Hasn’t America Suffered Enough?

Even a broken clock’s right twice a day, and occasionally, Republican politicians from Staten Island have a point. Outraged that Citigroup’s sponsoring the Mets’ new stadium while lining up for a bailout, Staten Island City Council Members Vincent Ignizio and James Oddo have proposed renaming the field “Citi/Taxpayer Field.” And while people who advocate heavily for taxpayer’s rights tend to lean towards the belligerent brand of Libertarianism (all-around asshole Grover Norquist achieved national prominence as head of the National Taxpayer’s Union), it’s a pretty appealing idea.

Taxpayer-funded stadiums are a boondoggle to begin with, and corporate bailouts are the same. For them to be wed so deliciously deserves some form of recognition. But, like most “rebellious” gestures from the right, it’s kind of empty. How about some equity in the team for these beleaguered taxpayers? How about giving every taxpayer a pair of complimentary Mets tickets.

Oh, right: the taxpayers would then be forced to watch the Mets. And haven’t they suffered enough already?

Something Beautiful

Cactus Cooler, anyone?

The release of Gmail themes today is as good a spur as any to do a little spring cleaning on your computer. After a hard week of moralizing, it’s time for some eye candy.

If you haven’t checked your mail today, Google’s released 30 skins to customize Gmail, and while they can’t all be winners, it’s a nice change of pace. There’s been third-party scripts to change the kind of bland look of Gmail before, but they don’t always integrate with the system perfectly. To have one supported by the monolithic all-owning corporation is a giant step up. Above is an example of 70s-Sports-Team-Uniform, skinning your inbox in rust and failure. All last names have been redacted.

Once your inbox is looking refreshed, it’s time to tackle the desktop. Not to be all Martha Stewart here, but you don’t still leave dirty socks on your floor (right)? At least not when you’re having company over. Before you do anything else, get rid of the unnecessary files and icons on your desktop. It’s ugly and it slows down your computer. If you must, create a temp folder to act as a repository for your orphaned files.

Now that you’ve deleted the 20 .zip files that you’ve long since unzipped, you can get to the fun part: the wallpaper. Although there’s plenty of websites out there that have attractive wallpaper, Bobby Solomon’s been making an artform out of it lately. Solomon, a Los Angeles-based graphic designer, has been featuring the Desktop Wallpaper Project on his blog (Kitsune Noir). In it, he’s gotten his friends in the design field to contribute desktop wallpaper to create a repository of wallpaper that goes beyond cityscapes and trees. Kitsune Noir in general is an interesting read- Solomon’s able to rail against the injustice of California’s bigoted Proposition 8 and push a homemade mixtape with equal passion. Ultimately, though, it’s the Desktop Wallpaper Project that’s really put Kitsune Noir on the map, and Solomon’s ability to consistently get people in his field to contribute has made it a treasure.

Stop gawking here and start beautifying your computer!

Mavericky Update

The meme that Cuban’s insider trading charge makes for a bad year for mavericks is starting to get some traction. The New York Times is linking to Ilya Somin’s post, which makes many of the same points as the post below, but also adds one crucial component that was overlooked: Insider trading is one thing, but trading Devin Harris for a washed-up Jason Kidd is truly unforgivable.

It’s Been A Bad Year For Mavericks

This week’s news that the SEC has charged Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban with insider trading feels like it was inevitable; it’s one of those punctuation marks that’s part of a coda for the last eight years. It wasn’t that his business practices had changed; it was that the culture had. Cuban’s always had a legendary reputation for boorish behavior that was bound to spill into his business ethics. The only question was when someone would call him on it.

It wasn’t going to be David Stern. Cuban’s earned his rep as the NBA’s enfant terrible by racking up over a million dollars¹ worth of fines for questioning the integrity of league’s officiating,² insulting Stern, and throwing on-court tantrums that have interfered with his team.

Of course, what else do you expect from an Ayn Rand-worshipping Libertarian? Cuban vocally supported Bush in 2004, but claimed that he was not a Republican. Of course he’s not. Libertarians never identify as Republicans, but seem to vote for them every election. Surely it’s coincidence. Just like there’s no atheists in foxholes, Libertarians tend to make themselves scare in times of crisis. In 2004, when the Mavericks were a true Western Conference power, his business acumen was unquestioned (his next target? the film industry³), and his preferred politician was puffing his chest out after a resounding mandate for his war, Cuban looked like a winner. Now that the free-market evangelism of the last eight years has been thoroughly discredited, privatizing social security doesn’t look like such a swell idea. The captains of industry and finance who had sided with the GOP to stick it to needy welfare queens were now lining up for the federal dole themselves.

“Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.”

-Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski

And no matter how vile the overriding philosophy behind the Republican Party may be, at least many of them honestly believe their policies will reduce poverty, bring about peace, and create a fairer society. Libertarians don’t believe any of this. They don’t care. It’s a mindset crystalized at age 6, when they’re told “no” by a parent and never get over the injustice of this. It’s a political philosophy based around the ethos of I’ll eat ice cream for dinner, and stay up as late as I want, and if you won’t let me, you’re a Nazi.

And when combined with a personality as defiant as Cuban’s, it’s a pretty lethal combination. His contempt towards the basic norms of the NBA made him seem like a folk hero at first, fighting against a buttoned-down league that’s occasionally tried to legislate the fun out of basketball. But as his act wore thin, it became clear that it was never about fighting a broken system, it was about indulging Cuban’s need to act out. Even before he bought the Mavericks, when he made the billions that gave him this soapbox in the first place, the ink was barely dry on his deal with Yahoo before he was bragging about how badly he’d ripped them off. Good luck getting a second sale out of them. When he started a website designed to bring down companies’ stock prices so he could profit off a short sale, no one was buying his posture as a crusader against corporate corruption. It’s not like he had a working model for how to run an ethical business. He just wanted to make a quick buck, destroy a few companies as a show of power, and if cornered, claim that the victims had it coming. It was never ethical, but it would figure that someone with as much to lose as Cuban would do his due diligence as to whether it was legal. By taunting the SEC just as he’d taunted Yahoo and David Stern, he got his answer. It’s tragic, but predictable. And he’s about to go to a court where it’s a lot harder to bully the refs with a blog post.

¹ Conservative estimates have it at $1.65 million.
² He famously claimed that the head of officiating “wouldn’t be able to manage a Dairy Queen.”
³ This also hasn’t worked out so well.

Paper Route Recordz Does The Lord’s Work

Not two days after this blog posted Viva La Hova as an example of how to exploit the internet to distribute great music and challenge the industry’s flagging business model, Mad Decent and Paper Route Recordz have raised the stakes. Radiohead’s lucrative “pay-what-you-want” model is starting to attract followers, and the more artists try it, the less it looks like a gimmick and the more it looks like the future of the music industry. There’ll always be a place for artists who give music away for free on the internet, but getting people to actually pay is going to get taken more seriously as a business model. Lil Wayne’s deluge over the last few years only paid off for his label after it sold a lot of physical copies in stores… in other words, Universal still sees the internet as, at best, a loss leader to promote 1998’s industry model. Which is why the ability to get people to pay willingly (and not just out of fear of a lawsuit, or inability to find it on the hype machine) is key. Mad Decent and Paper Route are rewarding those who pay over $5.00 for their new release Fear And Loathing In Hunts Vegas with a higher bitrate and five bonus tracks. This looks like a winning business model, and one that even thick-headed suits like Universal CEO Doug Morris could understand.

In a week in which the aforementioned Lil Wayne dropped the much-hyped Dedication 3, which is already being written off as a disappointment, it’s nice to see at least one mixtape deliver the goods. The title refers to the remote burg of Huntsville, Alabama, and the geographical remove from traditional hip-hop hotspots shows. It’s as if people who had never heard hip-hop were handed a rough description of the music on paper and asked to create it sui generis. Hearing the Paper Route roster is like hearing Three 6 Mafia for the first time; in both cases, rappers had to create a scene where none existed, and the fact that neither initially expected their music to reach an audience outside their immediate area lent the music a freedom (not to mention a very loose approach to sampling). Actually, hearing Jhi-Ali take on Underworld’s rave classic “Born Slippy” on album opener “Stuntastic” is the best argument yet for reforming copyright law; it’s more convincing than an essay from Lawrence Lessig or Cory Doctorow (although they’re pretty damn convincing too).

