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"Wire contributor, semi-mythical pop svengali, erstwhile thespian, sampler troubadour and untidy kitchen user" - Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy

"Your songs are pretty little paths - take us somewhere nice." - Elodie Amandine Roy, Applejack Zine
And another thing ...
There are two further senses in which we can see Avatar as a conservative film. As Socialism and/or Barbarism puts it, “Avatar is possible the most staggering display of pure plenitude ever…
8 years ago
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The Angola Three

A new film entitled In the land of the free… tells the story of the Angola 3, Robert King, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, each forced to spend thirty years or more in solitary…
8 years ago
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My father never associated a song with a particular performer, and that was typical for the ‘teens and ’20s. A new hit might be introduced by a star like Sophie Tucker, but it was sung and played by everybody. In the days when printed music was the lifeblood of the music business, this was vitally important, because if a song became so closely associated with a single performer that nobody else wanted to sing it, that would hurt the sheet music sales. In most cases, rather than getting a single big boost from a major star or a Broadway show, a song would be circulated by people hired by the publisher as song pluggers, and the idea was to get it sung and played by as many different artists and in as many different venues as possible.

Elijah Wald, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock And Roll

I’m not just posting this quote about viral marketing in the 1910s for “nothing new under the sun” reasons, though it does remind me a bit of the ‘Big Seed’ principle of virality: Duncan Watt’s idea that basically the most successful way of spreading a meme is to get it to as many unconnected people as possible as quickly as possible.

But of course a Broadway show is a good way of doing that - as indeed is broadcast media. So what’s interesting in the 1910s model is the idea Wald introduces of resistance to a single source: “if a song became so closely associated with a single performer that nobody else wanted to sing it”

Did this actually happen? Enough to make a difference? It’s an interesting idea but it may just be Wald’s conjecture. If true, are there similar mechanisms at work in the spread of memes?

As someone who’s spent a bit of time hanging out with boho early adopter types online - in the world of pop, at least - there’s definitely some truth, sometimes, to the cliche about stopping liking something when it becomes popular. Usually it’s not exactly “stopping liking”, more “stopping showing public interest”, but there’s something to it nonetheless.

That’s not quite what Wald’s on about either, though. The equivalent would be people not passing on a story because a top site - boingboing or kottke or wired - was the source. And obviously that doesn’t seem to be what happens. That isn’t to say it’s not a factor: writing for Pitchfork I’m aware that there are plenty of people who partly define themselves against a site and its priorities or recommendations. Of course, a pageview is a pageview is a pageview so it’s not like Pitchfork worries, but in terms of the transmission of content and what its transmitters do to it, you have to take this resistance and ‘anti-influence’ into account.

So what else might account for the successful strategy in the 1910s being multi-artist, multi-venue seeding? Probably it was simply that the differential between the audience reached by the big venues and the small wasn’t great enough to make the more difficult business of concentrating on the big venues worthwhile. Pre-radio the maximum audience size for a performance of a song was a great deal smaller, which was what made it difficult - or impossible - to establish a ‘definitive’ version, rather than any innate audience dislike of the idea.

(via blackbeardblog)

8 years ago
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submersibledirigible:
“Space Shuttle STS-130 Launch
Endeavour (OV-105)
February 8, 2010
Final Night Launch Of The Space Shuttle Program
”

submersibledirigible:

Space Shuttle STS-130 Launch
Endeavour (OV-105)
February 8, 2010

Final Night Launch Of The Space Shuttle Program

8 years ago
2 notes
Settling an Old Score
“And the whole thing about scoring music is this anachronism writ in 20 foot tall neon writing. Who the hell would attempt to do something as inane as scoring music? In the 21st Century it’s an…
8 years ago
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"Like a wind-up toy, you stutter at my feet" : Towards an Aesthetics of Stammering

The Shows of London is a small reading group, based out of the King’s College English department and interested primarily in the “entertainment and display cultures of nineteenth century…
8 years ago
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A rare photo of Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram together, believed to have been taken by Malcolm Clarke at the 25th anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram left the Workshop several years before Derbyshire joined, in order to set up her...

A rare photo of Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram together, believed to have been taken by Malcolm Clarke at the 25th anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram left the Workshop several years before Derbyshire joined, in order to set up her own studio nd develop her Oramics system, but apparently the two became friends in later life, visiting each other regularly in the years before they both passed away, within two years of each other, at the very start of the 21st century. Photo is copyright Brian Hodgson.

8 years ago
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Other Special Sounds Including Dipthongs
It is now a little over a month since our last journey into the very bowels of Greenwich, the deep red underground interior of Oliver’s Music Bar. Having lost its left output some time…
8 years ago
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Special Sounds in Camden

So, I have been given “carte blanche” to play whatever I like at my four hour DJ set over at the Lock Tavern next week (Wednesday, the 10th of March). I have promised to play things you…
8 years ago
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I look down at my laptop screen...

A curious thing about watching films on one’s laptop is that one tends to look down at it. My eyes are more used to looking up at a cinema screen, or straight ahead at a television,…
8 years ago
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New Pipettes Video and Free Download
8 years ago
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New song and sci-fi video from The PIpettes - ‘Our Love Was Saved by Spacemen’ produced by Martin Rushent. Download the song for free from http://www.thepipettes.co.uk

8 years ago
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The Opera of the Future

What might a possible opera of the future look like? As the human genome becomes increasingly manipulable, we can imagine, for instance, the return of the male castrati singer - castrated,…
8 years ago
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"Question Time without any Nazis" : Mark Thomas's 'Manifesto'

I had some sympathy at first for the suggestion, made initially, I believe, by Alex Andrews on Twitter, that it might just be worth attempting some Obama-style ‘town hall meetings’…
8 years ago
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Join a Little Orchestra

Little Other presents a Little Orchestra … at the moment, it’s actually a very little orchestra, but it’s growing - and hopefully, growing in such a way as to include you. Ever learnt…
8 years ago
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