songs you (probably) know: Paramore, “Use Somebody”

Paramore, covering Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody” unplugged at the BBC Radio Live Lounge.

Yes, that song is probably too recent to cover.

Yes, Paramore misspells their band name on purpose, and that’s never a good sign.

I don’t care.  It’s a lovely version.  Enjoy it.

i made a music video!

This is the official video for “Nikita Says Love”, by my band The Pluto Tapes.   I made this.  Enjoy!

WBCN: requiem for the rock

This Guy Right Here, at a WBCN event at Harper's Ferry

Note: In case you hadn’t heard, WBCN, the Rock of Boston, is closing up shop in mid-August after 41 years of broadcasting.  You probably know this, but I’m a DJ there.   This is mostly about my experience at the station – there have been plenty of obituaries written about 104.1 in the last few days.   Go read them, especially Danny Schecter’s.

It was January 2003.  I was driving back home from work, with a take-out order of egg lemon soup from the Greek place that I had ordered in hopes of fending off one of my nasty sinus infections.  I was driving on 495, it was about 5 o’clock at night, it was snowing lightly, and my phone rang.  It was my mother, telling me that she had received a phone call from Steven Strick at WBCN.

mr. fancy-pants rock star tells us how to be big n’ famous like him

I think this may be Photoshopped from a picture of Borat, but whatever.

Nine Inch Nails monopticon Trent Reznor recently posted a list of awesome ideas for artists to get super-successful using the Web, and it makes a hell of a lot of sense.   Anyone with a blog, YouTube series, webcomic, band, photoblog, or anything remotely creative should print this out and paste it next to wherever they do their creative interwebs stuff.

His points make a lot of sense.  This really is a weird new world and, so long as you can create a solid base, you’re probably going to make a lot more money from merchandising than you are off of your actual artwork.  Amanda Palmer recently blogged about a spontaneous Twitter conversation that led to the spontaneous production of a spontaneous CafePress T-Shirt that netted her about $19,000 in one night, although to be fair, she (and Mr. Reznor) already have a pretty solid fanbase, and it’s unlikely you or I are going to score mad cash off of our sweet new T-shirt slogan (“What Do Fratboys Wash Their Hair With?  Natural Bro-tanicals!”) until we, too, amass an army of screaming teenagers in black tights.

Anyway, Janko on GigaOM weeded through The Trent’s original post, and came up with Five Important Points that make as much sense for YouTubers or Flash artists as they do for bands.  You’re not going to make any money off your content, you’re going to make your money off of a fanbase that likes your content enough to support it by buying t-shirts and things.  The Brothers Chaps were able to quit their jobs and spend all day making Strong Bad and Homestar cartoons because people kept buying their schwag (I’m thinking of them because I’m wearing my old Strong Bad shirt today.)  And you’re going to build a fanbase by giving your stuff away for free.  Crazy, right? 

The folksiest Web 2.0 pioneer there ever was.

Except… hasn’t public broadcasting essentially operated off of this principle for years?  We’ll give you quality programming for free, and if you like it, you’ll support us with your donations, and you’ll ”buy” our tote bags and This Old House mugs and DVD collections of Miss Marple.  That’s right, fellow New Englanders – Fritz Wetherbee and Elaine Pasternack over at New Hampshire Public Television were doin’ the new media revenue thing twenty years before anyone.   As Trent says, any song you could possibly want is only a click away, so music and media are now free no matter what we do.   You want to make money as an artist?  Embrace it.

Happy belated 4th!

Yep, it’s from 1776.  Music starts at about 2:48.

“I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, that two is called a ‘law firm,’ and that three are called ‘a congress!’”

omg fanvids lolz ^_^: “Ghostbusters”/”Nine Inch Nails”

Perusing io9 this morning, I stumbled upon many interesting things about which I could have blogged.  There’s the ill-advised plan by the producers of the forthcoming G.I.Joe movie to write, direct, and produce a film based on – I kid you not – the ’80s video game Asteroids.   There’s an actual, real-live blob living beneath the city streets of Raleigh, NC, with video to prove it.   And then there’s this: a mash-up of the Nine Inch Nails song “The Hand That Feeds” with the theme from Ghostbusters.  

