How Do You Say Ace of Spades In German?

If the whole heavy metal thing doesn't work out Motorhead's Lemmy might want to make a switch to fashion consultant:

Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, former Hawkwind member and the longtime singer/bassist/wart-wielder of metal legend Motörhead, has pissed off some Germans by wearing a Nazi hat for a photo shoot for a German newspaper. Such displays of Nazi paraphernalia are illegal in Germany, and an official investigation has reportedly been launched into the situation.

Lemmy offers this flame-fanning response: “I’ll tell you something about history. From the beginning of time, the bad guys always had the best uniforms. Napoleon, the Confederates, the Nazis. They all had killer uniforms. I mean, the SS uniform is fucking brilliant! They were the rock stars of that time.” Then he defends himself against claims of racism just a wee bit dubiously by adding, “Don’t tell me I’m a Nazi ’cause I have uniforms. In 1967 I had my first black girlfriend and a lot of more ever since then.”

I'll be generous and just suggest that decades of headbanging have taken their toll.

The Hardest Working Dead Man in Show Business

Death Row records was sold this week to some faceless company called Global Music Group. The label that defined hip-hop in the 90s fell on hard times thanks to the legal woes of its owner, Suge Knight.

So what does the new owner get?

[T]he Tennessee based-indie took immediate ownership of the label’s entire catalogue, including 20 unreleased records by the late Tupac Shakur.

20 fucking albums? Tupac has already been more prolific in death than he was in life and he's still got 20 more albums ready to go? Wha?

Back in '98 or so a friend told me he thought Tupac had faked his death because he was still releasing albums. I laughed at him. I wouldn't do that today.

High Fidelity versus Compressed Music

I posted on this before and got lots of angry comments from iPod fans but now I am emboldened by a comprehensive Rolling Stone article on the subject.

The gist of it is that current music releases are being engineered to sound good on iPods, not stereo systems, as most buyers today listen through their computer or their iPod.

...today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

As a high fidelity partisan, I applaud the efforts of brilliant deceased Jeff Buckley's mom to force his record company to resist the low-fi MP3 craze and instead produce real, good-sounding music:

In 2004, Jeff Buckley's mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original three-quarter-inch tape of her son's recordings as she was preparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. "We were hearing instruments you've never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked," she remembers. "It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio."

To Guibert's disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on an independent A&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the studio. "You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the room," she says of the new release. "Compression smudges things together."

DC Dispatch: Bob Mould's New Act

Bob Mould, the former frontman of Husker Du, is a US punk rock legend.

So what is Bob Mould doing now? Well, he is living in DC, came out as gay and now DJ's the wildly popular monthly Blow-Off party at the 9:30 club.

So I was there Saturday morning at 11:45, one of the very few people who showed up to see his new film, Circle of Friends, at the Lincoln Theater yesterday as part of the DC Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. He introduced the film and played a solo set after it. I could never have imagined such Bob Mould intimacy for $10 when I was 20 and loved "Sorry Somehow." It was fun. Anyway, if you are a fan check out gay happenings to see him in a small setting.

George Michael Cutting Back on Pot

Keeping on the pot themed Monday, pop singer George Michael is trying to limit his marijuana consumption. Story from Reuters

Are iPods Ruining Music?

I never listen to my iPod because I find that compressed music sounds bad. Jazz, my favorite genre, sounds especially bad. Now it turns out that in addition to serving up poor quality sound, the popularity of the MP3 format is actually creating poor sound.

Those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry -- producers, engineers, mixers and the like -- say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as MP3s on an iPod music player. That combination is thus becoming the "reference platform" used as a test of how a track should sound. (Movie makers make much the same complaint when they see their filmed images in low-quality digital form.)

But because both compressed music and the iPod's relatively low-quality earbuds have many limitations, music producers fret that they are engineering music to a technical lowest common denominator. The result, many say, is music that is loud but harsh and flat, and thus not enjoyable for long periods of time.

