Hooray for us – possibly the vilest and least romantic Valentine’s Day Podcast yet!  And before anyone whinges about that picture, go to fucking Wikipedia and complain, because that’s where we bloody got it from.  I know!  Scandalous!  Someone should complain.

So erm, yes.  I don’t think we left anyone unoffended this year.  I sincerely hope not because I don’t like to think of people out there nurturing an anticipated false outrage complex only to be let down.

We do not like romance, we do not like being told when to have fun by people who are simply hoping to exploit our disposable income, we do not like it being implied that being single is some sort of failure, we do not like people measuring their self-worth by how much their partner can be emotionally blackmailed into spending on them, we do not like having to live up to commercially defined standards to demonstrate that we love one another, we do not like having to skip the football just cos we’re supposed to behave one some particular day or other, we do not like fucking teddy bears or fucking chocolates, we do not like sitting in tumbleweed-infested restaurants whilst people glance nervously around them wondering if they’ve done it right, and we do not like having a list of things to live up to before our relationship is considered functional thank you very fucking much.

We do like lazy Saturdays in the garden, swearing at the fire for twenty minutes trying to get it to light with damp logs, meals with friends, new places, listening to vinyl so loud the floor shakes, a bit too much to drink with people that we really like, laughing/shouting at films, arguing about the side of the bed, swearing blind it’s not your turn with the chores when you know damn well it is, drinking coffee in the garden when it’s sunny, slagging off almost everyone, shouting at reactionaries on TV, emailing one another stupid stuff all day, insulting the cat, surprise cups of tea, buying shit on the internet when we’re drunk, only coping with the washing mountain when it threatens to start a SARs epidemic, watering the plants mere minutes before death and walking hand in hand through the park and peering at cool old dudes chuntering around at the allotments or sailing model boats in the park pond.

Oh, and getting pished and recording offensive podcasts for Valentine’s Day… enjoy!

Toadcast #108 – The Boabycast

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01. Cracker – Mr. Wrong (03.10)
02. Billy Bragg & Wilco – Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key (09.57)
03. The Smiths – Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me (17.11)
04. Eels – Love of the Loveless (20.16)
05. The Clash – Brand New Cadillac (29.40)
06. Bill Hicks – Pussywhipped Satan (31.41)
07. Evan Dando – Hard Drive (44.33)
08. The Coathangers – Nestle in My Boobies (48.11)
09. Virgin of the Birds – She’s in the Moon Again (59.10)
10. David Cross – Your Baby is FUCKING BORING! (65.59)

Well, it’s been an interesting week, hasn’t it. There have been some pretty major blow-ups in the blogosphere, posts taken down, people quitting, and some pretty angry tantrums. And fucking fair enough, too, quite frankly.

The weirdest thing about the whole situation is just how disjointed it all is. Ed received a takedown again yesterday for posting a Keane remix which was sent to him by a PR contact and hence, one has to assume, legitimate. That same PR person was baffled and not a little annoyed by the takedown notice, telling me this morning that:

“This is hugely frustrating. All the band/ management/ label wanted to do was to giveaway the CSS remix to a handful of blogs so that fans could get a wee thank you for making the album No.1.”

And as much as I don’t like Keane, this is a pretty decent thing to want to do – definitely how we would all want our favourite bands to be thinking.

What happened with Glasvegas has also baffled and annoyed Columbia UK, who knew nothing about it until the angry reactions were pointed out to them. It turns out it was nothing to do with them: Sony BMG in the States had been the ones wielding the flame thrower.

This pretty much sums up why I hate the major labels. Almost none of the individual people working for them will be stupid, but moving in large groups makes people stupid. None of us, as the saying goes, is as stupid as all of us. Or, from the rather splendid film Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” While people on the internet have been innovating for them, the major labels have presumably not been standing still, and presumably they will have had some amazing ideas, but as soon as you have large meetings and committees and a legal department, A&R, management, publicity and global strategy all involved then innovation is killed stone dead.

Innovation seems to find it almost impossible to survive meetings. I know this because this is exactly what I see every day in Proper Job. Consequently the major labels, by virtue of their sheer size, are proving virtually impossible to move forwards in this respect.

Then the other side of it: the self-righteous bleating about illegal downloading when they themselves do not even have a coherent internal position on it. The right hand wants the remix out there and the left hand abhors mp3 blogs. Until such time as they know what they are thinking collectively and have an actual, consistent position, irrespective of its merits, they have no right threatening people and interfering with what the rest of the world is doing. Get your own fucking house in order before you start invading ours and destroying our work, you disgusting hypocrites.

There’s another side to this: the bands. Reading The Pop Cop I happened across this particular snippet, and Jason is pretty well connected within the music industry, so I think he is a credible source.

