The Peer

Where's Spotbook?

2010-03-24T09:33:00.012Z

Jeremy Schlosberg shows some good insight into the failure of the current playlist ecosystem, in his article Playlist Nation, which was posted to the pho list.

As something of a playlist nut myself, I recognised a lot of truth in his assertions about the personal, internal use of music. He's quite right, for instance, that it's often more fun to make a mixtape for someone than to listen to one they made for you. But I disagree with his main point that playlist sharing has no future.

For a start, he has it backwards about Apple, whom he credits with inventing the playlist, and putting it centre stage on the iPod. Apple's approach to listening is: music all the time. Party Shuffle is the epitome of this - you can add music if you want, but in any case it will just add random stuff to keep it going. And generally - he's right here - that's all people care about. But it's the antithesis of playlist making, which is about a journey from A to B via X, L and P. The functionality iTunes and the iPod lack is to turn the bunch of songs you happen to have just been listening to into an instant playlist, effortlessly. You have to think to yourself: "today I'll make a playlist". Which of course, unless you're a saddo like me, you rarely do.

It's also painfully obvious that the author hasn't has first-hand experience of Spotify. It's a game changer with regard to playlists. He's wrong about it not having playlist sharing built in, but more importantly playlists are its default use case. There is no Party Shuffle; it wouldn't be very helpful anyway as you'd be shuffling the whole of (available) music.

Spotify may look like iTunes, but functionally it's more like other music players such as Winamp or foobar2000, where the only distinction between "Now Playing" and a new playlist is whether you've hit the 'Save' button. Spotify's 'radio stations' are awful, so the user is confronted with two options: either create a playlist or listen to someone else's. It has been a boon to magazine sites and other tastemakers, such as Drowned In Sound or misterchristrout.com, which publish regular Spotify playlists.

I take Schlosberg's general point about playlist sharing. It can't be anonymized; can't go many-to-many. I used 8tracks a couple of times then forgot it existed because it's too hard to find the nuggets. Whereas I often listen to my last.fm friends' libraries, even though they lack that "journey" quality I crave.

But I think playlists have yet to take their proper place in music discovery because there are still unnecessary hurdles in their creation, for which Apple is partly to blame. Spotify has forced users to at least think about finding, creating and sharing mixes. Also, currently portability is a real headache, and the cure for this, the XSPF format, has yet to be properly realised. But the cloud will smooth this problem, even if the wished-for global music id system fails to emerge.

My playlists are primarily missives to my friends and future self. I want them in a permanent form, available everywhere. Combine a properly-stocked Spotify with a facebook-like intimacy and you might get an explosion of one-to-one events.

Accio Value!

2009-07-07T14:06:00.007+01:00

I'm getting fed up hearing that music has lost its value - to pirates, the internet, goblins or what have you.

Of course recorded music has value! What it lacks is price. It is the nature of the internet to lubricate communication, and it turns out that the apparent correlation between value and price is completely dependent on a certain friction in the marketplace. If it takes no effort to bring something to you then the actual price of that good is zero. This would be equally true if we could summon bananas to us at will from plantations on the Ivory Coast. It would be tough on the growers, but in a frictionless market they could no longer realise the value they had put in tending the plants. Of course such banana-summoning is clearly theft by any definition that has meaning today, but if we all suddenly had this Harry Potter-like power, what - short of a sudden outbreak of global altruism - could be done to stop it?

Music may have been the first sector to experience this effect, but it's not alone. And since the whole issue of music copying is fraught with emotion, consider instead the market in news. The internet has actually increased the value of news by making it both more immediate and longer-lasting, and by giving readers everywhere the ability to interact with and discuss it. Although there is no such thing as "news piracy", the true market price of news is also being revealed to be: nothing. This is why News Corp is trying to sue Google, and Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal was prompted to say that "Google devalues everything it touches"¹. But it's the internet itself which is to blame for such reduction in cost, even as it ramps up the value - Google is but one of many lubricants which - fantastically! - enable us instantly to find what we want. The downside (if that's what it is - perhaps we should say, less judgmentally, "side-effect") of this unfettered access is the stark and unavoidable separation of value from price.

Clearly, long-term, this is going to be a major problem (or opportunity, if you're so inclined): if journalists, editors and writers, like composers and performers before them, are unable to convert into a living the effort they put into their valuable work, continuing their socially important efforts will become unviable. Perhaps, instead of the seemingly impossible task of artificially raising prices we should start looking at ways to reduce the cost of living for all content creators (indeed for everyone) by spreading the gift economy into other sectors in a race towards a universal zero price.

¹ http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=158432

Hound Them Out!

2008-03-07T19:49:00.000Z

The public seems to be waking up to the reality that the British Army is not a force for good in the world. Not only have several Student Unions banned the army from recruiting there – on the very reasonable grounds that these new recruits would soon be off killing people in places where they have no right to be – but soldiers in at least one area have been instructed not to wear their uniforms in public for fear of vilification by members of the public. This conjures up quite a strange image of hardened squaddies skulking in the shadows to avoid dangerous mobs of Daily Mirror readers, armed with nothing but their rapier-like tabloid wit.

Predictably, Gordon Brown has appealed for these pillars of the State to keep their drabs on and for we subjects to show some dashed respect for what he calls “servicemen”, missing the point that it is their very apparent lack of service to either their countrymen or the citizens of the countries they are occupying which is prompting this reaction in the first place. What, Gordon, is this oh-so-important function which these unfortunates are fulfilling, without which our way of life would collapse? The silence is deafening.

So I urge everyone to follow suit – show these hirelings the same respect you would perhaps not to a crazed high school gunman, but to a hitman caught with his cloak and dagger askew. Jeers and catcalls, public shunning, ridicule… while perhaps not the do-as-you-would-be-done-by scenario I usually advocate, these seem a reasonable enough response to antisocial behaviour. (We have smoking ban, why not an overseas-interference ban, too?) Though come to think of it, I would like to think that if I decided to boss people around at the point of a gun I’d come in for some serious stick from my mates.

I’m sure some soldiers are in it for the violence, but the majority probably misguidedly join up to make something of their lives and do some good. Plastering over the macho ads with VSO posters, while keeping up a steady stream of barracking, seems like a good way to bring morale and eventually numbers down – with a full programme of forgiveness and rehabilitation for those who leave.

But of course the real problem is the sponsors of this international crime gang – us. We voted for the people who sent them there, and are even now funding their misbegotten exploits. So save the really nasty stuff for Brown, Cameron and everyone else who supports organised State violence – take their bloody jobs away.

Give Me Dissonance or Give Me Death

2008-01-18T09:04:00.000Z

When I was growing up, back in the Eighties, disposability was a glorious thing - something for young bands to aspire to. Pop is disposable, ran the argument, because it is the thrill of being young, of living in the moment. Pop is disposable because, once you've heard that spine-tingling riff a couple of dozen times, like an overchewed piece of gum its buzz has worn out, and it's time to move on to the next quick thrill. Pop is disposable because we live in ever-changing times, and the best music reflects NOW most perfectly; its significance tomorrow will be only as an archaeological layer on which the next frothy edifice can be built. And Pop - the music of the people - is the state to which all music should aspire. A truly universal, proletarian artform.

Could there really still be critics who believe this twaddle?

For me, while I know that what we put in our ears is as political as the diet of our eyes and tongue, this self-serving argument has nothing to do with my experience of music. Disposability is a disappointment; it's the moment you realise that the little charmer - who yesterday folded their gorgeous arms around you, breathed seductively in your ear and so fully penetrated your mind - is no soulmate, no rock for hard times; is nothing indeed but a pretty dilettante, without an original or useful idea in their head, who could no more wire a plug or bring up a child than count through a bar of thirteen sixteen time. I refuse to celebrate airheadedness and aculturality as any kind of achievement.

I want music that continually offers something new; that's worth a repeat visit to my eardrums; a re-imagining, a fresh experience with each revelatory listen. There's a lot more of this than you might think. It just takes some patience and an open pair of ears to find it. A subscription to last.fm doesn't hurt, either. No bubblegum on my bedpost - I am building a collection of music that will remain with me, my close companion until I die.*

I used to cling to the idea of "Experimental Music" like a dirigible in choppy seas, but nowadays music's emotion is more important to me than its novelty per se. Which is not to say that I've gone off music that challenges the ear. Rather, I'd argue that the ear must be challenged if there is any hope of communication on a musical level. But some settle for connection via the everyday language of speech alone, with the band just puffing alongside.

For it is the deviations from what is expected that reflect the opinions of the music's creators, their experience, their personality. The all-important what-it's-like-to-be-someone-else-ness that makes storytelling so compelling and connecting is right there in the composer’s necessarily singular choices. If not, hearing music is like having the kind of non-versation Al Swearingen from Deadwood so hates: "Do not repeat back to me what I just played in different fucking notes!" (The current UK scene needs to unhitch itself from the wagon of the celebrated but largely un-nuanced Arcade Fire. Go Godspeed instead!) Consonance is the very epitome of bland: Bach, Mozart and their ilk mercilessly subverted the very harmonic rules they invented to wring out feeling. We have to go so much further today to hit the real highs.

Recently I went to see Japanese "post-rock" outfit Mono. I don't really want to get sidetracked by the P-R thing, but - sorry! - they use drums, bass and two guitars; they produce all their own rhythms (no beatboxes or samplers); their music has melody and dynamics; it's all in either 4/4 or 6/8; THEY'RE A FREAKIN' ROCK BAND!! There's nothing "post" about them! Repetition and no vocals - is that all it takes to be on the cutting-edge these days? Bah! Anyways, they do make a lovely, lovely noise. The lead guitarist has an exquisite tone, and pulls convincing Andrew Latimer-style faces. In fact, every song seems cut from a chunk of Camel's mountainous 'Ice'. But will Mono keep me warm at night? Even when I've lost the rest of my teeth, and can no longer squeeze into a Medium? I doubt it. They don't have the stamina. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that, emerging from Brighton's seafront Engine Room where they played, a strong gust of sea breeze had carried them out over the English Channel.

I hate to say it, but there is about consonance - the staple harmonic arena of Mono and fellow travellers like Explosions In The Sky, Sigur Ros and Autumn Chorus - something weak and unsatisfying; a smoothness to which, like Pure Pop Disposability, many disparate and unlikely bands seem drawn, as if they can't wait to cast off everything that made their music interesting, special, different,... moving. I appreciate that this current crop of bands are, unlike pop entryists of a bygone age, trying to reclaim the bathetic allure of consonance as an art medium. And the peaks of this music can indeed be disturbing, as the best art should be: bleak in their unending, monolithic prettiness; or allowing some of existence's ugliness to protrude through the veneer. (Check out Pelican’s The Fire In Our Throats... for one of the best examples of this.)

Don't give me polish; give me rough, infinitely crystalline edges. Give me, in fact, large chunks of modern chart music: the wild syncopations of Missy Elliot and Kelis; raucous CSS shoutiness; the guitar grind and sample mania of Madonna and Britney - the best producers seems to have forgotten that Pop is bubblegum. Nowadays it's more like a radioactive gobstopper. (Though the sickly sweet vocal style that has plagued R'n'B since the 80s continues to ooze gooey tentacles, yielding toffee apples everywhere from Justin Timberlake to Avril Lavigne.)

Somehow, we never get around to actually throwing away the best Disposable Pop, because it snags us and refuses to let go. Music which requires passage through a pain barrier, some kind of dissonance, will often lead to the greatest long-term pleasure, because that barrier is precisely the price of admission to another soul.

