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Listen to the Music | Aug 22, 2008 11:33

Ever since David Haywood wrote Summer of the L.E.D.s, that great little band from Christchurch has been a favourite around here. We're pleased to have been able to help them reach a few more ears. And I'm delighted to say that they're allowing us to give away a free track from their new album, Still, to you, the Public Address readers.

The track is called 'Tide' and it'll be right here for the next week or so (after that I find we start getting inbound links from spammy MP3 sites). So grab it, stick it on your chosen player and, if you like what you hear, feel free to pop on over to Amplifier to download the whole album at a friendly MP3 price. (It seems physical CDs aren't there at Amplifier yet, but they are already available at Galaxy and Real Groovy in Christchurch and Real Groovy and Slow Boat in Wellington.)

The sound of Still is more expansive than We Are the L.E.D.s, and the vocal duties are shared around more this time, but there's still the familiar, warm, artful electro-fuzz and understated pop. The title track encapsulates a little bleak humour about depression in its "I've got a touch of the Kirwan" refrain. (BTW, that's my voice you hear saying "Don't let depression get the better of you …" at the end of the repackaged John Kirwan TV spot. Have I become the "word in your ear buddy" voice of public health campaigns? I'd be cool with that.)

After half a dozen listens, I'm seriously sold on Still, and mentally comparing it to all kinds of things. I did an interview with Blair Parkes from the band for tomorrow's Public Address Radio, and we confessed he hadn't worked out why people start spewing comparisons when they hear his band. I went for "Kraftwerk vs the B52s" with the last album, the weirdest comparison they got was the Pet Shop Boys, and Blair thinks their most important influence is The Fall.

Something else I'm loving -- and also comparing to all kinds of things -- is Keeper's by Deastro. I've realised that all the blank looks I get when I blather most-favourite-new-artist-in-ages are because the album, composed of 22 year-old Randolph Chabot's bedroom recordings and demos, is an eMusic exclusive. You could do a lot worse than spend some of your free-offer 25 eMusic downloads on this album, because it's brilliant, and you'll be able to say you were totally into Deastro before he was famous.

Chabot strikes me as having the same sublimated pop instincts as a young Trent Reznor but (hurrah!) without the angst. Like a lot of things at the moment, it's as if someone's taken 80s electropop out to the back yard and gotten it nice and dirty. You can hear slightly weedier versions of his Keeper's tracks on his MySpace, and watch him perform live in this YouTube clip and this one. He also makes really cool posters for gigs.

Like Simon Grigg says, you could also do worse than pop over to Peter McLennan's MySpace for a listen to the new Dub Asylum stuff, which range from Price Fatty-style rocksteady revivals to the tricked-out funk of 'My Sneaker Collection Weighs a Ton'. It's music produced by someone who really loves music.

Simon also has a less happy story about the continuing disconnect between the music funding system and local dance producers. You'd think radio (and, ergo, NZ On Air) would be gagging for the new Timmy Schumacher single with the guy from OpShop singing on it, but no, too risky apparently.

I keep wondering if I was too hard on Ladyhawke's gig last week, but no I'm not: Pip Brown was anointed as one of the new wave of female pop artists by The Times last week, alongside the likes of Santogold. She's got great tunes, a nice image and pretty much a scene waiting for her to turn up -- but someone really needs to make it happen musically with her band.

Still, power of the internet and all that. I ran into Mike Hodgson from Pitch Black this week (at the Point Chev Countdown) and he says that paid downloads have really started to work for them. Ingrooves, the San Francisco-based aggregator they use outside New Zealand gets them a direct link off the electronic genre page on every iTunes country store.

They now release digital singles regularly via this route, and in the last six months Pitch Black sold 18,600 individual tracks online, in about 55 countries, from Belgium to Brazil, Latvia to Luxembourg. Mike says allowing the tracks onto subscriber music services, which return quite a low rate, has been a surprise boon. I'm guessing it probably doesn't amount to much more than $10,000 net per six months, but it's passive income that doubles as marketing in multiple territories. Mike's pretty happy with how it's going.

The top artists on Amplifier are now billing five-figure sums too. And increasingly, they don't have conventional record deals. Interesting.

