Song, by Toad

The Link Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murders

You know, for once I think the religious right in America have actually put their finger on something which I find difficult to argue with.  Robert Peters, President of Morality in Media, of whom Song, by Toad is a staunch supporter, has written this insightful little piece for Christian News Wire called “Connecting the Dots: The Link Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murder”.  In it he points out the obvious fact that a decline in Judeo-Christian morality (actually, I think he means Judeo-Christian-Islamo morality because the three religions are all basically offshoots of the same sapling) has led to the permissiveness in society which leads us to tolerate both the marrying of ‘people’ of the same sex and the mass murder of innocent children.

I think it goes with out saying that knowing that our brief time on Earth is all you have, rather than having a nice safe spot in heaven to look forward to when it’s over, would lead you to be cavalier about human life.  Basically, the secular Darwinian values of modern society encourage you to go and kill people, whereas no-one with a safe knowledge in a neverending afterlife of bliss would be at all tempted to be even remotely careless with the seventy or eighty odd years they might have to spend on Earth in advance of it.

The clear, rational crux of his argument is expressed beautifully in the following paragraph:

“This secular value system is also reflected in the ’sexual revolution,’ which is the driving force behind the push for ‘gay marriage;’ and the Iowa Supreme Court decision is another indication that despite all the damage this revolution has caused to children, adults, family life and society (think abortion, divorce, pornography, rape, sexual abuse of children, sexually transmitted diseases, trafficking in women and children, unwed teen mothers and more), it continues to advance relentlessly.”

I don’t think anyone would argue that gay marriage and the sexual revolution are clearly responsible for abortions, divorce, rape and abuse of children, and the trafficking in slaves.  Gay marriage has been on the agenda for the last twenty years, at most, and is only legal in a tiny number of states in the US and other countries around the world.  Yet even in this short period, rape, the slave trade, abortion and the sexual abuse of children have all clearly skyrocketed out of control.

Only a staunch Darwinian, like Hitler, could try and argue that the world is undoubtedly a safer place now than it has ever been.  Because don’t let the Nazi definition of a woman’s role in society: “Kinder, Kirche, Kueche” (Children, Church, Kitchen) fool you, they were self-evidently atheist liberal elitists.  Allowing rationality into the law and into society in place of obedience to the dogma of the Judeo-Christian(-Islamo) values system on which the United States was founded will inevitably result in a terrifying slide into anarchy, plagues, and the rebirth of Sodom and Gomorrah in the 21st Century.

The United States is the most religious of all the first world nations, and has the highest levels of violent crime, which proves conclusively the need for more religious guidance in the law-making and social policy of developed nations.  The fact that there is absolutely no correlation between the contents of the two doesn’t mean that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights weren’t clearly founded on the Bible and the Ten Commandments, as David Limbaugh recently made clear.

And if anyone needs any more proof of the direct link between gay marriage and mass murder, I offer you this little personal anecdote.  I have now attended a couple of gay weddings, and since then, every single time I hear this kind of babbling, incoherent rhetoric I am overwhelmed with the desire to hunt and kill absolutely any of the retards who take this sort of shit even vaguely seriously.  So there you go.  Maybe Peters had a point after all.

The Magnetic Fields – When My Boy Walks Down the Street

The Ballet – The Face of Everything

Billy Bragg – Sexuality (Live)

Paul Haig Day

You know, it’s fucking ridiculous, but I am not sure what the overwhelming emotion of this post is for me.  It’s either warm appreciation of Paul Haig for his support and attitude towards a good friend of mine, or it’s sheer frustrated annoyance that this kind of thing is necessary in the first place.  Sadly, I think it might be the latter.

To explain, a while back my friend JC from the Vinyl Villain posted about Paul Haig, former Josef K frontman, and possibly the coolest individual from the last time Edinburgh had anything like this vibrant a music scene.  JC is a big fan, and was absolutely delighted that Paul and his management got in touch to thank him for his post.  Then, the next day, he was absolutely gutted to find that his post had been deleted by Google after three Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints had been made against it within about five minutes.

