Village Voice:

…it was Friday night’s screening and live soundtracks (created by Detroit techno godfather Carl Craig and Berlin’s nsi. duo) for Andy Warhol silent films Blow Job (1964) and Kiss (1963) that proved the festival’s love of the long departed pop artist. One can easily imagine the entire festival moving over from Poland after seven years and bringing along Finnish, German, and Romanian artists just to host these events amid Warhol’s old environs.

For Blow Job, a 35-minute study of theater director DeVeren Bookwalter’s facial reaction in the grips of an off-camera set of lips, Carl Craig exacted a similar intimacy from his analog components. On-screen, the audience was subjected to Bookwalter, off-center and at times out of the frame, as his eyelids fluttered, neck clenched, and mouth grew agape. Warhol’s film depicts both ecstasy and separation from its enacting; similiarly, Carl Craig away from a packed dancefloor means tantalizing moments of old techno drops rather than full-on release, his sounds always dissolving back into indelible bass frequencies and sizzling cymbal high tones. Dipping into the low range to make the theater throb like a heart (or, since you’re at a movie called Blow Job, a hard-on), the delicious play of frequencies meant you could be forgiven for shutting your eyes to the on-screen action/ non-action and just feeling it yourself.

White Stripes Official Web Site:

[Below] IS THE WHITE STRIPES SONG “FELL IN LOVE WITH A GIRL” [AND] THE NEW SUPER BOWL AIRED COMMERCIAL FOR THE AIR FORCE RESERVE

WE BELIEVE OUR SONG WAS RE-RECORDED AND USED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE WHITE STRIPES, OUR PUBLISHERS, LABEL OR MANAGEMENT.

THE WHITE STRIPES TAKE STRONG INSULT AND OBJECTION TO THE AIR FOCE RESERVES PRESENTING THIS ADVERTISEMENT WITH THE IMPLICATION THAT WE LICENSED ONE OF OUR SONGS TO ENCOURAGE RECRUITMENT DURING A WAR THAT WE DO NOT SUPPORT.

THE WHITE STRIPES SUPPORT THIS NATION’S MILITARY, AT HOME AND DURING TIMES WHEN OUR COUNTRY NEEDS AND DEPENDS ON THEM. WE SIMPLY DON’T WANT TO BE A COG IN THE WHEEL OF THE CURRENT CONFLICT AND HOPE FOR A SAVE AND SPEEDY RETURN HOME FOR OUR TROOPS.

WE HAVE NOT LICENSED THIS SONG TO THE AIR FORCE RESERVE AND WE PLAN TO TAK STRONG ACTION TO STOP THE AD CONTAINING THIS MUSIC.

Air Force Reserve Ad Here:

Daily News:

Yep, you should totally wear a T-shirt if you plan to whirl your arms around during the Super Bowl and you aren’t exactly into working your abs.

The band’s show was thrilling to say the least, but maybe someone (anyone) should have told Pete to button those bottom buttons or at least wear a T-shirt.

CNN:

Dr. Conrad Murray, personal physician to Michael Jackson, was charged Monday with involuntary manslaughter in connection with the pop star’s death last summer….A criminal complaint filed earlier in the day alleged that Murray “did unlawfully, and without malice, kill Michael Joseph Jackson.”

Murray turned himself in shortly before 4 p.m. at a branch courthouse near Los Angeles International Airport. He pleaded not guilty during a brief hearing before Judge Keith L. Schwartz….The judge set bail at $75,000, despite arguments from prosecutor David Walgren that Murray is a flight risk….The judge refused to suspend Murray’s medical license as a term of his bond, but he did order him not to use any anesthesia on patients. “I don’t want you sedating people,” Schwartz told Murray.

The involuntary manslaughter charge means that Murray caused Jackson’s death by acting “without due caution and circumspection.” If convicted, Murray would face a maximum four-year prison sentence, according to prosecutors.

People:

Involuntary manslaughter wasn’t a tough enough charge against Michael Jackson’s doctor, says an attorney for the pop star’s father.

“This charge is a slap on the wrist,” Brian Oxman, Joseph Jackson’s longtime lawyer, tells PEOPLE. “There’s great disappointment here. [Conrad Murray] should’ve been charged with a higher degree of responsibility. What he did was reckless. It was a disregard for human life.”

New York Times:

Nearly eight months after Michael Jackson died suddenly, his personal physician was charged Monday with involuntary manslaughter for providing him with a powerful anesthetic that was ruled a major factor in his death.

Michael Jackson fans gathered outside the courthouse where Conrad Murray was expected to appear.
The filing of the charges capped an investigation that revealed Mr. Jackson’s heavy reliance on narcotics, including propofol, an anesthetic normally used in surgery but administered to Mr. Jackson, 50, as

The filing of the charges capped an investigation that revealed Mr. Jackson’s heavy reliance on narcotics, including propofol, an anesthetic normally used in surgery but administered to Mr. Jackson, 50, as a sleep aid.

