Monday, March 24, 2025

Global Digital Advertising Monetization Corporation Nexxen Needs Your Cash!

To purchase reproduction rights to this image in high definition, visit shutterstock©

 

Allmusic has an an interesting history. Founded in the nineties by music enthusiast and scholar Michael Erlewine, it quickly became the major internet music reference resource. Since then it's passed through a dizzying series of multi-multi-million dollar corporate buyouts (Erlewine trousered 3.5m on the way) and is currently owned by media conglomerate Nexxen, which specializes in digital advertising monetization. This banner has appeared at allmusic.com:


"Advertising is no longer able to cover our operating costs." This, from the company that specializes in digital advertising monetization. They employ - as far as I can make out - a couple hundred employees from their premises in San Francisco. I've used the allmusic site for many years, more frustrated than entertained or informed by their often boneheaded opinionating (people get paid for that shit), and indifferent to their marketing strategy of genre sub-categorizations and "mood indicators". For hard-core information I've always relied on wikipedia.

If you feel their pain, and want to make a contribution to a valuable internet resource, give your money to wikipedia.


This post made possible thru "free" internet access.



 

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Kandy Klickbait's Favorite Lemon Twigs Album Isn't Really A Lemon Twigs Album! Dept.

Foam-O-Graph© features new 3D imaging technology! Note how album, hand "floats" over background!

Please welcome Kandy Klickbait, th' Isle O' Foam©'s new Pop Outreach Executive! Kandy will be presenting carefully curated new releases with you, the pop music enthusiast, in mind! Here's Kandy to get this whole krazy ball o' wax rock n' rollin'!

KK: Hey, fam! Wassup! Heyyy! Today I'll be rapping about the latest drop from Brian D'Addario, who you'll know from that sick power-pop band The Lemon Twigs! So let's get into that right now! Remember to hit that like button down there and follow me for more fire drops! So without further ado I'm going to get right into this ill new album from Brian D'Addario who is as I'm sure you guys know is like one half of The Lemon Twigs right they're like brothers? Which is really cool! And this new album which we're going to listen to right now is by one of the brothers but the other one kind of features too so it's like a Lemon Twigs album who I'm sure I don't have to tell you guys is a fire pop band tha-

FT3: You're fired. 


 

Thursday, March 20, 2025

Perfect Tens Dept. - Two Sevens Clash


If you've been following this Pulitzer-nod series, you'll be aware that elevation to this lofty musical élite is contingent upon the album having no demerits, faults, or lapses from artistic or professional perfection in any area. Yes, yes, *eyeroll emoji* yeah well it's all subjective innit one person's opinion is as good as another's innit *yawn emoji*. Bearing all this in mind the inclusion of Culture's benchmark album might seem to be a surprise, because the cover, at first glance, doesn't reach the Warner Brothers Art Department standards. And the cover has to be as great as the music to get a Perfect Ten (so no Pet Sounds, f'rinstance - harsh? Maybe, but I don't make the rules).

The cover, for all we know designed by a Dave at the Kingston printer's, makes a unique and immediate impact. I can only think of the inferior sleeve to Ry Cooder's Paradise And Lunch (ironically a product of the Warner Brothers Art Department) that looks remotely similar. The colours are straight from the process ink tins, the photograph is snapshot quality (that horizon! the cropping! the finger in the ear!), the sevens seem clipped from an ironmongery catalogue, the dash before the band name is bonkers ... it should be a graphic graveyard, but it works. The layout is inspired (even the Joe Gibbs logo and credit adds to the composition), with a dynamic use of space, light and shade, and proportion. No shit. Some eye is at work here. The sun-saturated vibe of Jamaica warms you up just looking at it. And - it's mysterious. Two sevens clashing? What the actual?

Joseph Hill, yesterday
From the sleevenotes, the songs wrote themselves. Nobody gets a composition credit, which makes you wonder, naively, what happened to the publishing money. Ri-ight. Culture was the vocal trio of Joseph Hill, Albert Walker, and (possibly) Roy Dayes, none of whom get a credit on the sleeve of any Joe Gibbs Jamaican release. Incredible, although a "written by - Culture" credit appears on a later Blue Moon release. Joe Hill, who sings lead, apparently wrote the songs, but if you know better, I'd like to know too, because they're original, unforgettable, and varied enough to be the work of a true melodic talent. The musical backing is supplied by the relaxed, un-showy perfection of a dream team of home-grown session players, and fueled by blissful clouds of home-grown.

This may have been the first true roots reggae album I heard. Bob Marley? Well, okay. euuhhh. But Culture packed an atmospheric punch that hit me in the heart, like stepping into tropical heat from an air-conditioned plane. This was the beat of lazy submarine depths, the shimmer of water under a limitless blue sky. The whole album was a trip outside a grey suburban life, authentic, unique, beautiful, its shining power undiminished over the years. For Culture, it was a peak they never quite reached again, but very few did.

 

 

Hi to Koen, who passed through my home town yesterday!

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Thirty Minutes Dept. - With The Avant-Garde

Vaudeville funsters Joseph Beuys and Pina Bausch slapstick, yesterday. Copyright Foam-O-Graph© for Artificial Ignorance Corp.

 (This is work in progress, and I'd appreciate some thoughts before I wrap it up.)

Defining avant-garde is as tricky as defining art; a quick study of musicologist brow-furrowing on the subject leads to the conclusion that a precise or useful definition is impossible, due to the extreme variety of works that either claim to be or are cited as avant-garde.

The gimlet-eyed among you will have noted the subtitle to this collection: Volume I Challenging Societal Mores. It includes the type of music that most would agree is avant-garde; the difficult, antagonistic, atonal, dissonant, ugly, joyless, dreary, pretentious ... okay, you get the drift.