Now, given that the only people with any right to make that complaint had already been in touch with JC to thank him for the post, who the fuck made these infringement complaints?  Over-zealous legal interns at some obscure distribution company in the States?  Someone with a personal grudge against JC filing nuisance complaints?  Of course, this is very reason why the DMCA is such comically bad law.  Which corrupt clowns drew it up and then signed it into fucking law I don’t know, but they should really be made to walk the streets of the world in nothing but a fucking frilly tutu for their craven idiocy.

Google, when they receive these complaints are obliged to remove the allegedly infringing material immediately.  They are then legally not liable for any damage caused to the victim of the complaint’s business by virtue of a potentially frivolous complaint.  Now, Google don’t merely revert the offending post to ‘draft’ mode or something sensible like that, or lock it, or anything, so that the actual merits of the complaint can be ascertained.  No, they just delete it forever, and getting a response from a counter-claim is like pulling fucking teeth, despite what their terms and conditions would seem to suggest.  They presumably have no desire to actually examine the veracity of these complaints because it could potentially cost them a fucking fortune.  As it is, this job has been outsourced to Chilling Effects, which is basically run by a team of volunteers – their backlog may be as bad as a year at the moment.

This is a fucking disgrace, and it is something we should all be very worried about, because it signifies a very powerful and very scary change in how the law works: guilt by accusation.  In this situation the actual factual accuracy of the accusation is irrelevant – a blogger’s work can be destroyed simply by someone making an accusation, irrespective of the truth.  Remind you of anything?  Yes, another fucking diabolical piece of legislation which the big media companies are trying to jam up our arses at the moment: three strikes and you’re out internet disconnections. The European Court has ruled against this nonsense on the basis that the internet is becoming a fundamental utility in the Twenty-First Century, but they didn’t mention the simple fact that accusation does not mean guilt, and that this is supposed to be the very cornerstone of a civillised legal system.  And the French government is pressing ahead with their plans to implement it nevertheless.

So what are we left with?  Feudalism, basically.  Guilty unless you are prepared to take on a massive corporation in the courts of law and risk total ruin and bankruptcy.  Justice by might, rather than right.  Brilliant.  Vic from Muruch is the only person I know of so far who has been brave enough to actually fight any of this, primarily because she knew for absolute certainty that she was in the right, because Muruch is a 100% legal music blog, but for most people they simply submit to the legal hatchet jobs and either soldier on or end up quitting.  I can’t stress how brave Vic’s actions were, however.  People with houses and families don’t want to be on the receiving end of the music industry’s famously ludicrous damages claims, recently upheld by Barack fucking Obama thank you very much.  And once law becomes about accusation rather than guilt the world could become a very scary place indeed.  It is already happening in other fields, and we should be very, very worried about this.

So a big thank you to Paul Haig and his management for their support during this bloody nonsense.  Please show your appreciation for their efforts in putting out a press release highlighting this silliness, as well as making Reason available for free download as a statement of intent.  Feel free to show it by buying something from here, for instance.  Once the artists and the fans turn on this fucking rotten law who are we left with who will speak up for it?  Ah yes, the grasping whores who made a merry living for years fleecing both of us.  Never let anyone tell you that this is about encouraging art or protecting artists.  It’s just another major industry trying to throw their weight around as their self-importance and onanistic sense of personal entitlement consistently fail to be matched by reality.

Paul Haig – Reason

Paul Haig – Let’s Face the Music and Dance

Dark Was the Night – Red Hot Compilation

Good grief this is like a gigantic great indie-kid wet dream.  The short story: this has been put together by Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National and released on 4AD to benefit the Red Hot Organisation, an AIDS/HIV project.

From a musical point of view, you really couldn’t ask for a better snapshot of this particular moment in independent music.  It’s phenomenal, from the amazing Feist and Ben Gibbard collaboration, to the gorgeous Iron & Wine, to all the other curiosities and unreleased gems they have managed to pull together.  Compilations like this are usually either done by labels, hence limiting their scope, or by marketeers, hence polluting their musical potential with populsim.