The doctor, Conrad Murray, a cardiologist with offices in Houston and Las Vegas, had acknowledged giving Mr. Jackson the drug shortly before the singer was found unconscious on June 25 in a rented mansion here, according to police affidavits. The coroner determined that Mr. Jackson had died from “acute propofol intoxication,” combined with other sedatives.

Mojo:

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez will both play Washington later this week almost 50 years after they first sang during the Martin Luther King-led Jobs and Freedom March in 1963.

In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement, is set to take place on Wednesday (February 10) and will see the pair join a bill that already includes Smokey Robinson and John Mellencamp.

Reports that Dylan and Baez will perform together currently remain unconfirmed. The concert will be streamed live via whitehouse.gov.

jigsaw:

Personal weirdness aside, I think it’s cool that someone wrote this book for a mainstream audience. My hope is that teenage girls and young women who don’t know this history will get inspired to find out about riot grrl. It would be really cool if it inspired girls to create a new young feminist movement rooted in their generation.

The book made me think a lot about documenting history from a strategic perspective. How could this story be told to incite participation in girls? A big part of the original “girl power” idea, was to get girls to stop being consumers of male-dominated culture and start producing our own. I guess my fear is that this kind of pop-culture history could encourage girls to simply consume “girl-culture”, thereby claiming the identity of “riot grrl” or “feminism” through the act of buying a record, as opposed to starting their own band or fanzine or putting on a show. To me the point is to encourage girls to start their own young feminist movement, not just to copy what we did. That is the danger of nostalgia I think…

via Hypebot

Barnes and Noble Review:

Class is America’s nastiest secret, always worth raising in pop. But the concept is at its most slippery in the U S of A, where economic power is wielded by an ever-changing alliance of the wealthy and the well-born. Although indeed Ivy Leaguers, another vexed concept, the members of Vampire Weekend come from backgrounds that are managerial if that. Bassist Chris Baio’s parents are lawyers, although his dad was a child actor and he’s related to ‘80s teenthrob Scott Baio. Drummer Chris Tomson’s father is an engineer. Having escaped Iran shortly after the ayatollahs took over, keyboard maestro Rostam Batmanglij’s mother Najmieh is a renowned Persian cooking expert, his father Mohammed a publisher of books on Iran who gave $250 to Howard Dean in 2004. Frontman, wordsmith, cutie-pie, and scholarship boy Ezra Koenig is the son of a set designer and an academic. This is all still privilege. But it’s no closer to ruling-class power than it is to the affluence of the average American geekboy who gets to insult music he resents online.

New York Times:

“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

People’s passion for karaoke doesn’t end in the Philippines, from the Telegraph:

In unusually dry language, the Stamford Police Department said in a press release that the six “made derogatory comments about the the other female’s singing ability (or lack thereof)”, before embarking on a sustained assault, punching, kicking and pulling the hair of Miss Alcantara.

From DNAinfo, the post-karaoke throat slash murder party:

A karaoke bar employee accused of slashing a woman’s throat after Lil’ Kim’s birthday party in Times Square pleaded guilty to murder on Tuesday.

Syed Rahman, 24, was charged with bludgeoning Ingrid Rivera, also 24, of Queens, on the rooftop of the popular Times Square karaoke club Spotlight Live after consuming shots of Patron tequila on Aug. 4, 2008, according to reports from the incident.

And, in other Guy Hands news:

Mr. Hands owns a 12th-century estate in Tuscany, where he produces wine and olive oil. He has an enormous collection of karaoke records, and, on at least one occasion, has belted out “My Way” after an exhausting day of deal-making.

VEVO:

Promoting New Music

Posted In: News, VEVO. Posted By: evan on 02.8.2010

Fans watching VEVO videos on YouTube might see something different today. Up until now we’ve had the same design on every video watch page, but today we’re starting to grow part of VEVO’s mission: exposing fans to new music. A selection of our video pages on YouTube today are promoting La Roux, an artist whose catchy electropop has already made waves across the Atlantic but is new to most fans in the US. Check out this video page for P!nk’s GRAMMYs performance on YouTube to see what I mean.

