Song, by Toad

Hasta La Vista Matthew

That’s Italian for goodbye for those of you who are not in the know by the way.  So, Bart, Dylan and me are now in control of the good ship toad for the next few weeks.  During this time we solemnly do pledge that we will maintain the level of cutting edge journalism that you have become accustomed to on these pages.  There may be less swearing, less controversial ramblings and far, far less gin but hopefully there will be a fest of new and exciting music for you to enjoy.  Things won’t really kick off properly until next week though because we’re all away to the pub just now.  We just thought it’d be nice to give you a taster of what you can expect in the coming weeks.

So, to finish, we thought we’d send Mr. & Mrs. Toad off on their Italian adventure with a song that carries a warm and heartfelt sentiment we can all share.

Andrea Bocelli – Time To Say Goodbye (Con Te Partiro)

And here’s the definitive live version:

That Sony Meeting

Well because of the intervention of Homegame this post has been somewhat delayed, so apologies for that, so here we go.

Firstly a brief description of the circumstances.  A little while ago, London-based Winston’s Zen was the victim of another of those DMCA take-down hits.  Due to connections he was able to actually get through to the label at the source, Columbia Records, part of Sony BMG, and they invited him in to talk to them and suggested he bring along a couple of other bloggers and make something of a meeting out of it.  So last Thursday myself, Winston himself, Jamila from Fucking Dance and Tim from The Blue Walrus went along, the Sony people booked a table in a pub and we talked about stuff and drank ourselves into a stupour.

And what did we achieve?  Well honestly, I’d say not an awful lot, really.  We chatted, but I am not sure either side had much of a concrete idea of what we wanted to get out of the meeting, so it was little more than a start, I’d say.  Some thoughts, though: more »

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

Being WRONG on the Internet

I enjoyed the video at the bottom of this page, although it’s a little long for most internet attention spans.  In it filmmaker Kevin Smith, of Clerks, Dogma and Chasing Amy fame, to name but a few, talks about how obsessively he used to read all his internet reviews, right down to the comments.  This is quite rare, or at least it was until recently, because most people still tended to treat internet criticism as a distant and very poor relation to its more salubrious and established cousins.

The problem with taking it seriously is of course, well, where do you stop?  It’s like being able to overhear every last pub conversation about your work that has ever taken place.  Not one single human being talks complete, considered sense all of the time and before you even get into whether or not you want to bother agreeing with someone or not just imagine how many times you yourself just don’t quite express yourself properly.  Instead of disappearing into the air, being re-stated slightly better, or just mitigated with a shrug of the shoulders this stuff now sits there in black and white for all eternity, staring you down on the screen.

The Soft Pack – Right and Wrong (How I wish these guys were still called The Muslims.)

Then there’s whether or not you really want to bother.  As he sort of mentions, would you ever want to hear every last conversation about you which was had by anyone who’d ever met you, no matter how brief?  Christ, the number of people out there saying that I, for example, am a bit of a dick would be enormous.  Face it, most people don’t like you that much.  Think how many people you like, then subtract it from the five or six billion people in the world.  Think about how many bands, or films, you like and then subtract that from the total number of bands or films which have ever existed.

For some reason, because things are in black and white, including both the comments and the posts on this site, people seem to vest them with more importance than they merit, whereas they are the musical equivalent of a pub conversation.  The table might be a little bigger for those sites with a large audience, but how many of us would your average band or fan even bother to disagree with if they overhead us publically not liking their band in a bar somewhere?  Probably very few.  I know the internet has made these conversations much more public than they used to be, but they are still just ordinary conversations.

Kevin Smith:

There is No ‘They’ About It

[Disclaimer: this post has been written with no academic authority whatsoever and, perhaps more importantly, no real psychological or sociological training or background, so if you really, seriously know about this stuff I would appreciate you enlightening me.  This is just a 'best guess as I see it' sort of a post, so please don't think I'm setting myself up as an authority.]

There has been some chat going on in the comments section of the Gaza Appeal post which I thought worth elevating to a post all of its own.  When I rant about religions and anti-Darwinism and mysticism and so on one of the things I inevitably end up shouting at everyone is that as a species and as individuals we have a lot of misplaced vanity.  We think we are special, and we aren’t.  I don’t mean it in a mean, pompous way, but I firmly believe that human beings have no real conception of how mechanical, how average, how just like everyone else we all really are.

