• WFMU Marathon

  Really good this year. The station seems to be getting back on track.

• J-pop vs. Metal: Full Site Edition

  I’ve been working on jpopvsmetal.com. Which was just the tumblr version of a running thing that taken various forms but I’m taking it up a notch. There’s no need to over-explain it. Or at all.

• Copyright issues: Unexpected

  I received an email that one of the Wub Machine auto-remixes I posted on Soundcloud was infringing copyright and was taken. This was to be expected. But it wasn’t from major label act Kyary Pamyu Pamyu or infamously litigious Greg Ginn, but my one of Herman Cain ad background music. It’s political! Not quite, even dumber. It was this guy who thinks he invented the wub wub thing (which is just a computer synth setting or whatever), or more likely his record label does, or most likely a computer algorithm just thought the songs matched enough. I will have more on that on the Hakujin blog when I get to it. I will probably just post all the remixes there and move on to something else cause I’m not dealing with that nonsense, dubstep is kinda done right?

• Google Reader: Not Dead Yet

  Oh boy, I have a bunch of notes here about some old blogs. I think it can wait until this thing dies for good. People are questioning the decision to kill Google Reader but it’s got to be an increasing strain on their system because of the way it worked. Most people do not even realize that the RSS for every dead blog is stored on their servers. It’s probably a healthy thing to clean out.

• Other things

  I watched the doc Life After People finally and the thing that struck me most was how it maybe could have been better but the people working on it must have been like, “fuck it, who cares, all this bullshit is turning into dust in 1000 years”.

  Comics artist Eddie Campbell has an interesting and totally depressing view on posterity, but he also thinks he’s not a comics artist. But he is.

  This article on Alan Moore vs. Hideki Anno is also interesting, and old. I was researching some stuff. More on that later maybe.

  The new David Byrne book How Music Works not only looks and feels great, it’s a pretty good read. Some of the chapters were straight from his blog, one of them was one of the first things I linked to on my old blog. That was a moment. Whatever. It’s not whatever it’s a great book. It’s soft and velvety smooth.

  This very long interview with Steve Albini and Tim Mid(g)yett of Silkworm makes an interesting point (of many) that indie bands of Silkworm’s level are like outsider artists. It seems like the 90s was maybe a period where it seemed like that wasn’t the case and it was all an illusion that there was some kind of common ground among all bands.

  So you’re going have to see the Silkworm doc if you haven’t.

  And read this great Robert Crumb interview on record collecting.

  And I missed that Camille Paglia was in Vice magazine a few months back. Doing the thing she does. I was not smart enough to get in her class at UARTS or whatever. (It fills up fast, I’m not bitter about it.)

• Bowie/Momus

  That new David Bowie song had a full-blown Momus reference. But you caught that.

• Amu making real videos again

  I mentioned how Namie Amuro doesn’t seem to care about making decent videos anymore (somewhere). But she is back with a new one. Somehow,
  one of the videos where she looks bored and nothing happens is nominated for MTV Japan video of the year. (None of the amazing Perfume videos were as you can see.) check it that video yourself. Oops, you probably can’t. The videos are blocked outside of Japan. I do not understand what it is they think they are doing. Taste aside, they put non-Japanese acts the whole world has seen in their awards, but actively prevent Japanese acts from going international themselves. I think there used to be some kind of business reasoning behind this, like they would lose money shipping CDs worldwide or something, but I dunno. I don’t get it.

• Momoiro Clover x Go! Team

  This happened over a year ago but I wasn’t paying attention at the time. Before this I had singled out Go! Team as the closest Western musical equivalent to groups like Morning Musume. I’m not even sure about that statement myself, but someone else must have thought so. (The audience apparently didn’t and the single bombed, but what can you do.)
  I’m just gonna end with this cause you gotta end somewhere.
  

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This month was a bit stressful but things seem to be working out. I got extremely sick and bottomed out my bank account, and credit. (Not in that order.) It’s not really important, except as an excuse for not getting anything done. But I’m feeling better, and I did my taxes way early so I just got my rebate. Just in time for my insurance to be raised again. But shouldn’t I get another job anyway? I should. Somewhere in there I found out I almost passed the JLPT, which is a big improvement over totally bombing it, but still not something you can put on a job application. A bigger failure is not being able to keep up a regular blog in Japanese. Definitely said I was going to that. Sleep and keeping up with everything else has gotten priority. Altho getting sick has kinda hit the ol’ reset button in the ol’ brainpan. Maybe not all of those things I have been keeping up with are worth the constant hyper-caffeinated hyper-vigilance. Yes, I could even exclude things I have no interest in. Wow, what a concept.