“it’s clear that many people don’t think Glasvegas themselves are immune from blame. In fact, we can tell you that the band have been made personally aware of the situation but have chosen not to comment on it.”

Which says one thing to me: fuck Glasvegas, fuck their careers and fuck their music. Let them rot. They were happy enough to enjoy all Ed’s hard work when they wanted him onside, but now things have changed and the minute this happens they snuggle up to the devil’s penis and lick it lovingly like the loyal lapdogs they are. Not an apology, not an explanation, not even a message of goodwill. They could easily have emailed Ed and simply expressed regret for what happened. They wouldn’t have had to condemn their label, which would have been brave, they could simply have grown a teeny tiny little bit of a fucking spine, or had some grace, or even simple manners. But they couldn’t muster even that, so fuck them. If that’s the particular flavour of jism they choose to swallow, may they fucking choke on it.

This week’s five were chosen by Dylan from Blueback Hotrod, official Toad photographer and all round bon vivant. They continue the theme of large corporations, which seems rather fitting, given the week we’ve just had. If you want to choose the five for next week, just pop me an email. As ever, please do take the chance to de-lurk and say hello. And after all the seriousness, wailing and gnashing of teeth, let’s take the chance to have some fun, eh.

1. Last major-label record bought (Not counting boutique subsiduaries – an act signed straight to one of the industry behemoths.)
2. Last item bought from IKEA
3. Average weekly spend in Tesco. (Or largest supermarket chain in your territory if not the UK)
4. Favourite brand of trainers (that’s sneakers, Americans).
5. Usual watering-hole – friendly local run in person by the landlord and host, or soul-less chain venue owned by an international leisure conglomerate?

What a fine and fitting selection of songs we have this week.

Bill Hicks – Satan Starmaker
Jeffrey Lewis – Don’t Let the Record Label Take You Out to Lunch
Hefner – The Greedy, Ugly People
David Cross – Women, Please Rinse Off Your Vagina And Anus!
The Wedding Present – Getting Nowhere Fast
And one more bonus, just because it’s so appropriate. The man was an unmitigated genius.
Bill Hicks – Fuck Only Artists

I find the idea of posting endless Christmas novelty tracks around this time of year to be both tedious and lazy. When I think about the best things that Christmas means to me, it is warmth and family time and the chance to just relax and spend time with the people I love the most. It is not sleigh bells and fucking mistletoe. Consequently, when I think about Christmas music it most certainly does not include some indie group either rattling off an ironic version of some shitty festive song, nor does it include some ‘twist’ on the genre either, where misery and unhappiness are overplayed to try and subvert the overweening saccharine of the genre as a whole.

What Christmas music tends to include for me is music that makes me feel warm and cosy inside. Intimate, emotional songs that are warm and sincere and have a wonderfully enveloping atmosphere, to go with the crackling fire. This pretty much excludes everything that anyone could describe as a Christmas song, but that is, in a musical sense anyway, how I see Christmas.

This song, on the other hand, is a song about Christmas that is in no way a Christmas song. There is nothing about this track that you would ever want to play as you munched on mince pies with a slosh of expensive brandy lurching dangerously about your glass as you sway precariously back and forth in mid-conversation with some elderly aunt you never speak to at all for the other three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year.

Phil Ochs is a genuine genius. He wrote some of the most directly political, the angriest and the most conscientious music in history. If you are one of those who looks at the hideous gargoyle that modern America has become, with its total disregard for its own poor, its warped, impotent rage manifesting itself as foreign policy, and the vain, selfish avarice that the charred ashes of the American dream have become, and feels nothing but disgust, it is people like Phil Ochs that should temper your views.

For the same society that produces such bloated parasites as Bush and Falwell, such vicious scorpions as Rumsfeld and Cheney, the kind of self-regarding insecurity that condones the genocide of anyone other than themselves as long as it ameliorates their own contemptuous sense of self-righteous indignation, and the sort of business practises that define what others do as immorally anti-competitive and what one does oneself as enshrined in the imaginary declaration of the rights of the greedy, the grasping and the aspirational, must also produce its antitheses. Any country that produces this kind of rottenness must, almost by definition, produce the people who fight against it the most directly and with the most courage.

In other words, if you think it takes courage to sit on this side of the Atlantic and snipe about stripping Americans of their civil liberties, destroying the rule of law in order to give the government unchecked power to do as it pleases, suppressing internal dissent and calling all who question this madness traitors, imagine what it takes to deal with it face to face. Phil Ochs was just that man. He was far from just a political singer, he was also a brave activist. He never flinched from anything, and spoke with his heart and conscience and he acted on his beliefs with the courage barely a single caustic commentator today could come within a mile of equalling.

