“Act Naturally” is the first time I’ve ever had advertising stuck on my music. There wasn’t much opportunity for that back in the days of The Four G’s Hotel in Bethlehem.
YouTube checks your videos with some type of scanner when uploaded.
It determines if some of the content is raided from other sources, which — of course — it is in the spirit of fair use. At which point you get a note telling you ads will run with it.
In this way YouTube monetizes things it thinks have a chance at being popular due to the way sheep 15-17 year-olds search the site. The joke is the unsophisticated viewer may not realize you’re not the one putting in the overlay advertising.
So “Act Naturally” now has lots of ads attached to it, some coincidentally amusing. Dick Destiny and Honey-Nut Cheerios. Or pastries and cupcakes made in a regional bakery/supermarket. Or Susan Boyle’s new album on iJobs. You haveta admit that’s really choice considering the nature of DD stuff.
Also common, ads for Rhapsody, the other on-line music store.
Everyone with any brains knows no one small is allowed to earn any money making music. In the age of the web it’s all for the famous.
Backed by a label, great publicity and a place like Nashville or LA, the known fancy and fine can get dispensations from Steve Jobs, the most powerful man in the world, and other barnacles and wanna-bes, to sell music and grant them a piece. Even the Beatles, half of them dead, serve iSteve.
Additionally, the famous can get more by having the intros to their vids as conveyors for television-style commercial advertising.
Of course, there was a brief period when stupid people believed the Internet was a liberalizing and leveling thing. But they’ve all been shown the door after helpfully lubricating the running off of all B, C and D list talent. Rightly so.
What’s important is that the wonderful people get all the spoil. And that’s how it should be. Anyone who doesn’t know that isn’t mentally fit.
This was written for La Puta, slated for later in the week. But I’ve moved the tune up as a teaser. It fits the leaden Made In China green reusable grocery bags story perfectly.
Go to neighbor store
Buy stuff for the poor
Socks, socks, socks with holes
Crap that’s full of mold
Go to Acme store
Buy stuff that falls apart
Toothpaste made of dirt
Pills to make your head hurt
Pills to make your head hurt
For the ladies, a cheap skirt
Now stores all full of shit
All made with plastic bits
Wigs all full of lead
Things to make you piss red
Socks, socks, socks with holes
Socks, socks full of holes
All things now with mold
Socks, socks, socks with holes
All things now full of mold
Toothpaste made of dirt
They also make black T-shirts
Toothpaste full of dirt
Pills to make your head hurt
The request line is open! If you have an idea for a tune you’d like to hear DD make a spoof of, suggest it either in comments or in private mail. Really.
If I think I can do a good job, I’ll give it a shot.
This as advance teaser/warning of sorts for DD’s ZZ Top hard rock in the Seventies boogie satire/tribute, La Puta.
I’ll be posting the album in its entirety here sometime next week as part of a fundraiser.
Since you can’t actually sell music CDs unless you’re famous anymore, it might as well be threatened as the gift part of a PBS-like plea for the collection cup.
The election seemed perfect visual adornment for an altered cover of “Act Naturally.”
The basic track had a couple secs of silence before a drum crash. It seemed to call for a short introduction.
One of the Hitler/Downfall parodies furnished a perfect one. It was great and the original (big ups to its creator, hope he doesn’t mind too much) is here.
So many, but not all, of the suicide bombers come from failing, humiliated societies that generate huge numbers of “sitting-around people,??? who are easy prey for recruiters offering martyrdom and significance in the next life. We need to do what we can to eliminate their sources of energy.
Boy, what other “failing, humiliated societies” that have generated “huge numbers of ‘sitting around people'” do we know of?
We must do all we can to eliminate their sources of energy, too.
Good news, lads! Good news! There’s no satire here!
If you view this on YouTube, you’ll notice the video is the property of the PasadenaTeaParty. Of which I am not a member.
Everyday, DD takes a walk to pick up lunch supplies, crossing the el Molino Street bridge on the way to Lake. On the right hand side just back of a church is a rambling mansion, fenced in by iron and guarded by a Doberman which has been de-barked.
Big sign in front yard: “Putting liberals in Congress is like putting PIRANHAS in your child’s playpool!”
” ‘I’m a beginner political activist,’ said former ‘Saturday Night Live’ star Victoria Jackson, who took to the stage with a ukulele and sang ‘There’s a Communist Living in the White House,'” wrote LA Times columnist Steve Lopez on a Tea Party rally in Beverly Hills last week. (Unbelievably, there was one.)
“I thought either Jackson was satirizing the movement or that she was doing a Porky Pig impression,” continued Lopez. “But I later saw video of her insisting on various occasions that President Obama is indeed a communist.”
Here’s an astounding video (with some jump-on-the-grenade quality) of some harmonica pro extolling the virtues of his $180 Harrison. He gets through the entire video without once actually coming right out and saying the thing’s price.
In fact, the entire video is from the point-of-view of rationalizing the cost without ever mentioning it. It’s awkward in its cognitive dissonance but standard for selling extravagances for the haves now that we can’t make things everyone can afford in this economy.
Your run-of-the-mill viewer, even your pro, is going to be hard pressed to tell any difference between the harmonica this guy has recorded and any other harmonica they’ve heard on blues and rock records over the years. That’s a fact.
The next videos clear the mind, reminding how far the above rubbish is from where it started.
The new Guitar Center shopper arrived in the mail this week.
