If you are interested in Music, you’ve got to check-out this amazing site.
The SoundJunction website’s all about music. You can take music apart and find out how it works, create music yourself, find out how other people make music and how they perform it, you can find out about musical instruments, and look at the backgrounds to different musical styles.
Spinning Into Oblivion – New York Times
Our intention was to offer a haven for all kinds of music lovers and obsessives, a shop that catered not only to the casual record buyer (“Do you have the new Sarah McLachlan and … uh … is there a Beatles greatest hits CD?”) but to the fan and oft-maligned serious collector (“Can you get the Japanese pressing of ‘Kinda Kinks’? I believe they used the rare mono mixes”). Fourteen years later, it’s clear just how wrong our assumptions were. Our little shop closed its doors at the end of 2005.
In the late ’90s, our business, and the music retail business in general, was booming. Enter Napster, the granddaddy of illegal download sites. How did the major record labels react? By continuing their campaign to eliminate the comparatively unprofitable CD single, raising list prices on album-length CDs to $18 or $19 and promoting artists like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears — whose strength was single songs, not albums. The result was a lot of unhappy customers, who blamed retailers like us for the dearth of singles and the high prices. Continue reading “Death of the Music Store”
Heavy metal a comfort for the bright child | Science News | Connected | Telegraph
Intelligent teenagers often listen to heavy metal music to cope with the pressures associated with being talented, according to research.
The results of a study of more than 1,000 of the brightest five per cent of young people will come as relief to parents whose offspring, usually long-haired, are devotees of Iron Maiden, AC/DC and their musical descendants.
Researchers found that, far from being a sign of delinquency and poor academic ability, many adolescent “metalheads” are extremely bright and often use the music to help them deal with the stresses and strains of being gifted social outsiders.
The Netherlands, the New Tax Shelter Hot Spot | StarNewsOnline.com | Star-News | Wilmington, NC
Over the last 20 years, according to Dutch documents, the three of the Stones have paid just $7.2 million in taxes on earnings of $450 million that they have channeled through Amsterdam — a tax rate of about 1.5 percent, well below the British rate of 40 percent.
The Rolling Stones are not the only celebrities sheltering income in the land of tulips, windmills and Rembrandt. The rock powerhouse U2 has transferred lucrative assets to Amsterdam, as have other pop singers and well-known athletes, all of whom have used or continue to take advantage of the Netherlands’ tax shelters, according to a Dutch tax lawyer who requested anonymity because of client confidentiality agreements. Continue reading “The Netherlands, the New U-2, Stones Tax Shelter Hot Spot”
WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: On Using Happy Flowers Tunes to Interrogate Iraqi Prisoners
Listen to these songs and read how this GI uses it to get information from witnesses. Click on the CD Covers Art to hear 2 cuts. From Wkipedia The musical group, Happy Flowers, was formed in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1983 by John Beers (“Mr. Horribly Charred Infant”) and Charlie Kramer (“Mr. Anus”). The band is known for combining improvisational tuneless noise with wailing vocals and primal screams. Their humorous songs consist of rants about childhood traumas.
For example; We came across a bomb in the road and while waiting for EOD to arrive to disarm it, I noticed a guy on the other side of a canal watching the area with binoculars. So we have a bomb, we have a triggerman… unfortunatly, by the time we can get around the canal he managed to escape. The triggerman was within 50 meters of a house. We go to the house and of course the gentleman living there has seen nothing. We had questioned this guy before and not gotten any information so this time, we put him in the Humvee, tell him we are taking him with us and start playing “Mom, I Gave the Cat Some Acid” over and over. Continue reading “Music as Torture?”
New Year’s nightmare for visiting Yale singers
How’s this for an only-in-San Francisco story:
Members of the Baker’s Dozen, the renowned, all-male a cappella singing group from Yale, are pummeled outside a New Year’s Eve party after singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The attackers allegedly include graduates from Sacred Heart Cathedral, one of the city’s oldest and best-known private schools.
The attack happens outside the home of two prominent San Francisco police officers — former mayoral bodyguard Reno Rapagnani, now retired, and his wife, Leanna Dawydiak — who were both accused and later cleared of leaking internal SFPD personnel documents during the Fajitagate debacle.
Part of a documentary of Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam visiting in Maui with Laird Hamilton, big-wave waterman extraordinaire. Thanks to Randy Marks for forwarding this video of 2 innovators. The Sundance Channel is showing this and has a link to a clip on the bottom-right of this linked page.
the things we miss along the way
Photography has taught me a lot. It has helped me to notice life. To realize that there is beauty in the mundane. That art is everywhere waiting for someone to notice. That the marrow of life lies in the alleys and forgotten corners of our own homes as we rush by everyday on our way to work and bed.
Thanks to Bob Bopp for sharing the Love.