This one appears to be largely free of that – or at least, it has the confidence to target the indie audience with genuine flair. Rather than just slapping on songs by all the box-ticked big sellers on Amazon, they seem happy to assume that we either all know who Dave Sitek, Kevin Drew and Stewart Murdoch are, or at least that we are capable of finding out, and hence is able to absolutely pepper the playlist with genuine jewels of curiosity for those of us with indie inclinations.

So, really, there’s no excuse not to buy one.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t buy one then you’re a fucking idiot, because there’s just so much on here to love.  Get ten indie kids round a table, and I bet they’d all have different hits and different misses from this, and that is a very, very good thing.

Oh, and have you heard of HIV denialists?  There are people who deny that HIV causes AIDS, and insist that the whole thing is one Big Pharma conspiracy to sell more drugs.  This was even the official position of the South African government for some time, which basically led the Mbeki administration to allow the deaths of over three hundred thousand of its own citizens by refusing to participate in emergency medical relief programs.

As if African AIDS patients didn’t have enough on their plate with Western homeopaths exploiting their conditions for money.  Homeopathy is basically the administration of either water or a sugar pill, entirely devoid of active ingredients, accompanied by hilarious claims of medical efficacy.  It works, according to Jack Killen, the Acting Deputy Director of  the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine “beyond current understanding of chemistry and physics”.  This is a claim which would be ludicrous enough, were it not for the fact that actually it doesn’t work at all, never mind by what mechanism.  As the same fellow states: “There is, to my knowledge, no condition for which homeopathy has been proven to be an effective treatment”.

In the Western world homeopathy is generally just a tax on ignorance, or the self-indulgence of the worried well, and easy to ignore.  In Africa it is basically exploiting the suffering of people, who do not count in the West, in order to profit from their illness.  And then letting them die.

Just in case you didn’t think it was important to make a contribution in this particular case.

Feist w. Ben Gibbard – Train Song

The Books w. Jose Gonzalez – Cello Song

Stuart Murdoch – Another Saturday

Dark Was the Night | Buy from Amazon

If You Build It, They Will Come

The key word in that phrase, of course, is if.  There are a massive number of people in the fucking internet age, however, who seem to think that intending to build it is reason enough for people to come and it is really, really getting on my nerves.

Bloggers start blogs, write five posts, and then start making demands about being listed in the Hype Machine or elbo.ws directories immediately, despite it being incredibly fucking clear that it’s going to take at least two months before they’ll even consider you. They are important services and drive a lot of traffic to your site, so I can understand the desire, but please just show some fucking patience.  At least create something of substance before clamouring for people to shower you with praise.

This happens when penis-brained publicists get their hands on a small but promising band as well: the uber-hard sell comes out to play.  “Greatest band ever, set to explode!“  And not infrequently this band has no more than a small handful of songs to their name.

Venture capital-backed start-ups promise to REVOLUTIONISE online music sales/sharing/funding/whatfuckingever and send out these breathless fucking emails full of wind and promises about how you’ve JUST GOT TO BE in from the start.  Do we?  Do we really have to?

People do it bands all the time.  I can get you on the radio, I can get you this, I can get you that.  And then they just stop paying any fucking attention, it all fails to materialise and the band is left with nothing.

The new mantra for the 21st Century should be more along the lines of: “I don’t care about your fucking plans, your grandiose ideas or your vacant, meaningless promises.  I don’t care what you intend to do, or about your fucking ambitions.  Go away, get your nose to the fucking grindstone and DO something.  Then talk about it.”

Can you tell I haven’t had enough sleep?

Shout Out Louds – Hurry Up, Let’s Go

The Magnetic Fields – Promises of Eternity

Micah P. Hinson – Patience

Erm, Okay, But This is Actually Pretty Funny

Haha, welcome to Kick Christian Bale While He’s Down Week, here on the internets.  Now the Mae Shi have jumped on the bandwagon with a snazzy little number celebrating the great artist’s work on the set of the Oscar cert, Terminator 4.

