News

7/18/2008

• My what horrible netizens we are,  defying the entire twitter generation by repeatedly disappearing for extended periods of drunkenness and larceny leading to widespread rumors and rampant gossip about our shocking demise!   Shocking!

• The rumors of a year long WE Fest however, are true!  Starting on August 22, The Soapbox and French Quarter will be hosting a monthly WE Fest Friday, hot damn, five stages of music, all for just one single solitary dollar and sponsored by Surf 98.3,  it's downright damn amazing.

• Sorry to bail on you so fast, but there's something going on with the software on this laptop that's eating shit.  Time to figure out how to update this site without it taking five minutes to add a link, Jesus Christ.   Be back.

5/16/2008

• WE Fest is less than a week away!  As ever, be there or be rectangular, we do it for the lulz, people.

• Hooray for The Milwaukees for giving Kenyata props!   Hooray to Gone Fishing For Blue Skies for playing us in Japan!   Hooray for Review Stalker for giving WE Fest props!   Hooray for the Star News for giving WE Fest early ink!  Hooray to Lazlo and BlowUpRadio in Jersey for interviewing Kenyata and letting him babble randomly for two whole damn hours!   I'd link to Bootleg Magazine,  but they don't have a website, hooray for them despite the fact they're obviously Amish!  Zoom Zippity Zoom Zoom Zippity Zoom Zoom!

4/30/2008

• WE Fest, WE Fest, WE Fest!

No, we're still not done with the new damn record you bastards, because it's not good enough, and we've also been crazy busy with WE Fest. You want WE Fest to rock, right?  Damn right you do!  We're just hosting the event (not playing), but come get drunk with us at the end of May.

That being said, we're probably gonna go pretty apeshit if we don't get you some new music soon.  All this cool stuff is collecting in our heads and banging from our bandroom, but no one hears it but us.   Hmm.

The local rumor mill even suspects that we've secretly broken up because we've been so private for so long, but that ain't so, not even close.   In fact, we're just now moving into a much larger bandroom so we can include a piano in the initial songwriting from here on out.  As soon as we can find a theremin player, a horn section and a full gospel choir, we'll be good to go.

• Hooray for VideoHIVE, Video Vision, and TVfuntime.com for still playing our video for "Cry", to Lazlo and Blow Up Radio for including us on their online compilation, and also to The Mental Nomad, Nicole, Chris Mezzolesta, etc etc, jeez, this is the problem when I take too long to update this thing, I forget folks who've been great to us and I feel bad.  

3/20/2008

• Kenyata is delighted to have just accepted the Music Supervisor's gig for the short film Blue Skies, the latest project from Bad Trip Productions based right here in Wilmington, NC  (though most folks don't know it, we're the third largest film community in the USA,  right behind NYC and LA.   No shit.)

He's also tickled that his buddy Mike Daugherty is gonna be in town in about a week, showing off his metalwork for a new horror movie that features SFX by one of  Kenyata's oldest pals, the mighty Will Purcell.

If you check out our video for "Livin' On The Beach" from back in the day, Mike is the dancing cop, and Will is the guy who slaps the flier on the wall and beckons you into the club at the beginning.  Both of them are doing great, Will is blowing shit up left and right for the movies (and has just gotten engaged), and Mike is selling replica train whistles for tons of money faster than he can produce them.   There's nothing better than when your friends are going out there and kicking the world in the ass!  Especially when they still wanna drink with you, even when they're all Mr. Big Shit and stuff.   If you've seen the Bukowski inspired movie "Barfly," yell it with us, "To all our friiiieeeeeends!"

• Kenyata is also thrilled to have been asked to join The Atticus, which should be great fun!   The Atticus is a small collection of songwriters with ties to the teams led by  Butch Walker and Linda Perry out in Los Angeles, so don't be too shocked if you see K's name at the end of the lyrics of a big pop single soon.  Seriously, don't go all rolling bug-eyed and indie rock arrogant, roll with it baby, enjoy the ride!

Pop songs are a hoot,  it'll be fun to write 'em, kinda like crossword puzzles, doncha think?!   Watch out, Diane Warren - before you know it,  in addition to the everyday manic emotional and noncommercial political madness of our records, we're gonna be using American Idol stars, pop country icons, and disco divas to absofuckinglutely drink America's Top Forty milkshake.   Bee-otch.

Shoutout to Mook since we just dropped the milkshake on ya.

3/18/2008

• Hooray for VIRV Indie Music Television!

• Hooray for Twilight And Thebes!

Mostly we've been working on the new disc, raising money for the new videos, and getting everything together for WE Fest 2008.   Busy busy!

3/07/2008

• Thanks to Crackle for spotlighting our video for "Cry"!   Thanks also to the new folks who are now playing the video,  including Strictly Global from MHz Networks, Video Countdown in Toledo, and iNDiGO TV in NYC.

3/05/2008

• A few days ago while I was working on the next disc, I used the morning of the session to write and record a sad little piano song called "Eminent Domain".   If you want to hear it,  it's posted over at Culture Bully, along with the story of how it happened.

• Hooray for Star Wars Action News for using "Welcome To The City" in the soundtrack for their annual Toy Fare video episode!

• I'm pleased to announce that we've found the director for the first video from our upcoming disc!   His name is Ilias Sounas,  and he's a phenomenal animator.   He lives in Greece,  check out his short film Space Alone.   W e can't wait to see what he does with our humble little dance track called "Amphibious Vehicular Love",  and it's an honor to be collaborating with him.

2/28/2008

• As many of you know, we host an annual music festival here in our little hometown!   Preperations are well underway for this year's event,  you should come when the end of May rolls around,  here's the skinny:

In 1996, a ragtag bunch of musicians, artists, filmmakers and writers decided that the established events that were constantly hyped to them were bullshit.   They decided instead that they would have their own festival, celebrating some very simple things - great music, community, and the independent spirit, as opposed to money, the mainstream music industry, and blind ambition. 

While an awful lot of indiespeak gets bandied about nowadays, this was pretty novel at the time.  They called it W.E. Fest,  short for the Wilmington Exchange Festival, due to the fact that the event was (and is) held in the sleepy southern beach town of Wilmington, NC.  

Over the past decade plus, they've managed to intentionally stay homespun and under the radar, even though their relatively small ranks would include an awful lot of people who would become some of the most pivotal and vital contributers to today's modern music scene.   

The Dismemberment Plan when they'd just released their first record.  Ryan Gentles before he managed The Strokes.  Alison Mosshart before she was in The Kills.  Lamb Of God when they were still called Burn The Priest.  The Mooney Suzuki when they only had a demo tape out.  Mae when they were still unsigned.  xbxrx when they were still underage and their Dad drove the van from Alabama.  Anthony Rossomando before he was in The Libertines and Dirty Pretty Things.  Daron Murphy before he was Moby's guitar player.  Todd Evans before he was Beefcake in GWAR.  Asobi Seksu when they were still called Three Cornered Season.  ASG before they were on Volcom.  Val Emmich before Sony, 30 Rock, and Got Milk?.  Weedeater before they were on Southern Lord.  Martha Mooke before her ASCAP award and her stint with David Bowie (not to mention her current gig with Philip Glass), and many many more, all WE Fest.   

Cover charge is intentionally small, between $1 and $3 a day.  All of the staffers and organizers are volunteers, and once basic expenses are met, the rest of the money goes to the bands.  WE Fest intentionally never turns a profit.   

People from the mainstream biz are intentionally not invited, though some of them who get what we're doing and are in the know show up anyway, just to have fun.  Ernie Brooks from the legendary Modern Lovers graced us with a set.  Last year actor Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood) and his band Mook surprised us with two sets, and didn't even tell us he was coming beforehand (silly Mook!). 

WE Fest is for musicians, artists, writers, and fans, not businessmen.  This is why the bands don't suck, and why WE Festers are disproportionally successful, because WE Festers - as a community - truly give a shit.  

If you want to join us, our 12th annual event is happening this May 22-26 on all three floors of The Soapbox Laundrolounge in Wilmington, NC.  Indie rock arrogance is just as frowned upon as major label dominance.  We just want to hang out, listen to great bands, drink great beer, and genuinely get to know each other.  You know, just have fun, like in the old days when none of us had an inkling that anyone else might care.  

It's good stuff, and if you're into that kind of thing, you should probably find a way to be here.

2/27/2008

• Thanks to Logo for playing our video for "Cry"on NewNowNext!

• Thanks to Lazlo and Blow-Up radio for including us on their March/April sampler CD!

• In non-band news, hooray for my cousin Austin for his work rebuilding coral reefs!

