I have been a Weezer fan since the first time I heard "Undone" in 1994. With the exception of their most recent album called Make Believe, I think Weezer's stuff still has something to offer. (Make Believe struck me as an attempt to reach a younger demographic. If so, then maybe it wasn't "bad." Maybe it just that it wasn't "my" Weezer.)

The new album will be self-titled but it will be called The Red Album (in the tradition of The Blue Album and The Green Album), and it will be released in June. The first single is called "Pork and Beans" and sounds promising. But in the meantime, front man Rivers Cuomo has been using YouTube to pull together his minions in a collaborative song-writing effort. I've included the video for steps 1 and 2 below, but you can watch all the steps of the compositional process at Rivers' YouTube page.

I got to see R.E.M. tape Austin City Limits today (the show will air on May 24.)





While, I'm not a diehard R.E.M fan, it was pretty awesome to be 10 feet from Michael Stipe during songs like "Man on the Moon" and "Fall on Me." Oh, and the new single - "Supernatural, Superserious" - is really good.

During a great SXSW day show sponsored by the Austinist, I spotted this piece of gold on the wall of the men's room:

Considering how many blackberries and side ponytails I've seen during the past couple of days, this nugget of wisdom is fairly accurate.

This piece in the Guardian breaks down Radiohead's possible profits from In Rainbows - an album that allowed fans to name their own price.

Some years ago, William Fisher of Stanford University published some interesting data on the cost structure of CDs. According to his figures, the retailer's slice of the CD is 38 per cent, while distributors take 8 per cent and marketing another 8 per cent.

The artist, in contrast, typically gets only 12 per cent and the music publisher 4 per cent. So the maximum Radiohead would get from a conventionally marketed CD priced at £8 is actually £1.28 - which, coincidentally, is almost exactly what Comscore thinks they got from their online experiment.

Rap meets Powerpoint (Link courtesy of Double A). See what happens when Ice Cube hits the boardroom:

I had an Ulmer moment this morning. In my computers and writing class, we're using Greg Ulmer's Internet Invention and creating mystories. Part of what Ulmer is trying to get students to do is recognize how certain forces and discourses shape us at the level of both the conscious and unconscious. To this end, he offers a number of different exercises that get students to recognize what Barthes calls the "sting" of the punctum. That is, how an image or sound or text stings the body prior to consciousness - prior to us making sense of it.

This morning, I parked my car next to this car:

There was clearly a sting of some sort. This picture affected me in some way because I took a picture. I snapped a couple of pictures and started walking toward campus. I had the Decemberists Castaways and Cutouts album playing on my ipod, but for some reason that wasn't doing it for me. So I scrolled a bit farther down in the D's and stopped on The Doors. My brother and I recently bought the re-issue of The Doors The Soft Parade album for my Dad (it has some new tracks on it). Dad and I talked recently about how great that album is and how under appreciated it was when it was released.

Slashdot reports that Radiohead did okay with their stunt to let customers set their own price for their In Rainbows album (quote from Comscore):

"During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the 'In Rainbows' site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing... Of those who were willing to pay, the largest percentage (17 percent) paid less than $4. However, a significant percentage (12 percent) were willing to pay between $8-$12, or approximately the cost to download a typical album via iTunes, and these consumers accounted for more than half (52 percent) of all sales in dollars."

The second day of FunFunFun Fest was not as good as the first, but we still managed to see some decent stuff. Day one: Of Montreal, Okkervil River, New Pornographers, and Girl Talk. All very good. Day two: Ted Leo, Mates of State, and Battles. Cat Power played too, but she could not get her shit together and it ended up being a train wreck. She apparently could not hear herself (sickness? busted ear drum? We were getting conflicting accounts from her).

Battles was an interesting show. Here's a taste of their stuff:

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Girl Talk is a DJ/Mashup Artist from Pittsburgh who mixes A LOT of songs to make crazy tracks. I saw him last night at FunFunFun Fest here in Austin (and I saw him last Spring at SXSW). Last night, he kept saying "Let's move together." It seemed like his goal was to build an organism that bounced, waved, and grooved together. He was looking to compose both a track and a scene. He succeeded. There was a mob of people up on stage with him. It was pretty fucking awesome, and I took a clip of it with my phone (you can kind of see him...he's the white orb at the center bouncing up and down).

If you're not familiar with his work, check out his "Night Ripper" album. My favorite track - "Minute By Minute" - mixes the following songs:

* 0:10 (13:15) Ying Yang Twins ft. Mike Jones and Mr. Collipark - "Badd"
* 0:28 (13:33) LL Cool J - "Around the Way Girl"
* 0:44 (13:49) Michael McDonald - "I Keep Forgettin" / Warren G ft. Nate Dogg - "Regulate"
* 0:56 (14:01) Missy Elliott - "On & On"
* 1:04 (14:09) Neutral Milk Hotel - "Holland, 1945"
* 1:14 (14:19) Jefferson Airplane - "White Rabbit"
* 1:14 (14:19) Juelz Santana - "There It Go (The Whistle Song)"
* 1:32 (14:37) Steely Dan - "Black Cow" / Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz - "Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)"
* 2:06 (15:11) Bruce Hornsby - "The Way It Is"
* 2:11 (15:16) Sophie B. Hawkins - "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover"
* 2:18 (15:23) Panjabi MC - "Mundian To Bach Ke"
* 2:27 (15:32) The Game, 50 Cent - "Hate It or Love It"
* 2:45 (15:50) Better Than Ezra - "Good"
* 2:47 (15:52) Pixies - "Debaser"

Source: Wikipedia

Radiohead has been teasing the music blogs and the leering press for weeks about the album they're set to release. They've finally announced the date, but the kicker is that they'll only be releasing the album on their website. You can buy the physical CD (comes with some extra stuff), or you can download from their site. The best part: you pick the price. As a friend of mine notes:

The consensus seems to be that this is a pretty amazing step, a pretty amazing fuck you to the music industry: one of the biggest bands in the world releasing an unannounced album without the support of a record company through their site for whatever price the customer chooses. Regardless of whether or not you're a fan, it will be interesting to see what kind of ripples this sends out through the industry.

Yes, that's right...you choose the price. When you pre-order the album, the price is listed as "it's up to you." You fill in the price.