I’ve been entertained by British singer Lily Allen’s blog, It’s Not Alright, which focuses on her fight against file sharing. If for no other reason, it’s entertaining to read for the comments, which go off on the musicians opposing file sharing with pub/soccer match vitriol, coarseness and wit. James Allen from Glasvegas gets ripped pretty solidly, and merits of Glasvegas aside, he deserves it for donning the hair shirt when he wrote:

yes i discovered late 70’s artists such as suicide and the cramps
through illegal file sharing but y’know what? that was wrong. brave
artists who took risks and had nowhere to even fucking live at one
point, worried about where their next meal was coming from were being
denied a few pennies because i found it easier to click on a mouse
instead of moving my lazy soul less fat arse  to a record store.

First, easy to say. Suicide and the Cramps are two of the most obvious influences on Glasvegas, but I believe the band nicked its sound from the Jesus and Mary Chain. The Chain, on the other hand, heard Suicide and the Cramps. I suspect Allen checked the bands out to find out what everybody was comparing him to. And since Allen likely wasn’t born when Suicide and the Cramps were starting and file sharing didn’t exist in the mid-1970s, he wasn’t forcing poor Lux Interior and Alan Vega to eat cat food and drink Aqua Velva while living in bus shelters.

In general, the site is charming in its dunderheadedness. Allen worrying about file sharing in the ’70s. Producer Stephen Street writes:

I’ve been banging on about this for years in various interviews and always felt that my opinion wasn’t as ‘cool’ as some musicians and journalists felt who thought that the internet was great liberator from “the Man” i.e (the big bad music business). Well now they are beginning to realise that this once great industry in this country is on it’s knees and is need of some kind of protection.

Nice of him to plea for sympathy for the record industry since it’s shown so much sympathy for musicians for the last few decades. More often than not, though, Lily Allen and crew boil it all down to the simple premise that if you didn’t pay for it, you stole it and that’s that, as if magically ending file sharing would roll back the clock to sunnier times for the music business. It ignores the greedy policies of the record industry that helped create this situation, and the price paid by Metallica and the industry for chosing to treat music fans as criminals. It ignores the value of unauthorized sharing as illustrated by James Allen (if we take him at face value) and pretty much all complexity associated with the issue. Reading the ferocity with which they defend such a simple-minded position is almost endearing – my general feeling toward Lily Allen, actually – and consistently entertaining as the contributors can’t help but trip over themselves while trying to make the case.

               

The promise of Voodoo is best realized in the Bingo! Parlor, where acts as different as Fischerspooner, the reunited Squirrel Nut Zippers, Jello Biafra and the Meat Puppets will perform. In what might be the most punishing set of Voodoo, Down will also perform in the confines of the Bingo! Parlor. All of that side by side with local acts and - on Halloween - an attempt to break the Guiness world record for largest zombie gathering, suggests a level of nuttiness and eclecticism that is unique in contemporary festivals.

               

OffBeat receives press releases on most of Voodoo Music Experience’s activities, but the September 4 release explaining Voodoo’s Loa Lounge Front Row  seems to have skipped us. Like Jazz Fest’s Big Cheese pass, this will give the wealthy a reserved pen in front of the Voodoo main stage. That’s right all you drudges who work to make the Voodoo ticket price; no matter your level of fandom, rich folks get better than you because they’re richer than you. And if Voodoo will sell front of the stage real estate, it tells you that they, like Jazz Fest, take fans for granted. “Here – have some cool, interactive art. Please ignore the rich dude stepping in front of you now that Jane’s Addiction is starting.”

               

Anyone who grew up in the 1970s or later has had to live with the premise that they missed rock ‘n’ roll’s best days. The Rolling Stone history of music says that the 1960s were a musical and cultural high water mark, and everything since pales by comparison. The iconic moment for that belief is Woodstock – a gathering that demonstrated just how large the rock ‘n’ roll audience was (more than 450,000) and what it would do for rock ‘n’ roll (travel to the country outside Woodstock, New York, which is no Monterey). It provided the conceptual blueprint for future music festivals – Jazz Fest included – by linking music, culture and arts, and it provided the model for future festival booking, emulating a Chinese buffet as it put on a little bit of everything people liked without lining up exactly with anybody’s tastes.

Last month was  the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, and to commemorate the moment, Rhino has released Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm, a six-disc set of music from Woodstock, reissued Woodstock and Woodstock II,  while Sony Legacy has repackaged albums by Woodstock artists with their Woodstock sets. Combined, they offer an occasion to reconsider Woodstock as it was, as opposed how it has been represented through history.

