T-Bone Burnett is perhaps now best known as the producer of the soundtrack to the film O Brother Where Art Thou?, but he’s had a long career as not only a producer of other people’s music but a musician in his own right. From what I’ve read, he’s a pretty devout Christian (see, for example, this article). I do not share his faith, but I find that his spiritual concerns emerge in his lyrics in interesting ways. Some time in college I picked up a bargain-bin cassette copy of his 1983 album Proof Through the Night, which now appears to be out of print, unfortunately. I can’t find the cassette, and I can’t find transcriptions of the songs online online, so I’m trying to remember what they sounded like and figure them out from memory. It’s a great album. If Elvis Costello had more of a country sound, this is perhaps an album he’d make, and the track “Shut it Tight” is one of my all-time favorites:

I find it hard sometimes to say the way that I feel
I do the very things I hate to do
I act like a child and I’m afraid of what is real
And so I try to cover up the truth

I stumble like a drunk along this crazy path I walk
I have a hundred thousand questions too
I’ll go to any length to prove that nothing is my fault
Then later on I will deny the proof

I don’t like to win but then again I hate to lose
And in between is something I can’t stand
I don’t care what you think and I hope that you approve
I am just an ordinary man

Sometimes I want to stop and crawl back into the womb
And sometimes I cannot tell wrong from right
But I ain’t gonna quit until I’m laid in my tomb
And even then they better shut it tight

Word is that the title of the Sonic Youth song “Teenage Riot” (off of 1988’s epic Daydream Nation) was inspired by an offhand comment from J. Mascis, then of Dinosaur Jr.

I recently stumbled online across his latest musical project: J. Mascis and the Fog. You can download a few free and legal mp3s from Epitonic (“Same Day” is particularly good) and a whole lot more from their official website. If you’re a fan of non-stupid riff-heavy rock, this is the music for you.

I’m not sure if having these mp3s now makes me more or less likely to buy a CD, but I think I’m more inclined to go check out the album featuring “Same Day.” There’s nothing like this being played on the radio right now, so I don’t know how else I would have heard this. Major record labels and commercial radio are clearly now just an irritating appendage to music, rather than something that fulfills any sort of useful function. Well, I guess this has always been the case, but it’s only gotten worse. I hear the same dozen songs or so over and over and over. And as I’ve said before, it’s not that I’m a snob about popular music, but why are we forced to hear such a limited range of artists and styles? It’s frustrating.

So check out Epitonic, a website that bills itself as “your source for cutting edge music” and find something you otherwise might not have heard.

By the way, Mascis’ guitar of choice appears to be a Fender Jazzmaster, but I did find a picture of him playing a Telecaster, albeit one that’s a lot more glammed up than mine. Strangely, there’s something reassuring about musicians you dig playing the same instrument as you (e.g. Radiohead‘s Jonny Greenwood plays a Tele that looks a lot like mine). Silly, I know.

From Billbooard magazine:

Singer/songwriter Warren Zevon died Sunday (Sept. 7) in Los Angeles. He was 56. Zevon was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August of last year.

One of the earliest singles I ever owned was Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” which had as a B-side, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” a song based loosely (I think) on the The Song of Roland. As I prep for continuing the medieval portion of my British literature survey class this morning, I’ll be thinking of Zevon.

This was a story in Britain this summer and I just forgot to blog about it. Now here it is stateside in the New York Times. A growing revenue stream for the music industry is the downloadable ringtone of popular songs for cellphones: sales of $16.6 million in 2002, and $50 million predicted for 2003. And while synthesized versions only put money in songwriters’ pockets, ringtones that are snippets from the actual recordings spread the wealth to musicians and singers, too. And a few songs have made more money as a ringtone than as an honest-to-goodness, played-on-the-radio, bought-in-the-music-store song.

And here’s the money shot:

The ring-tone business offers many attractions for the labels. Unlike CD’s and digital music files, ring tones can be bought anywhere at any time by someone whose cellphone has the software and hardware for music. The cost is added to the user’s monthly bill. In addition, most cellphone networks are controlled by the carriers that own them, allowing them to be monitored in a way that is impossible on the Web. Some people in the music industry see a not-so-distant future when teenagers will pay a few dollars to download full songs onto their phones or other wireless devices … Companies have sprouted up to act as liaisons between the music owners and the phone-service carriers.

The future of legal digital music just keeps looking bleaker and bleaker. Let’s break this down, shall we?

• Monitoring and control of the cellphone network so that what you store and play on your device is always under surveillance? Nice. Where do I sign up?
• Teenagers will pay a few dollars to download a full song? When a CD usually costs less than $15 for at least ten tracks and often more? I can’t imagine why any consumer would balk at such a scheme.
• And yet another layer of administration has cropped up to act as liason between music labels and phone companies? So is any of the money we pay for music going to people who actually make music?

The music industry is now claiming a decline in music sales of 26% over the last four years, according to the article, although in PBS NewsHour q&a from June, Matt Oppenheim of the RIAA claims much more modest figures. The industry has never been good with numbers (or they’ve been very good, depending on how you look at it). Musicians have historically been given the short end of the stick when it comes to the profits arising from the sale of their music through the industry, and the ability to fudge numbers has had great benefits to the business.

The industry claims that this decline is “[b]ecause of factors like unauthorized music swapping,” in the language of the Times article, which is a weird construction. How many factors “like unauthorized music swapping” could there be? In other words, how many are the result of consumer behavior versus other factors? Consider that

1. The whole economy has been in the toilet for much of the last four years. Why should the music industry expect to be exempt? Or maybe the problem of online file sharing is worse than we thought. (New car sales are down because of unauthorized music swapping. Unemployment is up because of unauthorized music swapping.)
2. The music industry just doesn’t try that hard to produce good music.

To expand on point 2: I’m a fan of popular music (look, I may quote the Replacements to bolster my indie cred, but I also love songs like Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” or Mary J. Blige’s “No More Drama” even as I recognize that they are emotionally manipulative and more than a little clichÈ), but even I have my limits. There are far too many insipid songs (rock, hip hop, r&b, and especially the god-awful crap that passes for country music on commercial radio) that the music industry spends literally millions of dollars producing and promoting, way more money than they spend paying people who actually write the music and perform it. That’s why they have a problem: their music just isn’t very good. And I think they know it, or else they wouldn’t spend so much money to cram it down our throats.

The solution? Is it to get back to basics, to try to encourage creative people to make interesting and innovative music, to take advantage of new technologies to streamline the production and distribution process so that it’s less expensive, thus putting more money into the pockets of the people who deserve it, to create a fair and equitable process by which artists are remunerated for their work?

Yeah, we could try that but…. oooooh, cell phones!

Everybody at your party
They don’t look depressed
And everybody’s dressin’ funny
Color me impressed

–Replacements