The involvement of Mad Decent brings on board some high-profile guests and producers–Diplo, Blaqstarr, and Wale among them–but never threatens to overpower the Huntsville flavor of the tape. The formula’s so straightforward, it’s a miracle it isn’t tried more often: Take a blank slate of a regional scene, rappers with so-bad-they’re-good stage names (Dawggy Bagz and the half-Asian MC Jackie Chain), innovative (and brazen) use of sampling, a forward-thinking business and distribution model, and an assist from well-connected Mid-Atlantic bloggers and DJs.

How hard can that be?

Download It Here

The Shock Doctrine on Your iPod

Charles Nesson, Pizza Wolf

Harvard University’s made its share of mistakes over the years–they did, after all, let Larry Summers run the joint–but from time to time they prove their use to society, and more often than not, it’s their law school mopping up the damage. Remember, Bush went to their business school; Obama went to their law school. So it’s nice to see Professor Charles Nesson defend a Boston University student accused of sharing seven files. The RIAA, to date, has preyed upon members of society who couldn’t afford a decent legal defense, or risk a trial. Eventually, someone was bound to bring in All-Star legal representation, and its hard to imagine anyone more up to the task than Nesson.

It used to be a joke that the RIAA was relying on lawsuits as its primary business model, but with every month of declining sales, it’s starting to seem like nobody told the RIAA that it wasn’t meant to be taken literally. Even worse than the disproportionate damages the cartel is demanding is the fact that the RIAA has been allowed to act on behalf of the law, a privatization of the legal system that even Naomi Klein didn’t foresee. When DJ Drama was arrested, the agents raiding his office weren’t wearing ATF jackets, they were wearing RIAA jackets. Yes, they really can come to your house.

Just as Blackwater has no business raiding marijuana dispensaries in Venice, CA, the RIAA has no business knocking down anyone’s door. Nesson’s pull quote for the case accuses the RIAA of using the courts “like a low-grade collection agency,” which proves why he makes the big bucks. The RIAA’s gamed the system so far, often moving cases to courts that have universally ruled in its favor (one jurisdiction in Texas has made a cottage industry out of this, using its stacked court system as an incentive for businesses to hold their lawsuits there). Maybe, just maybe, they’ve met their match.

They Finally Fixed The Last Coldplay Album

Mick Boogie and Terry Urban’s Viva La Hova represents everything this blog stands for: free music on the internet, a Creative Commons-esque approach to remix culture (in other words, the willingness to face down a $10 million lawsuit like Danger Mouse), and a love of digging into interesting failures.

Failures? Sure, they might have tens of millions of records sold between, them, but Jay-Z and Coldplay both have some flops in their recent history. American Gangster‘s undone some of the damage from the outright disaster that was Kingdom Come, but calling his next album Blueprint 3 reeks of desperation (as well as trying to catch up with Lil Wayne in the franchise department). Coldplay, in addition to becoming something of a punchline (perphaps even unfairly¹) is still seeing the law of diminishing returns, with each album since the one with “Clocks” on it being treated like the tepid rewrite that it is.

Thus, it’s nice to see a mashup album that doesn’t shy away from redeeming these failures. Viva La Hova works well divorced from any context (the true acid test for a successful mashup), and hearing verses from Kingdom Come and The Blueprint 2 in a fresh context gives them a chance they never stood against the overcooked production on those albums.

Not to mention Chris Martin gets to good and truly cement his title as this generation’s Phil Collins.

Download Viva La Hova

Courtesy of Viva La Hova and Get Right Music

¹ And anybody who laughed at the part in 40-Year Old Virgin about knowing a guy was gay because he listened to Coldplay is just trying too hard.

It’s Not A Bug, It’s A Feature

Michael Lewis is mostly famous these days for his Moneyball, one of the few sports books taught in business schools. In it, he describes how the Billy Beane built the Oakland A’s into a perennial contender¹ on a relatively small budget by challenging the conventional thinking on what statistical categories truly measure a player’s contributions. Before Moneyball, though, Lewis’ best known work was his debut Liar’s Poker, an account of his years at Salomon Brothers after graduating from Princeton. His depiction of the win-at-all-costs culture of Wall Street was intended to be a wake-up-call to a country that was already getting an object lesson in what happens when Wall Street greed goes unchecked. Instead, the book found a ready audience among those who would use it as an instruction manual.²

Lewis’s piece in Portfolio (apparently it will be among his last for them, as Vanity Fair’s scooped him away) on the current economic meltdown feels like an appropriate bookend. Among his arguments in it is that the Eighties never really ended. Hairstyles changed, one party drug replaced the next, and periodically, the worst offenders in the financial services industry saw a show trial, but none of the underlying causes of the crash of 1987 and the recession of the early 1990s got addressed. When Salomon went public (and its contemporaries followed suit), investment banks no longer bore the ultimate brunt of their mistakes; they could always ultimately stick the shareholders with the losses. The increased (and irresponsible) use of exponentially increased the scale of each error in judgement.

