Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?Cheney
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences. The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.Ezra
Yes, they want a nuclear weapon. No, that does not mean they will use it on us, give it to terrorists, or nuke Israel. They want a weapon because it offers them an insurance policy against American invasion and prestige and pull in the world community. If anyone tells you they want a nuclear weapon in order to attack us, arm terrorists, or blow up Israel, they are a profoundly stupid person and you should stop listening to them immediately.Stop listening to profoundly stupid people.
“Is there anybody alive out there?” Springsteen shouted at the outset, and turned the show’s first 45 minutes into a rousing wake-up call. He buzzed through eight songs nonstop, one feeding into the next with a verve that recalled the band’s ferocious heyday, circa 1978. There has been a lot of shucking, jiving and mugging on recent E Street tours, but this time sidekick Steve Van Zandt was all business and Clarence Clemons hung in the shadows in between sax solos. Van Zandt was back in his element as Springsteen’s foil as a guitarist and vocalist, and the show revolved around their fevered interplay.
The duo set the tone by slamming down the chords of “Radio Nowhere,” then traded piercing leads on “Gypsy Biker.” Van Zandt channeled John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” on a blues-drenched “Reason to Believe,” Springsteen matching him with an appropriately swampy, fuzzed-out tone on harmonica. “Adam Raised a Cain” raised a few goosebumps, Springsteen conjuring a wall of drone with his guitar overtones.
At the center of it all, Curtis twitched for air. “For entertainment they watch his body twist / Behind his eyes it says I still exist,” he sang on “Atrocity Exhibition.”
Read superficially, these performances support those who would view Curtis’ death as some sort of sick validation for the veracity of his lyrics. But the live performances appended to these discs resoundingly rebut that caricature. They affirm what countless concert bootlegs already have: that Joy Division was a blistering band, nothing like the one represented in the studio recordings. Sumner’s guitar tone flirts with the savagery of heavy metal, almost gleeful in the way it sends spasms of noise shooting through the mix. Hook’s boldness on bass is a given, but Morris’ furious machine-like drumming is a revelation. Curtis doesn’t hold back either. There’s no self-pity here, no despair. Just demon fury.
At times it’s hard to fathom exactly how stupid our nation has become.Until you read this:
...the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently broke up a major terrorist plot that threatened to strike a painful blow to America’s collective loins. The strike was thwarted when DHS agents on the Canadian border confiscated a hard drive containing the song files for a new solo record by Death Cab for Cutie guitarist/producer Chris Walla.
1.) "Would you have sex with a man to stop a terrorist attack?"via Andrew Sullivan
2.) "If lowering taxes results in increased revenues then would lowering taxes to zero result in infinite revenues?"
3.) "If you had a time machine, would you travel back in time and abort Bin Laden?"
4.) "Would you torture and kill Jesus to ensure mankind’s salvation? And how does that work?"
"If you think about the last time we beat Michigan here, nobody on our football team was even born," Zook said. "I think that I had just gotten married. It's been a long, long time."Still haven't won.
The Illini (5-2, 3-1 Big Ten) haven't defeated the Wolverines (5-2, 3-0) in Champaign since 1983, and haven't beaten them at all since 1999.
As kids, Cubs fans were told by announcer Jack Brickhouse that the law of averages always evened things out in the long run. But that has never been the case with the Cubs, as proven by the fact that expansion teams keep going to the World Series while they continue to avoid it.
It's hard to be a Cubs fan, and getting harder with each passing year.
Within each 3-minute song, Daniel and his bandmates played and sang only what was absolutely necessary. Daniel’s guitar-playing was more like a series of stabs, jabs and feints. His gangly elbows and knees jutted out in time to the twitchy bursts of notes, while drummer Jim Eno played with an economy that sometimes required him to play barely at all. Eric Harvey hunched over an electric keyboard and drizzled counterpoint melody lines against Daniel’s voice, while bassist Rob Pope straddled the line between rhythm and melody with a minimum of fuss. This was a finely tuned machine, and the in-concert incarnations of the songs hewed closely to the studio originals. Spoon isn’t and never will be a jam band.
