In 1999 I wrote and recorded a track called Burning Disaster, which got released on hip London-based label Kahuna Cuts (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore).
The song made a reasonable stir, not least because – through a stroke of amazing good fortune – Groove Armada ended up doing a remix of it. (A stunning remix, at that.)
Burning Disaster has been bubbling along quite nicely for the subsequent 11 years. It’s ended up on various chill-out compilations, plus (personal career highlight) a couple ofChris Morris projects.
And each small bump of activity has brought in a chunk of money – be that a sync fee, an advance, or some form of royalties (mechanical, performance or recording). Most recently, via a company called AWAL – who broker a relationship with Apple on behalf of unsigned artists – I got the original EP onto iTunes. Which is nice.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, my latest PRS statement brought an unexpected treat.
This is the first PRS distribution (unless I haven’t been paying attention) where royalties for YouTube’s use of music are starting to filter through to UK songwriters. And here’s the line in my statement which confirmed the pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow:
Wow. That’s just over 18 new pence, in total.
Information Is Beautiful had a terrific graph recently (as always) depicting how much musicians earn online. It was hotly debated by folks on all sides of the “new business models for music” discussion. Was the graph really making a like-for-like comparison at every level? (Answer: inevitably not).
But my PRS statement confirms one thing. Anyone who’s looking to buy their first Rolls Royce with the proceeds from streaming media will be waiting for Quite A Long Time.
If you’re feeling generous and fancy making me a quick 0.009065p right now, though, I’m not going to stop you.
Except that – against all odds – it really reminds me of an early 90s clubbing classic from my Sheffield days.
I pose the question… Could the doyenne of “I’m a drunk mess” pop have once been a regular at Occasions nightclub, behind the BT offices in Charter Square? It was, after all, the home of the bleep scene.
(Reality check: She would have been five years old at the time. So probably not.)
Here’s Ke$ha’s new, erm, masterpiece.
And here’s that early 90s clubbing classic, Testone by Sweet Exorcist – one of the first releases on Sheffield’s seminal Warp label. Can you spot the similarity?
Sweet Exorcist was Richard H Kirk (Cabaret Voltaire) and Parrot (later of All Seeing I); its video was directed by none other than Jarvis Cocker.
As noted here, the Blah Blah Blah video makes prominent use of Nokia’s X6 handset. Presumably Nokia have paid for this, given the enormous size of their logo on the phone.
Is it just me, though, or is Ke$ha really struggling with that on-screen keyboard? At 0:51, all she’s trying to type is repeated exclamation marks, but even that seems to be a tricky, hesitant process, with the very real danger at all times that she might hit the backslash key instead.
And at 0:23 – well, I would never have imagined texting What a mega douche MASTER!!!!!!!! could look so awkward and unergonomic.
Maybe she could release a branded stylus?
(NB – This isn’t one of the music production posts which I so blithely promised yesterday would be “next” on this blog. They’ll be, erm, next.)
I love hearing photographers talking about their work, and the technical choices that went into making it.
One of the main reasons I love it is this: I know absolutely nothing about photography.
I know what I like (pretty much), but I couldn’t even start to identify why one use of lenses, or exposure, or f-thingy is different from another. I am a photo dunce.
My understanding of music is very different.
I don’t mean music composition – I almost failed my music O-level, and never ascended beyond the dizzy heights of Grade 1 theory.
But music production, I get. I know the tricks, I understand the techniques – I can immediately see how it all hangs together and why. Where records are concerned, I’m like that irritating Dad in the art gallery, lecturing his kids on exactly how Picasso layered his paints to make the vanishing point a bit more pointillesque. (NB: I know as much about painting as I do photography.)
You might think this would be enough to spoil my enjoyment of pop music. Interestingly, this isn’t the case.
However, via the wonders of my blog, it is enough for me to spoil your enjoyment of pop music.
Because over the next few posts I’m going to talk about a small number of pop records – actually, about bits of a small number of pop records – in the kind of forensic detail men normally reserve for car engines and power drills.
