XX

The XX “Crystalised”

DJ Mehdi

Dj Mehdi “Signatune”

How Music Changed My Life

I grew up listening to the sounds of the 60s, The Beatles and a bit of Motown, two things I still enjoy. But since I was a little kid, there were a few songs that really opened my ears to something completely new. This doesn’t necessarily mean these songs or artists are the best their respective genres have to offer, they were enough to get me to check out new things.

In chronological order, songs that changed the way I thought about music:

Dr. Dre “Nuthin’ But a G Thang” – I was in fourth grade at a friend’s house when I saw Dr. Dre come across the screen in his droptop on hydraulics. I think my draw dropped to the floor. I’d heard rap before, but never anything like THIS. This started a life long love affair with hip-hop. These days I listen to more of the underground stuff – Aesop Rock, Little Brother, and the Cunninlynguists.

I picked up Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle, Dre’s protege’s first album, a short while after hearing G Thang. My parents found this cassette and were NOT happy. I wasn’t able to buy albums with parental advisory stickers after that whole incident. Grunge and punk rock, for some reason, were acceptable. About a decade later, my parents would let me take my little brother to see Snoop in concert for his 16th birthday.

Nirvana “Heart Shaped Box”  – I actually like Nirvana’s earlier albums better, but this is where I started listening to grunge music. This lead to other things, but Nirvana is pretty much the epitome of grunge.

In college I worked at a CD store and thought it was strange when the little kids came in with Kurt Cobain t-shirts. While I think grunge defined the late 1980s/early 1990s, I don’t feel like this genre transcends that period in time. I can’t really see younger generations getting into Stone Temple Pilots or Soundgarden. Maybe I’m naive, but this stuff doesn’t seem to fit in with post 9/11 thinking. Most of grunge was about suffering from addiction, feeling alone, and the crappy state of society. I mean, we have Obama now! What do we have to be depressed about?

For me, grunge paved the way to garage and punk rock.

Nine Inch Nails “Closer” – Post Industrial music. I feel this song exposed me to a bit of electronica, without moving me too far away from the distorted guitars of grunge. I know I’ve said this before, but you should really see NIN in concert.

NoFX “Philty Phil Philanthropist” -  In seventh grade I started listening to a lot of bands on the Epitaph label, sort of by chance.  Someone I hesitate to call a friend had one of their CDs and I decided to it check it out. I didn’t like it on my first listen – it has a really raw sound. The album actually talks a bit about capitalism and a few other moderately “political” things, so I was intrigued. I started listening to Rancid and a few other punk acts shortly thereafter.

Since Epitaph was an independent label, I started picking up samplers for other indie rock acts. This eventually led me to The Impossibles – a band that today would likely be classified as emo. I was emo before there was a word for it. And if someone did mention “emo” in those days, it wasn’t an insult.

The term originated from emotional hardcore punk. None of those guys wore eyeliner. If anything, you would have thought there were a bunch of beer swilling frat boys (unless they were straight edge, and then you would just assume they were just a bunch of asshole frat boys – there is a difference). Nowadays emo is associated with tight-jean wearing, eye-lined teenagers that hang out at Hot Topic. I’m pretty convinced that AFI is at fault for starting all that, but I’m not really sure who labeled this “emo.”

Daft Punk “Around the World” – Electronica! Like “Heart Shaped Box,” this song was my first exposure to Daft Punk. And like In Utero, my first exposure to Daft Punk isn’t what I considered their best work. As far as I’m concerned, Discovery is their masterpiece. Daft Punk lead me to Orbital and Bjork – both acts that I would fit under the electronica/house umbrella, but each with a very different sound.

And sort of like a color wheel, musical genres blend together to form new sounds. The blending of electronica and punk/indie rock brought us acts like Minus the Bear and Cut Copy.  You can see how each group is a blend of my “primary” genres. Same goes for Kid Cudi and M.I.A. – both blend elements of hip-hop and electronica (I’d even say there is a bit of indie rock in there). And this is pretty cool.

