Mojo Nixon to put entire catalogue online, for free

(Mojo, as captured by Flickr user kathyp.)

Digital Music News is reporting today that psychobilly legend Mojo Nixon is going to release his entire catalogue – over 150 songs – online for free download, alongside the debut of his latest album, Whiskey Rebellion (also free).

DMN:

“I’m just the kind of crazy person to do it,” Mojo told Digital Music News in a phone conversation.  “What do I have to lose?  I’ll make make more money off of this in the long run.” […] The Orchard is now preparing an official release on the matter, pending various executive approvals.  “Getting all 150 tracks, that might be like having a bacon sandwich with sausage on it.  It’s like chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup,” Mojo shared. [Link added for reference.]

I don’t put this up here suggesting this is the way to go for everybody.  Indeed, Mojo’s 1980s releases on Restless Records might cause The Orchard some trouble during those “executive approvals.” Restless would probably be more into getting their catalogue out there for free before they were bought out by WMG.  Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating step, and something to talk about during the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit over the next few days.

Cash for Warhols

Nothing like a little street art to raise awareness about the Rose Art Museum legal situation. Care of the very excellent Wooster Collective.

Back in DC

Sorry for the unannounced hibernation here over the past few weeks.  I was finishing my work, taking a vacation, and moving my life back down to DC for my 2L year.  I don’t have much time to write, but I wanted to post this sign up a little memento from my summer in Cambridge:

“Violators will be towed perfunctorily.”  Only in Cambridge would you see an SAT word on a parking sign.  I’m going to miss the place.

Bad Call?

This is a slightly more whimsical (and short) approach to a topic I spilled a great deal of ink on last week.  I saw this bumper sticker on a traffic pole yesterday:

Clearly, a sticker done in homage to:

Is this good?  Bad?  Acceptable?  Infringement?  Legally fine but artistically dubious?  Artistically clever but legally questionable?  An unfair use of Bad Brains’s design to imply support from Bad Brains or their fans?  A strategically bad decision of iconography, considering how different Bad Rabbits and Bad Brains are?  Totally fine and rather cute or amusing?

I’m torn.  All I know for sure is I checked them out because I thought they may be similar to Bad Brains, but they turned out to be entirely different (and I see very little crossover between these fan bases).  I also think I may know some people in Bad Rabbits – at least a few went to Northeastern – so I should be careful before I rip on them too much.

The State of Music Reviewing

The blog Aritsts Paid posted up a video of Rolling Stone and Village Voice music critic Christopher R. Weingarten, speaking at a web/twitter conference in New York this past June.  He argues that crowdsourcing and amateur music blogging has killed popular music:

(Not suitable for work, or for the kiddies.)

With the obvious grain-of-salt caution that this is a Rolling Stone writer complaining about how amateur reviewing has undercut his professional usefulness, Weingarten raises an interesting point. Before the Internet, music reviewers would dish out opinions from up on high.  Their opinions were respected (if not agreed to).  When the Internet first began to spread, music websites kept up this tradition of, as he puts it, separating wheat from the chaff.  But with the advent of the amateur music blog (*ahem*) we switched from parting the waters in music to opening the firehoses.  As Weingarten puts it, it was like a sprinkler, with opinions and MP3s flying everywhere.

On top of this, the one edge “professional” reviewers had for years was the coveted “advance” copy of records: even if consumers didn’t care what people like Weingarten were saying about bands, at least they could scoop us bloggers out here.  Nowadays record labels seem to run their organizations about as watertight as a swiss-cheese submarine, and albums are leaked well in advance of promotional distribution.

At the meat of his speech – around the 7-minute mark – he argues “crowd sourcing killed music” because “people have terrible taste,” and, “if you let people decide what good music is, nothing different or adventurous gets out.”  Weingarten says this trend lead to professional music critics being forced to review bands that are popular instead of bands that are “good,” and a close-minded online listening world (“I only listen to X music and thus I have no idea about Y”).  His solution: spend less time saying online that “I like this music” and start saying why you like different music.  In other words, don’t get so caught up in consensus.  Advocate for the bands you love, and disagree about it.  Practicing what he preaches, his uses his Twitter account to review albums at a breakneck rate, injecting a great deal of “why” into his reviews and keeping pace with the amateur reviewers.

