Anatomy of a Scoop: The Music Media and Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson’s sad passing occurred less than 24 hours ago at time of writing, but we all know how this one went down. Speedy gossip website TMZ, who have been the first to publish numerous celebrity gossip/scandal stories in the last few years, got the scoop to end all scoops on June 25. After publishing a story that Michael Jackson had collapsed from an apparent cardiac arrest, they followed it with the real hammer blow: The self-styled King of Pop had died after paramedics failed to revive him on arrival at his home in Holmby Hills, California.

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Freemium Thinking

A few cosmic forces aligned last week. On Monday (June 15), Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, gave a thought-provoking speech on the future of free products. Anderson’s core belief is that any product sucked into the digital realm will ultimately end up being given away for free. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, a 32 year-old mother of four named Jammie Thomas-Rasset was pondering the actions of a jury who had just fined her $1.9 million for music copyright violations. Her decision to illegally share MP3 files by Green Day and Sheryl Crow (among others) via the P2P service Kazaa had caused her long-running battle with the music industry to come to an unfortunate ending.

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Sonic Youth on Jimmy Fallon: Report From the Band Bench

We cover a lot of band performances from late night talk shows here on Prefix. So I thought we should take it to the next level and actually attend one of the shows and report back from there. I scored a couple of tickets for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week, figuring they have the best range of musical guests of all the talk shows. Last night (June 22) I made the trip to 30 Rock, where Fallon’s guests included John Leguizamo, Nick Cannon and Sonic Youth. These were ‘Band Bench’ tickets, meaning I would be ushered onto the bleachers behind the stage when Sonic Youth played, with instructions to “go crazy” from one of Fallon’s producers.

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Tiny Masters of Today - Skeletons: Album Review

Ava made the transition to her teenage years with this record, and it shows. Her oblique lyrics work as allegorical paeans to typical aspects of teenage life—suffocating peer group alienation, a drive to be cool, the possession of a jaded seen-it-all-before outlook. She’ll often just repeat catchphrases (“drop the bomb, man”, “banging at the rhythm of my big bass drum”) that she’s picked up, which don’t ostensibly mean much, but serve as a fond reminder of how such things play an important part at that age: all the cool outsidery kids at school add jargon-filled catchphrases to their dialect. There’s no great lyrical depth at work here, other than a few barbed comments at Ava’s fellow teens, and nor should there be; her self-reflective Billie Holiday opus can wait until she’s at least 16.

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Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker Interview

The Careers Through Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP) is a non-profit organization that helps high school seniors gain scholarships to culinary school. The program was set up in New York City by Richard Grausman in 1990 and has subsequently spread across the country. Pressure Cooker was shot by Grausman’s daughter, Jennifer, and her filmmaking partner, Mark Becker. It follows three students, Erica, Dudley and Fatoumata, who attend Philadelphia's Frankford High School under the watchful eye of their Culinary Arts teacher, Wilma Stephenson. Wilma’s blunt teaching methods have made her a formidable figure in the education system, her forceful drive positively compelling her students to exceed expectations. Pressure Cooker is a deeply affecting movie that played to sold out crowds at the IFC in New York City, leaving barely a dry eye in the house as Wilma’s students attempt to gain admittance to the finest culinary schools in the country.

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Wireless Culture: Online vs. Terrestrial Radio

Radio stations have endured mixed fortunes since broadband speeds allowed them to comfortably stream content online, ultimately throwing them into competition with a slew of similar services. A global audience has opened up for many broadcasters—I have friends in England who have become firm fans of certain shows on WNYC and WFMU in the past decade. But threats from streaming media sites like Pandora and Last.fm, who have taken the word “radio” and used it to refer to user generated playlists, have sent tremors through the broadcast radio industry, calling into question the disparity in royalty payments between online and broadcast radio.

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Northside Festival Coverage

Sisters look great—drummer Matt has a huge afro that rocks back and forth as he pummels his drums, and the stack of amps acts like a third member of the band. It certainly causes people up front to question the validity of their decision to stand so close to the stage when singer/guitarist Aaron begins scraping great sheets of noise from his instrument. They lack the thinness that some two-piece bands discover when all the bass frequencies are stripped from their music, and have a great pop-noise thing going on. Imagine a punky My Bloody Valentine with John Bonham on drums. Sisters trigger an instant reflex to dance and sing in half the audience, and some of the widest smiles of the entire festival can be seen when two little grunge kids join the mosh pit at the end. A special moment.

Read Day One here
Read Day Two here
Read Day Three here
Read Day Four here

TV On The Radio/Dirty Projectors in Central Park: Live Review

The last time Dirty Projectors played a big outdoor show in New York was in downtown Manhattan last summer. A huge lightning storm played out in the sky behind the stage, providing the type of backdrop the members of AC/DC have spent their entire careers dreaming about. A remarkable act of synergy occurred just before the plugs were pulled on the show. Singer/guitarist Dave Longstreth jumped into the air and hit the stage at the precise moment that a huge bolt of lightning struck behind him. It may have been the most rock and roll moment of any show, ever.

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The Power of Mashups and Mixtapes

In 2004, Danger Mouse (real name: Brian Burton) released The Grey Album, which took the burgeoning mashup culture to a logical extreme. A mashup is a track comprised of two or more songs, which are seamlessly blended together. The most common trick is to take a vocal from one song and lay it over the instrumental backing of another. Mashups reached considerable popularity in the early 2000s, with artists such as 2 Many DJs seizing on easy-to-use audio editing tools (Wavelab, Soundforge) to bring their bastardized creations to life. The proliferation of free MP3 files available through Napster and elsewhere, coupled with the rise of broadband Internet speeds, suddenly led to a glut of amateur mashups all over the web.

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Hell - Teufelswerk: Album Review

If music is supposed to reflect the times we live in, DJ Hell hasn’t been paying much attention to the cataclysmic events triggered by the global economic crisis. Teufelswerk (German for “Devil’s Work”) is an ambitious collection of luxuriant techno that oozes opulence. Hell runs in direct contrast to the scrimp-and-save dictum that governs most people’s actions in times of hardship. Instead, he has made an album that reeks of money, with high-end production values and guest appearances from Bryan Ferry and P. Diddy. If Hell is aware of our impending meltdown, he appears to be working under the tacit understanding that such times require a piece of art that can free us from all our worries.

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Jeremiah Zagar: Interview

Jeremiah Zagar is a filmmaker with an infectious passion and commitment to his craft. His documentary, In a Dream, was shot over a seven-year period and is culled from 300 hours of footage. The film is based around the relationship between Zagar’s father, Isaiah, and his mother, Julia. Isaiah’s work will be instantly familiar to anyone who has spent time in Philadelphia. His beautiful mosaics are sprawled across numerous buildings in the city, making him one of the greatest American folk artists of his generation. In a Dream brings Isaiah’s work to life in bright, vivid color. But it also affords him room to ruminate on his personal life, sparking a number of revelations that provide genuine insight into his character. I spoke to Jeremiah about the film in Brooklyn.

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