It takes all kinds of culture to make a world, to soundtrack a life; I am not ashamed of the Abba and Duran Duran in my eternal jukebox, but I am vetting it for Rock-Post-Post-Rock taggers-on who slipped by while I was lost in thought, even as I enjoy recent discoveries such as the wild and moody 65daysofstatic. As with anything we do, music is only an adventure if you let it be.

*And yes, I did get a 160GB Archos - thanks, my gorgeous Lucy!

The $5 LP

2008-01-05T01:15:00.001Z

I just paid for my copy of Saul Williams' excellent album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust. I was reminded to do this by an editorial by the album's producer and evangelist Trent Reznor, in which he quoted the exact figures for the album's "sales".

Like In Rainbows, Niggy Tardust was available as a potentially free download, although it carried a suggested price tag of $5. Since I'd never heard of Williams before, I opted at the time to pay nothing for my my download, despite the slight ticking-off I got from the site. Seems harsh, but there's just so much music out there. However, the record is great, and clearly I'm not the only person who thought so because it quickly rose to the top of last.fm's "Artist Hype List" for that week.

Reznor's analysis, though, is a little bleak. He begins with the facts:

“Saul's previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.

As of 1/2/08,

154,449 people chose to download Saul's new record.

28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:

18.3% chose to pay.

Of those paying,

3220 chose 192kbps MP3

19,764 chose 320kbps MP3

5338 chose FLAC”

He assumes that most of those downloading the album were fans either of Saul Williams or of Nine Inch Nails, citing a lack of press coverage for the event. But, ironically I guess, it seems even Reznor underestimates the power of the 'net. As someone who takes an interest in digital music generally, but not NIN-related stuff in particular, I saw references to this experiment in several places and took a happy chance on downloading it.

What I read from these figures is a fivefold increase in interest in Saul Williams' music, and would assume that most of the extra listeners are newcomers, rather than people who already liked it, but not quite enough to buy the previous record on CD. (Of course we have no figures on how many people may have downloaded that album for free.)

David Gretton has the insightful suggestion that a follow-up email should have been sent to all us freeloaders, asking us if we liked the album and suggesting making a payment if we did. This is such a great idea it should be baked into the newly-emerging business model. People expect to try before they buy - good thing that they can, given the amount there is to try - but there's no harm in reminding them about the "before you buy" part.

But I strongly disagree with David's belief that there is little price resistance in the album market and that $5 is too low. If the suggested donation had been $15 I don't think I would have gone back and paid; I'd want physical product for that. To be fair, what he actually said was "fans are price insensitive" (my emphasis), although even that is a stretch. (I am still wincing over the £40 cost of my - admittedly lovely - Radiohead box.) But times have changed, and not everyone with a copy of your music is a fan. Yet. The great majority who have yet to make up their minds, and have increasingly large amounts of storage space to fill, are very price sensitive indeed.

Blogged with Flock

The 160GB iPod - My Music World in My Pocket

2007-09-06T22:59:00.000+01:00

Woo-hoo! I am so delighted by today's announcement that I don't know where to put myself. I thought Apple had stalled at 80 gigs, and the others seemed to be pulling back from the brink. When I read about the Archos 605 Wi-Fi 160GB player this morning &ndash the first personal media player with more than 100GB that I know of &ndash I nearly signed up on the spot, even though it's primarily a video player and my favourite movies would all fit on a single DVD.

I'm no fan of the iTunes Music Store, as is known by anyone who's spent any time around here with their sarcasm-radar switched on. But then I don't like Audible.com either, and that hasn't stopped me buying – let me see – four Creative Zen players to date. I also don't get on at all with the iTunes application — it seems aimed squarely at those who don't want to think about how their songs get strung together as long as they're wall-to-wall, with playlist functionality shoved into the Picky Bugger Annexe.

But my poor old 60GB Zen Xtra, though I love it dearly, has been overflowing for months and is subtly corrupted in some bizarre way that means it no longer synchs properly. (I am having to recreate its contents on my new network drive from scattered archives, as I can't actually find a way to reliably copy all its files in one go. Although it uses Microsoft's own MTP transfer protocol – it stands for Mutie The Pig, right? – Windows gives up totally; two Linux utils cheerfully start the job but both fall over after a few hundred files.)

And there are now alternative iPod tools for all platforms, not to mention accessories, and even alternative firmware which I'm keen to try once it catches up with these new models. It's time to go with the flow, and finally have the storage capacity my enthusiam demands.

This moment is one I've dreamt of since I first heard of MP3 players. I wasn't exactly an early adopter. Many times in the early Noughties I'd pop into a gadget vendor to gaze dreamily at the various audio oferrings, but sigh at the salesgeeks' inability to convince me that 64 megs was all I needed. How I would have hated having to choose my hour's worth of music for the day each day over breakfast. Happily we now have solid state players with capacities measured in the gigabytes, but I need more: my world of music in my pocket, no less.

Lefsetz' price rant hits the nail on the head - digital music's high pricepoint is holding it back. But for now, no philosophising from me. In the immortal worlds of Marty DeBergi: "Enough of my yakkin'. Let's Boogie!"

Music and the Meaning of Money

2007-07-14T17:34:00.000+01:00

The role of money in our world is bizarre. Even within its own narrow parameters it makes little sense; for example I am still doing pretty much the same kind of work at pretty much the same level of competency as I have been for several years - yet now I find myself earning literally double what I was just a short time ago.

This is great news for my family, of course, but I know it doesn't actually mean anything. I have not now somehow doubled my 'social worth' or whatever it is your earnings are meant to reflect.

I can't deny, though, that it's a nice feeling being able to buy toys for my kids, to feed ourselves healthy food, to upgrade my computer when I need to, without fretting. I have been taken aback, though, by my sudden desire to buy a massive pile of CDs, accompanied by a twinge of guilt when firing up μtorrent.

Me, mister information-not-only-wants-to-be-free-but-already-is-so-ner, suffering from p2p guilt?! What's that about? Actually it's not completely unexpected, and doesn't shatter my previous worldview; I have always maintained that the main benefit of filesharing is as a social leveller: to be against filesharing is to be against equal access to culture. (Which I suppose is equivalent to saying that you're against equal access to culture if you're in favour of capitalism.) The 'iTunes sum' says it all: full iPod = cost of player + song capacity x iTunes-price-per-unit. For an 80GB player, that comes out at £200 + 20,000 x 79p or a round £16,000. Very few have that kind of disposable income to spend on music.

But those that do should probably pay it. Although the cost of producing music has fallen dramatically in the past couple of decades, it is still appreciable: even home recording equipment costs money, and musicians have to keep themselves alive somehow while they create and rehearse. The social benefit of music is actually quite high, but due to the strange nature of the modern economy, the price point of recorded music is now practically nil. How could this be; and how should moneyed individuals (or perhaps everyone, at a price they can afford) support new music?

Some still reckon the old way is best: let record labels front the money for production, promotion and artists' wages, which they recoup through sales. Trouble is, this indirect method of (let's be kind for a minute) artist support is no longer viable because recorded music has lost its exchange-value. For the first time in history there is a commodity with utility but no price. A win, I'd say, for Marx's Labour Theory of Value, which sees a commodity's price as a function of how much work has gone into producing it and bringing it to market, only tangentially related to how useful it is.

Labels banked on barriers to distribution (the cost of creating and transporting physical products) keeping prices up, but the arrival of CD burners followed by mass internet penetration has vapourized these barriers. They cannot be re-erected. The plastic disk in a case is a wasteful, inefficient delivery system, out-competed and undercut by transmission wire. As a result, labels' uneasy pact with artists is at an end because labels can’t keep their side of it: their efforts no longer actually add any value to what’s created. (It was amusing to read some prat industry spokesman criticising Prince's decision to give away his new album as if the Artist owes retailers a living!)

Maybe rich labels should turn themselves into actual banks?

Meantime I am left with a moral dilemma about my CD itch. There's a ton of music that I've sampled at its new, low distribution price, for whose life-enhancing qualities I'm extremely grateful. I want to have it on my shelf, even though I know it'll mainly just sit there. It may be the socially-accepted 'right' thing to do, but there's perhaps more guilt there than the p2p option. I also want its creators to flourish. Since I started reading the music press at around age eleven, long before I became a socialist, I have understood that the music industry as it exists is bad for musicians and listeners alike. Buying CDs from labels just prolongs the agony, to artists and the environment; it’s become an unnecessary evil. Similarly iTunes just feels wrong. One solution is to make donations directly to bands, and I will be doing this, but that's a bit haphazard.

Once it becomes impossible to ignore the Marxian logic of what's happening, society will have to find music-makers a way to get paid for the actual creative work they do, rather than for a byproduct that's lost its value. This seems to point the way towards some kind of progressive Culture Tax, maybe like the downloading licence I suggested a while back, but I don't want to elaborate on that idea now - it feels like papering over the cracks. If we want real equality we have to do away with that strange immoral glue we currently use to hold our world together: money.

The Price Is Wrong

2007-04-02T15:07:00.000+01:00

iTunes will be selling its DRM-free content at an even sillier price

While I'm all for saving the Earth's precious resources (by which I mean the plastic, metal and Wikipedia-knows-what-else that goes into a CD) and going digital with music distribution, there has to be an economic incentive for the buyer.

Since the going rate for a new CD here in the UK is now between £5 and £10, the iTunes store is already sailing close to the wind at 79p a track for its unFairplay-encrusted ~~downloads~~ rentals. Now it makes sense to sell premium product at a premium price: the new actuallyFair AAC files it's selling thanks to its deal with EMI (and, presumably, the indie labels who've been asking for this for ages will soon be included) are being offered at twice the usual bitrate, which is soundwise practically indistinguishable from the uncompressed files you get from a CD.

So I don't want to spit in the pudding — after all, isn't this what reasonable folk have been asking for since the iTMS first opened its doors? — but Jobs and his cohorts have now effectively doubled the cost of an album if you download it rather than rip it from CD.

I may now dip my toe in the iTunes waters, but there'll need to be a price adjustment before it becomes my first port of call — except of course for those drone LPs with only three tracks on them…

We Owe Them Nothing

2006-12-19T21:29:00.000Z

You might think that by now everyone would have realised that peer-to-peer filesharing trounces media companies' traditional (ie 20th Century) business model. In fact, when else do you even hear the phrase "business model"? For a while there was a valid industry in selling facsimiles of music in various forms - sheet music, wax cylinders, CDs, etc - back when copy-making was a complex and costly business. Now it isn't, the industry's raison d'être has evaporated. (They never did sell actual music, of course, because that's impossible. If recording had never been invented, there would be no music industry, and musicians would probably still do what they've always done - earn money entertaining people through live performance, or indulge their muse while sponging off a friendly rich person.) This is what made me so rabid about the Gowers report and - particularly - press reaction to it. To pretend that p2p is a fringe activity whose practitioners a few tech-savvy police can round up and toss in jail is not just to miss the point, but to lob a nuclear grenade vertically in the air. The only reason for retaining copyright on private sharing is as a handy persecution mechanism for Joe Normal.

For the social net challenges more than one particular business model, it challenges the notion of business itself. For decades, the idea of basing an economy on sharing rather than trade has seemed an airy-fairy, wouldn't-it-be-nice-if ideology, rather than a practical possibility. Now, there is a growing, grass-roots communism lodged in capitalism's heart. This is not some high-falutin' political theory imposed by a minority of agitators, it's a groundswell of millions of ordinary self-interested folk discovering the cultural, social and monetary benefits of sharing.

That forward-thinking artists are also joining the p2p revolution comes as a surprise to some, but you only have to look at authors of wiki pages, FAQs, blogs and tutorials - the entire open source software movement - to see how normal it is for creative people to 'give away' their work for everyone's benefit.

