caffeinedout.com

If you have ever downloaded a song (and who hasn’t?), pause for a moment to pay your respects for the software that made it all possible.  It suffered greatly and gave its life so that iTunes and Spotify could live, and it forced an industry that threw up a great big middle finger to the idea of changing its business model for the better, to be dragged kicking and screaming into a new era.

… because it shows an 85 year-old Tony Bennett continuing to add to his legacy (that’s not the sad part… his story is actually extraordinary), and you get to see one of Amy Winehouse’s final performances where she somehow pulls herself out of her pill-popping, coke-snorting, heroin-and-alcohol-soaked delerium long enough to channel Billie Holiday and deliver a swan song worthy of her considerable vocal abilities.

What a fucking waste.

MTV, along with the rest of the music industry, discusses the internet in 1995.  Get ready to see the less wrinkled versions of your favorite rock stars.  Bonus:  A downright coherent Ozzy Osbourne.

Here’s Robert Cray with David Sanborn on the Letterman Show.

Yes folks, Bob Dylan turned 70 on Tuesday, May 24, 2011.  Since his voice is enough to make people jump off buildings, here’s a link to seventy artists who are not Bob Dylan doing seventy covers of his songs.

If you’re lookin for the definition of irony, I think I just found it.  Sean Parker… you know… the guy that founded Napster?

No… you’re thinking of Shawn Fanning.  He’s the guy that wrote the software.  I’m talking about Sean Parker… the loose-cannon serial entrepe… oh brother.  The sushi-eating, borderline batshit insane money guy from the Social Network… THAT Sean Parker.

Anyhoo, Parker and a group of investors are currently attempting to purchase Warner Music Group.  In case you’re wondering how the irony fits into this, Warner Music Group is Metallica‘s record label.  It always seemed to me that the rest of the guys in Metallica could really give a shit about their music being downloaded.  Money really isn’t made on album sales anymore.  The real money is two things:  concert promotions and publishing rights.  Not sure about the publishing rights, but Metallica certainly has the concert thing down.  When you can wake up one morning and go, “You know, I need a new Ferrari.  I think I’ll announce a few club dates and then play Madison Square Garden,” and be supremely confident that all dates will sell out in 10 minutes or less, you know you have something good going.

That being said, who was it that was always in front of the camera complaining about Napster’s capabilities when some unreleased demos were found circulating on the file sharing service?  Lars Ulrich, Metallicas teeny little pint-size version of Gene Simmons, minus the coffin.  The critical mistake that Hetfield, Ulrich and company made when making the ill-conceived decision to go after Napster was in thinking that Napster was an annoying piece of technology, when in fact Napster was the beginning of a paradigm shift in music distribution.  Of course, nobody, myself included, knew this when it was just Napster and not much else on the landscape.  Napster was peer-to-peer, which meant Napster was basically the centralized hub of all of its activity.  Those of you in my age bracket, think of your Christmas tree lights when you were little:  one goes out, they all go out.  Instead of this being the end of it, what it turned out to be was more like a mushroom:  step on one and 10 more pop up around it later on.  After Napster came BearShare.  After Bearshare came LimeWire and Kazaa.  After these came a zillion more Gnutella clients and then after that came BitTorrent.  And yet Metallica still fights because they’re too stupid to realize that continuing to fight results in more of their music being illegally downloaded rather than not fighting and ushering in the iTunes era and the demise of the RIAA that much sooner.

The man known to his mother as Ian Fraser Kilmister and known to his fans and the rest of the planet as Lemmy will be celebrating 30 years at the helm of Motorhead this year.  Lemmy had a choice to give his soul to God, Satan, or Rock n’ Roll.  He chose Rock n’ Roll and in return, Rock and Roll has made him immortal.  Anybody who consumes as many cigarettes and Jack n’ Cokes in a day as Lemmy does has long ago entered the boneyard just prior to the great beyond.  What would have killed most mortal men has only made him stronger.  Lemmy was a roadie for Hendrix years before I was a twinkle in me mum’s eye.  I’m 41 now and I’m thoroughly convinced that Lemmy will still be touring as my next of kin places the urn with my ashes in it on the mantlepiece.

There is one word you cannot use with Lemmy that you can use with almost any other musician that has achieved his level of longevity… and that word is “prime.”  You can easily talk about Eddie Van Halen’s prime being VH’s first 3 albums or Steven Tyler’s prime being sometime before getting clean and judging American Idol.  With Lemmy, that term doesn’t apply.  Listening to Ace of Spades played now sounds just as good if not better than Ace of Spades played 25 years ago.  Along with Lemmy’s relentless pursuit of the Rock n’ Roll lifestyle goes Lemmy’s adherence to a standard… a standard that demands the an absolute 100% commitment to the man, the music, and the machine that is Motorhead.

Let’s recap:

1.  The deep cuts don’t keep the mansion running.

2.  Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.

Happy Christmas shopping everybody!

It is a rare thing indeed when a cover tune ventures into dangerous territory… the territory of possibly being as good as the original. Even rarer still when the song is as revered as Led Zeppelin’s Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, a song you had better not attempt unless you can summon some serious Robert Plant-esque vocal power.

One thing is for certain… Pink needs to do much, much more of this.