Autoterrorist

At an izakaya one night we had a lively discussion going as usual, rich with references from American pop culture—movies, TV programs, Myspace—and I realized then how impenetrable our conversation must have been for our Japanese friend, Yuko, who couldn’t know the intricacies of our cultural references. Even if she knows that Myspace is in America what Mixi is in Japan, she might not understand the humor implied behind the phrases we use to describe it or the jokes we make about it, which are subculture-specific and come from parodies circulated on the site. It struck me that so much of our conversation relies on reference, as if we have nothing original to say anymore. All we do is re-mix elements of popular culture, insert movie quotes into conversation, and draw parallels between TV shows and daily life. This realization sparked a debate about culture and entropy, which was never quite resolved and the details are not exactly relevant. However, it made me think about how reliant we are on other people’s creative activities to define ourselves.
Azuma Hiroki calls it “database postmodernity,” where elements of culture are stored like a database then cut and pasted, rearranged, disassembled and fragmented to make new forms. We live in a world where appropriation is the cultural norm, and where popular culture is engaged in a self-referential cycle of parody and simulation.
Parody, however, is not a breach of copyright rules. So Weird Al Yankovic has no problem taking Michael Jackson’s song “Beat It,” stealing it verse for verse, beat for beat, and turning it into his own song, “Eat It.” But if a hip-hop DJ wants to sample a break-beat from “Beat It,” not even the whole song, he must get permission to do so.

Hip-Hop

It wasn’t like that at one time. In the early days of hip-hop, music was generally made without instruments, instead using turntables and samplers to cut up beats and bass lines to create new songs. For young people in inner-city areas, where money is sparse, only minimal investment was required for these tools of creative musical expression.
DJ Kool Herc was the first to isolate the percussion break in funk songs—the break beat—and repeat it over and over, laying a foundation for hip-hop music. Kool Herc came from Jamaica, where sound system parties featured toasters, singing or rapping over reggae soul records. Some toasters, like U-Roy, even released their own records of themselves toasting over songs recorded by other artists. So this tradition of using another artist’s music as a platform for new expression evolved from neighborhood sound system parties in Kingston, Jamaica, and traveled with DJ Kool Herc to parties in New York City, where it was adopted and transformed into hip-hop.
This unauthorized use of copyrighted music in hip-hop went relatively unnoticed until hip-hop proved to be quite lucrative and popular. Now artists must clear the use of samples with the copyright holder, often paying an upfront fee or a portion of royalties. Dealing with major artists like the Rolling Stones or the Beatles with lots of lawyer backup, however, involves heavy fees. After a short time it seemed that using samples, rather than an inexpensive way to create music, became more and more expensive.

The Case of the Amen Break

In 1969 a soul band called the Winstons recorded a single, the B-side of which was a song called “Amen Brother.” The drum break of this song, dubbed “the Amen Break,” became the most sampled drum break-beat ever. As Nate Harrison shows us in his piece recounting the history of the Amen Break, this drum solo became a “ubiquitous piece of the pop culture soundscape,” used in hip-hop songs and car commercials alike. The break’s individual drum hits were isolated using more sophisticated sampling equipment, and by rearranging the beats new permutations were formed. These beats created the foundation of drum ‘n’ bass and jungle music played at all-night raves. Harrison shows us, then, that “an entire subculture was…based on 6 seconds from 1969.” The Winstons, however, never received any compensation for the use of their copyrighted recording.
The Amen Break can be found on copyrighted jungle and drum ‘n’ bass sample kits, but it is never credited to the Winstons, nor is there any indication that the Winstons have licensed the use of the break to the sample kit creators. In effect this creates two copyrights for the same material, and Nate Harrison demonstrates that this produces a situation where “the Amen belongs less now to the Winstons and more to companies like Zero G Ltd,” a maker of such kits.
The case of the Amen Break shows how incredible innovation, even entire subcultures, can be formed from something as simple as a six second drum solo—as long as the material is free to use and build upon. As it stands now, if an artist wants to use any sample, no matter how long or recognizable, she must get a license.
Nate Harrison ends his piece with a quote from Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kaczinksy, “Culture is impossible without a rich public domain,” a sentiment that unfortunately is not upheld by the most recent rulings regarding copyright and fair use, which have extended copyrights so far as to effectively remove all music created in the twentieth century from the public domain.

