Back in London, wiping strawberry jam from a CD, Reece Maclay agrees. “All the music I’ve ever known I got free, and I didn’t know what owning or paying for music was all about– not that most CD labels charge anything but voluntary fees anyway. But all this isn’t just about trying to turn the clock back ’cause we liked mix CDs when we were kids. CDs started to die when people stopped wanting to pay for a product, and then social media and music streams came along and let people stop paying for it all legally, and the product vanished. But when you can’t see what the product is and someone’s still making money, then the product is you.”

From NME.com:

James Brown’s body has been stolen, according to his reported love child LaRhonda Pettit.

The soul legend’s body was put in a crypt after his death on Christmas Day in 2006. Since then it has been kept at his daughter Deanna’s house in South Carolina while a public mausoleum was being prepared.

Pettit has now claimed the body has gone missing. Consequently, she says she is being denied the opportunity to carry out an autopsy to determine Brown’s true cause of death, reports the Daily Mirror.

“My daddy’s body has disappeared. I have no clue where it was taken, but I need to know where,” Pettit explained.

She added: “I’m convinced his death was suspicious and I want the people responsible brought to justice. The only way to do that is to exhume his body and have an autopsy. I cannot understand why one was never conducted.”

[Read more at NME.com]

I know you use binaural beats and other methods to enhance your music by making it consciousness altering. Can you describe some of the methods you use?

Well, much of my music is a sort of “hypersigil” imbued with specific frequencies designed to induce altered states. When combined with psychedelics, it can be intense. I have done much research on cymatics/sound healing/binaurual tones.

I started making acid house as the first electonic music i did, and binaurals were first introduced to that music. I am heavily influenced by Coil, who also did much work w/ frequencies to transmit information/altered states-specific qualities. Psychic TV is an early influence as well, which was less about traditional sound-mind altering, but more about raw feeling/energy.

And as a raver since the early 90’s UK hardcore/jungle/garage, “techno” and old-school “trance” play huge roles in the type of vibe i try to get across. Pure butt-shaking, mind-quaking funk. Also heavily effected by hip-hop and breakbeat/sample culture, that kind of cut-n-paste mentality carried over.

But what, more specifically, do you do to make your music mind altering? Or is that a secret?

Semi-secret. Much of it is energetically imbued, but as far as technical wizardry goes: binaural tone generation and specific frequencies mixed in at nearly sub-liminal levels.

I’m afraid that’s *about* all i can say to that. I do a lot of my music when in trance states, so honestly SOME of my method is not even known to me.

Read More on Technoccult

via wired:

The sonic space cadets in Man or Astro-man? mashed surf, sci-fi, punk, samples and Tesla coils into a jagged rock juggernaut, touring nonstop in the ’90s before burning out at the dawn of the ’00s. But the Alabama-based band has rebooted for the ’10s, and returns to interface live with fans on a U.S. tour next month.

Contrary to unpopular opinion, the quartet wasn’t just waiting around for developments in nanoscience to help repair its worn-out biocircuitry (although the band members are totally fine with that idea).

Also, check out this great interview over at Chunklet.

In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace.

Across the UK, local councils and other public institutions now play recorded classical music through speakers at bus-stops, in parking lots, outside department stores, and elsewhere…as a deterrent against bad behavior.

Tyne and Wear in the north of England was one of the first parts of the UK to weaponize classical music. In the early 2000s, the local railway company decided to do something about the “problem” of “youths hanging around” its train stations.

Read More in Reason

Was Jimi Hendrix’s ambidexterity the secret to his talent? This is the question explored in a new paper by psychologist Stephen Christman (via TwentyFourBit), who argues that Hendrix’s versatility informed not just his guitar-playing – but his lyrics too.

According to Christman, who is based at the University of Toledo, Hendrix was not strictly left-handed. Although he played his right-handed guitar upside down, and used his left hand to throw, comb his hair and hold cigarettes, Hendrix wrote, ate and held the telephone with his right hand. He was, Christman argues, “mixed-right-handed”. And this “mixed”-ness, signaling better interaction between the left and right hemispheres of the guitarist’s brain, suffused every part of his music.