The initial response? Overrated. The six-disc set  is pretty baggy, with folk singers thankfully lost to time, folk singers who treat every sentiment as gospel (Joan Baez), and folk singers who are too high (John Sebastian). Canned Heat boogie on for a half-hour, and even Jimi Hendrix’s closing jam loses purpose.

Such criticisms feel a little unfair, though, critiquing music that is inextricably linked to the aesthetics and causes of the moment from a contemporary perspective. It’s a little like members of one generation goofing on their parents’ style; it might be dated, but it wasn’t always dated, and perhaps the error is in being too much a part of the moment. Many of the musical sins of Woodstock are directly attributable to the self-assured attitude that the bands, audience and youth in the culture were doing right, and the belief that right thought made good art. We know that’s not true and I’d like to think the artists at the time did too, but the sense of revolution dulled their judgment.

Even if we agree to be charitable, much of Woodstock is tough to listen to. Sha Na Na seems like an even worse idea as the group rips through “Get a Job” with punk rock rapidity, and a generous sampling of Mountain says the only Mountain you need is “Mississippi Queen.” But Woodstock wasn’t all rain and fear of brown acid; Sly and the Family Stone are represented on the Rhino collection by a medley that keeps on giving, but as the Legacy release demonstrates, the show was pretty relentless. The Legacy set ends with “Stand,” which finds the band spent after the medley and “Love City,” and it’s anticlimactic.

The Who were not about peace and love, and not getting on stage until 4 a.m. did nothing to improve their mood. Neither did encountering a very high Abbie Hoffman onstage, one who felt that their set was the perfect time to talk about freeing John Sinclair. As a result, their tracks are ferocious, horribly and blessedly out of step with the vibe. Grace Slick started the Jefferson Airplane set by announcing, “You have seen the heavy guys. Now you will see morning maniac music,” and the results are sufficiently unruly to make me rethink my general disinterest the band. Their set is packaged with Volunteers, and they do bring a level of chaos that folk rock usually needed – their own included.

Obviously, a six-disc Woodstock set is designed to take listeners to the experience as best as possible, and the announcements from the stage between sets are some of the most interesting, revealing parts. There’s a surprising amount of drama in announcer Chip Monck’s carefully phrased and ennunciated news. You can hear moments of barely suppressed pride in the size of the crowd and what it represented, barely supressed laughs at some of the more ridiculous announcements, and not-even-remotely supressed exasperation with the people who found perches in the scaffolding, even though they obstructed the view of those behind them. That and the infamous brown acid also reminds us that Woodstock wasn’t as utopian as we’ve been led to believe, and that no time has been free of assholes and predators.

Weirdly, when I was Woodstocked out – never made it through Janis Joplin’s and Johnny Winter’s set, the former because I didn’t care enough, the latter because I love the rush of 15 minutes of anything Winter did at that time, but more is just more at some point – I was a little sorry for the releases. On one hand, it’s vindicating to know that previous generations don’t necessarily have the aesthetic upper hand on mine, but it’s still a little disappointing to find out how ordinary much of Woodstock was. In truth, though, it really only suffers because of the place Woodstock has held in our culture. If it hadn’t been posited as something momentous, one would expect some dross on an album that presented the highlights of from 33 sets. But it was a remarkable moment, and it’s a shame that its soundtrack provides reason to doubt the whole event. If the music was less than history has led us to believe, what else about Woodstock has been overhyped?

               

We dropped in this morning for the yard sale at the Mother-in-Law Lounge, where Antoinette K-Doe’s daughter was clearing out the collected gear that cluttered up the apartment upstairs to such a degree that she had to sleep on the downstairs sofa in the bar. Going through the K-Does’ leftovers was a more disspiriting exercise than I expected, though.

As always, it was great to see how many people from different walks of life felt connected to the K-Does. Still, both Ernie and Antoinette were such dynamic figures, and seeing the remnants of their life without them in made it seem like they were just another old couple. The upstairs apartment was dingy with an unpainted ceiling, and the closet was piled with bags of clothes that were out of date years if not decades ago.

Thankfully, the K-Does could never be completely ordinary; Betty wasn’t selling costumes, but despite that limit, a lot of sequins were walking out of the door. But Antoinette made such a powerful final statement as she laid in state in a glass-topped coffin in her Empress of the Universe gown complete with scepter, and anything less regal and dynamic than that is inevitably a little diminishing.

