Do you want new wave, or do you want the truth? Part II

switchstatement pointed me to this Yahoo! AP story about the CMJ Music Marathon.

Just about exactly 20 years ago I was in college radio as a music director. There was all this crazy shit going on, because of punk. Punk meant that college stations stopped playing Journey all the time and started playing newer music. Because of the general smashing of boundaries, this meant that genres and race barriers were at least partly knocked aside. Suddenly we were all listening to thrash, dancehall, house, gangsta rap, folky stuff, and of course lots and lots of whiteboy refined rock ‘n’ roll made by four guys with guitars and drums.

About at this point, 1985, a publication called “College Music Journal” became more important. We all told them what we played, or in some cases what we wished we were playing, and they reported it in detail and aggregate. There was a Top 100. Those Top 100s were eclectic. Just about every current musical subculture had a few songs in there. The Top 10 or so were almost always new wave or postpunk records like R.E.M.’s “Lifes Rich Pageant” or INXS’s “Listen Like Thieves”. It was a half-assed revolution at this point but about 2/3 of the music was good.

In the next three years everything went to shit. College radio was recognized by the big companies as the farm team for top 40. Independent labels and their supporters fought back with “indie only” movements that insisted that only music from small companies be played, but it was mostly garbage. The CMJ top 100 became more and more important. The top 10 froze for weeks at a time. A mania for jangly folksy Americana rock created thousands of forgettable REMitators and straight-shootin’ junior Mellencamps. Hip-hop disappeared from college radio formats.

I myself was out of college in ’87 and out of music writing for pay by ’89. Somewhere between those two points, the idea of an alternative to commercial radio was replaced, in true Animal Farm fashion, with a new radio format called “alternative”. This was: bands consisting of four white guys with guitars and drums; leftover punk and new wave that people remembered from high school; two Bob Marley songs; and two Ministry songs. The format crept further and further down, through dark corners and fetid swamps as did Gollum, until it finally and inevitably reached the gates of Mordor the Spin Doctors.

Why do I tell this inane story? Because 20 years later these bastards are still fucking the bloated, maggot ridden corpse of my generation’s half revolution. Indie rock was fresh, new, and full of promise in 1985. It was killed and eaten in 1989 and then they vomited it back up so they could eat it again. That music was pretty pale and refined to start with. Now it’s just the sonic equivalent of a beige lace doily. This stuff is the denim troubadour easy listening for 2005; our James Taylor and Jim Croce are Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie. It’s over, people.

Fuck you, Steven Malkmus, for saying “I started when it was still college rock… It seems to have become more institutionalized in big cities … I’m glad to be a part of it.” Fuck you right in the ear. Fuck you, Nic Harcourt, for “Today, the sensibility is more of an aesthetic than it is a manifesto.”

I can’t believe these assholes manage to coopt the same revolution twice.

…but I was e bloom, and Richard Hell, Joe Strummer and John Doe. Me and Mike Watt, playing guitar.

Bill Maher from the other night

I saw this clip and it’s on the huffpo today.

“Mr. President, this job can’t be fun for you any more. There’s no more money to spend–you used up all of that. You can’t start another war because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen to your Mom. The cupboard’s bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one’s speaking to you. Mission accomplished.

“Now it’s time to do what you’ve always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball team. It’s time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you’re saying: there’s so many other things that you as President could involve yourself in. Please don’t. I know, I know. There’s a lot left to do. There’s a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.

“But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You’ve performed so poorly I’m surprised that you haven’t given yourself a medal. You’re a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes.

“On your watch, we’ve lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you’re just not lucky. I’m not saying you don’t love this country. I’m just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side.

“So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: ‘Take a hint.’ “

LJ, blog searches, datamining

Google’s new blog search is pretty nifty if you either like searching through people’s weblogs or are an egotist who likes to kiboze. I’m both. Since I’ve always been a shameless self-promoter and I ping all available services, index myself in search engines etc. this is just peachy.

