Paul Ford on How Bing Crosby and the Nazis Helped to Create Silicon Valley:

The nineteen-forties Bing Crosby hit "White Christmas" is a key part of the national emotional regression that occurs every Christmas. Between Christmases, Crosby is most often remembered as a sometimes-brutal father, thanks to a memoir by his son Gary. Less remarked upon is Crosby's role as a popularizer of jazz, first with Paul Whiteman's orchestra, and later as a collaborator with, disciple to, and champion of Louis Armstrong. Hardly remarked upon at all is that Crosby, by accident, is a grandfather to the computer hard drive and an angel investor in one of the firms that created Silicon Valley. [...]

Ford mentions one other technical innovation in broadcasting that Crosby allegedly inspired, but you'll have to read the article to the end to find out about that one. It's worth it.

[Via kottke.org]

Nitsu Abebe has written a thoughtful piece on The Amanda Palmer Problem. By which he means not so much the various issues some people have with Palmer's own actions¹ but the wider problem of how artists seeking support from fans can bring down such vitriol upon themselves online:

I think there's a lesson to be learned from Palmer, and it's not the falling-into-the-crowd lesson she offers. Yes, she's correct: The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren't available before. Here's the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one's fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties.

This sort of furore is only going to get bigger and noisier as the example of the The Veronica Mars Movie Project is followed by the likes of Zach Braff and more and more recognisable names show up on the front page of Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

[Via Waxy.org links]

1. i.e. using Kickstarter to raise more than US$1 million to fund an album, then inviting fans to donate their services as musicians on her tour. Then defending herself against criticism of both moves in part by emphasising that fans being given the chance to play with her were gaining non-monetary benefits from the exchange, i.e. the chance to accompany their idol. ↩

Martin Belam, QFT:

Just a thought. I reckon anybody writing a comment piece about whether the BBC should play Judy Garland and "Ding-Dong The Witch Is Dead" as part of the chart run-down at the weekend should be forced to name the current #1 single before they are allowed to hit publish…

Taylor Swift meets TOS:

[Via MetaFilter]

It turns out that combining Nine Inch Nails and Carly Rae Jepsen gives a really strange result.

I honestly can't make my mind up whether this is epic or embarrassing, or possibly just a little from Column A and a little from Column B.

Why My Bloody Valentine's 'mbv' Has Come Too Late To Stop The End Of The World:

Thanks Kevin. Thanks a fucking bunch for taking 22 years to make a record that could have saved the world. All you had to do was make a bunch of songs that sound like being hit on the head with a shovel after doing poppers while listening to a melancholy whale sighing. But you couldn't be bothered and now we're all going to die in planet wide nuclear annihilation.

[Via The Null Device]

A tribute to the ZX Spectrum and the albums of Kate Bush:

(In fairness, I should note that the copy above is at 50% of the size of the original, which serves to mask some of the rough edges. Follow the link to see the album covers in all their pixillated, colour-clashing glory.)

Nice work. It's surprising how nicely some of them turned out.

The Sensual World and 50 Words for Snow benefit from being essentially black and white images in the first place, so the dithering doesn't fall foul of the limitations of the Spectrum's graphics display,¹ but some of the more colourful later albums like Aerial and Director's Cut look pretty damned fine all things considered. The run of albums from Lionheart to Hounds of Love is another matter entirely…

One last thought: we should all be eternally grateful that the creator of these tribute images didn't accompany them with reproductions of Kate's music created using a Spectrum's sound chip.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Basically, in graphics mode the 256×192 pixel screen was divided into 8×8 pixel blocks, each of which was limited to a single foreground and background colour. Chunky, but more than made up for by the sheer amount of computer you got for your £175 if you went for the version with a massive 48KB – yes, that's Kilobytes, not Megabytes – of RAM. Those were the days. ↩

Visualizing 50 years of The Rolling Stones on tour.

It's hard to imagine anyone matching the scale and longevity of their career as a live act.¹ Is Jay-Z still going to be embarking on massive world tours 30 years from now? Will Muse? Take That? Metallica? The Pet Shop Boys?