Hendrix’s special ability, Christman wrote, “enabled him to integrate the actions of his left and right hands while playing guitar, to integrate the lyrics and melodies of his songs, and perhaps even to integrate the older blues and R&B traditions with the emerging folk, rock, and psychedelic sounds of the 60s”. Certainly the guitarist’s technical virtuosity is clear. Christman points to Hendrix’s technique on songs like Still Raining, Still Dreaming, “where Hendrix uses his right hand to play an intricate series of bends and slides, while his left hand, in between plucking the strings, uses the pickup selector to switch back and forth between the treble and bass pickups”.

Read More in the Guardian

An apparently lifeless John Lennon lies on the ground, his fellow-Beatles by his side. The haunting picture was taken in 1968 – 12 years before Lennon was gunned down by a crazed fan, Mark Chapman, in New York City.

It was one of many images taken by society photographer Tom Murray during the Fab Four’s last official photoshoot in 1968, which lay forgotten in an envelope for decades.

It was among a number of photographs which were made public today after lying forgotten about for years.

‘From two rolls of film there are 23 surviving shots. The colours are astonishing and it’s basically because the original slides were kept in the dark in an envelope for so many years.’

From The Huffington Post:

AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson is taking on Bono and Bob Geldof for their public displays of charity work.

“When I was a working man I didn’t want to go to a concert for some bastard to talk down to me that I should be thinking of some kid in Africa,” he told Melbourne’s Herald Sun. “I’m sorry mate, do it yourself, spend some of your own money and get it done. It just makes me angry. I become all tyrannical.”

Johnson said that his own band prefers to make their charitable contributions in private.

“Do a charity gig, fair enough, but not on worldwide television,” he said.

[Read more at The Huffington Post]

Multi-instrumentalist Joshua Ellis, who records under the name Red State Soundsystem, has just self-released his debut album Ghosts a Burning City. Ellis — whose music sounds like a cross between Paul Simon and Nine Inch Nails — recorded, mixed, and mastered the album himself. I caught up with him via instant messenger to talk about his music and DIY music production. [...]

The most important things, I think, are these: a good audio interface with minimal noise and high-bitrate capabilities, and the best microphone preamp you can afford. With those things, you can afford to be a little lax on other stuff.

Also, the most important investment is time. Learn everything you can. Listen to your favorite albums, figure out what you like about the sound, try to figure out how they did it. Read reviews of gear. Read magazines like Sound on Sound and Future Music. It took me a lot longer to learn how to record than it actually did to record the album.

Read More: Technoccult

An underground sensation and cult hero in Memphis since his teens, Reatard had just recently begun to get more mainstream attention, as evidenced by a lengthy and fairly silly profile in the New York Times this past summer.

He leaves behind a large body of recordings, as well as a reputation involving excessive drug use, stage antics and violence at shows, and feuds with other artists. If you haven’t heard his abrasive, punk-inspired music, now’s a good time to take a listen…he always lived up to his name.

Jaron Lanier performing at the Garden of Memory Solstice Concert June, 2009. Photo: Allan J. Cronin, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

By JOHN TIERNEY for the New York Times:

When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs?

In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts.

Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity.

He blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

I find his critique intriguing, partly because Mr. Lanier isn’t your ordinary Luddite crank, and partly because I’ve felt the same kind of disappointment with the Web. In the 1990s, when I was writing paeans to the dawning spirit of digital collaboration, it didn’t occur to me that the Web’s “gift culture,” as anthropologists called it, could turn into a mandatory potlatch for so many professions — including my own.

So I have selfish reasons for appreciating Mr. Lanier’s complaints about masses of “digital peasants” being forced to provide free material to a few “lords of the clouds” like Google and YouTube. But I’m not sure Mr. Lanier has correctly diagnosed the causes of our discontent, particularly when he blames software design for leading to what he calls exploitative monopolies on the Web like Google…

[continues in the New York Times]

A technology reporter sees a day when the music industry abandons “leasing licenses on intellectual property” and earns its money from exotic technology-enhanced concert experiences.