The way LJ did it was to provide a large-scale XML data feed of Livejournal and Typepad blogs. The feed is explicitly intended for use by larger organizations who want to resyndicate or index this huge quantity of data. It’s not usable by end users; it’s an institutional service.

This is great if you’re Google, or AOL, or an MIT grad student doing a thesis on weblogging. However, if you’re an LJ user who checked the “please do not let search engines index me” button, it may be an unwelcome surprise. People who assumed a level of public presence that included friends and internet acquaintances, but not every coworker or family member who Googled them, have now discovered that the verb “to Google” now includes a well-indexed stream of all their public entries since March.

I had a frustrating conversation about this with mendel yesterday (sorry I got ruffled there, Rich) in which I think we were both right about different things. He quite rightly pointed out that public LJ entries were subject to data mining and indexing in a number of ways already, and that the check box for blocking robots did not imply privacy to someone who understands the current state of of the Internet. Certainly my personal expectation is that anything I post, even with the lock on it, could conceivably end up as the lead story on CNN, and I proceed with that risk in mind.

And of course many of the complaints received by Six Apart about this will be from people who are misinformed about technology or the law in various countries or any number of complicated issues. I actually have no idea what U.S. law would say about what a customer can reasonably expect in this situation, and since the technologies involved about about fifteen minutes old, it may be unknown anyway.

My concern was different. Providing a massive datastream only useful to large-scale operations is qualitatively different than allowing spidering, even. Marketers, credit agencies, insurance companies, and government agencies now have an optimized tool for data mining a huge chunk of weblogs. The amount of effort required to monitor and index all of LJ and Typepad just deflated tremendously.

I am reminded, for example, of FedEx providing a stream of their tracking information to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or of the supermarket loyalty card information being informally turned over to the government right after 9/11/01. A recent event I posted about in which auto repair records from dealers were aggregated and sold to Carfax comes to mind. I have been told by people in the email appliance business that spammers derive a good chunk of income these days by selling verified email addresses with names attached to insurers and credit reporting agencies as additional identifying information for their records (“appends”).

In short, Database Nation (Amazon link). To my mind these changes are inevitable, irresistible, and both exciting and frightening for different reasons.

But I also think that Six Apart failed their customers, at least in the customer satisfaction/PR department, by not providing a pre-launch opt-out or removing customers who checked that box from their institutional feed.

Neo-metro-emo-pomo-bozo-slomo

  1. This seems like Bad Idea Jeans: Let’s go koala hugging, kids! Even the Holy Father himself looks like he just realized this was a very, very bad move.
  2. According to Automotive Digest’s summary of WSJ and LATimes articles (registration required, BugMeNot works), gasoline demand dropped 4% last week. Yes, four percent in one week. 52 oil and gas platforms are missing, 49.6% of combined oil & gas production in the Gulf is offline, crude oil futures are up 48% year-to-date, and 20% of US refining capacity is shut down or at reduced capacity.
  3. do_not_lick pointed out a case of life imitating The Onion.
  4. The water in NOLA is full of sewage bacteria, lead, and heavy metals. Best sentence: “Tests by aircraft of the city’s air, which has a strong stench even from a couple hundred feet up, indicated no potential health issues.”
  5. September 11 Memorial burns out eyes of aged veterans with death rays.
  6. ParanoidWatch: They’re using UAVs for rescue operations in NOLA. How long until they’re flying over every city, 24/7?
  7. Lost dolphins from a Missisippi aquarium were found huddled together in the Gulf, probably squeaking “holy fucking SHIT that was intense!” at each other.
  8. I wish some of these failed 90s trends had happened.

Waterclosetgate Hearings

ignatz: Mr. President, at the time of the memorandum you did not specify #1 or #2. Was there additional communication between you and the Secretary of State on this distinction?
ignatz: Please let the record show that the President slowly lifted both hands.
maciej: Republicans angrily denounces insinuations that the President may have intended to go do #3
ignatz: Why do you hate defecation?
maciej: 2 4 6 8… Condi can I micturate?
ignatz: Mr. President, you already have. It’s time to go to the “undisclosed location” again.