Archiv der Kategorie: music

almost a diary, songwriting, US Politics

Mary Hodder is right

to state that not all blogs that are inactive are abandoned.

Take this one for example. See, I haven’t updated my proto diary for a month now and not even written anything over on afoe but that doesn’t imply I have given up blogging much as I haven’t stopped reading in the meantime.

I have taken breaks from blogging before over the last two years (although I have to agree that the inactive intervals have become more frequent) and I am rather sure I will do so again in the future.

However – and I am saying this particularly to the handful of faithful readers of my personal blog – should I ever stop writing here for good, I would certainly inform you about it.

And thus, gentle readers, begins the third year in the young and exciting life of www.almostadiary.de. I’m starting off with a teaser… tomorrow I will regale you with a rough pre-demo of a little song I’ve written about a certain guy from Texas whose analytical skills have already been the subject of a certain number of posts on this blog. Until then, if you haven’t yet, please go and watch this clip about rural campaigning in the US, brought to you by the only reliable US news source, Comedy Central’s Daily Show with John Stewart…

Oh, and this is what I wrote two years ago, on August 19, 2002:

Is the bottom line really chapter 32, in part VIII of volume one?

Oxford’s Niall Ferguson thinks that Marx’s thoughts about crisis prone capitalism should be given more attention in light of the not so recently past days of “CEOcracy” and increased income inequality in the US. But today, Ferguson claims, the class struggle is not waged between workers and owners but between ordinary shareholders and their CEO and controlling oligarchs, so the Marxian acculmulation theory could have a point. In the end, he somewhat loses track and the article becomes more of a summary of recent estimates of American growth prospects. And he never tells us what the consequences could be if the analogy were correct.

But anyway. Could it be true? Could Marx be headed for big comeback in the digital age? I am very sceptical. Alhtough I do think that he has created a scary seductive beast whose feared return will likely scare this planet for some decades to come.

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oddly enough, songwriting, US Politics

Pretty Good.

The George W Bush Don’t Worry, be Happy List by Tim Dunlop.

Oh, and did I mention I composed a song called “George W Blues”…. well, it’s not actually blues, it’s got more of a Texan country feel in the latest version. It’s about a dyslexic boy whose dad once read to him from Machiavelli and then told him he would become a great leader, if only he learnt how to read…

If Michael Moore won’t produce it, I’ll post it here sometime.

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music

Proof that Xavier Naidoo is wrong.

Alright, I’m posting this simply because Xavier Naidoo just sang “There’s nothing as beautiful as you” (that means me, no?) on the radio.

He’s wrong. Clearly wrong. Want proof? Have a look at the ladies competing in this years Miss Universe beauty pageant.

Well, I mean, I have personally witnessed how make-up artists and skilled photographs will turn any reasonably looking human being into an angle-specific Claudia Schiffer/Brad Pitt, but beauty is always nice to look at, no?

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almost a diary, music

(barely) aLive and (rather) Acoustic

Cindy AlexanderGentle readers, it’s a shame.

The very talented Californian singer/songwriter Cindy Alexander is touring Germany for the second time in only two years and I won’t be able to attend any of her concerts for I am not in a state to leave my bed for much more than brief stops at the trusted pharmacy and, of course, the videostore around the corner.

Even if I could leave the house for longer I suppose I would immediately be sent home by a police officer for disorderly conduct – sure it’s getting better, but sometimes I am still coughing in a way that would most certainly make late 19th century tuberculosis patients pale in comparison. Of course, spreading cold germs is not yet a crime. But there’s a reason it’s frowned upon…

So, much to my dismay, once again I will have to turn to Ms Alexander’s recordings instaead of “the real thing”. However, all of you who are not confined to your beds tonight and live not too far from Marburg, Hessen, Germany, should leave right now and attend “The Acoustic Meeting” in the Waggonhalle at 8pm.

Unfortunately none of Cindy’s songs are legally available online since c|net has shut down the mp3.com servers in January. Well, not quite – there are at least some samples at amazon.com, even including my favorite song of hers, “Better Than I Am“.

