90s hardcore will never die.



Once again the battle field is your body and those
Who want control have laid down their terms in
Black & white
And red all over
They keep the backstreet butchers in
Business as advertised
From a bullhorn
And the all knowing
Man has set up his make-believe graveyard
With tiny white crosses for millions of
Make-believe souls
Someday I'd like to see
A cross set up for a real live
Human being who bled to death
To maintain the sanctity of
Mary Mary & child
Scream the bigots who couldn't care less
Couldn't care less about human life
Obey their self-righteous lies
While your sisters & daughters die
All decisions are final
Your body is forbidden.

From hardcore to beyond... how hardcore shaped late 20th century rock music.

( Video orgy! )

Feel free to play along. Post one hardcore song/video and a later style of rock that directly descended from it.

Legendary UK music writer Jon Savage has finally released his curated best-of first wave California punk compliation "Black Hole."

Savage is, of course, the well-respected journalist and author of the UK punk tome "England's Dreaming" and an all-around incredible historian.

I'm hoping that all of the press and media I've seen thus far is to blame for the large, glaring errors I'm reading, and not Savage himself. Most pieces I've read cannot tell the difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which is frustrating. I suppose we can forgive this as most Americans don't know the difference between London and Leeds.

It's great to see Savage extending an olive branch to the US/California punk scene. The prevailing attitude of the time was that the UK or the US/NY people defined punk. The US west coast wasn't even in the picture, even though Savage gave his support from more or less its beginning.

The compilation itself? Of course it's amazing, but it's not really for the US audience. If you cared stateside about this music, you'd already have "What Stuff" or the Dangerhouse compilations and this new disc has very little that those do not.

Punks from this time always manage to register complaints against hardcore, the movement that ultimately brought about punk's demise, or at least as it was known at the time.

I always feel bad for people who couldn't grasp hardcore. It's understandable from a demographic POV. The inner-city art crowd meets the angry suburban male, and the results often looked pretty ugly. I am sure if I was one of the former at the time, I'd be pissed off too.

But hardcore - aside from being GREAT, I'll never back away from that - was responsible for turning punk into a folk music, which then began a long transformation for at least a decade until it came full circle. Despite the bullshit of violence, jocks, stupidity and such, it still managed to create music and art every bit as inspiring as the music made by its forebearers.

Hardcore was also responsible for changing the way rock music was made. Up until then, almost all rock music (almost, but not all) was directly influenced by rhythm and blues music. Even punk often followed very traditional chord changes and time signatures. The "no-wave" scene in NYC was innovative and influential, true, and things now categorized as "post-punk" provided great leaps forward. But hardcore took the guitar rule book and completely threw it out. It was a complete rewrite, a back-to-basics approach to songwriting. And out of hardcore came "indie rock" and "post-rock" and "math-rock" as well as "grindcore", many flavors of "metal" and the juggernaut of "alternative rock" as we know it today.

Articles of Faith singer Vic Bondi says as much in "American Hardcore", correctly pointing out that hardcore felt like the first form of rock music that was not a blatant rip-off of music created by African-Americans. I dunno if hardcore itself was smart enough to do this intentionally, but the break was notable and the previous paragraph attests to that.



I wanna meet Jon Savage. If you're his friend, please show him my blog. :)

Wow, I remember music! And look, two shows on two consecutive nights, both at the Regency Ballroom here in San Francisco.

Do I go to one? Or both?

Enslaved on Sunday!!!



Os Mutantes on Monday?!?



Poll #1649614 Norway, Brazil, or both
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

Which show(s) should I attend this coming week?

View Answers

Enslaved
2 (15.4%)
Os Mutantes
5 (38.5%)
both
6 (46.2%)
neither
0 (0.0%)

I missed the boat on the FM3 "Buddha Machine" and apparently his first release, but Tristan Perich's "1-Bit Symphony" is totally ruling me at the moment.

It's not a CD. It's a damn microchip, glued inside a CD jewelcase, programmed with raw 1-bit sounds in a sort of frenzied, glitchy soundscape way. I don't listen to a lot of this type of music, but I'd categorize it as minimalist avant-garde electronica.

