Jeffrey McManus

I beg of you, do not expose your children to this video, particularly on long car trips, lest they sing it obsessively all weekend.

Then again, if you want your kid to be able to name three or four Mesopotamians, this song may not be the worst way to do it. Witness:

There is a big connection between TMBG and UCSB for me since they played Santa Barbara the week of my 21st birthday. I saw them in a club somewhere in front of about 20 people. The next day some other friends took me to see them in a club in L.A. in front of a couple hundred people. They carried their own equipment out the front door of the club when they were done. We’d been obsessing over their first album for months and we told them “you guys kick ass”. They said “you do too”. Twenty years later I get a very special sense of parental happiness when I can turn my kid on to more of their goodness. Their two DVDs for kids are tremendous and their Friday night video podcast is awesome too. My two-year-old refers to the band simply as “Fwiday” because he associates them with Friday nights. “Mo’ Fwiday, Daddy! Mo’ Fwiday!”

Hello, there, Yukimi Nagano, you very groovy Japanese/Swedish/American reincarnation of Billie Holiday. Your band, Little Dragon, just released a full-length album, but you’ve been playing gigs for some time, haven’t you. Yes, you have. You’ve also made quite a few cool videos which we can enjoy on the YouTubes. Like these, f’rinstance:

Little Dragon MP3s on Amazon.com

Unless you are French, in which case it is an abomination before God, since this year France’s Eurovision entry is sung in Franglish.

I’m thinking that the French should be counting their blessings that their song isn’t as bad as some of the tripe that comes out of Eurovision every year, but apparently some of them are getting bent out of shape at the fact that the song isn’t completely in French.

I dunno. I think that entering a song in an international song contest that can only be understood by a bilingual audience is an interesting choice. It says a lot about culture and class. In a way one could argue that singing in two languages is more elitist than desperately trying to defend your language/culture from cross-pollinization.

Link: British Pomp Greets Sarkozy And Wife on State Visit

“Bystanders were thrilled at the spectacle.

“‘We came down specially from the north so the kids could see the Queen,’ said Mark Stickles, accompanied by one son waving flags and another with a Darth Vader light saber.”

These guys are pretty much my all-time favorites. You can sample tracks from their new record on Amazon and buy it online in MP3 format.

Here’s a performance clip from the tube-o-mo-tron: a classic, “Rock Lobster”. I remember hearing this song for the first time when I was in seventh grade and it seems like yesterday, even though it was approximately four hundred years ago.

Update: Holy jeebers Wordpress screws things up when you try to embed a YouTube video. Wonder if Wordpress 2.5 will fix this? Just needed to install the EasyTube plugin, nice.

Madonna Heads to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

[Justin] Timberlake told of how he felt ill one day while working on Madonna’s new album and she asked whether he wanted a B-12 shot. He said sure, expecting a doctor to show up, but Madonna pulled out a syringe and said, ”drop ‘em.”After he pulled his pants back up, ‘’she looked at me and said, ‘That’s top shelf,’ and that was one of the greatest days of my life,” he said.

”Everything he said is basically true,” Madonna confirmed, ”but I didn’t say ‘drop ‘em,’ I said, ‘pull your pants down.”

Link: Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store

"Sony BMG, the music company, announced Thursday that it would become the fourth and final major label to begin selling digital music on Amazon.com, offering its entire catalog in the MP3 format by the end of the month."

Buh-bye DRM. Buh-bye now.

Dammit! Look at that suave, handsome mo-fo. This tune came on in the cafe just now and I had to share.

Link: Tickets Play a Big Role in Madonna Deal

"The possibility of having Live Nation as a competitor drew a bring-it-on response from [Barry] Diller, chairman and chief executive of IAC [Ticketmaster's parent company]. ‘We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our infrastructure. Let someone else make these investments and get into ticketing,’ Diller said at a New York conference in September. ‘It’ll be good for us and interesting for them.’

About 22 percent of all event tickets are now sold online and they are expected to generate sales of $4.9 billion this year, according to Jupiter Research retail analyst Patti Freeman Evans."

