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Sorry for the back to back to back music posts...just getting my groove back on...and I gots nothing to say.
Plus...a song that lets your sing
I know you like to think your shit don't stank but lean a little bit closer ..see...the roses really smell like poopoopoo
is just good clean fun.
Note to "Carolyn"...pissing off a musical artists? Not a wise move....
Click to watch faces of politicians having sex scandals.
Stumbled on the video for Part Ben's "Pump Up The Doorbell" and thought I'd post the audio to go with it. Great mash-up, very simple, but oh so catchy! Erik B's "Paid In Full" vs "Doorbell" by the White Stripes.
If I were Leni Riefenstahl I'd be on the payroll of some nasty conservative PR firm or another.
Keep in mind I made this ad before Hurricane Katrina.
It was also before the Bush PR hacks tried to hijack the whole "World War II" thing. I did see that one coming.
Too bad I don't have a corollary for Earthquake Defense!
a cultural appropriation by Richard Walker
Update: May 2008
From the Lessig Blog:Deadline is June 2, 2008TotalRecut has launched a remix contest: "What is Remix Culture?" I'm a judge (as close as I'll ever get to that title, but now twice -- just finished judging the Obama in :30 contest). Cool prizes. Great question. Get busy.
Update: Feb 2008
- Lawrence Lessig has retired from his role as Free Culture advocate, and will be focusing on how money corrupts politics. A moment of silence, please!
- Steal This Film II is a very good shareware film that explain some Intellectual Property issues and history, without requiring you be a lawyer.
- The new book (and blog) "The Pirate's Dilemma" introduces a new name in the Copyfight wars: Matt Mason.
See Unread Book: The Pirate's Dilemma - Jenny Toomey has left the Future of Music Coalition.
- Nine Inch Nails released the source material to a work in the form of Garage Band Tracks. This was done specifically to allow remixing of the work.
- Nine Inch Nails in collaboration with Saul Williams offered a release with alternative payment options
- Radiohead stirred up a big controversy by releasing their last album In Rainbows with alternative payment options, including "zero money" pricing.
Cory Doctorow EFF graduate, Sci Fi writer, copyfighter, technologist, Canadian, CC-er
US Rep Mike Doyle Defends Mixtapes and Mashups on Floor of Congress
by Marshall Kirkpatrick
The Ecstasy of Influence (on radio program "Open Source", Christopher Lydon, PRI) Feb 2007
The "Ecstasy of Influence" with novelist Jonathan Lethem, who asks: without borrowing, stealing, cribbing, remixing, mashing-up, collaging and compiling -- without influences great and small, in other words -- is "creating" even possible?
Open Source » Blog Archive » The Ecstasy of Influence
Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)
Click to listen to my "Back to School Edit" of the Show (30 MB MP3)
(includes illustrative audio under hosler interview)Jonathan Lethem
- Author, The Ecstasy of Influence (Harpers.org), Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and the forthcoming You Don’t Love Me Yet, among many others
Siva Vaidhyanathan
- Associate Professor of Culture and Communication, New York University
Blogger, SIVACRACY.NET
Author, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens CreativityMark Hosler - Founding member, Negativland
Mike Doughty - Solo musician, Former guitarist and lead singer, Soul Coughing
- Extra Credit Reading - You can find Greta’s Mother of All Reading Lists here. She spent all day on it. It will make her very happy if you go check it out.
Update, 2007/02/07 (Christopher Lydon)
Mark Hosler of Negativland was kind enough to send me a few MP3s from their latest album, No Business. I asked him if he’d mind if we posted them on site. His reply: “I don’t give a s**t what you do with them!” Well, this is what we’re doing: No Business Downloading Favorite Things
Urban Slang: Gank: n. to steal or take something that does not belong to you.
An episode of Center for Internet and Society published on February 2, 2007
The Stanford Law & Policy Review and Stanford Law School welcomed Congressman Rick Boucher (D., Va.) to deliver a speech entitled "Congress Must Balance its Copyright Agenda".
Jonathan Coulton's charming "Code Monkey" is a song about a programmer. At the end of 2006, Jonathan and Quick Stop Entertainment held the "Code Monkey Remix Contest" [which provides links to tools to help get you started at remixing]
Here are the winners; I particularly like what Kristen Shirts did with it.
There many code monkey videos and video remixes on YouTube. Click here to search.
Thanks to Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte for covering this on their podcast Net@Nite, ep14Future of Music Coalition
I've been a supporter and fan of Jenny Toomey's efforts for years now. She and her cohorts are working hard to make a better future for artists.
Lawrence Lessig (his blog)You may have heard of Creative Commons or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, two critical efforts he champions, both conceived "for the good of the people."
He welcomes artistic appropriation of his book "Free Culture," just click the link below...