Passion Pit – Sleepyhead

Passion Pit “Sleepyhead”

The End of Twitter – Why Facebook with Supersede Twitter’s Usefulness

I’ve been using Twitter for close to three years now. At first, I didn’t see it’s usefulness.  I’m frequently bored by what I’m doing, why would anyone else care to know I’m editing PowerPoints at the office or want to hear me complain about the bad television I’m watching?

But then usage of Twitter evolved. Adding hash tags to my thoughts gave my tweets context. I could see what other people thought of debates between Obama and McCain (#debate08), episodes of #Heroes became an interactive Mystery Science Theater 3000 as I tweeted my thoughts on what would happen next and laughed about some of the silly props with other viewers, and I came to enjoy the Tweetup at both concerts and networking events.

But the excitement and interest on the social web shifts like the desert sands. Things seem to be changing once again.  Facebook has over 200 million users and many of them update their status regularly. Although I cannot find stats on the volume of wallposts versus tweets , I would guess that Facebook users are more inclined to update their status than Twitter users because Facebook users (all 200 million of them) spend an average of 4 hours and 39 minutes on the site every month, and Twitter users (25 million) spend and average of five. And let’s not forget that Twitter has an 80 percent abandonment rate and that 10 percent of Twitter users create 90 percent of all tweets.

Now before you go on saying how I’m bashing Twitter – I’m not.  I think it’s great. I just think it is a niche network that is reaching its saturation point and that a more mainstream site, like Facebook, is going to take take microblogging to the next level.

What I see happening to Twitter

As advertisers, spammers and public figures hop on Twitter, the site becomes more about promoting oneself or one’s agenda. The site is less and less about conversation between individuals and more a channel for advertisers to hock their wares. I’m exaggerating a bit – it’s not traveling salesmen selling snake oil; it’s thought leaders and people with influence talking to the masses to try to convince others of their point. Even people providing entertainment aren’t likely doing it altruistically, but to gain some notoriety. So for all intents and purposes, Twitter is becoming a commercial channel to sell your brand (brand = ideas, yourself, tangible products, etc).

As more commercial Twitter feeds are launched (this includes all the types of accounts for self-promotion mentioned above), the less everyday folk will tweet – that is to say professional users will drown out amateur tweets.  This seems to happen in all mediums of communication. (I’d even argue that YouTube now has its own celebrities that people regularly follow, making the whole community less amateur and more commercial.) The radio didn’t originally have ads, nor did the Internet – but marketers will eventually take over and sully an otherwise pure channel. I’d say most people don’t want to be advertised to based on their TiVo habits.

And this is happening with Twitter. Most of my followers are vacant accounts with a baited link that will infect my computer with some nasty STD, internet cam whores, or marketers hoping I will follow them because they follow me (not going to happen). Why are these people following me? Because they all think they can get my attention in some manner.

And to come degree Twitter is encouraging this type of behavior. It’s going to launch commercial accounts in the near future that will put companies in touch with interested users. I doubt this very much. Unless I’m very interested in the product (at the moment I’m following @Diablo in hopes of learning more about the Diablo 3 video game. In the three days I’ve followed it, it’s been entirely worthless. @Marvel, however, does a wonderful job).

What’s going to happen next?

People are still going to use Twitter, but it will mostly be for real-time information gathering – like metro delays, traffic reports, sports scores and to follow their favorite celebrities. It’s going to be a message dissemination channel. Sure you’re always going to have your die-hard users – but it’s going to gain any more traction with the plebs (I use this term in jest – I simply mean non-techies).

As Twitter becomes more like QVC, people will turn to other sites to post their status updates – the most likely candidate, by sheer user volume, is Facebook. And, as I posited above, people likely doing this now. And Facebook is going to make it easy for people to broadcast their status updates across all networks.

One recent, immediate step is the Facebook app that allows you to send you status update to Twitter. This is just the start.