Eventually, disillusioned by the brutal police attacks on an anti-Vietnam war protest, amongst other things, and emotionally devastated by an attack in South Africa that left his voice permanently damaged, he took his own life in April 1976. For a better history, try reading this, from which I have lifted the following quote.

His nephew David found him hanging from his own belt in his sister’s bathroom. He was thirty-five years old. I can make no case for martyrdom here. There is nothing noble about suicide, regardless of how that suicide may have been the result of social forces or diminished expectations. Had he lived, I doubt Phil would have made any new songs, and if he had, they probably would not have compared favorably with his best work. But it remains a fact that whenever I read about some ludicrous injustice or monumental hypocrisy, I wonder what Ochs would have said about it, how he would have summed up the situation with an acerbic line or two. And I wonder who the next dead hero will be.

He reminds me of Bill Hicks a little in that sense. In fact, I have Bill’s commentary on the last war in Iraq, and its just frightening how applicable it is to this one. So for those who berate America, of whom I am definitely one, think on this: those of us who so smugly criticise, where is our Bill Hicks, and where is our Phil Ochs?

Phil Ochs – No Christmas in Kentucky
Phil Ochs – The Ballad of William Worthy
Phil Ochs – Here’s to the State of Mississippi
Bill Hicks – Hello Oxford (Best bits towards the end)
Bill Hicks – Polls (Excerpt)

Buy some Phil Ochs here. You’ll be a better person for it.
Also, visit The Waiting Room and have a listen.  If it hadn’t been for DC I might never have found No Christmas in Kentucky.  Thanks mate!

No, it wasn’t just stupidity that caused the US and the UK to fuck off and commit catastrophic genocide in Iraq, nor that led to the abject and utter failure to create anything other than murderous anarchy since the war was officially declared to be won.

It was complete and utter dishonesty, as this clip of Dick Cheney from 1994 shows – posted below. They are simply liars – good honest ‘Mercan good ol’ boy humble gawd fearin’ FUCKING LIARS. I don’t know if I find this sort of thing vindicating, but fuck me it’s incredibly depressing.

Plans & Apologies – Mel Gibson’s… IRAQ!
Bill Hicks – Iraq Excerpt From his Oxford Playhouse show back in 1992. This could so easily apply to the current Iraq War, it too is pretty fucking depressing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I]

This from Dick Cheney. The very same Dick Cheney who, when planning for the invasion of Iraq, lost his temper and threatened to fire anyone who mentioned the need for a post-invasion plan to bring stability to the country (source – Washington Post):

Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said.

Brig. Gen. Mark E. Scheid told the Newport News Daily Press in an interview published yesterday that Rumsfeld had said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a postwar plan.

Scheid was a colonel with the U.S. Central Command, the unit that oversees military operations in the Middle East, in late 2001 when Rumsfeld “told us to get ready for Iraq.”

“The secretary of defense continued to push on us . . . that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”

Planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4″ — plans that covered post-invasion operations such as security, stability and reconstruction, said Scheid, who is retiring in about three weeks, but “I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that.”

Jesus fucking wept.

Erm, I ave no idea how to explain what you’re in for if you bother to listen to this I’m afraid. The story goes like this: it was our anniversary, we were drinking and chatting and listening to music. A classic came on the stereo and we got talking about songs that would be so popular and so ingrained in popular culture that the writer of them would never have to work again and could live off the royalties, be they from television, advertising, movies or everyone wanting to cover your song. Like that chap in about a boy, for example.

Unfortunately, we were far from sober already and by the end of this, honestly: take my gin consumption, take the equivalent volume of water out of Noah’s flood, and the Ark would have run aground on Clapham Common. In Toad world, apart from slurring, that means ranting and a relatively well-conceived podcast about commercial immortality descends into a rambling, incoherent tirade against the advertising industry, with songs.

So listen to it at your peril, you have been warned.

Toadcast #6 – About a Boy

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1. Blur – Song 2 (02.38)
2. Eileen Carr – What a Feeling (04.46)
3. Eels – Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues (10.10)
4. Bob Marley – Three Little Birds (16.15)
5. Tom Waits – Innocent When You Dream (20.58)
6. Kinobe – Slip Into Something (27.00)
7. The Pet Shop Boys – Go West (30.28)
8. Queen – Crazy Little Thing Called Love (35.34)
9. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts – I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll (38.06)
10. The Pogues – Fairytale of New York (43.15)
11. The Who – My Generation (49.40)
12. The Clash – Should I Stay or Should I Go? (52.55)
13. The Kaiser Chiefs – I Predict a Riot (58.14)
14. The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army (64.04)
15. Bill Hicks – Marketing & Advertising (71.09)