Big news:

MBV vs. AKB

Two things happened early this month I’m glad to have had a few weeks to think about before commenting on. First, My Bloody Valentine announced after 20 years their new album was suddenly done and was being self-released immediately. That was a shock. But I wasn’t as excited as other fans of the group because I still hadn’t gotten their other albums. It’s this problem I have with focus—sometimes, for years at a time. It’s why I require so much caffeine. (But not so much as I thought, right.) So with my rebate money, in a generic DayQuil haze, I bought the new album (download and vinyl, being shipped to me as we speak) and a copy of that Loveless album I’ve been hearing about and meaning to pick up for two entire decades. So yeah…it’s good. Pretty good group. Make great music.

Then a member of girl group AKB48 revealed that it sucks to a member of AKB48, which was not so much of a shock. They are not a pretty good group and they do not make great music. It’s a little more complicated than the usual “guilty pleasure” and “showbiz is hard, big deal” arguments. AKB is, one commenter bluntly put it, “the most cynically formed group in pop”. (In part of a series of posts debating idol culture on the Clear and Refreshing blog.) The fact that the group has ridiculous rules and makes ridiculous music is not so much the issue for me, it’s the underlying shittiness of it all. This head-shaving video—which, it’s gotta be stressed, is not her walking into a barbershop and saying “gimmie a 1”; she looks like a crazy person or a P.O.W.—was posted of the official management youtube channel. It wasn’t even a scandal that leaked out, it was presented as part of the entertainment package. When you consider instances in obvious parallel group Hello Project which has the same dumb rules, the girls get simply dropped and in some cases product was actually pulled from the shelves. There’s no appeal process and they even choose to lose money rather than benefit from the negative publicity. (New AKB single out now!) This is almost too principled a stance but at least it’s based in some kind of principle. I believe the people behind AKB are so warped this was their attempt at trying to look “better” than other agencies by giving the girl another chance. Just has to go through a standard Yakuza punishment, I mean, she’s still got all her fingers guys, it could be worse! That’s before any of the feminist or other political arguments that makes this event generally disturbing that other people have already covered better. I was kinda joking in the past about this group vs. Hello Project because of course they’re superficially very similar and I really don’t give the music any chance but life is too short to give everything a chance, and I was right. Let us never speak of of this group again, until they put them on an island to kill each other or wherever you can possibly go to after this.

Small news:

Site changes

Since I registered in a fit of paranoia, jimhaku.com has redirected to this blog of indeterminate purpose. I’ve been meaning to make a decent front page for a while, but instead I just pointed it at my main tumblr, which then links here. It makes a kind of sense that way. And it gives you something decent to look at from a phone because I’m not changing this blog layout for that. The design is almost more the point than the writing. I don’t think writing is ever gonna be my main gig.

Also I got rid of that old last.fm “quilt” thing:

But I just couldn’t let it go entirely you see. It’s no longer supported by the site anyway. It keeps on working but the code is a trainwreck by current standards. And it’s silly but it just feels like something should go there on the page so I put a mixcloud widget there instead:

Follow jimhaku on Mixcloud

While I’m embedding a bunch of nonsense, why don’t I try out this new gallery feature. Here are some other obsolete last.fm chart thingys (that I designed):

Well, that’s a mess. You have to click on these to see the whole thing and read the caption. This random list of bands would have been a generated RSS of whatever last.fm data, like a personal or group top artists or tracks. It was kinda cool until it stopped working. If you found a good spot for it. It’s pretty limited really. Most people used them for really obnoxious sig files.

What else

I had something I started about the decline of music coverage in the Village Voice but I’m gonna save it until it gets worse cause there might to a way to make it funny instead of just sad.

But former editor Maura Johnston has her own thing now. You’ve probably heard about that already if it’s the kind of thing you care about but I’m going to risk it.

Also there’s a new Marc and Tom show, similar deal.

And while I’m mentioning some things and not mentioning other things ever again I have a suggestion: if you cover the culture of another race of people, maybe you should not make racist jokes. Like, not as in I’m the PC police or something, but maybe as if your audience might possibly include people of that race and the whole world is not just a bunch of white people laughin’ it up at that other planet over there that can’t even see or hear us? Cause that ain’t true. Just a thought. Happy Black History Month. Listen to En Vogue. They are good at singing.

Oh, I said something like “politics should be more like the internet” which was a joke.

But there is
this and this. TTFN. %