Music Goodies

Twilight Singers

Love/Annie Mae
A Love Supreme/Please Stay

This is two live tracks from the Twilight Singers first tour. Word is Greg Dulli's personal life was bottoming out. The performances are excellent. I do wonder how much coke Dulli did during the set.

Gina Vivinetto used to be the lead singer of Bullwinkle. She informed me that her old band was on Myspace. I was surprised by how well the music held up. Many early 90s Tampa indie bands recordings sounded bad back in the day. They only got worse. Even great local bands like Monday Morning had trouble in the studio. Next the the Grassy Knoll Gunmen tape and CD and Kacy Ross's experimental music, this is the best recording from the era.

Beware: Gina name-checks Sam Shepard in a song. I'm disappointed she didn't drop entire passages from The Tooth of Crime.

Recommended listening: Sonic Thing Or Two, Mess.

www.myspace.com/bullwinkleband

Tampa bands, drop me an email and a link to your Myspace site. If I like it, I will mention it in a post.

Facebook News (Literally)

This sums up how I feel about the silly Facebook news feed controversy. I support Facebook users having privacy options. Which they do. I think it's silly people are freaking out over friends knowing what Itunes track they downloaded or movie they saw. These idiots should read the privacy options before they post on Facebook.

Update: Annie Heckenberger has a post about the good ole days of Facebook. She even mentions Friendsters. I'm not with her on Myspace. That site sucked before the Ruport Murdoch takeover.

Netroots For Dummies

"His fanbase is entirely netroots... they're not frequent voters if ever. A lot of the people I spoke to never voted for a candidate, but this guy turned me on."

Wayne Garcia on Ron Paul.

Garcia makes the mistake of thinking Ron Paul's Myspace friends are netroots. They are not. The Republican Party, and it's current presidential candidates, have yet to provide anything resembling on organization. Gene Smith is also known as Gatordem. He has worked on Democratic campaigns in the Tampa area for years. Boy wonder Ray Seaman is highly active in the Florida Democratic Party. These are people that hardly can be accused of rarely voting.

Garcia and Jim Johnson have no idea what the netroots is about because they aren't apart of it. Progressive bloggers don't give a shit about Myspace polls. It is about making the media cover issues, raising awareness and money for candidates.

Getting Trent Lott to step down as Senate Majority Leader was a result of action taken by progressive bloggers. The Note was the only news site to mention Lott's racist comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party. No network broadcasts covered the story. Josh Marshall and Duncan Black read The Note and wrote about the Lott story. Both correctly guessed that John Kerry's expensive haircut would get more media exposure. Other bloggers then covered Lott. The attention was so great that Lott then because a story. The rest is history.

Howard Dean's netroots campaign made him the frontrunner because of exposure and online fundraising. Dean proved that the internet can't stop a candidate from embarrassing himself on television. It did give him the potential tools to win. Democracy for America was created from the Dean campaign. The site encourages Democrats and activist to meetup with other likeminded individuals to raise money and GOTV. Not vote in online polls. Ron Paul has nothing resembling the netroots. For Garcia to call it that is a mistake.

What the netroots does is even the playing field for Democrats. For too long the Donkeys had nothing to compete with corporate fundraising and the right-wing echo chamber of talk radio and Fox News.

How do I know all this? I am part of the netroots. I used netroots organization to draw attention to certain stories. The police-handling of the University of Tampa rape and Rachel Moran's offensive post against the homeless are examples. I also was in contact with the Kathy Castor campaign last election and work with the 527 group Florida Progressive Coalition.

Short answer: we could play six degrees of separation with all my netroots connections.

Another Reason Disney and Myspace Sucks

This has to be the dumbest thing I have heard Disney do. The Blake Babies can not stream their own music on Myspace. The reason is Disney owns the masters. How Disney thinks this will help sells records of a defuct indie pop band is left unexplained.

John Strohm explained that Myspace suspended the Blake Babies streaming privileges. The band is not allowed to post music not owned by Disney. The most surreal thing about all this is the band members wrote the majority of their recording output; barring a few cover tracks.

Okay, I've never posted on here, but something has come up that merits explanation. MySpace pulled the songs we were streaming because The Blake Babies do not own our master recordings -- they are the exclusive property of the Walt Disney corporation. I apologize for this inconvenience; although our intention is only to generate interest in our music and make the streams available to established fans who can't find our recordings elsewhere, our posting the tracks is indeed an infringement of Disney's copyright. They'll get no argument from me.

The frustrating thing is that there are certain Blake Babies recordings that we do own and control (nothing from the original Mammoth catalogue, but some more recent recordings from the reunion phase), and we would very much like to make these recordings available for streaming on this page. Nevertheless, because of the unauthorized use of the Disney recordings, our streaming privileges have been suspended "until further notice." I understand that MySpace must actively police the website and its users to weed out infringing uses. That said, I hope they permit us to post our controlled masters soon. We mean no harm to anyone; to the contrary, our sole intention is to spread the love and make/keep people interested in this band's music.

Strohm is being too kind to Myspace. I'm sure he is aware of that, but why piss off a music marketing monster.

This is the same Myspace that believed they were legally allowed to use any song posted without the artist's consent. Folk singer Billy Bragg said the Myspace policy was copyright infringement.

