American Madness

Some of you may be asking who is Harold Hunter, others may already know. In 1995 Harold Hunter became one of the faces representing youth in New York City in the movie Kids, a few years later he ended up in the Joan Osborne video “One of Us.”

Harold was a member of the early 90’s NYC skateboarding scene and part of the Zoo York team. Harold was last scene on TLC’s Miami Ink getting a tattooed tribute to WTC with the words NYC, Sk8 or Die. By the time this episode aired in April of ‘06, Harold had been dead for almost 2 months. On Feb. 17th of 2006 Harold overdosed.

This year Zoo York is one of the sponsors of the 2nd Annual Harold Hunter Day, a day in which Harold is remembered for his amazing skateboarding skills and his general good natured presence.

This year Harold Hunter Day will be this Saturday, May 17th. Zoo York is sponsoring The Harold Hunter Skate Jam forom 12-6pm at the Manhattan Bridge Skatepark and the Harold Hunter Party at KCDC in Brooklyn from 8pm to midnight. For more information you can check out the website.

An AmericanMadness Quiz:

What famous rapper is starting his own wine company?

a) Snoop Doggy Dog
b) Fat Joe
c) Lil’ Jon
d) All the above, together in an East Coast-West Coast rap/wine lovefest

I know, it’s a difficult decision. All the above exhibit excellent taste in wine. Anyone of them would make a fine vintner. (more…)

Earlier in the week there were a few news stories around that caught my eye, but I was hesitant to post them. ‘Why?’ you ask, well it was April 1st and I tend to take any news that comes out on April 1st with a grain of salt. Since there hasn’t been any retraction of these stories they get the full posting treatment.

The Recording Industry Association of America just received some bad news. A New York Federal Judge has made a ruling that is going to greatly effect most of their lawsuits against file sharers. According to Judge Kenneth Karas making a copyrighted file available for download does not necessarily violate the law. Instead it now needs to be proven that the file was actually downloaded or intended to be downloaded.

This is kind off a complex issue and this ruling will actually influence a lot of future download cases (NY courts are apparently known for how well they handle copyright issues). Essentially what this case ruling means (or can mean) is that the RIAA needs to show that some one had the intention of sharing copyrighted materials just having copyrighted materials available for download is not illegal. It is a complicated issue, I am sure complicated more with P2P file sharing programs. CNET has some decent coverage on the issue with explanations better then I can provide here.

This doesn’t really mean that anyone is going to get off scott-free in any of the pending lawsuits, but it does mean the RIAA is going to have to do a bit more legwork to prove that individuals were working to intentionally share copyrighted files.

I recently came across the site RCRDLBL, add some vowels and you’ve got Record Label, which is the idea behind the site. It is a chance for musicians to have their music heard and maybe make some money. As they say “RCRD LBL is an online record label releasing exclusive and completely free music from emerging and established artists.” Oh, right, and it’s all free. Personally I am downloading some Bad Brains right now. They hand select the artists whose music they are pushing

A similar site, US Trendy is doing similar stuff, but also includes a place for Fashion and Art work to be displayed, kind of an artistic collective to show off your work and maybe get discovered. Instead of the music being chosen and artists being selected to have their work exhibited, US Trendy allows folks to upload their own stuff.

Finally on the music front we have Mp3gle. Don’t ask me if it is a legal, I have my doubts. It kind of looks like it is a file sharing search engine. I am not sure the sources it is searching, but it is allowing folks to search for music and then either play it or download it. And this isn’t music by folks you have never heard of, this is brand name, big label music, the type of stuff you pay to download on iTunes. Pretty nifty if you ask me

Slow day, eh? Everyone’s already in holiday mode.

I went on a LOOOOONG lunch today and got to talking with a new friend about the follies shows we put on (most recently I posted about the Bloomberg parody video and Gawker picked up on it, too).

She asked how long it took me to write the song parodies we do each year. This year I think I spent a total of five hours, maybe less (for five songs).

But the longest I’ve ever spent on a single song was getting the concept of the housing bubble to work to the tune of O, Fortuna from Carmina Burana. Not that you care, but here were the lyrics to that.

Staccato bursts of words (versus multi-syllable words) are definitely harder to replicate with modern English than one would think.

Wish I had the video of this. It was pretty well done. At the end, we had a journalist come out wielding a huge drum and crashing head first through a cardboard brick “house.”

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There is an interesting little article from this month’s Wired about the Rza from Wu-Tang Clan, well, actually more so about the music… Okay, the samples in the music.

Rza discusses some of the Kung-Fu movies samples he and the Wu-Tang clan have used in the past and Wired breaks it all down with the movie and at what point in the movie the sample appeared. Then there are audio clips from the Rza commenting on each sample as well as the full recording of the interview at the bottom.

