Martin Brennan isn’t really an “area man”: his company is based in the UK, and besides, I’m not aware that there’s a large community of “silicon-chip designers” here in the Inland Empire. I’ve just always liked the sound of that phrase. I’m sorry to have lured you in under false pretenses. (But then, false pretenses [...]
My daughter Audrey was lucky enough to be in the audience for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week. She would say the timing was lucky because she got to see Belle & Sebastian; Zzzzzz. AUDREY: Right. I guess the sublime beauty of Stuart’s voice and the witty poetry of their lyrics are a total [...]
Yup: 24 hours later, I still can’t get Cee-Lo out of my head. And he keeps cussing in there! Just a few more stray thoughts about “Fuck You,” on a Sunday morning. First, what a remarkable bridge, right? Cee-Lo holds it off until 2:40; that’s mighty late. The change in tenor, both musical and emotional, [...]
More significant, perhaps, is the fact that much of the communal activity of rock-music consumption has been driven underground. Given the copyright maximalism of legislation like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the hyperactive enforcement regime of the Recording Industry Association of America—whose prosecutorial zeal against college students since January 2003 has been [...]
The biggest strike against summer music festivals is that festival music sounds awful. The logistics of the Lollapalooza staging requires one-hour breaks between acts performing on the same stage; after one act has cleared out, the next has perhaps 40 minutes to set up, so there’s no time for a decent sound check. And projecting [...]
Of course all of those festivals, whether explicitly or implicitly, hark back to Woodstock, but the more-recent summer festivals serve a different function for this generation of rock fans than did their near-mythical progenitor. A familiar reaction to the current festivals is to complain that they are commercialized and commodified corporate productions, unlike the original [...]
[Gentle Reader: I'll be without Internet access for the next few days; blog posts are cued up and ready to publish until I'm back, but I'll likely not be able to respond to Comments as quickly as usual. I'll look forward to reading all when I'm back on line Thursday, March 18.--Kevin] I wrote [...]