Technology

As technology evolves, so culture evolves. From the wheel to the PC, culture follows the technology. New information technologies lent culture the ability to freely copy, cut and paste text, graphics and sound. Digital technologies provided the environment for what Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, calls “cut and paste culture.”
In his book Free Culture, Lessig states, “Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn’t easily do them legally.” He calls for an adaptation of copyright laws to allow creativity using new technologies that protects the creators of the derivative works and the creators of the original. His innovative solution is the Creative Commons organization with the slogan, “Some Rights Reserved,” an alternative to the strict copyright laws. In his lecture, “Who Owns Culture,” he implores us “to protect the creators that this technology will enable, not just the creators of the 20th century” whose copyrights derivative works may infringe.
Though these new technologies make new forms of creation possible through layering, cutting and pasting, editing, remixing, and rearranging existing material, the structures of law are not in place to freely allow this creation. Lessig makes the point that the only way to do this legally is to hire a lawyer to track down the people that need to be paid compensation for the use of their work, or to hire a lawyer to defend your work as fair use—“either way, the creative process is a process of paying lawyers.”
What if you expect no profit from your work? After all, the technology is fairly cheap and distribution is easy over the internet. Users of digital technologies don’t incur the costs of commercial production, and often don’t expect a return on their creations, yet this does not protect them from copyright lawsuits.

Podcasting

Cody Hanson is a blogger who presented hard-to-find, forgotten songs on a podcast series called “Vinyl Podcast.” Each podcast contained one song. He would also include background information and commentary. In January 2006 he decided to stop the podcasts because of a package he received from BMI containing information on its podcasting license. He took it as a friendly warning and decided to quit.
BMI is a company that, along with ASCAP, protects songwriters, paying them royalties every time one of their songs is played on the radio, even cover versions. If Hanson had bought the podcasting license from BMI, he would only be permitted the right to rebroadcast the content of the songwriter’s composition, not the exact version he played, which is protected under the mechanical rights of the recording. So he would need to get permission from a different company, the Harry Fox Agency, to get the mechanical rights. The price of the mechanical rights is determined by how long the song is and to how many people it will be distributed. Cody Hanson’s podcast at one point had 5,000 subscribers, and he calculated that “a song 4:07 in length would have cost $455.00 to license for use in [his] podcast.”
Hanson wasn’t making any money from his podcast series, in fact “the Vinyl Podcast was a money-losing operation,” because of the money he paid each month for hosting. Amateur podcasting certainly cannot survive in such an unfavorable environment. Yet Hanson turned people on to music they probably would never hear otherwise, music out of print and hard to find. He was promoting it, like a college radio station might.
Unfortunately podcasts are downloads, not webcasts or radio broadcasts, so it provides people with their own copy of copyrighted material. This subjects podcasts to different rules than radio, which is not required to pay the artists whose work is played.

The Kids are Alright

I come from the tradition of a college radio where promoting unknown, underappreciated, unsigned, independent music was the rule rather than the exception. I worked as a radio DJ for KUCI, 88.9 FM in Irvine, California, which forbade the play of major-label bands or hit songs out of a spirit of promoting the underdog. After all, the Beatles certainly don’t need any more promotion; why not give the airtime to a band signed to an obscure independent label, whose music needs exposure?
My podcast series, named after the show I DJed on KUCI and later on Pirate Cat Radio in San Francisco, still operates with that spirit in mind. I would argue fair use of the music in my podcasts because I go to great lengths to provide easy links on the blog post so that interested listeners can find out more about the bands featured and buy their music. I expect no financial gain from creating these shows.
When I can, I contact the artist directly to obtain permission to use their music. The use of the social networking site Myspace has facilitated this to a great degree. However, most of the music I appreciate most is over twenty years old, nearly forgotten, and never played on commercial radio. This music was in the public domain until the Sonny Bono Act of 1998 extended the length of copyright to 70 years after the death of the author, even if the copyrights are not renewed.
Until a usable structure is in place where amateur podcasters can purchase licensing for a fair price, a price that fits the product, podcasters will have to stay underground. Luckily there is a very low chance of my podcast being singled out for prosecution for breach of copyright law. I will continue to podcast until then. Hopefully by that time a fair structure will have been instated, and the madness of copyright extensions will be tempered, allowing more music to enter the public domain.
I think of my podcasts as public mix CDs, an opportunity for me to share my knowledge of music, and promote interest in the artists and recordings that are represented. I partake in the “cut and paste culture” afforded by these new technologies. I believe that this is what makes our culture what it is, a remixing of other elements, a postmodern database, a pastiche of old and new. I would hope that the courts could see it the same light and find a fair way for all kinds of creators to be protected. Maybe Creative Commons is the way. But what about bands like the Winstons who may not even be aware of the copyright infringement of their material? What about artists who are dead, bands who have disbanded? Who retains their copyrights? Who gets paid? Invariably, it seems the trend is that the lawyers get paid the most out of the bunch.