               

Recently, The Times-Picayune’s Doug MacCash recorded a video that considered the questions posed by the “READ” graffiti that has popped up recently around town. The open-ended nature of graffiti is part of what makes it so provocative and controversial. Is a mark on a wall a private expression, a threat to others, or something else entirely? What does a stenciled angry cat or pope mean when it shows up on a wall? Does it mean anything, or is it a form of urban surrealism, throwing a visual non-sequitur into an otherwise-defined environment?

One of the things I find most engaging about graffiti is its designed impermanence. The artist/tagger – I don’t assume all graffiti-makers are artists – has to know the work won’t last, and that they’re a temporary part of an environment. Earlier this summer, someone pasted up what looked like a Charles Burns portrait of Elton John on a Tchoupitoulas warehouse, and its stark, graphic look and logo – “icon” – gave a banal urban space a note of whimsy and low-grade mystery. Before a month was out, it had been scraped off. When Banksy came to town after Hurricane Gustav, much of his work was gone within the month, painted over by property owners, marred by other graffiti artists, and perhaps painted over by Fred Radke (though Radke may have been framed in the partially successful paint-over of the piece across Clio Street from the Big Top). Some, however, remain.

My current favorite is already in danger. Someone has pasted up pages with the lyrics to Big Star’s “Thirteen” on a Tchoupitoulas Street warehouse a few blocks Uptown from the convention center. The poster-maker ran together part of the first verse and part of the second, but the series of signs is a charming mystery. Why Big Star in 2009? Why “Thirteen” – hardly a song charged with some sort of subterranean buzz? In fact, the song’s evocation of youth and young love seems even sweeter posted on a wall as a series of signs you can sing along to. But even the signs come with an additional mystery. Next to them is a stenciled woman. Was she put there by the same person? Or did someone see the Big Star lyrics and think that a more mature, grim presence might add some needed gravity? Whatever the case, a long white wall that was once a banal part of an industrial roadway is now alive with possibilities, and it’s only made more interesting by the realization that those possibilities won’t be there forever. You’ve got to see them before rain or do-gooders wash them away.

               

 

It’s clear – no event can exist in New Orleans without an accompanying poster. I just received notice of the Project 30-90 poster, and really – can just call them merch and be done with it? Eliminate all pretensions to art or higher purpose and just acknowledge that this is something other than a T-shirt people can buy? As posters go, I’ve seen better and seen a lot worse, but the one thing greener than an environmentally friendly poster is no poster at all. No carbon footprint is better than a light one.

               

 

The debate over the proposed sculptures for Armstrong Park interests me more than the art does. What I can figure out is how beautifying the park is supposed to bring life back to it. Who goes to a park to look at the sculptures, and how long can that take? Wouldn’t it be better to open the park so that people can use it? And bring Rampart back to life – and not as  Ye Olde New Orleans – so that the park is an integrated part of the city. Clearly, treating it as a stand-alone, culturally significant place that you’re supposed to want to go to hasn’t worked. When has, “Do this. It’s good for you” ever worked? 

… speaking of the art, I’m conceptually amused at the transformation of Indian feathers into stone, but it’s hard to get around how lumpish that piece looks.

               

Harry Shearer’s keynote address at the Rising Tide bloggers conference Saturday was a sobering one. “We’ve lost the media war,” he said, speaking of New Orleans and the way Katrina’s story has been told. Rather than being a story of the federally neglected protection mechanisms – the floodwalls and the disappearing wetlands – and how their failure in the face of Katrina caused 80 percent of the city to flood, the media has told it as the story of poor people who suffered catastrophically after a freak natural disaster. That narrative has sapped much of the political and countrywide will to do what’s necessary to make sure that New Orleans isn’t similarly flooded again.

By now, most of us who hoped Barack Obama would be more of a leader in the recovery effort than his predecessor have become skeptical. Shearer told a story that further gives us reason to believe that now as then, we’re on our own.

               

One concern after this mornings culture panel at the Rising Tide 4 bloggers conference: How many bloggers will treat what they heard as gospel, and how many will do additional research or confirm some of the assertions? Much of it was right in broad strokes but quite as it was reported from the stage.

Whether people caught it or not, keynote speaker Harry Shearer called for bloggers to be the journalists that the mainstream media cant or wont be. His call for bloggers to invest their time was a call not for slow writing or patience, but for dedicated, well-researched blogging.