It has been widely noted that the advent of 'Web 2.0' has seen a change in the way people... uh... "consume media" online. While the sheer quantity of material being copied from hard drive to hard drive worldwide, without a penny changing hands, has never been higher there is, in addition, a shift in emphasis from established big names to smaller artists and homegrown art. This is of course completely healthy, but it's even scarier for record labels than the viral spread of the fruit of "their" artists' labours. First, we just wanted it all for free. Now, we are learning that music itself is not a commodity at all, it only seemed that way because it mostly manifested as a lump of matter. No wonder "content owners" (they wish) have responded so chaotically to the rise of YouTube. Do they want to crush it or embrace it? They don't know, themselves; there is no real answer to: "you can shrivel and die for all we care - your business is irrelevant".

It is natural for people to feel confused and, in the case of record giants - indeed the entire established business world - threatened by an imminent flowering of people-power in the intrinsically social environment engendered by the Net. But while we mouse-wielding revolutionaries should be compassionate towards employees of such businesses, we owe the companies nothing. In fact it would be a social good to dismantle the music industry forthwith: their work is no longer of any social benefit. (That it is also almost totally despicable is academic at this point.)

Instead of imposing unnatural copy-restriction in a vain attempt to retroactively apply old thinking to this refreshing, healthy and empowering new way of doing things, we should be asking how the physical world of less intangible commodities, and its attendant drain on the world's finite resources, can be made more like the online free-for-all.

Copyright Penalties to be Extended

2006-12-07T23:30:00.000Z

No change otherwise

I'm snowed under at work, but someone has to say this: Andrew Gowers is a reactionary old goon who should be ignored. He's the bloke who's supposedly going to recommend that the government not extend the period of copyright beyond the current 50 years.

Well, pardon me if I don't give even one cheer. While a lot of fuss has been made about Cliff Richard's impending loss of earnings from hits he had in the 1950s, and how marvellous it is that some ex-editor of a rightwing paper has seen sense in leaving our times' most controversial area exactly as it is, not a lot has been said about the sting in the tail of his report: that filesharers are recommended to be lumped in with forgers and imprisoned for up to 10 years.

Does this man actually live in the same century as the rest of us? It's bad enough that people who want to share their delight in new music are criminalised under existing legislature, drawn up in times when copying music cost money. Now, if this old duffer has his way, practically everyone with a computer is heading straight to jail.

The man's an idiot. Don't give him the time of day.

Radiodread

2006-10-06T00:54:00.000+01:00

Music of Human Origin

Even with the existence of the MOBO awards, there are fewer boundaries in popular music here in the UK than there were in the Seventies when I was growing up. Back then you couldn't listen to Disco and Rock; it simply wasn't allowed. One TV music quiz had a category called "black music", which was a mystery to me - I thought it was something satanic. (At least they were honest, though. "Music of Black Origin" just opens the doors to whiteys like Joss Stone whose music is - to my ears - less "black" than, say, Beefheart's, while also managing to hint that unqualifying people of colour like Kele Okereke are race traitors for playing Indie Rock. Nice one.) Still, I am happy to be living through times when these arbitrary distinctions are being purposefully and humorously dismantled, even if the White Boy Rocker in me complains that the Scissor Sisters sail too close to the wind.

Outside the bedrooms of mashup DJs, few are doing more in this regard than Easy Star All-Stars. Their Dub Side of the Moon altered the Pink Floyd standard forever - it wasn't so much a Reggae homage, as a memory refit for those who heard it: the Floyd are Rastas. The Floyd always have been Rastas. I love Big Brother.

What struck me most forcibly about Dub Side… was the All-Stars' obvious love for their source material, which shines vividly through every skanked-up detail. Here were highly accomplished Reggae singers and players, not to mention a producer, who clearly adored one of history's supposedly "whitest" groups.

While Radiodread - a walk through OK Computer - reveals a similar affection for the Floyd's closest living equivalent, the experience is rather different. In retrospect, the melancholy and mellow minors of Dark Side of the Moon were made for the ganja treatment, while Thom Yorke's angst and Radiohead's rhythmic and harmonic awkwardness don't succumb quite so easily.

Take the swooping ebow motif which opens 'Airbag': its devil intervals and false relations sit irreconcilably against the uptempo Reggae shuffle and Horace Andy's sweet vocal stylings, and fragile songs like 'Exit Music' don't quite survive the transplant surgery. At other times you can palpably hear them grappling with the instrumentation, as on 'Lucky', where it takes a voice, a slide guitar and a trombone to replace Ed O’Brien’s stratospheric guitar on the chorus.

Elsewhere the project is more successful: translating 'Fitter Happier' into a Deakus-like patois mumble ("Respec' Jah creatures!") is a creative swipe akin to Dub Side's D'n'B treatment of 'On The Run'; replacing Thom's desperate falsetto with a female voice, as on Tamar-kali's intense 'Climbing Up The Walls', ought to have happened more often; and my heart quickens whenever the Easy Star horn section bursts in on the scene.

But the best idea on the whole LP was to turn 'Paranoid Android' into a Special AKA number. Dammers and co. had a grasp on the darkside rarely heard at the popular end of MOJO (the 'J' is for Jamaican), and this pastiche follows the idea through to its logical conclusion, clipped time signatures and all.

So I salute the All-Stars in shirking easy targets in their evil plan to Dub every Uncut reader's favourite albums out of existence - I think even I could make a Reggae version of What's The Story (Morning Glory) - even if this time the result is "just" an album of great covers, rather than We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Easy Star peeps, you have my complete support. If you're looking for suggestions - why not do Spiderland next?

Another Ten Years

2006-08-08T23:58:00.000+01:00

Where But For Playlists Would I? (part two)

Since I wrote Part One of my playlist trilogy, I have realised that there are basically two things I want from my player’s firmware that I’m not currently getting: 1) better tools for handmaking playlists, such as the ability to edit tags, set markers and to do crossfades; and 2) a better AutoDJ. So I have decided to dissect a recent playlist project to expose current inadequacies, to unearth the oblique and often conflicting reasons for picking and sequencing the songs the way I did, and to examine how our engine might be coaxed into making similar choices. In the final part of the trilogy (which will probably appear over here), I will go into the technicalities of how my proposed playlist engine will work.

It's hard, perhaps impossible, to be creative entirely without constraint. There have to be explicit rules even if only to work around, kick against, circumvent; a big fat problem is what gets the creative juices flowing. Way back in 1986 I got really serious about my comp-making rules, my necessary constraints. It was my Year Zero. That no artist should appear more than once on a given compilation, and no song may appear on more than one compilation were two inviolable ones (except when I decided to break them), but there was also an unspoken third rule of self-restraint and enquiry, which I will eventually attempt to define, so that the first comp of the new regime (called, modestly, “Now That's What I Call Music, Vol. I” - note the emphasis) didn’t just consist of my all-time favourites and leave me scratching my head over the content of the next one.

These were the explicit rules, and that’s a very good start for a computer program, but for a playlist engine to be able to make interesting and artistic choices, more subtle DJ voodoo needs to be brought out into the light. When, back in 1996, I made Ten Years, a celebration of my musical life through compilations, I chose to break that third, hard-to-express rule about ebb, balance and flow. Instead, I wanted each intro to provoke a gasp of delight from the casual listener – or in me, at least.

The subsequent decade, in which my publishing empire collapsed and none of my bands made Single of the Week, have been more problematic musically speaking, and it was difficult to know in what spirit to approach a follow-up. I decided to stick with the same no-holds-barred approach, but with the emphasis on favourites from the past decade. Also, I figured that, as a stateless, ineffable playlist it could run for as long as it jolly well liked. Hey! There goes another constraint: running time.

Fortunately, as the best comps do, Another Ten Years pretty much wrote itself, and I was amazed – as candidates suggested themselves – to find not just a lyrical theme emerging (a first for me), but one that tells the story of my difficult past decade. My core beliefs have been undermined and rewritten numerous times, on plenty of occasions leaving me grasping at my own identity – but I hadn’t realised how closely my favourite music was conspiring to comment on this. An interesting comp, then. (If a track-by-track runthrough doesn’t appeal, here’s a skip button.)

Yin and Yang

It was always pretty clear to me that I’d have to include Bear’s ‘70 Years’, from their sadly-neglected, final Taking Money From Kids album – mainly because I like the way the title clashes with the comp’s, but also because it’s one of Chris Trout’s very best songs. It was going to be the opener, but intros have a way of piling up, especially when you’re preparing for a long journey of indeterminate length. So, first, the amazing Natalie Imbruglia track (yes, you heard right) ‘That Day’ (which I have just discovered) dervished ahead of Trout’s dour evaluation of human worth under capitalism, sparking gems like “what a marvellous mess… I accept everything… everyone’s a cynic, and it’s hard and it’s sweet, but it’s supposed to be like this”. After trying several permutations of the first few tracks I realised such a hippy-dippy opening wasn’t right either; it needed a dirge-like drone or monotone first, which role is currently filled by Low’s ‘Lion/Lamb’ (the demo version, with no string orchestra but a massively obtrusive e-bow solo); and although it still doesn’t quite hit the right note, the question “Are you a lion or a lamb?” is pretty pertinent so I’ll probably leave it.

In the interests of keeping the yin and yang swinging, the epic, bombastic conclusion to ’70 Years’ of course leads to the understated beauty of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Strange Boy’: an exploration of kidulthood well ahead of its time, implicitly asking if there’s more to life than ‘mere’ sensory pleasure – a recurrent theme of my turbulent decade. Hm, I should say something about conflict of philosophies, which is intrinsic to my personal comp-making style. I love pitting punks and hippies, hedonists and puritans against each other, so I’m pleased to have made a zigzag that runs: Low (Mormons) -> Natalie Imbruglia (New Ager) -> Bear (‘Drugs Not Jobs’) -> Joni Mitchell (solipsistic social commentator) -> The Cure (Goths); in this case each casts a different sheen on my life. I’m not proposing introducing an ID3 tag for Philosophy (or any of the other scategories that pop up in these discussions), but this is one of the many things social tagging could encompass.

It is hard to believe that 1984, the year I got into The Cure, is now twenty-two years behind me, and I have started listening to them again after at least a decade’s hiatus . There are probably a hundred live renditions of ‘Faith’ online, but the original has a clarity that’s hard to beat.

In 1995, the year of Britpop, The Lizard declared Pram Britain’s Best Band, and so they were. ‘Water Toy’ was the first thing I ever heard by them, and appears here as a reflective pause after all that philosophical rollercoastering. Then, proving that my life has been more yang than yin of late, comes ‘A Pillow of Winds’ – perhaps the loveliest of all Pink Floyd songs. In a piece of this length we can afford the odd double bill, and here – cocking a snook at, but not actually breaking the once-per-comp rule – we segue from one PF track to another: Easy Star All Stars’ loving translation of ‘Any Colour You Like’ from their rightly acclaimed Dub Side of the Moon, one of my favourite discoveries of the past year. Allowing a playlist engine to pivot about the actual artist name like this will be a challenge to pull off; I mean, imagine going from, say ‘Summertime’ by the Sundays to that awful cover version of ‘Here’s Where The Story Ends’ by Tin Tin Out? Disaster! There are far more bad covers than good ones, so I reckon a quick look at the user’s rating would be essential for this kind of move.

