A disappointingly small percentage of the DIY zine movement survived the transition from print to digital unscathed. Fortunately Henry Owings’ Athens, Georgia-centric Chunklet crossed the rubicon not only unscathed but skillfully, maintaining the magazine’s near-obsessive love of bands few knew about then and fewer remember now, adding the ability for like-minded aficionados to download and hear rare, sometimes never-released recordings. Couldn’t do that on paper!
Looks like the most recent issue of the print magazine was about fifteen months ago, but considering there was a three-year gap before that one came out I wouldn’t expect anything too quickly. Never mind, plenty of stuff here to catch up on.
You will almost certainly have zero interest in this if you aren’t into comics, but recently I’ve been enjoying watching the CCW TV Comic Culture Warrior youtube channel. Rather than bother to describe it myself I’ll just copy/paste their self-description below:
The CCW YouTube Channel features conversations between columnist/comic-book writer Elliott Serrano & comic shop retailer Jose Melendez, featuring reviews of their favorite comics, rants about the ones they dislike and talk about anything in the world of comic & pop culture. Elliott Serrano is a writer/columnist/graphic artist/geek who has been reading comics since he was 8 years old. Jose Melendez is a comic shop manager who has worked for several franchises in the Chicago area. Both of these comic-nerds have plenty to say about everything, especially when it comes to comic books.
So yeah, it’s a single-cam static shot internet TV show of two guys talking about comics, exactly what you would think it would be — but better. I find myself entertained by most of it, far above and beyond what I expected, frankly. I still have no interest in reading Serrano’s ridiculously-themed Ash Saves Obama comic (yes, there really is such a thing) but the guys have opinions that are well-reasoned and thought-out for the most part, and passionate and honest even when they’re not.
If the CCW TV dynamic — “snarky thin guy and generally more forgiving less thin guy perform cultural review in the Chicago area” — seems familiar, well, it’s because it was done to perfection by Siskel and Ebert, whose partnership created the template after which CCW TV is patterned. In fact, frankly, I’d like to see Serrano and Melendez adhere to the S&E model even more closely: very very often, CCW TV episodes take the form of its two leads in agreement, vigorously petitioning their audience to support a book they both like. However, as any At The Movies/And The Movies viewer could tell you, it’s at the points where the hosts’ opinions diverge that real onscreen drama occurs, allowing more topics for debate and discussion to arise naturally through conversation. And really, the joint admonitions and endorsements do get repetitive over time — “I like this book” “So do I” is just not an interesting conversation unless you wrote/drew the book in question.
Obviously, out of hundreds of ten-minute (for the most part) videos there are going to be ups and downs and I haven’t watched the majority of the older videos, but in my limited experience I’d have to say the magnum opus of CCW TV is theirthree-partreview of Batman: Battle for the Cowl #3, which was an utterly unnecessary, terrible comic DC put out to fill the hole in their publishing schedule while they readied Grant Morrison’s Batman & Robin and Greg Rucka/JH Williams III’s “Batwoman” in Detective Comics, both of which are pure awesome. Basically the awfulness of Battle for the Cowl #3 causes Jose’s brain to explode beautifully and horrifically, the scope from his rant expanding outwards from one shitty comic to indict creators, publishers, fans, and the entire comic industry, among others. His pain and frustration is palpably evident — these are guys who care about comics — but despite Jose’s often sneering tone, they never (okay, rarely) descend into easy kneejerk snark or glib fanboyisms. Plus, unlike 99.999% of comics reviewers, they aren’t absolute idiots with no taste, sense, or critical thinking facilities — always a nice bonus.
Recently gnats have become a persistent minor annoyance here in San Diego, to me anyway. A couple of searches suggested to me the home remedy of leaving a glass out with a mixture of cider vinegar and hand/dish soap. Fortunately I happened to have both components on hand already, because if the suggested remedy had involved getting something specific there’s no way I would have ever gotten around to it. But this morning before leaving for work I left about three ounces of vinegar with a squirt of dish soap, promptly forgot all about it, and returned home this evening to find three dead gnats submerged at the bottom of the glass. Victory through firepower!
Michael from Musibility contacted me recently, asking some relevant questions about copywriting, music, and the nebulous area I inhabit where the two intersect. It turned into a full-blown interview, which I found interesting enough to save, document, and post below:
Q: I found that you’re a musician as well as a copywriter. I thought you’d be the perfect candidate to know both sides. Let’s say there’s an artist who has an album releasing in 3 months and has a mailing list of 3,000 fans. The average artist would probably just email saying “coming out soon” a few times, maybe give updates as to what is going on with the album artwork or the studio progress.. and then finally announce the release. What could a well written sales copy do for them?
