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dipshit Chistaug writes on (defends himself) Bangs, Meltzer and Toches in this weeks Voice.

Richard Meltzer


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Worst Band Names.......

;-) and the Emoticons
Aesthete's Foot
The Affable Frenchmen
Articulate As Fuck
As If and the Air Quotes
Atlas Frugged
A Very Special Episode of Blossom
Borrowing Joe Orton's Hammer
Britney's Plain, Bitter Sister
Brother, Can You Paradigm?
Christo Draped My Girlfriend's Ass
Classified 'Nads
Ctrl-Alt-ROCK!
Demoted From Übermensch
Does This Dental Dam Taste Like Coleslaw to You?
The Dot-Coms Aren't Hiring Anymore Because The NASDAQ Is Tanking, So We Were Going To Make An Indie Film, But Then We Saw Blink-182 On MTV And We Figured, Hey, If They Can Do It, Any Idiot Can Do It, So We Formed This Band
Doubtful It's Mayonnaise
Droppin' Trou With Senor Wences
Dude, Your Mom is HOT!
Durwood Kirby Sleeps On My Living Room Couch
E. Coli and the Food-Borne Illnesses
Ernest Borgnine Naked
The Fact That We Rock Is the Third Secret of Fatima
Fartin' Sartre
Fat, Drunk, And Blowin' Chunks Onstage
Find the $100 Bill Hidden Somewhere in Our Drummer's Pubic Hair
The Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Beatles
Five Guys Who Formed a Band And Still Can't Get Laid
The Four Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf
The Four Horsemen of the Disappointing Ending
The Fuckin' A's
Garrotted with a Scrunchy
God's Only Nose
Go Foucault Yourself
Graceland Über Alles
The Grumpy Dead
Gynecological Whack-A-Mole
Hava Negilah, No, Have Two
He Called Me A Mook. You Can't Call Me A Mook. What's A Mook?
He Do The Police In Different Hairstyles
Hey...I Think I Know That Tongue
Hi I'm Five and I Can Count to One Hundred! One, Two, Three, Four...
Hissyfit Against the Machine
Hungry Hungry Hypocrites
I Don't Think Presumptive Means What You Think It Means
I Ejaculate Bosco
If 6 Was 9, That'd Be Just Wacky
If You're Ready to Rock and Roll, Press 1 Now
Inscrutable Crouton
I Should Have Been A Pair of Ragged Claws, But Instead I Work Nights At Wendy's
It Came From Burl Ives' Goatee
I Think My Spirit Guide Is Licking Me
It's Alright, Ma (No It Fucking Isn't Get Me A Doctor Before I Bleed To
Fucking Death On Your Goddamned Fucking Turkish Rug)
I Want To Die Like Lupe Velez
Jimmy Crack Whore
Kaballah Not Glue
Klaatu Verada Nick Lowe
Labia Menorah (X-rated klezmer band)
Lao-Tsu-Tsu-Tsudio
Leave the Gun, Take the Zamboni
Leg Humped By Quakers
Mack The Naif
Mangione...Or Astromangione?
MC Escher (I tried listening to his album, but I'm not sure where it begins or ends...)
The Men They Could Hang, But Didn't Because George W. Carefully Reviews Every Death Warrant That Comes Across His Desk And He Saw That They Might Be Innocent And Immediately Called Off The Execution
The Men Who Funk Forgot
My Enormous Mantits
My Nutsack Salutes You
My Uncle The Would-Be Trotsky Killer
Nebbishes With Attitude
New Riders of the Gulag Archipelago
Nixon Prayer Session
Noddy Holder's Spell Checker
No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You To Plotz,br> Oh, There's Godot
Okay, We'll Throw The Girl In Too
Ontogeny Recapitulates Yo' Mama
The Other White Meat
Ophelia Self
The Orangina Monologues
Our Name Is Self-Referential!
Pantsed In Gaza
The Parts of a Chicken You're Really Not Supposed to Eat
The Perpetually Queasy
The Putra Faction
The Richard Feynmen
Ringo Ate My Baby
Schroedinger's Cat Scan
Schtup With People
Single Mullet Theory
Sisyphus is a Pusher
The Slouching Wallendas
Sociopath of Least Resistance
Sopping Wet Cusack
Speak, Mummery
Spy In The House of Pancakes
Syd Barrett's Missing Chromosomes Ate My Puppy
Tastes Nothing Like Chicken
That Darn Catheter
These Your Testicles?
Things That Look Like Pudding
Three Chords And a Legally Accurate Representation Of the Events As They
Transpired On the Night of September 14, 1997
Tinky-Winky, La La, Po & Young
Tittie Bar Sinister
Too Idealistic for the Oneida Colony
Tower of Impotence
The Trembling Mohels
Two Tons O' Nun
Ubu Roi G. Biv
Watch It or We'll Give You an Indian Burn
Weasels Who Drive Zambonis
The Weenie Mocks You
We Vishnu a Hare Krishna
What the Corporate-Owned Media Won't Tell You About My Eleven-Inch Love Muscle
What The Hell Happened to the Cat?
When People Were Shorter and Kept Things on Much Lower Shelves
Where The Hell's My Cookie?
Yoko Boingo
Zeppo Marx Was the Funny One!



