, I think this belongs on another thread.

On the other hand, Michaelangelo's piece on "Apache" was wonderfully well-written and educative (Matos is also a fine extemporaneous speaker); the convo with him, Geeta, Jess, Tom, and J Smooth was fascinating; Douglas Wolk's Coke jingle history was marvelous; and it should not go without saying that Eric Weisbard and Ann Powers are two of the nicest people one will ever encounter.

Tom pretty much agreed with you, Joseph (again, I will let Tom speak for himself once he arrives back in London and is settled.). Tom and I, on our walk balk to our lodgings/home respectively last night, talked about the piece. He was horrified by the presenter as well, but he mentioned still getting something out of it.. namely, the presenter's horror of the Juggalos pretty much clearly exemplified the POINT of the existence of the Juggalos. I then facetiously brought up whether the presenter was presenting this "Oh, this is HORRIBLE!" thing as a calculate facade or not.

(This very last thought will segue into the Buddy Holocaust thread I will start tonight)

(and Joseph, I'm sorry I never got to see you... I hope we get to meet in the future.. but it seems, by not meeting, we apparently attended each other's complement of panels, which is great for this thread.)

I'd like to know more about this. What sorts of things were addressed? Last year's CMJ panel on "the future of online journalism" basically just talked about mp3 blogs the whole time -- which was fine and interesting (and gave Matthew Perpetua and Mark Willett a nice forum) -- but I'd hoped for something broader.

Other papers I liked: one on Steely Dan by Paul Anderson (though it got a little theory-heavy), one on Albert Ayler by T.R. Johnson, one on Lester Young and the "cool mask" by Joel Dinerstein, and one on Merle Haggard by Cotten Seiler (all of these but the Steely Dan one were part of the same panel). In order to catch the Steely Dan talk, I had to be late for the Black Feminist Rock Critic panel, but I caught the last of Kandia Crazy Horse and wished I'd been able to engage her one-on-one afterward, and caught Laina Dawes talking about being a black female metalhead. I would have preferred a more formal presentation from her, but it was still very interesting and she seems cool and I definitely don't feel like the I'll-go-to-yours-if-you-come-to-mine deal I made with her in advance was in any way a one-sided favor to either of us.

Folks I had a good time talking to one-on-one: Dave Queen, Allen Lowe, Matos, Jess, Tom Ewing, donut, T.R. Johnson, Joel Dinerstein, Geeta, and surely some folks I'm forgetting.

It wasn't a theory-drenched panel by any means.. I think the intent (and Matos, as moderator of the panel, can correct me if I'm wrong) was to be a more informal, round-table discussion of a sample of bloggers.

One of the things i remember most was Geeta explaining -- in the context of the relative dearth of females in the dedicated music "blogosphere" -- from her science/MIT edu background, that she's seen evidence that guys are more inclined to make "lists of things" than women are... something, as a list-making guy myself, didn't notice.

And of course the "Are all music bloggers the product of lost fathers in our childhood?" revelation which had everybody LOLing.

(to explain, Oliver Wang brought up an interesting comment about how parents might feel about blogs, "why do you do it? how is it going to make you money?", etc. which led Matos to ask the panel "What does your mother think of your blog?", to which everyone was able to actually answer. Someone in the audience then asked "What does your father think of your blog?", and -- except for Geeta and Tom -- everyone else didn't ever happen to know their true father after their single digit years.)

Did Dan threaten Motorbooty Magazine and not tell us about it?

Ringmaster and Riddle Box are fantastic albums and the "Tunnel of Love" EP is great, too. Everything else is patchy, although there are moments of greatness on Bizarr/Bizaar and The Great Milenko and "Redneck Hoe" has possibly the greatest hook ever ("Bitch, you's a hoe/And hoe, you's a bitch/Everybody knows/That you're a funky funky bitch").

the juggalo thing was disappointing to me because it probably should have been scrapped when she couldnt actually "walk with the juggalos". perhaps the title promised too much.

The one piece that absolutely FLOORED me was probably the most academic one of them all -- Peter Mercer-Taylor's piece on the breakdown (and I mean BREAKDOWN -- he had an extremely detailed hand-out containing outlines, diagrams, you name it!) of Cradle Of Filth's song "From The Cradle To Enslave". I was grinning non-stop throughout the piece because I rarely get to hear this genre examined in such a manner. The most academic presentation of them all rocked my ass off -- literally. I felt rectified. (NO PUN INTENDED!)

And yeah I was the guy who made the comment afterwards: "Why was everyone chuckling? If this were a Black Sabbath or Korn or Misfits or Venom song, no one would be chuckling, and those bands aren't any more worthy of being taken seriously in this context, IMHO."

quoting the Black Commentator blog: "'Black Americans do not need European models of fascism to understand the threat.'" (this is re: Bush's 2004 reelection)

"Slavery is a murderous business, but even compared to the rest of the West, American slavery was abhorrent."

at one point he showed a street sign crossing from N.O.: the names were RACE and RELIGIOUS

"Lots of murders means lots of work for brass bands at funerals."

In the 1800s, N.O. was the U.S. capital of sex slavery (he talked extensively about how slaves were bred for specific purposes of sex slavery, both male and female; the figures he cited were staggering--something like an increase from a quarter-million to four million over a certain number of years, like 50 or so). Slaves were primarily a cash crop: "We could just call it the slave-breeding industry."