I went to see our older boy in the class production of Twisted yesterday afternoon. The music for the party scenes was Katy Perry's insanely catchy 'I Kissed a Girl' (produced by longtime Saturday Night Live guitarist Dr Luke). The song is controversial both with Perry's former friends in the evangelical rock scene, and with parts of the gay media, who detect a residual homophobia in the lyrics. Meanwhile, Hype machine has gone mad with the remixes. Best just treat it as a pop song, I think. But I can think of a few prominent windbags who'd be horrified at what schoolgirls are singing these days …

And finally, Chris Bourke has republished his 1988 account of Going to Graceland. With pictures.

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Trust. Us. | Aug 21, 2008 10:49

Stephen Judd raised an interesting idea yesterday in discussion of this week's Media7 programme on the demise of the 115 year-old Levin Daily Chronicle, after I commented thus:

Tonight's Media7 looks at the portents of APN's conversion of the Levin Daily Chonicle to a bi-weekly freesheet. It's the PANPA 2007 small newspaper of the year, the APN newspaper of the year, it has increased its (admittedly modest) circulation and it's not losing money. If it were independently-owned, it would probably still be a real newspaper.

One issue: these small papers pay a chargeback to APN for accounting services -- and it's several times what those papers would have to pay to just employ an accountant. It seems that APN corporate taps the small assets hard to try and recoup more group costs.

When you note that there's a strong implication (by a councillor and defeated mayoral candidate) that the Levin council helped get rid of its feisty problem paper by withdrawing $60,000 pa in advertising and giving it to a docile freesheet, it casts an interesting light on APN's chest-beating about a free press.

And …

I should have noted that the smaller Fairfax papers probably face similar fish hooks. It's a corporate media fact of life, especially when your national newspaper market is essentially an offshore-owned duopoly.

We're losing family proprietors, who used to play a strong role in the free press, but I'd hope that "trust media", in the mould of the Guardian, will begin to fill the gap. David Geffen and his mates should just have bought the LA Times back from the Tribune group when people were talking about it. Perhaps they're waiting till it's been completely sucked dry.

Then Stephen said:

As far as the Guardian and its funding go: l pledge $100 this year and every year that I am employed, towards any trust or non-profit body that will employ journalists, in any medium, to research, and write or produce really good New Zealand stories.

I bet if a few other PA posters and lurkers did the same, we could get an article or two out of it at rates that would be better than the current freelance ones.

I think it's something worth at least discussing (and also, if it's worth doing, doing at a greater scale than just the audience here). I'm genuinely concerned about the draining of expertise and experience from print journalism, especially amongst freelancers, and about the lack of resourcing for strong reporting and feature writing.

I've banged on about the strength of the Guardian model in speeches before -- although it's worth noting that the newspaper itself loses money -- it's supported by less exalted publications in the Guardian Media Group, which "exists to support the core purpose of its owner, the Scott Trust: to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity."

In 1992, the Scott Trust refined its central objective thus:

To secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

What declared view of the world should such a trust have? It's certainly possible to establish non-partisan good faith in such a venture: The Pew Charitable Trusts were founded on extreme right-wing Christian oil money (and they still send a few evangelical kids to Bible universities), and yet I -- godless liberal that I am -- place great trust in the integrity of the various Pew research projects. And yet, both practically and philosophically, The Guardian's constitution demonstrates the virtue of some political clarity.

On the other hand, actually publishing rather than simply financing good independent journalism is a big job. In the US, there are many existing precedents, some very well established, for the non-profit funding of journalism projects. They provide material to PBS and a range of newspapers and magazines.

In New Zealand, what publications would carry such stories? Would there be practical or ethical barriers to commercial media organisations carrying privately-financed stories? Would they want to?

Exactly what stories would be written under such a trust that are not written now?

What copyright would be asserted in the material generated?

Who should reach into their pockets for this?

Who would run it?

Discuss.

Anyway, the show is there on TVNZ ondemand. And for offshore readers, it should be on our YouTube channel soon. Ditto on the Windows Media clips and the podcast.

We're quite proud of this programme, just quietly.