So listen quickly, and then get going.

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Europe, media, music

I want to read The Sun tomorrow!

The annual Eurovision Song Contest is over. And Turkey is taking the cup to Ankara. As usual, however hyped, there’s no reason to watch the entire event if you are able to catch the replays intended to remind the voting public of earlier entrants. These ten minutes are usually not only sufficient but at times as much as is possible to bear. The real reason to watch is not the music, it’s the voting procedure that is happening afterwards – and this time, the European Broadcasting Union even offered an animated scoreboard. If your country doesn’t get points from other European television viewers (or Juries, for those countries without a stable telephone infrastructure (Russia, Bosnia-Hercegovina), you can follow its label on the screen moving downwards…

That is if the label has been up somewhere at some point. In light of the UK’s results tonight, the BBC News Online’s Caroline Westbrook was a little bit more than prophetic when she said –

“This year Jemini have taken the UK’s hopes to Riga, and while their song Cry Baby is perfectly pleasant it’s not thought to be strong enough to see off the likes of Spain, Iceland, Turkey or the much-hyped Russian entry from Tatu. … It’s fair to say that if we do want to win again, we should come up with a better song…”

Well, I the song is probably a part of the explanation for the fact that the UK did not get even a single point from any of the twenty-six nations involved. But it was not worse than most of the other songs, nor was, in my opinion, the performance – as far as I can judge from the replays…

Looking at the results it is pretty evident that voters all over Europe rewarded musical diversity. And a huge part of the songs performed in Riga tonight simply were hard to mentally separate from each other, in fact, watching the replays was like watching one ten minute medley. The British song was no exception to that rule. Like the song, the British performance was as dull as any other medley-song performance. So Caroline Westbrook had probably a reason to predict they would not win – but being just like the others is clearly not helping to explain why Britain did not get a single point this year.

And I don’t understand it either. I don’t think it was about the British stance in the war on Iraq – despite the fact that it was a telephone vote in most countries. So it might just have bad luck. The BBCi is reporting the result remarkedly calm so far –

“The UK’s entry Jemini – duo Chris Crosbey, 21, and Jemma Abbey, 20 – had the ignominy of being the only entry to score no points. It is the worst performance in the UK’s Eurovision history. The UK’s previous lowest performance was in 2000, when it was placed 16th.”

Maybe it’s too early for comments. Maybe they just don’t care. But I can’t wait to read The Sun tomorrow.

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almost a diary, music

Ode An Die Freude.

Brad DeLong always finds a new twist to inquire about the fundamentals of human civilisation – here’s what he writes today:

“By what right is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so damn good?
Why do we like it so much?”

The 4th movement was my first hit-single, believe it or not. And deaf Ludwig van B. was my first pop-star, when I was six (it never mattered that much that the words are actually Schiller’s). I even got the orchestral score as a Christmas present once – although I would not recommend trying to play it on solo-piano. It just doesn’t sound like it does in the Berlin philharmony, if you know what I mean.

I largeley quit classic music as a teenager, for obvious reasons. But one of the few pieces I voluntarily listened to (as opposed to being forced to listen to by well-meaning parents) even during that period was Beethoven’s ninth.

So why do “we” like it that much? Maybe because it is an ode to joy written by a man whose will was strong enough to cope with the hardest of all fates for a composer – deafness. Maybe because it reassures us that whatever seemingly insurmountable problem may appear one day, there is always hope. [author off to look for CD]

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compulsory reading, Economics, intellectual property rights, music industry

They’ll get the pricing wrong.

For at least five years. If you search my blog you will find that I have repeatedly said that all attempts to sell musical downloads will suffer from problematic price policy. Apple’s new itunes download service is no exception. True, it is probably closer than anything previously seen to actually enhancing the user experience with digital music. According to wired news,

“… opening day downloads equaled the number of songs legally downloaded over a six-month period last year.”

But it is nonetheless bereft with a pricing dilemma. A dollar a tune is not always a justifiable price, even though NY Times columnist David Pogue is ridiculing criticism of this pricing policy.