Why have I decided this now? Well, I’ve been inspired by today’s Twitter hashtag #dynamicrangeday.
It flags up an event designed to highlight the unpleasant but undeniable fact that commercially available music has (for years now) been losing its volume peaks and troughs. The quiet bits, in other words, are getting noisier until they’re pretty much identical, volume-wise, to the supposedly louder bits. It’s a process that’s been dubbed the Loudness Wars.
Like many other creeping changes to the world, few people are conscious of it, realise why it’s happening, or understand why they should be bothered. In a future post I hope to put your mind at rest on all of these factors, and much much more. Whether you like it or not.
If you’re interested in finding out more about the Loudness Wars in the meantime, you might want to listen to this short radio feature from America’s NPR.
For anyone who thinks I’ve blogged too much in the last few weeks about air disasters…
From 1964, I give you Les Parisiennes (avec l’orchestre de Claude Bolling) with an awesome promo which will make you feel a whole lot better about flying. Flying Air France, in particular.
In that era I think they’d have described this as “lively and gay”.
Though I’ve always been a fan of certain types of jazz, I can’t pretend to know much at all about Dankworth’s legacy.
But here’s the thing I most associate with his name – the original title music for Tomorrow’s World. It’s brilliant – and impossible to imagine even being considered as TV theme fodder these days.
Here’s the full version in stereo for your further enjoyment:
And finally, for good measure, the short version on piano.
“Complex” and “approachable” aren’t always easy attributes to combine in music – but this is a textbook example of how that formula can work. If you’re a bit of a genius, that is.
I’m currently reading Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix (subtitle – “Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy”).
It’s an impassioned, largely well-argued cry for copyright laws to be reworked so present and future generations can build new content from the “prior art” of the past. Lessig’s celebration of “read/write” culture obviously strikes a chord with a blogger like myself – even as the long-time copyright-holder in me starts to bristle at the thought of any erosion of intellectual property rights.
But all that’s beside the point – because when I reached page 95 of the book, I nearly stopped reading it altogether. In fact, I wanted to throw the damn thing out of a window.
Why? Referring to the mash-up genre of which he’s so fond, Lessig writes:
I want my kids to listen to SilviaO’s remix of fourstones’ latest work – a thousand times I want them to listen. Because that listening is active, and engaged, far more than the brain-dead melodies or lyrics of a Britney Spears. Her work draws on nothing, save the forbidden and erotic. It is [...] totally derivative, and deeply disrespectful of the tradition from which she comes.
Now wait just a second. Did I read that correctly? Britney Spears’ work is deeply disrespectful of pop?
Man, if there’s one thing I hate it’s a quasi-populist intellectual who doesn’t understand pop music.
Dear Mr Lessig. I invite you to climb down from your Olympian heights for a moment. Then enjoy, below, one of the smartest, sharpest shards of pop culture from the last decade. And then reconsider your views immediately. Kthxbai!
Christmas TV spells glitz and glamour. Or at least it did when I was growing up in the variety wonderland of the 70s.
These days I’m inclined to think the excitement and production values have gone out of Christmas telly. (Admittedly I haven’t actually watched any in the last decade, but go with me on this.)
So I thought I’d take the law into my own hands and inject a moment of class into your Yuletide experience, via a special piece of music.
Friends, I give you Laurie Johnson’s 1952 composition ‘Gala Performance’.
I invite you to click play, close your eyes and picture – as the title would suggest – immaculately-dressed ladies and gentlemen entering a glittering West End theatre, perhaps shaking hands with minor royalty on the way. Red velvet seats, marble busts and gilded balconies may come into your mind’s eye. A sea of bow ties, mink stoles and opera glasses.
Or, if you’re of a certain age, you might involuntarily imagine Eamonn Andrews “disguised” as a bus conductor, scrabbling up the stairs of a Routemaster to greet a surprised John Conteh.
Either way this is a stunning tune. Merry Christmas, one and all.
You’ll notice the title of this post is a statement, not a question. That’s because what I’m about to assert is beyond dispute. Really.
Tik Tok by Ke$ha is this year’s best pop record by a country mile.
