Adam Has a Posse...

...well, OK, gathering a posse. *sigh* OK, to be more honest, a group.

As a megasuperhumongous music fan, I'm always looking for other people who are into music. One of the best places that I know of is last.fm. I have pimped it many a time, and will continue to do so. What last.fm does is keep track of the music you listen to on your iTunes through an app called AudioScrobbler. The device "scrobbles" the tracks you listen, whether on shuffle, playlists, albums, etc. and sends that info to last.fm which tallies the artists you're listening to. From that data, last.fm suggests other artists you may also like and also finds people that share your musical taste. (It also opens up a Pandora's Box of metadata stat geekery that you could break down like fantasy football addicts, but that's another post.) From last.fm I have met people literally around the world who also display their musical tastes for all to see, both as individual friends and as groups of various musical ideologies. One I happily discovered was called the Weekly Album Appreciation Club in which we dissect a new and different work each week or so. From this group, I've gotten into stuff by The Walkmen and The Wipers and other bands that don't begin with "W." At some point late this summer, I thought, this group is neat, but what if we did it face to face in person?

And so in late August/early September I sent a Craigslist post to the Janesville and Madison boards putting out feelers for a CD of the Month club. A few people responded, this led to that, and so tomorrow we're having our first meeting. We as yet do not have a name, but I have quiet confidence that will come in time. The debut meeting I'm planning as an informal meet and greet just to kind of see how people got to be into music, what they're into, etc. Our first CD of the month (which we will discuss at our second meeting proper) will be Creedence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory. I have no overriding reason for including it beyond it being very close to my person as I was thinking of candidates. (It's not even mine: I'm borrowing it from a friend.)

I'm kind of excited to see where the group goes from here. I've put off putting flyers in record stores/concert halls/coffeehouses because I want to more sure I have a good foundation to start from and I want people, at least in the start who are **honestly** into broadening their musical horizons and who aren't afraid to have a honest discussion about music. Obviously this idea is an offshoot of Books of the Month club or film discussion groups, but why isn't there a musical equivalent to this? Music is as important to the arts as books or film, so why should they not be as available as a subject? Maybe I'm the only one who gets that passionate about music and the meetings will turn into me lecturing the empty seats next to me. But I am hoping there are open-minded, music freaks like me who are excited and motivated to find new stuff for their ear-holes. If there is, then a posse I shall truly have. I'll keep you posted, maybe.

It's actually going to be a Sunday afternoon full of music for moi, as I have the meeting at 3pm and then at 8pm I'll be heading to the Majestic to watch Liam Finn + Eliza-Jane. Liam is the son of Crowded House figurehead Neil Finn (and by extension, the nephew of Tim Finn, who founded Split Enz and works with his brother here and there.) Eliza-Jane is a childhood friend of Liam's who's toured with him off and on for a few years. They have a joint EP called Champagne in Seashells and both are prominently featured in the recent 7 Worlds Collide project that also features all the Finns listed above, Radiohead, Johnny Marr, Wilco, KT Tunstall and many others. (Liam, in fact is playing this gig as a one-off, as he is actually opening up for Wilco in much larger venues throughout the Fall.) So it should be a fun gig, which would make it 2 great gigs in two weeks, as I saw Carbon Leaf, Toby Lightman and Stephen Kellogg & the Sixers two Sundays ago. And then Monday, some football game is on. Can't remember who's playing.

Wall Of Ice Ahead... ! or ?

[NOTE: I also posted this at my normal home for musical musings, which is right here.]


So the hot music news of the weekend revolves around a leaked mp3 that may or may not be an advance for a new Radiohead extended play release that may or may not be available for public consumption on Monday. They're speculating on Stereogum, they're pontificating on Pitchfork. Heck, the buzz on this has been so large it woke up grandpa at the old folk's home and he dutifully told his floormates at Rolling Stone. Whether or not there is an actual Radiohead release at the end of this Rainbow (pun intended) is not the point of this blog, at least not the main part of it. Instead, let's take a step back and dissect exactly what the discovery and overanalysis of a single mp3 floating in cyberspace means.