And the Media7 blog includes come more background and a list of the six remaining independent daily papers in New Zealand.

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Rain on his parade | Aug 20, 2008 10:00

I have never met Steve Crow. I have no particular wish to do so. He strikes me as an unpleasant, cynical man with whom I would have little in common. His claim in court yesterday that his Boobs on Bikes parade was only "loosely connected" to his commercial porn show was disingenuous to the point of absurdity: the event is quite clearly a large, live advertisement for the Erotica Lifestyles Expo. It seems odd that such an advertisement should be allowed to stop traffic and hinder everyone else going about their business

And yet I am glad that Judge Nicola Mathers yesterday struck down an Auckland City Council injunction and thus gave Crow the go-ahead for his parade. The councillors' action in devising themselves a bylaw by which they could, on hazy grounds, deny permission for a public event they deemed "offensive" was a retrograde step. As No Right Turn points out, it is not against the law for women to bare their breasts in public.

Essentially, we don't elect city councillors as moral arbiters. In years past in New Zealand we've allowed any number of officials and elected members to over-reach their roles and the result has been a mess; a frequently ludicrous mess.

In 1954, MPs in the grip of the moral panic that accompanied the Mazengarb Report (and seeking to stem the tide of comics reckoned to be corrupting the youth of the day) passed a stinkingly awful amendment to the Indecent Publications Act that effectively let nameless Customs officials decide what anyone could read.

The amendment was struck out in 1958, and the Indecent Publications Act received an enlightened revamp in 1963. And yet, the following year, Customs tried to prevent the University of Auckland receiving two psychology texts and a nameless senior officer explained that "It was impossible to leave such matters entirely to the Indecent Publications Tribunal."

The grey men of Customs made their own rules. They would stop what they saw fit to stop, and anyone who didn't like it could take it up with the tribunal at some later time

"Nobody questions the good faith and integrity of Customs officers," wrote Monte Holcroft in the Listener, "but it's time we remembered that public interest includes the defence of freedom as well as protection from pornography."

Things were not all that different in 1972, when police officers to fit to arrest and charge Germaine Greer for uttering the words "fuck" and "bullshit" indoors.

Even in 1994, the moral guardians of the Auckland City Council made it their business to try and frustrate the Hero Parade -- although even they didn't award themselves extra powers: they simply refused to fund the clean-up afterwards. The council of 2008 went further than that; it went too far, particularly given that, as the judge noted, a great many ordinary citizens seem to regard Boobs on Bikes as harmless fun.

It's certainly not my style. I certainly don't have a problem with women's breasts: they're basically awesome. Not only are they profoundly, fundamentally functional, I find them attractive. Of course, the breasts on display today won't be real ones: they'll be as fake and tacky as the commercial porn they were made for. Their public presentation as some sort of ideal doesn't seem very healthy. It seems a long, dulling distance from the authentic night-time naughtiness of the Hero Parade. I suppose that's an aesthetic rather than a moral judgement.

I'm very relaxed about what consenting adults do and how they express themselves, and I consequently don't have a problem with pornography per se: it's just that Crow's thing seems to me to represent the joyless end of the form. (I remember Steve Simpson and Jeremy Wells broadcasting their bFM show from the Exotica show floor one year and becoming palpably depressed by what was around them and deciding to just go home.) And anyone who thinks Crow is just a bit of a wag has presumably forgotten his attempt to include the birth of baby in a porn film. I can think of few things more indicative of a contempt for life that that.

In the circumstances, I agree, again, with No Right Turn that the answer to objectionable speech is more speech, in the form of protest -- but I fear that the women protesting will be so earnest (marching in front of the parade with a banner reading "Pornography Fuels Sexual Violence Against Women and Children") as to simply invite mockery, when the more effective message would be mockery of Crow himself. But perhaps the weather will do the job. This is one parade it would be most amusing to see rained on, literally.

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I've been hybridising for a while now ... | Aug 19, 2008 11:35

I gather the unprecedented freedom of content on the Listener website this week is not entirely intentional, but it does provide a happy opportunity to link to Jane Clifton's Politics column in a week in which she ventures on the blogosphere and the associated evolution of relationships in the political media.