Conclusion

The current stringency of copyright laws seems like a feeble attempt at slowing the future of creative expression, by imposing twentieth century business models on twenty-first century creativity. (Lessig) The technology serves to enable and empower, but the law heavy-handedly takes that power away from the people. The law restores power to the big businesses, which can afford the lawyers to sue twelve year olds for utilizing the technology at their hands to download mp3s.
The reactionary lawsuits and excessive extensions of copyright rules are trying to put a halt on a culture and a new form of creative expression which digital technology affords us, trying to stop a process that seems inevitable. Hip-hop, drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, dancehall—these types of music reflect postmodern creativity, a cut and paste culture using technology to build something new from building blocks of the past. Though the music derives from previously recorded material, reassembled and remixed into a different form, this does not negate its authenticity and originality.
Intellectual property is a right that should be protected, but consumers and creators should be protected when their actions are without malice and cause no harm. In many cases, when work is freely copied and distributed using new technologies, it affords greater publicity for the work. Even in my own case I have found one of my own photographs and articles reproduced elsewhere without my prior consent, but this allows for exposure to people who might not otherwise see it.
This culture enables greater sharing between people and artists and musicians, taking the power from the hierarchical structure of record labels and distribution companies, and putting it into the hands of the people. This egalitarianism of the new technology is threatening to the corporations because they are not in control. Amateur podcasts, though they are non-commercial and promote musicians and record labels, are not under their control.
But a culture based on free sharing does not necessarily mean total anarchy. Piracy is still unethical; it is stealing. However sharing, or building upon another’s creative work does not constitute piracy. The structure of the law should be changed to reflect this reality—to regulate the technology and the creativity it enables in a non-reactionary fashion, rather in a way that promotes culture and innovation.
As Lawrence Lessig writes, “this movement must begin in the streets” in order to effect change in Washington. Our best chance, then, is to educate others and ourselves on the issues regarding copyright and fair use. Maybe then we’ll have a chance at creating an alternative—an alternative that allows digital creativity and peer-to-peer sharing, but also protects originators and artists, a culture based on freedom not prohibition.

Click the headphones to listen! 37.3 MB / 40.42 minutes

This is a long one, but it is totally worth it for all the funky tracks.

Featuring:

Post Punk

Liquid Liquid
Rough Trade Records

Afrodisiac/Open & Close

Fela Ransome Kuti & The Africa ‘70
Wrasse Records

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Wheedle’s Groove – Seattle’s Finest in Funk & Soul 1965-75Various Artists

Black On White Affair
Light In The Attic

• Buy at iTunes Music Store

Oh Girl/Something Sanctified

Young Holt Unlimited

Termination Dub

Glen Brown and King Tubby
Blood and Fire

A South Bronx Story

ESG
Souljazz Records

Ethiopiques Vol III

Mulatu Astatqe
Buda Musique

Midnite Blues Party – Volume Two – Rare Rhythm And Blues From The 1940’s & 1950’s Various Artists

Sister Rockaway
Electro-Fi Records

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Girl Group Sounds—Various Artists
the Geminis

Reachin’

Digable Planets

I just recently received a membership at IODA Promonet, as per Aaron’s suggestion, which is a service that hooks you up with podcast safe music, and gives you the code for posting the info in your blog. It makes my job a lot easier, actually, because usually I have to hunt down official websites, record labels, pictures and cut and paste it all into my post. Since I didn’t have a lot of time to browse I only included a couple of songs I found from IODA, but maybe soon I will devote more podcast material to what I find from there.

Next podcast is devoted to Japan!! To subscribe to the Kids Are Alright podcast series, drag this link into your iTunes.

I gotta write something about this in order to keep it in mind for further research for my thesis. I ran across a post on an art project called Double Take Billboards, which ran in San Francisco from 2004-2005. It looked something like this:

picture-in-picture 3

Okay, cool right? The art project takes details of the particular location and blows up the image to billboard size. The website describes the project as:

Each billboard image is designed to integrate the billboard to its location, taking into consideration the surroundings: architecture, the function of the site, transient city elements, and permanent urban infrastructure. Each work replaces the billboard’s didactic message with a recognizable detail of the location.