2/23/2008

• Finally,  it feels like we're moving forwards and getting this new disc done, songs are getting finished!   The process is striking though, especially when I compare it to my early days.

I keep flashing back to when I made my first record with Pandora's Lunchbox.  Me and the fellas back then started a band mostly because our friends had a band, and we practiced every day  'cause we wanted to be better than them.   Shane and Jack didn't even know how to play their instruments, they learned as we rehearsed.   Three and a half  months later we made our first record. 

We recorded it live to two-track in Thalian Hall here in Wilmington, and I think there are only two splices and one overdub on the whole damn thing.  This was back in about 1991,  I think?  It still sounds great.   You can even hear one of the Thalian ghosts contributing feedback (we saw ghosts while we were recording the song "Windowpane", but being really young and pressed for time, we didn't stop playing and just went with it.   Curtains started moving, a figure materialized as a haze in the seats, that's true.   We were tired and it might have just been our collective imaginations, but it was one helluva ride.)

I'm a bit older now,  kinda like grandpa indie rock, and for now anyway, making a record in a weekend just wouldn't be satisfying.   Nowadays,  it takes a while.  Because of  money and family, we all record basic tracks together, and then I go back up to the studio whenever we have the money to get things polished and finished up.   That's when I do the vocals, and the ear candy, and the extra arrangements.   I can't stand the idea of it sounding half-assed and demo-ish, but since I come from a low-fi and punk rock background I'm also always worried that I'm killing the spirit of the songs by being so meticulous about them. 

There will always be one part of me that thinks every song should be stripped down and raw, and another part that wants four part harmonies, a fairlight, aand a full orchestra ta boot.  I joke with Jerry that this whole record is like Black Flag and Kate Bush trying against all odds to make a happy baby  (for you young 'uns,  make that Strike Anywhere and Cat Power).

Jerry and I also joke that 90% of what we do in the studio is a failed experiment.   Sometimes I change not just the words, but the entire delivery because what I was doing live just sounds wrong when we get it on tape.   Even beyond that, sometimes I get a wild hair from a particular keyboard sound or something, and before you know it, I've got a drum machine rolling, and a brand new song is on the way.    If the guys like it, they're nice enough to  let me stick it on the record.   They're kinda the tits that way.

These are the only times I wish we were better known.  If we were better known, we'd have the resources to write and record so much faster, we could put out so much more music.   But I can't bitch, because we really do have exactly the right amount of  fame.

Contrary to popular belief, too much fame can really be a huge pain in the ass.  When I make it out to see a show, folks are really nice to me and buy me beers, we laugh and tell stories.   Sometimes we enter my own private Twilight Zone  and a band will dedicate a song to me, or pull a Majestic Twelve cover out of their kitbag, which always makes my week.   Musicians send me nice snail mail and emails to let me know they're listening, or that they're reading all this computer stuff that I usually expect to just slip into the ether.  

The other day I was on the phone with my old friend Kristin Forbes up in DC (she's in the delightful Olivia Mancini And The Housemates), and we were talking about how nice (and how humbling) it is to be locally respected veterans, while also being decidedly anonymous to virtually everyone outside of  "the scene". 

I can't deny that a little money here and there would be nice.   I guess we all wish we could just do the work, just write and play music, and not worry about the other stuff .   But if  I have to choose between rock star or musician/member of my community,  I'll take being the guy who works his ass off so he can make music that he loves and gets free beers when he goes out.   No crybabying here.   My life ain't perfect, but it's some good good shit.   To all of you who are actually reading this,  I love all you guys.

For the record, those of you who remember our song "I Don't Have A Job" from our first disc can thank Miss Kristin Forbes for that.  She was telling me back in the day about a well known punk band she was touring with, and the front man was bitching about what a pain in the ass it was to be on the road, complaining that he was still in the trenches while a number of his friends' bands were getting mainstream attention.

Kristin pointed out to him that he was doing what he loved for a living, and that thousands of other bands would have given their left nut to be in his position, so he should basically shut the fuck up and be grateful for all the love the kids gave him every night.   When she told me that story that's when I wrote those lyrics.   Despite the protestations of some critics,  it had nothing to do with REM, and was supposed to be much more of a whitey appropriation of  hip hop, completely due to my conversation with Kristin.   I love ya baby,  you rock Miss K!

• Hooray for Jack9 for licensing our stuff!

• Hooray for Zillafag!

• Hooray for Angelika at Nova M!

• Hooray (we think) for Pop News in France!  Anybody speak French?

2/20/2008

• More video adds!  The retail pool DMX Entertainment had added us to their BarFly Hits reel for February,  and now they've also added us to their Hot Traxx and Chart Attack reels for March.   Since they service over 200,000 retail outlets with video content,  it's one heck of a coup.

We've also now been seen on the legendary and venerable JBTV out of  Chicago,  Studio 21 in San Antonio, and Yale House Rock on Yale University's YTV.   Dandy!

2/11/2008

• In addition to being in MTVu's Top Ten this week, we also wanna thank a bunch of other folks who have added the video for "Cry"  - Indieist out in Santa Barbara, Indy's Music Channel in Indianapolis, Ruckus based out of  Herndon, VA, R n R TV in Baltimore,  Point Music TV in Stevens Point, WI, and we've also just climbed to #7 on the Taylor Production Broadcast Retail Pool's Top Thirty Rock & Pop Chart.   Movin' on up! 

You can also now see the video for "Cry" online at Roxwell.   Roxwell are a hoot because our video for "Trapped Underwater" has a perfect rating up there, while the one for "Livin' On The Beach" has one single lonely solitary star - guess Roxwell fans dig the tragedy and hate the irony, eh?

If you want to download the MP4 video for "Cry" , right click and save right here.

2/09/2008

• Man, what a week!  First we got slammed by the posh kids on MTVu for "Cry" (naughty posh kids, no more bottled water for you),  and then we just barely lost a squeaker to Foxy Shazam in the voting (who rock by the way, big ups to Foxy Shazam).    But hold the phone, then we found out that since we had such a strong showing, MTVu decided to add the video the same as if we'd won,  and badabing badaboom, the next thing you know we're on the Dean's List, which is MTVu's national Top Ten countdown!    Hot tamale!

Many generous thanks to all of you who voted, especially the folks who blogged and posted about it - Chris over at Culture Bully, bashba at the Pearl Jam Message Pit, Aspen Suicide from Pretty On The Inside, Kim Ware at Eskimo Bliss, Billy Maulana at Sound The Sirens, Bambi Weavil at Out Impact, Stephen Bailey Cultural Exchange Advocate,  the delightfully sublime Djinbala, brand spanking new tv personality Gaeton, Lazlo from Blow Up Radio and Lazlo's Den, and so many more of you who posted bulletins on MySpace, harrassed your friends into helping out, and voted until you developed carpal tunnel.   We are all an army waving pillowcase flags.

• In other good news, I got a check in the mail right outta the blue from my pal Blair Murphy!   Lemme tell you a story about Blair, this is fantastic.

Back in the 1990's, he made a self-financed low budget vampire film that's become a bit of a cult favorite called Jugular Wine (which gets slammed on IMDB, but never mind those pricks).   Since he didn't have any distribution, he decided to try and sell it to Blockbuster directly, 'cause, you know, he just has big balls like that.  When they said "no", he told them to hold on a minute, and go ask their kids if they would rent a vampire movie with Henry Rollins in it.  Their kids said yes.   Blockbuster bought thousands of copies for their stores directly from our intrepid filmmaker.

That in and of  itself  is a fantastic story of  DIY can-do and victorious moxie, but it gets better!   Blair took all that money, and instead of just making another movie like most folks might do, he bought himself his own haunted hotel, and moved into that sucker proving once and for all that this is a guy with style.

Since then the hotel has become a hub for artists, photographers, musicians and writers.   Oh, and vampires, too.   Ever going beyond the call of duty, Blair also hosts the annual Kerouac Fest, and proves on a daily basis that he is one of those rare people who actively drives the underground we all relish and enjoy, as opposed to just marvelling at it from afar, or leeching from it's more lascivious fruits.    Blair Murphy,  my good friends,  is a scholar and a gentleman.

So anyways,  it's always great to hear from him, and this time was even better - he asked if  he could use our song "Busy Work" for the opening sequence and end credits of  his upcoming film "Coolsville", which is a documentary about his Kerouac Fests.  And he sent a check for the rights ta boot!  We would've let him use the song for free (and I'm pretty sure he knew that), so that was downright classy.   He sent us a cool frisbee, too.