Now Radiohead has gone and done it again --- raised expectations, that is. This time, much of the hub-bub is directed not at the music itself, but the means by which it is being distributed. By choosing to release their seventh studio album, “In Rainbows,” as a digital download through their own Web site at a price determined by each consumer willing to part with an email address, the band once again has become the talk of the music world. After two days, sources within the band’s camp were claiming that more than 1.2 million copies had been downloaded.
As Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood said a few days ago, the band’s intent is not to start a revolution or give away its music, but rather to prevent it from leaking out to the public haphazardly over several months before the official CD release next year. In turn, it is the band’s hope that once fans hear the music on compressed MP3 files, they’ll want to buy the sonically superior physical product.
So will the music still matter to non-diehards in a few months? Probably not. Radiohead has evolved into an art-rock band, and lately “art” has trumped “rock” in the band’s internal hierarchy. For the rockers, “In Rainbows” won’t have nearly enough guitar crunch to satisfy. But for sheer chilled loveliness, this album is a keeper. There are guitars all over it, but they weave in and out of the melodies rather than barging over them. Its songcraft is more direct than any album since “OK Computer,” and also more low-key, with the glitchy electronics toned town in favor of warmer instrumental interplay and vocals.
The band’s desire to reclaim the album from rogue file-sharing networks is understandable. Like all of Radiohead’s albums, “In Rainbows” was meant to be listened to as whole, in sequence. The 10 songs create a loose narrative about intimacy, its allure and its traps. They explore humanity’s essential contradiction: the desire to be loved, no matter what the cost, no matter how painful the heartbreak. For a band often accused of being cryptic, that’s about as direct and universal as Radiohead has ever gotten.
“How come I end up where I started?” Yorke sings at the outset. “How come I end up where I went wrong?”
Each time he is confronted with evidence of his own policies condoning torture, President Bush responds with the same phrase: “We do not torture.” It is a lie. A brazen lie. The American public now recognizes this (see next item). But in the etiquette of American politics, no one is prepared to say that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.
The Cheneys routinely support and give credibility to and rely upon people who demonize their own family, and embolden forces that make life intolerable for many people in this country. A few platitudes, almost always uttered to get themselves off the hook in decent society, do not count as courage. And their invocation of privacy to protect themselves from legitimate questions about their rank hypocrisy is b.s. of the most refined variety.
“15 Step”: Space-rock meets hip-hop, with otherworldly synths floating over crunchy, syncopated electro-beats. Thom Yorke’s voice curls languidly around a jazzy guitar figure.
“Bodysnatchers”: Radiohead reminds us that they still know how to rock. A distorted guitar paves the way for a trance-inducing groove, perfect for riding metro trains at night. Then more guitars scream and swoop through the mix as Yorke becomes progressively more agitated, yelping about being trapped in the 21st Century.
“Nude”: A gorgeous ballad that nonetheless has a nasty undertow, and Yorke floats away with it.
“Weird Fishes”: Undulating guitars and skittering beats, with voices layered into a haunted choir, eventually overwhelmed by keyboards.
“All I Need”: Slow and swollen with foreboding.
“Faust Arp”: Woozy strings swoop through what is essentially a voice-and-guitar folk song.
“Reckoner”: Percussion knick-knacks create a loose groove and a sense of space around a wan vocal melody that is further enhanced by counterpoint guitar and strings. Lovely, yet chilling.
“House of Cards”: Pensive guitar and a patient vocal, with Yorke adrift. “Infrastructure will collapse,” he murmurs, as the strings shiver.
“Jigsaw Falling into Place”: Guitar and drums conspire to create a scrappy groove, but as usual there’s more to it. The wordless backing vocals surge with menace, and Yorke’s lead vocal ratchets up the intensity.
“Videotape”: A stately voice-and-piano meditation tarted up with disorienting percussion.
“We’ve stuck around, banging people over the head until they got it,” Daniel says. “We're good and kept doing it, and people are paying attention. Tenacity helps.”
