Yep, This Is Still America.

Happed across this today, which needs no further comment from me, save that when it comes down to it, “Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.”

(Can’t find the thingy that lets me use the c’s with the little curlicues on them)

Wil Wheaton Tells It Like It Is

It’s all right here; I don’t need to add anything, except to say I’ve been told he’s been to see the Dirtbombs twice. 

Why I Have Finally Become A Prince Fan

     I have to come clean here:  I really liked Prince before ‘1999′.  I even kinda liked ‘1999′ the first three weeks after its 1982 release.  But then I got sick of hearing it, and it wouldn’t go away.  In Detroit, thanks to incessant spins by The Electrifying Mojo, ‘1999′ became one of the most played records in town.  You couldn’t get away from it.  In fact, it didn’t go away until the 1983 release of ‘Purple Rain’, which STILL hasn’t gone away (and I still cannot stand it).  After such overexposure, I don’t see how I can be blamed for developing an intense dislike for all things Prince, which lasted throughout the eighties.  Apart from some isolated deep LP cuts and b-sides (‘17 Days’, ‘New Position’, ‘Partyman’, and ‘Erotic City’ which is all the more ironic since it’s the b-side of the particularly overplayed ‘Let’s Go Crazy’), I avoided anything the man did because I just couldn’t bear to hear any more.  After 1990’s ‘Graffiti Bridge’, he fell off my radar.  I didn’t know what he was up to, and I couldn’t possibly have cared less.

(Okay, there was the incident in 1990 when, after working for weeks to come up with a track for a house 12″, and I’d finally got something I was proud of, Prince released the ‘Gett Off’ 12″ which sounded EXACTLY like the track I’d recorded a few months earlier, and was shopping around.  I was convinced that either a) he was eavesdropping on the studio I’d been at, or b) he just plain stole my track.  I swore to kill him, then the Gories went on tour, and I forgot about it.)

In 1998, Prince jandered onto my radar again: in an article about the internet’s effect on the record industry (yes, kids, the writing was on the wall even then),  it was noted that Prince’s then new LP ‘Crystal Ball’ had been released for purchase only at his website.  While that’s nothing new now, in 1998 almost no-one had done it.  What made it TRULY amazing is that even with this sole source of distribution, ‘Crystal Ball’ had charted at #64 in Billboard Magazine.  Even I, by this time internationally known as a disliker of all things Prince, had to admit I was impressed.  It was a new day, and Prince understood this.  After having been jerked around by Warner Bros. Records, he took his music directly to the people.  For someone at his level of fame, it doesn’t actually get much cooler.

In recent years, I’ve mellowed on my issues with Prince.  It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anything by him, and I still like the first three LPs.  I’m even actively trying to find a UK 12″ of ‘Gotta Stop (Messin’ About)’ with the red-and-black striped cardstock cover, and a peach-vinyl copy of The Black Album.  I’m basically over it, yeah? I still haven’t really paid any attention to his new releases, though.

All of the foregoing is prolegomena to mentioning this article in The Guardian about the release of Prince’s new album (I have to stop using ‘LP’ at this point because as far as I know there won’t be an LP release) ‘Planet Earth’.  It will be released free with the 24 July edition of The Mail On Sunday, in England.

That is totally rad.

Prince, having internalised the new paradigm of the music business, wherein distribution is in the eye of the beholder (see ref. previous post), has made a deal which gets him a lot of listeners, since The Mail On Sunday averages about 2 MILLION copies (this also guarantees him a Double Diamond-selling album from The British version of the RIAA, AAAANNND the Guinness World Record for ‘Most Records Sold On First Day Of Release’.  Now That’s what I call thinkin’.  Buy that man a see-gar).  However, this isn’t setting too well with the British Entertainment Retailers Association,  who are having walruses at the thought that someone could sell a record without them.  Well guys, someone could.  Prince could.  Prince doesn’t need you.  Prince can sell records wherever he wants.

