Grünerlykke 2011: Valget er klart for alle poptryner. Du må stemme på Martin — Martin Grüner!

I kvar som gjeng og som rid og køyrer,
d'er deg eg ser; deg i alt eg høyrer:
I song og synth- og technolåt,
men endå best i min eigen gråt.

– A.O. Vinje, poptryne

A.O. Vinjes spøkelse, som hjemsøker Twitter som @AasmundVinjeboy, har noe uventet vist seg å bli blant Grünerkampanjens sterkeste støttespillere. Han har nå, i sin rolle som leder for Austnorsk Poplag, bidratt med kampanjens første og så langt eneste valgkampsang! Den heter "Lei martini og gamle tryner? Stem på Martin, Martin Grüner", og er embedded rett under dette. Sjangervalget er, for Vinje å være, litt ... uventet. Hans eneste krav som takk var min valgkampslovnad om at Carl I. Hagen kommer til å bli tvunget til å skrive nynorsk når Grünerne har makta.

Lei martini og gamle tryner Stem på Martin, Martin Grüner by austnorskpoplaug

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Du må også passe på å høre på valgsangen til den andre Grünerkampanjen. Der er budskapet litt mer antagonistisk. Tittelen er "Stæm inkje på Mikkel Grüner, han er danskajævel". Jeg tror det er en vinner!

Stæm inkje på Mikkel Grüner, han er danskajævel by austnorskpoplaug

Uansett: Her i Grünerkampanjens Oslohovedkvarter er vi dypt beveget og takknemmelige overfor Austnorsk Poplag, som for alltid kommer til å ha en plass i samfunnet etter vi har gjennomført verdensrevolusjonen. Det straumer på meg so eg knapt kan anda!

Doctorow on Norwegian Piracy Study

Cory Doctorow is, as always, making a lot of sense – this time about the Norwegian BI study that shows that pirates are 10 times as likely to buy music as non-"pirates". He makes two key points. First he explains the result in an intuitive manner:

There's a simple explanation for this: if you really love music, you do lots of music-related things. If you're in the 20 percent of fans that buys 80 percent of records, you're probably in the 20 percent of downloaders that download 80 percent of music, the 20 percent of concertgoers that buy 80 percent of the tickets, and so on. The moral is that music superfans love music and structure their lives around it.

Which means that when the music industry targets "the worst offenders" in its legal campaigns against downloaders, the people they're attacking are the ones who are spending the most on music.

Second, he looks at piracy as progressive taxation according to artist success. This closely aligns with my experience of music pirates. Very few people want to buy Britney Spears, because they're not invested in the artist. They are heavily invested in a particular song. We want to download "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)" and play it at our high school reunion. We don't want the complete Spears oeuvre. As one commenter on Boing Boing puts it "I no longer buy records that suck. And I check out more bands. That's what piracy does for me."

So artists such as Spears, who depend in their business model on constantly attracting attention from newly converted, but fundamentally low- and short-term-interest around hit singles, rather than a complete catalogue, will lose some money:

As Doctorow puts it:

Now, does this mean that downloads end up interfering with sales of music, or not? My guess is that it's a little of both. As Tim O'Reilly wrote, Piracy is Progressive Taxation. Obscure acts probably get more sales than they lose. Modestly well-known acts probably lose and gain about the same. Very famous performers probably lose a little. This has been the conclusion in the quantitative studies in music and books to date, and it makes sense to me.

Me too.

Dreaming about Africa

So last night, having slept like the dead for 45 minutes, I found myself suddenly awake, sitting up on the sofa, exclaiming "CONGO! CONGO!"

I haven't, to my knowledge, done something like that in years.

This morning, the front page of the paper reads

DANGER OF MAJOR WAR
The conflict in Eastern Congo could spread to the entire region and trigger a major African war, fears the head of the UN. Yesterday, Congolese soldiers drew closer and closer to the rebel army. Over 250.000 people have been sent running in the last few days.

And then I learn that basically Congo has been tearing itself to pieces for a while now. My all-Obama-all-the-time filter probably kept that news out of my consciousness until it surfaced in this strange way.

I'm going to Africa in 10 days, but fortunately not near Congo. I'll be in Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa.