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Courtney on everything

yo alll...

"this is really long + love her or hate her....she is brilliant. she cribs a lot in the beginning from Steve Albini's piece, but then gets it so right..." -cb ............
June 14, 2000 | Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.

I'm talking about major label recording contracts.

I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:

This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.

What happens to that million dollars?

They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.

That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.

That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.

The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)

So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.

The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable. The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.

All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.

Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.

If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.

Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero!

How much does the record company make?

They grossed $11 million.

It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.

The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.

They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.

Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.

So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.

Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn't have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit.

Worst of all, after all this, the band owns none of its work ... they can pay the mortgage forever but they'll never own the house. Like I said: Sharecropping. Our media says, "Boo hoo, poor pop stars, they had a nice ride. Fuck them for speaking up"; but I say this dialogue is imperative. And cynical media people, who are more fascinated with celebrity than most celebrities, need to reacquaint themselves with their value systems.

When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says copyright 1976 Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever.

The system's set up so almost nobody gets paid.

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)

Last November, a Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier, with the support of the RIAA, added a "technical amendment" to a bill that defined recorded music as "works for hire" under the 1978 Copyright Act.

He did this after all the hearings on the bill were over. By the time artists found out about the change, it was too late. The bill was on its way to the White House for the president's signature.

That subtle change in copyright law will add billions of dollars to record company bank accounts over the next few years -- billions of dollars that rightfully should have been paid to artists. A "work for hire" is now owned in perpetuity by the record company.

Under the 1978 Copyright Act, artists could reclaim the copyrights on their work after 35 years. If you wrote and recorded "Everybody Hurts," you at least got it back to as a family legacy after 35 years. But now, because of this corrupt little pisher, "Everybody Hurts" never gets returned to your family, and can now be sold to the highest bidder.

Over the years record companies have tried to put "work for hire" provisions in their contracts, and Mr. Glazier claims that the "work for hire" only "codified" a standard industry practice. But copyright laws didn't identify sound recordings as being eligible to be called "works for hire," so those contracts didn't mean anything. Until now.

Writing and recording "Hey Jude" is now the same thing as writing an English textbook, writing standardized tests, translating a novel from one language to another or making a map. These are the types of things addressed in the "work for hire" act. And writing a standardized test is a work for hire. Not making a record.

So an assistant substantially altered a major law when he only had the authority to make spelling corrections. That's not what I learned about how government works in my high school civics class.

Three months later, the RIAA hired Mr. Glazier to become its top lobbyist at a salary that was obviously much greater than the one he had as the spelling corrector guy.

The RIAA tries to argue that this change was necessary because of a provision in the bill that musicians supported. That provision prevents anyone from registering a famous person's name as a Web address without that person's permission. That's great. I own my name, and should be able to do what I want with my name.

But the bill also created an exception that allows a company to take a person's name for a Web address if they create a work for hire. Which means a record company would be allowed to own your Web site when you record your "work for hire" album. Like I said: Sharecropping.

Although I've never met any one at a record company who "believed in the Internet," they've all been trying to cover their asses by securing everyone's digital rights. Not that they know what to do with them. Go to a major label-owned band site. Give me a dollar for every time you see an annoying "under construction" sign. I used to pester Geffen (when it was a label) to do a better job. I was totally ignored for two years, until I got my band name back. The Goo Goo Dolls are struggling to gain control of their domain name from Warner Bros., who claim they own the name because they set up a shitty promotional Web site for the band.

Orrin Hatch, songwriter and Republican senator from Utah, seems to be the only person in Washington with a progressive view of copyright law. One lobbyist says that there's no one in the House with a similar view and that "this would have never happened if Sonny Bono was still alive."

By the way, which bill do you think the recording industry used for this amendment?

The Record Company Redefinition Act? No. The Music Copyright Act? No. The Work for Hire Authorship Act? No.

How about the Satellite Home Viewing Act of 1999?