Aaron Poehler: Actually, as a musician, copywriter, and former music journalist I’ve experienced all sides of the music promotion game and seen some of the best and worst of each. What professional copywriting can help you achieve depends on two things: 1. where you are, and 2. where you want to be.
In the example you gave (artist who has an album in 3 months, a mailing list of 3,000 fans), this artist has probably developed a certain rapport with their fans via email/twitter updates or face-to-face at shows. In this situation, hiring the wrong copywriter could be worse than hiring none at all. If what was previously a friendly discussion between artist and fans suddenly becomes a high-pressure ‘hard sell’ campaign, longtime fans are likely to be put off and irritated, while chances of actually getting new music sales may be no higher. Music copywriting must be carefully tailored to work in tandem with who an artist is, what they wish to convey with their music, and the image (or lack of same) they project. Otherwise it’s just going to be good money after bad.
On the other hand, very often artists lack the perspective to effectively market themselves and their music. They try and cram every aspect of their music into a marketing medium which is suited to convey only simple thoughts and messages, and are unable to reduce their creativity to a simple tagline. That’s fine; it’s not their job to do so, it’s a musician’s job to make good music. A good copywriter can help connect that music with people.
A good copywriter can also help keep you from sounding like a complete idiot. I know when I was working as a music journalist I could tell from a quick perusal of a onesheet bio whether an album was getting played or going straight into the trash. Certain phrases and presentations telegraph amateurism and wannabes; needless to say, no one wants to come off this way, but the majority do. By hiring the services of a skilled, experienced copywriter, you automatically put yourself ahead of 95% of the pack.
Q: How would you recommend an artist to go about finding the right copywriters, rather than bad ones that would hurt the effort or just editors posing as copywriters? How much would they cost?
Aaron Poehler: There are really no shortcuts to finding a good copywriter — or perhaps more importantly, an appropriate one. Word of mouth is always a good sign, so ask for recommendations, but if you don’t know anyone who’s used copywriting services that may not be helpful. In that case, try to find someone with experience in the field who has professional work samples somewhat in line with what you’d like.
How much it should cost is literally impossible to say without knowing the scope of the project — I’ve done everything from help bands come up with appropriate names to writing press releases and bios to crafting entire advertising campaigns. It shouldn’t cost more than you’re willing and able to pay, but jobs can be either billed hourly or on a per-job basis. It’s generally a good idea to get at an estimate before committing to a particular individual, and make absolutely sure you have the money you’re committing to pay and you’re not spending mythical back-end dollars you think will come rolling in someday. If you stiff someone, word gets around quickly, and that’s really not the kind of word-of-mouth any musician is looking for.
Q: Sounds very reasonable, I like that you don’t fluff it up. When I was researching “copywriting for musicians” (interchanging a lot of words) I couldn’t find many that were specialized in that area until I found you. Copywriting is often confused with copyrighting. [AP note: you’re telling me!]
So if a band is in the infancy stage a copywriter (maybe even a branding agency?) could be a major help to the “stickiness” of the band name and image. But for a formed band they will often be broke and spending their money on microphones, amps, etc. So someone like you probably won’t be affordable to most bands during that time because they’ll be saving up for releasing an album or EP.
But lets say they saved up $5000 for an EP and marketing campaign. I would assume that before they ever step into the studio that they should see someone like you that knows how to do a good campaign. What can they expect for $1000 to someone like you(qualified) and $4000 on their EP? Is 20% a good amount to spend on marketing an album?
Aaron Poehler: These questions are getting into the marketing end of things rather than copywriting. A copywriter is not an advertising agency; I don’t place ads or set budgets for advertising.
I would also say your assertion that marketing should be taken into account “before they ever step into the studio” is completely wrong. Get the music right first, then figure out how to market it, not vice versa.
A copywriter will write something for you when you know what you need: press releases, blog posts, ad copy, whatever. But you have to know what you need, it’s not a copywriter’s job to tell you.
Q. You’re right on about getting the music right first. I work in a recording studio and I’ve seen artists who aren’t ready, it’s an expensive nightmare for them. I’ve also seen good albums released with no money left over for marketing them. Unfortunately in those cases by the time enough money is available to market the album, it’s 6 months old and lost it’s buzz.
Can you give an example or two of phrases that go in the trash versus those that were ahead of the pack?
Aaron Poehler: These things tend to come in cycles, where for six months or a year, people will be trying to hop on whatever they perceive as the current trend either in terms of music or in how they present themselves (image/marketing/etc.). Problem is, if you’re imitating something that’s currently popular, you’re already old hat by default — and out of the race. Hopping on today’s fad is a sure route to sounding dated and ridiculous tomorrow, and fashionable types hate nothing more than last season’s look. Be who you are, not who you think people want you to be.