And oh! there had to be Yes. Although during my time as a music journo I vigorously championed the idea of Prog Rock, I became increasingly uneasy about the music I had actually liked from the early 70s, and indeed through the 90s moved so far from it that I failed to find any merit in the (I now realise) occasionally outstanding Porcupine Tree. This trend was suddenly reversed when someone introduced me to Yes (whom I’d almost totally ignored during my childhood prog-mania). As with most art of worth, there is an admission fee, and for many the sheer Jon Anderson-ness is not merely a bridge, but a middle 128 too far. (It’s the harpsichord breaks that can stick in my craw. Anderson’s overconfident falsetto twaddle has become a real plus, at bleak moments one of the few things guaranteed to lift me. There is also a perverse pleasure to be had in enjoying one of history’s most reviled bands.) ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ actually has discernable subject matter (alienation), but it’s the band’s deft moves, steered by rhythmic genii Chris Squire and Bill Bruford, that really impress. Originally I had ‘South Side of the Sky’ here (yes, Jon, mountains are cold), but the dub-isms on this one, which follow Squire and Bruford’s opening salvo, dovetail well with the All-Stars. And it’s the first Yes song I ever liked.

From one ten-plus minute track to another (I am digging the ability to pile them on without worrying about hitting the end of the tape). While Yes at their best could effortlessly extend a simple idea to a side of vinyl through tangent and embellishment, Quickspace Supersport achieved epic proportions through sheer insistence, a technique that only works, as The Fall can tell you, if you have a truly awesome riff to begin with. A band who seem forever smiling through gritted teeth, QS are a welcome addition to this first, direction-questioning part of the comp. Its single, oft-repeated stanza runs: “It’s a beautiful world / There’s no need to ask why / When the seas are green / Blue is the sky / And if you don’t like it / You’re not bloody trying.” La la la la la la la la la.

The Threefold Aspect of Everything

After completing the whole 32-odd-song running order (yep – lots more to come, sorry), I wondered if, with a little nip and tuck, a two-CD set would be possible but, while the celebratory last part should fit on a CD almost exactly, the more introspective opening section is almost twice as long. So I started to think about Another Ten Years as a (hopefully not too bloated) set of three CDs; the song we just reached in our walkthrough making a reasonable end to the first disk, and giving part one its obligatory subtitle, t’boot: “Not Bloody Trying”.

So disk two, which I’m thinking of calling “The Drift”, begins with two very different punkish offerings. I can thank Nomeansno, and ‘Metronome’ in particular, for the realisation that my vision of a freed, decentralised utopia is incompatible with traditional left-wing doctrine. I wasn’t a communist, as I’d thought, but an anarchist! Right on! This was long before the internet showed us that property is untenable, and social control an impossible centrist fantasy. “I want to jump out of my skin and be free,” bellows Rob Wright, and “I want to liberate this human machine”. All set to the most… well… metronomic accompaniment, and the persistent parent-like interjection: “Steady!”, concluding acidly that “… what attracts people to a steady beat is the certainty… of knowing what and who you are.” Music can indeed have a large impact on our beliefs and actions, as well as our feelings, but there seem few in Britain who remember this in 2006. While Placebo can hardly compete philosophically, this half-gay trio rock like rednecks – especially on the intriguingly-named ‘Allergic (to Thoughts of Mother Earth)’, which, under the relaxation of the inexpressible Third Rule, I feel obliged to include, for no reason other than they are unlikely ever to better it.

A little too young to appreciate Kate Bush when she first appeared in ’78, I was unable to escape her allure seven years later when Sounds mag commended Hounds of Love to me. I have loved many artists’ music over the years, but Kate’s alone made me fall in love with the artist herself. While her lyrics, like those of Alanis Morissette, would hardly win any poetry prizes, to this day even her silliest songs can make me cry: the sheer physical presence of her voice, in combination with the music, rarely fails to open the floodgates. With the recent Aerial album she was audibly pushing this uncanny talent to its limits, singing the first umpteen digits of pi and whatnot, and here, on ‘Mrs. Bartolozzi’ she pulls off a feat only Kate could: making a sexy song about laundry: “My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers.”

Part of the art of playlist-making is, by choice of position in the running order, to emphasise each song’s individuality as well as its connection to neighbouring songs, to the suite as a whole, to all of music. Having ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ suddenly sprung upon me when I’m all Bushed and vulnerable is one of those ‘Yes!’ moments I’ve been aiming for. Of course, every song on The Bends is a candidate for this but it matters that we haven’t just heard ‘Sulk’. Suddenly the song Thom Yorke has described as the one that first made Radiohead feel like a proper band has a new identity, not merely as the closing track from one of the world’s favourite albums, but as the fourth track on the second disk of a Chris Ovenden compilation!

But seriously, it is the impulse to recontextualise, to hear music afresh, that drives me. ‘Chinatown’, extracted from my very very own copy of Orange Rhyming Dictionary, continues the run of personal highs. Regular readers know how I feel about Jets to Brazil; while ‘Sea Anemone’ is probably their peak moment, another ballad wouldn’t work here – we need to pick up the bastard rock-out groove again for a while (this track delivers with a cool whiteout climax) and continue it in the shape of a recent track from Minus the Bear, possibly the finest Pop Rock band on the planet right now. Lyrically, ‘The Fix’ takes us back into the realm of carnal imperatives: “This [underwater sex] is the difference between living and not living.” If they’re right I’m wasting my time twice over writing about their thrilling slap-back echo riff and fake-retro guitar solo.

In not wholly unintentional answer, I selected ‘Peel Away Velleity’ by the austere June of ’44. Its thematic aptness (‘velleity’ means a superficial wish on which no effort is expended – gravestone material for me) and full-on Boat Dub in sixes and sevens slips down easily enough – though I had forgotten its extreme length and that, a third of the way in, just after the rhythm straightens out, it descends irreversibly into a wonderful amorphous sprawl of competing guitar and trumpet squeals worthy of Sonic Youth.

And here I really, really want to do collage. June of ‘44 have done me a big favour, introducing a note of drone into the proceedings, but the pacing is all wrong. Rather than ‘…Velleity’’s closing stasis I want a drone that passes through several moods. This is why I need playlist capabilities that include splitting and cross-fading. I will have to resort to using the computer to make a custom mix. Not sure what the ingredients will be exactly, but my collage will probably return to June of ‘44’s guitar skreel before cross-fading into the opening screech of The Beatles’ ‘It’s All Too Much’, the happy kaleidoscope that ends Yellow Submarine (and the second CD).

The Future in The Past

Similarly, a bit of cutup is called for at the start of the final disk. I meant to call up ‘Zoo Station’ by U2 but accidentally picked ‘Zooropa’ instead. Quite a happy accident, as the latter closes with an apt, uplifting, subtitle-worthy imperative (“Get your head out of the mud, baby!”) and has a brilliantly fizzing, chaotic intro. The problem is what happens in between. I appreciate what Bono is trying to do with his oxymoronic advertising slogans, but they merely flick ass, plodding when they should be pounding. Again, some wave-editor jiggery-pokery is required, to splice in substitute verses from ‘Zoo Station’.

‘Bam Thwok’, the Pixies’ comeback track, is here for purely political reasons. I have bought mp3s from the 4AD website before, but was delighted to grab this iTunes-only release, sans DRM, on the first day. Didn’t really listen to it then; turns out to be quite catchy. And I wasn’t thinking at all about my theory that Frank/Black/Francis was the Nineties’ answer to David Bowie when I popped ‘“Heroes”’ in here, only that it works. Similarly “How Soon Is Now?”, The Smiths’ legendary dancefloor-clearer, is an ultra-lazy choice that I really can’t justify at all; though it’s nicely at thematic odds with Bowie’s ironic self-inflation.

That was all warmup. Now we get to the most forward-looking part of the whole comp. ‘I Chill’ by Katie Lenlow is extracted from the otherwise failed Portishead mashup album, Dumb, subtly blending ‘Wandering Star’ with ‘I Will’ from Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief (yes, them again; did I break the Unbreakable Vow this time? Sosumi). Yep, mashup is a great way to get your head out of the mud, and we continue this mini-extravaganza of DJ whizzmanship with some ‘Independent Woman’-based fun. The playlist says ‘Independent Woman Inside’ (Destiny’s Child vs Stiltskin – provenance unGooglable), but in my head it cuts into ‘Independent Room’ (with Fugazi via Party Ben) after the first chorus. More Soundforge work for me, all because I can’t put two little markers into the playlist. And without pausing for breath we’re into ‘Wrapped Detective’ – one of Go Home Productions’ slyest moves, mixing as it does Elvis Costello, The Police, Bob Marley, Peggy Lee, The Hollies and Led Zeppelin into one seamless Reggae stomp; and, with one sadly impossible crash-edit, up an extra notch with a cut I call ‘Rude Sk8ter Boi’, a cheeky McSleazy mash of Avril Levigne and The Selecter. To a typical trainspotterish male music collector, this alluring new mashed-up era is problematic in its undefinitiveness. I don’t know where it’s all leading, and my inner Hornby is dithering over its filing system, but I’m certainly enjoying the uncertainty.

As we’re already dancing round our intellects, a bit more high-speed sample madness won’t hurt, and Japanese acoustics’n’turntable trio ICU manage to tickle both my funny bone and my feet; and one upright bass always leads to another, putting Soul Coughing in the frame. I’m not allowed their killer track ‘Screenwriter’s Blues’ as it graces another of my fine creations, but ‘St Louise is Listening’ from their final El Oso LP comes close in throbbing menace. Though I never intended a Silencer/Lizard-era nostalgiafest, it is somehow fitting to wind things down like this. ‘Poolhouse Blue’ sounded magnificent the day in 1995 when I saw 18th Dye at the Piao! Club in Camden, and still lifts the heart now. And we were all glad that Gary Wiiija persuaded us to book Cornershop for our Christmas party extravaganza – they played a wired set of heaving, subcontinental ambience, of which ‘Jullandar Shere’ is unfortunately the only track to emerge in recorded form. (Please, please correct me on this.)

Continuing the wind-down vibe (about 1bpm slower) is The Beta Band’s showstopper ‘Dry The Rain’, which picks up the almost-forgotten lyrical theme. “If there’s something inside that you wanna say/ Say it out loud it’ll be okay” is a message appropriate to every Brit (though it must puzzle Americans and Italians). Six minutes of sighing trumpets would be enough to bring many a suite to its end, but I needed more. Or so I discovered when a jaunty track by The Shins happened to pop up unbidden at the end of the playlist. I’d never heard ‘New Slang’ before but not only is it an upbeat rejoinder to Steve Mason’s deadpan moroseness, but a happy reminder that there are still new things worth hearing.

Conclusions

It’s a complicated, ad lib and often whimsical business this compilation malarkey. If it is to have any chance of rocking our world, a playlist engine will need to be able to follow these maxims:

Location, location, location: at every level music has to have shape. Popular music is often accused, with some justification, of not operating at enough levels. Yes, most Pop often fails in he details of each introduction, coda, middle eight, break, refrain, etc; but we can give it fractal structure at playlist level. DJs have long understood how to shape the dynamic of a set of pieces of music, using each like building blocks. Without shape, our MP3 utopia resembles the old Soviet Union: the repressive law of the album broken, but nothing with which to replace it.

Pivot on this: however capricious the next choice, like good paragraph construction there needs to be an underlying link between adjoining tracks. It could be a puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a joke, or it could just be that the two songs work really well together.

Folksonomised by presumption: genre terms are bad at the best of times. Only a tag cloud can do justice to the music’s many-faces, and del.icio.us-like social tagging would open the window still wider. Can we have an easy-peasy web interface for this, or do I have to make it myself?

Fade out again? Surprisingly much depends on how well you make ends meet. I want my database to remember the moment of the first and last waveform peak for those auto-generated pin-sharp crossfades and beat pivots.