Currently we have multi-camera concert streams and the ability to “telepresence” sounds (which may one day allow the blind to drive). But he visualizes live feeds from special eyeglasses provided to concertgoers — as well as footage piped directly to their eyeglasses. “Telepresencing technology and the raw hunger of fans for free and novel entertainment is in an arms race with corporate ingenuity’s efforts to commodify increasingly abstract souvenir experiences … In response to freely available live music, the industry must work harder to create points of artificial scarcity and more intimate/intricate pay-to-play options.”

Read More in h+ Magazine

———————————————————————————–

Irving Berlin (1888–1989)

How many patriotic Americans know that “God Bless America” was written by a man who did not believe in God? Or that it was intended as an anti-war anthem?

Irving Berlin is by any measure the greatest composer of popular American music, with hundreds of enduring hits, such as “White Christmas,” “Anything You Can Do,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “I Love a Piano,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Marie,” “Play a Simple Melody,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and “Easter Parade.”

Born in 1888 into a Russian-Jewish family who came to New York City in 1893 to escape religious persecution, he quickly shed his religious roots and fell in love with America. “Patriotism was Irving Berlin’s true religion,” notes biographer Laurence Bergreen.

“Though he is not a religious person,” his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett writes in her family memoir, “doesn’t even keep up appearances of being an observant Jew, he does not forget who his people are.” Irving and his nominally Catholic wife, Ellin, were married in an unannounced secular ceremony at the Municipal Building, not a church or synagogue. They had three daughters. Mary Ellin recalls:

Both our parents would pass down to their children the moral and ethical values common to all great religions; give us a sense of what was right and what was wrong; raise us not to be good Jews or good Catholics or good whatever else you might care to cite, but to be good (or try to be) human beings…. When we grew up, she [my mother] said, we would be free to choose—if we knew what was best for us, the religion of our husband…. It wouldn’t quite work out, when we “grew up,” as my mother hoped. All three of us would share our father’s agnosticism and sidestep our husbands’ faiths.

The man who wrote “White Christmas” actually hated Christmas. “Many years later,” Mary Ellin writes, “when Christmas was celebrated irregularly in my parents’ house, if at all, my mother said, almost casually, ‘Oh, you know, I hated Christmas, we both hated Christmas. We only did it for you children.’” (This also had something to do with the fact that they had lost a baby boy on December 25.)

Why did an agnostic humanist who loathed Christmas write the song “White Christmas”? Because he needed a number for the 1942 movie Holiday Inn, which called for a song for each major holiday celebrated in the US. “White Christmas” is not religious; it is not about the birth of a savior-god. It’s about winter, the real reason for the season.

“God Bless America” was originally written in 1918 for Yip, Yip, Yaphank, a WWI show about the US Army. As he was finishing the musical, Berlin added a patriotic melody that he imagined the soldier characters would sing. Bergreen writes:

But even as he dictated it to [his pianist Harry] Ruby, Berlin became insecure about its originality. “There were so many patriotic songs coming out everywhere at the time,” Ruby recalled. As he wrote down the melody, Ruby said to Berlin, “Geez, another one?” Deciding that Ruby was right, that the song was too solemn to ring true for the acerbic doughboys, Berlin cut it from the score and placed it in his trunk. “Just a little sticky” was the way he described the song. “I couldn’t visualize soldiers marching to it. So I laid it aside and tried other things.”

The song was forgotten for two decades. During those years, Berlin’s attitude toward war evolved.

In 1938, while the United States was resisting joining the new European conflict, Kate Smith was looking for a “song of peace” for her Armistice Day broadcast. Irving Berlin tried writing a couple of songs, but they were “too much like making a speech to music,” he said. It then occurred to him to dig up that discarded composition from 1918.

