It’s becoming a problem for newly popular British bands to tour in the United States, because they are being denied P-1 visas unless they can prove that they have been “internationally recognized” for a “sustained and substantial” amount of time. Recently the band New Model Army, which has actually been around for decades, were denied visas to perform in San Francisco at the DNA Lounge.
Last night, Einzige sent me an email (which I opened this morning) pointing me to a video of a song by Bob Log III called “Boob Scotch” (NSFW). Bob Log III is a guy who performs wearing a motorcycle helmet, singing through a telephone microphone, and simultaneously drums and plays guitar. The sound was very familiar, reminiscent of a band I saw perform at the University of Arizona Social Sciences Auditorium back in 1994 called Doo Rag. As it turns out, Bob Log III was half of Doo Rag, the guy I remember singing through a vacuum cleaner hose. The other bands who performed at UA that day (April 30, I’m a bit obsessive about collecting information) were Formica Bob, A Band Called Moss, Teeth, Click, Cortex Bomb, Irving, The Lonely Trojans, and the Fells. I was there with my friend Pam, who knew people in Irving and The Lonely Trojans, the latter of which included a student, Chris Morrison, from one of my philosophy classes, who’s now using the name “C.S. Morrison” for his music, probably due to the large number of other musical Chris Morrisons. Pam’s two friends in Irving were Greg Petix and Gerard Schumacher who were also in the Lonely Trojans. The two went on to form another band called the Weird Lovemakers, and Gerard still has a band called The Knockout Pills. Wikipedia seems to have way too much information about Tucson bands… I just learned that Schumacher was also in The Fells and intends to return to Australia this year, and that Petix formed a band called The Cuntifiers (no albums released yet). ...
This morning on the Howard Stern Show, there was some discussion of Timothy English’s book, Sounds Like Teen Spirit: Stolen Melodies, Ripped-Off Riffs, and the Secret History of Rock and Roll, along with playing some pairs of songs that had very strong resemblances. I didn’t realize that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was a derivative work, with the main guitar line closely resembling that in Spirit’s “Taurus”–and Spirit used to open for Led Zeppelin. (Apparently a lot of Led Zeppelin’s songs are derivative works.) An example of this kind of borrowing that I recognized myself was when Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” first started getting airplay–I immediately thought that the main guitar riff sounded almost exactly like that in Killing Joke’s “Eighties." It’s not clear which of these borrowings are intentional and which are accidental, but as English’s book makes clear, this is an extremely common occurrence. Some of these have led to successful copyright infringement lawsuits, but most haven’t–at least in the past. The Dr. Demento Show, which I used to listen to every week back in high school, used to have a regular feature called “Damaskas’ Copycat Game” which would play short bits of songs in sequence, demonstrating their similarity. Spider Robinson wrote a short story in 1983 called “Melancholy Elephants” which is a story about a woman who tries to persuade a Senator to oppose an extension of the term of copyright into perpetuity on the grounds that there are finite permutations of notes that are perceived as distinct musical melodies, and thus that the bill would result in an end to creation of new works. In the story, she succeeds in persuading him to kill the bill, while in reality, the equivalent bill–the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998–passed, and Larry Lessig and Eric Eldred failed to overturn it at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 (Eldred v. Ashcroft). While this didn’t extend copyright to “in perpetuity,” it has an economic effect virtually indistinguishable from copyright of infinite duration (as Justice Breyer’s dissent recognized). In 2005, arguments over the practice of sampling music came to a head, when the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that no sampling could take place without a license–not even for a 1.5-second, three-note guitar riff that N.W.A.’s 1990 song “100 Miles and Runnin’” sampled from Funkadelic’s “Get Off Your Ass and Jam.” This decision led to a protest in the form of a collection of songs composed solely of that sample. [The Downhill Battle organization’s website has been down since November 2007, but can be found on the Internet Archive. -jjl, 6 Jan 2009.] (Related: An excellent short video documentary about the use of a six-second drum sample from The Winstons’ “Amen Brother.") UPDATE (December 27, 2011): The Economist, Dec. 17-30, 2011 year-end issue features an excellent article, “Seven seconds of fire," about the Amen break. UPDATE (May 18, 2014): The estate of Randy California, of Spirit, is suing Led Zeppelin over “Stairway to Heaven” being a derivative work of “Taurus." The site whosampled.com has a list of songs which have sampled “Amen, Brother." I should have noticed that the Killing Joke/Nirvana riff is also very close to an earlier (1982) riff in The Damned’s “Life Goes On” (I certainly listened to the album “Strawberries” enough times…). ...