Stealing our copyright reversions in the dead of night while no one was looking, and with no hearings held, is piracy.

It's piracy when the RIAA lobbies to change the bankruptcy law to make it more difficult for musicians to declare bankruptcy. Some musicians have declared bankruptcy to free themselves from truly evil contracts. TLC declared bankruptcy after they received less than 2 percent of the $175 million earned by their CD sales. That was about 40 times less than the profit that was divided among their management, production and record companies.

Toni Braxton also declared bankruptcy in 1998. She sold $188 million worth of CDs, but she was broke because of a terrible recording contract that paid her less than 35 cents per album. Bankruptcy can be an artist's only defense against a truly horrible deal and the RIAA wants to take it away. Artists want to believe that we can make lots of money if we're successful. But there are hundreds of stories about artists in their 60s and 70s who are broke because they never made a dime from their hit records. And real success is still a long shot for a new artist today. Of the 32,000 new releases each year, only 250 sell more than 10,000 copies. And less than 30 go platinum. The four major record corporations fund the RIAA. These companies are rich and obviously well-represented. Recording artists and musicians don't really have the money to compete. The 273,000 working musicians in America make about $30,000 a year. Only 15 percent of American Federation of Musicians members work steadily in music. But the music industry is a $40 billion-a-year business. One-third of that revenue comes from the United States. The annual sales of cassettes, CDs and video are larger than the gross national product of 80 countries. Americans have more CD players, radios and VCRs than we have bathtubs. Story after story gets told about artists -- some of them in their 60s and 70s, some of them authors of huge successful songs that we all enjoy, use and sing -- living in total poverty, never having been paid anything. Not even having access to a union or to basic health care. Artists who have generated billions of dollars for an industry die broke and un-cared for. And they're not actors or participators. They're the rightful owners, originators and performers of original compositions. This is piracy. Technology is not piracy This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't work with us to protect us. I'm on [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich's side, in other words, and I feel really badly for him that he doesn't know how to condense his case down to a sound-bite that sounds more reasonable than the one I saw today. I also think Metallica is being given too much grief. It's anti-artist, for one thing. An artist speaks up and the artist gets squashed: Sharecropping. Don't get above your station, kid. It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'. Recording artists have essentially been giving
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How about that musical ethics watchdog Pat Metheny?

"Wow, an amazing concise spew of bile and rage. First Metheny starts making noise records and dueting with Derek Bailey, then he shoots a fish (kenny g) in a barrel. 17,000 times. I predict next he replaces Eazy-E on the NWA reunion tour." -bt

from www.patmethenygroup.com
Date: Jun 05 2000 Subject: Controversy and Kenny G
Question: Pat, could you tell us your opinion about Kenny G - it appears you were quoted as being less than enthusiastic about him and his music. I would say that most of the serious music listeners in the world would not find your opinion surprising or unlikely - but you were vocal about it for the first time. You are generally supportive of other musicians it seems.