[Via Flowing Data]

1. I don't doubt all sorts of rock, pop and rap musicians will still be making music in their 70s, but they'll probably not touring on the scale of the Stones' recent tours. ↩

They Might Be Giants' Fingertips meets Star Wars…

… and Buffy…

So, so good.

[Via MetaFilter]

Jarvis Cocker, reviewing The John Lennon Letters, gets to the crux of the matter:

I am so the target-audience for this book that it hurts – but something feels wrong.

Britpop (I can scarcely believe that I typed that word of my own free will) perhaps comes in useful for once at this point. People of my generation felt this obscure pang – this feeling that we'd somehow missed out on something amazing. So we tried to make it happen again – but exactly the same. You cannot do a karaoke version of a social revolution (good fun trying though). What changed in the interim? Why was Br**pop doomed to failure? Too many factors to go into here, but one was: too much information. Too much reverence. Wearing the same clothes and taking the same drugs will not make us into Beatles. It will make us fat and ill. And books like this (along with many others, I admit) are what make that mistake possible. The Beatles didn't know they were the Beatles. The Beatles didn't have a plan or a blueprint to follow.

Former BBC Senior Broadcast Journalist Alan Connor, on making a radio programme about John Cage's 4'33" and encountering problems clearing the broadcast rights for the performances he wanted to include:

A lesser journalist might have bypassed some rights or recorded his or her own performance on a smartphone and used that to provide the wordless, note-less soundtrack for the slideshow. Nobody would know. Actually, that may not be true in the case of Frank Zappa's 4'33". I'm sure there are hardcore Zappa fans who would detect in a moment that the room tone was unlike that of any studio Zappa had ever used. But it wasn't the zappaphile's conscience that made me do the right thing. It was my own.

It wasn't even my training: there had been nothing on the Safeguarding Trust course that covered the appropriate attribution of recordings of nothing happening. But in order to demonstrate that each version of 4'33" is unique, the package had to be exactly what it said. So out went the version chosen by Radio 3 regular Ian McMillan for his Desert Island Discs in which Hungarian percussion instruments were not being played, sadly unclearable in the time available.

[Via currybet dot net]

Rob Weychert was hoping to use the Rdio streaming music service to broaden his musical horizons. The result wasn't what he'd expected:

[Last fall...] I was convinced to give Rdio a chance after a friend showed me how he used it as a try-before-you-buy service. As a discovery mechanism to augment my personal collection, the prospect of a subscription service was suddenly intriguing. At any given time, there is a ton of music, new and old, that I'd like to properly investigate before committing to a purchase. For ten bucks a month, Rdio would give me unlimited access to a lot of that music, all in one place. I decided to give it a whirl.

Moments after signing up, I dove in head first, and in the months that followed, I wolfed down music at an unprecedented rate, dutifully working my way through a mental checklist of veteran bands who had long needed my attention as well an avalanche of new releases. [...]

At one level, what Weychert found wasn't a surprise: he listened to a lot more music, but with so much to explore he listened to a lot of material just once and didn't ever return to albums to get to know them well enough to decide to buy them. It'd be the same if he'd inherited umpteen boxes of CDs from a friend with good musical taste. Presented with so much material to listen to, you'd always be tempted to find out how great the next thing might be instead of stopping and concentrating on the contents of the first pile you grabbed. With a finite amount of waking hours to devote to listening to music, something has to give.¹

It'll be interesting to read a further report a year on to see whether Weychert can find a strategy for avoiding the temptation to keep on pressing the Next Track button on his infinite jukebox.

[Via swissmiss]

1. These days I primarily use Spotify – more or less the equivalent to Rdio for users in Europe – in order to sate my desire for just one listen to a track or album I've just been reminded of but which isn't in my iTunes library rather than as a preview-before-purchase service. To be fair I only have the free Spotify service, so the constraints on my streaming music are a bit different to those Weychert encountered. ↩

First Avenue, August 3rd, 1983:

Wendy Melvoin is fresh from high school. She is a wearing a V-necked sleeveless top, and patterned shorts. She is playing the first chords of a new song on her purple guitar, opening chords that she wrote, a circular motif with a chorus effect. Wendy is eighteen-nineteen and she has the high cheekbones and diffident confidence of a Hollywood upbringing. She half-smiles at the faces that crowd close to the low club stage. This is Wendy's first gig with the new band, and the song she is playing is "Purple Rain," and nobody in the audience has ever heard "Purple Rain" before because this is the night that Prince and the Revolution record the song. [...]