With Facebook’s recent acquisition of Friendfeed, a site that collects all of your web activity into one feed as well as allows you the ability to post new content to several sites, it is trying to position itself as aggregate source for all social media activity across the net. This will content aggregation will likely be integrated into Facebook very soon.With new widgets, applications and other software, Facebook will be the one site you’ll log in to update all of your social network accounts – making Twitter entirely moot for 99% of its users.

And finally, I would guess that almost all Twitter users also have Facebook accounts. And when people eventually pull down some of the privacy walls they’ve built up on Facebook, we’ll see mircoblogging reinvented.

I’m giving Twitter three more years – then Facebook becomes the mircoblogging hub of the Internet.

So, what do you think?

House party

One of my friends was gracious enough to invite me to a house party. It was held at her friend’s apartment. I don’t know what you all think when you hear house party, but I tend to think of college – people everywhere, loud music, binge drinking, and probably an altercation about someone being served a beer with soap in it (that really happened – more than once).

Last night was an eye-opening experience that made me ask “how did it come to this?”  The night started off well enough – lots of free food, a nice beer, people that were somewhat willing to engage in conversation.

Upon entering the house, I was given a name tag with a state on it. The idea was to find the person with a location on their name tag that corresponded to yours. Great idea! It’s a fun little ice breaker. Then about two hours into the party, I realized the hostess had some kind of crazy neurosis. I was asked, several times, if I had found my match. I must say, I wasn’t actively seeking my counterpart. I was going with the flow, not forcing any awkward conversation. And so I was chastised.

Fair enough. I wasn’t playing by the rules. I met my person, we talked for a second, then went our separate ways. The group I was with migrated to another room and we found Catchphrase, a social game. We started to play. The hostess came into the room and asked what we were doing. Apparently this was an unsanctioned type of fun. Twice chastised.

Over the next couple of hours, the group of people playing Catchphrase increased. A really drunk girl harped in, shouting answers. Not to be a jerk or whatever, but she had really saggy boobs in a dress that didn’t help the girls out and she wasn’t wearing a bra. And I saw her nipple. Obviously, we became fast friends. The guy she was with was actually really cool and I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was doing with her. Slumming I guess. When she left the room, he made a point to say that she wasn’t his girlfriend – twice. That made me feel a little better. Sticking with the post topic, I think he should ask himself, “How did it come to this?”

Anyway, at some point I went to the bathroom. Maybe 10 minutes later, the hostess is asking me if I was the last person in the bathroom. Thinking something had gone horribly awry in there, I said, “Maybe?” I figured she was going to tell me that toilet had overflowed or that someone had pissed all over everything. Nope, I had left the toilet seat up. I gave a stunned apology. This lady TRACKED ME DOWN to tell me this. And even stranger, I got the feeling the nipple flasher ratted me out. She was sort of standing over the shoulder of the hostess as I was scolded. If that’s the worst thing that happens at your house party, you ma’am, are not allowed to call your event a “party.” It’s more of a soiree (and pronounce that “sorry,” as in “it was a sorry excuse for a party”). Thrice chastised. Apparently, I’m not cut out for such civil affairs.

That’s when I asked myself – what have I become? My 21 year-old self would definitely want to kick my current self in the nuts. And I’d let him, because my social functions are a sad state of affairs. At the same time, these events make me appreciate my friends a whole lot more. Friends – you are awesome. Let’s have a real party sometime.

Other highlights:

• Conversation with a 35 year-old woman, new to DC, on the prowl for men. I asked her what she liked to do, which she told me have a glass of wine with a friend. I suggested several wine bars. Her retort – the men aren’t at those places. I should have told her to try online dating, but that would only validate my theory that most people using those sites having some kind of incurable social stigma about them. In the few minutes of our conversation, I got the impression she would never be happy with anything. She tried to one-up me just about every time I said something. I may be guilty of some braggadocio, but this wasn’t the fun type. She also asked me if I was a lobbyist. I think I was offended.
• I managed to get painted into a conversation topic corner. I had a really awkward exchange about this person’s out of the country trip for like 20 minutes. And there were a lot of palpable pauses and no openings to change the topic.
• Heard a story from a girl that said she slept next to (not with – in the coital sense) George Clooney, in his hotel room. No offense to her, but I feel George has more discerning tastes. Sorry lady, you’re a liar!

