Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to BenWilson,
I'm curious also why you left out radio as a music milestone.
I was more talking of the in-industry delivery mechanisms and technologies rather than the marketing and exposure mediums.
Of course radio was massively important, but over the decades that power waxed and waned for a variety of reasons.
Radio and the record companies were at loggerheads for years, until the 1930s in the US and much longer in Europe and the UK. Record companies wouldn't allow their products to be played on radio and radio insisted on live music. In the middle of that conflict you also had the American Federation of Musicians who were a powerful law unto themselves (they refused to bend to FDR's executive instruction in the early 1940s) until the 1950s, banning music from the airwaves and from shellac at various times.
The power of radio - in the US anyway - really didn't peak until the arrival of programmed Top 40 in the early 1960s (and in the UK/NZ with pirate radio in the mid 1960s onwards).
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to BenWilson,
I missed it in your list of game breakers.
It was a vital technology of course, but so was the electric motor in the turntable (from Victor's labs), the diamond tipped stylus (same) and the introduction of vinyl (thanks to the US DoW and the V discs for troops offshore).
However technology is only as good as what you do with it. Jobs took the technology and harnessed it to a viable delivery system. And doing so - battling the paranoia and reactionary protectionism of the creative dinosaurs - was something he can take full and complete credit for. There were no engineers, forgotten visionaries or other players on his side in that brawl. He had a vision, chose his battles and allies carefully and won.
And without that war you could perhaps successfully argue that there would not have been an app store or the software delivery systems we Apple and Android users now take for granted.
I think I just said what Sacha did :)
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to BenWilson,
You don't think mp3 + Napster rates a mention?
I think I did.
Napster forced the issue no doubt and mp3 provided the technology but it was iTunes which opened the door to the digital delivery mechanisms that saved the big labels. And it was Jobs and Jobs alone who did this.
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Stephen Judd,
It's hard to say what he actually invented though beyond an incredibly appealing brand.
I'd argue that - for better or worse - iTunes is the seventh pivotal waypoint in the history of recorded music*.
Jobs may have not invented the MP3 but he invented a way of dispersing them that (eventually) satisfied the creators and the media giants - and in doing so completely reinvented the moribund record industry and offered it a way out of the hole it was rapidly digging itself.
They hated him for it and there are all sorts of questions about control, quality, manipulation and bullying but it was without question an utterly brilliant creation on so many many levels.
All that despite having perhaps the least attractive and efficient Apple interface since the Newton.
*The others being Edison's Cylinder, Berliner's Flat Disc, Bell Labs' Electrical Recording, BASF's Magnetic Tape, the RCA 45/CBS Microgroove, and Sony/Philips' CD.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Sacha,
is that just retaining the rhythm of their own more intonation-based languages?
I guess. It's interesting to note the influences of non-English tongues around the world - Yiddish in NYC for example.
Places like HK & SG are similar melting pots of languages and dialects.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Brent Jackson,
For Asians even with moderately good English, this must be very hard.
In Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, where English is a first language to many, I find it very hard to make myself understood at times, especially away from the urban centres.
And the West Pacific English dialect they speak day to day, which I guess is spoken by far more people than our variety, sounds very stilted, almost staccato, to my ears.
could be the results of American TV too
An American a wee while back insisted to me that folk in Hong Kong had such a reasonable grasp of English because they'd picked it up from US movies and TV.
He was immovable even when the history was explained.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Sacha,
Nah, that's just wrong, eh. :)
It was a very, very long time ago. I could've substituted Lion Brown or similar but not much else. A Steinie was the height of Kiwi sophistication then.
It was. Really.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Every time we came home to visit we'd sit in the departure lounge quietly listening to the people around talking .... it was wonderful
Heh - I do that, or things like it. Even after just a few months away the departure lounge on a flight to Auckland is mesmerizing.
Coming back to Auckland in the mid 1980s, after three years away, when I boarded an Air NZ flight and was offered a Steinlager I had to fight back a very happy tear.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Russell Brown,
We share remarkably little of each other's news, and it feels somewhat culturally different when I'm there.
I'm quite intrigued by this. I - and I guess many others on here - come from an era when the gap between Australia and New Zealand was much clearer than it is now. Pre-internet and pre-80 TV channels Australia had a mystery, a murky fascination and reputation as bigger, harder and much faster. It was sophisticated in both good and bad ways and far less naive.
When I moved to Sydney in 1979 I quickly worked out that mostly the reputation had substance - Sydney was another world of badness, hardness, money and glamour that we simply didn't come close to emulating.
However over the next couple of decades gap disappeared somewhat. Auckland may still not be Sydney in many ways but we lost our innocence rather quickly and by the time I was going trans-Tasman every two or three months in the mid 1990s to early 2000s (38 times in 10 years!) it had become a fairly seemless transition from one to the other - mostly we did and thought the same way.
I reckon this has broken down even more in the past decade as a trip to Sydney for a weekend becomes common for many and our League team plays as part of the internal Oz competition. Ak to Sydney's cheaper than flying to Wellington sometimes.
After the earlier post I asked a bunch today whether they saw Australia as a foreign land and the response was split age wise. A couple of people over 40 very much saw it as a foreign land, whereas the sole 20 yr old said 'nah, it's just another 'burb.'
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to BenWilson,
Simon's difficulty in distinguishing the accents is, I suspect, a function of living in neither country.
I guess there is that. Brigid and I play a game on the train in Bangkok sometimes to kill a moment - you see an antipodean (they stand out strongly) and try to pick whether they're Australian or New Zealanders. The voice sometimes gives it away but it's increasingly hard and when the voice is identifiable at least half the time we're wrong. The two nations' tourists seem to walk, talk, develop bodily, dress and react to external stimuli in almost homogeneous ways, and increasingly so. Far more so than than Canadians and Americans - perhaps the closest equivalence I can think of.
I think we like to think the gap is more identifiable than it perhaps is to observers.
Australians, a very surprising 1,000,000 out of 21 million, so only 4.8%
I'm very surprised by that given the number you encounter everywhere compared to the pleasurable and much rarer encounter with New Zealanders. I guess that's because we are mostly in Oz and then clustered in the UK and Eastern US.
We share remarkably little of each other's news
Right now the glaring difference is probably that they have news. A foreigner arriving in NZ right now could be forgiven - looking at the first six or so pages of the NZ Herald and almost the nightly entirety of TVNZ and TV3's nightly bulletins - for assuming that we simply don't cover external news here.