He spends a while complaining that music is “rising to the middle” and popular interest leads to an overabundance of mediocre, mass-appeal bands (citing the current indie rock world as his major case study), which the music world is compelled to review to feed the “click-economy” and get the all-important hits.  While I agree that there are far too many mediocre bands out there, I don’t think that’s the online music world is as dire as he claims.  While Weingarten spends some time talking about the stratification of music consumption (people getting more narrow and closed-minded about listening), he neglects to mention is a duplet characteristic of online music writing: (1) there are a lot of music blogs/twitters/online sources that write about different music online, and (2) many people are diverse in reading blogs.  It doesn’t follow that because music websites are narrow music listeners are too.  Sure, there are blogs like Detailed Twang which focus heavily on a specific genre (to wit, bluesy garage rock and proto-punk), and I read that Detailed Twang for that purpose, but that’s just one music blog in a personal arsenal that I use to keep up with music. Speaking from anecdotal evidence, people tend to diversify their niche sources.

Some people will be closed-minded about music, but that’s no different than listening to Top-40 radio for one’s entire life.  (And I never subscribed to this axiomatic inquiry the because you don’t listen to weird music you are less of a music. I respect objective music fandom above any subjective taste.)  While Weingarten is right about there being a lot of derivative, Pixies-meets-Death-Cab-at-a-party-for-Pinback bands out there, there are also troves of unique and interesting music blogs talking about quality artists.  Save for maybe the late 1960s, I don’t think fringe music fans like us have ever been happy with what’s in the mainstream, be it on radio or in major music blogs.

There’s a certain degree of “physician, heal thyself” sentiment I feel towards Weingarten, but that’s likely misplaced.  I know that he’s not the one that selects which bands to review in Rolling Stone, and I know that precious few places can afford a good music critic (and he is a good critic).  The belt-tightening and corner-cutting of the industry forces most national music magazines to go for quantity of sales over quality of writing.  What we have here is the cost of national distribution.  If Rolling Stone plans to be a magazine with broad appeal, its writers can’t act surprised when they focus on music with broad appeal, “crowdsourced” from the Internet.  While I wholeheartedly share in his dismay of writers being replaced by blogs, there’s an inherent circularity to Weingarten’s central argument about crowdsourcing.  Crowdsourcing by definition seeks information mass of people; the bands that someone finds from such a search will almost by definition mass-appeal.

Critique aside, I do sympathize with Weingarten and other experienced, professional music reviewers.  Were there a place (online or offline) where we congregated and compiled our Lester Bangs protégés I would certainly open my wallet to it.  For now, I suppose the best we can do is promise to each other that we’ll argue viciously over bands and strive not for consensus, but diversity.

Thrill-arsis

There’s more to write about Michael Jackson – the will and its deep-in-the-music-industry executors, Internet music sales records set and broken this past week care of Jackson, how monoculture will change after his passing – but I’m done.  I think this story has been blogged to death.  I’ll end with the weirdest two stories on this topic: one, care of BoingBoing, that They Saved MJ’s Brain, and two, care of WFMU, on the worst eBay cash-in imaginable.

Brookline’s Roadhouse: a nuisance?

The law of nuisance, governing a use of one’s land which causes harm to another’s land, was best described by the Supreme Court in the 1920s: “a nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.”  This expression – nuisance being “a pig in the parlor” – has somehow stuck and is in every property textbook, but so rarely is the pig in question literal, much less rubbed in spices and slow cooked, served with a side of cornbread and cole slaw.

But so it is in my former town of Brookline, where, as Beeriety reports today, Washington Square’s Roadhouse has been forced to close its meat smoker after neighbors complained that they did not want their home filled with the awful, awful smell of gourmet slow cooked food.  Losing the smoker has caused the Roadhouse to change its menu entirely.  From Wicked Local:

[Roadhouse owner David Ciccolo] said he’s cut all the smoked items from his menu, and planned to debut a new selection of Creole and Mexican-inspired dishes on Wednesday night. The new menu includes shrimp étouffée, jambalaya, gumbo, blackened salmon, gazpacho, and tacos with either catfish, steak or chicken.