Ultimately, though, the biggest mistake was to believe that each scandal and each crisis was brought about by a rogue trader or a pocket of corruption. The problem was not that one trader or rater was individually corrupt or incompetent, or even that most of them were. It was that they were doing exactly what the system was designed to have them do. Actors who gamed the system weren’t the problem. The system itself was the problem.

¹ Though Beane also issued the infamous caveat that “that shit don’t work in the playoffs.”
² Not to mention Ben Mezrich, who’s made a career out of aping Lewis.

This Is Not Okay

What is it with George Bush and college hand signals that look bad out of context?¹

No, it’s not Photoshopped. There’s really no interpretation of this that does enough to explain it away.

(Tip of the hat to boingboing)

¹ And as much as we might loathe Bush, this site is run by loons.

The Funky Four + 1: 5 Albums That Sound Better At 128kbps

As the price of hard drives goes down, and the relative storage capacity increases (Moore’s Law), the unspoken corollary is that the size of information will increase to match it. Even flash-based mp3 players can hold 16 GB these days, and it’s not like the number’s going to go down. Greater broadband speeds and penetration (although the U.S. lags most developed countries–hell, we’re even getting lapped by some places where we wouldn’t even drink the water) are constantly reducing the speed and effort involved in sharing an album. In return, consumers (paying and otherwise) demand higher quality files, usually measured in bitrates. In the glory days of Napster, the thrill of free music was enough to make people overlook the 64kbps rips that cut off in the middle, punctuated by the alert sounds from the ripper’s AIM program. Now, anything less than 192kbps is considered not even worth stealing. When Radiohead gave away In Rainbows last year, they caught hell from audiophiles–and can we imagine a Venn diagram of audiophiles and Radiohead fans?–for encoding it at 160kbps. That’s right, people were complaining about something they were getting for free. VBR and 320kbps rips are fast becoming the standard, expanding in file size to match the increasing capacity to store them. Five years from now, music pirates of the future will probably turn up their noses at 320kbps rips as unlistenable. The Loudness War that’s going in the mastering rooms isn’t helping either, as accompanying the increased bitrate is a command from music engineers to flatten the dynamic range to optimize records for cellphones and tinny computer speakers.

And as the first generation to grow up without cassettes comes of age, the classic Maxell tape of the 1980s has achieved an iconic status. For these Millenials, mixtapes are something you download, not buy from the guy at the subway station (although the standards in cover art haven’t improved much). On the indie rock side of the dial, muxtape (R.I.P.) may have replaced mixtapes as the fastest way to a would-be lover’s heart, but High Fidelity types still fetishize the cassette regardless.

And as the Millenials age, it’s inevitable that crappy rips will take on a nostalgic element, whether it’s warranted or not. In anticipation of this, Black Ships is presenting the Top 5 Albums That Sound Better At 128kbps. Many considerations went into this list. Recent attempts, like Justice’s Cross, are penalized for intentionally aiming for this effect (it’s also mastered at ear-splitting levels). Hip-hop classics like Straight Outta Compton or It Takes A Nation Of Millions… would seem like logical choices too, but Dr. Dre and the Bomb Squad both took enough care to include a full dynamic range that, even accounting for the JVC boomboxes of the time that they were designed to be listened on, demand to be heard in high quality to be appreciated. No, this list comprises records that, through a combination of nostalgia, bad mastering, and low budgets, really flower at 128kps. Due to his prolific output, the entire career of Bob Pollard (Guided By Voices) is not eligible for this list.