"Why am I looking at slavery so much here? Because in New Orleans it's right in your face."

He discussed the book Mandingo at length. The author was on the list of writers Cyril (I think) Neville (or whomever the youngest of the Neville Brothers is) mentioned as people he read to learn about black history in the Neville Brothers' oral autobiography. Mandingo was--in one of the abolute greatest lines of the entire Conference--"A turd on the front door of Eisenhower's America" that sold five million copies. "One of the kinkiest books I've ever read," said Sublette, who went on to note that it is, in fact, a meticulously researched book that is also a total "potboiler."

He talked about how the Indian tribes in N.O. parades cannot be pinned down, origins-wise.

Most haunting part of the presentation: Sublette is a fast, loud, authoritative speaker with a pronounced and quite engaging twang. (He spoke about his childhood in Louisiana, and having to play "Slave Auction" in class at age nine, quoting self-written dialogue from a classmate playing the auctioneer: "I hate to break up families, but I must do my job." He's been living in N.O. for a year, which inspired the presentation, and I think he spent a good amount of time in Texas as well.) Three-quarters into his talk, he spoke about hearing the sound of one of the tribes coming up the street: "Congo . . . Congo Nation," he sang, softly. It was like someone had broken the air in the room apart, and you could hear a pin drop in the gap between the two "Congo"s.

I already raved about my faves on the other thread but now that I think of it some extra points . . .

Yes, me too, I really loved that Mendellsohn scholar that gave the Cradle of Filth talk- he ruled, and so did his handout.

I loved how the old blues and jazz geezers with beards would bust each other's chops about facts and historical "firsts" during Q+A time, it gave that part of the talks a certain treacherous feeling.

I loved Judith Halberstam's discussion of the concept of "temporal drag" in relation to queer cover songs.

Ned Sublette truly did kick a lot of ass it must be said

but so did that Morissey paper about his "artful evasions", and the Morrissey Q+A time got really confessional and weepy from some quarters which was fun and awkward

the talk about, like, how like Sun Ra was like this, like, totally far out guy into drones dood and like how, like free folk is just like Aleister Crowley dood who was like this really freaky old guy from like 1903 and stuff and like weed helped me hear Animal Collective this whole new way man etc. made me kinda cranky . . . but perhaps I'm not the intended audience, to be fair it seemed to be a survey for the uninitiated and I think we were all hitting conference fatigue at that point

aside from technological burps and gaps as people struggled with recalcitrant PowerPoint presentations it was all pretty much
totally fun and rad

Heh heh, I think this exemplifies the "within the art" angle to the highest degree, for better or worse.

I actually really appreciated the execution of his presentation, because I think he was trying to make the presentation itself analagous to the music itself he was describing. Busy, out of sync, then in sync, then out of sync, again, background music, long quotes/rants appearing and disappearing, "like, DOOD" enthusiasm. It was a fun presentation overall.

However it didn't really endear me to the bands he was talking about per se, but I think that's because of my specific background. I've played in many improv noise-rock bands for the past couple of decades, and I've never cared much for "magick", the occult, "mystery", or did any drugs other than have the occasional beer or girlie drink... and after performances I've done with friends, I'd have people come up to me saying "dude, you totally, like, blew my mind.".. However, I can appreciate that this would have been interesting and informative to people who never heard of No Neck Blues Band, SUNN 0)))), Sun Ra, Sun City Girls, etc., so I have to give J. Farrar credit here.

(Matos, thank you for the C.L. and Sublette)

I'm seriously considering going to this next year.

Same here, would have gone had not other plans been locked into place. Have to see what the general topic next time around will be.

First of all, to Ned: I lasted one song of USE and had to leave. This wasn't because the band were bad, not at all (actually I couldn't tell, but they sounded good), it was that the hyper intense audience reaction basically freaked me out: not knowing the material, and feeling damp and old and heavy and tired and sober, I couldn't muster the will to give myself over to it in that way, and I didn't want to be a bystander in that situation, so I left. I think not going to a gig for about 2 and a half years - Glastonbury aside - had something to do with it, too. It was an odd moment for me.

OK a general point - next time this happens I recommend it to anyone(if you can afford it). I had a really good time. Thanks to everyone I met but I should single out Matos for a) setting me up to go in the first place, b) moderating the panel in such a way that I didn't make a dick of myself and c) making a travel-addled and sleepless me feel so welcome on the Wednesday. He takes joint credit on c) with the totally awesome DONUT X who was the perfect guide and a zen-like rock of calm in the face of much touristic befuddlement. I would offer these two gentlemen the countless riches of the Earth but CD-Rs of crappy UK No.1 novelty hits may well have to do instead.

Some actual analysis to follow (maybe) (hopefully)

Interesting! I sense an essay or a thread or something. :-) (I'm usually once a month for shows these days.) And yes, Matos and Donut are spiff beyond measure. :-)

Musician/critic/dj/teacher Franklin Bruno weighs in on EMP at his blog:

http://konvolutm.blogspot.com/

BUT the paper seemed a kind of answer to the Juggalo one, where the presenter's disgust at ICP's refusal to join THEIR dots was very obvious. The band's claim that their KISS-style face make-up came to them in a dream, or that they were the only white guys in the WHOLE WORLD to be listening to hip-hop in 1988 obviously enraged this presenter (OK, as did everything about the band, but this was part of it). What on earth did the band or fans get out of this, she was asking? And the answer from free folk dood was: a sort of naive, invulnerable fandom that in some way draws energy from not joining the dots.