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Speaking of Africa, if you ever get the chance to see Amadou & Mariam live (as I did last night), RUN, don't walk. They're this incredibly sweet blind African couple who play incredibly groovy African blues music:

Love song for the internet age

I've been there:

(Amanda Palmer: "I Google You")

I Sing the Dylan Electric

Man, people really got bent out of shape when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in '65. The story of what happened is the stuff of legends. From the wonderful Wikipedia article "Electric Dylan Controversy":

In the documentary footage, the sound of loud booing and sporadic cheering begins just a few bars into Dylan's first song, "Maggie's Farm", and continues throughout the second, Like A Rolling Stone and "Phantom Engineer", (which evolved into "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry " released on Highway 61 Revisited).

After playing "Phantom Engineer", Dylan told the band, "Let's go, man. That's all", and walked off-stage. The sound of loud booing and clapping can be heard in the background. Peter Yarrow returned to the microphone and begged Dylan to continue performing. Apparently desperate to appease the audience, he assured them that Dylan was "just getting his axe" even before it was clear whether or not he was willing to return solo.

Dylan was, by some accounts, highly distressed. Eventually coaxed back onstage by Yarrow and Joan Baez, he realized he didn't have the right harmonica, and lashed out at Yarrow--"What are you doing to me," he demanded. [4] It was a reasonable question. Yarrow's public hectoring of Dylan to return to the stage was clearly a spur of the moment ploy to soothe the crowd. The band couldn't return (Kooper admitted they had only mastered the three songs they played[5]), so Dylan was essentially being forced to perform an impromptu acoustic set on a night when plugging in was a major artistic statement. And Dylan, his voice betraying real nervousness and distress, had to beg the audience for 'an E harmonica'. Within a few moments a clatter of harmonicas hit the stage. He snapped one up out the darkness and returned to the spotlight with a Chaplinesque flourish that got a laugh, but certainly the atmosphere was still tense. He then sang two songs to the now-silent audience, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man", clearly relishing the kiss-off theme of the former. The crowd exploded with applause at the end, calling for more. Dylan did not return to the Newport festival for 37 years, and in an oblique nod to the events that transpired in 1965, his 2002 appearance was the only time he's performed in a wig and fake beard.
[emphasis mine]

Esbjörn Svensson has died

I just got the terrible news that the Swedish jazz pianist Esbjörn Svensson of EST (the Esbjörn Svensson Trio) has died in a diving accident, only 44 years old.

I interviewed Svensson at least once. He struck me as a wonderfully friendly, articulate guy with a lot of humility about his work.

I'm not sure I always liked the direction they were taking the trio in the last couple of years (flirting with varying degrees of success with electonics, moving in a more pop/rock/easy listning direction – even though I'm not really much of a jazz purist, I never thought it worked when they got too "easy"). But I won't soon forget the concert they gave at USF in Bergen in 2002. I was having a bad month of epic, biblical proportions. (The kind of month where the bills pile up, you do badly on exams, a flock of locusts threaten your crops, barbarians pillage your tribe and hear the lamentation of your women, fire and brimstone fall from the sky, etc.) I came late, and walked in in the middle of "And God Created the Coffee Break":



And I felt my foot tapping, and then they segued into an extraordinary version of "Behind the Yashmak":



And after that it just got better and better. And seriously, I think that concert was the only time I felt really happy for like three months.

In Rainbows

I just bought the new Radiohead album I'm dying to hear it. Here's the opening track. It's all clappy. Not crappy. Clappy

As a follow-up to the Clinton piece below, here's an enormous profile of Clinton in the New Yorker.

(oh, and here's a completely nauseating, beatifying puff-piece on Clinton written by Alistair Campbell. It turns out that Campbell is not just good at sexing up dossiers that leads one to go to war under false pretenses, he can also sex up the confoundingly, neither-nor career of a president. Anyone who says that any president or national leader is right in everything that they do is just plain wrong, and therefore not your friend. That having been said, I long for the sunnier days of the Clinton presidency.)

Completely unrelated: here is an article I found on an album of music recorded during tuning and between concerts. The cacophonic effect of the orchestra rehearsing separately in the same room is like listening to a flock of birds. Quite beautiful. Here's a sample track where the woodwinds go crazy. Listen for quite atonal readings of "Oh Suzanna" and "Deilig er jorden" (English title?). More clips in the NY Times article. (via Suttonhoo)