Talent does too. Daniel, drummer and band cofounder Jim Eno and longtime producer Mike McCarthy have forged a distinctive sound, one that links the music of Prince’s “Kiss,” AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” Wire’s “Pink Flag” and the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa.” Those seemingly disparate records share a few common traits: a Spartan minimalism in which every note and word count, taut arrangements that value space and silence, and a belief that if a song can’t say what it needs to say in 3 1/2 minutes, it shouldn’t say it at all.
Spoon holds those values dear. About 30 songs were in various states of completion for “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” but the band eventually whittled them down to 10, which blitz past in 36 minutes. One of the more annoying legacies of the CD era is that bands convinced themselves it was a good idea to put as much as 72 minutes of music on a record, whether the music justified it or not. Most of Spoon’s albums are half that length.
“We stretched our previous record to 41 minutes, but otherwise I like to keep them under 40,” Daniel says. “It’s partly because of people’s attention spans. Who wants to listen to more than 40 minutes of an album at once? But to me it's also about consistency. If all the songs we worked on were like the ones on [Bob Dylan’s] ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ I'd put them out, but they’re not.”
Daniel is his own toughest critic. But his songwriting thrives when he doesn’t overthink it. His best ideas occur when he’s just “exercising my fingers.”
As one of the most marketable names in the business, Radiohead is in a position where it doesn’t have to give away anything. It has the cache to charge just about any price it wants for its music, and the clout to sue anyone who refuses to pay. But it wants no part of a music industry that labels its own customers as thieves. By declaring, “It’s up to you,” Radiohead made it clear whose side it’s on.Sounds like a great move for Radiohead. Of course, it's more of a decision in line with their values and beliefs, than a "move" or a marketing ploy. It works, as opposed to, say, treating your customers as thieves. That, too, is not necessarily, a move, but is most definitely a decision in line with the music industry's values and beliefs, which include selling and promoting inferior product with albums full of filler, while turning around and treating all of your customers like criminals.
“I think what will happen is a lot of people will download the album for free,” says Spoon singer-guitarist Britt Daniel, “but when it goes on sale, I bet it’ll still be No. 1 [on the album chart]. The bands who get hurt by free file-sharing are [bad] bands. The good bands are going to do fine.
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
Radiohead has announced that it will release its seventh studio album, “In Rainbows,” on Oct. 10 as a digital download. What’s more, the band will let its fans decide how much, if anything, to pay for it.What does this portend for the music industry? Answer here.
“It’s up to you,” the checkout screen says on the U.K. band’s Web site, radiohead.com, for pre-ordering the 10-song disc.
An expanded, physical version of the album also will be released, but not until Dec. 3. It will include an18-track double-album packaged in both CD and vinyl versions, with lyrics, artwork and photographs in a hardback book and slipcase It will be sold for 40 pounds, the equivalent of about $80.
The band’s Jonny Greenwood made the announcement Sunday on radiohead.com: “Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days. We've called it ‘In Rainbows.’ ”
That sort of terse public-relations release wouldn’t fly at a major label, but the internationally acclaimed U.K. band has completed its obligation to Capitol/EMI and is a free agent. Though the major record labels have blamed free file-sharing for cutting into album sales, Radiohead’s career has painted a different reality.
It’s not like Radiohead’s living in a different world. But they’re playing by a different rule book. One that says the money flows from the music, that people have to believe in you, that you’ve got to treat them right.Just bought my discbox. Felt good to pay the band direct. Screw the record companies. Support bands who are willing to challenge the status quo. Here.
Shit, you can barely get a ticket to a Radiohead show. The venues aren’t big and the demand is incredible. They’re doing it all wrong, don’t they see??
Well, obviously they don’t.
This is big news. This says the major labels are fucked. Untrustworthy with a worthless business model. Radiohead doesn’t seem to care if the music is free. Not that they believe it will be. Because believers will give you ALL THEIR MONEY!
This is the industry’s worst nightmare. Superstar band, THE superstar band, forging ahead by its own wits. Proving that others can too. And they will.
This is what happens when you sell twenty dollar CDs with one good track and sue your customers for trading P2P. This is what happens when you believe you’re ENTITLED to your business. This is what happens when music is a second-class citizen only interested in the bottom line.