Earth to Barry Diller: the value of your business is not equivalent to the hundreds of millions of dollars you’ve invested in infrastructure. It may not even represent a particularly steep barrier to entry, assuming that’s the fright wig you’re trying to brandish here. You may very well discover that your big expensive infrastructure is a liability when a well-heeled competitor comes along to disrupt your business armed with little more than…the internet.

Just like the wise man says, it’ll be good for us and interesting for you.

This is another band I’m surprised I hadn’t yet gotten around to showcasing on Jeffrey’s ongoing blog video show. This is a tune from a few years ago that showcases the incredible pipes of Neko Case. They have a new record out that I’m going to pick up soon (it’s on the new Amazon MP3 service but sadly not on eMusic).

Chapter 3 of all-super-slo-mo-Wednesday.

Chapter 2 of all-super-slo-mo Wednesday!

I’m surprised that I haven’t blogged about these guys since I started blogging music recommendations — they’re definitely one of my favorite rock bands ever, and I’ve been pleased to see that the quality of their output has kept up after their first record. They just released their third record, in fact, which is terrific.

I know that a lot of Interpol fans like their dirges — I can pass on most of those. Here’s the video to an uptempo rocker from the new record. The super slo-mo in the video reminds me of Spike Jonze’s video for the Wax tune “California” and the Pixies’ “Velouria”. I think these are both on YouTube as well so maybe I’ll just post ‘em here as well in a minute and we’ll have an all-super-slo-mo Wednesday.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a music recommendation here, so here’s a terrific video by Maximo Park.

These guys have a new record out which I haven’t bought yet because it hasn’t appeared on eMusic yet and I can’t be bothered to go to the trouble of sanitizing the iTunes tracks so I can actually listen to it on all my various players. But their first record, which is available on eMusic, is highly recommended.

The reviews are in on The Police reunion tour, and apparently they suck. Well, at least they did in Vancouver the other night, and that’s according to their drummer, Stewart Copeland.

I have a feeling this was a one-time flub and they will get it together by the time the show comes to the bay area in a few weeks (my sister got me tickets to see them for my 40th birthday). When I was a teenager, the Police were my favorite band — I actually got to see them play when they were at the peak of their popularity back in 1982 (25 years ago!). I later became embittered when they broke up and Sting started playing elevator music.

The 1982 concert was terrific, though. They headlined the first night of the US Festival, the big shindig thrown by Steve Wozniak, which probably marks the first time I indirectly benefited from Silicon Valley’s largess. I saw the show from about ten feet away, which was an impressive feat since I had to squirm past tens of thousands of people to get there. Watching the show from the second row was worth having to stand in the dirt with no shoes on while a random beautiful yet inebriated girl in front of me would occasionally slump into my arms. I also got to camp out at the festival with my stepmom’s secretary, which was also fun, although not quite in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense that my embarrassingly randy father tried to imply at the time.

Sting quote of the evening: "I hate doing festival shows because everybody can see you pick your nose on stage." (He then picked his nose on stage.) A class act all the way!

Hooray.

This is exciting not just because DRM blows, but because having more than one major DRM-free vendor in the market will serve as a market counterweight to iTunes’ "OK, we’ll take off the DRM, but charge you 30% more" calculus.

A lot of my opposition to DRM stems from not from some high-minded principle, but the simple fact that I use a lot of different devices to listen to music. I have a desktop machine, a laptop with a virtual machine running inside of it, a couple of iPods, a couple of car CD players, and our Tivo, and I want to listen to my music on all of them. I don’t care to have to have a debate with all those devices over whether I have permission to listen the music I paid for on them.

These days I’m getting most of my music from eMusic, sans DRM. I have the plan that lets you download 50 songs per month, which I originally thought would be too much for me but I’m discovering is just about right for my habits. The 50 song plan is US$14.99 per month, which works out to about US$0.30 per DRM-free song — an incredible value compared to iTunes. (eMusic has monthly plans as cheap as $9.99/month, and you can buy "booster packs" that let you download additional tracks if you run out of downloads for the month, which I did last month. The nice thing about the booster packs is that unlike your monthly downloads, you can download booster pack downloads whenever you want.)