3 Years Later

Come August 1, I will have lived in my current DC apartment for three years. I can’t really complain about the experience. The building supers have been great, the building manager is accomodating (like when I went out of town for three weeks he tossed my mail under the door), and the neighbors are friendly and quiet.

But having lived here three years, I still get the previous tenant’s mail. We’re not talking about junk mail, I’m talking about hand-addressed letters.

I’ve taken it upon myself to inform the senders of these personal letters that the intended recipient of their message no longer lives at this address.  I cross out the address, write RTS (mail slang for Return to Sender), followed by, “Nancy hasn’t lived at this address, for three years. If you do not know this by now, you aren’t friends.”

Internet Sharing and Community – Part II

Marx and Engels start the Communist Manifesto with a warning: the people in power are scared of the coming changes. This warning can be adapted for our times:

A spectre is haunting the Internet – the spectre of file sharing networks. All the powers of old media have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the RIAA, the MPAA, the corporate lawyers and government police-spies of the FCC.

After reading Lessig’s book Remix, I realized the war waged on file sharing could be made into a Marxist argument.

Current intellectual property laws give rights to the copyright holders. In most cases, this is not the artist. For musicians that sign a contract with a record label, the record label retains exclusive rights to the artists’ songs. Over time, the length of a copyright has been increased dramatically. Originally, the rights to an idea, song or movie were held for 20 years. But now it has been increased to the life of the artist plus 99 years. Since the artist doesn’t own the rights to the songs, the record label stands to gain much from this arrangement.

After years of abuse, the musicians are fed-up with the poor treatment received at the hands of their tormentors. Music sales have also declined. The price of media has continued to rise, but there has been little reason for the cost hike. Online distribution eliminates the need for manufacturing and physical distribution, so it should reduce the cost to consumers.

Marx argues that when the working class rises up to fight the unfair and oppressive ruling class, it will then redistribute the wealth so that everyone shares ownership of property. After this revolution, anything created by an individual   can be used by anyone without having to ask permission. Comparing this to communism, the file sharing networks take property in the form of mp3s from the RIAA or ripped movies from the MPAA (the bourgeoisie in this instance) and redistributes it to the masses (the proletariat).  Most people do not view intangible electronic files as something that one can possess due to the lack of a physical presence.

It seems the time for revolution is now.

Artists such as Nine Inch Nails and, to a lesser extent, Radiohead, are releasing their music for free.  File sharing networks are most of the traffic on the Internet. The MPAA and RIAA are trying to put the kibosh on any extra curricular activity.

The Internet is the great equalizer Marx envisioned. With the Internet, any one individual has as much power as the next.  If the entire Internet community united against the media companies, nothing could be done to stop it.

So, do I feel sympathy for the record companies? Not really. I do feel bad for struggling artists. If I enjoy their music, I should support them in some fashion. If I don’t buy their albums, then I should at least make an attempt to see them live or purchase a t-shirt from their website. As one of my friends told me, “albums are loss leaders for tours.” The music is the advertising used to pull in more revenue.

Internet Sharing and Community – part I

I’ve been ready Lessig’s Remix:Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. In his book, Lessig mentions several open-source projects and how they are made better by the community. For example, volunteers improve Wikipedia entries on their own time without compensation (other than the satisfaction knowing they are helping others). A similar attitude can be found in the open-source software community; people update and improve lines of  code, usually to meet a specific need, but provide these enhancements for free to the entire community.

This type of sharing can be found on the Internet as a whole, especially with file sharing. Metcalfe’s Law suggests that the more people in a social network, the more value it has. With Bit torrent, the more people sharing the better the network. But there is also an element of comraderie. People sharing files do so because they want to help other people. It isn’t a giant “Fuck you” to the RIAA and MPAA (although it turned into that). No one dislikes the artists of the music or movies they are “distributing.” They are fans who want other fans to have the material.

Global Warming

Al Gore talks a bit more about global warming. From February 2009.