Most of the panels I liked best had these questions (dot-joining and its costs; problematic vs unproblematic fandom; who gets to be a fan of something; the idea of initiation and fandom) floating around behind them but not often addressed front on - maybe next year!

- Robert Morest's on native american hip-hop.
- Douglas Wolk's on soda-pop.
- Jessica Hopper's very very funny grunge crush story (also totally key for my macro-reading of the conference's secret themes)
- Matos's also very very funny Apache paper (totally IRRELEVANT to my etc etc. but who cares)
- Eric Usner's examination of Starbucks music, not so much for content but for the many questions it sparked in me.

I keep looking through the programme and seeing so many really intriguing papers that I completely missed, too. :(

Tom you are very OTM about the dood and I see your point, I think fandom was the unacknowledged spectre behind a lot of the talks and sometimes it would surface explicitly and sometimes it seemed like irony and a critical layer of intervention was a way of disavowing/mocking fandom. I guess my reaction to dood would be a sign of that too: other people's pleasure can be an invitation to join in, or a solipsistic turnoff, but at least he was unabashedly being a peppy advocate for what he digs.

the Velvet Underground installation from Sweden,and a presentation Weisbard describes as something akin to an off-Broadway theater piece, the Saturday lunchtime Diva Monologues performance by Holly Bass, "Diary of a Baby Diva: A One-Woman Show."

Also: dude quoted MEL LYMAN a couple times in his PowerPoint show, Lyman being a pioneering cult auteur in the sixties with a reputation of intimidation, violence and authoritarianism towards his members and the outside world (tho I'm not sure he used sleep-deprivation as a tactic).

You had a very valid point when you yelled that out. I was thinking about your comments while on the verge of death going through severe turbulence over Reno, NV, clutching a cold brew. BTW- I am returning to Reno two weeks from now to get married.

Anyway, I remember the question asked was “What do you find most disturbing in music?” I replied MTV and its use of cult tactics. My full and better answer if I had had another 20-minute presentation would have been this: People get all freaked-out about the Manson and Lyman cults because they brainwash people and make them kill. Manson is a total American bogeyman and scapegoat even if he is guilty of something heinous. However, I don’t find them, their beliefs, or their music disturbing. At least, they don’t appear disturbing when compared to one of the most destructive cults of the 20th-century, the United States. They brainwash way more people (via television and radio and other technology) who do way more unspeakably horrible crimes in the name of the USA than the followers of Manson or Lyman ever did. These two are small-potato, amateur cult leaders compared to those pulling the strings in our society. (What about black metal? More people have been in the name of GOD than SATAN. The numbers aren't even close.)

As for La Monte Young, he totally utilized sleep deprivation, as did Sun Ra, as do yogis. However, I bet if you were to compare the brainwave activity of somebody who attended an all-night Theatre of Eternal Music gig (or how about a late-night NNCK gig like the classic 5th Anniversary show at Hint House since TOET is long gone) and somebody who stayed up all night watching MTV then the dude digging NNCK/TOET would have brainwaves closer to a yogi in deep mediation whereas the dude wanting his MTV would have brainwaves closer to somebody sleeping. (Again, that is a guess, but I might not be too far off.) So, what we might be talking about with Young vs. MTV is the use of black magic and technology to control the mind, and the use of white magic to free the mind.

Also, I don’t think video and radio are mentally destructive in-and-of-themselves. Energy released is energy released. It depends on how one uses it. The VU video exhibit was one of the most incredible uses of film and video that I have ever witnessed (to give Steve K an answer). I felt so awake and alive and invigorated after going through that thing twice in a row. I didn’t want to leave that little black box on Friday. I felt deeply fortunate that I got to see that.

Other than that, I am glad that folks got something out of my presentation.
-Dood

You do realize this sounds more than a bit paranoid, I hope.

However, just for the record. Crowley and Sun Ra were only briefly mentioned during my 20-minute presentation. I mentioned Crowley ONCE, and it was in reference to the fact that he(as well as Blavatsky) was a pioneer in fusing Eastern mysticism to Western science and philosphy despite his more storied drug problems. That's pretty straight-up. Few in the West knew anything about Eastern mysticism in 1903. He was one of the first to travel to and study in Tibet, and I admire him for that. Blavatsky, in fact, beat him to it. She was in Tibet by about 1860. That's amazing.

I mentioned Sun Ra TWICE (kind of). My independantly running slide show included a picture of Ra and stated "Sun Ra: The Father of the Modern Drone". And, I actually uttered his name just ONCE when talking about NNCK's ability to fuse all kinds of different music that inlcuded his name. But, I never actually talked about Sun Ra.

Okay. I am shutting-up now. If anybody wants to correspond about anything in great detail in regards to my presentation then please feel free to e-mail me.
-Dood

http://www.emplive.org/visit/education/popConfBio.asp?xPopConfBioID=497&year=2005

T.R. Johnson
Tulane

T. R. Johnson is an associate professor of English at Tulane University and the author of _A Rhetoric Of Pleasure_. He also hosts a radio program on WWOZ FM New Orleans (www.wwoz.org) every Thursday morning that focuses on post-bop jazz. He grew up in Louisville.