“We were forced to make this come together pretty quickly,” Ciccolo said. “Needless to say, we’re all a little bushwhacked.”

I’m sad to see this happen to the Roadhouse.  The place opened right after I left the neighborhood and moved to DC, and I haven’t had a chance to return.  While the new menu sounds great, I can only imagine how good their cooking must have been with the smoker in use.  If they did to BBQ what (Ciccolo-owned) Publick House did to Belgian food and beer, I’m sure we’re all missing out.

I also would add that there’s not a place I’ve lived in the Boston area where my apartment’s odor wouldn’t have been improved by a perpetual, eminating smell of quality BBQ. This includes the two years I spent on Beacon Street near Washington Square.

This is not the first time Ciccolo has had to deal with the town of Brookline.  As Andy Crouch notes in his BeerScribe, the Publick House Provisions store took ages to secure a liquor license so it could sell bottles of the superb craft beers the Publick House has on tap.  He should consider moving to Cambridge: it only took United States Supreme Court intervention to get Grendel’s Den up and running.

So how about that Beatles catalogue?

(All too perfect, and care of Flickr user motionblur)

The factoid is legend, known to anyone who watches VH1 or has a taste for music industry gossip: Michael Jackson in the 1980s bought out a large slice of the Beatles catalogue, beating out Mr. Paul McCartney himself for it.  A lot of us are wondering, now that Jackson’s deceased, What’s going to happen with the Beatles’ songs?  Where are they going to go?  Who has the rights to them?

To answer that question, one must understand the how Jackson obtained the Beatles catalogue in the first place.  And to understand that, a little British television and music history must be explained (and a major hat tip to Wikipedia for helping me thread this all together).  We start with Associated Television, or ATV: a British television company which decided in the 1960s to create a publishing wing to handle the royalties of theme songs of ATV shows and wholly-owned subsidiary Pye Records.  This was the early 1960s, and around the same time the Beatles, just beginning their world success, formed a publishing company called Northern Songs, owned by the group with Brian Epstein and Dick James.  In 1963 virtually all Beatles songs were owned the publishing company, but by 1965 Ringo Starr and George Harrison each had formed their own publishing company to handle their songs, leaving only the catalog of Lennon and McCartney.  Around 1965 the group decided to take Northern Songs public on the London Stock Exchange, with Lennon and McCartney each owning 15%, Epstein with 7.5%, Dick James with 37.5%, and Harrison and Starr with about 1.6%.  The balance (a little under 25%) was traded publicly.  Following the death of Epstein, attempts were made to renegotiate the split between Lennon, McCartney, and James, but to no avail.  James sold his share to ATV Publishing, and ATV was able to take a majority share out of publicly traded stock and own Northern Songs.  Despite a tough fight from the Beatles, they were unable to stop the sale, and lost control of their catalogue.

After a vibrant 1960s, publishing the likes of the Moody Blues, the Kinks, and Donovan, and managing the UK sales for Chess Records, ATV Publishing was expanding heartily, obtaining the impressive catalogue of Leiber and Stoller (highlights include “Jailhouse Rock,” “Kansas City,” “Hound Dog,” “Yakety Yak,” “On Broadway,” “Stand By Me” (shared with Ben E. King), “There Goes My Baby,” and “Charlie Brown”).  However, bad business decisions and generally bad luck sank ATV, and by the mid 1980s they were looking to be bought out.  After an Australian businessman flipped ATV Publishing and sold a great deal of the assets in the process, the ATV catalogue, Beatles songs and all, went for sale, precipitating the sordid storm between Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson we’ve all heard before, ending with Jackson owning the ATV catalog for $47 million.  Most critical to this sale was the exclusive right to license Beatles songs, which Jackson did in a myriad of commercials.  (These were covers of songs, typically, as Apple Corps still owned, and still owns today, the sound recordings themselves.  Apple Corps is considerably more stringent about licensing the recordings.)

