Music

Once again I awoke on that magical day when anything could happen. It was the day of the BDO announcement, where the media gathers in anticipation of the unknown. It is a day when dreams can come true and people start counting down the days to January with intent. And I'm glad I slept in and forgot to attend. I have learned to live with the yearly disappointment of another year without a good international punk band in the line-up; I have gotten over the fact that there are hip-hop groups now coming (and I liked it much better when they had their own stage); I have even come to terms that there will always be crappy New Zealand bands getting better spots than great international bands just because, you know, it's more patriotic (the Rise Against incident of '05 proves my point on this).

I have a draft somewhere for an article about the real reason that downloading is killing the music industry; on the whole it's a downer, so I'll only paraphrase it here. When you buy a record, you're not just handing over cash for a commodity; you're taking part in the process that makes that commodity what it is. Popular music needs to be sold to be what it is. People put posters of their favourite rocker on their bedroom walls - and those posters basically amount to advertising. Music videos are ads for singles, which were once ads for albums. Some music may not be all that "mainstream" but it still has a niche, to whom it needs to be sold. And it still defines itself within the context of pop music, using its conventions to sell itself. Commerce is so deeply entrenched in the motives of every pop star, from Black Francis to Ne-Yo, that you can't separate the two. "Sell-out" is meaningless and hollow as an insult.

Source: my brain, ‘cos obviously I remember all this stuff, ‘cos it's really 1998, and none of this was more than a year ago. And it's not from Wikipedia ‘cos won't be invented for another 5 years, besides it's 1998, who has the Internet anyway?

January:

1. Johnny Ramone: Proud life-long Republican - refused to play the song "Bonzo goes to Bitburg" live.
2. Morrissey: A "Suedehead" is a skinhead after a week's regrowth - never sure what that signified though.
   
3. Ted Nugent: Called Barack Obama a "piece of crap" -articulate.
   
4. Gary Numan: ...apparently.
   
5. Bryan Ferry: Said... what did Bryan Ferry say? ... "The Nazis had really neat uniforms"? ...That's not THAT right wing. ...

This whole list isn't very good ...I'll steal one from the Internet.