"The Creative Remix" (October 2004) an hour-long broadcast special from
Here are Track one and Track two
A very enjoyable, lawyer-free, in-depth examination into the nature of creativity and "originality" from antiquity to the present day. Grey Album. Ancient pornographic literary theft. East Coast relics are given new life during an installation. Curmudgeonly antiques dealers are contrasted with young art school graduates. What is this thing? Less than five hundred bucks, the trafficker in dead things mutters.
In celebration of the Supreme Court of California's recent ruling.
Assume for the sake of this post that ART means "audio reversed in time", i.e. any audio clip played (and saved) backward. This is an invertibly lossless transform.
Consider this mix, track times approximate:
00:00 -00.00 ART version of: "Barber - Adagio for Strings - Bernstein and L.A. Philharmonic "
02:00 -00.00 "William Orbit - Barber Adagio for Strings Techno Remix"
This mix goes from strangely familiar mourning straight to techno, and in between a short eight bars where you get the original theme. Were it not an overplayed piece you could insert the original (non-ART version) in the middle and go in and out of techno and/or the ART version.
ART tracks are more appropriately named by using the original name, with all the letters back to front, i.e. "cinomrahlihP .A.L dna nietsnreB - sgnirtS rof oigadA - rebraB".
Note that the reversed name is unique for all uniquely named tracks, and the capitalization is a hard-to-miss clue. Note also lack of misrepresentation and improper taking of credit where none is due. Also, no need to define a new abbreviation for this transform, which can be very confusing:
Another favorite example of this technique is the mix:
00:00 -00:00 "nialecroP - yboM"
00:00 -00:00 "Moby - Porcelain"
This is a pure "audio-palindrome" if you will; the ART version is undeniably musical and listenable. Key points: start with the ART version of a very familiar ART-friendly track, followed by the original track.
The question of applicability of Copyright law to ART-transformed tracks is an open one. It is quite complex, and assuming copyright did apply automatically, what of an ART-transformed sample? It seems unfair to think that ART-transformed tracks would be automatically limited, as they are NOT the same as the original at all. There is also a good bit of skill in knowing beforehand what tracks will sound like reversed, but of course this is a type of "recombination" art form, much as collage and remixing are.
A term I coined for unreversed backwards speech (* see below) is "Lynchified" with an abbreviation of single capital "L", but that does not really describe this transform: all [non-live] audio is ART-ible but only spoken or sung words are "Lynchifiable", furthermore "Lynchifying" begins at the time you make a recording, and cannot be applied after the fact since the vocalist must use phoneme-reversed words. And, ART reverses the entire track whereas "Lynchification" is the un-phoneme-reversal of many single words, but preserving the order of the words.
Related tidbits about reversal of glyphs, letters, phonemes, words, speech and audio:
- Phoneme reversal (phoneme-reversed words, or PRW): "it is not" becomes "tih zih tahn"
- Letter-reversal of text (letters reversed in time, or LRT): "it is not" becomes "ton si ti"
- Reversed letters (letter-reversed words, or LRW): "it is not" becomes "ti si ton"
- Word-reversal of text (words reversed in time, or WRT) "it is not" becomes "not is it"
- PRW, WRT, and ART together give you Lynchified speech. (Note: WRT and ART together restore word order)
- Reversed letter glyphs (flip single letters graphically on the X axis, or LRX): "p becomes q becomes p, b becomes d becomes b, z becomes s-like, s becomes z-like"
- "X-mirror" transform is related, allows you to make an "ambulance" sign readable in a rear-view mirror (hint: LRT with LRX)
[* Note: David Lynch invented the technique as far as I'm aware, used very effectively in Twin Peaks]
Matt Mason began his career as a pirate radio and club DJ in London, going on to become founding Editor-in-Chief of the seminal magazine RWD. In 2004, he was selected as one of the faces of Gordon Brown’s Start Talking Ideas campaign, and was presented the Prince’s Trust London Business of the Year Award by HRH Prince Charles.
He has written and produced TV series, comic strips, viral videos and records, and his journalism has appeared in The Observer Music Monthly, VICE, Complex and other publications in more than 12 countries around the world. He recently founded the non-profit media company Wedia with his wife Emily. He lives in New York City.
Article by Matt Mason on TorrentFreak
Pirates are innovators, they signal market problems and lead the way to new business models. Nevertheless, they are tagged as thieves by many. We invited Matt Mason to write an article on the pirate’s dilemma for TorrentFreak.
Mason discusses why piracy can be an opportunity as well as a threat, how pirates
innovate outside of the marketplace and how legitimate businesses can respond.
Current TV just put up an interview I did a few months back with Brooklyn producers John Carluccio and Mark Kotlinkski - They dug up some cool slides I haven’t seen before. Mark also has a production outfit called 88 Hip Hop which does some great stuff - look for his film The Mural Kings about legendary graffiti artists TATS CRU - which is well worth checking out.