Hmm. I communicated a few things sorta under my breath to my colleagues and I raised my hand when you asked rhetorically (IIRC) who in the audience had ever mocked drug-taking hippies, but as far as I can recall, I didn't say anything that would've been audible, I don't think. Perhaps I was thinking too loudly. (That's not entirely a joke, btw.)

However, I bet if you were to compare the brainwave activity of somebody who attended an all-night Theatre of Eternal Music gig (or how about a late-night NNCK gig like the classic 5th Anniversary show at Hint House since TOET is long gone) and somebody who stayed up all night watching MTV then the dude digging NNCK/TOET would have brainwaves closer to a yogi in deep mediation whereas the dude wanting his MTV would have brainwaves closer to somebody sleeping.

Well...speaking from personal experience, back in 2001, I made a point of watching MTV continuously for 24 hours while blogging about it in real time. It wasn't anything like sleep OR a trance state, really, it was hyper-sensitivity, giddy fatigue and odd serenity. All-night dances have been a little like that for me; so has personal tragedy.

The experience made me quickly realize that I was using MTV in a way that ran completely counter to its design. I couldn't see how anybody, no matter how impressionable, could tolerate the nagging repetition of their ads and full-length shows for very long. Plus, shows were very sound-bitey (even more so now, and even more so with VH1 and their talking-head shows), to be consumed in discrete gulps than a long slow draw from a cool water pitcher.

Plus it's probably organized much the same way top 40/20/10 radio is, which assumes the average listener puts a station on for only a very short span -- like a car trip to and from work or the grocery store -- a key reason why radio playlists are so tight tight tight. MTV's prpbably even shorter than that, given how easy it is to use a remote. It also put me in mind of another very notorious use of music in the service of social control: in-store soundtracks, esp. those falling with a tight twenty-thirty minute loop, defining for the consumer the amount of time they're expected to linger in a store. (But why would MTV want its viewers to see less of it in one sitting than more? Perhaps its magi[c][k] collapses when one lingers too long in it.)

Depends on what you mean by "few" (not to mention "mysticism") seeing as quite a lot of the great 19th century Western philosophers had some grounding in the Upanishads, Buddhism, Taoism and so on: Emerson, Thoreau, Schopenauer, Hegel, Nietzche. (To say nothing of all those Jesuit missionaries in China.)

Well, that's her story. And like most of her stories, it's entertaining, self serving, and highly dubious.

In her own way, though, Blavatsky was ahead of her time. She was an early pioneer in the field of New Age marketing.

New Age marketing, of course, has been used to sell a lot of droning, quasi-Eastern music, so she's definitely a character in the story El Dood seems to be telling here. However, her adventures in Tibet were likely little more than pretty patter.

"After hearing Jess Harvell dismiss posting MP3 files on music blogs, Mike Merrill thrust his hand in the air to issue a challenge. Unfortunately, time had run out for further formal discussion, but Merrill approached Harvell.

"'Normally I wouldn't rush to argue with a speaker, but I felt that he missed the fundamental point that music writing is better if you can hear the music,' said Merrill. 'We agreed that the problems of posting MP3s are more technical issues than style issues.'"

Hmm. Brainwaves don't work like that....this is erroneous. I used to work in brain science laboratories, and I can almost 100% vouch for the fact that you will not see this result. In fact, you might see the opposite. Monitoring brainwaves is pretty antiquated, anyway; instead of an EEG, which would give you very limited and not very useful data, I would recommend doing fMRI scans of both the NNCK group, the MTV group, and a control. What you will probably see is that the MTV group may very well have *more* excitatation of various centers, not less -- a lot of action in the visual cortex, for sure, with the constant barrage of images and lightning-quick edits. Plenty going on in the auditory cortex, of course. Various parts of the frontal lobe (attention, etc) firing like crazy.

Well, I think Jess's main point was that once you go the Mp3 blog route, it pressures the blogger to go towards the "MY MP3 IS MORE OBSCURE THAN YOUR MP3" dynamic all too easily... Otherwise, you just took up a big chunk of your webspace quota with a song that someone could just otherwise download easily via s1sk or similar.. which is completely OTM. But I don't think Jess was dismissing Mp3 blogs at all, in fact... Merrill missed the point me thinks. (but I'll let Jess speak instead of me for him)

which gets at my main issue with mp3's: they are extremely limiting to what you want to write about. tom mentioned something on the panel or afterwards, that, once you start posting mp3's regularly, your hits begin to skyrocket with no sign of slowing. and it's true: people looooove free stuff, duh. but it's also kind of insulting. i don't like to make any great claims for Art about what I do, especially with the blog. that'd just be silly. but at the same time i didn't start a blog to necessarily be handing out musical hors d'ouvers to an anonymous and (not to put too fine a point on it) ungrateful audience.

