Wednesday, June 25, 2008

McDonalds sued over Happy Meal toy

Check out the picture of New Wave Nigel, he's a cute little fellow. I'm going to go out and see if I can get him in a Happy Meal today, he may become quite valuable, because after reading this article, I think Devo has a good chance of prevailing.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Telstar
Date: Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 4:47 PM
Subject: [Up-Tight] McDonalds sued over Happy Meal toy
To: Up-Tight@yahoogroups.com


"Post-punk pioneers Devo say they are suing McDonald's in the US over a
Happy Meal doll that sports the band's signature red flower pot hat."

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4583430a12.html

Al




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Whip it up and start again

They work on more than 100 ad campaigns a year, and Mothersbaugh confirms the rumours that he has inserted subliminal messages into many of the jingles.

"For about six years, I put them in every single one," he says. "If the product was something I didn't care for, I'd make the message stronger. In a candy commercial I remember putting 'sugar is bad for you'. And I'd put things like 'question authority' and 'toil is stupid', and the old Devo phrases like 'are we not men?' and 'we must repeat' into these commercials for BMW and McDonald's and Coca-Cola. I only stopped doing it because it was too easy."

Seems like a kind of passive aggressive response to he must feel in his situation as a former outsider who got inside.  It hardly seemed worth the effort, since it's clear that it had no effect - the advertisers kept hiring him, and their products kept selling.

Otherwise, good article. 

And I love the irony of his children thinking his band is copying Devo 2.0.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Telstar <>
Date: Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 6:32 AM
Subject: [Up-Tight] Whip it up and start again


http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/still-twitching-with-anger-at-human-stupidity/2008/06/23/1214073141674.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

.
"Once upon a time there was a little boy who grew up in a town that stank of
rubber. The town was called Akron, in Ohio, and during the '50s and '60s it
was the tyre capital of the world. For the first two years of school, the
little boy got into all sorts of trouble for misbehaving and not paying
attention. Then the doctors discovered the problem. The youngster could
hardly see more than 30 centimetres in front of his face. In fact, he was
legally blind.

"By the time I was in third grade I had glasses with lenses like the bottom
of Coke bottles," says the little boy, who has grown into a 58-year-old man
named Mark Mothersbaugh. "Plus I had a weird last name that even my teachers
couldn't pronounce. I started off on the wrong foot and never got it
together until college."
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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

[Zebra_Trucks] Re: Jan Turkenburg's Birthday Today

Congratulations, Jan!

On this occasion, I sent you 3 birthday songs, only 66.6% of which is shameless self promotion:

http://www.last.fm/music/Modeselektor/Happy+Birthday


http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=195994&songID=1621847
A birthday song I wrote for myself because nobody else would, once ranked  116  out of 28,306 songs on the soundclick Experimental Alternative charf)

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=302257&songID=4425136
peaked at 34 of 24,000 songs  listed in Experimental Electronica



On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Oddio Overplay <oddiooverplay@yahoo.com> wrote:
Hi There,

Just a little birdie singing a song about the birthday of Jan/
Splogman. Thought you might want to know.

If you are not Jan's buddy, then sorry about the note. Still, you might
want to know this great guy!
http://www.splogman.com

When is YOUR birthday? I hope it is a happy one!

Cheers,
Katya








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Is it time to forgive Stockhausen?

Kettcar apparently forgave Stockhausen, 30 seconds of their excellent song "Stockhausen, Bill Gates und ich" can be heard at:

http://www.last.fm/music/Kettcar/_/Stockhausen%2C+Bill+Gates+und+ich?autostart

it's well worth seeking out the whole song to download, maybe even pay for.

If they knew about it, I don't know if they would forgive me for my cover version at:

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=706909&songID=5419792

In English translation by Google, with authentic bits of Stockhausen and Microsoft Sounds stirred into the mix!

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Telstar wrote:

"Karlheinz Stockhausen's reputation was tarnished after he reportedly
remarked that the September 11 terrorist attacks were the 'greatest works of
art'. But his music looks likely to survive."

http://tinyurl.com/4q4rfx

Al




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[Zebra_Trucks] Fwd: Happy Slip Productions - Chris Cendana!

I concur with Christine. 

