“Friday night’s here / What’s the scene?”

The oven is on, preheating, and soon I will put my pizza in it to cook. Not one that I made; I'm not that smart. It's a bought frozen one, but they're okay once in a while. Meanwhile, Red will have leftover chilli from last night, which I cooked. Chilli sin carne is one of my specialities, but last night's was a little lacking in seasoning, so I'll rectify that for her when I recook it today.

And then we'll be preparing to go to The London again. Specifically, The Camden Town, for tonight is the long-awaited gig night. (We don't get out much, as you can tell!) Omaha, Nebraska's finest, Mr Conor Oberst, aka Bright Eyes, will be performing for our listening pleasure. Very exciting.

So, I'll catch up with y'all over the weekend.

Ooh, first, though, I have to choose my ensemble, as does the missus. Ooh, what to wear? What will make us blend in with the undoubtedly 20-something crowd? What will prevent them asking us, "Are you in the right place, Gramps?"

Jeans, for sure. Converse? Do you even need to ask? Maybe a stripey pullover? Aaahh, but it's in the washing basket! (I'll give it a sniff. Might be okay. Plus, do you think I'll smell any worse than 20-something Londoners? I think not!)

“Money makes the world go round / the world go round / the world go round”. Oops, guess I’d better change this heading...

A few months ago, I heard an interesting news item.

Not content with having been victorious over Napster and other file-sharing websites, The Big Global Corporate Music Machine had devised another plan to bring in more money.

Don't get me wrong here. I appreciate that an artist should be rightly rewarded for his or her work. I believe that copyright theft is a bad thing. Indeed, I feel quite uncomfortable using other people's images on my blog as frequently as I do. However, I do it because I feel that no one is actually losing out here, and no one is making money they shouldn't be. That is, I make no money from my blog, so I'm not making money off of someone else's efforts; and if I were to be asked to pay for images used, I wouldn't use them. Simple as that.

So what is it that The Big Global Corporate Music Machine had/has planned to do? You know, this is so simple it's genius. I can hardly believe they didn't come up with it before...

Just as it is illegal for me to put an mp3 of a published song on here -- let's say "Stand and Deliver" by Adam and the Ants, since that's also the name of his autobiography, in shops today -- The Big Global Corporate Music Machine proposes that it should also be illegal to put lyrics of published songs on sites without paying the appropriate royalties.

Yes, yes, I know, this is still someone else's copyrighted material, and as such it should rightly be protected. But come on. At the end of the day, most sites posting lyrics often use people's best guesses where songbooks have never been made available. These are the online community's version of sitting down with paper and pen and hitting pause on your tape deck every couple of lines, which I'm sure we all did as kids. Who knows what the fuck Joe Strummer, Shane McGowan, and Tupac Shakur are saying half the time. Check out the lyrics on two different sites and the chances are you'll get two different interpretations.

AND NOT ONLY THAT... Of course, all of this is also applicable to fan sites that offer tab notes for guitar players. The Big Global Corporate Music Machine believes it is losing out because people are learning their guitar parts from free online-community websites instead of going out and buying the sheet music or songbooks. That's a semi-fair point, but if I want to learn how to play songs by guitar-based artists such as Bright Eyes or Elliott Smith, there aren't any fucking books available for me to turn to. What then, Big Global Corporate Music Machine, you dumb cunt?

Am I being naive, or is this whole scenario just really fascistic?

Great websites #2

It's been about a month since my last "Great websites" post, which you can find here, so I figured it's about time I threw another one together.

This time, I want to bring your attention to Grammy.ru. Now, before I go any further, I must first say that I can't vouch for the legality of this site. It seems perfectly above board, and maybe it is ... in Russia! But my guess is that it's not something that non-Russians should know about. Why? Because it offers free mp3 downloads of songs by hundreds upon hundreds of artists. You can pick up virtually anything by Prince, for example; there are some 800 songs each by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; seemingly everything from this year's Eurovision Song Contest... Well, the list goes on and on. There's even a four-CD bootleg box set by Buddy Holly on there, called What You Been A-Missin'.

It's not fully comprehensive, of course. What would Russians want with Elliott Smith, Bright Eyes, Adam & The Ants, and the Black Crows? And some albums mysteriously have one or two songs missing(!). Even so, it's got to be worth checking out if you're looking to top up your iPod.

I wouldn't want to be seen to encourage piracy, so I can't tell you which buttons to push. I will say, though, that the link in this post will take you to the English-language version. And that will make everything look far less scary.

Would it be worth buying the Internet for just this one site? Well, no, possibly not. But it is fucking cool nonetheless.

So, without further ado, Grammy.ru, for services to music, the Web, and the world, A Blog About Nowt salutes you.

No future fuchsia

For the first time in my life, I have booked my next holiday just one day after returning from one. I've never done that before, but it feels so good!

This means of course that I need to recover from my current bout of sunburn in time for the next lot.

I am the king of sunburning.

In fact, I still suffer the consequences of my honeymoon in Thailand. This was in 1998. I got so badly burned on my sternum that just the faintest sniff on sun makes it glow today. It's bizarre. And I don't mind saying, just a little bit scary. If I'm ever to be diagnosed with skin cancer, it'll be there, I'm sure.

In September, it'll be ten years since my first trip to Italy. Since then, Wife and I have been at least once a year. Some years, we've been three times. The shortest trip was 24 hours; the longest, three weeks. And we usually try to go for at least five days in the height of summer.

