Shelter From the Storm Edition
Todays links of interest:
- Smartest drug story of the year: Rolling Stone on the war on drugs
Right, but if we had actually had a smart, sane, non-hypocritical drug policy all of these years, we wouldn’t have had "The Wire," one of the greatest TV shows ever. So, see, on balance it all works out! Sure, on one hand, zillions of dollars wasted and millions of lives ruined, but on the other hand: "The Wire!" (jc)
- Iconic daredevil Evel Knievel dies at 69
And so we lose yet another ‘loper icon.
- EMI May Cut RIAA Funding
Interesting. Very interesting.
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People often stop me on the street, and ask me this question: “Jim,” they ask me, “what is it like to be a Replacements fan?” Well, let me tell you . . .
In the most recent of Rolling Stone magazine’s forty zillion 40th Anniversary Editions, they had a section called “The Indie Rock Universe: An Illustrated Guide.”
This so-called “Guide” was essentially a gussied-up list of Indie Rock bands, broken into incredibly arbitrary distinctions surrounding the “Universe” theme. One of the sections was called “Ancestral Planets” — the pioneers of Indie Rock if you will — and it listed a bunch of worthies and honorables: Nirvana, Pixies, The Smiths, Hüsker Dü etc. These are some of my all-time favorites, and certainly worthy of inclusion on any list of great rock of any stripe.
Conspicuous by their absence: The Replacements. Whether it was an oversight or on purpose, it almost immediately jumped out at me, and ironically, this was a few pages away from where Billie Joe Armstrong was talking about how much he was influenced by “Answering Machine.”
This is what it’s like to be a Replacements fan.
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Tangled Up in Baby Blue Edition
Todays links of interest:
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Ghosts of Electricity Edition
Todays links of interest:
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I’ve just finished a big project: I recently bought a 1TB network-attached hard drive and put nearly every single song I own on it. I even finally finished ripping all of my CDs.
I set the hard drive up so that it automatically backs itself up, and so it’s the third thing I grab in case of a fire: Rox, my laptop, and that hard drive. Of course, maybe Rox can grab both laptops while I get the hard drive, but I’m guessing she might have other priorities.
In any event, the current count is approximately 68,000 songs on 4700 albums by 950 artists. This crazy-ass number reflects 30 years of being, well, a big dumb rock ‘n’ roll guy. It’s what I do, it’s who I am.
And between eMusic, iTunes, Amazon, Amoeba and the life-long friends whom I’ve been trading music for two decades, I have a pretty steady pipeline of new stuff that I’m looking forward to, older stuff that is reissued, new stuff that is suddenly huge super buzz, and older stuff that I missed in the past.
It. Just. Keeps. Coming. World without end, amen.
Stop yer complaining, you’re saying: this is not the worst problem for a music geek to have. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the best problem for a music geek to have. So shut up and stop whinging, already!
No doubt, my 15-year-old self who rode his bike to Tower Records to buy Who’s next, my 25-year-old self who was resigning himself to getting the CD version of Who’s next and my 35-year-old self who was downloading Who’s next outtakes from dodgy websites are all looking at me agog.
But it’s still a problem. And the problem is me.
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