Video of the Week: The Making of ‘Aura’, the Stunning Light Show at Montréal’s Notre-Dame Basilica
13 May 2018 Leave a comment
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Loreena McKennitt: Why I’m leaving Facebook
11 May 2018 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: Loreena McKennitt
(Richard Haughton photo)
The invasion of privacy and erosion of human rights, the weaponizing of our personal data, the destruction of the music and news industries, a platform designed to be addictive — the time has come to act, writes Loreena McKennitt.
By (via the star)
I remember as a rambunctious red-headed tomboy running around the house with my playmates and my mother admonishing me, “Don’t run so fast, you’ll break something!” And sure enough, sometimes we did.
Now, decades later, those words come flooding back as I reflect on the defining motto of Silicon Valley, “move fast and break things.” In particular, I think of Facebook.
In response to the recent revelations of its misuse of personal data, I’ve decided to leave the platform and encourage my half-million-plus followers to instead keep in touch through my website. I’m told this is a path of professional suicide, especially as I’m about to release a new recording.
Times have certainly changed in the music business since I started out busking in the 1980s. Some would argue we were the first industry to be broken…
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The Low Notes: Examining The Worst Songs Of All Time
11 May 2018 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: worst songs of all time
(via urbo) by Jamie Wiles
They say music is subjective, but don’t tell that to the critics.
Lester Bangs, the patron saint of U.S. rock criticism, once said that, “The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.” Yet plenty of music critics get paid to make that mistake, and even more do it on a volunteer basis.
Paid or not, critics seem to assume that the creators of a song are, like, morally culpable for the quality of their product. People hate few things like they hate a bad song. Maybe that’s just because no nuanced weighing of relative merits is as fun as a thorough critical hatchet job.
That’s why we have Sean Beaudoin in Salon sneering at the “10 Bands [He] Will Be Forced to Listen To in Hell.” (Beaudoin goes on to trash The Beach Boys, a band that inspired luminaries from The Beatles to My Bloody Valentine.) It’s why we have Pitchfork, the website that once said of Sonic Youth: “These 40+year olds continue to operate under the perception that they matter.”
Here’s the weird thing about paying really, really close attention to pop music, though: The closer you look at a given track, the harder it is to discard it out-of-hand. When you pry a song open to check out its composite elements—harmonic structure, melodic lines, counterpoint, rhythmic shifts, dynamics, all the nuts and bolts of the pop tradition—pretty much everything is at least interesting. Even the terrible stuff…
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https://www.urbo.com/content/examining-the-worst-songs-of-all-time/
Every Moment Has A Song 