Pat's Answer: kenny g is not a musician i really had much of an opinion about at all until recently. there was not much about the way he played that interested me one way or the other either live or on records. i first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with jeff lorber when they opened a concert for my band. my impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like grover washington or david sanborn, but was not really an advanced player, even in that style. he had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues-lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble - lorber was basically playing him off the bandstand in terms of actual music. but he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the keys moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again) . the other main thing i noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, play horribly out of tune - consistently sharp. of course, i am aware of what he has played since, the success it has had, and the controversy that has surrounded him among musicians and serious listeners. this controversy seems to be largely fueled by the fact that he sells an enormous amount of records while not being anywhere near a really great player in relation to the standards that have been set on his instrument over the past sixty or seventy years. and honestly, there is no small amount of envy involved from musicians who see one of their fellow players doing so well financially, especially when so many of them who are far superior as improvisors and musicians in general have trouble just making a living. there must be hundreds, if not thousands of sax players around the world who are simply better improvising musicians than kenny g on his chosen instruments. it would really surprise me if even he disagreed with that statement. having said that, it has gotten me to thinking lately why so many jazz musicians (myself included, given the right "bait" of a question, as i will explain later) and audiences have gone so far as to say that what he is playing is not even jazz at all. stepping back for a minute, if we examine the way he plays, especially if one can remove the actual improvising from the often mundane background environment that it is delivered in, we see that his saxophone style is in fact clearly in the tradition of the kind of playing that most reasonably objective listeners WOULD normally quantify as being jazz. it's just that as jazz or even as music in a general sense, with these standards in mind, it is simply not up to the level of playing that we historically associate with professional improvising musicians. so, lately i have been advocating that we go ahead and just include it under the word jazz - since pretty much of the rest of the world OUTSIDE of the jazz community does anyway - and let the chips fall where they may. and after all, why he should be judged by any other standard, why he should be exempt from that that all other serious musicians on his instrument are judged by if they attempt to use their abilities in an improvisational context playing with a rhythm section as he does? he SHOULD be compared to john coltrane or wayne shorter, for instance, on his abilities (or lack thereof) to play the soprano saxophone and his success (or lack thereof) at finding a way to deploy that instrument in an ensemble in order to accurately gauge his abilities and put them in the context of his instrument's legacy and potential. as a composer of even eighth note based music, he SHOULD be compared to herbie hancock, horace silver or even grover washington. suffice it to say, on all above counts, at this point in his development, he wouldn't fare well. but, like i said at the top, this relatively benign view was all "until recently". not long ago, kenny g put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old louis armstrong record, the track "what a wonderful world". with this single move, kenny g became one of the few people on earth i can say that i really can't use at all - as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music. this type of musical necrophilia - the technique of overdubbing on the preexisting tracks of already dead performers - was weird when natalie cole did it with her dad on "unforgettable" a few years ago, but it was her dad. when tony bennett did it with billie holiday it was bizarre, but we are talking about two of the greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly the same level of artistic accomplishment. when larry coryell presumed to overdub himself on top of a wes montgomery track, i lost a lot of the respect that i ever had for him - and i have to seriously question the fact that i did have respect for someone who could turn out to have have such unbelievably bad taste and be that disrespectful to one of my personal heroes. but when kenny g decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great louis's tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that i would not have imagined possible. he, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that louis armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. by disrespecting louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, kenny g has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. we ignore this, "let it slide", at our own peril. his callous disregard for the larger issues of what this crass gesture implies is exacerbated by the fact that the only reason he possibly have for doing something this inherently wrong (on both human and musical terms) was for the record sales and the money it would bring. since that record came out - in protest, as insigificant as it may be, i encourage everyone to boycott kenny g recordings, concerts and anything he is associated with. if asked about kenny g, i will diss him and his music with the same passion that is in evidence in this little essay. normally, i feel that musicians all have a hard enough time, regardless of their level, just trying to play good and don't really benefit from public criticism, particularly from their fellow players. but, this is different. there ARE some things that are sacred - and amongst any musician that has ever attempted to address jazz at even the most basic of levels, louis armstrong and his music is hallowed ground. to ignore this trespass is to agree that NOTHING any musician has attempted to do with their life in music has any intrinsic value - and i refuse to do that. (i am also amazed that there HASN'T already been an outcry against this among music critics - where ARE they on this?????!?!?!?!- , magazines, etc.). everything i said here is exactly the same as what i would say to gorelick if i ever saw him in person. and if i ever DO see him anywhere, at any function - he WILL get a piece of my mind and (maybe a guitar wrapped around his head.) NOTE: this post is partially in response to the comments that people have made regarding a short video interview excerpt with me that was posted on the internet taken from a tv show for young people (kind of like MTV) in poland where i was asked to address 8 to 11 year old kids on terms that they could understand about jazz. while enthusiastically describing the virtues of this great area of music, i was encouraging the kids to find and listen to some of the greats in the music and not to get confused by the sometimes overwhelming volume of music that falls under the jazz umbrella. i went on to say that i think that for instance, "kenny g plays the dumbest music on the planet" - something that all 8 to 11 year kids on the planet already intrinsically know, as anyone who has ever spent any time around kids that age could confirm - so it gave us some common ground for the rest of the discussion. (ADDENDUM: the only thing wrong with the statement that i made was that i did not include the rest of the known universe.) the fact that this clip was released so far out of the context that it was delivered in is a drag, but it is now done. (it's unauthorized release out of context like that is symptomatic of the new electronically interconnected culture that we now live in - where pretty much anything anyone anywhere has ever said or done has the potential to become common public property at any time.) i was surprised by the polish people putting this clip up so far away from the use that it was intended -really just for the attention - with no explanation of the show it was made for - they (the polish people in general) used to be so hip and would have been unlikely candidates to do something like that before, but i guess everything is changing there like it is everywhere else. the only other thing that surprised me in the aftermath of the release of this little interview is that ANYONE would be even a little bit surprised that i would say such a thing, given the reality of mr. g's music. this makes me want to go practice about 10 times harder, because that suggests to me that i am not getting my own musical message across clearly enough - which to me, in every single way and intention is diametrically opposed to what Kenny G seems to be after.


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Aron Kay is Pieman

A J Weberman is a Garbologist


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