Fancy cup work!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: FeedBlitz <feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 1:15 PM
Subject: Happy Slip Productions - Chris Cendana!
To: "matt. mattlove1" <matt.mattlove1@gmail.com>


Your email updates, powered by FeedBlitz

 
Here are the latest updates for matt.mattlove1@gmail.com

"Happy Slip Productions" - 1 new article

Chris Cendana!

So I had the BEST time at the Houston YouTube gathering and I'm working on editing some clips together. Meanwhile, I have been constantly listening to this cover of Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" by Chris Cendana. It is guaranteed to put a smile on your face! :-) He uses the cup beat that I used in my HappySlip Jingle video which comes from a kids show called Zoom. So now I am inspired to perhaps use this same song somehow. Just makes one feel sooo happayy!! hahha! You guys should check out Chris' YouTube channel where he posts his original music as well. Subscribe to his awesomeness!! ;-)





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Monday, June 23, 2008

[Zebra_Trucks] Worst covers

In response to Celine Dion winning some kind of "Worst Cover Song" contest (for her version of an AC/DC song, "As It Happens" on CBC radio is asking for people to submit their candidates for worst cover version. 

Their email address is: aih@cbc.ca


I submitted the following:


Worst Cover Version:
tie:
 Osama Namarino covering Led Zeppelin's 'Dazed and Confused' at http://www.weirdorecords.com/cpCommerce/document.php?id_document=24
Anything by Wing.  She has a special way with AC/CD - Celine Dion, as bad as she is, isn't even in the same ballpark.  Samples at:
http://wingmusic.co.nz/listen.html
--

I hope everybody submits something. I'd be curious to know / hear your candidates



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The Mods/ Instros from Pakistan

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 10:14 PM, matt love <mattlove1@gmail.com> wrote:

To me, somewhat remeniscent of the Munsters theme song.

I like it!


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Telstar>
Date: Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 7:30 PM
Subject: [Up-Tight] The Mods/ Instros from Pakistan
To: Up-Tight@yahoogroups.com


"The band name and incredible sleeve look promising, but the 'Mod' flavor
comes entirely from using Western beat combo instruments to play traditional
songs. The results are an odd combination of Pakistani melodies and rhythms
with some flavor of surf music, especially from one guitarist's use of
tremolo sound. More surprising is the use of a wah pedal, which would date
this Columbia EP to not much earlier than 1968."

http://www.garagehangover.com/?q=ModsPakistan

Don't miss it!

Al




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Thursday, June 19, 2008

[Zebra_Trucks] 'Welcome to 'the disco'

I always thought those Metallica guys were assholes, I never understood why they got a pass (as opposed to all the other metal bands) from otherwise reasonable people.

The guy from Deicide presents as a moron - exactly what you would expect.  The Barney Song composer is also beneath contempt, again, just what you'd expect.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo

US army public affairs soldiers at the Northeast Gate, the only passage in the fenceline between Cuba and the US naval station at Guantanamo Bay. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

According to US military authorities, it was God himself who first wrote the strategy of "torture by music" into the field manual - by turning the amplifier up to 11 on the enemy. "Joshua's army used horns to strike fear into the hearts of the people of Jericho," retired US Air Force Lt-Col Dan Kuehl told the St Petersburg Times. "His men might not have been able to break down literal walls with their trumpets, but the noise eroded the enemy's courage." Kuehl, who teaches psychological operations (or psyops) at Fort McNair's National Defense University in Washington DC, added, "Maybe those psychological walls were what really crumbled."

It is not clear whether God would approve of the current US playlist: the number one slot is taken by the death metal band Deicide, whose track Fuck Your God is played at prisoners in Iraq. That said, the proponents of torture by music doubtless think they have come a long way since the early 1990s, when the FBI blasted loud music at the Branch Davidians during the Waco siege in Texas. The repertoire then included Sing-Along With Mitch Miller Christmas carols, an Andy Williams album and These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra.

However unpleasant it may be to have such tunes blasted at your compound, bringing the music into an enclosed interrogation cell was a quantum leap in psyops. Nonetheless, in the strange lexicon of 21st-century America, the US military calls this "torture lite". Torture is apparently OK if it is not too "heavy". Metallica's Enter Sandman has been played at cacophonous levels for hours on end in Guantánamo Bay and at a detention centre on the Iraqi-Syrian border. One Iraqi prisoner said it was done at "an unidentified location called 'the disco'".