Yes, others might be subtler, more sophisticated, less crass. But is that what we want in our pop music? No, it is not.
We want trashy lyrics about booze, boys and clubbing. We want shameless audio gimmicks galore. We want thumping choruses topped with a vocal that could strip paint. And if those choruses are underpinned by dirty analogue synthesizers, then that just about completes my Christmas list.
The acid test of any pop record is this: how would it sound at a nighttime fairground, PA cranked up to 11, accompanied by flashing lights and the smell of onions? I bet this would sound fan-frickin-tastic.
On a podcast I listened to the other day, this question was posed:
When your ISP claims your connection’s unlimited, but then applies usage caps, or blocks certain bandwidth-hungry applications… how can they still claim it’s “All You Can Eat”?
Isn’t there case law in the world of catering?
Well, I had to find out.
And in the process – as is often the way – I discovered a ton of extra information which now needs to go somewhere, otherwise one day my brain will explode under the sheer pressure of trivia.
So here, my friends, are five things you never knew about the world of (new acronym, sincere apologies) A.Y.C.E. dining.
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1) Variety is a dangerous thing
According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, it’s not just greed that makes us overfill our plates at the All You Can Eat buffet counter.
Authors Joseph P. Redden (University of Minnesota) and Stephen J. Hoch (University of Pennsylvania) found that, when faced with a large variety of items, consumers tend to underestimate how much of each item is present.
When participants were asked to pour food into containers, they poured more when the candy had a variety of colors. “This occurs even though people knew they could not consume the candy,” the authors add. “Specifically, people pour more in the presence of variety since they perceive lesser quantities [...] Since prior research has shown that people eat most of what they serve themselves, variety could lead people to eat more solely due to this perceptual influence.”
This isn’t the only scientific research on diners’ behaviour at A.Y.C.E. outlets.
In a study published in the journal Obesity, Cornell University’s Food & Brand Lab reported that in Chinese buffets “compared to normal weight diners, overweight individuals sat 16 feet closer to the buffet, faced the food, used larger plates, ate with forks instead of chopsticks, and served themselves immediately instead of browsing”.
Brilliantly, the same laboratory also conducted a study of how we perceive portion size, by using doctored soup bowls. This is 50% Professor Heinz Wolff, 50% Wallace & Gromit.
The soup apparatus was housed in a modified restaurant-style table in which two of four bowls slowly and imperceptibly refilled as their contents were consumed [...] Participants who were unknowingly eating from self-refilling bowls ate more soup (14.7 ± 8.4 vs. 8.5 ± 6.1 oz; F1, 52=8.99; p<.01) than those eating from normal soup bowls. Yet despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls.
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2) Sport and troughing do mix
Heading to the US any time soon? Fancy taking in a ball game?
Why waste your time spectating, when you could be participating in your own competitive endeavour: figuring out how much grub you can cram into your face before you expire and/or the final whistle blows?
Put simply, this is a ticket in a designated area of a sports ground which entitles you to mount multiple raids on the concessions stands for as long as there’s some kind of (potentially distracting, in my opinion) sporting activity happening below.
Seven hot dogs, three cokes, a bottle of water and a half a bag of peanuts – that was the price for my dignity today as I stuffed my face at the All You Can Eat event at the Rogers Centre. I was proud and ashamed of myself all at the same time.
You could walk up to any food stand in the designated area and just serve yourself. People definitely took advantage of this and would literally stuff their shirts full of chips and peanuts, then grab four hot dogs and head for their seats.
The strangest part of the afternoon was when our sections started chanting “pizza, pizza, pizza” in hopes that the Blue Jays would get their seventh strikeout to win them a slice of pizza. Glad to see they had their priorities straight.
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3) Gastronauts are greedy pigs too
In this country we’ve traditionally associated A.Y.C.E. with low-rent Oriental buffets: plates of ruddy, MSG-infused meat and batter, sweating under remorseless orange lights.
But unlimited nosh can be a gourmet’s delight too. Witness the $48 Sunday Smörgåsbord Brunch at Aquavit, New York City’s premier Scandinavian restaurant.
