Ignorance can be as harmful as hate, even though there is no malicious intent in there. In fact, no matter what your intent is, you can still cause harm and spread poison through the culture. If your intent is to not care about how you affect other humans, then that's not too far from being hateful.
Yeah, if we count people playing an instrument on someone else's album or coming up with certain parts as "featuring," then a LOT of albums would have features. This kind of collaboration is surprisingly common when you look at any random band's liner notes & credits.
Still excited though. Wonder what a cool drum machine part sounds like.
I understand the idea is that it's a parody of the kind of ruthless tearing-down of celebrities that we do, but it seems like that wasn't properly set up with the right context? It reads more like a shock value joke, something where the one trick is to purely say something that is naughty and awful, and when it's at the expense of a 9 year old girl, that's a pretty shitty joke.
Even assuming that it's supposed to be a rad takedown aimed at the TMZ-types, it still seems off-target to use a little girls as collateral damage. Suppose they wanted to make a point about oversexualization of celebrities, what if they had made a joke that was more aggressively hypersexual than anything Seth McFarlane even hinted at, aimed at a 9 year old girl? Would that have been a Cool Edgy Worthwhile Satire Joke?
They're definitely at a disadvantage, since the appeal of their newness has been replaced. It seems only "events" like a new Leonard Cohen album are recalled.
I AM STEALING SOME OF YOUR IDEAS
Andy Dwyer
April Ludgate
BMO
Joe Biden
Gillian Jacobs
Maru
Sufjan Stevens
Idris Elba
Daniel Bryan
Blake Griffin
Sarah Vowell to give us all kinds of interesting, funny and depressing Thanksgiving history while we eat
I was mostly aware of the DJ after realizing that the people had to keep dancing/celebrating for the cameras for a long time while they waited for Romney to concede and then Obama to speak. No wonder he ran out of songs. If I was picking music, I'd be freaking out about how to keep these clearly tired people swaying.
I was drunk looking for my friends at a club and so I texted one of them, "where are you guys" followed by "fuck you." I don't know why I amended the last part.
Anyway, I found him and he punched me in the face.
I think artists dislike Spotify because the idea that it's taking away paying customers, that no one's buying albums because they can just listen to it on Spotify, and then they get mere pennies. But people are stealing music anyway. So if we approach it the way some artists approach illegal downloads -- that is, using free music as a marketing tool to grow an audience that will hopefully become concert goers, t-shirt buyers and loyal fans -- then Spotify is better than putting an EP on Megaupload. A curious potential fan who heard about your band on a blog isn't downloading your EP on The Pirate Bay anymore, they're checking it out on Spotify, and in that instance pennies > nothing.
It feels like Spotify wasn't designed not to be your income, but a compromise between the free-for-all-eat-everything download culture and the labels that wish radio still made them bank. It feels like they want this to become the 21st century radio, except instead of 50 different songs being played every day, it's now an infinite number of songs, and so they hope to aggregate the pennies from those plays into a decent payoff.
Also I feel like in all of these debates I have to put the disclaimer that I buy art all the time and I bought the new Grizzly on release please dont hunt me down oh god
Good points all around, but it seems to be about the weaknesses of today's download culture and not its strengths. Because while I agree it sucks, and that it is just one of the shitty realities of the modern day that we all have to adapt to, it's not without its benefits. There's a trade off, and I think today artists of all mediums have to work with its strengths instead of trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
Would either of you be better off in the "cuddly" major label days? The days before blogs? It's hard to say, but there was far less space at the top because it was all maintained by gatekeepers like labels, radio DJs and what have you. I don't know if Grizzly Bear would have even gotten big enough to be a cover story on New York Magazine were it not for the internet build. I don't know if they'd even have the chance to be not-rich were it not for the ubiquity of downloading.
I think they're just running out of notable mainstream comedians. They've already run through all the late night talk show hosts and they don't want to get Ricky Gervais to an awards show for the 9th time so now they're reaching into animation.
As someone who works in a creative field, despite people telling you otherwise, sometimes it seems like you HAVE to do a bunch of free stuff before people notice you. I have no problem with that.
It DOES, however, rub me the wrong way that Amanda Palmer is really really dead set on not compensating her volunteers. For me, it's not that "no one should ever play for free," it's that because of her history & fan involvement, Amanda Palmer seems like she SHOULD be "one of the good ones." We all know there are shitty predatory internships that basically amount to free labor & busy work, but there are also good ones that take care of you. I think we just expected Palmer to be one of the latter.
I wonder if she's just making a light hearted joke or, as someone who has never had to manage her own money in here entire adult life, she just doesn't know how these tax things work.
