Before we get to the list, a little self-indulgent get-to-know-me holiday montage….
Full disclosure, last year I actually set my parents house on fire Christmas Eve. No one was injured. The Harrington’s ham was saved. We had to do a lot of cleaning though… damn, oven smoke is insipid.
This year, however, although we did set off some smoke alarms, it was all for a good cause: smoked turkey.
With Erik (my sister’s husband) on turkey detail, it seemed like a good time to have a glass of wine and take an IQ test (stocking stuffer). Serious focus folks. Serious.
I passed 
.
From serious straight to silly: an eyepatch and a dog (Ruben) in a necktie. That’s the Christmas spirit!
Next, breakout that Wii! Again, serious business.
The best part though was the prize for winning. A ginormous chocolate egg!
Whew. Another Christmas for the records.
On to the Year in Review, tribal style.
I started this section, Tribal Shorts, a little late in the year but the idea was that — perhaps like the pictures above — what unites us is more than music, an axiology that extends from the music to our music-lover lifestyles: how we vote, what we drive, what we eat, what we wear, what ridiculous poses we make while virtually bowling….
The point is, we’re a tribe connected by vibe… for some of us, that means sporting an eyepatch on Christmas Eve. For others, an inexplicable fascination with glam organists. Hence, a few 2008 vibal tidbits worth recapping:
1. Fred Smith‘s Rock ‘n Roll Red (In Short: August 2008)
If you’re going to toast the new year like a rockstar (for it), what could be more perfect?
2. Seth Godin‘s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
A would-be entrepreneur MUST. Musicians, that means you. And anyone else who likes making money.
3. Return of the Souvenir (In Short: November 2008)
Whether it’s newspapers or an actual physical CD, people like to hold shit. Brings back the memories. AND, they will give you money for this. See Seth’s book, above.
Plus, a couple of things Santa brought to my attention:
4. Cure for Road Rage Shticks
Honestly, probably best not to use these on the road because you might get shot. But they were handy communicators around the holiday table.
See? Genius.
If you ever dreamed of actually being the walrus, now you can.
Koo Koo Ka Choo.
Happy New Year!
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12/29/08 | Comments (0)Tags: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE, IN SHORT, KATE BRADLEY, OUTLANDOS MUSIC —
2 feet of fluffy snow here in upstate New York this week and we are freezing our bums off. But I don’t think that’s what this week’s guest post-er, Greg MacAteer, means. To take a page from Lefsetz, what would Christmas be without a holiday rant? Not to worry, Greg’s a softy in the end:
Where will me mammy buy my Christmas present? She knows what I like. That’s not rocket science, I like good music. A lot of the time I like that good music to be played on instruments with strings and skins. So should she head over to the shopping centre and ask for a few recommendations in one of the big record shops? Not much point in that, I’m afraid. At best she’ll be looked at quizzically by the bum-fluffed young boys and girls that work there, at worst they’ll snigger at the crazy old lady in the one remaining CD aisle trying to find something that doesn’t come in a holographic cover.
So she has to trundle on down to the main street where the record shop I spent more time in than I spent in my own bedroom as a teenager limps bravely on. She’ll fare better there. The guy that runs it – without a lunchbreak because he’s not scraping enough together for an assistant –is my age and will have heard of a lot of the music I would be into. He won’t have it though because he can’t get it off the distributors anymore. They won’t take it because they think it won’t sell. He can’t get it so he knows it won’t sell! He’d like to sell some more CDs but mainly nowadays he makes his money, such as it is, on concert tickets.
She could go round to my cousin’s house and download something for me, except she doesn’t want to ask me what I want, and oh yeah, my cousin doesn’t have an iTunes account and oh yeah, how would she wrap up the download and give it to me as a present. This year for Christmas I’ll mainly be getting socks. Or an iTunes gift card maybe, although frankly it takes iTunes so long to put songs by independent artists online that I’ll often have bought the album at a gig by the time it makes it on there.