I think this artist’s statement is really valuable and I think the project itself turned out fantastic.

The controversy ensues however, when it was found out that the funding from the project partly came from Clear Channel—whose billboards are used.

Surveillance Camera Billboard Commis ArtOriginally uploaded by TedRheingold.This photo of the surveillance camera sparked a lot of interesting debate, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to sift through it, especially because of the time that has elapsed since the project ran. It brings up crucial issues, still. This post raises the question, “Is it corporate or is it art…or both?”
I first found the photo from Billboard Liberation Front, from this post, which had been updated with the new information regarding the funding from Clear Channel. Lots of people have problems with Clear Channel as a mega monster conglomerate, and they expressed distaste for a street art project that is “commissioned” by a corporation like that. (After perusing the Double Take website, however, it looks like the project wasn’t actually commissioned, but funded in part by Clear Channel, not necessarily controlled by it.) A comment was posted from the “guy from Clear Channel who worked with the artist on the project,” and he defends Clear Channels intentions with the project. His comment is valid and brings up the important issue that what the corporation is doing, all in all, is good—for art, for the artist, and for the audience. He says:

People should encourage corporations to partake in these endeavors and not dismiss it as “not the real deal.”

This is true, absolutely. The problem arises, however, when you realize how contradictory and hypocritical a corporation becomes when it is as large as Clear Channel. On this post on Laughing Squid, a particularly right-on comment informed us to Clear Channel’s court case in Portland, Oregon, against a public arts and murals program. Looks like Clear Channel wants a monopoly on street art. This controversy started when:

Clear Channel successfully argued in Multnomah County Circuit Court back in 1998 that murals and other “signs” (billboards, painted wall ads, wall wraps) all had to be regulated by the City’s sign code (a 100 page book of rules on what can be put on a wall).

In effect, after Clear Channel won in 1998- public art no longer existed.

All we had left was “signs”.

Now Clear Channel wants to shut down a public arts program? The comment hits the nail on the head when it points out:

Is there no corner of our civic life that does not need a “gift” or a stamp of approval from a multi-national mega-billion dollar-a-year corporation?

Clear Channel seems to be moving strongly toward the goal of “providing us with our free speech rights”.

More information on the deal in Portland can be found at In Defense of Art.

This issue shows where the power is shifting. It definitely does not lie with individual artists, or even with the government and their public arts funds. Corporations will tell you what is good, what is culture, what is art. If not through advertising, then through funding arts projects that get corporate stamp of approval. The billboard sure looks cool, but who is watching who?

Surveillance Camera Billboard PrankOriginally uploaded by TedRheingold.

Update—A couple more thoughts I have on the topic I’d like to share.. I want to make it clear that I don’t feel that it’s wrong for an artist like Felipe Dulzaides, who did the Double Take billboards, to take money from Clear Channel. Artists need funding, and throughout the ages different patrons have supported the arts, from the church, to wealthy merchants, to public and federal programs, and now, more often, corporations. And Michael from Clear Channel, who worked with the artist on the project, probably doesn’t know the details of the suit against the city of Portland about their public arts program. It’s not unusual for a mega conglomerate like Clear Channel, which takes over other businesses under one umbrella, to not have a clear idea what all is going on—for one tentacle to know what all the other tentacles are doing, so to speak. Case in point: Clear Channel owns Bill Graham Presents in San Francisco who employs a friend of mine who runs a pirate radio and TV station. So Clear Channel is technically funding a pirate!

So why not? Should artists stay true to some anti-corporate value system or just take more money, get more grants, more commissions? Corporations will give money away, and one thing artists need is money. Is that wrong?

Have you ever responded to those Myspace chain letters that tell you to Google “(Your Name) looks like” then post the silliest result from the Google caption? You end up with stuff like “Katie looks like recycled cat food” or “Martha looks like a disaffected salmon swimming upstream.” Well some poets are using the power of Google to create hilarious, crude, nonsensical, sometimes offensive poetry, called Flarf. This poem is from the Flarf blog, called Mainstream Poetry, and it’s an excerpt from the poem “Crucifixion X-ing” by Kasey Mohammad:

Any respect you get is FRANKENSTEIN SAUCE,
Beldame-boffer! GEORGE W.’s ass cancer
Makes me wanna shovel yellow snow

Right up the old LEAGUE OF NATIONS
Pomegranate-squat, say WAAAAAAAT?
Synchronicity got UGLY alla sudden

Then tell me how this feels, this wintry
Flank of erstwhile breeding somnolence
That, fretted, leaps to GOBBLE UP THAM THUMBTACKS!