you become locked in this format, of having to have mp3's every day on offer. what if i feel like writing about some pop thing everyone already knows about and dont feel like posting an mp3? what if i can't track down an mp3 for something but still want to write about it? there are a ton of considerations and limiters put on you when the music is right there for the taking. like, why bother writing about it at all? (i mentioned after the panel that having the mp3's there does shift the burden of the writing from the imagistic to the historical/contextual. i.e. what's the point of describing it if it's right there, other than the most bare bones "get you to download this" description. i don't want to insult anyone, but a lot of mp3 blogs seem to have this feeling that the writer is in training to get snatched up by a record company to provide content for them. and, you know, fuck that.) (that also leads to something tom and i brought up, which cycles back to the technical issues: what if you want to talk about something that's bad?)

for years and years, people read the music press without thinking they were going to get an instant hit of the music described therein. i don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. yes, everyone benefits by being able to hear the music a writer talks about. it should be, ideally, why we do it. (and yes, a lot of why i started posting mp3's was because i was talking about all this stuff that had pressings of perhaps 2,000 copies max.) but i don't necessarily know if its my job to hold your hand to find it. hell, maybe i'm just marking myself out as old, but part of the fun in discovering stuff was the lag time between reading it and tracking it down. mp3's have alleviated some of the frustration of the stuff which you're never able to track down at all. but they've also contributed to our blip/junk food/thumbs-up-down culture. which may be irreversible and i should just shut up. it's gonna be a helluva toboggan ride!

but, more than anything, they are also, you know, stealing. and, especially with the work of people i respect, i don't know how comfy i am with that. (i have taken down mp3's when asked, as I think everyone should.)

this is all poorly reasoned (it's before 8am and i'm doped up on allergy meds), but there are at least the kernels of my feelings on it there. mp3's are valuable, and have certainly turned me onto a lot of stuff. but they have turned me onto stuff because they were right there, undifferentiated from the music around them. fluxblog may have turned me onto MIA over a year ago, but i am sure a passionate bit of advocacy would have made me check it out too.

Particularly on the point that music discussion *must* include mp3s to refer to. Flux, as I'm sure he'll confirm, says he's often specifically been given mp3s by artists/labels to share, so that stands against the concern of theft as such -- I guess it depends what you're working with and what's specifically available. But to insist that the nature of things requires that for music criticism to function now that mp3s are an absolute requirement, even if a requirement only in one's head...yeesh.

I actually hardly read any MP3 blogs - the two that stand out for me are Fluxblog and the Tofu Hut, which are both a little different. Tofu does hours and hours of research for each entry which really backs up *why* he's picking these particular tracks. And Fluxblog is format-wise the template for all this stuff but in terms of content Matt's presenting and working out a fairly singular aesthetic so there's more of a sense of continuity than most blogs give you.

wtf? "even if [Manson] is guilty of something heinous." Hey maybe he was, like, in the wrong place at the wrong time? Charlie Manson is a convicted mass murderer and rapist and his delusional "beliefs" amount to pathological racism, misogyny and paranoia. And as Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher learned the hard way, his music was a scam.

Henry Kissinger IS a war criminal but how does that exonerate Manson? [impolite sentence removed by request of poster. he's very sorry. -- mod]

otherwise, i'd steer clear of mp3s, theres nothing wrong with talking to people who have already heard something (or are persuaded to go buy it). i dont think in this context there is any responsibility to talk to 'everyone'

I generally think that if you're not serving a niche un(der)served by other existing MP3blogs, you should stick to writing until you get good enough at that that you're attracting independent traffic and/or getting unsolicited music that you can then consider posting.

Haha Ned, you are correct, but I am not daunted by it!

The 'duplicate download' thing is interesting. When I did PopNose there were only about 20 MP3 blogs so it was pretty easy not to be duplicating stuff. Now there are hundreds. This ought to be intimidating but I'm not sure I'm that bothered, also I'm not interested in posting new material and I don't like much indie so the crossover should be minimal.

Anyway in the last hour or so I've worked out a format which deals with both these problems nicely, so watch this space (or rather my space).

Hurrah!

Tom, I promise I'll be writing more for FT here, just been busy/in a slight funk.

you mean the one around february 2003? i left before sightings, too tired.

if mp3 blogs are going to post only out-of-print stuff, shouldn't they be held responsible to renumerate the artist, when possible? i mean, if you've got a monopoly on the content, and it isn't yours...

Makes no sense to me for a couple of reasons -- the "monopoly" bit I don't understand in a literal or a figurative sense. Moreover, most of the time artists aren't exactly thrilled when their stuff goes out of print, and if the blogger isn't making a cent by putting it out there, it what sense does he owe the artist anything? I say this as someone who's stuff is mostly out of print and available only MP3s and bootleg -- the bootleggers are trying to make money off of our shit, so fuck them, but how do the MP3s hurt me? They don't!

good question, i don't know the answer. ive put up a couple of mp3s like this, and i don't know where you would find the people, if they are still alive or whatever. its an interesting question. perhaps there is no difference, other than you are not 'competing' with a valid way of selling it, as it is not for sale at all.

this raises further questions

1. sharing/providing obscure/outofprint content, while this may not be detracting from sales as there are no sales, presumably it detracts from potential FUTURE sales, why would anyone reissue if its become available online?

2. if a million freely available things from the past suddenly appear, doesnt this freely available music compete with new music, even though it is not the same music? if i find loads of 78s by now dead artists, that are unreleased, well, you know, i'm going to buy less other stuff, while i get through that*

*woebot had a good piece about that, this guy he knew had a bunch of old reggae dubplates, never reissued, he got them all onto cdr, and there were HUNDREDS of them. need to buy a reggae compilation ever again? or...anything!