In fact, for most downloads it is clearly too much, even though things are cheaper when an entire Album is downloaded – for 10 dollars. While a tenner a disk makes downloading for some albums cheaper than your local record store, it is, on the other hand, probably a prohibitive price for DRM protected material, and, moreover, a price justifiable only due to the channel conflict with the non-digital distribution universe, which still makes it necessary to spend millions on marketing songs to people who are not interested in them anyway. It is a price only justified if the advantages of the internet, especially in the realm of marketing to a smaller, but more appropriate audience, are not exploited.

Thus, a dollar a buck can just be the beginning. People will continue to negotiate this price by using KaZaa and Grokster. Record companies will continue to try to scare unwitting conservative politicians about “the end of property” as well as send cease-and-desist letters to people sharing songs.

The big unknown variable is the political one. Will politicians be willing to understand the conventional definitions of property are just not appropriate in the digital age? Or will they allow the record industry to gain a windfall from perpetuating the economic structures of previous times for an unknown amount of time? I firmly believe that eventually, the social and economic institutions will adjust to a new reality.

But again, it is a matter of pricing. This time, a matter of the price that our information societies will be willing to pay for patrolling people’s hard drives and digitally fingreprinting their lives. Maybe US Sen. Santorum’s intervention telling homosexuals that they do not have a right to privacy came at the right time. I don’t know. But it is more important now than ever to tell people that digital privacy is an important issue. Something, many people were concerned about when it wasn’t a real issue yet, back in the 1980s.

Now that it is one, people don’t seem to realise that the same mechanism that allows to reduce the prices of individual songs could be the reason for the end of civil liberties as we know it. [ author off to pay to see a film in a real movie theatre…]

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intellectual property rights, Iraq, music industry, oddly enough, quicklink

They take no chances.

If this report by Telepolis is right, then Hillary Rose, the former chief RIAA lobbyist, is currently rewriting the copyright laws of Iraq. Just in case the Iraqi ideas about intellectual property rights should differ from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Actually, the journalist Gregory Palast is not unjustifiedly wondering whether the combination of sharia and the DMCA would result in hands being chopped off for filesharing. Hmm, I guess I am favoring a kinder, gentler version – just chop off the index-finger. After all, isn’t it always that bad guy that clicks on ‘download’?

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almost a diary, intellectual property rights, music industry

Champagne Blogging

this is my first attempt at live-blogging, so give me some credit here… i am writing this on a public terminal in the museum fuer kommunikation in frankfurt, typing with only one hand, as i am holding a glass of champagne in the other. it is the “long night of museums” here and on of the special exhibitions in this museum for communication puzzled me – it’s an exhibition about mp3 and the digital music revolution, including terminals running the popular “kazaa.com” filesharing software.

did i miss something? i thought the revolution was still very much going on? what is this supposed to mean? is p2p filesharing already a part of history? could that be the reason no major label objected to this exhibition and it was even sponsored by Steinberg GmbH, maker of the well known studio software “cubase”.

i don’t know, but now is not the time to answer question of historic importance, so i will return to the party and leave you probably as puzzled as i am – albeit without champagne.

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almost a diary, music, oddly enough

Spring Cold.

Sorry for the apparent lack of entries, but even though the weather is brightening up in Southern Germany, I was hit by a pre-spring/post-carnival cold yesterday and so I’m not really in screen-staring mood. And there’s so much I would like to write about – the latest developments re Iraq, my best guess for Bush’s non-war exit strategy, exciting developments in German higher education, and, obviously, yesterday’s serious economic policy bashing by the Bundesbank which is obviously as scared as it gets of a possible downgrade of Germany’s debt rating.

But above all, on the day on which the first “German Idol” will be elected by tens of millions of phone calls, I would have loved to write something more detailed about an amazing documentary on ZDF television which covered the casting for the “Arabic Idol” [link in German]. When I see expressions of the ongoing Islamic reformation as vital as that, I can’t help but wonder if the “Arabic Idol’s” life will be made easier by a war that is likely going to seriously discredit the less inhibted, western lifestyle these young people seem to have discovered on their own.

I very much doubt it.

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