User rating is overrated: picking favourites is great if you’re content to listen to your personal top twenty endlessly recycled, otherwise a track’s user rating should mainly be invoked negatively, as an overkill avoidance tactic, weighting towards the middle of the bell curve. The only exception I can think of is as a check when dipping areas where the failure rate is disturbingly high, such as mashups and cover versions.

Break the rules when appropriate: ok Hard AI crowd, what’s the algorithm for that?

And for those who will insist on building them by hand, could manufacturers please include in their next firmware upgrade:

Named markers, for insane cutups and well-timed crash-edits.

User-specified crossfades – using the above markers, natch.

Proper, decent, useful TAGGING!!

Oh, and on-player tag editing. Why waste precious family time editing my metadata, when I could do it on the bus?

I will soon be making Another Ten Years available in a downloadable form.

A Saucerful of Bolton

2006-06-09T08:11:00.000+01:00

Where But For Playlists Would I? (part one)

(Yawn) Of course Microsoft had to get a music service. Dunno about you, but every time I hear about a new music subscription/download service with x million songs I get a mental image of a million-strong army of singers who look and sound exactly like Michael Bolton. I know these sites actually offer a sizeable chunk of music I love, but I can’t help myself; it’s such an inhuman thing to say to someone: “here, have a million songs”.

How times change. Remember the CD player? With only fifteen tracks or so at one’s disposal what kind of a geek would you have to be to program it to play songs in a particular order? Shuffle mode was almost always good enough for a quick mix. But – in the Boltonverse, as in the real world of CD rips and p2p – the prime importance of playlists has yet to be appreciated. In iTunes they’re almost an afterthought, while although million-Bolton-army subscription services usually offer a way to tailor your listening according to previously-noted likes and dislikes, none provide an actual journey through your personal soundworld the way a mix tape can.

I have been making compilation tapes and, later, CDs for myself and friends since I first got my hands on a tape recorder. Re-ordering, re-contextualizing songs I’m familiar with and music I’m still getting to know, and keeping these in a permanent form – or packaging them up as a postcard from my musical travelogue – has been a way for me to mark my passage through the fascinating, challenging, moving and ever-changing world of brain-stimulation-thru-soundwave. Rediscovering them later takes me straight back to that time.

Cassettes were easy (provided you had all day with nothing better to do). As long as you could connect your tape deck to your source – be it record player, CD, another tape deck, video even – you were away. It was pretty clear what you could and couldn’t do, though finessing your edits required a bit of practise. And as with everything in the pre-MP3 era, the fruit of your labours was an actual thing you could hold in your hand and lose at parties! (In another ten years music-as-artefact will probably seem strange to us: music will have reverted to its naturally ineffable state.)

I don’t look back so fondly on the CD-comp-making-process. Too many choices that have little to do with the actual work of building a playlist, like which software to use. I ended up using video editing software quite a lot, because the audio tools are so basic. As long as it could cut a track into pieces, I could work with it. One thing I do like about CDs is the effortlessness of making perfect (or tweaked) copies for different friends. When MP3 dawned (for me, around 2000) I started using MusicMatch Jukebox for instant playlist comps, and this was the quickest, easiest, and having-a-life-outside-comp-making-est process so far. There was a major downside was that, having no physical existence, many of these have been lost with changing computers, etc.

Now that I can leave the house with most of my unfeasibly large record collection in my pocket, the business of playlist-making has become more casual and sporadic, yet the need for it is greater than ever. I may not quite have a million songs in my jukebox, but on the plus side no poodlecut crooners are going to assault my ears, even in shuffle mode (although my player does seems to have an unstatistical predilection for Foo Fighters).

Which brings us to the nub of my complaint: can we really do no better than random? My player says to me: “Hey! I’ll be your DJ. Select the tracks you like, then I’ll play them back. No particular order, OK?” Call that a musical journey? Even radio DJs have been known to pay attention to running order occasionally, in between novelty items, and for every other kind of DJ it’s their bread and butter. “I’m afraid Paul Oakenfold can’t be with us tonight, but he’s sent his iPod along and told us to play it in shuffle mode.” Doesn’t happen. Playlists need to have shape and timing and cunning and wit and juxtaposition and yes!-moments. That’s before we get into the possibility of cutting up or overlapping tunes. It’s not rocket science, but it is an art.

Y’all know I don’t believe computers have an ounce of creativity in them, but we could perhaps bake a little humanity into a future playlist engine by get tagging right. Alongside the ubiquitous Artist, Album and Title fields, MP3s and other audio files can store information such as Tempo, Preference, Mood and Genre, though currently they’re not much use, as they either don’t get filled in or people can’t agree on what they mean. What genre, for example, should we assign to ‘I Might Be Wrong’ by Radiohead? ‘Pop’, ‘Rock’, ‘Techno’, ‘Experimental’, or something else? (My copy is rather misleadingly tagged ‘Ambient’.) Clearly one tag alone cannot capture the many-facetedness of even a single recording. But if we associated a whole cloud of tags – genre terms, mood indicators – a del.icio.us-like folksonomy like could provide our playlist engine with the raw materials, both averaged and specific, on which people-made playlists like the ones at tinymixtapes are based.

A typical journey might start with a couple of ‘beginning-y’ tracks (by picking two opening tracks - one quiet , one loud, say - from different albums, which could be as diverse as you like), then perhaps proceed by matching two random genre tags on successive songs. Half a dozen songs in, a sudden change of direction could be effected by basing the next change on something rather non-musical such as year, or a word common to both titles. I’d also like my database to register whether tracks fade in or not – don’t want to cross-fade when we can jump-cut. The system could have a simple scripting language to describe the kinds of changes that are allowed at each point, how much to randomize, and when. The end of the script would describe the kind of closing tracks required, and how to get there. If you can think of it, we’ll make the engine do it. I have some ideas about how this could be done, but I’m going to defer that to my next post. I’m still fuzzy on the details, and very open to suggestions. Write to me if you want to discuss it – my gmail address is the obvious one – or catch me on the pho list.

We are only just beginning our journey into networked music. Already you can have Pandora piped wirelessly around your house; it surely won’t be long before we have handheld, pay-through-the-nose access to the Boltonverse of songs; and not very far behind that will be the fabled and (by some) dreaded Big Black Box – a portable device with enough capacity for the entirety of recorded music, or at least a Boltonfull or two. (How do I know it will be black? Because white is already looking tawdry, and black is always cool.) By then we will hopefully have realised just how ridiculous is the squabbling between Creative and Apple over whose idea the most basic, unhelpful, just-about-works music navigation system actually was. Meantime, who’s going to be the first to make a player that actually enhances, rather than obfuscates, our enjoyment of music?

Fin de Tout?

2006-06-08T12:59:00.000+01:00

I just read the Introduction to Ian MacDonald's famed Beatles analysis, Revolution In The Head. There seems little point going on to read the track-by-track analyses, not being a Beatles aficionado, but the Intro puts forward a superb theory I haven't encountered before and which, in our decadence, we might be justified in trying to ignore: that the Sixties, far from being the beginning of a new age, was in fact the last attempt to preserve some sort of sense in a post-religious world of an eternal, carnal present. You really have to read it.

Anyhow, in this Register piece Andrew Orlowski is clearly thinking along similar lines. Mashups of the cultural and more particularly technological kind have, he contentds, led us to a postmodern nomansland strangely redolent of Futurism, Vorticism and all that far-sighted early 20th Century braggadocio. Blogs pointless asides to the real business of Googling.

Well, PAFF! to that. If we do live in an eternal, amoral present, bereft of context and meaning, that doesn't mean we will never make sense of anything ever again. If one is drowning, does that mean that dry land no longer exists? Has never existed? Of course, Mr MacDonald, the transition to a wholly scientific worldview was always going to be painful; and if anything the psychological challenges of the always-on, connected world are even greater. Not every blog offers profound insight, not every mashup a revelation into the relationship between genre, musical structure and the power of marketing. But this is democracy in action. If we are going to make the most of the speck-like nature of our societal role, maybe we need to learn to clam up more, but conversely to make every action - every blog post, every mp3 distibuted - really worth it.

Blogged with Flock

For Those About to Music Hall...

2006-05-03T00:47:00.000+01:00

The thought of the Arctic Monkeys' world tour fills me with embarrassment. For me, for them, for all concerned. It’s not the ‘cute’ Sheffield accents, the possible miscommunication (the meaning of “mardy” is pretty clear from context), or the band members’ blotchy appearance. It certainly isn't, as the Guardian so eagerly reported, their showbiz standoffishness (translation: this band are for real, man). It’s just that, once again, Britain is confirmed as a place where people no longer believe in the power of music.

Critics have been kind to the Arctic Monkeys so far. They’re emissaries, after all, of the world of Internet Music; beyond reproach as the People’s Choice. If this image of them is right, their manipulation of MySpace more than a clever way to pitch at a confused and scared trad media, then their success is a sad vindication of Big Label marketing techniques. From The Killers to Franz Ferdinand to the Kaiser Chiefs, Britain's star makers were selling us the right thing all along: pithy guitar pop with wry anecdotal lyrics. George Formby with a little Fender Tele in his hand.

This stuff can be entertaining, no doubt about it, but it has little to do with the primal power of music, sound's ability to grab your emotions by the scruff of the neck and shake your soul. For the stars of the new Music Hall, electric guitars and drums are mere backdrop for the all-important lyrics; the icing under the cake. But here in Britain we haven't believed in the Rock And Roll Dream for a long time.

Looking back at the most popular instrument-based music, at Indie entryism's success stories, there has been a steady decline in emphasis on the actual music, the noises made by those band members who didn't have our immediate attention. Take Pulp, for instance. Try to imagine them without Jarvis Cocker at the front in a diamonded tank top, with a twinkle in his eye, husking about the grimness of poverty, childhood in the Seventies and the North. What's left? A few organ riffs Abba would have discarded for being too twee. But this passed critical inspection in the UK with nary a murmur. The present course was already set.

Another example might be Oasis, the powerhouse of British Rock (they'd like to think). We should have known that all was not well right back when 'Shakermaker' was released in '94. If you've lost track of their bombastic maunderings in the intervening decade or so, this was he one that repositioned The New Seekers' Coke Ad song "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing"' as the cheeky leading edge of Britpop, name checking in its title a plaster moulding toy from – well it had to be – the Seventies.

The problem is that a real precedent has been set, now, and the downward spiral into chirpy non-musicality seems set to continue, under the unchallenged supremacy of 'Britpop'. The Smiths were never like this. In fact, three or four decades ago British Rock used to lead the world, achieving a high degree of popular success without compromising its power (much). From Pink Floyd's sad reflections to the explosive power of the Sex Pistols, I grew up to expect to be moved by what I heard. Rattled.The acts being fêted now need to revisit their Beatles albums and notice what's been lost. Even before they dabbled in the avant-garde, Lennon & McCartney threw in enough songwriting curveballs to keep the listener agog, with askew melodies from Georges Martin and Harrison wrenching heartstrings in directions of their own, not mere adjuncts to the singing.

It is only by comparison with 'mainstream' 'serious' British Rock, led by such miserable second-raters as Coldplay and Keane, that this stuff stands any chance. Even the dance scene, which I have despised for most of my life, is healthier. Recently DJs have found a purpose beyond mere hedonistic escapism and, advertently or otherwise, given both Rock and R'n'B a new lease of collective life. I almost feel nostalgic for the Stone flippin' Roses, for heaven's sake. There are still many avenues to pursue: from live mashup (anyone doing this?) to the maverick rockscapes of true artists like PJ Harvey and Radiohead, with innumerable half-bred forms and electronic oddities in between. Post-Rock is more promising even in hibernation than a hundred Arctic Monkeys sipping Piña Coladas in Hawaii. I happened to catch Smokers Die Younger (also from Sheffield, as it happens) at a recent London show, and their punk rock is a match for thee rusted satellites', even on a grey midweek evening in the grim West End. They can't be a one-off.

