Category: Uncategorized

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May 1977, I was back in Liverpool forming a band called Big in Japan. At that time, punk rock was at its most potent. But as we struggled to write songs for our new band, I became aware that punk rock was already a formula. If I used certain chords, in a certain order, with a certain attitude, one could mimic the sound of punk rock. But as soon as I did, it sounded rubbish. The instant a music can be defined as a genre and thus copied, it’s dead. Only make music when you don’t know what it is that you’re doing or even trying to do. Apply this commandment to all artforms and remember: don’t join the dots.

From here.

(Bill Drummond is one of the few “heroes” I’ve been afraid to meet, and one of the few who turned out to be exactly as charming and gracious as I could’ve hoped.)

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Is there any chance of a Phonogram story (I’ll even take a b-side) focussing on hip-hop? Or should I just fan-fic that up myself?

kierongillen:

I approve of this behaviour. Phonogram is a device to re-imagine your world.

While we’ve referenced Hip-Hop a little, we’ve never done a story. If I did one, due to Phonogram being Autobiographic, would have to be through that filter. I could certainly see a story about how it felt to discover Hip-Hop when living in an isolated, provincial Midlands town. “real” Kwk got into Hip Hop when he was 7 or something, which is interesting. The whole period where the Wu-Tang Clan was my favourite band had a lot of fun stuff. The image of Kwk and Kohl playing chess in a Wu-Tang tribute with a shitty 1 quid set they got from a Toy-shop is probably useable, y’know?

If I did a story, it’d be like that. And I’d like to do one, and hopefully will work it in somewhere.

Jamie and I always had the desire that, after we’d done the series, we’d like to do an anthology of other people’s PG stories – our friends, critics, whoever. They’d take the metaphor and apply it to their own music history. Some of the people I’ve talked to, growing up in America and active in the culture, would certainly be doing those stories. 

Reblogging because I love the idea of a Phonogram anthology filled with other people’s take on the concept.

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What was the first concert you ever went to? What was the best concert you ever want to?

bigredrobot:

Oh man, this is a tough one. I think my first concert experience was when my dad drove us out to the desert behind the Silver Bowl to listen to the audio bleed from the US concert from their Zoo TV tour. Which, according to the internet, would’ve been in November of 1992. It was a kind of a magic experience, sitting in the back of my dad’s Bronco, listening to the songs echo across the desert at night. This was Achtung Baby-era, before U2 had completely crawled up their own collective ass to fester and die.

The first “real” concert is a little trickier to pin down. I’m thinking it was this Pearl Jam show from 1993, where a group of us drove from the Las Vegas desert to the California desert to see them on an old polo grounds. I remember a dude asked me if I had any “papers” and I was really confused because I was/still am a huge square.

Best concert ever was probably seeing the Flaming Lips at the tail end of their Soft Bulletin tour (again, way before they started their long trek into the Inner Asshole) at the El Rey Theater in Hollywood. At the time, the schtick of people in animal costumes and confetti cannons and fake blood and psychedelic rear projections came across as fresh and charming and heartfelt, like a shoestring-budget Pink Floyd show. They also had this thing where they were renting out these portable FM radios that were tied to the soundboard and were supposed to play the higher registered sounds that weren’t being produced over the PA and it sounded incredible. I left the theater just feeling so happy and positive. It was an experience that stuck with me, and not just because I was covered in confetti for days.

I remember seeing them at the Hollywood Bowl a year or two after on Cake’s Unlimited Sunshine Tour and feeling like it had sort of become a gimmick instead of a fun thing. And now? Well, I don’t think I’ll be seeing them any time soon.

Runner up would be seeing Elliot Smith on his Figure 8 tour. Grandaddy opened for them in support of The Sophtware Slump and they were really good. Smith was a little spacey, and, according to this report, it was mainly due to the audience being a bunch of dicks, which is typical for a Vegas crowd. It was at The Sanctuary (RIP), so it was an intimate space, so seeing him there, like 10 feet in front of you, laughing and smiling between songs or when his bass player would try and fail to land a harmony, it was really nice.

