Hard News by Russell Brown

It's been dark a long time but it's starting to feel like summer. And that means the parties are starting. The nice people at Base FM kick off with a party on the roof of Rydges Hotel in partnership with Splore this Sunday. It runs from 2pm-8pm and features a live performance from SoccerPractise plus sets from Dylan C, FJ and other Base DJs, covering quite a range of styles. More details and (essential) free RSVP here.

95bFM has put together a really good-looking Christmas Party at the King's Arms on December 1, featuring Yoko Zuna, merk and Roy Irwin, among others, plus DJ sets from Princess Chelsea and the Grow Room. It's free but go here to RSVP.

Stinky Jim and Dubhead are grooving up Hallertau Brewery tomorrow afternoon. That sounds like a nice Saturday.

Much as I've been enjoying Leisure's debut album, I'm pleased to see that one of the band's members, Jordan Arts, is busting out for an evening to do do a show as High Hoops. He's playing with Spycc at REC on Saturday December 3 (tickets here), two days after the release of a new single, 'Burn It Up'.

–––

I'm doing The Mixtape with Alex Behan at 5pm on Music 101 tomorrow afternoon. The trick with these things is to choose songs that not only work as a playlist, but which come with stories attached. I've only called Alex back with one panicked change to the list so far, so I figure I'm winning.

You might also be interested in Episode 3 of From Zero, my RNZ podcast about New Zealanders and drugs. This episode is 'Drugs and Popular Culture' and it features quite a bit of music – and a nice interview with Tom Scott of Home Brew and Average Rap Band.

Also tomorrow: I'm playing some vinyl records at Real Groovy from 1pm-3pm. All styles, as ever.

–––

Kim Pflaum, formerly of Yumi Zouma, plays Whammy bar tonight (and Moon in Wellington tomorrow night in support of Bad Humours, her debut EP as Madeira. It's a pretty cool record. I like this Lontalius/Race Banyon remix too:

–––

A gorgeous (and good-humoured) new video for Fat Freddy's Drop's 'Fish in the Sea':

–––

Russell Baillie talks to Ian Chapman about his new book, The Dunedin Sound – Some Disenchanted Evening. And Audioculture has an except from the book – Amanda Mills' wonderful essay searching for evidence that the "Dunedin Sound" is a thing. 

The illustrations are a treat too. This is Alec Bathgate's HP agreement for his Les Paul copy guitar, 1977. He later sold the guitar to David Kilgour and it can be seen in most images of the Clean through the 1980s.

A few of these have emerged before, but Audioculture now has a full crop of Fiona Clark's images of early Auckland punk rock, centred on the Idle Idols and Zwines. There's a decent enough photographic record of this time, but most people were shooting in black and white. The colour is what makes Fiona's pics special.

In the centre, Jonathan Jamrag, at the time this was taken in Rooter. He would leave a month later to form The Atrocities, but is probably best known as the frontman of Proud Scum. In the front, Craig, the vocalist with The Aliens. Behind Gail Young, now a designer in Paris.

Oh, and one more David Mancuso thing: Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster interview, republished by RBMA last week. It's fascinating.

–––

Tunes! 

Whoop! New Dimitri from Paris! And it's fully afro-disco! This is an instrumental version of his new single. Click through for a free download. Yuss.

RocknRolla Soundsystem meet Pops Staples! Free download ...

Lord Echo featuring Mara TK. It's nice.

A bang-up-to-date deep house set from james carter – free download.

–––

And finally, I'd really like to thank Dan and everyone at The Audio Consultant for supporting the Friday Music post every week. They're good people. They're moving on now, so I'm looking out for a new sponsor. It's a very modest rate for a weekly presence, so if you think that might be you, click the email link under this post and get in touch.

The third episode of From Zero, my RNZ podcast series about New Zealanders and drugs, looks at drugs and popular culture: music, movies, TV and magazines.

There is more of this than most people realise. New Zealand was a bit of a late starter – while American jazz musicians wrote and sang about drugs as a part of their lives and environments from the 1930s (I explain what 'Minnie the Moocher' is about in the episode), we didn't have our first honest-to-goodness pop song about drugs until Lew Pryme's 'Gracious Lady Alice Dee' in 1968.