So, you'd think I would have learned by now about the sun, the dangers of exposure to the sun, sunburn... that sort of thing. But hell no. Every summer trip involves me turning, as the locals say, fuchsia. Sometimes this happens within the first couple of days; sometimes a little later. On this most recent trip it was on what should have been my penultimate day on the beach. In the event, though, I couldn't face another day after that. I arrived, sat for a few minutes, and went back home to the mother-in-law's, leaving Wife to enjoy a couple of hours there on her own.

I know we Brits are no strangers to burning. We do it well. And in truth, many many Brits do it far better than I. But I'm still the king. Why? Because, like I said above, I should have learned by now. I'm the king, or champion, of idiots. Although maybe Conan O'Brien, Conor Oberst, and George Costanza may want to challenge me on that.

“Old people” dig music, daddy-o

There's an interesting story on the BBC news site today. Under the wonderful headline "Music-loving mums rock CD sales" the article tells us how "older people" – i.e., those in their 40s – are buying more music than their teenage children. And within the article we are treated to pictures of Neil Sedaka and Barry Manilow.

Now, hold on for just one doggone minute here, please. I'm four years away from 40. Wife a little closer (I hope she covered her eyes at that bit). And we buy a goodly amount of music. But the latest stuff we have bought includes the likes of Alkaline Trio, Bright Eyes, Funeral For A Friend, Aimee Mann, My Chemical Romance, and Trivium. We're not parents, but we are still almost in the age range that the article is talking about. And frankly I don't see our tastes changing so much that we'll start buying Neil cunting Sedaka CDs within the next five years.

(At this point, I should mention that Wife has a soft spot for Manilow, so we have a couple of his CDs here and we've seen him in concert twice. And she'd love to see him during his current Vegas stint. What can I say? He's a good entertainer.)

Furthermore, on a recent shopping trip – I think the one when I bought Trivium – I saw a "young" lad of about 18 leaving the store pleased as punch with his purchase. And what was it that he'd spent his hard-earned money on? Well, I know because I saw him proudly showing his girlfriend. It was a double pack of Phil Collins CDs. Phil fucking Collins!

It's a fucking good job that "old" cunts like us are out there buying music with balls, cos the young cunts coming up behind us are about to destroy any sort of integrity the music scene ever had.

Terrible music. And Buddy Holly.

So, as is our semi-usual routine, Wife and I watched American Idol last night. And the music was worse than ever. The show’s “theme” this week was “the 21st century”, so the cuntestants had to choose songs that had been released in the past six years. Well, what a shower of shit. I kid you not, there was not one song that I had ever heard before in my life – not one; Wife fared slightly better (if you can call it better), saying she had heard one of them before. And in addition to that, I think I had only heard of one of the acts that had originally recorded these songs, Creed. [In fact, Wife has just reminded me, a couple of days after I originally posted this, that there were also songs by Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera. Of course, I am familiar with these gals, but not with the particular tracks performed on the show. My bad.]

Now, I fail to see how it is possible that these people have not heard better songs released in the past six years. And if Kellie Pickler really thinks “Suds in the Bathtub”, or whatever it’s called, is so great, then I feel terribly, terribly sorry for her.

The thing is, I hold my hand up here, I’m hung up on the ’80s, man. That is, most of the music I listen to now is stuff I was listening to during my formative years. And most of the new music I discover is actually via Wife. It was she who introduced me to Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes – probably two of the greatest singer/songwriters to emerge in the last 20 years, American or otherwise. (And I don’t mean singer/songwriters in the bastardized sense of James Blunt, KT Tunstall, Jason Mraz, and Katie Melua, all of whom seem to think that playing a guitar means you can write something of substance. Wankers.) Both Smith and Bright Eyes have released albums full of incredible songs in the past six years. Where is the music of this calibre of artist on Idol? Their music is adaptable, too, as is any great song: it is not restrained by its musical style because it is not entirely about the music, it’s about the words. Remember when music had words that meant something?

And yet, these poor kids on Idol, like much of America, probably don’t know these artists even exist(ed). These are the sorts of artist that are undoubtedly bigger outside of their own home country.

Of course, it goes without saying, in that Groucho Marx way, they’re too good for Idol anyway.

As a post script to this post, how can it be that on the “Fifties”-themed show last week, the two worst performances of the evening were the two Buddy Holly songs? I mean, they really butchered his tracks, “Not Fade Away” and “Oh Boy!” And yet here is an American rock ’n’ roll legend. Ah, I see a pattern emerging: Buddy Holly, too, was totally unappreciated in the United States during his lifetime – indeed, until the mid-1970s. He had been all but forgotten after his brief fling with stardom at the tail end of the ’50s. Guess they can’t see the talent under their noses in the States, and all the while they keep lining the pockets of shit-mongers like Garth Brooks, Celine Dion, Mariah Carey....

Weird name stuff

Strange... when I set up this blog I called it A Blog About Nowt because I thought that, by and large, it would be about nothing much. In truth, though, it’s less about nothing much and more about nothing in particular – but that’s by the by.

When referring to myself within the text of an entry it seems to make sense to refer to myself as Nowt, as though I am the Nowt of the blog’s title.

And yet, when I set up my profile, I opted for a symbol (just like Prince!) rather than reveal my real name. This was because if anyone ever were to find themselves here and they knew me, it might be embarrassing to find me bitching and whingeing about them. So I just selected the asterisk for no real reason.

The strange thing is the paradox: I’m both a nothing and a star by name. Guess it just shows how little thought I put into it in the first place, and how much thought (i.e. too much) I’m putting into it now.


Listening to: LIFTED or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, by Bright Eyes