They Report, You Decide: Life Amongst the Other Half

There are two kinds of people in today’s Amerika: those who get their news from Trawtopia, and the other 487 billion who get their news from FoxNews.

Being that you’re reading this, we already know you’re one of the good’uns. But have you ever wondered – possibly angrily and aloud after a 30-second dip into the No Spin Zone – what it is that draws the rest of your countrymen to Rupert Murdock’s font of fury?

Let’s take a look at FoxNews.com’s Top Stories and find out what broad conclusions we can infer together!

From the bottom:

Mayor’s Racy Lingerie Photo on MySpace Upsets Residents

Friends Mourn Woman Who May Have Been Eaten by Boyfriend

Third Man Dies From Tainted Dairy Products

Dog Triggers Shotgun Blast, Killing Owner in Freak Hunting Accident

Tom Cruise’s $100 Million Nazi Movie

From the get-go, a few noticeable trends emerge.

First, like anyone with any sense, the online Fox readership loves the idea of Tom Cruise admitting his SS sympathies.

Last, like anyone with zero sense, the online Fox readership is absolutely terrified of the idea of a sexually empowered woman in a position of power. C’mon, you’re already infatuated with the jackboots and riding crops (see Item 1), now give in to temptation!

And in the middle, we see that the Fox demographic is fascinated by the prospect of bizarre and gruesome death. You think it’s just those three stories? Let’s go back to the list!

Mexican Emergency Services Free Boy, 10, Who Glued Himself to Bed to Avoid School

Girl, 12, Dies After Mystery Illness Causes Series of Mini Strokes

Boy Scout Grabs Attacker’s Knife, Saves Maldives President From Assassination

2 Girls Killed in ‘Strange Ritual’ Slaying in Iowa

Missing Georgia Hiker Found After Suspect Leads Police to Body

Football Player, Wife Charged in Death of His High School Cheerleader Ex

Is it any wonder these folks see the hideous form of Satan in anything with an accent and a slight tan? Look what can happen when you trust:

Your new boyfriend:

Shearer’s boyfriend, Christopher Lee McCuin, 25, was charged with capital murder after police said they found her body, an ear boiling in a pot on a stovetop, and a hunk of flesh with a fork in it on a plate at the crime scene.

Your beloved huntin’ hound: 

“His dog was so excited,” she said. “He was jumping all around, because he was about to get out and go get that goose. That gun had to be knocked around just right to fire. I believe the dog knocked the safety off and hit the trigger, too.”

The weather:

“Next thing you know … a tornado just popped right out of the clouds,” Lischka said.

Al Ost said he “prayed like a sissy” as he fled to the basement of his house in Boone County, Ill.

Your friendly neighborhood tramp:

Union County Sheriff Scott Stephens said Hilton was a drifter well-known in the area, and was often seen with his dog, Dandy, and police-style baton. Since he was identified as a person of interest in Emerson’s disappearance, Stephens said his office has gotten thousands of calls from people saying they recognized his wiry frame.

Your Warlock stepfather:

“You’re talking about people casting spells, spells gone bad,” Sioux City Police Chief Joe Frisbie said at a Monday press conference, according to the Sioux City Journal. “Obviously, there is a lot more going on here than a straightforward homicide.”

Sweeeeet Jesus Christ it’s a scary ole world out thar!

Luckily….

Panasonic Debuts 150-Inch Plasma TV

A Public Service Announcement from TrawTopia

This might get a flamewar started when some silly fundamentalist tries to tell me where to stick it…

Today marked presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s political dissertation on religion (unofficially titled “Talkin’ ’bout Faith”). This was necessary because Mitt is a Mormon. Now before you all rush to judgment, I thought we should learn a little more about our Mormon brothers and sisters. Enjoy!

Anything animated in this fashion must be taken seriously!

Highlights include:

0:59 — an explanation as to the origins of those “billions of spirit children”

1:18 — “Lucifer, your profile is so…”

2:20 — where black people came from

2:54 — the not-so Virgin Mary melts from the seductive gaze of Elohim

3:11 — the Mormons really liked The DaVinci Code

3:36 — ever wonder why American Indians have been so doomed to suffer? Well, it’s because they’re Jews.

4:56 — the single thing about which Joseph Smith was 100% correct

5:10 — guest appearances by George W. and Jeb Bush

6:18 and on — the ex-Mormon Jerry Springer show

I’m guessing this video was created about 25 years ago by pissed off Evangelicals — the mortal enemy of the Mormons. Frankly, I’ve met some Mormons and my impression was that they are very hard-working people; efficient and industrious. Oh wait, I’m thinking of the Germans. The Mormons that I met were behind all those “wealth-building” and “success-training” businesses that suck up millions of dollars from suckers around the world.