I realize that isn’t very specific advice, so here are a few real-life flags that let me know without fail a band or artist does not have their act together enough for me to waste my time on their music:
A. Ridiculous lists of influences. I’m sure you genuinely believe your music was influenced by everything from Duke Ellington to Ray Charles to Faith No More to Paul Simon to John Zorn. However, if your band sounds like Phish crossed with the Grateful Dead, that’s what you should say.
B. No one cares that you got a music award in elementary school. So did everybody. It’s not amazing that you’ve been playing the piano since you were 8. You are not a child prodigy unless you are in classical music. (Even then, you are not a child prodigy.)
C. Describe the music. It’s not “like nothing else ever heard before”, trust me.
D. Don’t say how the music is “definitely going to set the world on fire.” No it’s not, and if it was, I’d have heard of it.
E. Don’t plagiarize.
F. The more elaborate, glossy, and expensive the presskit, the shittier the music.
G. Don’t forget to include all relevant information: at a minimum, website, email, phone, and US mail contact info.
H. Don’t take it personally when someone doesn’t like your music. More importantly, when you do take it personally, don’t pretend to be “a fan” and write the reviewer to complain because he or she will laugh at you and tell all their reviewer friends.
I enjoy the writing of Mil Millington, and some of his most amusing isn’t available in book form: that being, of course, the original, electronic catalog of Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. Yes, he does have a novel with the same name, but it’s just that: a novel with the same name as the webpage. The two share none of the same content other than a similar tone, as far as I recall. His classic thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com page is now at http://www.mil-millington.com and is highly recommended reading–I find I come back to it once every year and a half or so and find it freshly amusing.
Do note that the webpage isn’t updated. For new content, however, there’s Mil’s Mailing List, each edition of which generally contains one new Thing (yesterday’s–#49–was a particularly good one). It appears irregularly, so don’t expect new material every week or even every month, but when it does appear it’s always worth taking the time to peruse. Suffice to say, it’s the rare email list that is capable of inducing a smile merely by its inbox appearance. Effective marketing too, since each time I find myself rereading the webpage I generally end up buying a copy of Millington’s newest book (which at the moment is Instructions For Living Someone Else’s Life.)
Trip report: viewing SST: The Tour live 1985 video. Out of print SST Records home video of “The Tour,” live @ The Stone San Francisco, CA May 1st 1985. Released 1986.
Seems a tad out of sync, delayed audio .1 sec with VLC.
First up is SWA. Don’t recall hearing them before, this is pretty terrible. Singer’s blatant Jaggerisms unattractive. Wearing fedora with card tucked into brim, wielding tambourine. Should be beaten severely. Bald attention-whore bassist shaking like Flea. Like Ratt but shittier and more pretentious.
Next up: Saccharine Trust. Significant improvement. Vocals still not very good but far better guitar skronk and far lower douche quotient. Ew, track with intoned faux-poetic spoken lyrics like some Slint post-rock forerunner. Ugh. Still, good guitar, subject worthy of further investigation, always looking for good non-shitty underground non-mainstream oriented rock, especially from this era.
Now to the “name” bands, starting with the only band still active (and with only a drummer change at that), the Meat Puppets. Unrehearsed half-assed version of “Sea of Love” wastes a couple minutes, gets off to a real start with “Up On The Sun”. Fairly solid but plagues by the trademark erratically-pitched vocals that would tend to characterize the band until around the time of their post-Nirvana breakthrough. Hmm, Hendrix’s “Little Wing” another odd cover choice, but one that seems better-practiced–into the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider” done speed-punk style. Cute. A bit too much of the wacky side of the Puppets and not enough of the solid side for me though.
Perhaps the rarest of the footage is that of the Minutemen, oddly enough starting off with what has become their best-known song, “Corona” (though it’s admittedly only “The Jackass Theme” to most people). D. Boon in action is a rare sight, making pretty much every minute of the Minutemen segment fascinating. “Lost” jam finale with Puppet Curt Kirkwood on vocals is fun, but more prime D. Boon would again have been preferable.
Finally, the headliners, Husker Du. I somehow get the feeling Husker Du records are probably primarily bought these days by teenage/college-age Nirvana/Foo Fighters fans working their way backwards through the band’s influences, though I may be wrong of course. The dynamic on display here is hard to ignore as a direct Nirvana precedent, certainly, and anyone looking here for evidence of such will not be disappointed — watch this and tell me Grant Hart here isn’t Dave Grohl before Dave Grohl was Dave Grohl. If anything, it’s striking how much the mainstream subsequently moved toward what’s on display from Husker Du here, and it makes me wonder how much money Husker Du is leaving on the table right now, frankly. A solid performance from front to back and an adequate replication of their trebly cymbal/distortion overtone-heavy album sound with the exception of slightly more audible bass. “Eight Miles High” cover goes on a bit. “Makes No Sense At All” closer hits like “Teen Spirit”.