I get them regularly. Three years ago the thing was filled with offers indulging the stupid dilettante with money — boutique goods made by US brand manufacturers who had outsourced their everyman stuff to China. (Or maybe not so stupid person investing in a piece of ugly furniture they believe will appreciate significantly in value simply because it is ostentatious, rare and preposterous. Unlike off-shored guitars, which never gain in value, winding up at pawnshops and worth less than a case of decent beer to the seller.)
But lately the shopper has taken on a bit of a desperate quality.
Which brings us to the extreme high-end of the American custom market, where often mediocre instruments attain intelligence-insulting pricing, indicating the total extinction of common sense and the middle class.
American relic guitar luthiers could give Eddie van Halen a precise replica of his 1977 axe, complete with cigarette burn marks, ugly sticky tape, lousy but freakishly unique paint job and power drill holes.
In the Summer edition of DD’s Guitar Center catalog it is said, “Ed has partnered with Fender to bring you the Edward van Halen Frankenstein replica guitar — a faithful reproduction of one of the world’s most recognizable instruments. The red, black and white body … has been put through an aging process to replicate the original, down to every last scratch, ding and cigarette burn.”
List price: $25,000.
New guitars allegedly “worth” $25,000 dollars are never played where other people hear them. And DD never wants to meet someone who would pay such money. Neither does he wish to meet scary Eddie van Halen, who probably wouldn’t have even paid one thousand dollars in the late-Seventies for any electric guitar.
Instead of saving to send your layabout parasite of a kid to college, get a Gibson Jimmy Page Doubleneck relic reissue, cheap at $8,000. Or splurge for a Paul Reed Smith Doubleneck Dragon, $32,000. You know you deserve it.
Outside of these extravagances, almost all the merchandise in Guitar Center was either made in China or Indonesia.
Consider that for a moment.
The business of rock ‘n’ roll instrumentation was built on a foundation of American made guitars and amplifiers. Period.
Essentially, all the brand American companies — if they didn’t go out of business — turned themselves into custom shops for the high end. Except for the company that was always a custom shop for the high end — Mesa Engineering.
Can you believe the odious craftsmen at Fender responsible for the $25,000 Eddie van Halen guitar were actually revered a couple years ago? It tells you all you need to know about economics in present day America.
However, in the October 2010 Guitar Center shopper, almost all the goods shown are made by slave labor in China.
You have your Epiphone Guitars, used-to-be American factory made, now down market Gibsons made in China. (Sometimes Korea, a few years ago.)
You have your $119 Fender “Strat” — made you know where. Fender amplifiers, all made in China, except for one tube model at the high end of the range.
One could go on and on, page after page after page of stuff invented here for middle class Americans, made by middle class Americans, now all gone to China.
Paradoxically, the shopper features an interview with country music mega-star Keith Urban. Urban chats about his collection of vintage US-made guitars and amplifiers. Some of them were lost in the Nashville flood, he says.
It’s a pity. The cognitive dissonance.
Guitar Center employees, who are all rock musicians, probably make a little above minimum wage plus commissions.
What they think about working amidst the $4000 custom Gibson Les Pauls (plus the $9000 Gibson double-neck, the $4000 Gibson jumbo acoustic, and the $1200 Fender P-Bass) they can’t afford is unknown.
One wonders, for a moment, what the worker discounts are like.
From today’s business section:
In one of their final actions before returning to the campaign in their districts, members of House voted 348 to 79, with dozens of Republicans joining in support, for a bill that would open the way for the US to slap tariffs on Chinese goods … But the bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate …
But major business groups representing a diverse array of trades — including cattle ranchers, Los Angeles freight forwarders and Wall Street firms — lined up against the bill, saying it would do more harm than good for economic growth and job creation.
Turning back the clock is impossible. But smashing Fender and Gibson’s Chinese-made imports with tariffs would be a very good thing, if only from the perspective of boosting mental health. It would cause these firms, and their competitors, discomfort. Such discomfort would be great right now, particularly if sending even more things to Asia wouldn’t soothe it, for what were quintessentially US firms which had, long ago, been dedicated to quality musical instruments made by Americans for the same.
Their CEOs might consider banding together with others to go before Congress to lobby for better pay, a living wage for their potential consumers.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
In the front section of the newspaper, defeated by GOP filibuster, a rider on the tax cut legislation: “A bill to punish firms that send US jobs overseas was blocked …”
And on the Opinion page, this gem:
Income inequality [in China] is another major concern [to the Chinese]. Cities and provinces have raised the legal minimum wage. In Guanghzhou, for example, it’s now [$164] a month …
“Marvelous,” as Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood used to say.
Related: The $180 blues harp. Everyman instrument gets upgraded to Swiss watch status symbol.
As the recession shook Americans’ confidence last year, new figures show that weddings for people 18 and older dropped to the lowest point in over a hundred years.
A broad array of new Census Bureau data released Tuesday documents the far-reaching impact of a business slump that experts say technically ended in June 2009: a surging demand for food stamps, considerably fewer homeowners and people doubling up in housing to save money.
The government revealed that the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year by the largest margin ever, stark evidence of the impact the long recession starting in 2007 has had in upending lives and putting the young at greater risk.
The top-earning 20 percent of Americans — those making more than $100,000 each year — received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent earned by the bottom 20 percent of wage-earners who fell below the poverty line, according to the newly released Census figures.
A different measure, the international Gini index, found U.S. income inequality at its highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking household income in 1967. The U.S. also has the greatest disparity among Western industrialized nations.
Three states — New York, Connecticut and Texas — and the District of Columbia had the largest gaps in rich and poor, disparities that exceeded the national average. Similar income gaps were evident in large cities such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta, home to both highly paid financial and high-tech jobs as well as clusters of poorer immigrant and minority residents. — AP