• OK, let's see,  news, news.... we're still working on the new disc,  blah blah blah.  It's making me nuts that it's taking so long, but I can only get up to the studio to mix and do vocals a few days each month, and I'm an anal retentive little prick.   My punk rock friends pick  on me.

We also had the first production meeting for the video for "Condoleezza, Check My Posse" , because we finally had a good idea for the damn thing!   We're shooting to have it done in six weeks (and we damn well better come close to being on schedule since Bush will be gone soon, thank God.)     So,  yes,  despite the late  date,  we plan to continue making fun of  George Bush and his administration for as long as he continues to soil the Presidential office with his foul incompetent soulless zombie stench, down to the very last day.   The man's still a dick, and humor must continue to ensue.

1/28/2008

• Hey,  starting at 11 AM today, we're on MTVu's THE FRESHMAN this week!   The other bands are all good, but we hope you'll vote for us anyways!   Good times.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS - Keith Hopkin (the drummer in Asobi Seksu until about a year or two ago)  says they were on The Freshman and it was good stuff,  so hey, rockin'!    He has a new band he made just for fun called Blue Album Group,  which is a performance art project that will be playing Weezer's "Blue Album" in it's entirety.   Don't call 'em a tribute or cover band, it's art you bastards,  go dig it henceforth.

PSS - Mark in Scotland begs to differ with our opinion that all the bands are good, and says that Jack Penate is, and we quote, " one of the current wave of NME-sponsored fake indie idiots who sing about life's seedy realities without ever having LIVED any of them...  check out his video where he's running along Brighton seafront really fast. every time i see it, i hope maybe THIS time, he'll drop dead. plus, he looks like david gedge's younger, retarded brother. i DETEST him! see also, lily allen, kate nash and loads more. the TV coverage of last summer's festivals was FULL of this sort of shit when they could've been showing GOOD stuff like the hold steady, bright eyes, etc."

We,  being uneducated Yanks who've never heard of   Penate before,  cannot authentically verify our good friend Mark's opinion, but is was such a fantastic rant we had to add it as an addendum.   Now excuse me while I go Google David Gedge.   Oh yeah, Wedding Present!

When I myself watched Penate's video,  I mostly just thought he must be a big fan of  Paul Weller circa The Jam, or perhaps John Wesley Harding with really really happy happy feet,  but these are fine things to like, eh?     I  probably won't watch it again, but hey, I'm a picky little bastard.   What the hell do I know, anyways?

It's worth noting that Pinate is just one letter away from Pinata, which rhymes with Kenyata, which on second thought isn't worth noting at the least.

Keep the cool mail coming!  I'll be locked down in the studio for the next two days working on the new disc, but will be back here to blather on about your emails and much other somesuch, posthaste.   As ever,  keep talking to us, because we dig it!   You rock!

1/23/2008

• Thanks to everyone playing the "Cry" video,  you guys are fantastic.   Online we've now also been hooked up by Blank TV, and VH1, and MuchMusic, and Spike TV, and Roxwell, and Crossbones TV,  kickass.

Also, huge thanks to a bunch of video shows across the country who've been playing it - fine folks like Class A TV out of Jamaica, NY, Capitol Chaos from Sacramento, Eye Music Network from Atlanta, Video Countdown in Toledo, Raw Shorts from Bloomington, Video Hits from Rochester, Videology from Columbia.   Not to mention the retail pools that have stuck us on their reels, including Retail Entertainment Design (which means it's been seen in every Virgin Megastore for the past month), ScreenPlay (irritating unsuspecting shoppers at Macy's, Ikea, etc),  Rock America, and WYA Retail (women's clothing stores AND tattoo parlors - no shit!)

• We're back in the studio this coming Monday and Tuesday working on the next disc, hope to have it out to ya soon - keep your fingers crossed for a speedy and transcendent mix.   We have two new videos in pre-production right now - a short film for "Grandfather", and, finally we think we have a concept for "Condoleezza, Check My Posse" that can fly, so hey, wish us luck on all that stuff.

1/21/2008

You doubt the awesome kung fu skills

of  The Majestic Twelve?!  Prepare to die!

Kenyata's one year old daughter proves

that stubborn indie rock combat runs

in the family (photo by Kate Falconer).

1/03/2008

• Happy New Year!   We want to say thanks to all the folks playing the video for "Cry", in fact if you live in Rhode Island, you can watch it tonight on Bad  Taste Music TV.  

Fuel TV have also gotten on board, which is great since my 8 year old is going to surf camp this coming summer - here comes the newest grom on the block, coming to a Fuel show near you soon!   They're showing Valient Thorr right now on The Daily Habit, excellent,  Carolina boys,  I saw more than one great show from them back in their early nightclub days, they rock.   Go give some love to Valient Thorr.

We also wanna thank Power Play Music TV out of Newark,  Split TV out of Atlanta,  Playing @ A Theatre Near You in Michigan, Video Diversity in Omaha,  the 9:30 Club in DC, and also a couple of retail pools - EVision (which means it'll be seen at the House Of Blues and on Princess cruise lines) and VME Media's Pulse TV Network.

And it's popping up all over the web - in addition to Blender.com naming us a Blender Breakout Band, you can also see it on Stim TV, Rockdirt, AOL Music, Singing Fool, Yahoo, and of course it's popped up on YouTube several times now and it's on MySpace, plus a few other places that I'm spacing at the moment. We've only just begun the promotion, if you're a video programmer, hey, jump on board!  Let us know what format you need, and we'll see you get it asap.

Thanks again to the miraculous J.R. Stauffer at Broken Wings for directing a great clip, even taking money out of his own pocket to get it done when it went over our meager budget, and to everyone at Hip Video Promo for always having our backs, despite the fact that we don't have the money or machinery of a record label behind us.    All of you mean more to us that we can say, we appreciate your faith and your work more than you can know, thanks for believing in us.   Onwards and upwards.

• I have to apologize to all of  you fine folks for us not getting you a new CD in 2007!   The songs are all written, basic tracks have been recorded since September,  I just haven't been able to do the vocals and finishing work because of  family stuff.  

However, the good news is that I'm back in the studio starting Jan 14th, and we're gonna get that sucker done as soon as we can.   In fact, cross your fingers, we might be able to get you a full length PLUS a bonus low-fi EP tacked on the end of the disc in a few months if all the puzzle pieces fall into place - wish us luck!  

And yes, it will be free, just like the last one.    It's always gonna be free, that's just the way we roll.   Don't forget to tell Radiohead we did it first.

12/21/2007

• Blender Magazine named us a "Blender Breakout" band on Blender.com this week.  Merry Christmas to us!

• Thanks to Mackenzie, Oliver, Lexi, Wayne and Steve from UNCW's film studies program for making this student film video for Condoleezza Check My Posse!

• Someone sent us this photo of something a teacher at Brunswick High School in Leland, North Carolina stuck up on the school's wall:

We're starting to pop up all kinds of  cool places, huh?

12/12/2007

• I just realize I know how I change when I'm drunk, and it's all thanks to blogging!   I usually update this when I'm loaded, but when I wake up in the morning, I read it and fix it so it better represents what I really mean.   Because of this, I've been able to figure out what alcohol does to me, how it changes my personality, which is a pretty cool observation.

1.  I get more aggressive.  I'm not talking about getting more violent, just more aggressive, more interested in courting controversy than civilly figuring things out.  I also use more profanity, but that actually merges into #2.

2. I overemphasize my position, basically saying the same thing over and over again, searching for the most emphatic way to say it, instead of just saying it well one time, and leaving it at that.

Now this is hardly a revelation about drunkenness, everyone knows that drunk people can be more aggressive and say the same thing over and over, but hey, now I have evidence that I do that myself!  That's valuable info.  Hopefully I'll be mindful of that, and be a better drunk in the future (I'm drunk now,  how'd I do?!)

Oh, and I also overuse punctuation, and unnecessarily and repeatedly utilize internet abbreviations, fuck me, lol!!!

• As some of you know, we sell our stuff on eBay in order to pay for all of our projects, and have done so for a number of years (we highly recommend it).

On top of that, I have a New Year's Resolution to clean out my house and get a bit more Zen, so by the end of 2008, the goal is to have everything in my home (which is fucking huge) either have it's place, get sold, get donated, or get thrown away.

Part of this means that I'm selling off a lot of my audio archives, archives including some very rare music from the underground of the past twenty years, and it's led to some pretty interesting correspondence!   I thought I'd share with you this exchange between me and a noise fan, who actually clued me in to the importance of a certain cassette I had up for auction.