It's not all good, according to Jane:

Peace activist Nicky Hager and religious activist Ian Wishart have set up covert rival versions of the mainstream media, because they fervently believe that only their networks of true believers are uncorrupted and can tell the truth. The Blogerati – Russell Brown, David Farrar et al – have set themselves up as the aristocracy haughtily removed from the hoi polloi of workaday grunts on newspapers and the telly – a mere plodding peasantry who can be trusted only to miss the point. And that's not even to get started on the stealth-bombing activist activities of religious sects.

I can't even decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, this job-poaching. First up, best dressed, let the market decide, and all that. But morally and practically, it's now the Wild West out there, because we can no longer easily tell where journalism ends and politics begins. We used to be separate species, but now we're hybridising.

I'd like to point out that I've been hybridising for quite a while now: since 1991, when Hard News was first born as a radio commentary. I was a magazine editor then, and I'm still a journalist now. I don't know that I regard myself as "above" the "workaday grunts" reporting news (I have after all, won a couple of awards for news reporting and I'm not throwing the medals in the river). I am an enthusiastic consumer of journalism, as well as a producer.

But I do think that journalists can become institutionalised in a number of ways. In political journalist that can manifest as a tendency to report the sizzle over the sausage, and to -- yes, I am looking at you Jane -- depict it all as a grand, jolly game. In such circumstances, I think it's useful to have a third voice watching the watchers and, where appropriate, nerding it up with facts and figures (which is something that David Farrar does particularly well).

Are we reporting party spin? Well, yes, sometimes. But only in a different way to the conventional practice of reporting talking head counter-quotes as news. And sometimes it can be quite useful. Take this guest post on Just Left. I happen to know it comes from a Labour staff grunt, but it has empirical merit. It makes a strong case for its claim that National bullshitted on the issue of energy security last week. Not just passive, rhetorical bullshitting, but deliberate cut-off-the-end-of-the-graph-to-skew-the-numbers bullshitting. I haven't seen that reported by the pros.

Then, read the technical argument in the comments. I think that's useful too (Jordan may want to ponder on the different nature of commentary attracted by a post that isn't shouting party slogans). And, indeed, the thing I'm most proud of about Public Address is the quality of discussion provided by you, the readers. I learn from what you write every day, and it's a privilege to interact with you all, whether to debate issues or simply yarn.

Your presence bears out something I learned very early on about the internet: it provides access to many people who have the attributes for journalism -- a sharp mind and a good prose style -- but are not in fact journalists. In some cases, they might be as clattering partisan as The Standard, but if the Standard is offering the nourishing fare of statistics and visualised information, then, sure, fill ma bowl. If there's a site as informed, literate and philosophically cohesive as The Hand Mirror, I'm having that too.

We also live in the age of Scoop. It seems quaint now that political party press releases were, until quite recently, hand-delivered or faxed to a small circle of journalists who would decide on our behalf what was fit to print. Now, we can see the lot, and the parties know that. Unsurprisingly, it was small parties like Act who cottoned on to the power of the digital press release first. It wasn't long after that before the major party comms people turned it into an almost hourly battle of statements. Has the total quantity of bullshit increased as a result? Sure. But it's visible, public bullshit.

I am, of course, hardly the only working journalist to be blogging: see Denis Welch, Karl du Fresne and Rob Hosking. I think they've seen something in the blogosphere not offered by the day job. We're some way off the likes of Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, but that's largely a function of revenue. It's viable in the US, far less so here.

At any rate, if, as it seems, the unprecedented online availability of the Listener's contents in its week of publication is an accident, perhaps those in charge could see it as a happy one. The Listener joined and guided the national conversation for decades. It could use these marvellous new tools we have to do so now.

PS: We have a different style of show for Media7 this week -- it's anchored by Simon Pound's report on the impending demise of the Levin Chronicle, the award-winning local daily that APN is to turn into just another bi-weekly freesheet. The panel is former Fairfax executive editor Peter O'Hara, Joanne Black of The Listener and indie journalist Jon Stephenson. If you'd like to join us early this evening for the recording, hit reply and let me know.

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