Firstly, I think any doubts that Thom Yorke and co. are NOT the band of this generation can be quelled. Let's assume all this research is somewhat accurate and this track is indeed a cyberteaser for a Radiohead EP. Honestly, when was the last time a large audience got excited about a freaking EP? (My guesstimate would be around 1992-3 when Nine Inch Nails released their Broken Ep... people were jonesing hard for some new NIN and The Downward Spiral would not see release until 1994. I recall it doing really well, and you still see it here and there when used CD shopping.) EPs are habitually the redheaded stepchild of the music industry -- sometimes they fulfilled an artists's record contract, sometimes they are halfhearted attempts to keep a band's buzz, most of the time they were too much money for too little content. You name it and it's been used to fill up an EP: live tracks, band interviews, dub versions, remixes, versions of songs in a different language, etc etc. If Radiohead can get the masses excitedly expecting an EP, clearly they're a tail wagging a pretty damn big dog. Nickelback, purely in terms of raw sales, are like 10 times bigger than Radiohead... but if they tried a stunt like this, it would get 1/10th the publicity, if that. Love them or hate them, Radiohead get people excited about music.

Now, let's do some thinking here. Obviously, this leaked track has been the music news of the weekend, or the month (well, not counting Les Paul's death, but we'll say good news to qualify.) Radiohead don't really seem to be the type of guys who crave constant press attention, and that's probably why stunts like these (if this is, indeed a stunt) are right down their alley. U2 as an example wouldn't use this as a promotional tactic; they'd have a press conference involving robots and firecrackers and maybe Bono wearing a spacesuit. Now think about your run-of-the-mill aspiring band who have hope, dreams and a MySpace page to boot. Like a kajillion bands in this day and age, let's imagine this hypothetical band's two biggest influences are U2 and Radiohead, and so they want to try to appeal to the listeners of those two heavy hitters. Chances are they don't have the budget or the cache to do a U2-style press conference. But leaking a track anonymously and putting "Radiohead" in the ASCII code? Just like Anyone Can Play Guitar, anyone can reasonably do that. Based on this weekend's wild speculation, you can get thousands, if not millions, of people to check out your song if it sounds enough like Thom Yorke and co.

Now if you're dismissing this out of hand and claiming that no band would have the gumption to try to piggyback off another band's existence, there is historical precedent for such a thing. In the 70s, a struggling Canadian band named Klaatu made slightly proggy, Beatlesque '70s rock. One single newspaper article made a passing reference to the contents sounding like something The Beatles would made if they had re-united, and a Pandora's Box of hype, speculation and notable silence from the band itself ensued. Time passed, people eventually discovered Klaatu were NOT Paul, John, George or even Ringo, and they went back to obscurity. But during that time, Klaatu sold a fair amount of records, simply based on people thinking the Klaatu might or might not be the Fab Four, secretly back on good terms. Sound familiar?

Whether a band would go to such unseeming depths to get people to check out their stuff is a interesting topic to consider. (Your run-of-the-mill record company, on the other hand, would do it in a heartbeat. In fact, they're probably checking with their lawyers to find loopholes as I type this.) What do you think? Is Radiohead, by taking part in secret leakings and other tactics, simply creating a new way to sell music? Or are they opening the floodgates for lesser bands to try similar tactics to get a step ahead? (Let's not forget the flood of bands who released material from 2008 on with the "Name Your Own Price" online gimmick. I am not saying Radiohead were BY NO MEANS the first band to try that tactic, but their success with the "online tip jar" really and truly legitimised such a practice.) I guess in less than 24 hours, we may know if we hit a Wall of Ice...

{UPDATE: Monday came around and the track in question ("These Are My Twisted Words") did end up being a Radiohead song. The "Wall of Ice" EP however, was nowhere to be found. The band simply put the song up on its site for free, with another song dedicated to last surviving WWI vet Harry Parch, available for a small donation.}