From Hicham Chadly (a writer for Blastitude, who first got in touch when I first started listing the archives)):

" hey again =

what about this?

noise cassette ~ CULVER/TOTALL, HEAD, DRAG SENTIMENT

is it TOTAL??? matthew Bower??????
thanks
hicham"

MY REPLY:

" hey Hicham (writing you from my private email, not the ebay one),

Jeez, I don't know if this is Matthew Bower or not - it's definitely British though, Culver made the first modern noise that really opened my eyes to the
genre, and he/they/it, definitely from the UK.

It's one of those tapes with handmade cover and labels, and no contact information whatsoever.  If  I remember right it's more along the lines of
ambient noise, found sounds, organic stuff, as opposed to Merzbow or more bludgeoning noise, but I could be wrong about that.

shit, hold the phone - I checked his Wikipedia, and it has to be him.  Culver is Lee Stokoe, who plays in the ressurrected Skullflower's live show.
Son of a bitch.

I was really active in the underground and cassette culture back in the day, and still have some 500-600 cassettes to go through, wonder what else might
turn up.  You might have a lot of fun over the next couple of months, no doubt there's some stupid rare shit in these boxes.  I also kept all of my
handwritten mail, though it hasn't been sorted.  I probably have letters from most of these folks, talking about their daily lives, and why they made
this or that.  Just found a letter from Britt Daniel where he talks about joining a band called Spoon (not "starting", but "joining"), that made me giggle a bit.

The internet is great, fantastic, but I can't lie that I miss the days when it took such a commitment to be a part of truly underground music.  It was  much more personal then, and more free.  Nowadays because of all the available choices, people seem to pigeonhole their tastes, but back then, the boundaries were much more broad.  Altrock bands like us were
cross-pollenating with death metal bands, noise bands, pop bands, country, scum, dance, backwoods cajun, disco, pretty much everyone who wasn't being
heard in the mainstream.  We were all listening to and learning from each other, hi-fi, low-fi, found sound experiments, whatever.  It was just a
really exciting time, where on any given afternoon you could have all your preconceptions challenged (and also reaffirmed) in wonderful ways, just from
a trip to the mailbox, where several different tapes were waiting, and you knew that no matter what, no matter the genre, no matter the quality even,
the people who made those tapes truly gave a shit.  MySpace just isn't the same.

I disappeared from the cassette culture pretty abruptly when my Grandma had a stroke and I needed to take care of her full time, so I kinda went from being ubiquitous to flat out vanishing from the scene, so the best thing coming from cleaning out the archives has been musicians on those tapes emailing, "wow, how are you?"

And that's something else, ya know?  No one is gonna email me 15 years from now saying, "Damn, you commented on our MySpace!  Did you ever get married, or what?", lol -

sorry to babble, I just get nostalgic, it was a great time for me.  a time for conversations instead of soundbites, openness instead of dogma, and
absolutely no rules as to what music could or couldn't be, whether that meant a great pop song, or a soundscape that changed your mood like a silent
film, slowly eroding you from that shadow in the corner of the room you barely even noticed before.  it was really something else."

The reason I stuck this up here is that I really do miss the days when death metal bands and singer songwriters would correspond and make friends.  If you're in a band, and you like us but you do something that's completely different from us, don't think that'll turn us off.   We wanna hear you, we're not clones, we listen to everything, we just love good music, good sound, no lemmings here.

• On the eBay tip,  if you wanna buy our stuff in general, click here.  

And if you're really just interested in the rare music cassette archive, here ya go, there really is some spectacularly rare stuff here.

12/05/2007

• It's December, hooray!

Every time Christmas rolls around, I'm delighted to hear from someone out there who's googled me to say that he's getting drunk with his buddies and listening to "Pass The Fucking Egg Nog", and this year has proven no exception - thanks Rich, carol on, you rock!

What, you say?  You've never heard Pass The Fuckin' Egg Nog, you say?!  Well shit, here's the original version with my  old pal Simon Spaulding on fiddle, or if you prefer, you can find a version we recorded with a bunch of our friends for fun at a Christmas party in 2003 right here.  Download one or both versions, and you go sing that sucker to the rafters (heck, record your own version, that would be sweet!)

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE MAJESTIC TWELVE!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PASS THE FUCKING EGG NOG

Merry Christmas, ho ho ho

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Get real drunk and piss in the snow

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Hooray for the beer man, the keg is tapped

Time for bed for Timmy, all his energy is sapped

We got too drunk and he was accidentally wrapped

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Merry Christmas, ho ho ho

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Poison all the turtledoves with mistletoe

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Old Uncle Arthur is asleep in his chair

We took away his hearing aid

And packaged it with care

We put his hand in water and he wet his underwear

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Merry Christmas, ha ha ha

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Twelve lords a leapin' to Christmas ska

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

All the Rastafarians are staring at the treef

Toking really long on a really big spliff

The tree looks like a giant bud,

They stare in disbelief

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Merry Christmas, ho ho ho

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

We dosed Aunt Bertha and she passed out in the snow

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Santa's late and his heart gives way

Mama Claus gives CPR and dumps him in the sleigh

But we don't care, we're tripping

On the fireworks display

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Merry Christmas, ho ho ho

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

People sing carols on the street down below

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog...

Jingle bells, shotgun shells

Grandma's gotta gun

Someone please disarm her,

'Fore she ruins all our fun

The singers wait patiently for wassel and food

Myron yells out, "Just wait there, dude!"

We pour our boiling wassel on the goody goody brood

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Merry Christmas,  lights in the town

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

The Rastas tried to smoke the tree and burned it down

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

The stupid little carolers called the police

The cops found little Timmy, and gave the boy release

The keg just floated so we throw it in the street,

and yell  Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

Pass The Fucking Egg Nog

11/27/2007

• The new video is done, hooray!  It's for the song "Cry", hooray for J.R. Stauffer and the staff at Broken Wings Productions who've done another bang-up job.  In the next week or so, our good friends over at Hip Video Promo will be promoting it all over North America, wish us luck!   It's not officially released yet, but you can see it here.

You can also see it as part of a promo for the upcoming third season of Port City P.D, which will be featuring a lot of our music in upcoming episodes, which of course, is pretty much the tits.

• Manuel Gonzalez and his friends down in Texas rock!  They made a short film called Los Zapatos featuring our music, go check that sucker out.

• Want a preview of our next disc?  We've donated a rough mix of a song that's going to be on our new record to a compilation put out by Bootleg Magazine that's raising funds for two childrens' funds here in Wilmington - Dreams Of Wilmington, and The Carousel Center.  Our track is called "Dance With Me", you go and buy that sucker, it's for a good cause.   We're on Disc 1, but buy 'em both if you can afford it.  A lot of our friends are on both discs, it's good stuff.

• I'm on the mailing list of  a company that does music licensing out of LA, and while we haven't done business with them (we don't give 50 points for publishing, never have, never will), I thought I'd share this correspondence with you.

Just a little industry banter, might be fun for some of you who care about the music "business" and stuff.

From Jennifer Yeko at True Talent Management:

9663 Santa Monica Blvd. # 320
Beverly Hills, CA  90210   http://www.truetalentmgmt.com

"There is a trend that's developed among superstar artists.    They're giving their music away for free!  

First Prince did it:   http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/

commentary/listeningpost/2007/07/listeningpost_0709

Prince also did it at his concerts.  He gave every single ticket buyer a "free" CD when I saw him live a few years ago.  Those "free" CDs somehow miraculously counted as "sales" for Soundscan (the cost was perhaps built into the price of the ticket?!?)-- so because he had one of the biggest tours of the year, his CD charted so well, even though it wasn't very good.  

And then came Radiohead:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/

main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/10/01/bcnradio101.xml

But, despite the hype, Radiohead decided not to remain completely indie but recently signed record deals to have their music distributed in physical CD format.  

And now Moby:  http://www.mobygratis.com/film-music.html

Moby is giving away his music for free to independent and non-profit filmmakers, films students and others that need their music for independent, non-profit use.  

Yes, the trend is that "music is free" - and if superstar artists are giving their music away, that's fine. They have the right to do that. Just the same way that you do, as an indie artist.  

What I don't like is that it sets a precedent, yet again, that "music should be free" to the consumer.   

So, no use in fighting it, right?  Consumers want their music for free. They'll either go online and download it for free (on some illegal service) or they get it directly from the artist.  

The problem is, the artists like Prince, Radiohead and Moby that are doing this can afford to. They have all made tens of millions of dollars when record companies were doing well.  They toured like crazy and made a lot of money that way. Tens of millions, if not more.  Moby licensed the $#@$# out of his "Play" album.   

