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- Arcade Fire are mapping out the future of music videos
Coded in html5 and starring your childhood home, Arcade Fire have breathed new life into the medium. After all, why sit and watch when you can play?
If you've got a fancy computer – and don't mind being reminded of your childhood home – chances are you have spent the morning mucking about with thewildernessdowntown.com. It's described as a "musical experience made specifically for Google Chrome" that takes the Arcade Fire song We Used to Wait and pits it against scenes of your childhood home, rendered by Google maps. It's got techy types in a tizz – not least because it's a neat demonstration of some of the cooler tricks offered by html5, the next evolution in coding.
It's an equally impressive piece of viral marketing too. I can't stand Arcade Fire, but I've already shared it with hundreds of my friends. Thanks to making the website's animated hoodie run around the grounds of Doncaster Rovers Football Club, my old school, and (don't ask me why) Battersea power station, it's forced a tune I would otherwise have little desire to hear into the recesses of my brain.
Admittedly the experience is a little buggy – if your screen isn't big enough you might find certain pop-up windows lost in the depths of what you're looking at. But if you look at the idea as a sketch of what might come next, it certainly suggests an evolution is on the cards for music videos. It also poses the question: why watch when you can play?
Arcade Fire have previous history with this sort of thing. Earlier this month their live-streamed YouTube concert directed by Terry Gilliam was watched by 3.7 million viewers. In putting The Wilderness Downtown online this weekend, they have once again proved they are a band willing to embrace the internet and the possibilities it brings (rather than moaning about lost revenue sales like pretty much everyone else). Better still, they've made someone who can't stand their music genuinely excited about what they might do next.
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Переслать - Is Transport for London trying to get rid of buskers?
Transport for London denies it has banned a busker for using an 'undesirable instrument' on the underground. But there is no doubt that musicians are getting a rough ride on the tube
Nigel Burch plays a banjolele-led blend of punk, folk and cabaret jazz. He regularly tours abroad, and has been a licensed London Underground busker since 2003. Following a tour of Germany earlier this year, he applied to renew his licence, but was astonished to be refused an audition. The banjolele, he was told, is an "undesirable instrument".
Emails forwarded to the London Underground Buskers email list confirm that a list of "undesirable instruments" exists. It includes the banjo, though not specifically banjolele, which Burch pointed out to no avail – following clarification of what a banjolele actually is, it now appears to be on the list, although the ukulele is not. The Musicians' Union was called in and received a denial from TfL that there was any such "undesirable instruments" list, contradicting earlier TfL emails to Burch, and effectively ending any sensible discussion of the matter.
This is entirely in keeping with TfL's management of the busking scheme since it went in-house two years ago. Since then, direct and indirect busking income has been slashed by arbitrary bans on CD sales and distributing business cards. There is no more online pitch booking. Instead, buskers must call a premium rate telephone number during office hours to book slots; an ad hoc cancellation/pitch swapping mechanism via the email list was only grudgingly accepted. Annual licence renewal is now highly bureaucratic – the cut-off date for reapplication falls (counterintuitively) some time before the actual expiry, as more than one now ex-licensed busker has found. Fail to play a minimum number of pitches in a given period and the licence will be revoked, but buskers have not been told what that minimum number for that period is, with serious implications for those offered touring opportunities.
Like Burch, most buskers are professional musicians who busk between other gigs. Rumours abound among the community that Burch isn't the only experienced musician mysteriously unable to pass the latest round of auditions. A (superb) flamenco guitarist named Jacob Carey who, like Burch, was also trying to renew his license following a recent international tour, did get an audition but – astonishingly, to anyone familiar with him – failed it. Meanwhile for those still on the scheme, busking seems less attractive. A paranoid person might think that TfL were trying to get rid of us.
One thing that may shed some light on all this is another list which definitely does exist and has been distributed to all buskers. This one concerns specific instruments banned on specific pitches. It includes items lsuch as "robotic sax" – which appears to be there specifically to ban a guy called Steve Aruni, who plays guitar along with a latop-controlled modified sax-playing Henry the Hoover. Genuine health and safety concerns may lie behind some of these specific pitch bans; others seem totally arbitrary.
What's going on? Here's my guess. From its inception in 2003 to July 2008 the busking scheme was outsourced to Automatic Management, an independent artist management company that also handled Gene and other bands. Being artist managers first and foremost, Automatic tried to protect the musicians on the scheme from random nonsense such as the Notting Hill Gate station manager's dislike of all buskers and arbitrary ban of the flute from that pitch.