“I had to make one or two changes in the lyrics,” Berlin said in an interview,

and they in turn led me to a slight change and, I think, an improvement in the melody…. One line in particular; the original line ran: “Stand beside her and guide her to the right with a light from above.” In 1918 the phrase “to the right” had no political significance, as it has now. So for obvious reasons I changed the phrase to “Through the night with a light from above,” and I think that’s better.

Just as “White Christmas” is not about Christ, “God Bless America” is not about God. It is about love for America. “‘God Bless America’ revealed that patriotism was Irving Berlin’s true religion,” Bergreen writes. “It evoked the same emotional response in him that conventional religious belief summoned in others; it was his rock.” His choice of “God bless” was his picking up an American idiom, not expressing a personal belief.

Irving Berlin sometimes poked fun at faith. In 1922, confronting censors, he wrote “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil in Hades” for his Music Box Revue. During the show, a comedienne in a red devil suit dispatched jazz musicians to hell, singing, “They’ve got a couple of old reformers in Heaven, making them go to bed at eleven. Pack up your sins and go to the devil, and you’ll never have to go to bed at all.” The song is the perfect antidote to “God Bless America.”

Irving Berlin died quietly at home at the age of 101. He did not believe in an afterlife, but maybe he did jokingly wish for a hell, because “all the nice people are there,” his lyrics report.

——————————————————————————-

Read the entire article in the Disinformation anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick, available on Amazon and in all good bookstores.

About The Author: Dan Barker is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (ffrf.org) and author of Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist (FFRF, Inc., 1992). He is also a professional jazz musician and songwriter living in Madison, Wisconsin. He has produced two freethought musical CDs for FFRF: Friendly, Neighborhood Atheist and Beware of Dogma.

The bald, beefy moderator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in darkness. “It is my revolting pleasure,” he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, “to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who will present his paper ‘The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.’ ”

And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”

You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not just because plenty of people like to make fun of academics discoursing on youth culture but because the subject was something like the music that dare not speak its name.

Black metal, which has been a self-conscious genre since the early 1990s — with a prehistory in some ’80s metal bands — remains metal’s most underground subspecies…

Here’s the top 10:

1 | Gnarls Barkley — “Crazy”

2 | Jay-Z — “99 Problems”

3 | Beyoncé — “Crazy in Love”

4 | Outkast — “Hey Ya!”

5 | M.I.A. — “Paper Planes”

6 | The White Stripes — “Seven Nation Army”

7 | Yeah Yeah Yeahs — “Maps”

8 | Amy Winehouse — “Rehab”

9 | U2 — “Beautiful Day”

10 | Eminem — “Stan”

[see the full list in Rolling Stone]

Four months after the love-in of Woodstock, the Stones played a fateful, fatal concert on Dec. 6, 1969 – and its stain on rock ‘n’ roll has lingered ever sinc.

Altamont, it could only happen to the Stones, man. Let’s face it. It wouldn’t happen to the Bee Gees and it wouldn’t happen to Crosby, Stills and Nash. –Keith Richards, 1971

In the middle of the night before the `free’ Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway near San Francisco, Keith Richards drove to the last-minute site with the filmmaking team of Albert and David Maysles. The car passed a group of kids ripping apart a fence just for the hell of it.

Richards stared.

“The first act of violence,” he quipped.

On the DVD commentary he recorded for the 2000 release of the definitive Altamont documentary Gimme Shelter, Albert Maysles remembers looking back on what was about to transpire during the following day – Dec. 6, 1969 – and wondering, how did he know?

[Read more at The Star]

“When that wave of prosperity which brought us there – for a happy, shiny moment – rolled back violently, these kids found out even drugs wouldn’t help.” But remembering the 90s as “the time of Napster’s infinite-mp3-download-orgy,” Steve Robles asks whether there could be a nostalgia craze for music from the era. “Someone sold a lot of kids on the idea that the Brave New World had been reached,” he points out, also arguing that there’s now a subsequent bleakness “which continues to this day.”

And he lists the albums which historians will remember as defining the decade – while simultaneously noting that 10 years from now, no one will even be using the word ‘album’!”