Posts by philipmatthews
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It is rumored that $15,000 of the recording costs went to capturing the right theremin take.
Worth every cent.
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Bleach has sold north of 1.7 million copies -- quite an accomplishment for an album that, on its back cover, wryly proclaims that it cost a paltry $500 to record the 13 tracks. I'm not sure anyone told Kurt Cobain of its populatiry, though -- before launching into "About a Girl" from Nirvana's MTV Unplugged set in 1994, the singer deadpans, "This is off our first record. Most people don't own it."
But Bleach had only sold 30,000 copies before it got to piggbyback on the success of a much more expensively recorded-in-Hollywood-for-a-major-label follow up ($65K in 1991 money). A follow-up that took off because of MTV's high rotate of a well-made video ...
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had a similar cultural frisson yesterday
hearing The Smiths' This Charming Man
in the queue at the BNZ...And when you ring the call centre: How Soon Is Now?
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Robbie -- you would have agreed with Vicki Anderson's great opinion piece in the paper this morning? Eg:
just what is happening at NZ On Air? While the funding schemes available are appreciated by those who use them, just when is this government going to get around to chucking a few "funding advisers" and their labelmate buddies off this gliding- on-type gravy train?
They really are taking the mick.
It's well and truly time for new blood. If any organisation needs a shake-up and a good prodding by a group of bureacrats with calculators, NZ On Air is it.
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Maybe she didn't know what she was given.
I think it's more that she didn't have any genuine personality in the first place.
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Good column. I like a bit of teen-pop mania as well so I didn't mind the (what felt like) half an hour 3 News gave Bieber last night.
But I suspect there's a bit more to the we'd-never-heard-of-him factor. If Simon Reynolds and other critics are right -- and I think they are -- about how the rock/pop mainstream has fragmented into many self-sufficient genres, and will fragment more and more with the way the industry is changing, then someone can be a huge act for teens without anyone your age or mine ever hearing of them. I imagine that people in their 30s and 40s had at least heard of The Beatles, The Osmonds, Bay City Rollers, Jackson Five, and so on in the 60s and 70s. Media was so much more monolithic and music had few outlets.
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More about it here. No big surprise to see a link with Ponsonby DCs who had a slightly better novelty hit a bit earlier -- "G'day Mate" (there's probably a YouTube link but I'm not going to).
I remember that show. Your worst light entertainment nightmare.
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That Harper Lee namecheck reminds me to link to this very interesting story about a guy who nearly published a JD Salinger book and blew it.
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I was rather bemused at another comment suggesting that All Visitors Ashore was some kind of "revenge" on Frame. Not so sure about that - "Celia Skyways" is no more ridiculous than anyone else in that tragi-comic farce.
I saw that too. But if you look at the comment, you see that the connection was actually made by Michael King in his Janet Frame biography.
There was also a lively discussion of all this at The Dim Post.
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I've just picked up Cormack McCarthy's 'The Road', putting me in probably the same place vis-a-vis other people as you are with the Wire. It's bleak. And my workmate kinda ruined it by saying <SPOILER>: "And you keep hoping something will get better and it never does."
I guess your workmate stopped reading a couple of pages before the end.
And how many people (including my Aunt, who has always been my inspiration for good literature, introducing me to the likes of Vonnegut and Pynchon when I was a teenager) are going to tell me I *must read* 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'. I'm sure its addictively good, like Dunkin Donuts and Steven King, but a little piece of me will surely die...
Colm Toibin had a good comment on this the other day, on radio: he sees these books everyone else is reading and immediately wants to read George Eliot or something no one is reading.