Monday, August 20, 2007

The Money Shot: 8.20.07

Today's headlines...

Hattie Collins Meets Rapper M.I.A. (The Guardian)
MS: "You start off in the morning and you come across someone under a tree making coconut instruments, and you say, right, this is where I'm at, this is what's going on. And you make a song like Bird Flu or whatever."


Are Digital Music Watermarks a Blessing or a Curse? (Wired)
MS: EMI's files, as sold by Apple, come with the buyer's name and e-mail address embedded in the file's header, where it can be easily read. And the "open" MP3s soon to be sold by Universal through Rhapsody and other outlets contain watermarked data that identify each song's title and artist.


An Itinerant Refugee in a Hip-Hop World (NY Times)
MS: “By the time I got to America,” she said, “every amazing producer I could have possibly gone to work with, Paris Hilton had already been there. So I carried on doing my thing elsewhere. Because you know what? Me and Paris would deliver the same song, right? Because technically they always want me to sing about sex. And guess what? She has more time on her hands to sing about that than me.”


How The CD Was Developed (BBC News)
MS: In 1977 Philips began to take the development of a new audio format much more seriously. A new name for the product was discussed and names considered included Mini Rack, MiniDisc, and Compact Rack. The team settled on Compact Disc because it was felt it would remind people of the success of the Compact Cassette.


Interview: Okkervil River (Pitchfork)
MS: It sounds stupid, but I was listening to Bread on the plane ride over here, though I'm not a particularly big Bread fan [laughs]. But I happened to be listening to the Bread song "Guitar Man", which is exactly what the album is about. Bread, this really successful band, but they are celebrating this mythical guitar man roaming from town to town-- and then one day no one gives a shit but he's still out there doing it. It's sort of like "Lodi" by Credence Clearwater Revival. Any artist, even if you're wildly successful, if you're not incredibly arrogant you can imagine yourself in that position where one day people don't give a shit about you anymore. I mean, sooner or later, people don't give a shit about you, and if you equate your whole life and your whole personality and everything that is special to you with your artistic powers, it gets very crushing to imagine the loss of those powers.

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