I'm guessing that's the result of different word jockeys commissioned to write different patches of the piece and the introduction writer wasn't really sure what the overall theme/message was supposed to be because they just wanted to do something provocative and easy ("HIPSTERS! Am I RIGHT?!?")
But even within their own blurbs it's confusing. They equate fun. with Arcade Fire, Death Cab with Weezer, Beach House with Massive Attack and Stereolab. It's all so... huh?
I'll never understand the point of provoking people at an attempt of being edgy and counter-counter-cultural. Other than pageviews.
I imagine their idea of "free speech" is you ordering 40 chicken nuggets at Chick-Fil-A and begrudgingly eating it while hating them, because goddammit you're an American, and you're obligated to give money to people everyone you hate.
I'd like to see you guys dig in on the Penny Arcade kickstarter. I mean, you'd probably have to get acquainted with Penny Arcade, the webcomics hierarchy, their history and all that but once you do, BOY that one's a thousand times more audacious than this!
I think we just have a fundamental disagreement of how we interpret the event. You're still seeing it as a "rape joke," therefore it's fair game because then you can construct what the point of the joke is, but to me it still reads that he's invoking the specter of rape to silence a person. The authorial intent doesn't matter nearly as much to me when the actual fact of what you are doing is using the threat of rape so someone would sit down and shut up. And there are other, less gross, less vile ways to disarm a disruption.
Anthony Jeselnik, another comedian who sort of lives in the offensive zone but applies more craft than Daniel Tosh's style of push-a-button meanness, said on Marc Maron's podcast: "I'd make a joke about miscarriages, but I would never make fun of someone's miscarriage." He was talking about specificity, and in this, there's a specificity that pushes it beyond "making a joke" into "making an attack," and that's not something I can support. It's not about avoiding offending people, it's about avoiding hurting people.*
* = "But what about George W. Bush jokes?" Obviously power dynamics factor into this, that's the way humor works here, you can aim it anonymously towards general types of people or you can aim it up, but aiming it down specifically (eg Don Imus ranting on a black women's college basketball team) makes you a bully and you deserve the backlash that comes with it.
>"“Can’t we all just get along? We are all humane people here” and getting immediately shanked after saying this. Or an honest and trusting person during a looting saying “I trust you people to respect my property like the decent human beings you are” and having all his stuff immediately stolen."
Those all seem like bullying/personal attacks to me. Not "creating absurdist situations." In your hypothetical, i don't think the shanker is going, "this is going to be a great contrast of emotions once I stab him." I think he just wanted to hurt a dude because he could, and because the dude opened himself up.
The worst thing about springing to support Daniel Tosh, as Louie did, is that Daniel Tosh is fucking fine! You think he's losing millions on a rash of blog posts? Dude doesn't even feel bad he called for the gang rape of an audience member, why does he need your support and solidarity? He's going to forget this happened in a few days and keep bathing in his millions for being a shock jock with youtube videos.
Meanwhile, I guarantee the audience member who posted the initial experience on her blog is getting a constant stream of misogyny trolling because that's the nature of the internet.
Superman & DC Comics are owned by Warner Bros, so no DC movie is in danger of switching movie rights. The reason we're getting a new Superman reboot so soon is that they want to napalm the last one where Superman is an absent father which has little to no franchise potential.
But get ready for that Fantastic 4 reboot!
Great show. Their set piece was really cool -- simple, but it could do a lot. I was hoping you'd have a picture of the end when Victoria played in silhouette with that rainbow shear shirt ... very good visual and audio combination going on at this tour.
Here's my issue with the Lowery piece: I don't recognize the type of downloader he's describing. The person who buys "fair trade" coffee and american made clothing aren't the type that download with reckless abandon and no regard for the artist. At least, not in my experience. It seems to me the typical digital music geek, that is concerned with fairness and support, downloads a lot, and then pays for the stuff they really love in legit downloads, pre-orders, concert tickets, and merch. I know a lot of us go the extra mile to support small artists. As weird as it is, there seems to be an emerging self-sustaining community of artists and consumers who will pay out of the social/ethical pressure to do so. It doesn't work every time, but it has also worked in times when the old model wouldn't. I don't like the way Lowery paints a generation as hypocritical in the way they treat their beliefs and their music fandom.
I'm also uncomfortable when he veers towards getting Google & AT&T involved in restricting their ad network and search results.
Come down to what, making clothes? Is fashion really a strike against artistic integrity?
It's a peripheral interest. Some people make comedy duos. Some people make comic books. Some people make fashion lines.
Comments