Drawer B New Media Reviews: Records, CDs, MP3s, Movies, Websites, Concerts.

Drawer B New Media Reviews: Records, CDs, MP3s, Movies, Websites, Concerts.: and what can I possibly add to that summary? The Mysterons at Drawer B write a good, eclectic game, and this is yet another fine music-related site I can’t believe I’ve not stumbled upon before. I really need to update my side-links.

Recording Industry Seeks Immediate Shutdown of Napster

Recording Industry Seeks Immediate Shutdown of Napster - note involvement of poacher-turned-gamekeeper mp3.com.

THE MODERN LOVERS GUIDE TO BEING JONATHON RICHMAN

THE MODERN LOVERS GUIDE TO BEING JONATHON RICHMAN

Want to impress the ladies with your sensitive side fella’s? Why be content with merely owning a Jonathon Richman record, when you can be Jonathon Richman? Its easy:

1. If you really are sensitive, you have probably been in a number of fights and lost them. Think back on these experiences. They form the substance of your melancholia. (This is also step one of being Jarvis Cocker, Morrissey and the singer from Korn.)
2. Learn how to play the guitar from a book. When you can play two chords, and can almost do an F except it hurts a bit, stop.
3. Get together the loosest band in the world. Make sure they know the same chords as you. Make sure your drummer only owns two pieces of kit, preferably not a bass drum.
4. Jot down your most useless thoughts during the day. For instance, you notice how if you look at it in a funny way, a jar of pickled chilli’s looks much like a batch of wrestling mini alligators. There - you have just written a song called “Wrestling Jalepeno Alligators”. See how people avoid walking on cracks in pavement, and feel bad about the cracks feeling unappreciated - you have written a song called “I Feel Bad For Sidewalk Cracks”.
5. Do not worry if your tiny thought cannot fill a full three minute pop song of lyrics. It is perfectly fine to repeat lines, verses and words - especially if you cannot think of anything to rhyme with Alligator. If the worst happens, doobie-do or doidy doi are perfectly acceptable lyrics.
6. Sing in a fey way, slightly out of tune and out of time with the rest of your band (its okay, you can fire them, its their fault). Tour lots, be surprisingly grumpy when anyone asks you to play anything that you have written which might have accidentally turned out half decent and then be hailed as a misunderstood, underappreciated genius.

Unfortunately, much like owning a Modern Lovers record, this stuff does not impress the girls. They will just laugh at you and kick figurative sand in your puny face. You will then go home to your basement apartment, cry and write a song about this called “Figurative Sand In My Face”. The first line will be “She laughed at me and kicked figurative sand in my face.” The second line will be “Doobie do, in my face, what a waste, in my face”.

Beyond The Cataracts

Beyond The Cataracts: “The trouble with Sondheim’s complaint about “recycled” culture is that all culture is recycled”. Not many links to stories on musicals in NYLPM, so let’s rectify that by eavesdropping on this interesting little debate, which is after all the same debate we pop fans have all the time, just recast.

Mosh-pit mania

Mosh-pit mania “Civilization is hard to kill, even in the pit. They a woman was gang-raped in front of the stage at Woodstock ‘99, but that was three days into it.” - well, that’s alright then. I used to go down the front at gigs, right at the front because I couldn’t be arsed with moshing, and an eye-of-the-storm effect occurs right up against the stage/cordon (the security is watching, for one thing). Now I hang back, or sit down.

D-GENERATION - “Rotting Hill”

D-GENERATION - “Rotting Hill”
Another 1993 single. 7 years is a weird timespan in pop: I’d suggest that nothing recorded at a given time will have the slightest influence seven years on. It’s too late to react against, far too late to build on, but too early to canonise or reassess. So D-Generation (who were a footnote of a footnote even then) come at us out of time, cut loose from the recession-era fears that fuelled their dystopia dub.

Their music is basic and bleak, gritted-teeth skanking rhythms and icy, well-picked samples. A grotesque snatch of Proms-y pomp, a cockney sneer, church bells, and at the centre of it all a plummy voice, cracking: “Merrie England? Lutes and flutes and chase-me-round-the-maypole? Phoney baloney! It never was merry! It never was merry!” Severance from its original context doesn’t hurt this music at all: in fact it enhances it, makes D-Generation say things about the country’s deeper state, things which don’t depend on having the Tories in Downing Street or an economy in trouble. This England is an old, wasted place, sick inside but too tired and weak to shake the old poisons off, eating itself from within. “Rotting Hill” is a pinpoint map of heritage Britain: corrupted and featureless.

DUEL! - ROUND 2

DUEL! - ROUND 2: today it’s Moby vs Weller.

And yes, the archives are on the right. Sorry.