I know it’s a bit daft, I know it is now my turn to grow up and get over it, but this maelstrom of silliness in the wake of Bale’s uber-tantrum is genuinely quite funny.  Do you think he’s sitting at home laughing, holding his head in his hands or…

…throwing crisps about the place and swearing angrily at the whole world?

And, alluding back to this comment about when I oh-so-much less significantly lost it and swore long and loud at someone for really not very much at all, just imagine having your most childish, least gracious moment made into the subject of a pop song.  At that, I hope, he would at least break into a snigger.

The Mae Shi – R U Professional (4 Xtian)

Someone Just Slap Him

Here is a rather comical mp3 of Christian Bale going nuts at the Director of Photography on the set of the new Terminator film sometime last year.  After getting over the amusement of the rant the slow creeping sensation of wanting to kick him in right in his clearly excessively tight scrotum began to overwhelm me.

What a fucking licker of monkey nuts that man seems.  Particularly the bits about being ‘professional’.  I admit that I am the last person to talk about professionalism, given I spend three quarters of my working day cunting about on the internetz like a spastic, but I am pretty certain that I have never been in a professional situation that included an over-paid prima-donna squealing at some junior colleague like a pre-menstrual hippy who has just discovered that her organic tampons might not actually be made of one hundred percent free range llama wool.

The bit where he gets threatening is even more pathetic.  I have been around a lot of actors both at school and when visiting my brother at drama school and I guarantee you not one of those attention-starved, mincing nancy-boys could even come close to ‘kicking someone’s ass’.  At best you might get a girly little slap, a high-pitched squawk and a hasty retreat, which I think even an unusually tired octogenarian with bones like balsa wood might well be able to withstand with little more than a contemptuous snigger.

This is the worst thing about celebrity culture at the moment.  You can be certain that absolutely everyone in that room was thinking ‘Okay, we get it, sir is displeased.  Now can you please just grow the fuck up and get on with the job.  Preferably within the next half an hour, you hysterical ninny.’ and yet no-one can say it.  Why?  Because Mr. Bale occasionally goes on the telly and pretends to be other people for a bit.  Ooo, what an important person that must make him.

Christian Bale is a Big Girl

And the rather brilliant DJ remix by this chap.  I hate DJs and I hate remixes, but I tip my hat to this gentleman.

RevoLucian – Bale Out

Iggy Pop F’s the Baby Jesus in the A

There’s a reason that I swear a lot on this site, and mostly it’s because the world reduces me to fucking tears half the time.  People are pathetic; greedy, shallow, vapid, pig-ignorant, jealous and parochial.  I cannot possibly be the only one who saw this desperate Iggy Pop car insurance advert and had to double and triple take just to be sure that it really was the old banjo string himself:

Can my American compadres enlighten me – has he always pimped out his scrawny ass for the meanest shilling?  Is this a new thing?  What the FUCK was he doing appearing in that advert?  How the lizard’s penis did this abomination come into being?  It’s so surreal.  Car fucking insurance Iggy?  Is Iggy your real name?  I bet it’s something like Bernard isn’t it, you dismal black hole of dignity you.  I nearly cried, people, I really nearly burst into tears.

And for some reason my computer has now defaulted to Google Sweden.  Brilliant, that’s helpful.

Deer Tick – Ashamed (Yes, I picked this entirely for the title.  The lyrics have nothing to do with Iggy Pop’s auctioned dignity.)

Keanundrum

What a quality heading for this post – absolutely splendid!  And sorry, but that’s the only Keane picture I could face posting.

So, Keane, how did they come up then?  Well last week’s Friday Fives started out as a conversation in the pub the previous night.  Can’t Stop Now by Keane came on and I remember confessing that actually, if it existed in total isolation, I wouldn’t mind that song especially.  The vocal melody around the chorusy bit it fairly unusual and all-in-all I don’t particularly mind it.