If you are into discovering the origins of samples, like the Wu-Tang Clan or just want to waste a little time today it is actually kind of neat to check out (plus if you are in to old Kung-fu movies there are a few “can’t miss” titles on the list as well.

*Thanks to Fubz for the photo and tip-off

In the last two weeks Radiohead has been making a ton of news with the release of their new album In Rainbows. There has been a ton of hype surrounding it, as one of the most popular bands around decided to release their newest album directly over the internet and allowed customers to pay what they wanted for it. You may have read about it in one of my previous posts (1, 2).

Anyway, on Wednesday the album was released, folks could go online to the Radiohead website and download the album for what ever price they chose (including $0.00) or they could purchase a $80.00 box set that would ship in December with some special stuff included, making this the first album released by a super-major band without the help of a major label.

Well, apparently that was all a load of hooey. According to the Financial Times: “Radiohead’s much-debated decision to let fans choose what they pay for its new album online is a promotional tactic to boost sales of compact discs, the band’s management said yesterday.” Yes, they released a version of the album online to promote sales of the actual album. There are actually a number of things in this article that annoyed me to some extent or just plain pissed me off. Let’s look at a few of them, shall we:

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Yes I Wrote about a week ago that the Radiohead album was coming out today and that it would only be available on their website and that it was a pay what you want deal (that would be here).

Well it comes as no surprise to anyone that it came out today and their site was so flooded with people trying to download it. After 6 hours of trying I was finally able to get through (there was a bit of a disconnect between items actually getting into my “basket” so I couldn’t “pay”).

When I did get through though it was easy as pie. Put the disc in my basket, clicked on checkout, created an account and paid $0.00. The website then gave me a link to download a zip file (I am on a T1 connection, the 48.8 zip file took less then 1 minute to download) which I opened, copied into iTunes and now have the pleasure of listening too.

While it doesn’t surprise me too much that the site was excessively slow today, it does surprise me that there wasn’t more planning ahead for such network slow down. Billed time and time again as the most popular band in the word you would think Radiohead would have significantly beefed up its servers for this release. I’d have no complaints if this were the direction music releases were to go in.

So, it has been a day and a half since my last post so I am feeling a little rusty, I might have to take it a bit easy today to ease my way back into the whole blogging and typing thing, after all, I wouldn’t want to hurt myself or pull a finger muscle or something.

Anyway, earlier this week Radiohead announced that their newest album “In Rainbows would be released on October 10th. Normally, this alone would be cause for celebration, but fans have another reason to celebrate this album.

Radiohead’s contract with EMI/Capitol records was up after their last album. Instead of renewing with them or finding a new label, Radiohead went ahead and produced their album on their own and are planning to release it on their own through their website, but wait, it gets better…

Beyond just releasing it on their site, when you go there to purchase it, at check-out it tells you to pay what you want. According to an article from Time:

Drop In Rainbows‘ 15 songs into the online checkout basket and a question mark pops up where the price would normally be. Click it, and the prompt “It’s Up To You” appears. Click again and it refreshes with the words “It’s Really Up To You” — and really, it is.

This makes Radiohead the first major band to jump labels and allow customers to decide what they want to pay for their music. An interesting model as most musicians don’t make a ton off of music sales to begin with (now all profit goes to them), plus it eliminates the cost of actually producing CDs or anything like that.

Of course, record industry folks are freaking: “This feels like yet another death knell,” emailed an A&R executive at a major European label. “If the best band in the world doesn’t want a part of us, I’m not sure what’s left for this business.”

Of course they seemed to survive when Pearl Jam started to produce their own music in the 90s… and Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah chose to do it alone as well, plus Wilco did too. Anyway, 6 days to go until the Radiohead site is clogged with fans trying to download the new music from their site.

By now you must be familiar with services like iTunes or one of its many competitors trying to suck you dry of your hard earned cash.

Well, now there is a new player in the game: Spiral Frog. Similar in some aspects to iTunes it allows you to download music and videos over the internet from singers and groups you have actually heard of. A bit smaller then the iTunes library with only 800,000 songs available (meaning you won’t be able to find everything you are looking for) there still remains a nice selection, even of new music, such as Amy Winehouse.

So, we’ve covered the similarities to iTunes, now some differences- first (and this is the big one) it is absolutely and totally free! Yup, no credit card needed, no money asked for, kind of nice. Oh, also you don’t need any special software to start downloading, it is not exclusive to any software (though you do need an internet plug-in to make sure it all works). All kind of nice, there is, however, a catch: This service (like too many other services available on the internet today) is only for folks with PCs. Got a Mac? Well, you’re out of luck. In fact Spiral Frog strikes out against Apple- Won’t work on a Mac, can’t use the music in iTunes and, last, but not least, the songs won’t play on an iPod. (more…)