Category Archives: Uncategorized

For whatever reason, maybe you don’t like the PC version of iTunes. Well, now you can love your PC and iPod using a new WinAmp plugin.

This is where you can view the new Billy Corgan video in Quicktime. It’s the first single off his solo album, out in June.

Donewaiting.com Album participants Miranda Sound have just announced some exciting news about their next album that they’re about to record:

All hell will break loose in late June as we officially start recording our third LP. In case you haven’t heard the worst kept secret in Miranda Sound’s history, we’ve enlisted the amazing J Robbins to Engineer and Produce the new disc. J was one of the masterminds behind two of the most important bands in post-punk history, Jawbox and Burning Airlines. He has also produced a handful of our favorite albums, including The Dismemberment Plan’s “Emergency & I”, Shiner’s “The Egg”, The Promise Ring’s “Nothing Feels Good” and a lot of other monsters. We’re collectively pooping our pants, tightening up new songs and preparing to make our best record yet. The sweet news is that we’re recording it at Workbook Studio, here in Columbus. So Neal Schmitt and Jon Chinn will also be in the studio, kicking our butts.

Pretty extensive interview with Brian Wilson in today’s USA Today:

“I try to be hopeful. I write songs about love and happiness. Pain, that’s not my bag. My strength comes from my love for women, my love for singing and my will to survive. I go through a little hell now and then, but I get out of it.” (full story)

A documentary about “Smile” comes out tomorrow.

Recently Greg Kot has been trashing U2’s career moves and apparently Bono felt the time was right to set the record straight and sat down to an unusually in-depth and in-your-face interview when they played Chicago a few weeks ago. The resulting text goes a long way towards explaining U2’s motivations and current philosophy in regards to how music should be presented and it’s place is in today’s larger culture.

KOT: You told me the other day that U2 had “Kid A’d” itself to death [a reference to Radiohead’s 2000 progressive-rock album “Kid A”]. It was a funny line, but I’m disappointed to hear that.

BONO: I want to hear Radiohead, extraordinary band that they are, on MTV. I want them setting fire to the imaginations of 16-, 15-, 14-year-old kids. I was 14 when John Lennon set fire to my imagination. At that age, you’re just [angry], and your moods swing, and it’s an incredible time to be hit with something like that. Our last two albums are essentially about the combo. We used the limitations of the combo. We had 10 years of experimentation. We decided to rope it in, and tie ourselves to only one thing. And that’s the only discipline. Is it a great song? Is it fresh? Experimenting in rock is at its best when you dream from the perimeters and bring it back to the center. All my favorite innovators disappear into the woods and bring something back, and you get to hear the songs distilled from those experiments. I used “Kid A” as an example, because I love the album. We did our “Zooropa,” we did our “Passengers,” even our “Pop” experiment. There were great ideas on that album, but we didn’t have the discipline to screw the thing down and turn them into magic pop songs. We’d become progressive rock! Ahhh! (full story)

Sometimes I think Kot can be a bit too much of a cheerleader but this is one time when I think his criticism elicited what might be one of the most forthright and surprising responses ever from a band as big as U2. Required reading.

Doug Gillard is hitting the road in June. His performance @ SXSW was one of my favorites.

Jun-01 Cincinnati Northside Tavern (Free Show!)
Jun-02 Knoxville, TN Hott Fest, Corner Lounge
Jun-03 Chapel Hill Local 506
Jun-04 Athens, GA 40 Watt w/ My Morning Jacket
Jun-06 Orlando Will’s Pub
Jun-07 Gainesville Common Grounds
Jun-08 Atlanta, GA The Earl
Jun-10 New Orleans Tape Op (Richard Buckner, Anders Parker, Stan Ridgway)
Jun-12 Columbus Andyman’s Treehouse
Jun-17 Philadelphia, Tritone
Jun-19 Brooklyn, NY, Southpaw

Found this online:

Is your skin raw from repeated attempts to scrub yourself out of the shame spiral brought on by watching “Britney and Kevin: Chaotic”? Well, take comfort, y’all — you’re not alone.

Critics, apparently unable to handle the truth according to the Federlines, have delivered an evisceration of the shaky, flaky reality series not seen since the debut of “Hello, Larry.”

Seems they were unimpressed by Britney’s unparalleled talent for making goofy pig faces and tossing off such bon mots as, “Our sex is so good — ecstasy, ecstasy, ecstasy,” and, “They look like boobs, but they’re not. They’re my knees.”

Not even Kevin’s deep thoughts on marriage (“I don’t believe in it”) or the video evidence that the greasy ex-dancer does, in fact, bathe could win them over.

Here are some of the critical lowlights:

Variety: “A self-indulgent, mindless piece of drivel … a visual assault of nauseating camera angles, likely to upset even the most desensitized TV viewer … It makes Jessica and Nick look like Mensa candidates.”

The Washington Post: “There’s no danger of anyone ever dumbing it down. A dumber downer would potentially be lethal. It would have to be buried in lead for 10,000 years, like nuclear waste … An execrable mess by absolutely any standard, though of course these days the idea of standards is just all too uncool. It was America’s crummiest home video.”

Entertainment Weekly: “Career suicide by videocam … The truth is not only that she’s vapid, but that she’s self-obsessed to a dangerous degree.”

The Hollywood Reporter: “Spears comes across like a party-hearty college girl with her shaky-cam, finger-up-her-nose, close-up-of-her-pores, leering video snippets.”

The Boston Globe: “It’s just a tedious public exercise in self-importance and striptease.”

Television Without Pity: “The show is like an extremely boring car crash: It sucks and really nothing at all happens in the end, but nevertheless you can’t look away — the only true entertainment value being the constant and very real threat that at any minute either of Britney’s gigantic bodyguards might kick the [bleep] out of K. Fed, whom they obviously hate.”

Yee-ouch. Viewers seemed to agree with the brutal assessments: “Chaotic” finished dead last in its time slot.

Awesome.

The music industry lost its quest Thursday to curb online file-sharing when an attempt to smoke out the identities of 29 alleged uploaders was quashed by the Federal Court of Appeal. (full story)

Okay, not so fast. Once you get past the giddiness of the opening paragraph you encounter such terrifying stuff like, ?The 27-page decision gives the Canadian Recording Industry Association a roadmap of how to present file-sharing evidence in future attempts to stop rampant music swapping.? It kind of makes you wonder what the RIAA is gonna do with that Grokster decision if things don?t go their way.

Yeah, I understand they are two totally unrelated cases about file-sharing but the idea that the RIAA would use info gleaned from each loss to bolster future cases kind of creeps me out.

It’s sort of like that Terminator that can change shape and adapt to become a more efficient killing machine. Only way less sexy.

Mark Cuban says $5/Month—

The RIAA can no longer claim that students who are downloading music are costing them thousands of dollars each. They can?t claim much of anything actually. In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine.

Where’d all my money go? he asks.

“Where’d your good songs go,” I ask.