So where to now? What does the future actually hold for folk and traditional acts? Specialist labels? Sure. Love those. Direct from the band? No problem, I love to see the money go straight into the musicians pocket. I’m guessing that we’ll be buying direct from them though and we’ll still need a computer to get onto their website in the first place. I remember buying Buzzcocks and Clash records by mail order thirty years ago out of the back of the NME. Is this really the best the music business can come up with? Buy what we want to sell you or step back in time? What about the music fans who don’t have a credit card? It mightn’t be a very gratifying thought and two or three years ago when houses in Dublin were selling for the price of a Van Gogh it certainly wasn’t a prospect many music executives were contemplating, but boy oh boy, there sure are a lot of people out there now cutting their cards in half and there are a lot fewer twenty somethings having them thrust in their faces by the banks.
I know I’m in danger of sounding like some whining old duffer but I can see a return to the ethos that drove punk, with a small but specialist press, bolstered by small specialist radio shows creating a market that exists underground with records being sold straight to the few remaining record shops from the boots of cars. I can see a whole sector where CD sales only really happen at gigs.
I hear a lot of musicians talk about how the future of the music business is great and exciting because it is so easy to get music out there nowadays. I don’t see a lot of people making a living out of ‘getting music out there’. Musicians need money. You can make great music at home with a laptop and a couple of discs worth of decent samples. Unfortunately if you want to include anything with a little finesse to the sound, with a little delicacy you’re going to need at least a decent mic or two and a nice sounding space in which to record it, and these things are not getting any cheaper. So the costs involved in ‘getting it out there’ need to recouped somehow.
There’s a truism which runs recurrently through the music industry that the internet is a potent promotional tool, that all you need too do is build an audience online and then sell to them. The problem is that the music industry has become so fixated on the medium and the promotional methodology that it has completely lost any idea of what the product is. Imagine we built the world’s biggest billboard and the world’s biggest shop but we forgot to get the stock to sell.
Bear with me. I know my thinking is woolly but I’m trying to keep up. I’ve spent the last year signing up for specialist music industry bulletin boards and news feeds in an attempt to get a handle on what direction the conventional industry is taking but at the end of 2008 I’m no clearer than I was at the end of 2007.
I guess I wouldn’t expect supermarket managers to spend too much time talking about what kind of bread they sell so why am I so shocked by how little talk there is on these boards about the actual music we’re supposed to be encouraging people to buy. Why do I expect them to care? Maybe it’s because the musicians who make great music care so passionately about it, passionately enough to put in twenty hour days in the studio and then drive hours on frosty nights to appear on whatever radio show will have them. Maybe it’s because there are fans and audiences who care obsessively. Maybe it’s because I feel that passion needs to be communicated right through the system.
The single most depressing thing in all of this is that in an arena where music is habitually referred to as ‘product’ there seems to be next to no understanding that the ‘product’ is music.
They’re down on the ground then, writhing and squirming and calling for their mammies. The challenge for 2009 has to be how to take the ball from them and run away with it. It’s not their ball, it belongs to everyone and they don’t even understand the rules they’ve made up. Tempting as it might be to kick them, that’s not going to do anything for us.
I don’t have the answer but I’m clear enough that it involves making the best music possible, it involves musicians sticking together and helping each other build audiences in common, and working damn hard to forge a community that can sustain it. There are fantastic locally based resources out there –take http://www.downloadmusic.ie in Ireland for example – that can provide a viable non-corporate alternative but we have to use them and encourage everyone else use them if they’re to gain the critical mass to sustain themselves.
Greg
Greg MacAteer is a musician and music manager, his current collaboration w/ Paula Flynn, Happy Christmas Valentine:
xo
12/22/08 | Comments (0)Tags: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE, KATE BRADLEY, OUTLANDOS MUSIC —
This list shouldn’t surprise you much, for those of you who’ve been keeping up. In no particular order (isn’t that annoying), my favorite 10 albums of 2008. The main criteria being how long they spent in the car. Scientific. One quick diversion though, here’s what I did Monday morning on the road in North Hampton (that’s me filming).
