
With my big goth sister and her bitchin' black nail polish!

The Who declared that rock is dead, so long live rock. Elvis Costello named the murderer -- high-speed Internet.
Liverpool's second-most acerbic pop star isn't the first person to make this observation, but after nearly three decades of paying the rent on vinyl, tape and silicon, he is familiar enough with the way the music industry works to know when the vital signs are off. Costello, who made his remarks at the just-concluded South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin, Texas, said the end was nearer than many think.
"As soon as broadband is big enough, the record (retailing) business is over," Costello said, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "They will have to change or die ... It's going to be about five minutes to the end. All bets are off." Costello also said that "music chains like Tower Records had 'let the spirit go out of it.'"
[T]he U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments next week about whether Internet music-swapping services like Grokster and Morpheus break the law simply by existing.
When I discuss broadband technology, the first thing I do is break out the iPod and play something like Hey Ya by Outkast (gets the blood pumping when you're talking about boring techno stuff). My students think it's just a time wasting thing at first, but as we discuss how MP3s changed the music industry, it starts to dawn on them that it isn't just a lark but that there is indeed a method to my madness. We talk about compression, bandwidth, business models, how all this can be a lesson to the movie industry, etc. I note that my relationship to music fundamentally changed when it became possible to fit my entire collection into a shirt pocket.
In the midst of the discussion I talk about (the lack of) encryption and how the inventors of the CD never imagined a time when harddrive space would be so cheap that one could store thousands of songs on a computer. I also observe that the reason CDs have the storage capacity that they do is because Sony wanted to be able to fit all of Beethoven's Ninth, which had required multiple vinyl platters before, onto a single disc.
Recent developments in technology have made an amazing amount of legal, illegal, and questionable activities possible for music fans. As always, the new technology has been liberating to some, frightening to others, and confusing to nearly all. As the music industry, consumers, lawyers, and just about everyone else grapple with the new abilities to copy, send, and work with music, record labels are putting out an increasing number of CDs containing technology to limit access to the music. Amid the lawsuits, piracy, and debate, PopMatters thought it was time to chime in. Here we present views from an analytical specialist, a frustrated writer/consumer, and a pissed-off whore.
PCP: Unlike most power pop bands, Blue Ash had a really tough instrumental sound, very similar to what The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Faces, and the Stones sounded like live at the time, not at all like bands played in the '60s, even though you chose to play '60s style 3-minute pop songs using that '70s big rock sound.
FS: Well, you know we were a three piece band with a singer; Jim (Kendzor) didn't play much guitar live, so we all played a lot to make the sound bigger live. So I played a lot of bass, Bill (Bartolin) played a lot of lead guitar, and Dave (Evans) played the Keith Moon-style drums, we did all that to deliberately make the sound 'bigger' live. I've switched to rhythm guitar now, so the sound is actually much better, I think, than it was then, now that we have two guitars live. We have an old friend, Bobby Darden play bass, we have all the original members, plus TWO original drummers. All four original members sing, so we have 4-part harmonies. I thought the hardest thing to get back would be the singing, but a lot of us have quit smoking, so we actually sing better than we used to. I have an extra note in my range now (laughing). We're just nailin' everything, you know?!
CBGB's, with its familiar white awning, holds a special place in the city's music history. It was here that the Ramones, the Talking Heads and Blondie created the punk scene for small crowds that paid a $1 cover charge.
"CBGB's allowed bands - original bands, no less - the freedom to go and play and do whatever they pleased,'' recalls Tommy Ramone. "It was a good fit.''
Rosenblatt [Muzzy Rosenblatt, director of the Bowert Residents' Committee] is aware of the club's legacy. He and his future wife shared their first kiss inside the club, although he's quick to add that nostalgia won't keep its doors open.
"I will not subsidize CBGB's at the expense of the homeless,'' Rosenblatt said. "I can't allow my own sentimentality to impede our ability to serve homeless people.''
*There were multiple Andy Partridges. Somewhat pasty, bespectacled, sporting driving caps. Often doughy.
*Bikers, often with genuinely horrendous teeth. Hippies of all shapes and sizes.
*Punks. My favorite was a guy who had to be over 40, with hair uncannily like the Flock of Seagulls guy's. Differences? Jet black. And everything EXCEPT the wings was shaved.
*Many shaved men generally, in fact. One drunk guy near us kept stroking his own head.
*Lots of people with lots of tattoos.
*The really, really drunk guy, some vague cross between Kurt Cobain and The Onion's Jim Anchower. Flannel, stocking cap.
*Many guys--including a friend of ours--with Stonewall Jackson's facial hair. Our friend happens to be a Virginian, but that could hardly have been true for the three or four others I saw, one in an engineer's cap!
*Thers and I were shamed by the revelation of the weakness of our bond. How do we know? We clearly love each other less than the heavily inked couple right in front of us who spent the evening with their hands in each other's back pockets. This is my definition of love, owing its genesis to roller skating arenas of the late 1970's, in which this pose was often featured while skating, announcing couplehood to the assembled masses.
Atrios asks for: Bands Which Suck But You Love Anyway
I don't mean a couple boy band tracks you groove to guiltily at the gym. I mean, a band whose entire catalog is sitting on your shelf and you eagerly wait their next release but about which you are embarrassed...
Well, I have to say that I have a generally more favorable impression of MTV, which I take from being born in the hinterlands as opposed to the metropole. Dunno about anyone else here, but refinnej, eli, and thers are all city kids, and so didn't have MTV until 84 or 85, at which point yes, it sucked. But from 1981-84, there was an amazing amount of new and experimental music on MYV, things I still have trouble finding on CD. Slow Children, Tenpole Tudor, weird stuff like Total Coelo--there was a lot on early MTV that never made it to radio.
JM: We shot four videos in late 1979 for the European market (MTV was still two years away): "Too Late," "Tomorrow Night," "Cruel You" and "In My Arms Again" and they were some of the earliest videos played on MTV. At the time, some of the VJs actually wore Shoes T-shirts on the air! VH-1 still plays them from time to time, but by today's standards they look very primitive, being shot on videotape instead of film in a live performance format. We shot all four in one day. As MTV asked us for additional videos two years later, Elektra refused saying MTV was 'a flash in the pan' and 'no big deal' (They actually owned it, as MTV was a WEA/AmEx creation). That proved to be a fatal mistake.
What the new wave amounted to, in brief, was a violent short-circuiting of the normally slow process involved in bringing new groups and new music to the record-buying public. In place of the long and ardurous trek from garage band to album deal, the new wave created instant records, by groups that were new enough to be fresh, innovative, and unencumbered by the usual commercial considerations required to make it in the music business. By making the young groups appear to be an asset to the record companies, the new wave shifted the focus of the industry away from the older, stagnant performers and towards the radically different groups, sporting a new look, and playing a music that captured all the missing excitement of the unsophisticated early days of rock. The new wave broke all the establishes rules of the rock world, created a whole flock of new ways of working, and brought to the fore an amazing assortment of people and ideas that brought rock 'n' roll out of its doldrums. In England, after some initial resistance and problems, the movement proved thoroughly successful, and was ultimately adopted and institutionalized by the very forces it sought to evade. In a sense, the idealism of new wave was lost as its commercial aspects took hold, but the resulting changes brought about more than justify whatever sense of failure there might have been.
An idiosyncratic blog dedicated to the precursors, the practioners, and the descendants of power pop. All suggestions for postings and sidebar links welcome, contact any of us.