Do any of you have a funky health care-related song that you have recorded? must own the rights and recording? would be willing to  “donate” it to our digital re-release of the NOMC’s 1999 benefit cd GET YOU A HEALIN?

 If you have something, please please let me know asap. The Orchard is about to launch a world-wide download campaign complete with drop cards and solicitation to all medical dramas on TV to license some of the songs. and sell ringtones from it.

 During these hard economic times, we have gotta gotta gotta earn money to keep the NOMC alive and well!!!

If you’ve got just such a song and are willing to contribute it – or you’re looking for a way to help – contact Bethany at Bbbultman@aol.com.

On October 24, the Jefferson Performing Arts Society (JPAS) will host the local performance of “Thrill the World” – a worldwide, simultaneous performance of “Thriller.” “Thrill the World” predates Jackson’s death and is in its fourth year – seen here from San Francisco in 2007 – at Zephyr Field, but this year should be particularly significant. It also should be seriously attended after people have seen online the wonder of mass Jackson dancing here, here , here and here. 

To dance, you can register online at the JPAS Web site or the day of the event between 11 a.m and 1 p.m. Dancers must be available for a group practice from 4 to 6 p.m., and they need to have a zombie costume for the dance. There won’t be change rooms, so the costume should be easily thrown on.

Admission for the day is  $12 per person and parking is $1. There is a VIP package for $50, and dancers that pre-register online will get in for $10. “Thrill the World” at Zephyr Field benefits JPAS’ youth program, JPAS Jam & Jive Show Choir.

For more on Tabb, the Roots of Music and voting, go to CNN.com.

The Pop Machine: Music and Technology

Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

Seattle, April 15-18, 2010

Popular music might be narrated as a story of sounds and the machines that make them. From the talking drum and parlor room piano to the Gibson Les Paul, from the Edison phonograph to Roland 808 beatbox and Antares Autotune software, how have pop’s contraptions reflected, inflected, and mediated musical history? What changes when we start with the technology that makes the ineffable material, and its shaping of modes of production and consumption? As we close out a decade of momentous change at all levels of popular music, this is a salient moment for rethinking the continual dialogue in pop between the new and the traditional. Note: this call is not aimed only at gearheads. What counts as human is produced in and through the use of technologies. We need to hear the voices that wrap flesh around the wiring.  

Topics can cover any era or style of music and may include, but are not limited to:

–Hardware:  the effect of equipment on how we make, record, disseminate, and fetishize music.

–Business: economies of scale(s), the demand for profit in changing technological contexts.

–Identity: how youth culture, Afromodernism, and transgender/transsexual personas, manufactured divas and real fem-bots, among other pop categories, deploy technology.

–Technology in the 2000s: iPods, computer game music, music and war, digital technology exhuming analog artifacts.

–Aesthetics: “perfect sound forever” to pixelation and lossy file formats; Computer Love erotics; power chords from amplified blues to Guitar Hero.

–“The street finds its own use for things”: working class, global, racial, and other subaltern appropriations of technology, from sound systems to rock camps for girls.

–Bodies as technologies: the “natural” as a response to changing artifices; the voice as a modifiable tool.

–Music writing and the technological formations it rests upon.

–Anxieties and doubts: folk revivalists, roots rockers, and other tech-refuseniks.

The Pop Conference at EMP|SFM, now in its ninth year, joins academics, critics, performers, and dedicated fans in a rare common discussion. The conference is sponsored by the American Music Partnership of Seattle (Experience Music Project, the University of Washington School of Music, and KEXP 90.3 FM), through a grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. This year’s program committee members are: writer and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda, Jasen Emmons (EMP/SFM), musician Sean Nelson, Tavia Nyong’o (NYU), Lauren Onkey (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), Ann Powers (Los Angeles Times), Jody Rosen (Slate), Barry Shank (Ohio State), Tyina Steptoe (University of Washington), and Tim Taylor (UCLA).

Please send proposals of 250 words, with 50 word bio, to organizer Eric Weisbard (University of Alabama) at Eric.Weisbard@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals is Tuesday, December 15. Panel proposals, for either three presenters (90 minutes) or four (105 minutes), should include overview language and 200 word individual proposals, plus panelist bios. We welcome unorthodox proposals and proposals aimed explicitly at a general interest audience. For more information, go to http://www.empsfm.org/education/

In keeping with the true spirit of the Voodoo Experience, French DJ duo Justice will present a one-time only live performance in collaboration with the Life is Art Foundation. The Life is Art Foundation and Rehage Entertainment are curating a large scale 20+ piece international art installation within the Voodoo grounds featuring artists with roots as diverse as remote villages in the Upper Amazon to MIT students to the Rehage Design team. For Justice’s pre-Eminem set on Friday night, they will choreograph their performance with Illusion Eyetrap, a meditation exhibit featuring 63 enormous helium ballons. Justice will bring the installation to life as music and light mix to evoke a range of moods in a communal celebration.

Yes, it sounds nutty and pretentious, but it also sounds like something I wouldn’t get at many other festivals. And that makes all the difference.

The gray in the audience matched the gray onstage, but aside from the vintage of a handful of songs, it wasn’t a gray show. Wynn and McCaughey may have made their first splash more than 20 years ago, but they remain song machines, crunching out reliably intelligent, catchy songs that rock. The show also didn’t feel old because everyone onstage seemed comfortable with who they were, gray and all (Buck seemed comfortable being the designated Bill Wyman), and the lack of pretense freed up the evening to be about a bunch of songs.

McCaughey and Wynn and many of their contemporaries (including members of the Continental Drifters) occupy an interesting space. They were once part of a cutting edge that moves on as cutting edges do, leaving them not quite members of the establishment (didn’t sell enough records), not quite punk (too old) but not quite singer/songwriters (too rock). They’ve become a gold standard for a level of craft and independence, and if that’s not as sexy as the New Thing, it’s also far more reliable.

As an added bonus, those who check out the preview – nearly 40,000 on Thursday morning – get to see in the Comments all the Dylan arguments you’ve ever been a part of played out in text form. Anyone who can continue to confuse and outrage people that intensely after 40-plus years in music is someone who remains a vital part of the culture.