Maybe I should treasure our complacent, degenerated circumstances; salute the cumulative erosion of the word "indie". For here – in the shadow of those mighty stone tablets on which are carved the words "I bet that you look good on the dancefloor/ Dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984" – the seed of an actual rebellion, a return to music, may even now be starting to grow.

Changing Morality

2006-04-27T04:08:00.000+01:00

Thanks to a Ms Rosenberg I now have another reason to doubt the morality of buying a CD – it's wasteful of the Earth's resources – although for me the most compelling one is continuing to support an unfair, moribund and in many ways actually evil system of supposed artist support.

Talk of morality seems to be in the air nowadays, though. But, short of turning to elliptical ancient texts, how are we to truly tell moral from evil? It will be interesting to see what happens in the almost-too-good-to-be-true class action by CD consumers against the major record labels – which claims in essence that they failed in their moral duty to embrace digital outlets such as Napster, instead using their financial and political power against them. We all know that this is indeed what happened, but it's unclear what the long-term consequences would be if the court found in favour of the complainants (that's us). Should an organization be punished for protecting its interests?

In the current vacuum it's understandable that some people are looking to the law for moral guidance. After all, don't politicians see themselves creating laws to rid the world of immoral behaviour (at least to the extent that they are able to kid themselves that this is such laws' real effect)? What other justification could there be for, for example, banning a drug that millions enjoy? But most of us realise that this isn't the whole picture, once backhanders and lobbyists come into play, and that even with the purest of hearts you can't use the might of the police force and prison service to hammer out a more moral world.

So much precedent has been built up, now, that any compainant can probably find something on which to hang their case, whatever it may be; so that Judges have practically a free hand to decide who's right on a given issue, with case law as their guide. Maybe we should ditch laws altogether, and resolve all disputes by jury, with no-blame restitution rather than punishment as the outcome.

We're quite clearly lost, morally: most people in the UK, and I gather many in the US, are still fairly comfortable being led by a man who demonstrably lied – not about his personal business, as is usually the case, but about a decision which cost thousands of lives.

How can a person, a people, become morally lost? Should we blame previous generations for not teaching wrong from right? As far as I know, they tried. But, as the simple CD purchase example shows us, morality is not a fixed thing; or at least its practical implementation is not fixed. We are doing our best, but the goalposts are always moving.

Then there is context to consider: by whom should I do right? This is how Blair and Bush get away with slaughtering Iraqis, by choosing a context that suits. Summon up a supposed threat to your own country, or – better – to democracy itself, and we now appear to be in a framework where 'a few' 'regrettable' 'foreign' 'casualties' seems at the very least like the lesser of two evils.

Maybe a step back will resolve the blurry line between… um, I'm not even sure what the polar opposite of moral is… let's say moral and misguided. I would like to propose a few axioms that might help focus things a little:

We Are One.

From now on, those by whom I should 'do right' is the entire human population of the Earth. It is no longer acceptable for us to divide ourselves into ghettoes, enclaves, quarters, countries, continents; it is not acceptable to divide us by physical factors (gender, race, sexual orientation, body type); by religion, background, cultural preference, political belief. To act morally, in this age of increased communication and interdependence, is to act with the awareness that we are one people.*

Acceptance.

To 'do right' is to act without judgement of others. We all know that making mistakes is part of what makes us human. More than that, it is a necessary part of learning; and one of the most important things we all have in common is our flexibility, our ability to adapt. So if I am to act morally I may not deplore, disparage, cast aspersions upon, deride, dismiss or belittle my fellow humans. I must accept their absolute right to be wrong, and treasure my own. And I must acknowledge that I can never be certain when I am right. A corolloary of this is Forgiveness. If I accept that people may make mistakes, I have to accept that sometimes they will do wrong by me. To forgive is to free both parties from guilt associated with past actions, to enable vital learning to take place. This also includes forgiving myself when I fail to act morally.

Knowledge is value-neutral.

We have an enormous capacity for discovery, a curiosity which has taken us from Pythagoras' Theorem to nuclear physics, from dog breeding to the structure of DNA. To act morally is to seek facts, regardless of their implications, and in the fullest knowledge available to us. It is not acceptable to suppress any fact or line of enquiry, although conversely it is out moral duty to stand up and argue against falsehood masquerading as truth, against malicious propganda, against pseudoscience. Beliefs are temporary conveniences, not absolutes, and to hold on dogmatically to an untenable theory is a very unhealthy state to be in. I must bear in mind, though, that I and others will at various times do just this, and respect is mandated for those with whom I disagree.

Groups are not people.

It perhaps seems odd to have to say this, but we often treat them as if they are. Groups of people are powerful things, and their founding principles have a tendency to run away with the people involved and outlive their usefulness; a self-preservation instinct which sometimes runs counter to the needs of everyone. While harming a fellow human on purpose is unlikely to prove a sound action, attempting to destroy an institution may become a moral imperative (while of course maintaining a moral attitude towards the actual humans involved). Not an easy task, to put it mildly. No wonder we often lose our moral compass when engaged in political battles.

Trust.

The most important axiom of all, though I almost didn’t include it. It has become very hard to trust unconditionally, and I'm inclined to think of this as a goal rather than an imperative. If I trust no-one, I am truly alone. Conversely, if we can each find a way to trust every single person on this planet, then we truly will be as one. I do not accept the cliché that trust has to be earned. We may choose to give our trust freely, and expect to receive the same in return. A trusting action is always a moral one, though currently the inverse may not be so. We are only just becoming fully aware of ourselves as part of the most gigantic extended family conceivable. With the arrival of the world wide web, we need never be alone, but the magintude of the family, its diversity, may be overwhelming. If you can't manage trust, go with acceptance.

(Some might wish to include animals in axiom 1, but I beg to differ. At the present juncture it seems to me the priority is to get people thinking in a pro-people way. Consideration towards other beings on our planet is of course important, and recent research has shown us that we're perhaps closer to some animals than we thought we were. Indeed it is possible that some other species may be on the verge of an evolutionary leap not dissimilar to the one which first singled out humans as thinking, communicating, social creatures. We are certainly fortunate that our ancestors had the opportunity to make mistakes and still survive, a luxury not afforded many animals. In time we may well have to adjust or discard these axioms – that is the nature of the changing moral map. But right now, whether we like it or not, we are in charge.)

This is all starting to seem a bit abstract, so a concrete example is probably in order. Consider Google's recent decision to submit to Chinese government censorship. This action has been widely deplored, so the first thing to do is notice that, in accordance with the acceptance axiom, we mustn't judge the humans behind this decsion. (While our moral structure compels us to act in the knowledge that we are all one human race, it allows us to take any position we choose in relation to the non-human entity called Google, which clearly is not the same thing as the people who comprise it.)

It has been widely assumed that the decision to set up google.cn was a business decision based on a desire to enter the large and underdeveloped Chinese market, with a justification that – as a company based in a Western democracy – Google is well placed to introduce a less censorious atmosphere in China. If these assumptions are true, did Google's leaders 'do right' by the people of China, by the people of their native America, by the people of the world?

Let's try to put ourselves in the position of those responsible for this policy – presumably Larry Page and Sergey Brin – and consider the axioms. I see no grounds to argue on the basis of Acceptance: China's leaders, for reasons of their own, probably having to do with fear, have seen fit to build the Great Firewall of China, to filter what they see as subversive content; and Google has acknowleged this, while maintaining an anti-censorship position towards the rest of the world.

However, it seems that Page and Brin have fallen woefully short on axioms 1 and 3: they have divided the world into those with full access to the web, and those without, or at least collaborated in this division. All the while Google stood outside the Great Firewall, the lopsided treatment of Chinese citizens was not its responsibility. By entering the ring of fire, it – and more importantly the people of Google – have become party to censorship, which is a clear violation of 3, the knowledge axiom.

How might we approach the purported 'good influence' that Google intends to have on the Chinese authorities? Apparently censored pages will be indicated as such, which will probably make Chinese citizens more aware of their government's interference that they are already. But is this enough? Having already broken two fundamental axioms along the way, key principles of kinship with fellow humans, it's hard to see how the folk behind Google can live with themselves. But perhaps we could still see in a moral light their actions if we knew they had a clear strategy to break down the knowledge division between China and the rest of the world. Without inside knowledge we can go no further, but this will usually be the way with moral questions. Because of axiom 2, each human must ultimately be their own moral arbiter. The principles may be fixed, but their interpretation is up to you. Google itself is a nonhuman, nonsentient entity, so inherently amoral. Only Google insiders can decide if they are acting morally or not. The rest of us may harbour suspicions, we may continue to challenge them, we may organize boycotts and demonstrations, we may build darknets to increase China's access to information, but we may not stand in judgement on Google people. We may not attack them in the street, taunt their children or firebomb their homes.

These axioms are not easy to follow. I am liable to be criticised heavily by people who know me, on the grounds that I regularly break them myself. My transgressions, though, are precisely why I felt the need to write this. I want to live more morally, more in tune with my fellow people. I want to do good. And I so desperately need help in finding true moral North. The axioms weren't so hard to write: I knew them all along, in fact, as I suspect most people do. Morality may be constantly shifting, but not so quickly I think that principles like these are of no use.

Neither do I believe that we can pick and choose the ones we like. Being a fallible human I have almost certainly missed something, perhaps an important touchstone that's just a little too uncomfortable, and as any good netizen should, I invite and welcome amendments, additions, comments and criticism.

An Unnerving Calm

2006-03-24T12:35:00.000Z

In Gut's House by Ut (1987)

If five stars seems excessive for an album of squeaks, yelps and scrapes, then consider this: beauty is not a well-defined concept. To ask someone, "Isn’t that beautiful?" is to invite them into a shared viewpoint, one they might not have previously considered. Yes, that person is not conventionally good-looking, yet there is something intensely moving about how he holds himself; a fragility which fascinates the viewer, and which his portrait has somehow captured. If you'll allow that feeling in. Many don’t, and who can blame them? Fear is a scary thing.

I loved the idea of Ut - three noisy women who swapped instruments and argued on stage - before I ever heard them play a note, but I had to learn to love them for real once I got over the disappointment of their not being as I'd imagined. Not all that noisy, actually. Not in a crushing, masculine way, at any rate. And not a Throwing Muses precursor, either, except perhaps in their best-known, misleading song, "Evangelist", which opens In Gut's House. Get the skew-pop over early, girls, then on with the show.

It's almost impossible to describe what you will find when you do allow yourself to enter these kaleidoscopic corridors, these labyrinths of unease. It is fairly easy to point to the New York No-Wave scene of the early 80s as the garden from which these fracturing sounds sprang; we can look at the freedom of rhythmic invention those times allowed, when every sub-beat was not micro-timed and synchronized, when pop's permitted patterns were yet to be fully described in terms of the histories of two monoliths called "Rock" and "Dance"; we might point to their deliberate relocation in the early 80s from the disco-bound US to an England which still permitted the perverse likes of The Fall to persist; we could try to describe Jacqui Ham's forlorn scat in terms of freed female contemporaries such as Gina Birch (The Raincoats) or Ari Up (The Slits); we could mention a subsequent lineage perhaps taking in Babes in Toyland, PJ Harvey, Huggy Bear, Coping Saw and Katastrophy Wife. These things get us somewhere close to what Ut sound like before our moment of surrender, but they are just circumstances. Every truly great band transcends their medium, and, like fellow No-Wave refugees and labelmates Sonic Youth, Ut were - ultimately, completely, indelibly – themselves.