So I guess when Mitt Romney becomes President in 2009, at least we’ll all get free tickets to a Tony Robbins event. Then the upselling phone calls begin!

Out of the Box: Why Radiohead Might Just Destroy the Music Industry (We Hope)

A few weeks back, when the loyal Trawhordes were slavering for new material, I couldn’t promise much: the life of the Traw is rife with distractions (i.e. 6 fantasy football drafts), and I knew it would take some pretty monstrous news to bring me a-bloggin’.

Like many of you, I expected the desire to delve into the mysteries of Dragon Wars to be the siren which called me back, but alas: turns out there’s only so many ways you can say “Guh?”

Luckily, this morning brought a shocking bit of news which has since wended its way throughout the deepest canyons of the internets, leaving a trail of elated Anglophiles and (we imagine) distraught music executives in its wake: Radiohead are releasing a new record! Next week!! And you won’t be seeing it in stores until 2008!

Guh?

Yep, as it turns out, those mopey moppets from Oxford aren’t just innovative and brilliant in their musical endeavours: they’re now about as far out on the leading edge of the music business as anyone has been in years.

Here’s the innovation:

1. Radiohead does not have a label.

2. Following from (1), their new record In Rainbows will not be sold as a CD in your local Best Buy (yet), but rather offered as a digital download direct from their website, and/or a £40 double-LP/CD giant boxset, which is available to pre-order now and ships worldwide in early December.

3. Oh yeah: the price of the digital download is 100% at your discretion. As in, if you think it’s worth $50, you can pay $50 for it; if you think it’s worth a dime, you can pay a dime.

And here’s the genius:

1. I won’t speculate about the nature of Radiohead’s 10+ year relationship with Capitol Records. Capitol certainly did their part in helping Radiohead become one of the biggest bands in the world, but having fulfilling their contract, its hard to argue that the band has much else to gain from the relationship. It seems reasonable to assume that most things they lose out on by not staying with Capitol or another major (i.e. money and muscle to promote their records) is offset by cutting out the triple-threat middlemen of label, distributor, and retailer.

2. The formats offered with the initial release of In Rainbows shows that Radiohead, or whoever came up with the idea, has a pretty shrewd understanding of their audience and the marketplace they are dealing with. On the one hand, you have a lavish, expensive box set replete with vinyl, liner notes, photos…basically everything that traditional record collector nerds love to throw our money at. Money which, again, isn’t being filtered through a multinational corporation or two before it gets to Thom Yorke’s bank account. On the other extreme, you have mp3 downloads for the “casual fan,” which, again, aren’t coming through a titan like Apple or even Amazon, but are being sold direct through the band’s own website.

3. Most genius of all, the “name-your-own” pricing for the aforementioned mp3s. This isn’t just a cute PR move designed to make Radiohead look consumer-friendly. It’s an idea that shows great recognition of the realities of selling music in 2007. As unprotected files, these songs are sure to be up on Soulseek, Bit Torrent, and any other filesharing service you can think of within hours of their release to the public, which would usually mean that about 2/3 of the people who download them at all would be doing it illegally (i.e. free). Even if 1/3 of downloaders agreed to pay a standard $9.99 for the album, the file-sharing majority would ensure that, in essence, Radiohead would end up with about $3.33 for each copy of the record out there.

By offering the record themselves for next to nothing, and with the added guarantee that you’re not going to have to hunt through hundreds of fakes to find the real deal, Radiohead give their fans a pretty unshakable incentive to go to the source for their fix, and knowing the nature of their fanbase, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fair amount of people tossing a couple bucks their way. Y’know, just to show the love.

There are, of course, some lingering questions: What’s going to happen with the CD release next year? How much traffic can Radiohead.com handle? How many people are willing to spend $80 on a record you can legally download for free? How would this business model translate for a band without Radiohead’s clout? Ultimately, is In Rainbows even any good?

Regardless of how it plays out, this whole thing is fascinating to me. For years, the litany of the industry has been “Think outside the box – adapt or die,” and along come the industry’s favorite sons with a plan of their own: leave the whole damn box behind.

Countdown to Extinction

And now, let’s enjoy a bit of song:

1600 ’scans and whattaya get?/Another chain closing and closer to death/St. Branson won’t be calling to save your ship out/Cause Virgin’s closing shop: proceed to fucking flip out!

My horrid meter notwithstanding, this is actually some brutal news – as reported in the NY Post earlier this week, Virgin Megastores North America has been sold to a real estate con-glom. “Industry watchers” are forecasting the imminent closing of both NYC Virgin locations, in Squares Times and Union.

If you’re thinking “meh,” well, I can understand that. But here’s why this is terrible news not only for me, but possibly you as well.