It makes me sad because I know indie artists aren't in the same position. They don't have tens of millions of dollars in the bank and the luxury of giving their music away for free.  

But the future is just that - give away music for free.  License it.  Tour.  Get people to come to a show.  Maybe they will buy a t-shirt and CD at the live show, especially if you come out and sign for them after your set.  

So, the future for many of you, because of everyone wanting (and getting!) music from superstar artists like these guys for free, is that you will have to figure out a way to compete.  You must learn to make music really inexpensively yourself by recording your albums at home.  Or in really cheap studios.  Calling in favors.  Getting producers to work at a reduced rate.  Because, at the end of they day, you want to make a living from your music, right?  

It sure is hard to compete with free.  

But you gotta do it if you want to survive these days.  

So my question for you is - would you give your music away for free? Why or why not?   (There is no wrong answer here - just curious to get people's opinions).  If yes, under what conditions (if any) do you give your music away?  

Maybe the future has been here for decades.  A great interview with Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) from the November issue of Spin Magazine:  "A long time ago, someone tipped Grohl off about the secret of a long life in rock 'n' roll:  It's not about how many albums you sell; it's about how many tickets you sell.  Ever since, he's devoted much of his time to transforming the Foos from a solo studio endeavor into a well-oiled stage machine."  

"When I joined the band, we sucked live," Hawkins recalls.  "And we're still not Rush. We're sloppy, rough around the edges.  That's part of our charm.  But we've gotten really good, and I think on our best nights, we can take anybody."  

And if you think about it, TV shows are free to the consumer.  They are entirely paid for by advertisers.   

Maybe that will be the future of music.  

Only time will tell. "

MY REPLY:

Hi Jennifer,  

I rarely reply to your emails, but I thought I would chime in on this one.  

I would say that most independent musicians sell so few CDs that the money they get from them has historically been negligible, and that most musicians signed to labels have seen almost no money from record sales either.  In short, most of the time, record sales might impact record labels, but they don't really impact artists in a negative way.   

Back in the nineties, when I had my first experiences with A+R, it wasn't uncommon for artists to be told that they shouldn't even think of record sales as a source of income.  They were told to think of record sales as advertising for their live shows and their merch, because that was where they were gonna really get paid.  And if they were effectively promoted by the label they signed to, if the promotional pipeline of the label was applied to them, hey, that wasn't such a bad deal - if they were signed and being promoted, then lots of folks came to their live shows, and lots of folks bought their merch, so an artist could make a ridiculous amount of money, even if financially they were officially in debt to the label at the time, behind the eight ball in record sales compared to the money the label proportedly spent promoting the records, which happened more often than not.  

In short, as far as artists are concerned, records have been free for a long long time.  Indie musicians rarely earn back the costs of recording and manufacturing their DIY discs, and major label bands rarely earn back enough in record sales - versus label expenditures - for artists to actually get a check for those sales.  

This is why we were eager to give our newest record away online, it wasn't even a second thought.  And it's been the best thing we ever did - we can't tour right now, because my Grandmother had a stroke, and needs daily care.  Am I going to put my Grandmother in a home in order to run around the country touring with my band?  Never.  But I love music.  I love writing music, I love playing music. So if I can't tour, what am I going to do, quit?  Don't think so.  

I know I can't get people to buy a DIY record made by a band they've never heard of and never seen live, but I also know that record sales are realistically only the tip of the iceberg as far as money goes for songs and songwriting.  I also know we're in an era where downloading is rampant, and that's not going to stop.  

The last time I made it up to NYC for a visit, I had lunch with a great guy named Barry Bergman - a legendary radio guy, the guy who signed ACDC, the guy who broke Meat Loaf to mainstream radio with Bat Out Of Hell, just a good good dude with a ton of history.  We were talking about the RIAA's lawsuits against downloaders (which I'm against), and he said, "Well, it is working".  

But the truth is, it isn't.  The industry is just not as smart and as fast as the kids who have grown up familiar with computers and the internet.  By the time the industry sued Napster, the kids had already moved on to Gnutella, and now they're kneedeep in the newsgroups, and so it goes.  From here on out, the industry will always be behind the kids - there are too many of them, and they just work too fast for the bureaucracy to keep up.  

While records have been free (as far as artists are concerned) for a long long time, now records are free, period, and labels - and a lot of indie artists - just haven't figured that out and emotionally accepted it yet.  

Radiohead gets this, that was a great move by them.  Madonna gets this, which is why she signed a 360 deal with a concert promoter.  In fact, I would say that in ten years (if not much much sooner), record labels as we know them will no longer exist.  But this is OK!  

You see, all of this has happened before.  100 years ago, there were a handful of mammoth sheet music publishers who controlled the industry.  As a songwriter, you either played by their rules (aka sold your songs to them outright with no royalties later on), or your music didn't get published, and you had no hope of ever making a living as a songwriter.  Then this sparky little upstart named Thomas Alva Edison made a weird little box that played music on wax cylinders!  It was decried by the establishment as a gimmick, a fad, but that little wax cylinder turned into acetate discs, vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs.  The sheet music publishing industry didn't only lose their stranglehold on the market; they became also-rans in the markets they had previously dominated, because they, like the modern record label industry, were completely unable to leave behind their old processes in the face of a new technology that took away what had traditionally been the source of all their power.  

The one thing that didn't change before now though, was the way the industry was controlled.  It was controlled via physical distribution of product.   

It used to be - especially after regional radio died in the 1980's, and the trend of national "Top 40" became the norm across the country - that if you were an independent musician, you had almost no hope of reaching people outside of your hometown unless you either toured your ass off, or signed to a label that could promote you, and had some sort of national distribution.  And a big part of that was the actual physical availability of your records.  Why would any radio station play your record, or MTV play your video, when the actual product couldn't be bought anywhere but your hometown record stores?  

The answer is, they had no reason to play it (in fact they had they had reason NOT to play it), and they had no interest in playing it anyway, so it wasn't even an option for them.  Because of this, bands had to sign elaborate lopsided contracts with record labels, not just so that potential fans could know who they were, but sometimes just so their fans could have the option to buy their records in the first place.  

And there's the rub, this is why everything is different now.  For the first time in the history of the music industry, physical distribution is no longer an issue, and that's what the record labels seem not to understand - they've lost the main advantage that made them so dominant for so long.  

More and more established artists are going to work more and more kinds of deals.  The 360 deal (especially for an unknown artist) is going to be the norm, not the exception.  Soon, bands aren't going to sign with record labels anymore; they're going to sign with promotion companies, because it's not about whether you can get the record anymore.  It's whether you even know that it exists.  

So I say to indie artists, hey, give away your record, make it easy for the people who have never heard of you to fall in love with your stuff!  Let's face it, you never made any real money selling it anyway, and the kids?  They aren't buying the whole "downloading is stealing" thing any more than folks from my generation believed the industry line that cassette tapes were killing the music industry because we made copies of our friends LPs, taped songs off the radio, and made mix tapes for our pals of the music that became the soundtrack to our lives.  

As far as our experience, as far as my band, we started giving away free downloads of our CD a few months over a year ago.  Without touring, and using only our own money we made from selling our stuff on eBay to promote the music videos made by our friends, more than 50,000 people have downloaded our most recent disc.  On top of that, more than 2000 people have bought the CD we just let them download for free, and over 7000 people bought our first disc after hearing the second one (we only give away the new one... for now.)  

We're just a bunch of nobodies in Wilmington, NC, but people around the world are making us free music videos, writing about us on their blogs, MySpace made us a featured band, we made 14 critics' "Best Of 2006" lists, we've sold more than enough t-shirts to pay for the recording sessions of our new CD, and more kids than we can count made us the soundtrack of their summer, which is the best of all.  

Give it away.  Especially if you're an artist first, someone who cares first and foremost that your work gets heard and appreciated.   

But even if you're all business and just want to position yourself for a career in the business, seriously, there's no reason not to give the record away, because everything is different now, and the best way to win is to have as many kids as possible know who you are, and care about what you're going to do next.  

Do exactly what you love.  Be proud of it.  Promote it constantly.   

And give it away.     

Kenyata Sullivan www.themajestictwelve.com

JENNIFER followed up with an email including a lot of responses from various people on her list, including my own response, and prefaced it with this:

"First an email I read recently that struck a chord.  

I've often told artists not to move to LA because so many artists move here thinking it wil be easy for them to "make it" once they get here.  