There have been quite a few since – more than I could fit in the Top 10 New Zealand Songs About Drugs I wrote for Audioculture. In the episode I talk to Chris Stapp of Deja Voodoo about saying the unsayable in 'P' and Tom Scott about whether all the drug-taking in this video was real (spoiler: yes).

Also, Outrageous Fortune and Westside creator James Griffin talks about why Van and Munter just had to be this way:

And Geoff Murphy sheds some light on the weed scene in Goodbye Pork Pie.

All these and more have reached us without greatly troubling the censors. But there is one thing that will still reliably cop you a ban: the wrong kind of gardening tips. Chief Censor Andrew Jack explains why issues of Norml News and High Times have been deemed objectionable – and Norml president Chris Fowlie responds with indignation.

Some people might hear this ep as frivolous, or even as celebrating drug use. It's not, really: it's creative people reflecting society with the tools at hand. And you can be ensured that Episode 4, on methamphetamine, is considerably darker.

For now, here's that time Billy T. James went on TV and taught small children how to roll a joint ...

Episode 3 of From Zero, Drugs and Popular Culture, is available here on the RNZ website. You can also subscribe to the podcast via the iTunes Store.

I enjoyed Aaradhna's mic drop at the Music Awards last night: it added energy to an event that was already getting much of its energy from the Māori and Pasifika creativity on show. But I think there's something that needs clarifying about it.

Aaaradhna gave away her award, she told Duncan Greive afterwards, because

... it’s unfair to be put against a genre that’s got nothing to do with your genre. I’m not angry, I just feel like it’s unfair to be in a category that’s not related to what I do. To me, it just seems like it’s the brown people category, or the coloured people or whatever. That’s the category for the ‘urban folks’. But, to me, I feel like that’s for hiphop. There’s more hiphop artists that were nominated in that category and it’s always been that way and I feel like it belongs to that hiphop crowd.

This might give the impression that Aaradhna was in the Urban/Hip-Hop category against her will, that someone else had decided she should go there. What actually happened was that she was entered in the category by her manager, Andy Murnane, presumably with her consent. She could have avoided winning the award by not entering the category.

There is a separate discussion to be had about whether there ought to be seperate Hip Hop and Soul/R&B categories – and it's one that was underway before last night. RMNZ CEO Damian Vaughn told me today that Andy had raised the idea when he came to the RMNZ office to make and pay for the entries (each category attracts an entry fee) and he agreed to work on the idea for next year.

RMNZ (and before that Rianz) has added and tweaked award categories fairly frequently. There was no hip hop award at all until 2002, when Che Fu's The Navigator won Best R&B/Hip Hop Album (there was one other nomination: Dark Tower's Canterbury Drafts). The category was renamed Best Urban Album the following year, when Nesian Mystik won. The next year, 2004, when Scribe won everything,  it became Best Urban/Hip Hop album. The following year, P Money's Magic City beat the Feelstyle and Savage albums in the same category. Aaradhna won it in 2013 and Janine and the Mixtape won it last year. So it is an award that's been entered and won by both artists who didn't rap and who weren't brown. 

There was a change last year, when the Gospel/Christian category became the more open-minded Best Worship album. And this year, Best Electronica album dropped an "a" and became Best Electronic album, after Loop's Mikee Tucker pointed out that "electronica" was a specific genre and the category was wider than that.

I think it's fair enough for Aaradhna to ask "What does ‘urban’ mean?" because it's arguably not a music genre, it's a radio format. Mai FM, for example, is categorised as "Urban contemporary", taking its lead from the US, where the format was pioneered.

But radio formats kind of suck, so perhaps it is a good idea to work on two separate formats. The risk would be that there wouldn't be enough releases (RMNZ requires a minimum four entries for any category to go forward each year). The pool for the only-in-New-Zealand Aotearoa Roots category is a bit shallow most years, but it survives. So yeah, let's give it a go. It just seems useful to understand what actually happened here.

One more thing: the performances were great at last night's awards: Tami Nielson and Aaradhna both absolutely tore it up, Fat Freddy's Drop were great and Hall of famer Bic Runga was all class.

 –––

Hey, guess what? Me and Sandy Mill are DJing the late shift at Golden Dawn tonight! We're on from 11pm to 2am – Sandy takes the first hour, I take the second and we'll finish up going one-for-one for the last.

There are a couple of notable names on the decks earlier too: Automatic plays 5-8pm and Simon Sweetman 8-11pm.

