Category Archives: Music

Cheesy Song Lyrics — People You Didn’t Know You Knew Edition

Music

Via Rock Kills Kid.

Now you know that it’s all your fault
How are you doing with it?
Hey, are you nervous?
Everything that you’ve ever known
Will go up in flames
Tell me, are you nervous?

And the sky will fall down on you
And the world still turns round round round
And the sky will fall down on you
As your life goes on down down down

Everything that you’ve ever done
Will come back to haunt you
Tell me, are you nervous?
Now you know that it is for sure,
How are you taking it?
Do you deserve this?

(Chorus)

Dance! (x6)

Music

March 11th’s Electric Six show, which I’d been eagerly anticipating, was a blast — everything I’d hoped for and then some. Not only did Dick Valentine and the rest of the band live up to their billing, but the opening acts, Rock Kills Kid and Every Move A Picture, were entirely solid as well. (I actually wound up buying some of their music on iTunes yesterday, wondering all the while how I survived before the age of instant musical gratfication.)

For a while I worried that Greg, who had arrived in town earlier in the afternoon, wasn’t really enjoying himself, because he was just kind of standing there shrugged into his overcoat. It turned out, though, that he was just exhausted from having gotten up in the wee hours of an east-coast morning prior to a cross-country flight. He revealed his true feelings around the middle of Electric Six’s set, when he turned to me and said, with frank admiration, of Dick Valentine, “I don’t understand how he can still be alive after the third song.” The man is, indeed, a dynamo.

Be My (Dick) Valentine

Humor, Music

After nearly a year in which it was available only abroad, Electric Six‘s sophomore effort, Señor Smoke, has finally been released domestically. Those of you already familiar with Electric Six who didn’t feel like ponying up $30 for the import will know this is a time for rejoicing, and an album purchase.

Those of you who aren’t familiar with Electric Six will have to be convinced, and this will take a certain measure of doing, because while Electric Six are a hoot and a half, they defy categorization. (I suspect that a causal relationship between these two facts exists, but I’m not sure in which direction.) It might help to imagine a band that does for a certain variety of pompous, chest-puffing, late-70s rock what Elvis impersonators do for Elvis — poking fun and showing a certain kind of backhanded respect all at once, through a sort of exagerrated homage. There’s a definite degree of ridicule directed toward the most egregious excesses, but there’s an undeniable measure of affection, too. I’ve always thought that you can’t really parody something effectively unless you secretly love it, just a little, and I think Electric Six offfers proof.

In any case, they’re going to be playing at The Independent in March. I’m going. I’ve never seen them live before. I cannot wait.

An Open Letter to Blue Note, Sony, and EMI

Music, Software

Diehard jazz aficionado Volkher Hofmann is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it to the register anymore.

Read it. All of it. It’s a thing of beauty. Years from now, when the scavengers are picking over the bones of the major labels, we’ll look back and say, “This was it. This was the moment when they passed the point of no return, the beginning of the end. When people who spent thousands of dollars on, and arranged the rest of their lives around, recorded music decided that they’d finally had enough, and were no longer going to be apologists for a bunch of indifferent, cash-grubbing corporate tools.”

Dick is a Killer

Music

If you’re suffering an acute deficit of hearing the Preznit say what he really means, The Party Party has the rx for you. Given the veep’s recently-expressed feelings about the permissibility of torture, “Dick is a Killer” seems particularly timely. (Note that the server on which the songs are hosted seems to have a fondness for resetting connections: if you’re going to download them, you’re advised to use a tool that will recover gracefully. wget seems to fit the bill; others may, too.)

Sony: Pigfuckers

Idiots, Music, Software

Mark Russinovich, one of the more badass ninjas of low-level Windows programming and the co-maintainer of the excellent Sysinternals website, recently discovered, while testing his rootkit detector, that Something Unwholesome had made its way onto a system that should by rights have been clean.

Upon investigation, he discovered that he’d inadertently installed it himself when listening to a DRM-encumbered CD, the ironically-titled Get Right With The Man.

This discovery has led to a media furor and very visible tug-of-war, chronicled on Russinovich’s blog, with Sony and Sony’s purveyor of DRM technology, First 4 Internet. First 4 Internet’s programmers clearly don’t understand the nuts and bolts of deep-down Windows programming nearly so well as Russinovich, leading to their advancement of some blatantly false assertions which Russinovich has proceeded to casually blow out of the water. It’d be amusing if the stakes — to wit, users’ right to use media they own on computers they own without worrying that one is going to try subverting the other — weren’t so high.

Russinovich is one of my heroes; his autoruns is on my very short list of absolutely essential Windows utilities. And yet there’s a certain irony lurking just under the surface here. Free-software advocates have argued, sometimes stridently, that proprietary systems are to be avoided because they tilt the balance of power away from ordinary users and towards the Powers That Be. This episode would seem to offer evidence that even extraordinary users like Russinovich are at risk of being bent over the barrel for as long as they choose to be serfs in someone else’s kingdom. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess. I suspect it’s too much to hope that the experience will lead him to focus his considerable skills upon free software, but it sure would be nice.

Tim suggested that I make T-shirts declaring “SONY ARE PIGFUCKERS” as an alternative to having the phrase tattoed across my chest. I replied that I could probably cover my costs by selling a few. I’m not sure about an exact design, though.

iTunes Gift Certificates

Idiots, Music, Software

There are two ways to purchase an electronic iTunes Music Store gift certificate: through the Apple Store, and through the iTunes application itself. Never, ever, do it through the Apple Store.

If an e-mailed gift certificate you purchased through iTunes is accidentally deleted, inadvertently tagged as spam, or otherwise lost, voiding and re-issuing it through the iTunes application is trivial. If the same thing happens to a gift certificate you purchased through the Apple Store you are, not to put too fine a point on it, shit out of luck. You will have to contact Customer Service by e-mail and detail your woes, after which they will credit your account with the amount spent and you can try again.

I have to admit that I expected better — much, much better — from a company which has made usability a cornerstone of its brand.