3. i still dont know how to compare this to 2nd hand record shops. this guy i know has thousands of records, but, they're all 2nd hand. im dont think any of the money he spent ever went to artists or labels...

http://www.urbanhonking.com/dokuchan/archives/2005/04/saturday_at.html

WaPo article on award-winning "paper architect" Shigeru Ban. 1,600 words. One (1) photo. Why not 700 words and 4 photos? Reporter Linda Hales writes that one of Ban's projects features

a huge mesh-like canopy of translucent figerglass, which swoops over and around linear galleries.

We want to see that, not read that. 11:21 A.M.

I tend to agree. Nine times out of ten anyway when writing directly about the music I'd like to be able to hear the piece. Also, this bit

which gets at my main issue with mp3's: they are extremely limiting to what you want to write about. tom mentioned something on the panel or afterwards, that, once you start posting mp3's regularly, your hits begin to skyrocket with no sign of slowing. and it's true: people looooove free stuff, duh. but it's also kind of insulting. i don't like to make any great claims for Art about what I do, especially with the blog. that'd just be silly. but at the same time i didn't start a blog to necessarily be handing out musical hors d'ouvers to an anonymous and (not to put too fine a point on it) ungrateful audience. it's just a bit

is just a bit condescending to the readers, no? I guess it depends on who you write for though, yourself or the people reading you.

I think I feel the stirrings of an EMPalooza in the werks! Bring that shit to the people! (Note: said stirrings might be hunger pangs.)

And anyway I don't know of any MP3blogs that don't feature writing - it's still thought of as important. It may just be that there's a sense that unadorned MP3s would be more nakedly piratical and vulgar. But assuming the writing isn't just a figleaf, Jess' question - what does it do to your style? - is still crucial.

It's not quite like the art crit example Dan cites because even four photographs wouldn't be giving the reader the full experience of seeing the art in the way that an MP3 delivers a full package.

xpost tom slate does that! it IS annoying!

http://poplicks.com/2005/04/emp-wrap-up.html

However, as much as I did enjoy Jess' mp3 posts, if the same track-focused entries were posted without mp3s I probably would have tracked down the songs eventually. In fact, one of the things I like the most about mp3 blogs is that it forces the writer to write about songs rather than albums.

Is there already a loosely established distinction between reviews and criticism that I'm trying to describe here? For example, take Christgau's writing in the Voice, on the one hand there are the Consumer Guides which though fun to read, really work in the web version where they have linked mp3's from time to time and there are the essays which tend to focus on issues tangential to the music. The blogs I gravitate towards that don't use mp3's tend to concern themselves more with these divergent ideas or conceptualizations. Which is fine. When writing about music however, just understand, you've got another tool at your disposal, the actual music itself. It's not worth getting defensive about and lashing out at the readers, which is where I objected previously.

It truly deserves it.

hahahahahahahahaha

1) I find the anti-audioblog stances to be...interesting. I wasn't really sure where Jess was going when he brought it up on the panel and I continue to be unsure as to what the exact objections are, besides the intellectual property concerns which I think throws us back into the ever-sticky debate over whether downloading - writ large - helps or hurts artists.

I wrote about this a few weeks back, but for me personally (and I can't speak for other audiobloggers), but I kicked off Soul-Sides as an audioblog (it wasn't before, but rather, just a space to talk about records I liked minus the MP3s) not long after I stopped doing college radio (after 10+ years on the air). I didn't think of it at the time, but sharing music via a blog was simply the transference from one medium (radio) to another (internet) but the impulse was largely the same. People used to describe my radio show as a bit, shall we say, loquacious, and the way I blog about MP3s isn't that unsimilar to the way I ran my show. If I had the time and energy, I'd probably just podcast more but frankly, I stopped doing radio b/c I got tired of spending all the time it took it do it. Not like audioblogging isn't time consuming but personally, I find it more rewarding if only because I actually do get feedback on what I put up unlike radio, where I'd be lucky to get one or two calls during a three hour set.

Coming from the other side too, the way I avoid the "what if I want to write about something that's not obscure" is the fact that, well, I run two blogs (well, more than two but we don't have to get all into that) and if I want to write something about the new, say, Fat Joe album without having to illuminate with songs, then I can do that via Poplicks.com and not Soul Sides.

2) Not to ride the bandwagon but yeah, I had problems with the ICP paper too which largely sounded like a paper on "why I didn't do the ICP paper." And while I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt as to why she had trouble finding people to talk to, I just find it hard to believe that it'd be THAT hard to find ICP fans (the gully kind) to rap on why they're into the clowns. I mean, teens will talk about anything if you find the right forum for it.

3) There were a few other papers that I was disappointed by - like others mentioned, I thought Amy Phillips made a misstep by using largely inaudible soundfiles - she would have been much better off with reading the transcriptions. I also wasn't sure what her main argument was though her end point - the fact that there are very few women critics over the age of 40 - was really fascinating and deserves to be explored furthered.