And tomorrow night, Alan (House of Bamboo) Perrott, Tina Turntables and John Baker are teaming up to play tunes at Whammy bar. Entry is free and Alan tells me "the idea is to take the Good Times Sound System model of no fixed genre and play stuff to elevate the mood and hopefully leap around to."

–––

The toll on musical legends has been one facet of the strange year that is 2016. This month so far, we've seen the passing of Leonard Cohen and Leon Russell – but also of a man whose name might not be quite so familiar: David Mancuso.

Mancuso was the founder of The Loft, the New York venue (it was also his home) for invite-only parties that set the template not only for disco but for  what we think of as dance music culture to this day. Certainly, the culture has lost its way at various times – there's not much connection between The Loft and overmuscled yobs slamming each other to EDM in stadiums – but the eclectism and openness represented by The Loft resonate today.

And the songs still sound great. Resident Advisor has Loft-inspured playlists for both Spotify and Apple Music and there's a monster 11-tune playlist right here on Spotify:

And on Soundcloud, both discs of Mancuso's long-deleted The Loft Volume 2:

–––

Noisey is premiering the video for Leisure's 'Got It Bad' – and also 'Antlers', the first taste of The Bats' new album, The Deep Set, which is a cracking tune.

–––

Tunes!

You never knew you wanted an entire album of Beastie Boys/Daft Punk mashups, but hey – maybe you do! Daft Science lays the Beasties’ a capella tracks over music beds made up entirely of Daft Punk samples. Dangerous Minds has the full story, it's a free download – and here's a taste:

An amazing Hober Mallow remix of the Steve Miller Band's 'Serenade' (Hypeddit free download):

Paddy Buckley put me on to the amazing  SanFranDisko on HearThis. Sheer disco:

Spruced-up Deodato ...

And this storming job on a new wave classic. Shame about the spelling, but the tune is awesome ...

There's heaps more great stuff on that account, all free to download. Everybody say "Thanks Paddy!"

–––

The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by:

The Washington Post, Buzzfeed and others are reporting something strange and troubling today: a fake news site falsely claiming that Donald Trump and not Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote in last week's US Presidential election is the top search result in Google News.

The result of the popular vote is, I'm sure you know, immaterial to the result of the Presidential election – but it carries a undeniable moral weight. Equally obviously, the claim is simply untrue. Clinton will ultimately win between one and two million more votes than Trump.

I don't know enough about the way the Google News algorithm works to say exactly what's gone in here, but I can guess and say that the currency of the story – the number of times it's been cited and linked to – pushed it to the top of the news search results.

This isn't immutable. The Post's screenshot of the result looked like this:

By the time Buzzfeed screenshotted its search result, the Post's story had hove into view, for presumably the same reasons the fake story was elevated.

Another report by Business Insider found other debunking stories beginning to populate the results:

So debunking fake news is worth doing. But I tried the same search just now – and the fake story is still the lead result.

Google isn't doing this deliberately. It's not a corporate plot. Remember, Eric Schmidt, the executive chair of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc, was an informal advisor and donor to Barack Obama. He's also an investor in The Groundwork, a data company used by the Clinton campaign.

So what the hell is 70News and how is this happening? The Post's story notes that the report on the Wordpress-hosted 70News is based on a tweet, which in turn cites USASupreme.com – a site which occasioned the memorable Wonkette headline Hillary Clinton Threatened To Murder Bernie Sanders, Says Credible Not-Russian-Sounding News Site back in August. The Wonkette story is worth reading for its forensics on how that particular fake news story was put together.

A couple more things about USASupreme: whoever writes it appears not to have English as a first language – and they freakin' love Wikileaks and Julian Assange.

That story concludes:

So once again Assange the man who exposed the truth about Hillary Clinton to the world has confirmed that Trump is clean and it is the democrats that made so many bad decision over the last couple of years.

USASupreme also really likes – and I'm guessing this isn't going to come as a total surprise to you – Vladimir Putin:

The belief that Hillary Clinton, if elected, was going to precipitate World War III was remarkably popular in the weeks and months before the election, especially amongst professed left-wingers.

Does USASupreme spring from the bowels of the now infamous building in St Petersburg where a "troll army" labours to influence the beliefs of Russian and other citizens? We can't tell. But this story on what happened when Swedes debated whether to join NATO – a flood of confusing information and outright falsehoods into the public discourse – is interesting. And sobering:

The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.