“All-star”"Louie Louie” finale with pretty much everyone notable from all bands jamming together is kinda fun but let’s face it, the novelty punk cover button has franklybeen pushed too many times already at this point.
Altogether, a worthwhile artifact and a unique snapshot of a bygone moment in time.
I’ve had a Twitter feed for some time, though up to now it’s admittedly been seldom-used at best. I just got around to figuring out how to link it, my phone, and my facebook status, so in theory this might encourage me to actually use it. We shall see…I also added the link to the sidebar of this blog (though the changes don’t seem to be showing up for me yet) so there’s that too.
A day some thought would never arrive is here: the debut album by Guns N’ Roses Mark II has finally found its way into the wild. Let’s get the unrealistic expectations out of the way first: no, it’s not as good as Appetite For Destruction, nor either of the Use Your Illusion discs, and no album short of a career-defining masterpiece could really justify the record’s protracted gestation period. Yes, it’s basically an Axl Rose solo album, but frankly to release this under any name but GNR — no matter how technically inaccurate — would be flushing millions of sales down the drain, and that would be stupid.
Suffice to say Chinese Democracy is not a masterpiece, nor does it accomplish the nigh-impossible task of matching up to the work of an almost completely different band from a lifetime ago. That said, it is a record that deserves to be evaluated on its own merits, which is what I’ll attempt to do here as much as is humanly possible.
The album doesn’t flow particularly well, betraying its fragmented genesis — songs lurch this way and that in ADD fashion, rarely settling into any particular groove for too long and frequently introducing distracting effects and instrumentation. Several WTF moments punctuate the disc (particularly the bizarre acapella intro to “Scraped”) and definitely burst any remaining illusion that this could be the product of an actual band rather than a single overwhelming force of ego.
Speaking of whom, Axl is in fairly good voice throughout, though it’s somewhat disconcerting to hear obvious use of autotune processing throughout the record. He also tends to emphasize the melodic aspects of his singing above raw power, his true strength, and it does get a bit wearying over the course of the album’s 71-minute length — one keeps hoping for the band to hit more on the heavy rock groove and less on the over-arranged Queen ballad side.
Altogether, while no, Chinese Democracy is not a classic for the ages or what one would maybe hope for from one of the biggest rock bands in the world, it’s a pretty solid record, on a par with a good Alice Cooper album, and will likely hold up for several listens even if it’s not likely to become a favorite. It’s hard to picture anyone singing any of these songs at karaoke night, but it’s equally difficult to picture a large percentage of longtime Guns N’ Roses fans being completely dissatisfied with this album. More importantly, now that Axl has broken the dam, perhaps he can get the next one out in a more reasonable amount of time and perhaps avoid the painfully labored-over, yeah-let’s-throw-the-kitchen-sink-in-too vibe that’s substantially in evidence here.
Some spontaneity would be a welcome novelty for the followup. And hey, how about some straight-ahead, flat-out rockers? Maybe listen to more AC/DC and less Queen. That’s be nice.
“Governor Dave Heineman announced today that a special session of Nebraska’s legislature will be held next month to revise the state’s controversial safe-haven law…” Continue reading
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“The Oneida County Office Building in Utica, New York was reopened Thursday after test results for the presence of asbestos in air samples taken from throughout the building came back negative…” Continue reading
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A disappointingly small percentage of the DIY zine movement survived the transition from print to digital unscathed. Fortunately Henry Owings’ Athens, Georgia-centric Chunklet crossed the rubicon not only unscathed but skillfully, maintaining the magazine’s near-obsessive love of bands few knew about then and fewer remember now, adding the ability for like-minded aficionados to download and hear rare, sometimes never-released recordings. Couldn’t do that on paper!
You will almost certainly have zero interest in this if you aren’t into comics, but recently I’ve been enjoying watching the 
Michael from 
I enjoy the writing of Mil Millington, and some of his most amusing isn’t available in book form: that being, of course, the original, electronic catalog of Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. Yes, he does have 
Trip report: viewing 
A day some thought would never arrive is here: the debut album by Guns N’ Roses Mark II has finally found its way into the wild. Let’s get the unrealistic expectations out of the way first: no, it’s not as good as Appetite For Destruction, nor either of the Use Your Illusion discs, and no album short of a career-defining masterpiece could really justify the record’s protracted gestation period. Yes, it’s basically an Axl Rose solo album, but frankly to release this under any name but GNR — no matter how technically inaccurate — would be flushing millions of sales down the drain, and that would be stupid.
Nebraska Governor Calls Special Session to Revise Safe Haven Law