You Can Say What You Want, But It Doesn’t Mean It’s True

Pixeltan “Get Up/Say What (DFA mix)” – On this song, Pixeltan drops the busy, intense percussion that dominated their first EP in favor of the kind of sparse, pulsating disco beats that we’ve all come to expect from the DFA. It all seems a bit goth to me, not so much in the Crow make-up/vampire fetish/ripped fishnets sense, but in the “I am dancing to my pain” post-apocalyptic-themed warehouse party sort of way. If you love the gloom disco, this should work for you.

Har Mar Superstar “Body Request” – I’d prefer to think of a song like this less as some kind of stupid retro joke and more as being part of a tradition cut short by pop fashion. After all, we only really think of recent genres and subgenres as being time-specific because of the economy built around pop music which demands a high turnover in musical trends to make marketing easier and to keep press shills from wanting to kill themselves out of boredom. On previous releases, it was more obvious that Har Mar’s music was clearly meant to be taken as a selfconcious parody, but “Body Request” is straight-faced enough to fit right in with hits by Billy Ocean or Rick Astley. In other genres, I may be a bit alienated by such faithful devotion to convention, but in this case, there are so few artists currently keeping this sort of tradition alive with such earnestness that I feel respect is due. It certainly doesn’t hurt that it reminds me of the lite FM that I grew up on as a kid – WHUD, represent! (Click here to pre-order it from Amazon.)

Also: If you haven’t already seen this, I am quoted in this New York Times article about Music For Robots posting a song by the Secret Machines that was sent to a whole bunch of MP3 blogs (including this one) by Reprise/Warner Brothers. I don’t really have any problem with labels sending music to mp3 blogs, and I’ve been getting a lot of records sent to me for a while now, though it seems that less than 10% of it ever actually makes it to the blog. I try to keep this blog focused on my own experience with music, posting music which I am interested in on a day to day basis. The way I see it, finding music that excites me on a record sent to me by a label or artist is just as valid as discovering it via tv/radio/the press, so it’s not a big deal to me.

I considered posting that Secret Machines song because I do genuinely like that tune, but a few things got in the way – it arrived during my week off, MFR posted it first, it was already getting airplay on MTV. I’m glad that they are having success with that record, and I applaud the label for embracing the internet and being creative with its marketing, though I do think it was tremendously lame for them to send the song to blogs which have nothing to do with indie/prog rock and to (apparently) post fake praise in the MFR comments box. If labels seriously want to embrace mp3 blogs as a way of marketing records, then I suggest that they develop relationships with individual blogs rather than treating the lot of us as though we are some kind of monolithic entity.

Also: Here’s another article about marketing potential of mp3 blogs from Billboard via Reuters, including a quote from Scenestars curator Rachel Hurley.