Unfortunately, some artists are not offended by their work being used to torture. "If the Iraqis aren't used to freedom, then I'm glad to be part of their exposure," James Hetfield, co-founder of Metallica, has said. As for his music being torture, he laughed: "We've been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?" Such posturing may go with the territory for an artist of the Metallica genre, so there is no need to speculate about whether Hetfield is being naive or wilfully ignorant. But no sane person voluntarily plays a single tune at earsplitting volume, over and over, 24 hours a day, and expects to stay sane.

Despite this, to date, the Pentagon's semanticists have achieved their purpose, and many people think that torture by music is little more than a rather irritating enforced encounter with someone else's iPod. Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who is still held in Guantánamo Bay, knows a bit about such torture. The CIA rendered him to Morocco, where his torturers repeatedly took a razor blade to his penis throughout an 18-month ordeal.

When I later sat across from him in the cell, he described how psyops methods were worse than this. He could anticipate physical pain, he said, and know that it would eventually end. But the experience of slipping into madness as a result of torture by music was something quite different.

"Imagine you are given a choice," he said. "Lose your sight or lose your mind." While having your eyes gouged out would be horrendous, there is little doubt which you would choose. Mohamed remains in Guantánamo. The US military will decide, probably within two
weeks, whether to go forward with a military commission, based on "evidence" that was tortured out of him.

To those who have the misfortune to study torture, all this is old hat. Members of the IRA interned in Northern Ireland in the 1970s recall the use of loud noise, piped into their cells, as the worst aspect of their ordeal. One Guantánamo interrogator blithely estimated that it would take about four days to "break" someone, if the interrogation sessions were interspersed with strobe lights and loud music. "Break" is another euphemism that is bandied about among torturers, as if "breaking" a person was some kind of psychological truth serum. Of course, the "results" you get from a "broken" prisoner have little to do with truth.

Beyond pure barbarism, there are various reasons why music torture fails in its ambition. As ever in this "war on terror", there is a disconnect between the purported goal of the US forces ("actionable intelligence") and the methods used to achieve it. An order comes down from on high, from a Bush bureaucrat who has a bright idea, and it is left to soldiers in the field to use their imagination. How some bored soldiers came up with David Gray's song Babylon, played at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, defies analysis. Sometimes, people simply misunderstand lyrics: in 1984, Ronald Reagan tried to co-opt Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA as a patriotic anthem to get himself re-elected, despite the song being about government betrayal of Vietnam veterans.

Sometimes the selections used are wryly appropriate for prisoners being held without trial for years on end: Queen's We are the Champions ("I've paid my dues/Time after time/I've done my sentence/But committed no crime") was a torturer's favourite at Camp Cropper in Iraq. Other songs unwittingly give voice to what could well be the prisoners' inner thoughts: Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name Of ("Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses ... /Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!") was used
at Guantánamo.

Inevitably, when poorly trained interrogators are encouraged to let their imaginations soar, they veer towards their own idiosyncratic perversions. One budding Emcee artfully mixed the sound of crying babies (which humans
seem hardwired to abhor) with a television commercial for Meow Mix cat food.

Ultimately, though, the most overused torture song is I Love You by Barney the Purple Dinosaur. On the face of it, the lyrics may seem deeply inappropriate: "I love you, you love me - we're a happy family./With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you,/Won't you say you love me too?", but anyone whose child watches the television programme will know how grating
it is. In the torture trade, this is called "futility music", designed to convince the prisoner of the futility of maintaining his position.

It is time that those musicians who oppose the use of music to torture fellow human beings made some noise - and they are beginning to. This year's Meltdown festival at London's South Bank, which Massive Attack are curating, has highlighted the issue of torture by music. Projections showing the horror of renditions and secret prisons will be used on their world tour.

When President Bush visited the UK at the weekend, we greeted him by playing the Barney the Purple Dinosaur theme tune. What next? Perhaps the release of a special compilation: we could call it Now That's What I Call Torture, President Bush's selection of eight songs he would take to a desert island, and blast it at him for all eternity.