I haven't bought an album of Prince's in a good decade or so now, but there's just no denying that if you put him on a stage and hand him a guitar he's still got it. The MetaFilter thread where I got those link kept me happily entertained for a couple of hours following links to as much proof as you like of that fact:

On Saturday Night Live:

Watch Fury in Rock  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

At the half-time show for the 2007 Superbowl:

In memory of George Harrison:¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Wait a couple of minutes and Prince suddenly pops up and blows everyone else off the stage. Or, as one MeFi commenter put it, "And then Prince materializes 3/4 of the way through, blows the top of your head off with the solo, throws his guitar in the air, and disappears. It is a testament to the professionalism of Petty, Lynne, and Winwood that they don't just say 'fuck it' and drop dead, right there at the Hall of Fame." ↩

David Hepworth would like to see a proper David Bowie exhibition:

I'd like to see his childhood bedroom recreated, displays of Bromley town centre through the years, old school books, cheap guitars, bassdrum pedals, a chronology of his haircuts, marked-up tape boxes, old contracts, personal letters, sketches, false starts, crossings-out, studio logs, mixing consoles, bits of kit, clipping from FAB 208, preposterous film scripts, storyboards for videos, things thrown on stage by fans and, most of all, a royalty statement for Tin Machine.

The Osmonds 1974 – Fiddler On The Roof Medley.

You know, Fiddler On the Roof used to be my favourite film musical. Now, I don't know if I'll be able to watch it again without getting flashbacks of this … performance.

[Via MetaFilter]

Last.fm are trying to figure out what mood you're in based on various characteristics of the music you listen to:

As a first taster we've put together a visualization of your musical mood over the past 120 days, based on automatically computed machine tags for the tracks which you've scrobbled during that time. While individual tags are still far from perfectly accurate, we think that when taken together over all your listening week by week they still paint an interesting picture – one that stands a chance of reflecting real changes in your musical life.

My results over the last 120 days suggest that I was at my saddest over most of July. I can't say that I remember being noticeably less happy than I was before and since then, but that probably doesn't prove much. I may simply have failed to notice that I was sad.¹

One last point. If it was Facebook doing this, wouldn't we think it a bit creepy for them to be trying to figure out our moods? Is it OK for Last.fm to do this because people who use their service tend to like having their music habit dissected, summarised and analysed anyway?

1. Come to think of it, given the weather we had in July perhaps I wasn't so much sad as I was soggy and sick of being rained on! ↩

Ms. Attribution has all sorts of fun melding history and pop culture:

Sun Tzu (544-496 BCE)

Or possibly Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley. I'm always getting them mixed up.

[Via MetaFilter]

"Baby Got Back" Sung By the Movies.

Seems to me that dondrapersayswhat wins the internet for today.

[Via egotripland.com, via The Awl]

What I learned on the internet today: iTunes on a Mac¹ lets you filter songs by star rating by typing asterisks into the search field.

1. This might work on the Windows version too, but I can't confirm that. ↩

Rumour has it that the Olympics closing ceremony might include a bit of a treat:

Full details about the line-up for the musical extravaganza that will bring the London Games to an end are being kept a closely-guarded secret, but some acts have confirmed they are playing and there are strong rumours about others.

Fans of Bush had their hopes raised when a new 2012 remix of her classic song Running Up That Hill appeared on the Amazon website with a release date of this Sunday, the day of the closing ceremony.

The listing was later removed and there has been no official confirmation that reclusive 54-year-old British singer-songwriter, who has not toured since 1979, will perform.

Kim Gavin, the artistic director of the closing ceremony, has said that it will be an "elegant mash-up" of British music from Elgar to Adele, with much-loved songs arranged in a symphonic structure, rather than a conventional concert. [...]

You have to admit, it does sound like the sort of show that might tempt her on stage.

[Via The Awl]