The World Of Bonnaroo: In a move to make EVERYONE feel at home at Bonnaroo, the line-up this year is to include, but not be limited to...Metallica, Pearl Jam, Kanye West, Willie Nelson and Jack Johnson....man...just waiting for Michael W Smith to round it all out....
Little Faster Linkin: Linkin Park is stating that there will be a quicker turnaround between Minutes To Midnight and they're next CD. Bennington admits "There was a long period of time between the release of 2003's "Meteora" and "Minutes to Midnight"....yeah, I'm still betting 2 years at least.
The world of music is at a little bit of a stalemate right now. Aside from the area of upcoming albums, and the writers guild agreeing to write the Grammy's, there isn't much to talk about in music. You may say, what do you mean? Let me explain. As I search the connections each day for the fresh information, these are the top stories of music media.
But Perhaps The Only Compelling Story Out There Today - Pole Dancing At Astoria 2: That's right everyone, a pole dancing competition. I understand that this festival in London's West End is often something to talk about, and I'm sure most living breathing males are interested...but...wait, whats this. It actually states that the competition (which is for £100) draws 700 people. OMG not 700 people. Apparently that's an impressive number...
SEATTLE- In a move deemed by many to be suprising, The Writer's Guild of America has granted The Grammy's a pass and will let their striking guild members take a night off of the picket line to compose outdated and poorly recieved jokes for the annual music award ceremony.
This comes on the heels on the SAG awards, which was the first show to thusfar succesfully gain scribesmanship. The SAG Awards were never in question however, do to it being an event run by a fellow partnering union. The Grammy's securing writers is a sign that walls on each side are beginning to crumble. Like a cookie.
After missing concert after concert after concert, it LOOKS like I will finally have the honor of seeing my rock heroes R.E.M. live in concert. I have missed the boys from Athens on numerous occasions in both Seattle and L.A over the last 8 years of fandom. After all that, it looks like I have finally tracked them down to a gig in New York in June. While no house is given, judging from the rest of the tour, the NYC gig will be at Madison Square Garden (YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!!!).
There are thousands of reasons that people today will tell you for the state of affairs in music. “The musicians just aren’t the same, they have less talent.” “It all sounds the same nowadays”, and “What’s the deal with that rap music?” Though these all have valid points, I’d like to turn the general publics attention to a bigger problem. VGA’s. VGA stands for Variable Gain Amplifiers, or known to some as things like Compressors, Limiters, Extenders and Gates. It is the misuse of these perfectly fine tools that are the reasons for the music industries struggles (or should I say 1 of the reasons). To put it very simply and crudely, these tools “squish” the dynamic range of a sound so that the louds and quiets have less of a variance between them. Overused, as it is today, this can take any soul out of the music. Your quiet violins are coming through just as loud as your drum, and when they verse builds into the rocking chorus, you are stunned to find that the “jammin’” guitars are just as loud as they were before. Its this loss of any range that makes the average consumer not care if they have a CD or an mp3 file. Though the CD offers drastically better use of range, the songs we’re pumping out on top40 don’t even use the range, so no one notices the loss in mp3 format. However, you don’t need to take my word for it. I was inspired to write this article after reading a similar article by Roger Nichols (engineer of such famous artists as Steely Dan), and his EQ opinion column. It was titled “Another New Year’s Resolution, and it talked about this blight, and it was written January of 2002!. So imagine my shock after starting writing to pick up the latest Rolling Stone to have an article on just this issue…Hmm, maybe I am on to something…more soon.
OK, so I TOTALLY stole this piece of news from a bunch of other music news pages (who, most likely, jacked the news off the Rockworms fax machine this morning before we got to the office) but since no one else has been properly reporting/crediting sources, it has become public domain. Boo-yeah. Take that. Learn from your mistakes.
Anyway, Roger Waters (no related to "Muddy") is currently scheduled to perform on the kinda-sorta epic return of Saturday Night Live. Yup. THAT show. The show that has been and presumably still WILL be on full-fledged WGA strike come the February 2nd due date (coincidentally, my mother's due date for ME as well, 24 years ago) of the show.
With this strike, it appears that NBC is pushing for a return of the weekend giant and is encouraging them to go ahead with a writer-less show.
So from this news, a question emerges:
"So what, are they going to have Roger Water play the whole freakin' time?"
To find the Rocket Summer in your local music selection store, you
probably are going to have to wander into that undefined section of the
store known as Emo. While that is an elusive term, i don't know if it
deserves to be pinned upon The Rocket Summer. Though some of his music
could be placed there, it might be more apt to put him within the
Rock/Power Pop genre. Either way, i write this to put the name out
there and say...its good stuff.
So, my girlfriend throws a group name my way, telling me the lead singer resembles one of the other writers here at Rockworms. For a man in Audio Recording school with a need to review, its all I needed
Take the rockworms poll (over on the left) and tell us what you think of the new song and video from Meg and Jack. Also leave lot's of comments below. Come on. Tell us what you really think!
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