Pop Loser

Vinyl Remarks

Vinyl Remarks is a collection of messages found on records between the run-out groove and the label (the so called “dead wax”).

Popular Music Love TS Eliot

Songwriters love lifting lyrics from TS Eliot.

But why Eliot, above all other poets? One simple reason is that he is widely taught in British and American schools and he impacts on the adolescent imagination with peculiar force. The Waste Land may be unfathomably complex but it is easy to love regardless of whether you understand it. The language is juicy and pungent, full of fire and rain, rivers and dust, birth and death – lots of death.

DJ Prince Charles

DJ Prince Charles live in Toronto. This video has brought a lot of joy to my morning.

Ad Rock and Mike D on MCA

Rolling Stone has posted some short interviews with Ad Rock and Mike D.

How did you deal with the change in his writing, after he became a Buddhist?
His lyrics became simple ideas about love and non-violence. It was a struggle for Adam to write those things. Basic feelings come off as very Hallmark. But we went through that change together. I wrote the lyrics for the song “Gratitude” [on Check Your Head], and Adam was like, “I really like that.” It made me happy and proud that I had made him happy.

Can you imagine making music without him?
I can see making music. I don’t know about a band format. But Yauch would genuinely want us to try whatever crazy thing we wanted but never got around to.

John Lennon vs. Miles Davis

John Lennon and Miles Davis playing basketball. [via]

DJ Bio Madlibs

DJ bio madlibs. Awesome. [via]

Peel Collection B

The Peel collection has added 100 records from section B.

The Beastie Boys and Copyright

The day before MCA passed away, the Beastie Boys were hit with a lawsuit over samples used on Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique. Slate notes that Paul’s Boutique couldn’t be made today, which echoes the licensing math in the excellent book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling.

I like the idea that the most fitting tribute to the life of Adam Yaunch would be to fix the disaster that is copyright law once and for all.

Forget the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, where’s the Adam Yauch Right To Sample Act? We shouldn’t even have to fight for our right to sample.

SFJ on MCA

Sasha Frere-Jones on MCA.

Rather than being perceived as the first draft of Ali G, the Beasties were taken at face value; many threads got tangled in one of hip-hop’s breakthrough moments. Rap is ridiculously profane and loopy and perfect and anybody can do it and you can use any music you want! Ok bye! And then, two years later, on “Paul’s Boutique,” they took the idea even further: maybe you could rap every word you knew over every record ever made. Sure, why not . And there was still this talk of beating people with aluminum bats and other alpha-male stuff that came from who knows where. Rap had now been coded by both friends and enemies as a violent form inspired by violence, a view which these three pacifists had unwittingly helped install.

And then it all changed, and Yauch was the first to take it all back. On 1994’s “Sure Shot ,” MCA pulled the plug on the characters that made them famous: “I wanna say a little something that’s long overdue, the disrespect to women has got to be through. To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends, I wanna offer my love and respect to the end.”

Vintage Beastie Boys

The Beastie Boys on New York public access in 1984. [via]

There used to be some great footage from the Paul’s Boutique release party on Vimeo, but it seems to have gone missing.

UPDATE: Found it!

MCA

Adam Yauch, aka MCA, died. It’s rare that a celebrity death actually elicits a genuine emotional response from me, but this one really sucks.

Reviewing the Peel Collection

David Stubbs dives into the Peel collection for The Quietus.

Had he lived to be 265, rather than, sadly, 65, he could not possibly hope to have given these albums the solid, several times over hearing their makers naively hoped he would. Possessing them, conscientiously filing and noting them was the thing. This has been reflected in the widespread slew of praise for the undertaking of putting up the collection. What an archive. What a national treasure. What a man.

SFJ On Kraftwerk

Sasha Frere-Jones on the importance of Kraftwerk.

It turned out not only that anyone could make electronic music but that almost everyone wanted to. Kraftwerk is perhaps the only group that played the Ritz in 1981 that sounds entirely current today. Plenty of people saw the machines coming, but nobody else has listened as carefully to them, or documented their strengths as lovingly.

Collecting Records Doesn’t Make You Cool

Collecting records doesn’t make you cool. [via]

Some of these knowledge-seekers are young and impressionable, and maybe due to their personal experiences of being a high school student in addition to thinking some 56-year-old store clerk is “cool,” they get the idea that rare = cool and popular = shitty. Maybe these little cocksuckers try to ape their way into a shorthand version of the supposedly “cool” knowledge they just had dropped on them by whatever tuberculoid weirdo they just pestered. Maybe they develop and exude what many internet commenters think of as a “hipster attitude,” without knowing why, exactly. Maybe this “hipster attitude” becomes so prevalent, due to the seemingly increased cultural importance of knowledge transmittal in the internet age, that it borders on oppressive.

The Space

The Space is now online. Here’s an intro video about the site, but the best bit is the John Peel collection, which you can learn about here and view here.