I like it!

The device includes a headphone jack, a volume wheel and a fast forward button. It's entirely self-contained, powered by a common watch battery that lasts 20 hours and can be replaced.

A brilliant concept. It only requires headphones to enjoy. It's fragile and not very portable. It demands your full attention. And it's totally unique.

It's an appropriate remedy to the current music paradigm - buy digital files, load them on to your corporate-controlled device, play them in the background and forget about them. Perich's projects evoke the recent history of music - the non-digital, non-shareable, non-interoperable mode of music appreciation that thrived before passive consumption and ephemeral file sharing became the norm.

Purchased - of course - at Aquarius Records, and reviewed by them better than I ever could.

( AQ review )

Lots of people move to Northern California to work in technology. Problem is, Silicon Valley is not the most desirable place to live. It's hella boring. Many people would rather live in San Francisco and spend a few hours a day in rush hour traffic driving up and down the peninsula.

No surprise, then, that lots of tech companies offer free shuttle buses to their SF employees. Lately I've been a little obsessed with them, snapping pictures of them when I see them like they're some kind of rare bird.

IMHO, the buses actually mirror facets of their respective companies. You be the judge.

The GenenBus



It's big, sleek and branded, with a digital ticker in the front. Genentech is a solid, stable company and it shows. There are probably sensors in the seats that perform gene mapping on employees as they ride to work, offering treatment options for as-yet-undiagnosed predisposed health problems when they arrive.

The Apple shuttle bus



Another big, sleek, luxury bus, but totally unbranded. This bus would be totally stealth if it weren't for the giveaway route sign in the front window, rendered in the tell-tale Apple font. Clearly Apple owns this bus and has complete control over its presentation. Hmmmm.

The Yahoo shuttle



Operated by a third party carrier, the only thing that tells you this is a Yahoo bus is the makeshift little sign by the entrance. It's like a cheap cousin of the above, with a banner ad slapped on the side to make a little extra money. Every time I see the "Y!" logo, I want to change it to "Y?" but hey, I don't have to work there. Yet.

I'll continue to add more photos of buses when I get them.

Holy crap!

I need to pay closer attention to music these days.

Now THIS is what I call a fucking music video.

Warning:
Possibly NSFW - contains nudity and extreme violence.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

I don't wanna turn this into a tech blog, and I don't wanna really devote more time talking about my day job, which I view mainly as a source of income and not really fodder for much cultural or intellectual discourse.

However, if anyone's been following the "Apple-Adobe feud" I would like to offer you my take on what's really going on. And I could say that my opinion is the TRUTH, but you are free to make your own judgments. ;)

There are four large software companies fighting for you right now. They are fighting for the future of your personal computing. They are Apple, Microsoft, Google and Adobe. All of them have different business models.

Apple makes an operating system and ties it to hardware, where they are making boatloads of money.

Microsoft makes an operating system, some hardware, dabbles in many things and is virtually ubiquitous.

Google makes web software and a web platform, with small investments in the areas that compete with the above.

Adobe makes web software and a web platform, and desktop tools to make just about everything.

I may be late to this party, but Chatroulette is going to change the face of the web. It's the future. That might sound a bit far-fetched and presumptuous, but tell me that in six months.

If some self-professed Web 2.0 or social-media-scientist hasn't coined a term for it yet, someone will soon. Shotgun video conferencing? N-way webchat? It will be huge. And it will make even Twitter look intellectual in comparison.

"Back in the day, my kids used to actually type messages to each other... 140 characters long even! Now all they do is use the web cam."

So many things to say about this site, but two of the most interesting to me at the moment:

• This idea is hardly new. We had CU-SeeMe back in the mid-90s and it was pretty much the same thing. What makes it different now is slicker technology and critical mass of users.
  
  
• Chatroulette singlehandedly proves the Apple iPad is worthless as an internet browsing device. There are at least two major technical hurdles to using this site on the device touting "the ultimate browsing experience."