Results tagged “Arts” from blog riley

So after I arm wrestled with the sound collecting for the radio story and got to my seat, the band had found a respectful groove, and they were truly nerdy like you'd expect. Totally engrossed in their instruments, very little eye contact, and tossing off classic licks with original flourishes that would have made lesser musicians weap. Fagen sat up front behind a Fender Rhodes and shades, tilting his head almost like Ray Charles, and developed a rasp, but he was totally committed. He's gone way beyond irony and ennui, now you almost get the feeling this stuff gives him a kick. But like the others, he's way too cool to let on. Becker stood center-left in front of a music stand that obscured a lot of his work, but he took plenty of solos, even though that kid Jon Herington is stone dazzling. The drummer, Keith Carlock, is a serious talent, he didn't let Gadd intimidate him one bit, had the whole Aja thing rolling and spinning on his fingertips, quoting the record, then spinning off again, then coming back to reference your favorite little fills. He can't be 30. IT was one of those concerts that makes you feel old -- in a good way. Backup singers off to the right were always worth watching, smiling, swaying, concocting little dance moves, the only ones at their own private party over there. Fagen didn't talk until after Aja came to a finish, and then he announced they would play ROYAL SCAM. BOOM! "Kid Charlemagne," with 3500 people standing up singing every word. Ensemble got tighter and more involved as it rolled on. And that was something to hear, since they were spot-on to start -- now they started sweating. And the encores started with "Hey Nineteen" and went on from there, another 40 minutes at least of odds and ends. No material past 1980. Closed with "Boston Rag" and "Dirty Water," as if the hippest beatniks in the world could also pretend to be Red Sox fans.

Listen up to today's story on NPR's HERE AND NOW at 12:45pm EDT, podcast coming shortly.

Rent Party 09 lineup

It's impossible to say anything original about Michael Jackson, so I won't even try. As a celebrity and a media presence, for so much of his life, he cannot be extricated from all the words and images and sounds that he generated, or that were (and still are being) generated about him. Just as we cannot separate his music and performance from his persona, from all the allegations and scandals and media frenzies of his later years, so we cannot separate the "real" Michael Jackson from everything that has been thought and written and spoken and speculated about him. So, I can't write about him without quoting what other people have already written about him, both now just after his death, and over the years before...Pinocchio Theory responding to "The Freak of Consensual Sentimentality," by Greil Marcus in k-punk

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Early in "Appetite for Self-Destruction," Knopper quotes former Warner Records and EMI CEO Joe Smith as observing, "This business ain't full of Martin Luther Kings." It says something about the emotional power of music that anyone would expect sainthood in its executives, but in the real world the absence of "Martin Luther Kings" is notable in virtually all businesses. Internet romanticists liked to ridicule the often implausible claims of record execs that they were looking out for the artists, since these were, at times, the same companies that had been successfully sued by artists for inaccurate accounting. However, the venture capitalists were not funding business plans to advance a utopian vision. The tech companies were every bit as self-interested and just as much driven by short-term profits as the most venal record company execs. At least the record companies sometimes paid artists something.

There is no denying that the major record companies made mistakes, which leaders of other media were able to learn from and avoid (although not with demonstrably better results). There is, however, no evidence that there was any strategy, regardless of who ran the record companies or what decisions they made, that could have stopped fans, especially young fans, from legally or illegally copying or downloading music instead of buying it....--Danny Goldberg on Steve Knopper's APPETITE FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION

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