$48?! A family of four could gorge themselves insensible at Taybarns for that! Not on this kind of refined menu, they couldn’t – featuring Vodka Lime Herring, Pyttipanna, Egg with Kalles Kaviar, Västerbotten Cheese and much more, all washed down by “a complimentary Danish Mary made with Karlsson’s Gold vodka”.
But even New York Magazine can’t help but descend to the Taybarns mentality as they encourage you to:
claim a booth in the posh Sunday-afternoon serenity of the Aquavit dining room, strategize a plan of attack, and proceed to decimate the lavish spread in the room next door.
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4) Zen and the art of filling your face
I’ve been interested in business processes ever since I read Jack: Straight From The Gut. This is the autobiography of GE’s legendary CEO Jack Welch, and it bangs on a great deal about things like Six Sigma – an industrial philosophy designed to improve quality and reduce costs.
You’ll have guessed where I’m going here. Even when you’re shovelling limitless hunks of pork down punters’ throats, there’s always room for some high-end process innovation.
In this blogpost, Pete Abilla describes a visit to one Texan eaterie, and its adoption of a production line technique more often seen in Toyota factories: Kanban.
Kanban is a visual control that signals to the previous step that it is need of more resources, material, or something other. Kanban is similar to a gasoline light in a car. When a car is in need of gasoline, the gasoline light blinks as a signal to the driver to get more gasoline. At Toyota, every step in the manufacturing process has a Kanban, creating a “pull” effect that cascades backwards to the beginning of the manufacturing cycle.
How did this manifest itself in the All You Can Eat environment, I hear you ask?
At the restaurant, they had their own version of the Kanban. They had 2 colored coasters: Green and Red. Green is a signal for more meat; red is a signal to stop. Again, this was a simple system, but a powerful one. The coasters signals to the server, and when the server runs out of meat, he visits the kitchen for more meat, where they have their own Kanban system set-up.
Can someone please tell me where I’ve seen a Sbarro restaurant before? In London? Abroad? I have zero idea.
Anyway, Sbarro in Times Square is the scene of the alimentary crime in this moment from Krush Groove - arguably hip-hop’s most significant cinematic masterpiece. Yes, it’s The Fat Boys’ 1985 paean to the infinitely-refillable platter, titled (you guessed it) – All You Can Eat!
Pay special attention, in the YouTube clip below, to the Boys’ second helping at 2’08″. For one thing, they’re in breach of the house rules. Sbarro’s NYC Dinner deal is clearly defined as a “one-pass buffet” - hence the hapless employee’s remonstrations at 3’17″.
Secondly, as well as polishing off a set of hefty-looking Italian sausages, they manage to eat an entire poster-sized illustration of food from the restaurant wall. That’s going beyond the spirit of the deal, in my view.
Anyway, The Fat Boys should count themselves lucky. They may well boast
$3.99 for all you can eat / Well, I’mma stuff my face to a funky beat
but the same menu plan would set back today’s tourist $16.00. Now that’s enough to cause indigestion.
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Further reading
Still peckish?
I strongly recommend Eating The Road’s blogpost The All-Inclusive All-You-Can-Eat Buffet Guide, which masterfully breaks the A.Y.C.E. experience into its eight constituent elements, and offers sage advice for each. Sample, from Exit Strategy:
You should have the closest possible parking spot to the exit and be able to waddle right to your car. A good point to be made is if at all possible, do not be the driver. Your body will want nothing more than to sit and digest its lavish feast. You will not want to be thinking and making life decisions like whether or not to go through a yellow light.
I’ve been fascinated and absorbed by ambient music for decades now (along with its near neighbours, systems music and minimalism).
As an artistic form, ambient can be highly sophisticated. But fundamentally it’s very simple: long, slow, meditative pieces which, when played, form a “backdrop” to what’s going on, rather than demanding attention.
If you’ve never experienced it, or fancy trying your hand at producing some yourself, there’s now a brilliant online experiment which will allow you to do just that.
Just visit inbflat.net and follow the instructions (all 14 words of them).
It flags up 