Is this the awesomest thing ever invented by humans?   Yes.  Yes it is.

Michael Jackson is dead at 50.

I tweeted about this earlier.  This is what I said this afternoon, when I heard what happened:

Michael Jackson. Dead. Like so much about MJ, it’s a mix of sad and weird.

Maybe it’s glib, but for the last – say – 15 years or so, it’s also been accurate.  Michael Jackson was an astonishing performer – the most talented member of a very talented family, and the most fucked up member of a very fucked up family.  He never knew what it was like to be normal.  He was under the wing of a strict and abusive father, and a greedy and controlling Barry Gordy, since age seven.  He never had a childhood, never had to deal with life as we knew it.  He just performed.

The thing about him never having a childhood… that’s why I never bought the allegations of molestation.  Not real molestation, at least.  Were there “tickle parties?”  Probably.  Did he give the kids alcohol?  It’s pretty much been proven.   Did he sleep in the same bed with the kids on his ranch?   Yes.  But did he do all these things because he was a lecherous old pervert who desired them sexually, or because he was a messed up man who didn’t realize he wasn’t still a child?  I’m sticking with the latter.

But that’s his legacy now.  That’s what people of my generation, and the one after me, will probably think of when they think of Michael Jackson.  Not “Off The Wall”.  Not “I’ll Be There.”  Not necessarily Thriller.   Not “Smooth Criminal”, unless they’re thinking about the Alien Ant Farm cover.  It’s like the joke about the old Irishman who won’t be remembered as a teacher, or as a leader, or as a hero, which he did for many years, because “ya sleep with one goat….“

So, look:  I’m watching his videos on YouTube now.  I just watched “Billie Jean“, and I’ve got “Jam” on now.  There’s a certain messianic thread that runs through all of his videos.  In “Billie Jean”, the sidewalk lights up as he walks past, and he vanishes as someone tries to take his picture.  In “Jam”, he sinks a basket through the window of a completely different building, against Michael Jordan.   “Remember The Time” has him surviving execution in ancient Egypt by morphing and melting into a pillar of sand for the pleasure of Pharaoh Eddie Murphy and Queen Iman.  Even in “Beat It”, he pretty much puts an end to gang violence everywhere just by showing up.    And the thing is this: Michael may have been the only artist in the history of the world who could get away with this shit.

At the moment, I’m watching “Leave Me Alone“, which, apart from being the most Quantel PaintBox-y thing you’ve ever seen, is like being inside Michael’s brain at the exact moment it all started going horribly awry.  It’s full of paranoia, like a lot of his songs of that period, and the video’s full of tabloids and rumors about Michael marrying a space alien and such.  Then Michael drives off into a strange Yellow Submarine-esque world of oddness.   This should tell you everything right here.

He supposedly hacked off his nose because it reminded him too much of his Dad.   He developed vitiligo, which causes your skin to slowly lose its pigment in blotches, and covered it up with too much pancake makeup.  He became anorexic.  He had other, weirder, surgery done.   In the end, Michael looked like a completely different person than the kid who sang “ABC”.

Again, I’m being really glib.  The fact of the matter is, here was a guy who was one of the most important, influential, and fascinating entertainers of the 20th century.   If anybody represents the 1980s, it’s him (he’s at least third, behind Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.)   He has millions of fans throughout the world, he got black artists played on MTV, he wrote “Beat It”, for chrissakes, and “The Way You Make Me Feel” and “Scream” and “Blood on the Dance Floor” and “Man In The Mirror.”  And, honestly, whenever I hear “Man In The Mirror”, I’m suddenly eight years old, in my mother’s blue Volkswagen, and it’s snowing outside.  Oh, and he wrote “Do The Bartman,” for which we are eternally grateful.

songs you don’t know: Placebo, “For What It’s Worth”

Nothing deep or meaningful here – just a new single/video from the one of the best, and most underrated, bands in music.

