“Yeah, I’m trying to get to a new thing, I work hard at it, really, it’s not about cut and paste, it’s not about sounding post-modern, that’s not the point. I don’t care about what it refers to. It’s like, just listen to the music. Does it turn you on? Do you hate it? I just want to get to the basic human reaction, not the preconceived ideas, not the prejudices, not the categories, not placing the music on a linear time line and writing it off that way. Which is difficult now. We’ve seen so much, done so much and heard so much. You know, it’s really hard to do something new. I think you can just keep playing the same thing over and over, and rock’n’roll will never die, people will always like electric guitars, people need electric guitars. And on the other side of the coin you can start playing techno and electronic music and that is a sound that doesn’t have anything to do with 1965, but it’s limited to a certain amount of sound. I don’t want to be limited. I want to be able to use any musical texture that makes sense and makes the song interesting.” — Beck
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“The record industry suing file sharers is like the railroad industry trying to shoot down airplanes.” — Kenn Waagner, digital guru for Wilco
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“Piracy? The biggest pirates have been the record companies. The people running the record labels are lawyers and accountants, and they could be selling Brillo pads for all they care. It’s not about the art at all. So when people download a song, if it’s a good song, people want the artist. People worship Eric Clapton or Ray Charles. What they do is bigger than any song. Downloading music gives people a chance to be exposed to an artist, not just a Brillo-pad manufacturer.” — Chuck D of the Beastie Boys
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Introducing the Hexadecagon.
Read about it about it over at the Octopus Project website, and while you’re at it check out their awesome music video.
“The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions concerning it.” —
- Nicholas Nixon
(via David Blakeman)
Check out my friend Tom’s project on Kickstarter:
Sound Through Sight: A Gonzo Road Trip To Understand Music In 2010
“Picture Chuck Klosterman and Alexis de Tocquevillie joining Hunter S. Thompson, going not on a drug-fueled rampage across Las Vegas but on a trip of discovery across America, seeking to understand where music and the music industry stands in 2010, how we got here, and where we’re going. We are three passionate young music lovers who intend to do just that. To understand these questions and to look for answers, we are going on a Gonzo road trip, searching for insights and answers on the back roads of America. We will then write a book on the trip which attempts to answers those questions we just posed. We will also create a book of photography from our travels across North America and a short documentary about the music we encounter on this trip.
We are Tom Williams, a writer, Sarah Mulligan, a photographer, and John Kwamya, a filmmaker, and we are each going to attempt to find the answers through own respective mediums.”
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