TUESDAY MUSIC CLUB: Zolar X not rubbish
Note: Google's Blogger property is not without fault. Often it appears notoriously buggy, making posting impossible or fractured. Such was the case with a music piece on DD blog from a week or so ago. Initially, it could not be posted. Publishing was broken for an entire day. Then it was posted in duplicate, at which point DD deleted it. This is a virtual reprint.
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!"
Dicko, who was huge in Australia, has not been big in the United States. And DD skipped the show on Friday two weeks past, not being interested in 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 in the show even came close to making the big noise The Muggs can. In return, they got the standard treatment good hard rockers have always received at the hands of people who listen only to dance music and pop. Damning by faint praise.
The Muggs don't have a good singer -- nyah, nyah -- went the cant. But boy do The Muggs rock out live.
DD doesn't know if The Muggs made it through in subsequent weeks. 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.
No surprise, then, my taste is the exact opposite of Dicko's.
This being the case, it also no surprise that DD likes Zolar X, too, certainly enough to give them a good review in the Village Voice.
See here for 250 words worth.
Another reason to hate on China
"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 aural wallpaper, or more aptly air-freshener for your ears -- that's the future of pop and rock music. And I'm not interested in it. DD doesn't care about young people who steal music or their tastes. Don't care about the artists. Don't care about the music companies.
They're just symptoms from the disease causing the slow degeneration 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, this describes why digital music, for me, is joyless work -- while listening to records and CDs is the opposite. I have absolutely nothing in common with "consumers" and "critics" of popular music who sit on the end of high speed Internet connections downloading jumbles of MP3s, using another portable listening computer to jumble them more. When I see the likes of 'em in the record store across the street from Pasadena City College, I wonder what they could be doing there.
They're not a demographic a used CD and vinyl store can pitch to. (And then I see the sign on the front glass: "Buy and sell used iPods.")
A gargantuan number 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 crap that collects on any digital storage medium. It reminds me of the collections of computer viruses and pirated software accumulated by children running bulletin board systems in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
I wrote a book about the subject in 1994. It was called "The Virus Creation Labs" and not being much of a futurist, I never dreamed that today's common musicconsumer stealer would, socially, evolve from the model of teenage computer virus hoarders and software pirates.
Rather than sort and identify digital music, most of it becomes simply part of a pile, best deleted when tired of so that the process of digital junk collection can be started anew. One might get the same jazz from being a rodent running on a wheel in a cage.
See the entire story at the Reg, here.
Note: Google's Blogger property is not without fault. Often it appears notoriously buggy, making posting impossible or fractured. Such was the case with a music piece on DD blog from a week or so ago. Initially, it could not be posted. Publishing was broken for an entire day. Then it was posted in duplicate, at which point DD deleted it. This is a virtual reprint.
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!"
Dicko, who was huge in Australia, has not been big in the United States. And DD skipped the show on Friday two weeks past, not being interested in 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 in the show even came close to making the big noise The Muggs can. In return, they got the standard treatment good hard rockers have always received at the hands of people who listen only to dance music and pop. Damning by faint praise.
The Muggs don't have a good singer -- nyah, nyah -- went the cant. But boy do The Muggs rock out live.
DD doesn't know if The Muggs made it through in subsequent weeks. 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.
No surprise, then, my taste is the exact opposite of Dicko's.
This being the case, it also no surprise that DD likes Zolar X, too, certainly enough to give them a good review in the Village Voice.
See here for 250 words worth.
Another reason to hate on China
"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 aural wallpaper, or more aptly air-freshener for your ears -- that's the future of pop and rock music. And I'm not interested in it. DD doesn't care about young people who steal music or their tastes. Don't care about the artists. Don't care about the music companies.
They're just symptoms from the disease causing the slow degeneration 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, this describes why digital music, for me, is joyless work -- while listening to records and CDs is the opposite. I have absolutely nothing in common with "consumers" and "critics" of popular music who sit on the end of high speed Internet connections downloading jumbles of MP3s, using another portable listening computer to jumble them more. When I see the likes of 'em in the record store across the street from Pasadena City College, I wonder what they could be doing there.
They're not a demographic a used CD and vinyl store can pitch to. (And then I see the sign on the front glass: "Buy and sell used iPods.")
A gargantuan number 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 crap that collects on any digital storage medium. It reminds me of the collections of computer viruses and pirated software accumulated by children running bulletin board systems in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
I wrote a book about the subject in 1994. It was called "The Virus Creation Labs" and not being much of a futurist, I never dreamed that today's common music
Rather than sort and identify digital music, most of it becomes simply part of a pile, best deleted when tired of so that the process of digital junk collection can be started anew. One might get the same jazz from being a rodent running on a wheel in a cage.
See the entire story at the Reg, here.
posted by George Smith at 10:51 AM
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