BONUS ANSWER: The worst concert I have ever attended – HANDS DOWN – was a Grateful Dead show, again at the Silver Bowl. Like I said, I’m a straight-edge-type who is terrified of drinking/drugs/dirty hippies, but at the time, I was hanging out with stoners who talked me into going, and I thought, “What the heck? Maybe I’m a Deadhead deep down inside.” The mixture of outdoor concert + Las Vegas summer + terrible music (they had like a 10-minute drum solo!) + 90s hippie kids + not being on drugs was the perfect storm of awful. The parking lot was hilarious, though. Best brownies I’ve ever had.

Note: Dylan is awesome.

Second Note: I saw Elliott Smith on the UK leg of the Figure 8 tour, and he was fucking spectacular. Quasi and… someone else…? were supporting, and it was a grand show.

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Marvel has adopted a similar tactic lately when it comes to some of their event books. Yesterday, they asked us to set our orders for all four issues of their Thor and Loki Original Sin tie in. The first issue ships in July, while the last ships in September. They did something similar with the Hulk vs. Iron Man tie in, and will be doing the same for the Death of Wolverine series. Rapid shipping books without the luxury of order adjustment. This is a nightmare. Not only does it circumvent the final order cut-off system, which helps retailers reflect a book’s actual readership in their orders, but it takes the old system, and makes it worse. At least back then if there was a four issue mini-series solicited, you would be able to adjust your numbers according to a wider range of sales data. You didn’t have to set your numbers all at once, you could stagger the decision making, take a look at where your customer base is drifting, determine if they were even into the event, and maybe have enough time to save yourself for ordering way to much or too little on the final issues.

From here.

This is odd, and the first I’d heard of it. Does anyone have any more information about why final orders for September books have to be in so early in these cases? Are there production issues a la DC’s lenticular covers?

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It’s the genetically modified fruit from Australia that could turn East African nations into life-saving banana republics.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) researchers have engineered bananas grown in far north Queensland to increase the levels of beta-carotene, which is converted to vitamin A in the body.

The goal, they say, is to stop thousands of children in Uganda and the surrounding countries from going blind and dying from vitamin A deficiency.

And now they’ve successfully bent the banana genome, it’s being tested on humans for the first time.

From here.
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Top 400 Comics Actual–May 2014

Top 400 Comics Actual–May 2014

Warning. This is very wonk-ish. I was going to say “wonky,” but that’s already a word.

Anyway: ICv2 has the latest Diamond sales chart + estimated sales numbers up, for May 2014. As it says on the site, “Sales Estimates for May Based on Diamond Indexes and Publisher Title Data.”

We’ve heard before from creators and publishers that these estimates are usually off from the reality, and significantly lower than the actual numbers, but this is one of the first times where we can compare the estimates with actual numbers… or, at least, almost actual numbers.

ICv2 estimate that Trees #1, by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard, sold 31,926 copies. However, in his recent Orbital Operations newsletter, Ellis wrote that “we sold around 44,000 copies of TREES #1.” So does that mean that ICv2 is under-estimating sales by 10K or so?

Probably not. The ICv2 numbers are for North America only, for a start; they’re also not including re-orders, to the best of my knowledge, and I’m pretty sure that Ellis is including both re-orders and international sales. But then again, so will publishers when making decisions about the profitability of books and whether or not to cancel them etc.

Maybe something to bear in mind next time ICv2 says that a book’s selling 18,000 and people – myself included! – start thinking “Cancellation! Cancellation!”

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What we have is a new set of middlemen, the crowdfunding services, who skim off a percentage of each successfully funded project. Their genius is to make the big feel small, where you’re both individually valued and a part of a cosy digital island of like-minded people, but in many ways perform the same function of a label: a facilitator for culture. They’re not merely a cog – Kickstarter carefully selects the projects it allows – but this isn’t a total revolution yet, infrastructure-wise.

More conceptually, the problem is that a crowd tends to know what it wants. A campaign that brings a massive band to a small town is true democracy, and hugely heartening – but these and crowdfunding projects tend to work most effectively when you’re preaching to the choir, where fandom can be leveraged. For a project whose worth to the potential funder is less immediately demonstrable – and where fandom can’t fill that gap – it can be tricky.

The Guardian on fan activism online.