Ut is an invitation to do nothing less than re-hear music itself. Where noiseniks like Glenn Branca and Michael Gira embraced nihilism, Ut's art is closer to avant-gardists like Stockhausen and Cage who pointed towards the Zen stillness at the heart of life, while celebrating its chaos. The world according to Ham, Canal and Young is undeniably a restless place – witness 'ID''s jagged drums, the darting vocal and harmonica stabs on 'Mosquito Botticelli', guitar gravel scattered all over 'Swallow'. But over and above this there is an unnerving calm. Like one of the moving cities in Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines saga, every song is an awe-striking leviathan, slow to wake but unstoppable in its crocodilian movements, accompanied by the rattling of Handre-teeth. The album reaches its stumbling peak on side three of what was originally packaged as a double twelve-inch: 'Homebled' is all rickety violin and soft guitar clawings under a plangent Ham monologue, while 'Shut Fog' is catacomb-dark and arachnophobic; both songs oozing such sweet, sweet resignation all that can be done is to hold on for life itself. The album ends, surprisingly perhaps, with a sunrise – 'Landscape''s interpenetrating ice-planes suddenly meltwater under a sustaining yellow crayon guitar sun.

While they went on to produce a more muscularly powerful record, Griller, which scored more points with the hip-watchers, it is In Gut's House – in all its sullen, cracked beauty – that will still be there a thousand years from now.

I happened to notice this album had no review on Amazon, and resolved to put that right. The next day I ran into Sally Young and Jacqui Ham in the street outside where I work. Coincidence? The piece I wrote for Amazon was far too long, so here's the whole thing.

2006-03-21T17:52:00.000Z

Kit in the sun

Guilt-Edged Stock

2006-03-11T17:59:00.000Z

I don’t often buy things from online shops, but a couple of days ago I had the urge to track down a CD copy of an album I've been enjoying for several years on MP3. I never expected there to be any guilt associated with this, but sometimes these things hit you sidelong.

Jets To Brazil were a band I completely missed when they were alive and kicking butt – never even heard of them. But, during my WinMX days, cruising endlessly for new thrills, I happened to download a couple of random tunes of theirs alongside dozens of other bands I'd never heard of. So "Starry Configurations" and "I Typed For Miles" ended up on the CD-R equivalent of a mix tape (you can easily get a hundred songs onto a CD; an MP3-capable CD Walkman makes a pretty good low-budget jukebox). After a few days or possibly even months of random play, I started to notice how those two tracks stood out. "I Typed For Miles", particularly, is a doozy: In a Naked Lunch/Shining-type scenario the poor bastard protagonist has holed himself up in a hotel room, labouring under the belief that "I must keep writing if I'm to be better than everyone else", his ankles wired to the table legs so that literally all he can do is type. It seethes with barely suppressed rage ("They're playing love songs on your radio tonight/ I don’t get those songs on mine"), and rocks like a horse.

So of course I downloaded the rest of the album – Orange Rhyming Dictionary – and found I'd unearthed not a lost or forgotten treasure, but a treasure I hadn’t even suspected existed: a subtle, supple, but almost completely straightforward Rock album bent out of shape by devlishly clever lyrics. The songs mainly touched on subjects close to my heart, other than prose-related self-validation of course: repression, revolution and failed relationships ("Take my name off of the lease/ You can even keep the name/ It never suited me" – 'Sea Anemone'). The closest comparisons I can offer are the first Bear album, Disneytime, and Radiohead's The Bends (another record I failed to check out til later – I spent most of 1995 wondering whether I really liked Caspar Brötzmann or not). If it sounds like I'm selling it to you, you're right. It has to do with the guilt.

It struck me this morning on my way to work. Ordering that CD was totally selfish of me. While I get the benefit of slightly improved sound quality (especially the opening track, which I never could find at a decent bitrate), and being able to look at the artwork, quote lyrics without having to Google them, and most importantly of all file it under 'J' in my collection, the band will get practically, or more likely absolutely, nothing. (I don’t mean to single out Jade Tree, the Jets' label, particularly; it's just the way the system works. The people who didn’t pay me for records I made were nice guys, too.)

There is no guilt in enjoying music you haven’t paid for, or none that I've experienced. I like Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" although I've never even downloaded it, let alone bought it; it's a famous song, it gets sprung at you often enough in shops or on the radio, what would be the point in paying for it? Just enjoy it and move on.

But now I know that there is indeed guilt, tons of it, in buying music by bands you really love. What if Blake Schwarzenbach, who wrote all those songs I adore, is down on his luck somewhere, struggling to make ends meet, or just trying to finance his next project? What if he's right now having to choose which of his children gets to go to college? Or which he'll have to give up for adoption? The tenner I gave to some Amazon wannabes could have gone straight to him. It might have made all the difference. Instead, I blew it on my own vanity, on wanting to have a plastic disk in my hand for a couple of minutes before I put it on a shelf. There'll be no smug satisfaction in doing that, now. I feel a fool.

I'm sorry, Blake. I will track you down and next time I have some spare money it's going straight into your Paypal account. For now, the best I can offer is to make a really superb rip of that CD when it arrives, and put it somewhere for all to hear.

This article appeared under a different title on p2pnet

Top Totty

2006-03-03T23:14:00.000Z

(Why is it okay to rent people?)

Anyone who thinks that strip clubs are nothing to be embarrassed about should be obliged to drop into their next ten conversations the title of this piece, which is the name of a table dancing club in Brighton. Aside from its demeaning vibe, who actually uses the word "totty"? The only person I can think of is Tim Nice-But-Dim, the hapless Harry Enfield toff. And isn't that precisely the point? The sex industry flatters its customers, or at least it imagines that's what it's doing, by trying to associate itself with Aristocracy. High Society, Mayfair, the phrase "Gentleman's Club"... anywhere a woman has her tits out you'll find some grubby bloke trying to pass it off as Lord Lichfield.

I have started to wonder what genuine Aristocrats think of this. How do residents of Mayfair feel about the eponymous mag? As embarrassed as I would if there were a porn mag called Bakers' Bottoms? Possibly not. To the bourgeoisie, getting people to do whatever you want them to by flinging a bit of wonga at them is the principle around which the world revolves. It is no less absurd to get into someone's panties through a bit of casual wad-waving than it is to offer them a living in exchange for driving your car, managing your investment portfolio, or sitting behind the till in one of your supermarkets. Let's face it, these people invented exploitation in the name of freedom – although, even as I write the ‘e’ word, which makes me feel like a ranting lunatic just committing it to silicon, I wonder what it means exactly. Is it only exploitation if you’re doing something other people disapprove of? Or something you wouldn’t otherwise be doing? Or is it exploitation whenever somebody else is creaming off the value of your work, even if you’re having the time of your life?

We all know that owning people is wrong, and there are laws against it. So why is renting people okay?

I suppose because it's hard to imagine what a world would be like without it. Money has its own inexorable logic, as we know; reducing to an act of exchange every human activity, from food production to sex to art. It dehumanises us all, but we seem stuck with it. The only alternative that ever seems to get offered is a return to barter, which is going backwards in a rocket. Barter may seem harmless and Earth-loving, cutting out all the financial bullshit, but there is a good reason why money was invented in the first place, and which won’t go away: its generality. I can only barter with you if we both have a commodity* the other wants. With money, the exchange becomes transferable - so while I might not have something you want, the money I pay you can be swapped with someone who does. And even barter has a whiff of "I'm renting you" about it: "Hungry Nude Girls! Hot lapdance for a hot meal!" So there really can be no going back.

What the hell do we do?

I would strongly argue that, left to our own devices, we mainly do the things we love to do. Anyone who has ever worked for the love of it knows what that feels like: not a burden, not a chore, but a thrill. Something other than work, in fact. This feeling lies behind the urge to play in bands, upload movies to newsgroups, write blogs, develop open source software, do other people’s washing up, encourage children, make fanfic, invent gecko-boots, edit fanzines, help the aged, .... All the things that make life meaningful, in fact. Without money, think of all the bankers, stockbrokers, cashiers, tax inspectors and accountants free to fly kites, make Firefox extensions, become pirate DJs, customize cars, write plays,...

I have heard it said by some imaginative but misguided thinkers that money is love incarnate. I couldn’t agree less. If I had to sum up the spiritual meaning of money in one word it would be “distrust“. Being paid is demeaning. Remuneration is a daily reminder of the lack of trust, the threat, upon which Capitalist society is founded – do what I want or starve! – an unequal exchange we're brought up to see as equal. Only by freely giving our talents, with love in our hearts, would we truly earn the fruits of our fellow beings’ labours.

To me most of what I’ve written here is obvious. We all know that work feels uncomfortable compared to giving. We know – unless of course we’re one of those oblivious residents of Centerfoldville, who already feel the world’s bounty is theirs for the taking – the horrible gut-twist of financial compulsion in some aspects (if we’re lucky), or all (if we're not), of our lives. The fear of losing your job; of not being able to pay the rent. Yep, that's right: the girl gyrating on your table really does want you to like her body, ‘cause – like everyone you know – she's worried about being thrown out of her house onto the street. Does that turn you on?

Perhaps it's even obvious that we can’t go on like this, that barter is an impossible backward step, and that sharing the value of the work each person loves to do would not only lift the horrid spiritual millstone of wage-slavery but actually function well as a social structure. Perhaps. But what is far from obvious is how the hell we get from here to there.

I don’t want to fall into despair over this, because amid what can look like a downward spiral into miserable selfishness some positive things are happening. The Freecycle movement, for example, is a healthy alternative to eBaying all your unwanted stuff. And, in Brighton at least, we have the beginnings of a sane car policy where you can sign up for a community car, to use when you need. The prospect of an end to all those unused cars clogging up the street injects a little happiness into my step whenever I pass one. And need I mention filesharing?

These developments are quite encouraging, but I don't want us to sleepwalk into the future. This is rebel stuff, albeit in a low key, slackerish way. Let's read up on Communism, Anarchism, the past's failed attempts to "imagine all the people, sharing all the world". And do it right this time.

*Of course work is a commodity too.

Tangled Thinking

2006-02-17T13:41:00.000Z

It comes as no surprise to me to learn that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than the conscious. It has been my belief for a while now that our brains make use of quantum effects, and this piece of research fits right in with that.

We know that quantum objects can become 'entangled' for extended periods of time, which essentially means that the concrete outcome of their interaction is delayed until some macroscopic 'measurement' is made. (If this sounds vague, that'll be because it is. These effects are well known, but as yet have no proper theory to explain them.)

To me, some types of thinking, especially the unconscious, feel a lot like that. We all know the experience of waking in the morning with the answer to yesterday's unsolved crossword clue there in our minds. This research has confirmed experimentally that it really does pay to "sleep on it".

It seems our brains have two distinct modes: one which functions somewhat - possibly exactly - like a very complex computer program, following logical pathways; and a more mysterious one which is responsible for more creative thinking. It has already been shown (by Gödel in 1931) that human brains are smarter than algorithms, since we can perceive true statements which would bamboozle a computer - although the Strong AI crowd would like to pretend this isn't so. I can't help feeling that the difference has something to do with quantum entanglement, and its ability to hold contradictory states in tandem for extended periods, before "collapsing the wave function".

Maybe one day they'll make a true Quantum Computer, which can actually emulate these effects. Until then, I fear we're going to be stuck with plastic pals who are about as much fun to be with as Word's dancing paperclip.