More here from WSJ (sub only).

Ted Nugent Gets Even More Annoying Than He Was in the 70s

Even in the 70's Ted Nugent was annoying. He had that one big hit, and I keep confusing it with a Kat Stevens song and he became a Muslim convert. What they have in common!

The WSJ editorial page, in a new low, gave him a platform to espouse his views on drugs and the 60s. [Subscription only]

This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the so-called Summer of Love. Honest and intelligent people will remember it for what it really was: the Summer of Drugs.

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

Fuck The Police

The rock/pop band The Police finally realizes that they suck, their one good song forever branding women named Roxanne as whores notwithstanding. If you're a Police fan, a woman named Roxanne, or the boyfriend of a woman named Roxanne, feel free to put nasty comments in the comment section.

The singer in the Police jumps like a "petulant pansy," the drummer is making a "complete hash," and who knows what the guitarist is doing? Notes from a bitter critic? Actually, it's a disarmingly frank concert review from the aforementioned drummer of the newly reunited rock trio.

[...]

"This is unbelievably lame," Copeland wrote of Wednesday's show at the GM Place arena. "We are the mighty Police and we are totally at sea."

"It usually takes about four or five shows in a tour before you get to the disaster gig. But we're The Police so we are a little ahead of schedule," he said.

Copy, Copy, Copy

I've always been sceptical of intellectual property rights, largely because property rights only make sense when there's exclusivity. If you own your car, that means I can't. In contrast, if I copy your music CD onto my computer, you still have your CD. Copying something is by definition not stealing it. Downloading a song off the Internet onto my iPod is no more stealing than downloading a good cooking recipe into my Blackberry. Or repeating a joke I heard on Comedy Central. This is why I get upset when the record industry goes after young people. It is outright thuggish to threaten college students with lawsuits for downloading something freely available on the Internet. Thuggish. A case in point.

At first, Sarah Barg thought the e-mail was a scam. Some group called the Recording Industry Association of America was accusing the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sophomore of illegally downloading 381 songs using the school's computer network and a program called Ares. The letter said she might be sued but offered her the chance to settle out of court. Barg couldn't imagine anyone expected her to pay $3,000 — $7.87 per song — for some 1980s ballads and Spice Girls tunes she downloaded for laughs in her dorm room. Besides, the 20-year-old had friends who had downloaded thousands of songs without repercussion....But Barg's perspective changed quickly that Thursday in March, when she called student legal services and found out the e-mail was no joke and that she had a pricey decision to make.

Barg is one of 61 students at UNL and hundreds at more than 60 college campuses across the country who have received letters from the recording industry group, threatening a lawsuit if they don't settle out of court....Barg's parents paid the $3,000 settlement. Without their help, "I don't know what I would have done. I'm only 20 years old," she said.

The best way to fight this thuggery is by downloading lots of songs off the Internet. As many as you can. If RIAA had it's way, you would have to pay $25 to them every time you sang Happy Birthday. And just humming a song in the shower would cost you $5.

Who Wants Their MTV Anymore?

A Boston Globe article charts the sad decline of MTV into almost complete irrelevance. When the network was first launched in 1981 very few cable channels carried it and young music fans so desperately wanted to see this seminal channel that "I Want My MTV" became a populist scream. That slogan was so infused into the culture that Sting sang an "I want my MTV" back-up vocal on a Dire Straits song. My friends and I, in high school, were so desperate to watch MTV play videos like Madonna's Borderline or David Bowie's China Girl that we would on a Saturday night take the train to Penn Station in New York as they had one tv in the Amtrak waiting lounge that played MTV.

Ten years from its birth, the network was developing its bad habits of featuring mindless reality shows and spring break idiocy, but it still had some good music programming left. One night in 1991 I was watching its one good show, 120 Minutes. That night I saw Nirvana debut "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and that was the last time that MTV caught my attention.