'It's an issue that no one in the industry wants to deal with'

There is a clear reluctance within the record industry to discuss the use of music as torture. The Guardian attempted to contact artists whose songs have reportedly been used by the US military in detainment camps - a diverse group that includes metal bands Metallica, AC/DC, Drowning
Pool and Deicide, hip-hop superstar Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, British singer-songwriter David Gray and the makers of children's TV favourite Barney the Dinosaur. In most cases, inquiries were met with a polite but firm "no comment" from management and PR representatives, or calls were simply not returned.

"It's an issue that no one wants to deal with," says David Gray, one of the few artists willing to speak about the subject. "It's shocking that there isn't more of an outcry. I'd gladly sign up to a petition that says don't use my music, but it seems to be missing the point a bit."

Gray's music became associated with the torture debate after Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told of being stripped, handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample of Babylon, at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst.

"The moral niceties of whether they're using my song or not are totally irrelevant," says Gray. "We are thinking below the level of the people we're supposed to oppose, and it goes against our entire history and everything we claim to represent. It's disgusting, really. Anything that draws attention to the scale of the horror and how low we've sunk is a good thing."

The singer wonders whether governments who use music as a torture technique without asking permission from the artists involved could face legal action. "In order to play something publicly, you have to have legal permission and you have to apply for that.

I wonder if the US government bothered, but I very much doubt it. Perhaps you could sue, but let's face it, they're outside the law on the whole thing anyway."

However, Gray's anger is far from a universal reaction. Steve Asheim, drummer for the death-metal band Deicide, questions whether music really counts as torture. "Look at it this way," he says. "These guys are not a bunch
of high school kids. They are warriors, and they're trained to resist torture. They're expecting to be burned with torches and beaten and have their bones broken. If I was a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay and they blasted a load of music at me, I'd be like, 'Is this all you got? Come on.' I certainly don't believe in torturing people, but I don't believe that playing loud music is torture either."

Deicide's Fuck Your God is said to be a favourite for military interrogators, and the song topped the infamous "torture playlist" compiled by the American investigative magazine Mother Jones. It is worth noting that the lyrics are in fact anti-Christian, just as Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA and Eminem's White America, also claimed as torture tracks, contain anti-establishment messages. But, as Asheim points out, "Most people who listen
to this kind of music don't give a shit about a political message. They just wanna rock."

Was the song specifically chosen for its sonic and cultural impact on detainees? Asheim doesn't think so. "I don't believe there's a room where they discuss what songs they can play to annoy the prisoners.

I think they just show up at work with whatever they're listening to at the time. There's no shortage of metal-heads in the army, that's for sure. These guys who are going into battle, they're not listening to Elton John beforehand."

Asheim's theory raises the question of how the apparently innocuous Barney the Dinosaur music made it into a field dominated by hip-hop and death metal. Barney's producers, HIT Entertainment, declined to comment for this article. However, the creator of Barney's song I Love You, Bob Singleton, admits he "just laughed" when he heard it was being used by interrogators.

"It seemed so ludicrous that something totally innocuous for children could threaten the mental state of an adult," he says. "I would rate the annoyance factor to be about equal with hearing my neighbour's leaf blower. It can set my teeth on edge, but it won't break me down and make me confess to crimes against humanity. Will Barney songs break your psyche? I think that idea turns music into something like voodoo, which it certainly isn't. If that were true, then the inverse would be true. Playing hymns to someone strapped to a chair wouldn't make them a Christian."

Singleton, a classically trained composer, wrote and produced for the TV series Barney and Friends between 1990 and 2000. He says that the morality of what is done with his music once it is out of his hands is beyond his control.

"I would find it unfortunate that one of my works for kids was used as the underscore for a stripper, for example. I would prefer that my music for Barney is put to its best use with children, but beyond that there's not much I can do. Plus, we're not talking about dynamite or nuclear devices here. Music is just music. It's supposed to touch your mind, your body, and your emotions to varying degrees; but it doesn't fundamentally change people. I think that gives it much more credit than it deserves."
Paul Arendt

· Clive Stafford Smith is the director of Reprieve, the UK legal action charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners. Reprieve has hosted presentations at Meltdown at the South Bank Centre, London SE1, the last of which is the play Rendition Monologues, which is being stage on Saturday. For more information, see Reprieve, or contact Reprieve, PO Box 52742, London EC4P 4WS (020-7353 4640).




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