I also thought Morast's paper on Native American hip-hop was cool in some ways but he did the same thing that a presenter last year did: use Outkast's red-face performance at the Grammy's as a foil to "real" Native American hip hop. This begs the question that should be asked - if Outkast is performing, improperly, with one racial mask, why couldn't one make the argument that Native American youth, rapping and dressing "hip hop" (if you know what I mean) isn't also a racial mask? Especially for a conference dedicated to the idea of masquerade, I thought this was a rather obvious point that could have been addressed.

Mind you - I'm not defending 'Kast nor am I critiquing the rappers that Morast was talking about...but I don't think you can presume that Outkast = wrong and Native kids rhyming = good on unsaid principle.

3) I also wasn't sure what her main argument was though her end point - the fact that there are very few women critics over the age of 40 - was really fascinating and deserves to be explored furthered.

But, Oliver, if there are so very few women (music) critics over the age of 40 (and I tend to agree), there really isn't much to explore, is there?

I'm not sure I catch your confusion. The question is why aren't there more female critics over 40 - that topic really begs for further inquiry, no?

Just musings, and very possibly wrongheaded. But I get the sense that the answer is probably a lot more boring than the quest itself.

This, I fear, puts it mildly. (But this is in terms of 'music writing' as a certain mainstreamed/American construction, ie Rolling Stone, major newspapers etc. My impression -- NOT my definite conclusion -- is that in the English press there appeared to be relatively more female writers in the seventies and beyond in terms of relative percentage, but nowhere near parity. UK writers/readers should be able to say more to this.)

There are still presentations I haven't even gotten to yet that deserve high praise.

Daphne Carr's "Disco-Polo" presentation was amazing, in the same way that Robert Morast's presentation was, as far as showing a side of music culture that I had the faintest idea existed, and did a great overview of it.

BTW, to Oliver: While Morast may have not said anything in his presentation specifically about the quality of the rez hip-hoppers, I think he answered a question where he said that he didn't think the music was all that original, and that the artists kinda sounded like a second-rate Atmosphere (My words and paraphrasing, not Morast's). So, I don't think he was necessarily saying they were "good" or "better" than Outkast or other hip-hop acts per se.. I saw it as just as presentation of something he wanted to share to people who never knew it existed, and I'm quite sure at least 97% of the audience had no idea these guys existed... which is worth something, IMHO.

Sounding like a 2nd rate Atmosphere is kind of funny since Slug often gets positioned as white (and yeah, he's biracial, I know). but Morast wasn't actually addressing the question at hand, which, to put it crudely (i.e. not how I'd phrase it but how it does get phrased): aren't kids on the rez just trying to act black? Again, I think that's a poor way to approach the question but like I also said, Morast opens himself to it by trying to critique Outkast as his lead-in. You can't have it both ways unless you're willing to accept the question being turned around and directed back at you.

v. true

Right. Over the last year or so, I've been swamped by promos, and not just from small and unsigned acts, but from a lot of large indies and promo companies. No one pushes harder than the people with the big money, by the way. So if any of you would like some The Bravery and Louis XIV promos, give me a call. I only post a small amount of what gets sent my way, I still get most of the best stuff the way I always did - checking around online, getting tips, scouring slsk. Either way, there are LOTS of people who really want to get on my site, and Music For Robots and some others. To a lot of people in promotion, it's just another way to promote a record, like a new version of college radio or zines. Since downloading albums is a total given these days for the demographic my site appeals to, I think that the labels think of getting songs off of mp3 blogs less as "stealing" and more like nudging people in the direction of their product.

I'm really disappointed to hear that some people are intimidated to post comments on my site, especially since I tend to use comments as a measurement of whether or not people liked the songs.

I definitely understand Jess' point of view on this. I don't think the format is for everyone - I got into it primarily cos it suited my personality and skill level pretty well. I'd love to write longer stuff all the time, but it's more dependent on the song. Some will be easier to write about than others, and there are certainly some that are so difficult to write about that if I get three halfway decent sentences out, then I'm thrilled and chalk it up to getting through writer's block. Keeping a daily schedule is really important to me, because half the reason I do this is as a discipline-building exercise. I think I was pretty shaky for a while, but I'm pretty confident now. I feel like I could write 250-500 words on most any record thrown at me fairly quickly, and I doubt I would be able to do that if I hadn't been doing it every day for three years.

Also, when I started the site, it was partially a way to do a music site that wasn't about trashing things all the time, which is very much the old school indie thing, just writing lots of angry bad reviews and whining about trends that you don't like. Also, I wanted to write about songs and not albums and not only write about commercially released singls, which is the typical mode.

I've integrated film reviews into my format recently, and I plan on doing that on a permanent basis.

I want to read Ned Sublette's paper on New Orleans, and E. Wild's paper as well. The stuff on the afropop.org site seems to be only a taste of what the guy offered. I shamefully have not read his book on Cuban music yet.

Hehehe. This precisely makes me think of my AMG work, which while not consciously embarked on by me for that reason has led me to do this.

In terms of blog talk in general, I have to say I've grown a touch cheesed by people who insist that *long* pieces are always the correct way to talk about music, or who have stated that they think that shorter efforts can't accurately convey all of what's there. Personally I find that implicitly insulting -- I am writing in a conscious tone and with a preset idea of what my word length will be for the AMG, but I am also trying to be informative, opinionated and hopefully entertaining. (Also, to be frank, some albums only deserve that many words.)