Since the scheme has been taken in-house, it is being run by middle to low-level TfL bureaucrats who have no idea how to deal with either musicians or the fact that some station managers opposed the scheme from the outset (for example, at Notting Hill Gate the pitch is now permanently closed).
Hence the partial litany of troubles that seem designed to cull our numbers, especially those depending on the income, and to discourage all but the most laidback of hobbyist buskers.
It looks like the TfL strategy for handling the busking scheme is to turf out (and keep out) as many of the old guard as possible and give the licences to new people who, they believe, won't cause trouble by trying to turn the scheme back into something you can actually scrape a living from between gigs; new people on the scheme won't even know that such a thing was once possible. As such, the "undesirable instruments" list may well just mean "anything unusual played by an experienced busker trying to renew their licence".
Yet the scheme itself was originally set up as part of a recognition that busking is inevitable. It has widespread support among the commuting public and its removal would mean a massive waste of resources for both station staff and British Transport Police. TfL repeatedly assure us that it is committed to the future of busking.
As things stand, however, many licensed buskers feel that we all play undesirable instruments.
Wayne Myers is (still) a licensed London Underground busker
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Blink 182 and a day of old relics at Leeds festival 2010
A divide has formed at Leeds – great new music in the tents (Foals! Wild Beasts!) and tired old relics on the main stage, including Limp Bizkit and Blink 182. Now, who's for yet another song about masturbation?
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Guns N' Roses fail to rock ReadingThe Leeds Festival has a way of suspending reality. It's possibly the one place on earth where you can spray your hair green, stick stars on your forehead, walk around in your underpants and think you look cool. It's also an alternative universe where ageing rap metal bands and generic pop punkers All Time Low – hardly household names – can double or perhaps even treble the audience for Friday's headliners Arcade Fire – a band whose current album The Suburbs is at the top of the charts.
That there are no rules here equally applies – for happier reasons – to Wild Beasts, whose Mercury nomination for Two Dancers isn't the only sign of their ascendancy. A huge crowd – admittedly, some of them seeking refuge in the NME tent from a downpour – hear music that is virtually uncategorisable. Are they indie pop? Or are they opera? Genuinely challenging but surprisingly listenable, they're a bit like U2's work with Pavarotti, except that the haunting tenor comes from Hayden Thorpe, a 24-year old from Kendal. Fools Gold are almost as radical, mixing afro-beat, rock'n'roll saxophone and lyrics sung in both English and Hebrew to get the Festival Republic tent dancing.
Events soon establish a divide between new music in the tents and old relics on the main stage, where Limp Bizkit are partying like it's 1999. Fred Durst's dunderheaded rap metal remains exactly the same although there are visual developments. The singer has ditched the trademark baseball cap for what looks like his auntie's lampshade, and guitarist Wes Borland has stopped wearing a monkey mask and started making himself up as a golly. Cypress Hill are also essentially rocking the same stoner rap schtick they've been trading on since 1993's Black Sunday, saying "Yo" a lot, getting the crowd to sway from side to side and asking if we "wanna get high" so often it's a wonder they haven't landed a sponsorship from a budget airline. If it all gets too much, new psychedelic band Tame Impala will take you back into a perfumed garden circa 1967, maaan. Some wag has thought it would be a jape to couple equine-named bands together in the NME tent, but the, er, two-horse race provides the day's double whammy. Band Of Horses are in utterly resplendent form, offering beautiful songs about loss, hopelessness and confusion – easy for anyone to relate to after a trek by the main stage. Foals, meanwhile, are well on their way to becoming a more troubled Talking Heads. Their syncopated afro-funk/math-rock rhythms prompt the kind of dancing that normally results in injury, but a mesmeric performance hinges on Yannis Phillipakis ability to sing lyrics like "let the horror in" while climbing the lighting rig, knocking drums flying and resembling a brooding 18th century poet. After that, Paramore's FM radio-friendly emo punk pop sounds even more generic on the main stage, although on the other hand it's refreshing to see a band here featuring a (gosh) Actual Female Rock Star in Hayley Williams. Alas, veteran pop punks Blink 182 soon take us back to boyland. "This is a song about masturbation!" they inform us. Actually, all their songs seem to be about masturbation. It's not clever, but judging by the stampede to see them play, they're still very, very big.
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