Speaking of… Winterpills
Central Chambers
This Mess We Keep Reshaping Scottish Beck! Not for the timid.
Carry the Weight
Santogold
Lay It Down
Solidago Fun. Smart. Makes me wish it was summer. (Technically, it’s a 2009 record, due out in April but you can actually buy an advance copy here.)
Lose Big
Terminal Romance
The Odd Couple
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Tags: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE, KATE BRADLEY, OUTLANDOS MUSIC —
Naturally, it’s been mostly Christmas music this time of year. Unavoidable. Although I used to try. Now, I’m more of the “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” type. All-in. In very much a Griswold kind of way:
“Cousin Eddie” Hats RULE
Told ya.
Take it from someone who set her parents’ house on fire last Christmas…
Postfire Extinguisher Popovers
When it comes to the holidays, we don’t fuck around. And for this level of serious Christmas-ing, you’ve got to have a good soundtrack. So many to mention, here’s just a few I can’t imagine chugging that good ole 2000-calorie nog without:
1. Elf (the soundtrack AND the movie)
2. Ashton Allen, The Christmas Songs (well, sort of)
Some of you will remember me unabashedly touting this record last year. Leave it to Barnes & Noble to strip something amazing of its true brilliance… Jesus, they can be so damned vanilla. However, even after eliminating nine songs from the original (most of the best tracks in my opinion), it’s still definitely worth $7.99 (online, $5.99). Bargain.
3. Jon Graboff, For Christ’s Sake!
Tasteful, incredible musicianship. Not what you expect for Christmas music. “Too Late for Tonight (Bombay Noel)” is my favorite. We had it on replay while trimming the tree last weekend.
The Outlandos Holiday Tree
4. Bob and Doug McKenzie, 12 Days of Christmas
It’s still pretty freakin’ funny.
From my family to yours, Happy Holidays!
xo Kate
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Tags: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE, KATE BRADLEY, NOW PLAYING, OUTLANDOS MUSIC —
Guest post this week from yet another one of my favorites (can’t help it), Australian singer-songwriter Shane Nicholson. Buy his records. All of them.
Dear Pluto,
I’ve been thinking for a while now, that possibly you are finding it extremely cold and lonely out there at the edge of the solar system. Not to mention, with the time it takes you to orbit the sun, the years must surely feel to be moving very slowly.
I’m sure you’ve seen a few interesting things travelling past in your time…possibly even an earth-made contraption madly snapping photographs of you as it drifted by, but not stopping to spend any time with you, never to return…
how cheap and used you must feel!
You and I have something in common. We spend our time away from the cluster of other bodies, and always take the long way round. Sometimes we long to be in the midst of all the action, but with all that jostling for space and being bombarded by flying debris and fragments of old collisions, we realise we are much better off on the outer rim, watching from afar as everyone else crashes into one another, does their best to avoid one another, or slowly moves further away from each other.
Oh, what a perfect metaphor you are, Pluto.
The one thing I have that you don’t is music. I think if I was stuck way out there past the gas giants without my iPod I’d go crazy. I’ll have my people talk your people (NASA) and see what we can organise…
there may be an mp3 player heading your way on the next interplanetary mission. I’ll pre-load it with Mike Oldfield’s Music of The Spheres. You’ll love it!
You know, it’s time we send our music out into space anyway, for sometimes it seems there just isn’t any room left for it down here.
I’ll be in touch,
Shane.
[Yes, that's his wife, Kasey Chambers]
12/1/08 | Comments (0)
Tags: CUT THROUGH THE NOISE, KATE BRADLEY, LETTERS FROM THE ROAD, OUTLANDOS MUSIC, Shane Nicholson —