Last year, when Tower Records and their 81 locations finally succumbed to bankruptcy, Virgin Megastore became heir to the Deep Catalog Chain-Store throne. A dubious honor, to be sure, but a pretty vitally important one in the world of independent music. Whatever faults you may have found with Tower/Virgin, you could at least expect them to have a) a somewhat knowledgable and musically-inclined staff and b) a pretty deep catalog to back it up. Sure, if you’re looking for obscure and out of print prog LPs (and who isn’t!), you’re going to have to go to a specialty store (or more likely online), but in terms of overall depth/consumer reach, these two outfits supplied a lot of independent music to a lot of independent music fans.

And as much as a lot of independent music purveyors and fans like to dance around the issue in favor of upholding some idealized world of Music For Music’s Sake, the real fact is that it costs significant amounts of money to produce, distribute, and promote the overwhelming majority of the music we consume.

Consider this: next time you’re in a Best Buy, go check out the endcap/wall/whatever of New Releases. Then consider that, for each title you see displayed in this section, someone spent roughly $20-$30,000 to put it there. Like, not in some abstract sum-of-parts/this-is-what-it-costs-to-get-your-record-noticed way. Literally, someone cut BB a check for 20 large in order for their CD to be placed on the New Release wall.

The general point to all this being: putting out a record costs bank, and as the marketplace for physical retail shrinks away from independents and deep-catalog megastores, what you’re left with is Walmart, Best Buy, etc., whose interests aren’t in providing you with a wide array of choice, but rather pushing the top echelon of saleable goods at cut-rate prices in the hopes that while you’re in there, you may decide to pick up a washer/dryer combo on the way out.

(SIDEBAR: This is also actually why, if you see a CD on sale ridiculously cheap at Best Buy, you can sort of feel morally ok about purchasing it; often, they price new releases below cost to bring in the customers with the hope of making up the margin elsewhere. So as long as you *don’t* get the w/d combo as well, you get your shit for cheap, Best Buy loses money, and everyone’s happy! More reading on this here (simple) and especially here (lengthy and in-depth discussion, but worth it if you have the time)

Uh, sorry, back to the point: it seems reasonable to conclude that there is a tipping point for independent labels, where their music is not mass-friendly enough to warrant sale in the big boxes, and there are not enough specialty/deepcat stores left to take in enough of their product to even really justify manufacturing and distributing the CDs in the first place. All of which, at the end of the day, leads to a shrinking of the overall choices available to consumers (and perhaps more importantly, a shrinking awareness that these choices even exist in the first place).

All of this opens far too many cans of worms to even think about starting to get into – the intersection of art and commerce, the morality of file-sharing, intellectual property and copyright law, and the cloudy future of the music industry, just to touch the tip of the iceberg – but to end this ramble on less gloomy note: regardless of how it all exactly plays out, it seems to me there are a few (hopefully) incontrovertable facts about all this. First, that (hopefully) a lot of people are going to continue to make the kind music that they want to make. Second, that (hopefully) a lot of people are going to want to hear this music. Thus meaning that third, someone is going to have to figure out the best way to get this music to them.

How this will happen in this crazy digital world we live in is anyone’s guess (at least anyone more informed than I am), but ultimately it seems as naive to think that the death of independent retail will kill good music as it is to think that all those albums you got for free on Bit Torrent aren’t actually hurting anyone. Sooner or later, some genius capitalist will figure out a new model for the whole system and get filthy rich, and in the end perhaps we’ll all be better off, as fans and artists alike.

Oh yeah…and god willing, that genius will be me.

It’s Friday and that can Only Mean One Thing…

Why ask why?

Remember kiddies, “make good choices” this weekend. The kind of good choices Lohan would make…

On a (blog)Roll!

Hi friends,

Just taking a minute out of our busy Trawlives to hep you to a couple of vitally important new additions to the ole blogroll:

So Good!

Over at So Good, Jon Eick does what he does best: wax poetic about food, and offer up bizarrely detailed Would You Rathers? This blog is brand new, and so far, SO GOOD!

Music Writemare

CHOM on over to MusicWritemare for J.Temperance’s total ass-tearing of music criticism, along with assorted other fun. If you’ve ever wanted to reach through the screen to strangle someone at Pitchfork, this blog is for YOU!

Lin Swimmer

In which noted misanthrope Lin Swimmer shares purty pictures and slightly-less-purty musings on his daily existence. Don’t worry, though, I happen to know how much he loves Yes and Tangerine Dream, so it can’t be all bad!

Ask the Traws: Things That Make You Go Hmmm….

Phew! It’s been a busy week at Traw HQ, with the Trawbox bursting at the seams with questions and queries from far and wide. Keep ‘em coming, readers. But, uh, don’t get mad when it takes a week for a response. We’re mulling!