From a Richard Cheese email bulletin: I hope you will please tell your friends in Chicago to listen TONIGHT (Thursday 12/14) to WLUP 97.9 FM’s Jonathon Brandmeier radio marathon show…my Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine band will be performing LIVE VIA SATELLITE on The Loop from 9PM-10PM. And Friday night (tomorrow), our “Christmas In Las Vegas” holiday song will be featured on NBC-TV’s “LAS VEGAS” series! Be sure to tune in early at 8:59PM (7:59PM Central) or you’ll miss it! It’s on during the first five minutes!!!More Richard Cheese information at www.richardcheese.com.
Hot on the heels of his “best of” album, “The Sunny Side of the Moon," which came out at the beginning of this year, is a new holiday album from Richard Cheese, “Silent Nightclub." The festive tracks: 1. Holiday in Cambodia (originally by The Dead Kennedys) 2. Like a Virgin (originally by Madonna) 3. Christmas in Las Vegas (an original song by Richard Cheese) 4. Jingle Bells (originally by The Barking Dogs) 5. Ice Ice Baby (originally by Vanilla Ice) 6. Do They Know It’s Christmas (originally by Band-Aid) 7. Personal Jesus (originally by Depeche Mode) 8. Imagine (originally by John Lennon) 9. Last Xmas (bonus track) 10. Naughty Girl (originally by Beyonce) 11. Christmastime is Here (originally from A Charlie Brown Christmas) 12. The Trees (originally by Rush) 13. I Melt With You (originally by Modern English) 14. Silent Night
An amusing set of coincidences: On Saturday, July 8, Respectful Insolence posted a great video of William Shatner’s 1978 performance of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” at the Science Fiction Film Awards. On Sunday, an episode of Cold Case (“Honor,” a repeat from last November) began by playing Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” On Monday, the July 8-14 issue of The Economist showed up, with Kim Jong Il on the cover, launching into the air with a trail of smoke below him, with the caption “Rocket man.”
Every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office accepts comments on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for additional rule-making and exemptions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has given up on participating in the process, which they consider too broken to be worthwhile–consumer interests are simply not taken into consideration. The RIAA’s most recent filing (PDF) in this process shows that they’ve reversed their position since testifying before the Supreme Court last November in the MGM v. Grokster case, when attorney Don Verrilli stated (PDF, p. 12): The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.The RIAA’s position in the new filing (PDF, p. 22 footnote 46) is: Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even “routinely” granted, […] necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use.That is, they are claiming that they’ve given permission for such use, and have the right to take it away at any time, because it is not a matter of fair use. The filing points out that this is the 2003 position of the Register of Copyrights, who is quoted (p.22): proponents have not established that space-shifting or platform-shifting is a noninfringing use.On the same page (22), the filing states: Similarly, creating a back-up copy of a music CD is not a non-infringing use….(Somewhat less information may be found at the EFF’s blog entry which pointed me to this filing, Deep Links.)
Richard Cheese has released a “best of” album, The Sunny Side of the Moon. I was given a copy yesterday by Cheese’s alter-ego, Mark Davis, a former Phoenician who I’ve known since grade school but hadn’t seen in person for a few years. I’ve listened to most of the tracks (and have all of his other albums, Lounge Against the Machine, Tuxicity, I’d Like A Virgin, and Aperitif for Destruction), and it’s a better deal than most “best of” albums. There’s the standard bonus track not found elsewhere, but there are also several new “big band” re-recordings (completely new versions) and a couple of remixes. And it sounds like he may be doing some shows again in the near future. Mark has another project in the works, Revolution Central, but he hasn’t been able to spend much time on it lately, so there’s still a lot of those annoying “coming soon”-type pages.
A Nigerian actor/musician/comedian has made a song and music video about 419 scams. The chorus is “Oyinbo man, I go chop your dollar, I take your money and disappear, 419 is just a game, you are the loser, I am the winner." As this site complains (along with the next link), the video does nothing to raise confidence in Nigeria. The song is popular in Cameroon, and is apparently based on a tract authored by Nkem Owoh. UPDATE (December 10, 2009): Nkem Owoh was recently kidnapped while driving down the highway in eastern Nigeria, and the original ransom was 15 million naira ($99,000), but allegedly reduced to 1.4 million naira and his car. (Source: “Go for the locals," The Economist, November 28-December 4, 2009, p. 56.) ...