After two years of subscribing to Yahoo Music Jukebox I did unsubscribe from that service yesterday. Dwindling usage combined with an unfortunately-timed price hike made me realize that continuing to pay for this wasn’t a terrific idea for me. I still like the concept of renting music, though, I’m just not wild about the execution in this case. If I jump back into a music rental service it’s going to need to be much cheaper than purchasing tracks and it’s going to somehow need to provide me with a dramatically better discoverability experience than anything else that’s out there today.

I did buy the new They Might Be Giants CD on iTunes yesterday, but only because I couldn’t get it anywhere else. Were it not for the fact that some magic anti-DRM faeries descended upon my PC and converted the DRM-crippled iTunes music to MP3 so I could listen to it on my Tivo, I’d have waited until the album came out somewhere else.

If Amazon applies what they know about discoverability to their music store, I could see myself buying a lot of music there. Hopefully it’ll be better than their initial stab at movies — I’m not seeing a lot of Amazon recommendations for Unbox movies from Amazon today, and their browse experience still isn’t as good as Netflix’s, but it’s early days. Hopefully this will get better over time.

I think we’re all in agreement that folk music would have gone further if folk singers made more videos featuring 50-person synchronized dance teams.

I’m still gutted that because of her foot injury Bebel Gilberto won’t be playing in San Francisco next week. Fortunately, there is plenty of Bebelicious goodness on YouTube, including a brand new video of the title song on her new record and an old clip of her doing a duet with her dad. Enjoy!

Link: Bebel Gilberto Set for New Tour

"The daughter of Bossa Nova legend Joao Gilberto broke her foot a few weeks ago in New York. She faces a second round of surgery in Rio de Janeiro this week before embarking on a tour U.S. and Canadian tour starting in Miami on May 19. The injury has forced Gilberto and her band to use Internet technology to polish the arrangements for the songs they will perform for the tour which starts in Miami on May 19. ‘The band and I had to finish our rehearsals by Skype but hopefully everything will be fine,’ Gilberto said referring to the Internet telephone network in an interview from her apartment in Rio de Janeiro."

It was most excellent to find this Reuters piece on Bebel Gilberto today, and quite interesting to hear about how she used Skype to rehearse with her band after her foot injury. We have tickets to see her play in San Francisco in May (although this article implies that that show may be cancelled, mega bummer).

I just downloaded her new record, Momento, from eMusic today. I’ve only listened to it once and it sounds terrific, although a little mellower than her previous records. I’m looking forward to the inevitable remixes that always seem to follow a Bebel release.

Link: Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3’s Tangled Origins

Microsoft says it was doing the right thing: paying a German rights holder $16 million to license the MP3 audio format, the foundation of the digital music boom. Then an American jury ruled that Microsoft had failed to pay another MP3 patent holder, and slapped it with a $1.52 billion judgment.
But the MP3 toll gates do not end there.

The confusion stems from the number of companies and institutions — including Thomson, Royal Philips Electronics and AT&T (through Bell Labs, now part of Alcatel-Lucent) — that worked to create the MP3 standard almost two decades ago. The patent claims of those and others are increasingly being backed up by aggressive enforcement efforts, including lawsuits and even seizures of music players by customs authorities.

This situation is a mess but the story completely biffs it by failing to mention that there’s a free alternative to MP3. The fact that only twelve people use it is beside the point — It’s as if the reporter did a story on a mass-suicide without asking why all the nice people killed themselves.

The situation with MP3 patents is a very interesting counterpoint to the way that Microsoft has attempted to taint open-source over the years. In the past Microsoft argued (speciously) that there was huge risk for businesses that permitted to let open source anything come within 100 miles of their code base. Now we find that the real threat is not open source but software patents, and, ironically, the biggest victim may be Microsoft itself.