MONDAY MUSIC: Zolar X not rubbish
When Zolar X, a trio of middle-aged men who dress in the garb of Seventies Star Trek aliens hit the stage for Fox's "The Next Great American Band," talent judge Dicko yelled "Rubbish!"
See original essay on everywhere-a-rockstar reality TV here.
Dicko, who was huge in Australia, has not been so big in the United States. And DD skipped the show on Friday, passing on the further adventures of an assortment of obvious prop-ups (Rocket) and journeymen from Nashville (Sixwire, The Clark Brothers).
The Muggs, a trio, made it through week two by being the best hard rock band in the contest. No one else even comes close. In return, they got the standard treatment good hard rockers receive at the hands of people who listen only to dance music and pop. Damning by faint praise.
They don't have a good singer -- nyah, nyah. But boy do The Muggs rock. DD doesn't know if The Muggs made it through week three. Doesn't matter. Bands like The Muggs are always around years after everyone else on these types of shows have dried up like dog excrement and been washed into the sewers by passing rains. It has always been so.
No surprise, my taste is the exact opposite of Dicko's.
This being the case, also no surprise, DD likes Zolar X, enough to give them a good review in the Village Voice.
See here for 250 words worth.
More reasons to find China distasteful, if you needed any...
"While only a tiny percentage of Chinese people own a credit card (thereby making online download purchases difficult), the cash-pre-pay nature of mobiles means there is an established, digital payment system existing between the user and the mobile operators," writes on journalist at the Register.
"This allows for easy purchase of MVAS such as ringtones, caller ringback tones, background music and wallpaper."
Reduction of rock music to the equivalent of sonic wallpaper, or more aptly -- air-freshener for your ears -- that's the future of pop and rock music. And I'm not interested in that world. Don't care about the people who buy or steal the music. Don't care about the artists. Don't care about the music companies.
It's the destruction of everything I hold dear in the art.
"... [The] elaborate categorisation of music we seem to so enjoy in the west is the preserve of only a few music obsessives in China," continues the article.
"While Converse trainers and drainpipe jeans might make your average Chinese high street hep-cat seem like an alternative cognoscenti, the chances are that understanding is lacking and there is very little consistency between any two elements of their identity, including music preference. Whilst hanging at the bar in Beijing underground live venue D-22, I noticed a Chinese girl next to me with crazy hair, blackened eyes, torn clothes and black fingernails. I got talking to her and asked her what kind of music she listened to. "Backstreet Boys," was her immediate reply ... Music online is rarely searched out or bought according to genre. In fact, not only is your average MP3 not sold as part of a genre, it is also almost certainly pirated, completely DRM-free, with no meta data attached and, in a huge number of cases, doesn’t even have a file title. You are left with a completely ‘naked’ piece of audio. China simply never went through the age where music was bought at a premium on vinyl, cassette or CD, then lovingly horded, categorised and put on display for all your dinner party guests to see, encouraging in-depth dinner discussions about prog-rock or jazz."
In essence, that describes why digital music, for me, is joyless work -- while records and CDs are the opposite.
A gargantuan jumble of files on a hard disk, all with random names, does not make a library of rock music. It's a collection of junk, indistinguishable from all the other junk that collects on any digital storage medium. Rather than sort and identify it, eventually it becomes best only to delete it and restart the same process of junk collection. One might get the same jazz from being rodent running on a wheel in a cage.
See the entire story here.
When Zolar X, a trio of middle-aged men who dress in the garb of Seventies Star Trek aliens hit the stage for Fox's "The Next Great American Band," talent judge Dicko yelled "Rubbish!"
See original essay on everywhere-a-rockstar reality TV here.
Dicko, who was huge in Australia, has not been so big in the United States. And DD skipped the show on Friday, passing on the further adventures of an assortment of obvious prop-ups (Rocket) and journeymen from Nashville (Sixwire, The Clark Brothers).
The Muggs, a trio, made it through week two by being the best hard rock band in the contest. No one else even comes close. In return, they got the standard treatment good hard rockers receive at the hands of people who listen only to dance music and pop. Damning by faint praise.
They don't have a good singer -- nyah, nyah. But boy do The Muggs rock. DD doesn't know if The Muggs made it through week three. Doesn't matter. Bands like The Muggs are always around years after everyone else on these types of shows have dried up like dog excrement and been washed into the sewers by passing rains. It has always been so.
No surprise, my taste is the exact opposite of Dicko's.
This being the case, also no surprise, DD likes Zolar X, enough to give them a good review in the Village Voice.
See here for 250 words worth.
More reasons to find China distasteful, if you needed any...
"While only a tiny percentage of Chinese people own a credit card (thereby making online download purchases difficult), the cash-pre-pay nature of mobiles means there is an established, digital payment system existing between the user and the mobile operators," writes on journalist at the Register.
"This allows for easy purchase of MVAS such as ringtones, caller ringback tones, background music and wallpaper."
Reduction of rock music to the equivalent of sonic wallpaper, or more aptly -- air-freshener for your ears -- that's the future of pop and rock music. And I'm not interested in that world. Don't care about the people who buy or steal the music. Don't care about the artists. Don't care about the music companies.
It's the destruction of everything I hold dear in the art.
"... [The] elaborate categorisation of music we seem to so enjoy in the west is the preserve of only a few music obsessives in China," continues the article.
"While Converse trainers and drainpipe jeans might make your average Chinese high street hep-cat seem like an alternative cognoscenti, the chances are that understanding is lacking and there is very little consistency between any two elements of their identity, including music preference. Whilst hanging at the bar in Beijing underground live venue D-22, I noticed a Chinese girl next to me with crazy hair, blackened eyes, torn clothes and black fingernails. I got talking to her and asked her what kind of music she listened to. "Backstreet Boys," was her immediate reply ... Music online is rarely searched out or bought according to genre. In fact, not only is your average MP3 not sold as part of a genre, it is also almost certainly pirated, completely DRM-free, with no meta data attached and, in a huge number of cases, doesn’t even have a file title. You are left with a completely ‘naked’ piece of audio. China simply never went through the age where music was bought at a premium on vinyl, cassette or CD, then lovingly horded, categorised and put on display for all your dinner party guests to see, encouraging in-depth dinner discussions about prog-rock or jazz."
In essence, that describes why digital music, for me, is joyless work -- while records and CDs are the opposite.
A gargantuan jumble of files on a hard disk, all with random names, does not make a library of rock music. It's a collection of junk, indistinguishable from all the other junk that collects on any digital storage medium. Rather than sort and identify it, eventually it becomes best only to delete it and restart the same process of junk collection. One might get the same jazz from being rodent running on a wheel in a cage.
See the entire story here.
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