Jennifer Otter's piece about Robert Smith And This Lips... what it was trying to convey, which is essential an anti-image. How the aggressive application of his lipstick and the band image being either not present or heavily obfuscated was meant as a way to distract people from what he looks like and meant as a way to focus on the music... which is true, with few semi-exceptions (Disintegration, Blood Flowers, and I think that's it) Anyway the link to her background/synopsis is here.

What's really interesting to me is that, since most of my life, I've ran into so many people that instantly dismiss the Cure and note that they immediately cut into Robert Smith's looks.. mostly about being a "fat moaning goth", but some do cut into his looks, and specifically his lips. So apparently his lips do figure into his public image, for better or worse, at times. In the same way, i think many people had a crush on Robert Smith for the same reason. This doesn't invalidate Robert Smith's reason for doing what he did nor does it invalidate Otter's point per se, but it didn't fully accomplish his goals in the long run... especially when Smith went the full Star Hits magazine route circa Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and did no less than put his lips on the front cover of that double album (and yes, those are Smith's lips on the cover.) and plaster his image all over the press.

Otter's presentation style was great, as it was a break from the sometimes monotonic sounding academic presentation style. Otter acted like an "OMG I LUUUUUUUUV THE CURE!" fan, which gave the presentation a fun dynamic. The only complaint I have about the piece was that she obviously was trying to rush a 45 minute presentation into 20 minutes, and didn't seem to think about pre-editing per presentation. But I was especially taken, at the very end, by the montage of current band poses in the slide show: Interpol, Blink 182, Green Day, Mogwai(!), You Name Every Popular Indie/Alt "Boy" Band Today... and all their magazine promo shots were clearly influenced by those of the Cure back in the day.

..but I think the music has certainly progressed since I left SoCal. Some of the songs he played sounded familiar, but Akwid? DAMN! "WHY ISN'T THERE MORE TUBA IN HIP-HOP?" Fuck yeah. I need to seek out some Akwid myself.

Did find a few Akwid tracks online, though. Donut, I'll send you a couple when I get home later.

GO TO ONE NEW ORLEANS

Jordan, I think the reference to tuba above yours, was in part related to your other posts on New Orleans and that tuba thread.

Although Jordan's comment intrigues me as well, as far as what's going on in New Orleans, hip-hop-wise.

DD, brass band music in New Orleans today serves basically the same function as hip-hop as street/part/club music. There's been a fair amount of literal musical crossover (New Birth, Rebirth, Hot 8, and Soul Rebels have all had rappers on their albums, Hot 8 was in a Master P video, etc.), but mostly it's a vibe thing and a cultural thing...hip-hop is playing in the club or on the block, people are dancing, the drummers and the horns and the sousaphone player roll in and nobody blinks an eye.

There hasn't been as much obvious influence going the other way (like sousaphone basslines on Ca$h Money records or anything, though the reverse has happened), at least not that's any good, but I can definitely hear some New Orleans clave and street chants that have snuck into New Orleans rap.

Nope. He did use the word "BLUESHAMMAH!" though.

Gentry's paper: in spite of GLAAD's heavy-handedness on the issue of his homophobia, some gay kids actually like Eminem! The reasons I can remember him giving (He's HOT! He's ROUGH TRADE! He acts really gay sometimes!) seem a wee bit facile to me in retrospect since I can think of other reasons, even reasons specific to being young and gay. (Like, maybe Eminem's endless playfulness regarding "the self" mirror gay kid's own.) He also said that he's been working with gay teens in workshops about homosexuality in pop culture, and noted that in recent years kids no longer seem to respond -- or know how to respond -- to camp. It means nothing to them.

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0517,christgau1,63330,22.html

Whoo-hoo! Blogger panel picture!

It's like, University Challenge, Family Feud, WHAT?

"Toxteth O' Grady..."

christ, i just need to shave my head already.

"Look, it's quite alright, everyone. The R-word does get dragged out every now and then, but in these times, we just must collect ourselves and move on, right? The offending gentlemen has been taken care of... now then."

But I thought people liked me. *cries*

Am I reading too much into Christgau's piece to think there might not be money available to do this next year? Or maybe they've got to try to get Boeing to kick in even more bucks?

http://themusicissue.blogspot.com/

i'm looking more like my dad every year

&, yeah, props on the beard(s) all around - I wish I could grow one, but I fear I'd make like a dying lawn more than a hirsute stud.

Clearly. Then again, you don't know my brother.

Jason King, Tim Lawrence, Sharon Mesmer, and *especially* Steve Waksmen were great.

Waksmen did a piece on Alice Cooper's influence on stage/camp in a rock setting, and did so vary convincingly. I like how he started his piece with Easy Action and its album cover, front and end (puns completely intended), and then ended his piece with the Billion Dollar Babies era, because after that (skipping the contract breaker album Muscle Of Love), it was essentially Cooper out-Coopering himself -- to good degrees, and after, to *cough* not-so-good degrees.

*ok and Matos. But he could!

Right now it is Eric Martin Usner - Sounds of Starbucks (time is 6:30pm Pacific)

I work with a person whose husband works for the Seattle Channel and went to the conference and did a bunch of taping, so I know they have some of it on tape...

Thank you - my inner sociology student is going to have geekasm reading these!!!