One of the key comments on the Gaza post was about fundamentalists and fundamentalism and it betrays an important and very dangerous mistake almost all of us make when faced with this sort of behaviour.  It is the ‘they just aren’t like us, they can’t be reasoned with and ‘we’ are nothing like them’ mistake.  There are people who are mentally ill, and there are psychopaths and so on, I am not denying that, but for all these people may also be fundamentalists (of whatever stripe), the characteristic of fundamentalism is not an illness.  It is simply a human behaviour to which we are all prone and which can be relatively easily induced by certain social conditions.  We all like to think that we’re special, that we’re immune, but the vast, vast majority of us would simply be wrong in making that assumption.

Did anyone read about the teen suicide epidemic in the South Pacfic which was described in the Tipping Point?  Lots of otherwise normal teenagers started committing suicide for no obvious reason, until the phenomenon reached something akin to epidemic proportions.  How about the high school experiment The Third Wave, where the behaviours of Nazi Germany were so easily recreated, in order to demonstrate just how easy it is to get human beings to do insane and awful things.

Given that the whole discussion was brought about by discussion of Israel and Islamic terrorism, it is interesting to note that MI5 has recently concluded that, in terms of domestic Islamic terrorism, there is no simple ‘they’ category.  In fact, the one defining characteristic of domestic Islamic terrorists is that they have no defining characteristics.  They are simply normal people, and in fact are often not all that religious.  It would appear, then, that we are not discussing a kind of person at all, but more accurately a set of circumstances which would make extraordinary behaviour seem perfectly rational to a normal person.

Apart from simply being wrong, I think this blanket ‘they can’t be reasoned with’ approach is also very dangerous.  This is a phenomenon to which we are all prone, and yet is nevertheless reassuringly rare, so to dismiss it in this way is to deny ourselves the opportunity to prevent it.  It’s not something that is going to magically go away as a generation of people with a particularly antiquated mindset die out, it is a social phenomenon which is caused by a set of circumstances, and if we want to solve this issue then we have to identify those circumstances.  And by that I don’t mean the Easy Liberal Answer of jobs and prosperity, because that ignores the fact that a lot of people who you would consider to be dangerous fundamentalists are prosperous, well-educated and middle class.

But turning fundamentalism of any sort into something ‘they’ do is simply to deny the real problem in order to focus on a patently false caricature, which is dangerous for everyone.

Supergrass – What Went Wrong (In Your Head)

Day One – Ordinary Man

Gaza Fundraiser at Mono, Glasgow on Thursday 19th March 2009

I haven’t really mentioned the crisis in Gaza on this site which is, I suppose, somewhat unusual, when you consider my general lack of inhibition when it comes to wading into massive arguments.  It’s a difficult one, I suppose, in part because it’s just so fucking obvious.

Israel, by its alliances and by its supporters, seems to have been adopted as a de facto Western nation.  Imagine if, erm, say the Republic of Ireland adopted the Israel approach to dealing with Northern Ireland.  Maybe that’s the wrong analogy, because Palestine is of course an independent country – albeit one with apparently no right not to have the living shit bombed out of its civillian population on the slightest pretext every six months or so.  Maybe it would be closer to Germany razing Copenhagen to the ground every year.  But then, Denmark is our friend too.  How about if, say, Serbia decided to annihilate a small neighbouring country like, erm, Bosnia for example, and to declare an all-out war on the civillian population of that country.  What would we do if Serbia did that, I wonder?

And don’t get me started on the attack on Lebanon.  Breathtakingly barbaric, and the act of a rogue nation which knows that having its crazy friend leering over its shoulder makes it absolutely immune to any kind of accountability for its actions.

The other really frustrating part of the argument is the ‘in favour of terrorism response’ anyone who disagrees tends to come up with when you express this opinion.  It’s like the Iraq war, when you voiced a dissenting opinion, being asked why you were on the terrorists’ side – a complete non-sequitur, albeit one which tended to arise in the States far more than the rest of the world.  Here the equivalent seems to be that in criticising Israel you are somehow condoning the Palestinian acts of terrorism, as if they didn’t also have to be stopped.  No, of course not, but if attacking the civillian population is bad, then it’s bad for everyone.  It’s not okay for you because you are adamant that they started it.

Anyhow, to help alleviate the suffering caused by recent acts of Israeli terrorism in Gaza, Tom Snowball from Rags & Feathers is organising a fundraiser at Mono in Glasgow tomorrow night.  The lineup is superb: Sparrow & the Workshop, Punch & the Apostles, The John Langan Band, Mike & Solveig and Tom himself will be playing, and I urge you to go along and support the cause.  Who knows, you might just have an enjoyable evening at the same time.

Punch & the Apostles – The Engineers of Salammbo

Tom Snowball – Isabella

Sparrow & the Workshop – Devil Song

And yes, that’s a picture of a man carrying a dead child.  It’s actually quite serious.  Cough up.

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

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.)