Dig the funky Tetris riffage at 1:47.   And the bridge is the best lyric/beat cadence the band’s come up with since “Pure Morning.”

cover #24 – Suede, “The Wild Ones”

Cover #24, and yep, we’re still doing this, whether you like it or not, until we get 30, dammit, because I say so, is Suede’s “The Wild Ones”, from Dog Man Star, released in 1994 and written by Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler.

So, Suede never really got much attention in this country, and that’s really a pity.   You’ve maybe heard “The Beautiful Ones” or, more likely, “Filmstar”, if you sat through the credits after Eddie Izzard’s Dress To Kill comedy show.  But, man, they had some great songs.  This one in particular should have been the “In Your Eyes” of its generation.  It should have been in some movie, where boy loses girl and gets girl back again by playing her some heartwrenching ballad.

This, my friends, is a heartwrenching ballad.  I think it’s about Brett breaking up with Justine from Elastica, but I’m not sure.

Justine, by the way, went on to date Damon Albarn from Blur for several years (see cover #8, “End of a Century’” and, well, basically all of the albums Blur and 13.)   It should be noted that I freaking love Elastica.  Of all the bands that came out of that era – England from 1993-1998 aka “Britpop” – they were my favorite, moreso even than Oasis.   Unfortunately, Justine’s bandmates were all massive smack fiends and it’s really hard to be the best band in the world when everyone’s lying on the floor staring at the babies crawling on the ceiling instead of, you know, rehearsing.   So, Justine’s influence – apart from their self-titled 1993 record which gave the world “Connection” and 15 other rad little tunes – is mainly as the chief muse of the Britpop era.  She dated Brett from Suede, dumped him for Damon from Blur,  dumped him because he was being – let’s face it – kind of a dick, and then went on to host a home improvement show of some type.  The whole thing is written up beautifully in the book The Last Party, which I’ve re-read many, many times because I’m a massive Britpop fanboy and it’s sad.

There’s a story about what Suede means to me, but it’s sort of personal.   I mean, it’s dumb high school stuff, mostly, but I’m putting a break here in case you don’t care/feel uncomfortable with the idea of me talking about kissing girls and such.

Download.  Stream.

Cover #23 – TV on the Radio, “Wolf Like Me”

Cover #23 is “Wolf Like Me”, by TV on the Radio, from the 2006 album Return To Cookie Mountain, written by Tunde Adebimpe.

I first saw TV on the Radio when they opened for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs a few summers ago.  I wasn’t that into them, I gotta admit.  Not sure what it was, but it wasn’t workin’ for me.

Then, about three months later, I was enjoying a bagel and there was this amazing, weird, mind-altering music on the stereo in the bagel store, and I asked the girl behind the counter who it was, and she said “TV on the Radio, duh.”  Sometimes you gotta be in the right frame of mind to receive something like that.   Sometimes, it has to be raining outside and you’re eating a bagel in Brighton, and suddenly, TV on the Radio makes a lot of sense.  I mean, these guys are so wonderfully cool and odd, and no one – no one – sounds like them.

“Wolf Like Me” , well, it’s a driving, weird song about being a werewolf.  It’s instantly catchy and soulful and edgy.  I’ve wanted to cover it since I started doing this thing, but I didn’t know how to do it.  Oh sure, I could’ve covered it as is, but they already did it perfect the first time, and besides, if you’re covering an off-the-wall band like TV on the Radio, you gotta do something off-the-wall with it.

So: I made “Wolf Like Me” into a ballad.  I couldn’t get the drums to work anyway.  The tonal inspiration was “A Warm Place” or “Eraser (Polite)” mix by Nine Inch Nails.

I really like this one.

Stream.  Download.

Next up…: well, if Justine from Elastica dumped me, I’d feel the same way, mate.