Believe it or not, the sidewalks of Hollywood are not lined with gold.  And A&R guys aren't just standing around, handing out record deals on the street corners.  I believe that if you can't break into your local scene, LA is going to be the same, but with much more competition.   

But, never say never, the last artist I told to stay in his home state, moved here anyway, played out like crazy, and is now touring with a top 10 recording artist!  

Keep reading for more comments from artists like you regarding the last email I sent out about "free" music.  

***** I found this online from the Bob Lefsetz newsletter.  I agree, this could indeed be the wave of the future:  

"The future of the music business lays in a simple formula: 1 Artist + 1 Mgr = 1 Enterprise.  

The artist and the manager are 50/50 partners in the net profits of the enterprise.  

In the case of bands, the manager is an equal partner.  

He is the CEO, the artist is the board of directors.

The enterprise will control all income streams.  

The music will be a free promotional tool, except where packaging or personal bonding compels sales.  

Box office success and merchandising efficiency will dictate an acts survival.  

Artists will dominate regional music scenes and cross-pollinate with other regional successes.  

Hartmann's Law # 8: "If it ain't good live dump it."  

As always, most artists suck, every song you write ain't a crystal tear from the eye of Zeus and talent rules.  

Bands do not need to migrate to NYC, Nashville or L.A. since they don't want a record deal.   

If a band can't make it at home, it can't make it anywhere; if it can make it at home, it can make it everywhere.  

The Music Renaissance will be built on an Internet driven cottage industry business model.   Or, in some cases a condominium industry.  

It is no surprise that the 100 year old record business would die.

The good news is that the thousands of years old Music Industry will flourish and be bigger than ever. Pax. Hartmann" "

I RESPONDED to this idea:

hi Jennifer,  

I thought you would just excerpt my email, thanks!  you copied the whole thing, that was classy.  

I thought I'd follow up a bit if that's ok, just a continuation of the initial dialogue, no need to forward it or anything.  

As to the Bob Lefsetz quote, I think he might be missing the mark.  I doubt the "one artist+one manager = 50/50 split" model will become the norm.  There are so few Colonel Tom Parkers in the world (just one, come to think of it), and it's a huge rarity in the business for a reason.  Management teams often function better with more than one artist, and competent artists aren't going to want to sign a contract that gives half of their prospective 360 incomes to someone who has no proven track record, aka someone who doesn't have any other client.   

Management get power by leveraging their more successful acts in order to help break their newer acts.  If each manager dedicated him or herself to just one artist, more time would be dedicated to building that one artist's career, but there would be less leverage there to actually make an unknown artist successful.  Not to mention that the cost of running a nationally (let alone globally) effective management or promotional campaign necessitates having more than one client in the modern industry.  It takes a team of people to break a band into the mainstream, there's just too much stuff to consider, and it virtually always takes the revenue from more than one client to pay the bills for an entire team.   

Whether it's the randomly flailing tentacles of the major label octopus, or the homespun and focused teams at Righteous Babe or Dischord, no single person can navigate this ocean to the point of deserving 50% of an artist's earnings, especially when lawyers, bookers, concert promoters, radio promoters, video promoters, agents, licensors, and team employees are factored into the equation.  

I do agree that music will soon basically be a free promotional tool for the band and it's business associates.  Physical recordings will become like t-shirts, posters, and other forms of merch - physical things that express how deeply fans care about the music, and that's cool, i think that's inevitable.  

Box office success and merchandising efficiency will certainly help to dictate an artists' survival, but let's not forget about publishing and licensing, endorsement deals, sponsorships.  Perhaps there will even be a little old fashioned patronage shoved into the mix, and hey, that's not all bad; lest we forget, the Mona Lisa was painted as a commission.  

I also doubt that the business will revert to a more regional geographical basis with individual bands ruling their own scenes and networking specifically to expand each others' fan bases.  In my experience, these bands don't often help each other.  In a perfect world this would happen, but in a perfect world, musicians as a rule would care more about music than they do about drugs, girls, and their own egos, and we all know how that usually plays out.  

Regionally successful bands are always in competition with each other, even when they're friendly.  Bad blood can happen overnight.  It's definitely not a model you can depend on.  

Not to mention that in the internet era, I would say that regionality is virtually unimportant.  And a band who can make it at home can make it anywhere?  Most bands who rule locally never ever ever are going to be heard from anywhere else, you know this.  Good enough to win locally is just not the same as being good enough to win nationally.  It might be a nice plattitude, but it isn't true.  

So what's it gonna take for a company win in this new economy?   

1. Great ears.  And I don't mean great ears for what's instantly a hit today.  If you're going to do 360 deals, a 360 industry will not be financed longterm by disposable pop hits.  In a 360 era, the company that wins is going to learn from what I've heard applauded as the 1970's model of true artist development.  The winning company will not only make great choices, they will stick with those choices and promote them even when the artist makes a weird left turn.  Note to David Geffen: don't sue Neil Young.  Let him go through his Trans phase, it's ok.    

In any case, this is one thing that won't change - being able to identify great talents from the pool of chaff.  That will always be the first step to winning.  It's just that now the body of work is going to be more important than the single in the long run.  

Some people argue that now, in the MP3 era, the single is more important than ever, but those people are fighting over small potatoes, they're still thinking small and miss the big evolving picture.  From a business standpoint, in an MP3 era, why would a competent businessman do hundreds of deals with bands for just singles that may or not make money in an environment where if you only have one great single, everyone is going to download that one for free and then be done with the artist?  It's a sucker's bet, a gambler's bet.  Most will lose, because most of the artists who create those singles will have no longterm impact on gig attendance, merch, or publishing opportunities.  Think long term, with multiple potential revenue streams as the company builds the "brand" of an artist who can repeatedly create good work, build a real fanbase (even if it's a niche fanbase), and create longterm financial sustainability.  

2. Efficient management and oversight of employee expenditures.  In this new era the company that wins is not going to rely on a windfall from a mega-selling artist in order to cover all the wasteful spending accrued by company representatives on a hundred other bands' tabs.  Because when those other less promoted bands inevitably don't sell enough records, the bands get screwed, the company gets screwed, and the wasteful employees still don't have to repay those exhorbitant fees from the cash bar at the Marriott and the plane trips to see their bands showcase at CMJ.  Tighten the belt, weed out the leeches, and narrow it down to people who really care about music, AND the company. You want brand loyalty for both the bands, and the business.  You want people who are lean, mean, dedicated to both their artists and commerce, and proud of it.  

3. Effective promotion.  Instead of trying to find bands that best fit the company's established pipeline, find employee reps who are eclectic, well versed in multiple genres of music, and versatile in public relations.  In addition to that, have a well-oiled in house staff that daily keeps up with, and understands all media - tv, radio, print, and web.  There should be no more promoting pop punk to a radio station that's mostly playing hip hop as of six months ago, no more trying to sell a singer songwriter to a metal magazine.  It's a waste of everyone's time and money, and with modern effective data collection and an up to date staff, it's absolutely unnecessary.  

4. Have absolutely no in-house on salary A+R.  The current A+R culture has become utterly corrupt, and they're scared to death that the changes in the industry will make them get real jobs.  Right now most A+R sign to impress other A+R and/or to take points off the top for a quick financial bump, not to help either the company, or the bands, but just themselves.  Cut 'em loose.  All A+R should be freelance, and paid in small points, not money off the advance.  That way they only bring you stuff they really believe can make money for the company - not just themselves.  It also gives them a long term vested interest in helping with the careers of the bands they've initially promoted, as opposed to the current way things work.  

5, and this is the most important.  Because you are now a 360 company, you will be judged more extremely by every artist you choose to work with, because you will be taking a lot more than artists are accustomed to giving up.  It is no longer your job to just sell records.  It is your job to first find artists who you truly believe can consistently create great work over an extended period of time, and then find as many opportunites as you can to generate income from that work, utilizing an efficient and eclectic workforce who knows how to sell all kinds of music in all kinds of ways.  Even as some of those artists give you challenging projects to work with, you need to have a staff who knows the ongoing daily culture so well that they know exactly where you can sell whatever your artists give you - you need to know how to sell the crazy stuff, as well as the hits, and find revenue streams from all avenues.  

It is your job to put together a well educated team that can find a way to make every record you receive from your handpicked artists profitable.  It is not your job to spend tons of money trying to make every record you promote sound like something you've already made profitable in the past.  It is your job to know how to promote the work done by the artists you have painstakingly chosen and decided to ally with, whatever that work may be, and in a best case scenario, to try and make it part of the popular zeitgeist in some way shape or form so that it will continue to generate nostalgia revenue for the company even in the distant future.  