About a decade later, in 1995, tech megacorporation Sony decided it wanted to get into the music business, and offered Jackson $90 million for a 50% stake in ATV.  Thus was formed Sony/ATV Music Publishing, a catalogue of publisher’s rights second to none, which later bought up publishing houses Acuff-Rose (with Roy Orbison, Hank Williams, and all of the Grand Ole Opry crowd. As Jeff Tweedy put it, “name me a song that everybody knows / and I’ll bet you it belongs to Acuff-Rose.”) and Famous Music (with soundtracks to a vast number of Paramount / Viacom movies).  Today the catalogue has everyone from Bjork to the Beatles, and 50% of it was Michael Jackson’s.

…

And now what?  What’s going to happen to that massive collection of songs?  Shortly after Michael’s death Product Shop NYC and several other blogs reported that Michael had left his share in the Beatles catalogue to Paul McCartney, a decades-overdue olive branch for the once-close friends.  What would be most interesting, should this be true, is whether his interest included the right (or even more exciting: the sole right) to license Beatles songs.  After all, if the songwriter/publishing deal is anything close to a typical contract, royalties should have been split 50/50 over the past decade between the songwriter and the company.  So, Paul and John (and later, Yoko) were still getting their 50% from royalties, but Michael was keeping the other 50%.  This isn’t really about the money; this is more about the control.  To own the catalogue now would mean that Paul has the power to decide where the Beatles are licensed commercially.

Shortly after the buzz was out that Michael’s will left the songs to Paul, an anonymous source inside Sony/ATV told Bloomberg that Sony/ATV will retain the Beatles catalogue.  Strictly speaking, both Bloomberg and Product Shop NYC could be accurate: Michael had, at most, 50% of the corporation, so he could only give his 50% stake to McCartney, meaning that Sony/ATV would still maintain some degree of control.  The specifics of who can do what with what songs will only be made clear with the scrutiny of the contracts, documents, and agreements (most likely with a trip to the courts in the process).  Meanwhile, there are rumors that have been artfully explored by Bill Wyman (the writer, not the Rolling Stones member) that Jackson accepted a 50% buyout on his 50% ownership from Sony.  Should this be true, then Jackson could only devise 25% interest in Sony/ATV to McCartney.  And on top of all of this, there’s the massive levels of debt we’ve all heard about, over which no one seems to have an accurate handle.  Creditors buying up Jackson’s debt are certainly going to try and get a piece of Sony/ATV in collateral, as Wyman details in the article above.  It’s entirely possible that some large investment bank will wind up with Jackson’s interest in the Beatles catalogue, once all of the dust has settled.  And furthermore, we still haven’t seen the will yet.  It’s entirely possible this fact about the will isn’t true, or it’s from a will which has since been superseded, or there are conflicting wills.

Given the man at the center of all of this, I’m willing to bet we’ll see a lot more drama and show before we find out where those Beatles songs are going to land.  As of this moment, we simply cannot say for sure.

Remembering US Patent 5,255,452

“A system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes which will engage with a hitch member movably projectable through a stage surface. The shoes have a specially designed heel slot which can be detachably engaged with the hitch member by simply sliding the shoe wearer’s foot forward, thereby engaging the hitch member.”

Better known as the shoes that through this:

let you do this:

so Michael Jackson could do this:

as made famous in this music video (dance starts at 6:40, “the lean” is at 7:15):

And thanks to Google Patents, here’s the original: Method and Means for Creating Anti-Gravity Illusion. Be sure to note who the first named inventor is.

(Thanks to Idolator for the scoop)

RIP Sky Saxon of The Seeds

In this current deluge of famous people dying I’m afraid people are going to miss this one: Sky Saxon, lead singer of seminal garage rock band The Seeds, died yesterday in Austin, Texas.  There’s a fair number of Seeds videos out there, but my favorite is probably this random appearance on The Mothers In Law:

So long, Sky.