"If you understood everything I said, you'd be me" - Miles Davis
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" - George W. Bush
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
"Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government." - Lenny Bruce
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" - Homer Simpson
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we" - George W. Bush
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Utility Fog Blog has moved to UtilityFog.info/Blog

So update your bookmarks, subscribe to the new feeds, fax the cat, twitter the neighbors, because there ain't nothing new happening here, and whenever I get around to it, it'll be GONE.

  6 minutes and 13 seconds of being 18 again

Yea, he wasn't always a butter salesman



  Sunday Night Slide


  Hey Ya

Via QUIDQUID LATINE DICTUM SIT, ALTUM VIDETUR

  Basic Black

One-Man-Band rockin' the house on a drumkit and fuzzed out Omnichord:

sElf - Back In Black - YouTube
Via Dinosaurs And Robots

  That Sound Was My Frontal Lobes Vaporizing

John Lydon butter commercial

Via Laughing Squid

  Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street

Via Kottke.org



  Bo

Bo Diddley - Hey, Bo Diddley and Bo Diddley

Via {feuilleton}

  Glitter and Doom
Tom Waits interviews Tom Waits:

"Q: What's hard for you?

A: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.

Q: What's wrong with the world?

A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley's dog made 12 million last year... and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It's just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns."

Tom Waits True Confessions
Via MetaFilter

  Hate
The Most Hated Song in the World (mp3)
Via MetaFilter

  One of my Obsessions Just Perked Up It's Ears

"...David Byrne's booking agent at William Morris Agency, Mark Geiger, has been soliciting offers from a number of different promoters around the United States for Byrne/Eno live shows, promising the set list will consist of at least 40% Eno-era Talking Heads material. No word yet on if he's had any takers. Most of the tour is already booked."

Electronic Gospel: David Byrne and Brian Eno reuniting for new album, live shows...

  It Gives Me Hope

Black-clad long-haired teens ripping through Maggot Brain in a big-box chain store:

PGSORM HEB 8-25-07
Via MetaFilter
Via Waxy.org: Links


  Do Your Dance

Cue the red codpiece and Levar Burton rocking the trenchcoat....

STNG totally should have had a Cameo cameo.

Cameo - Word Up
Via Right Some Good

  New Music Sucks

When you turn on the radio, you might think music all sounds the same these days, then wonder if you're just getting old. But you're right, it does all sound the same. Every element of the recording process, from the first takes to the final tweaks, has been evolved with one simple aim: control. And that control often lies in the hands of a record company desperate to get their song on the radio. So they'll encourage a controlled recording environment (slow, high-tech and using malleable digital effects). Every finished track is then coated in a thick layer of audio polish before being market-tested and despatched to a radio station, where further layers of polish are applied until the original recording is barely visible. That's how you make a mainstream radio hit, and that's what record labels want.

.....

"When old-school producers and engineers talk about modern music, they're convinced that better recorded music would save the music industry from itself. Producer Joe Boyd wrote of the Buena Vista Social Club album (4m copies worldwide): "It's success is usually ascribed to the film or the brilliant marketing. But I am convinced that the sound of the record was equally if not more important." Beautifully recorded records by Norah Jones, Bob Dylan and others have certainly shifted units. But the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' brutally mastered Californication has sold 15m copies worldwide.

Why does most music sound the same these days? Because record companies are scared, they don't want to take risks, and they're doing the best they can to generate mainstream radio hits. That is their job, after all. And as the skies continue to darken over the poor benighted business of selling music, labels are going to cling to what they know more fiercely than ever.