Contrary to popular folklore, most artists want to be heard and accepted by a mass audience, even if they're doing experimental work, and there's placement for everything that's genuinely good if you look hard enough.  If you can do this successfully, not only will you make money, not only will you build a catalogue that will sustain you for decades, but you will also attract all the best talent in the world over the next few years as the word of mouth spreads, and you will dominate the industry as it evolves into it's next stage of the ongoing 360 artist/business evolution.  

just sayin', is all.   kenyata

I SHOULD MENTION that the reason I rarely reply to Jennifer's emails is because her advice seems to repeatedly groom musicians not to be true artists, but rather to be good little industry performers, so basically, yuck.   

But I do believe she's sincere.  I think she's really trying to help,  she just has a completely different worldview from me, so I mostly  keep my mouth shut. 

Shit, did I say that out loud?

09/29/2007

• It's been a while since we checked in, and lots of folks have sent us stuff - these pictures are from Afghanistan.    Come home safe, fellas.

06/20/2007

• Hooray for Jungle TV,  RNRtv,  Travis Moore's MetroCast, Videology, and Indigo TV who are all now spinning the video for "Break It And Breathe"! 

06/14/2007

• Thanks to Performer Magazine for giving Kenyata props in their June issue!

• Hooray for Coal  Cracker Radio!

• Hooray for Music Video 8 in San Francisco!

• Hooray for Lazlo from Blow Up Radio for blogging about all five days of WE Fest!

• Hooray for Jim Testa right here, and right here too!

06/13/2007

• Now that this year's WE Fest is over, we've switched gears and are really focused on recording the next disc.   As usual, our old pal Jerry Kee is engineering and co-producing it at Duck Kee Studio in Mebane, NC, and we think it sounds pretty good so far if we do say so ourselves - wish us luck! 

• Mark your calendars, the next show is booked:   Tuesday July 31st at The Soapbox with our old pals (now on Polyvinyl) xbxrx and our newer pals Beer Wolf, right here in Wilmington, NC.   Expect us to play early!  As you know, we think it's much more fun to get the set over with and drink beer while digging our friends' sets, so plan to come early and stay late, work be damned.  It's a helluva bill!   Cover is a mere $6.

• Thanks to all the folks who've been playing the video for "Break It And Breathe" (Hip Video Promo's one sheet for the video is right here) - hooray for VidDream, Power Play Music TV, Video Vault on DUTV, 360 Music Television, SacXtra!, Stim TV, eaTV, Video Jam, Channel Zero, PhatDV, not to mention the fine folks screening it at the 9:30 Club in DC and the great folks who included us on the ScreenPlay retail pool June Nightlife Reel!

• Thanks to our pal JR Stauffer for putting some production photos from the "Break It And Breathe" video shoot online!

• Massive thanks to our amazing friend Nina57 in NYC who actually built us a three foot high fully functional puppet of one of the robots from the video!  Needless to say,  she is now pretty much the coolest person we know.   It's pretty astounding.

• Thanks to the production crew of  Nights In Rodanthe for sticking their catering tent in Kenyata's backyard and helping us pay for the new disc!

• Thanks to Bog Gob for their review of Schizophrenology in issue #36 - you should subscribe, we are!  Support print zines!

• Thanks to Eartaste for sticking us on their CD Sampler #2!

• Thanks to Gone Fishing For Blue Skies in Japan!

• Thanks to Tattoes for the great review!

• Thanks to Memoirs Of A Manic Depressant!

• Thanks to The Beat for sticking our song on their myspace page as a representative for Wilmington music!  Check it out, our pals in Barnraisers (who are absolutely delightful) are on the cover.

06/06/2007

• Well, hot diggity, tons of news!  Let's start with WE Fest XI, which was an absolute blast, jeremy christmas you guys are fantastic - many hoorays to Jason Glastetter for blogging about we fest on CMJ's website, and to Jim Testa from Jersey Beat, and to the great folks at ILMatters.com for the great shout out and also the phenomenal photos from day one, day two, and day three, and to Thomas Gilbert and the amazing folks at Fanboy Comics, and to Shea Carver and Encore for the fantastic interview of Kenyata (plus they gave WE Fest the cover, holey moley!) , and to Shawna Kenney for her story on WE Fest for Currents, and to Brian at Bootleg Magazine, and so many more of you!

• The video promotion for "Break It And Breathe" has a great first week, many thanks to Blender.com for making us a Band Alert!  And thanks also to Grouper.com for making us a featured video, not to mention the fact that we've been added by a ton of other outlets - I'll get all that caught up tomorrow.

• Hooray for spacey*kitty at wakilmafm in Oregon!

• Check out Skratch Magazine's Indie Sampler V.6

05/21/2007

• WE Fest 2007 is less than a week away!  Tons of work, but it's all been well worth it.  If you're within driving distance of Wilmington, NC and you're actually reading this, by gum, you need to get your ass to The Soapbox, 255 N Front St, from May 24-28, because if you're reading this, that means you're one of us.  

Three stages of cool ass shit every night with only ONE DOLLAR cover charge, over 70 DIY and indie bands, plus independent films, zines, comics, visual art, improv comedy, small press publications, a complete celebration of DIY culture, practically for free. 

This is really happening.   Right now.

• The video promotion for "Break It And Breathe"  has officially begun!    Hooray for Andy and our good pals at Hip Video Promo!

• Hooray for Grouper.com for making "Break It And Breathe" a featured video!

• Hooray for Lazlo from Blow Up Radio in New Jersey for interviewing Kenyata!

• Hooray for Bootleg Magazine for interviewing Kenyata!   Not to mention, great choice of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" as your soundtrack, we can sing that shit in our sleep, 1980, bring the trenchcoats and the fisticuffs, fucking excellent.

• Check out JR Stauffer's Video Vinyl entry, we're in that sucker!  Vote for him!

• Hooray for Twilight And Thebes!

• Hooray for Mike SOS and 3:16 Productions! 

• Hooray for Mickey.TV in Asia!

• Hooray for Michael, and boobs!

• Hooray for John and The Best Way To Have A Good Idea Is To Have Lots!

• Hooray for Josh Hechinger and Desperate Irrational Exuberance! 

• Hooray for the Traverse Area District Library in Michigan for requesting our entire catalog to be in their permanent collection!   Watch out culture, here we come - one library at a time, you fuckers.

• Hooray for The Rover!

• Hooray for Serendipitous Reflections (May 9)!

• And hooray for you.   'Cause seriously, you're the tits.

Thank you.

05/08/2007

Wow, I had no idea so many of you actually read this stuff!   For the record, if you ever want to know if folks are paying attention to what you're writing, have a few beers and ramble out a diatribe about the current state of "indie rock".   Maybe I'll rant more often, your emails have been delicious -

On with the show!

• WE Fest 2007 is almost upon us!  95% of the bands are now confirmed (though the schedules at both our home page and the Soapbox's page need to updated), and we're now getting our film schedule finalized.  It's gonna be a great year, hope you can join us!  We're playing the first day on Thursday May 24.  Cover is just $1.00.

• Hooray for Culture Bully and BC Goodie Bag for blogging about the new video for "Break It And Breathe" before we've even started officially promoting!  Kickass!

• Hooray for Wikipedia!  We're now mentioned in their entry on The Majestic 12, which is pretty cool.  And if you've ever wondered why there aren't twelve people in the band,  here's where we got the name.

• Hooray for Amplifier Magazine!

• Hooray for Fabulist!

• Hooray for Liquid for doing this cool Majestic Twelve image manipulation!

• Hooray for CMJ for writing about WE Fest!

• Hooray for Migraine Man and Hope Mountain Radio!

• Kenyata has a Last FM profile now, though he never listens to music on his computer and doesn't what the hell he's doing.   There's a cool picture of him with his kids up there though.

• Hooray for Get Jacked!

• Hooray for Gustav Bertha and Way Past Bedtime!

• Hooray again for Bryan D Brown!  Tell Jennifer we apologize, we're getting sick of us too.

05/06/2007

OK,  so I'm sitting here listening to Don Campau's fantastic  Cassette Culture compilation Rewind And Pause Volume 1.  

Meanwhile, Interpol's universally acclaimed first disc reeks unapolagetically of  Ian Curtis' dangling corpse , and Silversun Pickups' single is a paint-by-numbers Smashing Pumpkins song.   One of the gals from Sleater-Kinney described a lot of modern popular "indie" music as "Gang Of Four if they sucked."

While I disagree with that overall kind of dismissal,  I have to admit, I know where the vibe comes from.  

