Rock songwriting peaked with Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill.”
Discuss.
Also – Can we talk about how awesome Manu Katche on drums is? The bald bass player gets all the attention but Katche kills it by taking what’s a simple part and making it more full while not taking away from the original at all. Just fantastic.
Like, no one should have a tattoo of Huey Lewis and the News, for heaven’s sake. But if you don’t absent-mindedly nod your head to “If This Is It” then you are a false human, made of synthetic plastic and lying to everyone about everything.
via Bands That Did Their Damn Job – CollegeHumor Article.
This whole thing is pretty funny. There are a lot of bands that I like a lot that would fall into this category: They’re nowhere near my favorite but I like their stuff a lot and listen to it often because it does what it needs to do.
Last week the trailer for The Internship was released. It’s terrible on a number of levels, from the ridiculous levels of cultural ignorance shown by Vaughn and Wilson’s characters (they know The Hunger Games but not X-Men? Really?) to the tired generational jokes on display here. But in an odd way it appears that this is to Silicon Valley what Top Gun was to the defense industry, a thinly veiled piece of propaganda wrapped in a homoerotic narrative.
More interesting than the trailer itself (which isn’t a high bar to clear) is the way it was released, via Google+ Hangout, showing just how much corporate involvement there was in the movie’s making and how they see the movie as a giant commercial.
There’s a lot of meaning about the nature web content packed into this sentence from Tumblr in their announcement of a redesigned publishing interface:
After months of careful crafting, we’ve reduced creation on Tumblr to its essence, while carrying over every single feature and making room for some BIG new ones (like completely customizable drag-and-drop photoset creation, faster uploads, and inline reblogging!).
There’s so much about the state of online news media that is summed up in this paragraph in a story about Slate and the pivots it’s trying to make:
In this regard, Slate is like other high-minded publications navigating a tough, even contradictory mission. On one hand, they promise smart and independent ideas; on the other, they’re heeding social media metrics that could tug them to the lowest common denominator. While news sites like BuzzFeed cut their teeth on silly cat photos only to climb up the intellectual and media food chain, it’s unclear whether this process can work in the opposite direction.
The ending of The Verge’s piece on the current state of traffic and editorial direction at digg is all about how the site, at this moment, isn’t giving people enough power and say in what stories are surfaced on the front page and how there aren’t profiles people can set up. And it ends with this conclusion:
The last time Digg took some control back from users was in 2010, when the “version 4” redesign caused a revolt and mass exodus to Reddit. That level of disaster hasn’t happened with this redesign. But without empowering its users, Digg may have trouble making a real dent in the online conversation.
Heading to San Fran for a few days. Leaving O’Hare about an hour and a half late but none the worse for wear.
My latest on Voce Nation.