I've used as my template Justice Potter Stewart's view on pornography - essentially, I can't define it but I know it when I see it. Nobody is going to whistle this shit in the shower. Volume II, should I recover enough to curate it, will be music that doesn't stray too far from what the man in the street (who is me, woh-oh oh-oh-oh, I talk the way I wanna talk) might consider interesting at worst, enjoyable at best. To shoe-horn Debussy into Vol. I would be ridiculous, but he'll be in swell company for Vol. II.

I already have some of the usual suspects up against the wall for this, but if you have any suggestions, they will be treated with my usual patronising indifference. Please bear in mind that the closer they are to recognisable music, the further they are from the concept. This is one Thirty Minutes that nobody in his - or hey! her! - right mind, or even armchair, would sit through voluntarily.

Use space below for your notes - use regular ballpoint or Sharpie:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sunday, March 16, 2025

Perfect Tens Dept. - Once Upon A Dream (TL-DR)


If ever there was a neglected album from the sixties, it's Once Upon A Dream by The Rascals. Reasons? Why ask me? Oh, right ... well, I'm guessing the name change for one. No longer The Young Rascals, they wanted to be taken seriously for the talented musicians they were, but you have to wonder if their teen fanbase (whose tastes were so accurately catered to by the Summer of Love's Groovin') weren't falling off the band's learning curve by now. Band name changes - and there were a few similar at this time - never seem to work as well as you'd hope. Old fans feel left out, and potential new ones tend to be suspicious.

For two (please try to keep up, it's not like this is a Wall Street Journal op-ed fercrissakes, it's only a music blog piece that'll be over soon, making no measurable impact on the internet Richter scale), and secondly: there's the cover art.

It's sensationally good.

It's also deeply unsettling. Designed and created by the band's drummer, the unfeasibly talented Dino Danelli, it's the Hippie Death Mask. Take a considered hinge at the difficult-to-find high-res scan above [above - Ed.], shown here in the correct color balance, and yes, that is important. Everything is washed out, a whited sepulchre. Not monochrome (the lazy way out), nor bursting with lysergic color. Compare with the Monkees' Birds And Bees from the same year [left - Ed.], using the same technique but diametrically different in execution and effect.

 

The cover, Danelli says, is "an assemblage of objects and sculptures that represent our dreams individually and collectively as a group. For its construction, I have, instead of carving from stone, used an opposite method of building and adding to create many objects which altogether form an environment. The objects exist not as separate identities, but as symbolic carriers. The impulse and thought they transmit is its spirit, image, and meaning." 

His literate use of the term assemblage shows his familiarity with the work of fellow Noo Yawker Joseph Cornell, who pioneered Assemblage Art in the 'forties, such as like this here piece below [below- Ed.]:

So, what does Danelli include in his assemblage box?

- A barely-visible, upended Stars and Stripes.

- A broken toy machine gun.

- Artificial flowers.

- Faceless mannequin heads.

- Dead fucking birds, FFS.

- A headless child in a cage.

- A man with a suburban house for a head.

- A busted clock.

- Illegible hippie buttons.

Yikes, right? And everything is smeared with powdery, crematorial ash. There could hardly be a more literal or obvious metaphor for the times, and yet it's a safe bet that few saw how bleak it actually was. The only hopeful element, and the only human face, is the fat Chinese Buddha, managing to crack a smile in spite - or perhaps because - of it all.

Danelli made another similar assemblage [left - Ed.] for the back cover, just to drive the point home, leaving the groovy color band photographs for the gatefold. Creatively, it was an astonishingly brave statement.

For three (cast your mind back, BACK! to  the second paragraph! We're thinking about why the album doesn't rank as highly as, say, Sgt. Pepper), and thirdly: anything influenced by Sgt. Pepper means, by definition, it's a knock-off, an inferior and disregardable copy. In 1967, Cavaliere stated, "our new album, and I say this in a humble way, will be Sgt. Pepperish." His humility was misplaced. Just as Sgt. Pepper was the sum of its influences (there's little on it that qualifies as original), so is Once Upon A Dream. The Beatles' most important influence is not in the occasional production flourishes common in pop at the time, but the conceptual - the album as a unified work of art. When Pepper is referred to as a concept album, it is in this sense. The Young Rascals' previous albums had been mostly collections of singles, many of them already familiar hits by the time the album hit the streets. This was, from the ground up, an album conceived for the album age, and the Rascals upped the ante by producing the album and providing the sleeve art themselves.

There is none of the bleakness of the cover imagery in the music. It is as beautiful and uplifting and honest as they knew how to make it, and if that involves occasional leaps into melodic melodrama (My Hawaii, and the title track) that's something we have to get over. These are good Italian boys and sometimes they like to sing for their mothers and the old neighborhood. This is heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, nothing knowing or "ironic" here, thank god. The lyrics don't strain for cleverness or impact, and the rhymes tend to the predictable. The songs are varied, as pop albums should be, showing their roots in blue-eyed soul, street corner harmony, blues and Rn'B. The production is just jaw-dropping, absolute state of the art stereo studio mastery. Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd are on board, which is a guarantee of the finest recording quality, all organic, no computers, the magic of magnetic tape, virtuoso musicians (including several jazz luminaries) playing together, a universe or two away from the sterility of contemporary pop production.

A standalone pop masterpiece, owing nothing to anybody outside the team of consummate professionals who made it, both of its time and timeless, an album for the ages, for right now, that reveals something new and wonderful on every play.


"Fuck lawyers! Their offices and cars may look gorgeous but inside they're full of shit and bones!"- Matthew NSFW 23-27