They were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the traditional news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, traveled the country to promote the pact in speeches and town hall meetings, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories.

“People were not used to it, and they got scared, asking what can be believed, what should be believed?” said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Mr. Hultqvist’s spokeswoman.

Further down:

“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.

“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”

Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”

And:

“The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,” said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia. The central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic.”

Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all American puppets.

Sound familiar? Every time during this US election campaign that I got involved in a social media argument with someone telling me things about Ukraine or Syria – which was far too many times – I'd find myself explaining that I actually follow a few people who cover those conflicts closely, and none of them say that's what's happening. Sadly, I was often referred to screeds by John Pilger that didn't tally with any reliable reporting either.

Meanwhile, the Wikileaks Twitter account gushed with misleading, out-of-context or outright false characterisations of material from its email troves. The Infosec Taylor Swift account has been on a tear about this over the past couple of days:

"WikiLeaks spreads information."
Like telling bigoted nationalists how Hillary's campaign murdered a dude and is run by satanists? Remember? pic.twitter.com/Bex8OIBX7z

— im a cat now meow (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 11, 2016

And it's still happening:

Yes, you can literally die and, against your family's own wishes, Assange will go on national TV and lie about your death for his own lols. pic.twitter.com/XlcWHeb2m0

— im a cat now meow (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 14, 2016

In truth, it'll be hard to tell what proportion of the bullshit is deliberately propagated and how much is simply an exploitation of the click-counting programmatic environment in which news must dwell these days. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg likes fake news any more than you and I do – it's just that the business model has evolved around it. The cancer has incorporated itself into the body.

This is not to say that Clinton, the USA and liberal democracy itself are blameless innocents in the world. But something pretty nasty is happening here. And by the way, a white supremacist publisher of fake news is going to be chief strategist in the Trump White House.

But I will tell you one thing: think twice before you complain about the "mainstream media". News organisations aren't perfect, but they've been basically your only bulwark against all this. Indeed, one of the few pleasures of the ghastly Presidential campaign was discovering the work of a host of good journalists – from David Farenthold at the Post to feisty independents like Sarah Kendzior. It's not just the Post and the Times, it's  Buzzfeed and Snopes and a hundred others. It's all those people literally put in a pen at Trump rallies. It's going to be a tough few years for some of them.

A couple of days ago, Silicon Valley investor and "contrarian" Keith Rabois posted a string of tweets along these lines.

Wait until journalists learn that today's AI is close to writing news stories on par or better than they do.

— Keith Rabois (@rabois) November 12, 2016

He seemed to enjoy the idea. We should run screaming from it. As Facebook moved from human curation to trust arficial intelligence to sift it stories, fakery exploded. It was a Google algorithm, not an editor, that made a wholly false claim about the popular vote the "top" story in its rankings. The idea that AI will actually write most of the news we see is genuinely horrifying.

Be nice to the next journalist you see. You'll need us.

The second episode of From Zero is available online this tumultuous morning. It's about cannabis.

I talked to quite a range of people for this episode: a dealer, a grower, an advocate and two doctors among them. But for wholly understandable reasons, most attention has focused on the interview I did with Helen Kelly, which turned out to be her last interview. A short clip from the video shot by Rebekah Parsons-King went nuts on social media over the weekend.

Here's a longer one:

Helen, being Helen, sought to deflect praise on to other people throughout the interview – but she did, in the end, accept credit for changing the conversation around not only medical cannabis, but cannabis in general. And then, after the interview, a funny thing happened – but I'll let you hear that for yourself.

One of the really pleasant parts of the gig so far has been paying a visit to Gerard Hindmarsh, one of the first wave of idealistic hippies to move to Golden Bay in the mid-70s – and plant marijuana. The episode opens with a walk around the 12-acre property he bought back then. Where a farmer would have drained the swamp on the land, he built around it. It's a heavenly place. He also showed me where he used to have a few plants, for personal:

There's also a gallery of pictures on the show page on the RNZ site, including a pretty impressive water pipe at the Hemp Store.

Even given what happened with ballot initiatives in the US last week, prospects for cannabis law reform in New Zealand seem slim right now. Only last Friday, I was in the room for a speech by John Key in which he reiterated that any kind of law reform was off the table, because "the message it would send to young people". Or something.

Anyway, I'm proud of this episode and grateful to everyone who helped. Have a listen.