"The real problem is the fact that they can sub-license it to any company they want and keep the royalities themselves without paying the artist a penny. It also doesn't stipulate that they can use it for non-commercial use only which is what I'd want to see in that clause. The clause is basically far to open for abuse and thus I'm very wary."

The appeal of Myspace perplexes me. I love that I can find new music. The social network aspect is retarded. The layouts and loading speed of the site is dreadful. The blog software is even worse. Myspace users are shocked that lurkers find out embarrassing personal details of their lives. Do people understand the concept of talking to each other in person? Try it people. You might like it.

Miltitary Censoring Soldiers' Internet Access

Via Sine.Que.Non: The U.S. military is keeping soldiers safe from Youtube and Myspace.

The US Department of Defense issued a memo last week that states it intended to begin blocking network access -- including that of soldiers serving overseas -- to several popular "Internet entertainment sites" from yesterday.

The 12 sites to be blocked, according to a story in the Associated Press, include several large social networking and media sharing sites like MySpace, YouTube, MTV, Pandora, and Photobucket.

The Department of Defense cite security reasons. So does China with what their citizens can see on the World Wide Web. I doubt these soldiers and marines want al-Qaeda to know their movements. It's most likely to stop the negative PR from graphic images of dead Iraqis.

Update: a reader pointed out that the DoD official reason for not allowing access to Myspace and Youtube is bandwidth. Not security reasons.

The Impact the Internet Has On Politics

Jim Johnson links to an article on Myspace holding their own mock primary. Jim also links to a Jeff Jarvis post.

But now MySpace steals some of that thunder, for candidates will now need to spend some effort and, yes, money there to make sure that Obama doesn’t walk away with the virtual election and the subsequent rush of publicity (just watch: the winner on MySpace will end up being announced on network news shows; it would be more newsworthy than last night’s NBC Nightly News report on the voting campaign for Sanjaya).

I have never seen a mock primary have any affect on election results. Mitt Romney won CPAC and he is doing lousy in the polls. Does anyone remember who won the straw polls in 2004?

Jeff Jarvis is an idiot. He keeps saying blogs are going to replace the media. Tommy gave a speech along the same lines to a bunch of lawyers. The truth is Jarvis is a running joke amongst A list others from Eric Alterman to Atrios. He's horrible, boring and used his blog to promote AOL blogs without informing his readership he has worked for Time-AOL for years.

I haven't went to one Myspace candidate site yet. The software just presents the profile and links to blog updates. The Dean model is better for a campaign website.


Tommy Duncan makes this hysterical statement in the SOS comments.

What an interesting development. Could make all the primaries moot, regardless of when they are held… Jarvis makes good points too.

Last time I checked Howard Dean wasn't President. That comment is coming from someone who dissed the netroots and discussed our off-the-record talks online. I think I will mention he told me afterwards me didn't know what the netroots are. I love people who don't understand politics and media saying how it will magically change everything.

Amanda Marcotte wrote a good post on this subject.

Nor does the left blogosphere. There are some bloggers who do journalist work, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Truth told, good journalism is so utterly time-consuming and thankless that you need to farm it out to paying publications for compensation, so most bloggers who do that work will publish it outside of their blogs. But what left wing bloggers do offer is an opinion and analysis alternative, and as Mike says, a good deal of the time they simply are legions better than the paid pundits. For some reason, though, this obvious point about blogs is somehow avoided in most conversations about them.

My main theory as to why people avoid discussion the blogs’ major role in shaping opinion and offering analysis is that people are reluctant to admit outright that they look to others for opinion and analysis. The great myth of American politics is that we’re all just soberly analyzing the facts and opinions and “deciding for ourselves”, which would mean that we don’t lose out a whole lot if the field of available opinion is limited by Beltway wisdom. Unfortunately, human nature just isn’t like that. In reality, people tend to use the opinions they’re hearing as a gauge of what is possible and then reject the “extremes” of the available range of opinion and put themselves in the middle. There’s simply not a lot of thought that goes into it. Conservatives grasp this fact very well, which is why Fox News puts a bunch of conservatives on and characterizes them as left wing Democrats. Slowly but surely, they create the impression that very middle-of-the-road, boring liberal ideas are raving socialism—thus how I managed to hear this weekend from my dad how attempts to reduce carbon emissions through conservation and carbon offsets is actually a socialist plot to destroy life as we know it.

Jarvis is actually a conservative guy. Even though he doesn't want to admit it. Tommy lets is inner wingnut out with teens mooning teachers and Glenn Beck posts. They are the type of people who believe the internet will replace old media crap. Because they have no idea what they are talkuing about. People are still reading books and listening to the radio. Both were pronounced dead.

Jarvis and Tommy have never worked in the netroots. Tommy has been on the receiving end of it with the Rachel flap. I was the guy who organized the progressive blog push back. I understand online organization and journalism and Myspace will have zero impact on the election.

The funniest thing about Tommy and Jarvis's comments is they believe campaigns should spend vast amounts of money for a Myspace primary geared to mostly young people who don't vote. No sane campaign manager would take money that could go to Iowa and New Hampshire ground operations. Dean had the internet buzz in 2004. John Kerry ran a better campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. The rest is history.

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