Interstate 808

Angus Finlayson on Diplo’s musical theft for FACT.

This is fantastic and hits the nail very much on the head. Important use of the word “neo-colonial” too. Domination and condescension extended to the digital age yo. 

Richard Skelton - Rill

“runner,      a small stream.

strint,      a thin stream, as of milk from the cow.
syre,      a gutter, sewer.
keld, kell,      a spring.
(Ferguson)

smother,      foam on the edge of a river when it is in flood.
speat,      a sudden flood in a river.
threeple, tripple,      the gentle sound made by a quick-flowing stream.
(Prevost)”

Micheal Palin in The Very Best of Monty Python. 

Monty Python’s Away From It All: A Twisted Travelogue with John Cleese. 

Karl’s review of Drake for AU.

A timely reminder of what the live review form can be, in skilled hands. Absolutely brilliant, and I’ve never even really heard a Drake track.

More great recent examples of Karl’s writing (and his Tumblr).

Maggoty Lamb interviews visionary music critic David Toop for The Guardian.

Sometimes I feel like David Toop should never be read in anything less than book-length formats. He says so much in every sentence, yet every one leads to five more. 

This is interview is interesting because it comes in the light of Simon Reynolds’ comments at Off The Page (and on the page in the new issue of The Wire). You can read all about them in the interview so I won’t go on about them here. One thing that jumped out at me from the interview, other than the amazing quote above, was the line, “I’m an analytical practitioner, or an experiential analyst; I believe that all knowledge is provisional.” 

That is an important factor is all Toop has done. He doesn’t just sit back and write about things that are happening, he goes and does things and then writes about them. It makes a great mixture of traditional journalistic reportage, critical analysis and imaginative prosody in everything he writes. I hope I never run out of work of his to read. 

Ani DiFranco interview on SF Weekly.

There’s a few points in here worth looking at really. There’s some interesting things about the lack of protest songs in contemporary pop music. I don’t personally think that the reason for the scarcity is anything to do with people being worried they’ll “date badly”. Rather, it has much more to do with the ever-increasing compartmentalization and specialization of art in general combined with the modern drive towards escapism and simulacra over experience.

The way we consume culture now is very different to the way it was done in decades past; it is at once more open to possibilities but ever more shielded from them by means of curation. Your twitter feed is an open field, where you can have a million things a minute popping up in front of you or you can have a carefully selected feed relevant to your interests. I know which I have. It’s part of a more general thing where we drive ourselves further into our own specialist areas of interest and fail to pay attention to what’s going on on a wider scale. Personalised news feeds, Facebook, Google Reader, Twitter; they all feed this specialization, this focus on the first-person interest. The more hone in on your own interests and those of select groups, the less likely you are to write a song protesting the general state of things for people other than yourself. Maybe that’s more honest, I don’t know, but it is blinkered in some way and does breed a lack of empathy, the key ingredient in any protest song. 

What annoys me about the answer above is the implication that music made by non-musicians is fake in some way. The “There’s nothing wrong with smoke and mirrors and making records with machines” reads like “No offence, but…”. A piano is a machine too. A guitar is a machine. Any instrument is, except the voice perhaps. But then language is a machine too right? Where do we draw the line? Either way, it is no bad thing that “the music industry has been contracting and distilling down to its most passionate and dedicated people”. No bad thing at all. It’s important to understand that people that make music and art with machines are passionate and dedicated too. And no less authentic than a singer with a piano either. 

In relation to the actual question, it’s pretty much impossible for any artist now to have the same career model as someone who started in the late 80s. That’s how different things are now and it continues to surprise me when an established artist like DiFranco doesn’t recognize this. 

Com Lag: Slow Media and the occupation of online time - Ryan Alexander Diduck. 

Interesting thoughts here. I’d imagine almost anyone who spends a fair whack of their time on the internet, or at least in front of a computer or phone, can relate to much of it.

Slowing down is difficult and becoming ever more necessary for me. Rarely a day goes by where I don’t feel like I’m not doing enough and that all I really want is to escape to some imagined countryside for the rest of my days. I can’t but feel these thoughts are directly linked to my attention span which is dying a not-so-slow death at the hands of my broadband connection. Or rather, my misuse of that broadband connection.