This reminded me of when Keane first made the breakthrough – something like five years ago, give or take.  A massive swell of excitement caught a lot of people.  I wasn’t all that aware of it because I didn’t really buy singles at that point, and the album was yet to emerge, so I didn’t think much about it but I do remember just how excited the NME were. more »

Oh Right, That’s Why You’re Being Such Pricks

You’ve got to hand it to DC. He may be as mad as a box of frogs, but the boy has just the sort of insane, conspiracy-theorist, cynical paranoia that can make you a visionary these days. In fact, there are times when I get the impression that the world is actively trying to live up to his cynicism. Like this time.

Back on the Don’t Be Evil post, where I ranted somewhat furiously about indiscriminate and groundless wielding of DMCA notices to flush the blogosphere of certain artists’ mp3s, whether or not the mp3s were still there in the first place, DC commented saying this:

Seems to me a witch hunt has started – it must be a sign of something on the cards. Something big & expensive. Someone somewhere has a deal tied up with all concerned & they’re flexing their muscle to show they have zero tolerance in order to sate their benefactor. It simply can’t be a coincidence all these people are getting the toecap in the arse & I don’t think they woke up last Monday & decided “You know what, it’s nearly Christmas & I’m bored: let’s fuck with the bloggers”. Something’s about to launch, you mark my words.

Which, as I said at the time, seemed so paranoid that it was probably very close to the truth. Very close indeed, it turns out.

Because then the lovely Vic from Muruch noticed this press release in her inbox, peddling music website called Shockhound:

“millions of MP3s and merchandise featuring artists from the major record labels Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI Music, as well as independent labels. In addition, artists will be able to upload and sell their music directly to users… Content at launch will include reviews, music news, interviews, original programming and music videos.”

And whilst I cannot definitively link the two, they are very, very oddly coincident. Major label tie-ups… free DRM-free mp3s… you don’t think? Nah, couldn’t be.

So, without more than circumstantial evidence to base this speculation upon, it looks suspiciously like the majors saw the success of blogs, saw the launch of things like RCRDFCKNGLBL and decided they wanted a bit of the action. As Vic notes, all the artists mentioned in these vanishing post complaints are signed up to Shockhound. Mind you, lots and lots of artists are signed up to Shockhound, so that might not mean much.

Personally, I don’t give a shit what they’re trying to do. Any website that is little more than a massive shop, and which has Kaiser Chiefs, Snow Patrol, The Cure and Oasis on the front page is hardly any threat to my line of editorial, so fuck them.

Bob Dylan – Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues

Email to Columbia (& Sony BMG)

This is an email to a gentleman introduced to myself as the ‘MD of Columbia’ by the person who suggested I write him an email about the whole 17 Seconds Glasvegas fiasco. Here is what I wrote. Comments, anyone?

Dear XXXX,

I was given your email by XXXX who, having read the following post on my site, thought it would be a good thing if I got in touch with you personally regarding Glasvegas and DMCA notices issued in their name.
http://songbytoad.com/2008/10/23/dont-be-evil/

I don’t know how much you know about this, but DMCA notices are being wielded against bloggers completely indiscriminately at the moment, and as you can tell from that post people are both angry and afraid. Now, to be absolutely clear, I do not intend this to be an antagonistic email, nor am I getting in touch simply in order to shake my fist and point fingers. I genuinely would rather find an amicable solution to this situation, and I genuinely believe that the vast majority of music blog writers feel the same way. At the time I was angry, and wrong on some basic facts, but there are nevertheless a lot of things which I think need addressing and I appreciate you taking the time to read this email.

Basically, many people are having pages of their music blogs indiscriminately removed by people wielding false DMCA notices in the direction of Google and Wordpress, who host most of the blogs. In the case described in my post, a fellow Edinburgh blogger had his interview with Glasvegas from January this year erased because of old and expired links to recordings given to him freely by the band at the time. Writing a huge long interview with an unsigned band and posting their demo recordings with permission is absolutely not the behaviour of a copyright pirate, and the fact that Columbia has chosen to pursue Ed is frankly disgraceful, in my opinion. more »