The snores of wicked emissaries rumble & redound
YOW! JANET RENO grabbed me by th’ CRABAPPLES
& the snakeskin regiment aint coolin down

But it’s awfully nice to fry some GORETEX
HANDWARMERS in the nuclear backwash, uh huh

The initial aesthetics of Flarf went largely unarticulated, but they can probably be approximated by the following recipe: deliberate shapelessness of content, form, spelling, and thought in general, with liberal borrowing from internet chat-room drivel and spam scripts, often with the intention of achieving a studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile.

Flarf, then, uses Google as the hat from which they draw the words, as a window to the collective subconscious, if there is such a thing. Many artists use Google in their artwork, like Christophe Bruno and his “human browser” project.

I find a lot more similarities between Flarf and Dada in their social context: Dada was a response to the absurdity of World War I. Flarf responds to our 9/11 world:

Not too long after 9/11, people began posting again, though now all of the flarfs-many of which were parodies of AP News items-in some way shape or form addressed the aftermath of 9/11, including media portrayal of same. I remember, for instance, Katie’s “We’ll rebuild the Twin Towers-on your Pizza” (which I think was published in the latest online edition of Arras). I started a “sadness” series-doing searches on “The horrible sadness,” “the awful sadness,” “the unending sadness,” etc., in response to what was becoming a kind of stifling national(ist) mourning.

AW GAWD, blow me up a penguin ranch
Made out of PLASTIC ROBOT HEADS

One of my photos got featured on a post on the graffiti blog Wooster Collective! I thought it looked familiar.. .
Wooster had previously posted about the frustrating lack of Japanese graffiti representation on the site. They were excited to find a photolog that documents graffiti in Tokyo called CBCNET:TANK.

Someone must have directed their attention to the Flickr group Street Art in Japan as a resource for Japanese graffiti. I’m a member of the group, and they chose my photo! Cool!

Well, you have all probably forgotten already that I gave up complaining for Lent. Sometimes I’d forget, too. I would remember as soon as I said anything close to complaining, but after a while it seemed like no one was noticing. My friends were pretty good at the beginning, very vigilant, warning me if I was getting close to complaining.

All in all, it didn’t matter if my friends were keeping me in check, though, because after the first couple of weeks I became very aware of what I said and how I said it. I managed to complain about things almost as much as usual, but masking the statements to seem neutral and not whiny. So I feel it was a very valuable exercise for me. What do you think? Have you noticed anything?

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Click the headphones! 32.6 MB / 35.33 min

*This podcast contains explicit lyrics
As a fun game to help you procrastinate with me, count how many times you hear the F-word!

Featuring the likes of:

And for kicks here’s a fun picture of Pete Townshend:

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I recently found out that I will be graduating much sooner than I thought! I have enough credits to graduate after this semester, however, I have had to rethink my research, expand it, reformulate it and turn it into a 9 credit thesis. After much deliberation I think I have decided to return to the topic of graffiti art. This means abandoning most of the research I have done so far into Japanese contemporary art and going back down into the streets. However, I think this topic means more to me and is, in the long run, more relevant to the Friends World mission regarding social change and global citizenship.

Graffiti and vandalism is a growing “problem” in most cities across the world, and most municipal governments go to great expense to remove graffiti and apprehend and prosecute vandals. However, these efforts do not achieve the desired result—the eradication of graffiti.

In this thesis I will address street art and graffiti, illegal and otherwise, as a response to, interaction with and sometimes a reaction against urban environments. As such, I hope to explore solutions and creative strategies for the resolution of this stalemate opposition between the graffiti writer, interacting with urban space, and the authority, protecting private property. An added complexity is the role of advertising and commercialism; advertisements often become the target of graffiti because they are seen as invasive and unwanted in urban spaces.

As the culmination of my undergraduate studies, in my senior thesis I wish to incorporate research and sources from my earlier independent study in Japanese graffiti art, “the Bombing of Babylon” as well as gather new research in Europe and in America. Though my research will incorporate many sources regarding graffiti as a worldwide phenomenon, my focus will be the city of San Francisco to provide a case study of one city’s attempts at managing vandalism. I will conduct interviews with fellow graffiti researchers; graffiti writers and street artists of different nationalities and localities to gain a broad understanding of street art and its motivations, politics, and histories; as well as property owners, police officers and municipal authorities in San Francisco. I will also document my research and photographs in my weblog.