When I think about the body of work that belongs to someone like, say, R Stevie Moore - wow.   How is it that everyone knows Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices, but almost no one knows who this guy is?   R Stevie Moore is a fucking god and has been for thirty years.  But you've never heard of him.

Historically it's nothing new to see great musicians ignored,  but we're in the internet generation - right? 

We can't blame the critics anymore, we all have access to almost everything,  and now it's up to us.  Now  it's truly about whether we're listening for ourselves or not, but most of us aren't wandering outside of the box.   Why not? 

Well, I'll tell ya why.  For most of you, you'd rather be spoonfed and suck up to whatever Pitchfork tells you you should be listening to than actually take the time and make the effort to think for yourselves.   Clap Your Hands. ..  are you fucking kidding me?

My apologies, because I have friends who are friends with those guys, but are you fucking kidding me?!

And this is what really pisses me off.  All my life, the underground was made up of people who thought for themselves, and that's what made it exciting.   You wanna listen to Britney Spears AND Meshuggah?!  Kickass!   Because I don't wanna hang out with a bunch of people who are listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes, having the same political opinions, and just high fiving each other because theyre (ahem) rebelling against the system, shit yeah!   Woo hoo.

Bright Eyes is about as underground as Coca-Cola, but maybe that's what the "underground" is today.   Maybe it's a bunch of people who find a nice comfortable niche, ignore their own instincts, and just wear the right shirt so they fit in. 

If  so, then fuck the underground.  

Be awake, and be alive, and truly be yourself, or seriously - you should just shut the fuck up.

03/20/2007

• Hooray for DJ Whoselistening? and KTRM radio, broadcasting from Truman State in Kirksville, Missouri!   Be sure to listen to them online this Friday night (Saturday morning technically) from 2-4 AM for their on-air Schizophrenology listening party!  Yep, they're gonna play the whole damn thing.   Big ups to Kirksville's Tru Alternative 88.7 The Edge!

• Kenyata's new idea will change the world!  Though nobody else seems to think so.   Fools!  We will show them all with our high powered electrical mouse farms.

• Hooray for technotiger and Stripes of me...!

• Hooray for moggers  JCsuperstar89 and watchbatteries!

03/15/2007

• Hooray for Neil Young and Living With War Today!

• Hooray for PapaMatt and Irregular Joes for playing us on his podcast!

• Hooray for obcordateleafgatherer!  This lovely piece is of  Kenyata and his wife.

• Hooray for Bootleg Magazine for reviewing Scizophrenology in issue #20!

• Hooray for The Beat magazine for writing about us!

03/11/2007

Okie doke, I'm gonna try to get in the habit of updating this a lot more often - the culture section as well, we've been seeing and hearing a ton of cool junk lately.

• Hooray for Christina Breitenfeldt for quoting Kenyata in her paper on downloading!  That makes him, like, an expert and stuff.

• "Break It And Breathe" is going to be on the next Skratch Magazine CD compilation, Indie V.6 - it's the one they're giving away at Coachella.

• Hooray for Crud Cast!

• Hooray for WMCR in Monmouth, Illinois for having Condoleezza in their top ten right now, and also to KTRU in Houston, Texas which had Schizo in their top 35 through February - all these months later and we're still charting here and there.   Amazing.

• Hooray for whoever included us in this January Indie Rock torrent!

• Hooray for Sheffield's Real Indie Night and The Breakdown!

• Hooray for A Sign In Salem (the post is older, but we just now saw it)!

• Hooray for Spirit Soul at KZMU in Utah!

• Hooray for GeeseAplenty and Inspected by Number 57 on Vox!

• Hooray for Coop41 at New Wave Outpost!

• Hooray for YoSET on Melodysoft Salamandraforo!

• Hooray for gravedigger at Bleed Cubbie Blue!   After all, the most subversive pleasures in the world are the guilty ones.

• Hooray for joe_ at Zaan Zone!

• Hooray for Evolving Artist eaTV for continuing to show the "Trapped Underwater" video!

• Hooray for Mickey.TV in Japan!

• Hooray for Power Play Music Video Television in New Jersey!

• Hooray for Olive's Brain Indie Radio!

03/10/2007

Hey peeps!   Lots has happened, so I guess I'll just jump right into it -

• One of you guys has apparently been posting both of our discs up to every known group on usenet - shit yeah!  Keep going, if you see this, we're 100% behind it.  Stay on topic though, we don't want your service provider to go all wacky on ya.

• We're just finishing up the video for "Break It And Breathe" right now (we should have the tweaking done in the next day or so, and will be promoting in about two weeks).   In addition to that, we're starting work on a quick and dirty animated video for "Condoleezza, Check My Posse" that shouldn't take long at all (knock on wood) - mad respect to Joe Stauffer and Broken Wings Productions who are making all of this possible, that crew is no bullshit.  They're doing the new Breaking Benjamin video as well, how's about them apples?!

And a very big thanks to Chris for getting us access to shoot the newroom footage in the actual WECT studio, that was fantastic and unexpected, and was the tits.

• WE Fest 2007 is on, bitch!  The illustrious Sanders Hall is reworking the website from the ground up to make us look all fancy and stuff, and a whole new team is being built to organize.  Already on board to help us get all this shit together are The Soapbox,  Gravity Records,  Bootleg Avenue, the great Jim Testa from Jersey Beat, the phenomenal Kim from Eskimo Kiss, etc etc - it's gonna be a good damn year.

Okay, time for a bunch of hoorays, holy shit we love you guys -

• Hooray for The Anxiety Society in Fredericksburg, Virginia for the cover of "Condoleezza Check My Posse" on myspace!   For the record, we actively encourage any and all of you to do whatever the hell you want with our songs.  Love it.

• Hooray for Don Dilego, and also Julian 5Roses for saying we made one of the best records of 2006!

• Hooray for Bolt FM for playing our shit in the UK!

• Hooray for The Mental Nomad, Audio Pandemic, and Eartaste podcasts, and Jesus, lots more I don't remember, being drunk sucks.  damn!  

• Hooray for Bryan D Brown for sticking "Soylent Green" in his top ten!

• Hooray for the review from Silverfish Magazine!

• Hooray for the folks posting about us at Arsclan.net, Eartaste, OF Refugee Camp, XGen Studios, Problem Attic, Metacritic, etc etc!

• Hooray for the Backseat Film Festival for requesting our shit!

• Well, fuck me, that's what comes to mind at the moment, all the folks I missed (and I know there are a bunch, I feel like a dick), feel free to bitch slap me - we're just knee deep into making the new disc, and we're thinking it might not completely suck, so I gotta admit I'm preoccupied.   But please wish us luck anyway, we are paying attention and we're gonna try to do ya right.

02/02/2007

• You know who we wanna say hooray to today?  We wanna say hooray to YOU. 

As of today, over 20,000 different people have downloaded Schizophrenology. 

Even more amazingly, despite the fact we're giving it away for free,  more than 1000 of you have bought the disc from us through the mail anyway, just to show your support.   Not to mention that we're sold out of t-shirts again, and so many of you have also bought our first disc (Searching For The Elvis Knob) that we have fewer than 25 copies left - that makes us just shy of 7000 copies sold, which ain't no small potatoes, especially in unsigned band indie rock land, and even more so since we ain't on tour!

This is pretty unheard of, and we can't thank you enough.  Please keep spreading the word, and we'll keep working hard on the next disc.  We hope to be giving it away to you in a matter of months (though make no mistake... we will pimp no disc before it's time).   As always, we will continue to strive hard not to suck, and you all mean the world to us.   No shit.

Thank you.

02/01/2007

• Hooray to Comcast cable networks for making our video for "Trapped Underwater" available On Demand via Havoc TV for the past month!   If you haven't already, go check it out (it's available until the 5th).

• Thanks to Sean from Organ magazine over in the UK, both for the review and the blog!  One day we're gonna get him over here on our side of the pond for WE Fest, you betcha.

• Be sure to check out the February issue of  Southeast Performer - hot diggity, we're invading the print media!   They've even got our name on the cover, cool

• Thanks to Yorgos Vakoufis and Rodon 95 FM radio in Greece, Truck On The Radio, Kaflooey, Willie's Off-Brand Web Journal, the Politpunk podcast,  Podcast Pendulum, Ziggyspop, Visitronix Radio, Audio Pandemic  (in fact, thanks to a lot of you podcasters out there - because of y'all we currently have two tracks in Podshow.com's Political top ten), IndieBOOM, s3co, bluelizzie1, nadzeya,  crono_zero, Wolfgang D, and pitamagoito!

01/25/2007