So is that is? Have we arrived? Will records continue to increase in loudness and homogeneity until literally everything sounds like Californication? Optimistic engineers dream of a day when the world's music listeners spontaneously rebel against over-processed music. The Loudness War will end and people will stop buying Black Eyed Peas records. A new era of high-fidelity recording will be born, and men in white coats will once again stride confidently through acoustically-lively studios placing their vintage microphones with care"

I welcome my impending cootdom. You kids get off my lawn!!
Why records DO all sound the same | Word Magazine
Via Zenarchery

  Now That's Entertainment

TUCKER-LIVE 1
Via Music Thing

  In Echo park, It's Winged Eel Fingerling

Via The Slog

  Funkalicious
Bootsy Collins - Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer


  Gotta Get Up



Oh Yea, It's Business Time

  Miles' Dark Funk
The most hated album in jazz
Must....Possess ....Box....Set
Via { feuilleton }

  God Save the Dutch
This looks like one hell of a party

Killing Joke's Psyche played by Sox Pistels


Killing Joke (MetaFilter/YouTube)

  Glorious Noise
" Sunday Night, later named Michelob Presents Night Music, was an NBC late-night television show which aired for two seasons between 1988 and 1990 as a showcase for jazz and eclectic musical artists. ... " (Quote from the Wikipedia entry.)

"A revelation to music fans, this show appeared and disappeared with little fanfare, being light-years ahead of the bulk of it's audience in style and substance. Every possible realm of music was boldly explored...from minimalist art-noise to traditional folk styles and everything beyond and in-between. Absolute genius, a marvelously noncommercial experiment that was doomed to failure despite itself. ..." (Quote from user comment at the IMDb entry for 'Sunday Night')"
Lounge Lizards - Voice Of Chunk (YouTube)
Via PCL LinkDump - who also has a load of other "Night Music" video links

  Get Down
James Brown gives you dancing lessons(YouTube)
Via Fimoculous

  Not Dead, Still Funky
"To cynics and music-industry veterans, this very premise is laughable: an appointment with Sly Stone. Yeah, right. For 20-odd years, Stone has been one of music's great recluses, likened in the press to J. D. Salinger and Howard Hughes. And in the years before he slipped away, he was notorious for not showing up even when he said he would. Missed concerts, rioting crowds, irritated promoters, drug problems, band tensions, burned bridges.

But in his prime, Stone was a fantastic musician, performer, bandleader, producer, and songwriter. Even today, his life-affirming hits from the late 60s and early 70s-among them "Stand!," "Everyday People," and "Family Affair"-continue to thrive on the radio, magically adaptable to any number of programming formats: pop, rock, soul, funk, lite. He was a black man and emphatically so, with the most luxuriant Afro and riveted leather jumpsuits known to Christendom, but he was also a pan-culturalist who moved easily among all races and knew no genre boundaries. There was probably no more Woodstockian moment at Woodstock than when he and the Family Stone, his multi-racial, four-man, two-woman band, took control of the festival in the wee hours of August 17, 1969, getting upwards of 400,000 people pulsing in unison to an extended version of "I Want to Take You Higher." For one early morning, at least, the idea of "getting higher" wasn't an empty pop-culture construct or a stoner joke, but a matter of transcendence. This man had power."

Sly Stone's Higher Power
Via { feuilleton }

  Heed The Captain
Captain Beefheart's Ten Commandments For Guitarists
"(8) DON'T WIPE THE SWEAT OFF YOUR INSTRUMENT

You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music."
Via mike.whybark.com

  Glam
Two of my favorite things, Roxy Music and Bruce Sterling


  It's Too Hot
Captain Beefheart - Ice Cream for Crow (YouTube)
Via Exploding Aardvark

  There It Is
Why James Brown was so goddamned funky
Via TUNING

  Fuzzerific
bookofjoe has a great entry on Norman Greenbaum's classic 1969 hit Spirit in the Sky


  Marvelous


  Say It With Me
Death Grunt

  Puzzled and Disturbed
I suspect Russian pop-star Vitas is going to be making an appearance in my future nightmares. If I could put my finger on why he creeps me out while David Bowie doesn't I think I'd be on to something.

Opera 2 (YouTube) - wait for the falsetto.
Via Guru (YouTube - pretentious much?

Via WFMU's Beware of the Blog