Buy More ShitOriginally uploaded by !HF.

At one time I was a drone “sales associate” at a certain fragrance retailer at Fashion Island mall in Newport Beach, California, and one day while taking out the trash through the tunnel-like hallways hidden behind the stores at the mall I found the room which housed the Muzak box. This box provided the constant soundtrack to the entirety of the mall. (When I say constant, I mean constant. As bored suburban teenagers we had visited the mall in the wee hours and even then, the soundtrack would be continuous, hours after every shop window was dark.) After work that day, I devised a half-joking plan to destroy the Muzak box as a statement of protest against force-fed background music. This plan was never executed, unfortunately. (Probably because we were too lazy to be the hooligans we made ourselves out to be. The most exciting thing we ever did was steal a lamb from the life-size nativity scene at the Trinity Broadcasting Network.) I recently found this worth-reading-in-its-entirety New Yorker article that goes behind the scenes of the Muzak corporation and sheds light on one device used in the well-oiled machinery of consumer capitalism: background music especially formulated to encourage spending.

Muzak is still associated with watered-down instrumental versions of pop songs, but the company says that type of music hardly characterizes their business anymore;

it is no longer terribly popular anywhere, except in Japan. (“The Japanese think they love it, but they actually don’t,” a former Muzak executive told me. “They’ll get over it soon.”)

Most of what Muzak corporation does nowadays is build customized soundtracks for businesses, creating “audio architecture” that promotes the right “emotion” for the brand, giving customers a feeling of “belonging” in the store (this is probably why I react strongly against most of these soundtracks—I don’t belong in Old Navy or Armani Xchange) and therefore they are more likely to feel comfortable enough to spend money. I have on more than one occasion been forced to leave stores at the mall because the music was driving me crazy, but I think I’m hypersensitive. In any case, I thought it was fascinating how much thought was given to the arrangement of Muzak soundtracks. Muzak “audio architects” are like corporate DJ’s, essentially.

“The first time I explained to my mom what I do for a living, she said, ‘They pay people to do that?’ Most people walk into a store and hear music, but they never think that somebody actually put thought into what they’re hearing. A song they like is playing, and they’re nodding along with it, or maybe they’re kind of dancing to it and maybe they don’t want anyone to see that they’re dancing. They don’t realize that the song was put there for a purpose, and that there’s a reason why they’re doing what they’re doing. But there is.”

“I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they’ve hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ It was retail theatre. And I realized then that Muzak’s business wasn’t really about selling music. It was about selling emotion—about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than being just an intellectual proposition.”

*I apologize for the overabundance of parenthetical asides (but I thought they were relevant in a witty sort of way).

Podcast #4–Click the headphones to listen! 35.2 MB / 38 min 27 sec

Warning for kiddies, this podcast Contains an Explicit Lyric.

This is a revisitation to my days as a dj at KUCI in Irvine, California. At that time I was on top of all the new releases from random indie labels because of all the promos we would get each week. After I left KUCI I never had the budget to keep up with the new music all the kids were listening to, so I regressed and just started investigating the roots of popular music, which is a project I am still actively conducting. But since coming back to Japan, I had imported the contents of my CD collection into my iTunes (I had stopped collecting CDs a few years ago, concentrating on my vinyl collection instead) and now I have rediscovered a lot of the music that I found compelling at one time but had sort of forgotten about. So here they are, a few songs from my glory days at the height of my popularity as college radio dj and local celebrity…

This podcast features:

Circulatory System—Yesterday’s World. *They are working on a new album due out in Fall 2006.

Noonday Underground—London.

Belle & Sebastian—Legal Man.

Cato Salsa Experience—MF. *I lumped them in with the Swedish invasion, but they are actually Norwegian. Shows how much I know.

I am the World Trade Center—Better Off at Home.

Stereolab—Intervals. *Their home page is really hypnotic…

Vincent Gallo—Was.

the Places—Mission Impossible.

Miranda July—Reno.

Do Make Say Think—Landlord is Dead.

And just like many other days in my long career as a radio host, I am suffering from a sinus infection. I think this is just karma from fooling everyone into thinking I had broken my nose on April Fool’s Day using this picture courtesy of Google Images:

This is from someone named John’s wheelchair racing accident in 1988.

I hope you like the show. Sorry for the sudden volume increase in the middle there. Got to preview these things first.

If you want to subscribe to further podcasts just grab and drop this link into your iTunes!