It's All Mixed Up

2006-02-13T08:52:00.000Z

(the complex joy of mashups)

It's fitting that, on the mashtastic album American Edit, Dean Gray (Party Ben and Team 9) chose to include a tribute to the KLF. An unlikely collision of the Glitter Band's "Rock 'n' Roll" with the Doctor Who theme made "Doctorin' The Tardis" a mashup in all but name: it had the power to startle, the merry absurdity, kitsch factor, lawsuits, everything. And it was a hit single! In these ultra-litigious times, when a gratis recording is banned* for infringing the copyright of supposed punks, it's unlikely we'll see "Doctor Who on Holiday" (which, naturally has Green Day thrown in — a mashup of mashups) or American Edit's standout, "Boulevard of Broken Songs", on Top of the Pops. I mean, good luck to Go Home Productions, whose sublime "Rapture Riders" has been sanctioned for release by both Blondie and the Doors, but given the industry's unillustrious history of co-option I think I'd prefer it if mashups remain underground and illegal.

For Mashup is the most optimistic art form of our age; the first hopeful thing to appear in music in a long, turgid while. Simultaneously nostalgic and adventurous, it exposes for ridicule pop's ugly guts while celebrating its gustiness, its jouissance. Who knew that Beyoncé Knowles would make a better Fugazi front person than Ian Mackaye? Or that "I Want to Dance with Somebody" and "Teenage Kicks" were basically the same song? At its most astonishing, Mashup is like reaching into two noxious shitpits and pulling half a shooting star from each. The right combination of the tired, the cheesy, the malfunctioning; the overcooked or half-baked; the overfamiliar or surprising can transcend Pop's predictable patterns, even as it reveals them.

The first bootleg that really caught my ear was a track called "A Stroke of Genie-us": a pure mashup of Christina Aguilera and the Strokes. Like many other startled onlookers, I was fascinated how enjoyable I could find a combination of two artists, neither of whom I like separately. Aguilera's drunken melismas, shorn of accompanying treacle, sat perkily alongside a functional guitar and drumbox chug. What was going on? I dove in: at first the high seas of p2p fuelled my new hunger, but it transpires you can find most mashups on the open web. Just grab Google and go! (There is a great deal of other music just lying around on websites, too. These pages explain how to find it.)

Now a mature area of exploration (you can tell this by the way some one-time fans are sounding its death knell), the mashup naturally takes various forms. If there were a bootleg folksonomy, I would give every tune at least one of these four tags: pure, dance, comedy and rescue.

Pure mashups combine precisely two songs — vocals from one with the music of the other (save for the traditional final reveal of the original vox). Dogmé-style purists insist on no sneaky key- or tempo-changes, but really: who cares, so long as it works? The best I have heard of this type is TimG's "Teenage Kicks with Somebody", which matches Whitney's cadences to the Undertones' absolutely perfectly — she even scats along nicely with the guitar solo — culminating in a neat de-naffification of the cheesy closing chords.

Dance mashups are, at their worst, little more than what jobbing DJs have been doing for years: sliding two or more similar tunes together subtly enough to leave clubbers undisturbed in their footsteps. Personally, I have no need to hear the riff from "Teen Spirit" whirled into another anonymous House track, and this type of mashup usually ends up in my recycle bin.

The comedy mashup is audio satire, and loveable for it. Most good mashups raise a chuckle, but to hear 50 Cent's "In Da Club" set to the Benny Hill theme tune is freedom from ever having to take the overhyped goon seriously again.

Rescue mashups, though, are probably the pinnacle of the Art. As with the Redemptive Cover Version (see: Red House Painters), here the mashup DJ is doing us all a favour, binning Britney's producer (or whoever), and exploring more outré sonic backdrops. Madonna is a major beneficiary from this, particularly her dreadful "Music", which has been rescued more times than Peter Mandelson. "I Hate Music" uses the Hives' ripoff of Blur's ripoff of Pavement to good effect, while "Wild Rock Music" chucks "Born to be Wild" and an Apollo 440 track into the mix so gleefully even I want to dance. (Please don't mention the Abba thing. Can you really mash yourself up? Of course not.)

One of the greatest gifts of this movement is a perspective on where Rap, Rock and R'n'B are at in the Twenty-First Century — their strengths and weaknesses. Take Queens of the Stone Age, for example. Failing to produce a hummable tune hasn't prevented them from becoming the motor force behind many a saccharine warbler, to the improvement of both. And while we may charitably assume Eminem's producers decided to showcase the greatest poet of our age with the dumbest of musical clichés because they felt his rhymes needed no more than the bare minimum to shine, we know there can always be more — as evinced by his numerous rescue mashups, most notably TimG's masterful and moving "Eagles in my Closet". And now we know why the soul divas of today can't cut it like Aretha: it's the horrid fake strings and lite drum samples, stupid. Underpin 'em with a bit of savage rockery and they soar. My decades of Soul-fear are over, thanks to a man with Soundforge on his desktop.

For a long time little more than club-footed leeches, DJs have finally found their purpose. Some folks still appeal for them to spin one track at a time, but if this is sacrilege, why did the Doors stamp so hard on a highly lucrative ad deal, but give GHP the green light to fuck with Morrisson's memory? It's not just the cachet. Something has changed about our perception of the past. An unhealthy reverence has been overturned. I knew this bubble had burst when I first heard Scissor Sisters' cover of "Comfortably Numb" (a song whose original I adored) not with anger, but with a grin on my lips. Missy Elliot working for Joy Division? The Beatles driven to Belinda Carlisle? Kraftwerk digitally blended with Coldplay? "Blame it on the Boogie" clashing with "Should I Stay or Should I Go"? Basement Jaxx sleeping with REM? Portishead manacled on Black Sabbath? You know it makes sense.

It's not the Sixties any more, or even the Eighties. (Someone wake the Kaiser Chiefs, would you?) In the absence of much really forward-looking musician-made music, this truly postmodern form is currently our best chance of breaking from the straightjacket of genre and finding something better in which words, melody and rhythm are imprisoned together on a Celebrity Desert Island, and have to co-operate to escape. Musicians, stop footling in the foothills and find your feet! Pop, tuck your shirt in: your guts are hanging out.

Mashup isn't dead, but it's not the End Of Music either, just one big "Intro Inspection" (look it up), ushering in a new era of better band music. Well I certainly hope so. But even if it isn't, there's no doubt it's the best new fun we've had in a long while.

* Of course, one of the best things about the internet is that — at least until Google fucks it up — there is no "banned".

Britain's 100th Dead Perp

2006-02-02T18:48:00.000Z

... but they're calling him a victim. A few thoughts spring instantly to mind:

If you sign up for the army, you're putting yourself – quite literally – in the firing line. You can't turn around and whine, "I never knew there'd be a war! You didn't say I might die!"

Everybody I know thought this was a stupid, unjustified and probably illegal war, with a near-certain messy outcome, before it had even started. What do you think that protest was about? If over a million people actually marched, it's likely that many times that agreed with the marchers, and it's a reasonable bet some of the dissenters were soldiers. Why, with the noble exception of Malcolm Kendall-Smith, did they all meekly assent to fighting such a war? Fuck military discipline! It's just a job. Quit and be a poet.

Only a hundred? How many violent Iraqi deaths have there been since the war? A darn sight more than that. Apparently those people don't count. Nor, of course, do the ones – the many thousands – who died during our invasion. Some of them were soldiers, too.

Please, people. Heads out of the sand. A human is a human, no matter where they live. And armies are not a force for good.

Circles of Commitment

2006-01-31T13:00:00.000Z

(…and this is me)

"A man ain't an island / John Donne wasn't lying", sang Loudon Wainwright III, but don't we sometimes wish we could be? I have started to think of myself in a Venn diagram, at the intersection of many circles of commitment: worker, family member (leader, dammit!), home educator, partner, provider… These are roles I've undertaken by choice, and to none of which I am currently giving a hundred percent. And there are other, non-voluntary commitments that weigh in, too: tax payer, road user, tenant. Seeder. Am I sliced too thin, or taking everything too seriously? It ain't easy being a citizen of Twenty-First Century Earth.

I feel like the circles have me by the neck. The overlap is strangling me. Where is the inner circle? The singleton set with just me in it, and a good deal of white space padding it out? I have been trying lately to make time to do the things I really love to do – playing guitar, writing – and not just making style sheets (which I do love too, incidentally). But I end up spending a lot more time mindlessly doing SuDoku than would seem sensible for someone with so little time and so much to offer. Enough overly long TV series to blot my messy intellectual drainage.

I would dearly love to cut out some of those circles. But how? I've only really been playing the game of Western Civilization (one day I may write out the rules for this) for two years, and already I want out. A beach, a pad of paper, my guitar, and the kids playing happily: that would do it. Oh, and an infinite picnic basket.

I know we've never had it so good. (At least, we creatures of the West. Not sure about the people we stamp on to maintain it – are you having a good time in Nicaragua? in Liberia? Laos? How do the fruits of advancement sit with you? Is the yoke of Imperialism lighter than whatever was sitting on you before?) But having at least once been a socialist, I can't help feeling that it could be much better, right now. For everyone.

Thank God for iTunes!

2006-01-29T09:36:00.000Z

(a modest hope for the continued importance of money)

We have grown up to expect an orderly world, and – much though it has to commend it – the internet is disrupting that order in downright uncivilized ways. Regularly I hear talk that the old structures are being overturned forever, and it fills me with sadness and dismay; but it may not be too late.

Take the iTunes Music Store and its worthy competitors. The growing success of these systems in returning us to a world of paying for what we want to listen to has proved that the stabilizing influence of money is not yet a thing of the past. It is of course right and proper that those upon whom the livelihoods of musicians are dependent should be remunerated for the vital work they do: holding meetings, repackaging compilations and suing copyright infringers. Nobody could disagree with that. But there is an overriding reason for sustaining the rule of the dollar, which shouldn’t be forgotten: the balance of power between the haves and the have-nots. Since the French Revolution, those with access to society’s wealth have taken succour from the knowledge that their position – no longer ordained by God, as in the barbaric days of feudalism – now stems from their intrinsic worth as citizens of an equal and free civilization. Their superior position is their human-given right.

One measure of this all-important justification of all-out power is the depth to which we may immerse ourselves in culture. From frequent visits to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s excellent musicals to an extensive collection of Dire Straits DVD-Audio disks (not to mention the hardware necessary to really appreciate their nuances), the full swath of mankind’s creative output has always been the playground of those with the most important positions: bankers, politicians, generals, advertising executives, televisions stars, lottery winners, etc. Those with less vital occupations – heath workers, for example; farmers, even – have naturally found their access to culture properly restricted by lack of funds.

The rise of peer-to-peer technology seemingly put paid to that. First it was Napster and its successors, which effectively removed all natural constraints on the quantity and variety of music that could be heard by the lowliest worker, even unemployed person!, provided they had access to the internet. (Some US States have commendably, if belatedly, moved to partially reinstate that particular barrier – which was being flattened by free access programmes in several cities – by banning the proliferation of such networks. A move others have been painfully slow to emulate.) Now that Bittorrent has done the same for movies, we may wonder how long it will be before other cherished institutions of privilege – healthy eating, housing, warm winter clothes – are undermined and ultimately, heaven forbid!, shared out with a similar disregard for the proper order of things.

So I applaud iTunes in pioneering the paying model for online music, and for leading the way with video too. And while I do not contest claims that – with DRM, obscure formats, overcompression and lack of choice - the offerings from Apple’s and their competitors’ sites are inferior to what can be had for free elsewhere, I see it as a healthy sign that the cultural connoisseur, with more money than sense, is still very much alive.