A friend and correspondent Rich Juzwiak wrote in about YouTube’s policies:
I’ve experienced the stuff you wrote about YouTube and song copyright. It is nice that instead of just deleting the offending video, and having that apply to the three-strikes-you’re-out banning rule, YouTube allows you to go in and swap out the audio for one of their approved tracks. That often makes the original video irrelevant but at least they’re trying to work with the people that make them money, instead of against them.
Here are the mechanics of it. This video was originally set to Mariah’s “Bye Bye.” It’s a sarcastic tribute I made in response to an “America’s Next Top Model” elimination. The images were cut to match the song’s rhythm. When notified by YouTube that I’d violated their copyright rules, I swapped out Mariah for an Aretha Franklin track from their minuscule approved library. But now it seems to have no backing music at all, and none of it makes sense. But, hey, it’s still up.
This used to be set to Hi-Five’s “I Like the Way (The Kissing Game),” and the exact same thing happened.
Neither of these are unofficial “videos” for the songs, but instead simply use the songs as soundtracks. These videos never would have been detected as infringing on copyright had I not included the song titles and artist of record in my tags. I’m assuming that YouTube did a big sweep of, for example, Def Jam and Jive material, and my videos came up because I had entered those tags. This was, in hindsight, needless. Duly noted.
As for something more connected to the visual, there’s this. It was originally set to an edit I made of her “Don’t Stop the Music.” The edit was mine, but not mine enough. I chopped the video to complement the song’s rhythms. When I had been notified of the copyright breach, I reset the video to a super holy-roller organ version of “What Child Is This.” I believe that if you’re not going to make sense, you should really not make sense, and if you can involve some Christmas music while doing so, all the better.
Weirdly, this still exists, proving that YouTube’s rules are wholly arbitrary.
The Knife’s “Silent Shout” was chosen as the No. 1 album of 2006 by the influential music site Pitchfork. The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson and her brother Olof Dreijer have worked with fellow Swede Robyn on user-friendly material like “Who’s That Girl?,” but their stock in trade is spooking the bejeezus out of you with electronical machines. Do you not believe me? Look at their idea of a Web site. They will terrify you into joining their fanbase. No? Then think for a moment how you’d feel about them hearing that you didn’t like their haunted-house boogie. Not so good, right? You’d rather just fall in line, yes? Safety first.
There is a recent tendency in American female pop stars to look to Europe for inspiration in the middle of their careers. Madonna reached out to William Orbit and Mirwais for the 2000 album “Music.” Christina Aguilera and producer Linda Perry aped Goldfrapp for the single “Keeps Gettin’ Better,” and Aguilera then asked the actual Goldfrapp to work on her new album. The next step: Someone big will channel The Knife for their next single, with or without the actual The Knife.
If you want to know how high the bar is, then listen to Fever Ray, Andersson’s new solo project, which is more or less the perfect test case (seeing as how she’s in The Knife and all). Fever Ray sounds roughly like The Knife with the party music taken out, though this is an almost meaningless distinction. The Knife doesn’t exactly make party music, even when it does.
If you collect skeleton headsocks and are friends with lots of zombies, you will love the video for Fever Ray’s “If I Had A Heart.” (I think the verb “to have” works here in its secondary form, as in, “If I had eggs for breakfast or maybe oatmeal or maybe your still-pumping heart after I throw you into the swimming pool and tear it out of you.”)
Even if the music isn’t your thing, who do you think could get Knifey for album six? Who could use the Andersson trick of pitch-shifting their voice down until it sounds like a scary male butler? Could this be the next step after Auto-Tune? If so, then let’s figure out who can take it to the people. J Lo? Beyoncé? Britney? It could solve her paparazzi problem forever. (I am not suggesting the obvious candidates.)
In a move that will affect blogs everywhere, including some of those hosted here, YouTube is now muting videos that make unauthorized use of copyrighted material. Once again, as the general public tries to share music and construct miniature radio stations of their own, various branches of the entertainment industry conspire to stop them. The logical end of this will be that, after shooting themselves in as many left feet as they can see past their bellies, the remaining major labels will limp to Washington and beg for a collective bailout. I am hoping the new Administration’s apparently genuine sense of empathy will not be wasted on these chronic killjoys, misers, and exploitative puds.
Anybody who’s been at all entertained or amused by the discussion here of lazer bass, should get over to the Glitch Mob Web site, rummage around for a while, and grab the “Crush Mode” mixtape before moving on. It’s been a rough January for many people, and this is one of the first things to really get my blood going.
The ad for Microsoft’s new Songsmith software (make sure to watch it in HD, folks) has the Internet going nuts. Videogum and G4TV seem to think it is irony-free and simply bad. Cult of Mac notes the weirdly prominent MacBook and seems to enjoy the ad at some level.
Is this ad real? Sincere? I cannot tell. Microsoft may be having a lark with their bouncing dragons and 1982 styles. This is what I do know:
3. The music you hear below was written and played by an actual musician, rather than Songsmith, but it suggests that if Sarah Palin had used Songsmith to accompany her public appearances, we might be facing a very different January.
I wrote a Critic’s Notebook on FM3’s Buddha Machine for this week’s magazine. Above is a photo of the Buddha Machines I use. Left to right: my original blue Buddha Machine 1.0, the iPhone app version, and the Buddha 2.0 in grey and burgundy. The Buddha Machine does not intrigue me just because I happen to own it. The Buddha Machine is of general interest because it manages to exist successfully on three planes: the physical world, the Web, and the iPhone. Each iteration is fairly cheap and fundamentally different from the others. I don’t feel like I’ve exhausted any of them yet.
When the Buddha Machine is seen as a box, the first impression that most people over thirty will have is “transistor radio.” The Machine looks like the tiny AM radios we once used for listening to ballgames, and offers the same dubious fidelity. When the loops are playing through a three-inch speaker housed in thin plastic, distortion is part of the game. Combine the visual echoes with the grain of the signal, and it is easy to think of the Buddha Machine as a receiver of transmissions from a place you will never see.
According to this schematic, there is a tiny little plastic Buddha figure inside the box. I do not trust myself to explode and de-explode anything, so I simply have to believe that this is true. (An appropriate relationship to a deity.)
Space was the only thing that prevented me from mentioning Bon Iver’s new EP, “Blood Bank,” in this week’s column. Though not available commercially until January 20th, songs from “Blood Bank” have been circulating on MP3 blogs for the last month or so. As of today, all four songs from the EP can be streamed from the band’s MySpace page.
“Blood Bank” feels like the inverse of “Emma”: more capably engineered but musically slighter. I am becoming increasingly fond of the slide guitar duet in “Beach Baby,” and all of “The Woods,” which is one of the most delicate songs in recent memory about getting plastered. If anyone feels themselves about to get into a tizzy about the use of Auto-Tune on “The Woods,” they should probably go back to “The Wolves (Act I & II)” and listen for the Auto-Tune there, too.
