"I may not be the best looking dude out there…I may not be the most linked-in, the most prolific, the most successful…but I’ll be god-damned if I’m not up there with the most passionate
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i'mmmm gonna be a dick, but:tr2aJanuary 24 2010, 19:06:38 UTC
Shadow needs to stop dropping hints everywhere that I'm My Own Person before he says "sheeple" with a straight face.
i mean isnt all of this kind of fatuous? getting music for free has been around for TEN YEARS now. do we need another twenty-five before people go "oh shit, i guess mass accesibility has not influenced the staggering rate at which nascent scenes bloom, deviate, innovate, and turn into something we hadnt heard before. never mind, it's actually the A/POP/ALYPSE people have been handwringing about for the last 30 years. oh no!"
of course you shouldnt give something for nothing. no one should be expected to do that, but here's an idea: medium does not follow model. CD sales are down because CD labels are shit. There's a number of reasons why a guy like Zomby charges 14.99 for an EP and gets away with it, but aside from his "i piss off anyone with influence" attitude, a big part of it is how he backs himself up. he's on messageboards, hes on twitter, he's in interviews, throwing out mixtures of passion, honesty, bravado, and a wild array of influences from just about any genre where you can actually connect the dots to his own music, no matter how different. he's burned a lot of bridges but people know where to run when he has something new out at the same time. his sound, through him alone, has become important.
this is what being a self-styled "technophobe" gets you: you stop being aware of whats happening because it's mostly happening online. electronic music, and rap/hip-hop's certainly included in that umbrella, pushes forward, always. The Next Level is how the dialogue works. the best from the past pushed into the new: that which other genres are too chickenshit to face, and retreat to their classics from. it's not afraid to fall on its face, or call each other out, or of ideas with minimal half-life. it's not afraid to be made into a ringtone. in fact, why the fuck not? saying the internet is a den of porn and shit isn't credible anymore, it just makes it so that you had better be a genius and back yourself up to get away with putting your head in the sand like this. The Outsider was his best material in ten years despite half of it being shit because it was genuinely surprising. there's a biblical scroll of people convinced in their passion, it only means something when you can hear it.
no one expects big label funding anymore. for artists without the millionaire protege it's back to 12", talent, and word of mouth, but now it's international. That LA stays in LA aside for those willing to battle to the top, only to get sucked dry out of complacency and success, it no longer works. LA gets to london the next day. suddenly LA's second album is a big success to people who know what's good, and they casually collaborate with other, sometimes wildly unrelated people. this is the same for bristol, montreal, or amsterdam. major distributors like boomkat and juno have long organized their digital business model to be a major, MAJOR influence on electronic music, also proving that hype and image work much the same way as it did before, just that now you wont find anyone on Island or Geffen. as more time drags and the novelty of free music wears off, the more the consequences become apparent... then the closer the relationship is between the fans, the artists, and the commerce, and the more willing soneone is to pay that $1.29 from stores that arent itunes.
sorry for this rant but it just kept expanding and then too much time was spent on it to just not post it so... :\
Re: i'mmmm gonna be a dick, but:eraone1January 27 2010, 09:13:16 UTC
All good. I agree with what your saying. I think Shadow had a shitty christmas and he needed to vent. He isn't saying anything new. Music has been this way. In fact you can say that about damn near everything. A lot things aren't as good as they were before. It the law of diminishing returns.
The recession only made it more apparent. There is a lot of crap music out there. But at the same time there is more honest music than there has ever and its accessible. And that is thanks to internet. The very thing that he is damning. He still has that big fish small pond mentality and the idea of what he thinks is good should sell. He's no better than metallica a couple of years ago and all their bullshit. He is just on the other end of the spectrum. Shadow should know better than this.
i mean isnt all of this kind of fatuous? getting music for free has been around for TEN YEARS now. do we need another twenty-five before people go "oh shit, i guess mass accesibility has not influenced the staggering rate at which nascent scenes bloom, deviate, innovate, and turn into something we hadnt heard before. never mind, it's actually the A/POP/ALYPSE people have been handwringing about for the last 30 years. oh no!"
of course you shouldnt give something for nothing. no one should be expected to do that, but here's an idea: medium does not follow model. CD sales are down because CD labels are shit. There's a number of reasons why a guy like Zomby charges 14.99 for an EP and gets away with it, but aside from his "i piss off anyone with influence" attitude, a big part of it is how he backs himself up. he's on messageboards, hes on twitter, he's in interviews, throwing out mixtures of passion, honesty, bravado, and a wild array of influences from just about any genre where you can actually connect the dots to his own music, no matter how different. he's burned a lot of bridges but people know where to run when he has something new out at the same time. his sound, through him alone, has become important.
this is what being a self-styled "technophobe" gets you: you stop being aware of whats happening because it's mostly happening online. electronic music, and rap/hip-hop's certainly included in that umbrella, pushes forward, always. The Next Level is how the dialogue works. the best from the past pushed into the new: that which other genres are too chickenshit to face, and retreat to their classics from. it's not afraid to fall on its face, or call each other out, or of ideas with minimal half-life. it's not afraid to be made into a ringtone. in fact, why the fuck not? saying the internet is a den of porn and shit isn't credible anymore, it just makes it so that you had better be a genius and back yourself up to get away with putting your head in the sand like this. The Outsider was his best material in ten years despite half of it being shit because it was genuinely surprising. there's a biblical scroll of people convinced in their passion, it only means something when you can hear it.
no one expects big label funding anymore. for artists without the millionaire protege it's back to 12", talent, and word of mouth, but now it's international. That LA stays in LA aside for those willing to battle to the top, only to get sucked dry out of complacency and success, it no longer works. LA gets to london the next day. suddenly LA's second album is a big success to people who know what's good, and they casually collaborate with other, sometimes wildly unrelated people. this is the same for bristol, montreal, or amsterdam. major distributors like boomkat and juno have long organized their digital business model to be a major, MAJOR influence on electronic music, also proving that hype and image work much the same way as it did before, just that now you wont find anyone on Island or Geffen. as more time drags and the novelty of free music wears off, the more the consequences become apparent... then the closer the relationship is between the fans, the artists, and the commerce, and the more willing soneone is to pay that $1.29 from stores that arent itunes.
sorry for this rant but it just kept expanding and then too much time was spent on it to just not post it so... :\
Reply
The recession only made it more apparent. There is a lot of crap music out there. But at the same time there is more honest music than there has ever and its accessible. And that is thanks to internet. The very thing that he is damning. He still has that big fish small pond mentality and the idea of what he thinks is good should sell. He's no better than metallica a couple of years ago and all their bullshit. He is just on the other end of the spectrum. Shadow should know better than this.
Reply
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