Somehow we’ve never participated in Record Store Day before. We’ve done lots of instores all over the world, and have had to stop at stores to shop in probably every record store in the free world. This year we decided to do something special for RSD, because we think it’s important. This April you’ll be able to leave your house and go to a record store and get this cool record. We decided to use our 7” as a tribute to a bunch of cool stores in the US. Ten stores will each be featured with their own cover artwork, using pictures that they sent in to us. The 7” is just gonna be the two daytrotter songs from couple tracks, plus one that isn’t on the CD (“Crooked Head”). Here are the 11 covers (there’s a generic one), have fun trying to find them all:

Brookyln Vegan:

Super Bowl XLIV (44) took place Sunday night in Florida between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. The Saints semi-upset the Colts to win the big game for the first time in the franchise’s history. This post is a special edition of the long lost “Week In Music Licensing” post and as such, that’s the last you will hear about the game. Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire, many videos and more below…

Undercover:

For Those Interested,

The song Down Under is my friend. It has always been my friend, ever since it was born. I have been playing it for over 30 years, to audiences the world over, and will no doubt play it for as long as I am able. We look after each other very well. I co-wrote this song known as Down Under, with Ron Strykert, sometime in the winter of 1978. I remember because we had played the song at the Cricketers Arms Hotel in Richmond one Thursday night, and on the way home to Arthur’s Creek, just north of Melbourne, with Ron and my girlfriend Linda in the car, I fell asleep at the wheel, and ran off the road into a ditch. We ended up with the car pointing toward the sky, and we found ourselves staring through the condensation streaked windscreen at the stars above. It was cold, very cold, you know that two o’ clock in the morning Melbourne cold, the kind that chills your bones.

The Federal Court ruling of Justice Jacobson regarding Down Under, and Marion Sinclair’s song Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree, came down today. I am as we speak, wading through the 60 page document of his ruling. Clearly, I’ve had better days.

The copyright of Kookaburra is owned and controlled by Larrikin Music Publishing, more specifically by a man named Norm Lurie. Larrikin Music Publishing is owned by a multi-national corporation called Music Sales.

I only mention this as Mr Lurie is always banging on about how he’s the underdog, the little guy. Yet, he is part of a multi-national corporation just like EMI Music Publishing. It’s all about money, make no mistake. He litigated against EMI Music Publishing, who controls the copyright of Down Under, and Ron Strykert and myself, the writers of Down Under. He alleged that we appropriated a “substantial” part of Kookaburra, and in so doing, infringed upon that copyright, and incorporated it into the flute line of Men At Work’s recording of Down Under. It is indeed true, that Greg Ham, (not a writer of the song) unconsciously referenced two bars of Kookaburra on the flute, during live shows after he joined the band in 1979, and it did end up in the Men At Work recording. What’s interesting to me, is that Mr Lurie is making a claim to share in the copyright of a song, namely Down Under, which was created and existed for at least a year before Men At Work recorded it. I stand by my claim that the two appropriated bars of Kookaburra were always part of the Men At Work “arrangement”, of the already existing work and not the “composition”.

When Men At Work released the song Down Under through CBS Records, (now Sony Music), in 1982, it became extremely successful. It was and continues to be, played literally millions of times all over the world, and it is no surprise that in over twenty years, no one noticed the reference to Kookaburra. There are reasons for this. It was inadvertent, naive, unconscious, and by the time Men At Work recorded the song, it had become unrecognizable. It is also unrecognizable for many reasons. Kookaburra is written as a round in a major key, and the Men At Work version of Down Under is played with a reggae influenced “feel” in a minor key. This difference alone creates a completely different listening experience. The two bars in question had become part of a four bar flute part, thereby unconsciously creating a new musical “sentence” harmonically, and in so doing, completely changed the musical context of the line in question, and became part of the instrumentation of Men At Work’s arrangement of Down Under.

Justice Jacobson has ruled, and for the most part, not in EMI‘s or my favour. What was born out of creative musical expression, became both a technical and mathematical argument. This ruling will have lasting repercussions, and I suspect not for the better.

Mr Lurie is a music publisher, and today Judge Jacobson ruled mostly in his favor. Mr Lurie claims to care only about protecting the copyright of Marion Sinclair, who sadly has passed away. I don’t believe him. It may well be noted, that Marion Sinclair herself never made any claim that we had appropriated any part of her song Kookaburra, and she wrote it, and was most definitely alive, when Men At Work’s version of Down Under was a big hit. Apparently she didn’t notice either.

I believe what has won today is opportunistic greed, and what has suffered, is creative musical endeavor. This outcome will have no real impact upon the relationship that I have with our song Down Under, for we are connected forever. When I co-wrote Down Under back in 1978, I appropriated nothing from anyone else’s song. There was no Men At Work, there was no flute, yet the song existed. That’s the truth of it, because I was there, Norm Lurie was not, and neither was Justice Jacobson. Down Under lives in my heart, and may perhaps live in yours. I claim it, and will continue to play it, for as long as you want to hear it.

Sincerely, Colin Hay

at You Ain’t No Picasso blog