Top 5 Albums That Sound Better At 128kbps:

5. Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures
After singer Ian Curtis took his own life and the band forged on as New Order, Peter Hook’s basslines grew even more prominent, and the guitar and synth lines explored new textures and tones that accompanied their plunge into rave culture. Before that, though, producer Martin Hammett enabled a punk band’s foray into a dark, lonely place. Even before their bleakness reached oppressive levels with Closer, debut album Unknown Pleasures carried a chill about it. From the iconic cover art to the judicious use of synths, everything about this album is a piece of one aesthetic. To listen to it on a great stereo is to add a warmth to it that was never intended. Low bitrates keep the feeling intact, just as God (and Martin Hammett) intended.

4. Wu-Tang Clan: Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
There’s countless essays that can be written on this album (and producer The RZA’s already written a book on its creation), but one feature of many that made this stand out in 1993 was its violently lo-fi aesthetic. Even by the grittier standards of the time, everything about his record was, well, kind of punk, from the hand-drawn cover art on the “Protect Ya Neck” single, to the damn-near impenetrable inside slang, and especially the music. The drums lurch like a drunk in an alley before periodically attacking the listener. Inspectah Deck’s crack about mountain climbers who play electric guitar notwithstanding, the album does in fact utilize electric guitar stabs placed at random intervals. Rumor has it that The RZA ran Method Man’s microphone through a Marshall guitar amplifier to roughen his voice up, and nothing about the album suggests otherwise. Regardless of the financial constraints that might have gone into making this album, everything about the sound feels like an aesthetic choice.

3. Gravediggaz: 6 Feet Deep
With a major-label budget at his disposal, an equally inspired creative foil in Prince Paul, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of free time despite producing three other classic albums that year, The RZA took a left turn with the Gravediggaz project. While the Wu-Tang debut summed up a lifetime of sherm sticks and grindhouse flicks, Gravediggaz was a self-aware attempt to test how exactly how violent a rap record could be. With an almost clinical flair, the participants adopted stage names for the project straight out of the E.C. Comics vault (the Undertaker, the Grym Reaper, the Rzarector, etc.) and invented horrorcore as we know it. While this requires a strong sense of irony (or a superhuman willing suspension of disbelief) to enjoy, real cannibals don’t have access to expensive studio equipment. Thin sound only aids the illusion.

2. Cat Power: Moon Pix
While any of her early (pre-You Are Free) albums would work, Moon Pix is the best of the bunch before Chan Marshall started modeling for Chanel. The Beastie Boys sample on “American Flag” sounds as out of character for her now as it does then. Even as she’s branched out into styles beyond the gauzy folk of her early years, most of her music avoids drums of any kind, never mind the cassette-based backwards sample from “Paul Revere” (here we go again with the cassette nostalgia…). In low sound quality, her spidery guitar lines don’t stand a chance against her voice. Even when she sounds like she’s faltering, or about to give in entirely, her voice overpowers everything in sight. The school of singing that treats it like an Olympic sport has only gained more currency in the last decade, but sometimes the most poweful statement is the one that doesn’t puff its chest out. Truly haunting.

1. Scarface: Mr. Scarface Is Back
By the end of the 1990s, Rap-A-Lot Records had assembled an in-house production team that rivaled that of any label. Not only did it separate Rap-A-Lot from the contenders nipping at its heels, but its unified aesthetic helped define the Texas sound as much as anybody, with the possible exception of Port Arther’s UGK. At the start of the decade, though, the book had yet to be written, and Scarface, fresh off the Geto Boys’ breakout success, launched his solo career with Mr. Scarface Is Back, an excellent album, but one that also showed a sound that was a work in progress. The cover art hails from an era before Photoshop (when they build a Southern Rap Hall Of Fame, Pen & Pixel graphics is getting its own wing in recognition of the ludicrous Photoshop jobs it’s performed for album sleeves). Mike Dean and N.O. Joe had yet to crystallize the gumbo-funk sound that would serve as ‘Face’s constant companion. The beats largely lean on the popular sounds of the time: the Bomb Squad is an obvious touchstone, but so is Sir Jinx, who was largely responsible for Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. And while glimpses of the hard-edged social commentary that would become Scarface’s trademark poke through, a lot of the album also mines similar territory as the Gravediggaz album would five years later (“Born Killer,” “Murder By Reason of Insanity”). The combination of low-tech mastering (label head J. Prince had only just come over from the used-car business), classic samples thrown at the listener in haphazard fashion and violent lyrics that border on goth (“I’m Dead,” anyone?) give Scarface the top spot on this list. Brad Jordan, come forward and claim your championship belt.