The very fact that these people are angry insures that I, as a fellow recording artist, will purchase a copy of this record.  (If possible, I will try to get a friend in England to get me a copy from The Mail On Sunday, thereby helping Prince do his thing without any interference from another dinosaur who didn’t see the meteor coming.)  This isn’t actually about Prince; it’s more about people who think they can control how the music-buying public buys its music.  The days of control over music distribution channels are OVER.  The control of distribution has shifted to the artist, and while there will be a lot of record industry people who will get crushed under the wheels of change, almost none of them will be musicians.

Now get out and go see a band.

More On Universal/SpiralFrog: Here’s The Catch…

Here’s what’s hiding behind the ability to get at the kick-ass back catalogue owned by Universal.  I KNEW there had to be some evil bullshit they weren’t letting on about…

Facts…

I forgot a couple of links there.  When I said Universal was founded by mobsters, I was talking about this.  Also, this came up while I was doing that search.

I guess I shouldn’t say *founded* by mobsters, since that isn’t strictly true.  You have to read the books, though.  It’s late and I’ll get the facts wrong if I try to do it from memory.

Also, I know it’s quarter to four in the morning as I type all this, but how could I forget that Universal also owns CHESS RECORDS?  Damn, I get stupid when it’s late…

Goodbye, Christiania

Christiania is one of the coolest places I have ever been to, ever.

In 1971 a group of hippies moved onto an abandoned Danish naval barracks just outside Kobenhavn and, by setting themselves up as an anarchist free state, began one of the greatest social experiments in Western Civilisation.

They established a land trust, meaning every resident owned all of the land, and therefore no-one owned it.  The whole place was run as a co-op.  Early on, people could build on the land, even though they didn’t own it, and this led to a profusion of hand-built dwellings of every imaginable architectural mindset.  An entire city built by artists.  When the Dirtbombs played there in May 2002, Ben and I took a walk around it; it was like some mad homebrew conglomeration of The Shire and Lidsville.  It was beautiful.
The area of the existing barracks became the ‘downtown’ of Christiania.  There were restaurants, art galleries (of course), a bicycle factory, boutiques, a nightclub (the Loppen, where we played, which means ‘flea’ in Danish).  It even had its own radio station.  This place was really cool.

Christiania was not without its downsides, however.  There were two major ones:

Problem #1: Style of Government

You’d think, being an anarchist free state, that government would be a simple affair, yes?  Well, here’s how it worked.  There were volunteer committees for things like sanitation, so that trash pickup got taken care of, and the (beautiful) grounds got kept, but other than that all decisions were made by consensus, which means everything took a unanimous vote: through discussion, everybody  had to agree on whatever choice was made.  Now, crypto-commie symp I may be, but browbeating others until they agree to your point of view is no way to run a government, no matter what Bill O’Reilly would have you believe.

Problem #2: Pusherstreet

‘Pusherstraat’ was an open-air hash market which basically overtook the main thoroughfare of Christiania, becoming a huge outdoor drug mall in the process.  Originally run by cycle gangs, it was taken over by the Russian mafia when the cycle gangs were run out; any time the citizens would try to run them out they would just import more people to shout them down at the decision-making meetings (thus exposing what I see as a critical flaw in consensus government).  Christiania finally managed to close Pusherstraat down in 2004.
Anyhow, it was a good run while it lasted, but it’s finally coming to an end:  The Danish government has announced that they’re coming in and building condos.  With individual ownership, the basic tenet of Christiania life will be destroyed, and this vibrant community of free-thinkers will be gone forever.

Goodbye, Christiania.  I’ll miss you.

Yay Money Grubbing…

I was forced to make the decision today to change the price of my MP3s from 50 cents to 75 cents, solely on the grounds that over the long run I can’t afford it, what with PayPal taking 10 cents of every purchase.  On a 50 cent download, that’s 20 percent of the purchase price going to PayPal.

I chose my initial price of 50 cents mainly because I feel that 99 cents is just too much to ask for one song, so 50 cents oughta be good.  When I was  buying 45s as a teenager, they cost $1.50, and I still feel that 75 cents apiece is a fair price for two songs.

In the long run, 65 cents per song will enable me to record a LOT more songs, so I’m sure that’s okay with you, right?