Anyway, let’s get down to business. Today’s question comes from Blogophile Lin Swimmer. Lin writes:

Should I forgo my iPod in favor of finding someplace with a dusty Walkman to sell me, and requiring myself to make mixes for myself? Is that a good idea, or is it akin to writing a Missed Connection to yourself? Also, with my late discovery of music blogs that have endless quantities of free, odd-ball releases it might be kind of pointless and a pathetic attempt to be contrarian and cooler-than-thou. It sounds fun, but I’m kind of frightened a bit at the implications.

Thanks Traws!
(Come up with a funny fake name for me.)

Well, two things off the bat: first, I was under the impression that Lin Swimmer was your fake funny name. Second, “contrarian and cooler-than-thou”…uh, didn’t we used to work at Kim’s together? By default, that makes both of us so contrarian and cooler-than-thou that we might as well form a popular music group called C&C Music Factory.

 (SIDEBAR: a big Trawtopia “fuck you!” to Sony BMG for not letting me embed “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” God forbid you let those terrible bloggers steal your valuable content!)

Uh, right, there was a question on the table, back to that.

I’ve definitely felt a marked increase in the level of cassette-tape nostalgia in the last few months. I’ve gotten my paws on a couple of recent records from J.Dilla and Spank Rock on cassette tape, which, all things considered, are much cooler promotional items than no-art advance CDs or folded up posters. It also helps, in Dilla’s case especially, that these records acquire a bit of extra charm from the lo-fi background hiss inherent in the tape medium.

Still, it’s a little hard to buy that the cassette-tape resurgence is much more than the latest manifestation of our national obsession with retro-novelty. Vinyl monkeys can always argue that LPs sound better than digital recordings, and that you can’t truly appreciate the talents of Hipgnosis without a double-gatefold picture disc. And they can argue this because they’re right.

Cassettes? Poor sound quality that gets worse as it ages, artwork even smaller than a CD’s, and good luck trying to find the song you want to hear in less than a full minute.

And yet…and yet…

I owe so much of the early foundations of my musical taste to the lowly cassette that I can’t really bust on it. See, I couldn’t afford to buy every CD I wanted to hear in middle school. But I had friends (well, a few) who had what I wanted. And so: the mixtape.

I certainly had my personal formula down: you start each side with something short and sweet (Misfits on most of mine). Then you thrown in back-to-back songs from the same artist, then two from another artist, then a longer single, then more pairs. Most importantly, don’t try to get cute with your running times – for about 7 years, the only version I had of my favorite Fugazi song (“Blueprint,” if you care) was cut off by :40 at the end of a mixtape side. To this day, I still half expect it to go “Never mind what you’re sellin’ it’s what they’re buy-” hissclickstop.

Once everything is painstakingly recorded, you get your best pen and crab your hand up real good to try to fit artist and title for the full 90 minutes into a 2.5×4 inch space. Then, of course, you name your mix something cool and witty (by 1994 standards), and listen to it on your headphones during family car trips because your mother will not abide Primus.

So, to complete the most long-winded response yet, I’ll say “I don’t have a clue.” Yes, toting around a Walkman – not to mention acquiring and filling cassettes to use in it – will not only be a pain in the ass, but will inevitably smack of pretension in this day and age. On the other hand, you could just say fuck the haters, swing by your nearest Flying J to load up on Loggins & Messina, throw some masking tape over the holes, and mix yerself up a bit of retro-nostalgia gold.

Think of it as asceticism for the digital age, and cleanse thy spirit!

New Reasons to Love Life

As reported on a couple of websites earlier this week, Beck – he who transcends genres even as he redefines them – has recently taken to a studio in Los Angeles with Jamie Lidell - he of the wacked out white-electro soul masterpiece Multiply.

According to the limited info available, the pair of mad geniuses are recording a series of direct-to-vinyl songs for release as singles, or something.

Shatraw, hie thee hence to this studio! And bring Pop Levi with you.

We’re HONORED ACHIEVERS at Kipiniak.com!

Do you like Minnesotans and small Polish children?

Like to know the price of gas in New Jersey 8 months ago?

Pool-party-BBQ-Birthday-Dance-Breakdown-Extravaganzas!?

Well, even if you don’t, why not see how the other half lives!

The party never stops over at KIPINIAK.COM!!!!

My Kidz Gots PWNED!!@! ~rofl~rofl~

As always, good looking out on the newswire, Trawbro.

Although the funniest thing about this story isn’t the starving children or the crippling addiction (although those things usually are hilarious) – no, the funniest thing about this story is the picture below, which appeared next to the headline on Yahoo this morning.

I mean really, I can understand how you could be typing away on your turned-off laptop and not take the time out to attend to your crying, photoshopped child. But why would you angle yourself so that the CPC is directly in your field of vision?

I think the guy in this picture is saying to his child, “Hey, kid, we’re getting geared up for a raid on Lockewoode Forest Cove…u wanna wear the spare headset?”

And that, my friend, is true parental love.