Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

off-topics

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I’m starting to feel sorry for the records. Not all of them, but boxes upon boxes.

Even though my taste in music runs pretty slim these days, i’m not ignorant; i know my Evelyn Champagne King, my DJ Shadow, my No Limits crew, and my Jets singles with blue rainbowed MCA labels on them. Still, i find myself going through boxes of LPs and singles, primarily Hip Hop, and not recognizing a single name. At first i was prone to write this off to ignorance, but after a week i’m sure that isn’t the case. The records i’m pawing through aren’t all big name acts … instead, they are debut singles, self-owned labels, and one hit wonders looking for a rebound. I don’t know them because they aren’t known.


The thing that gets me about these records, though, is the effort they took. It takes a couple of hours for me to get ready for a Trio, not counting the time i spent writing, arranging, and practicing. It took me an on&off month in the studio to record my demo cd, which is nearly all solo. How long do you think it takes to record a solid hip hop track? Brainstorming and refining the rhymes, finding a hook or a sample to build on, getting into the studio to lay it down, adding other instruments, remixing and editing …it’s a long labor. And, a labor of love. Singer-songwriter snob that i am, i tend to marginalize a lot of urban artists because they don’t write their own music and play their own instruments. But, they’re not Celine Dion, that’s for sure. They own the words, they built the beat, and they might have produced on it as well. Forgetting for a moment about their ridik-u-lezlee mizspellled namz and overblown posturing, they took the time to create something, and they were hoping to get noticed because of it


And they’re in my $6 bargain bin.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85017433/

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I try to listen to my body when it screams at me.

Earlier in the evening it seemed as though everyone suddenly needed to talk to me. Lindsay had locked herself out and needed me to let her in, our friend Chris called to leave a mysterious message about how “important” it was for me to call him, members of my music fraternity were hounding me via email and instant messenger. Just as suddenly, i needed to go to sleep. It wasn’t even midnight yet, and i didn’t feel tired; my body just didn’t want to operate. I couldn’t type, or think, just slide into a dreamy haze every time i relaxed and listened to the music i had on.

I bid everyone a farewell for the night, started a cd on tenth track, and was asleep before the end of the eleventh.

It was in that same manner that i woke up: ostensibly because i heard a noise, but really because my body needed fuel. Lately I seem to have found myself on a sort of a diet, which is to say that i’m not eating a pint of ice cream every third day and i’m not eating half a pound of chocolate as a midnight snack. I know, though, what waking up like that means: i need some sort of fuel.

Down in the kitchen my body was like a compass: milk rather than juice & two small pieces of chocolate. I was obviously a little dehydrated and a little low on sugar, though i would have never noticed it on my own. In retrospect, i had hardly drank anything yesterday – definitely not the half gallon of water that’s suggested. Similarly, i had only had sugar from a fruit salad much earlier in the day.

My body knew exactly what i needed once i was in the kitchen, but did it send me down there as well? Did i wake up with the explicit purpose of needing a drink? Was the vaguely disturbing dream i had been having my subconscious mind’s way of waking me up to refuel? The dream i had been having was definitely strange … the nearest i could come to describing it would be to say that the Borg were drugrunning from a largish warehouse that was being fronted as an Acme Supermarket that my mother and i drove into by mistake, and that our only means of survival were pretending to have been already assimilated and making sure to sell out of our small stock of vintage G.I. Joes (who would apparently inform their child owners of the distress we were in, because all of the adults were on the drugs). The overall tone of it was one of horror … knowing that the tiniest slip would make everyone aware that i wasn’t who i was pretending to be.

The birds are already trumpeting sunlight, and my body seems to be through with telling me what it needs to keep it going. If only the rest my life were so succinct.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85009938/

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I often forget he exists in the same relative universe to mine, but occasionally i am reminded. We haven’t talked for a few months now, since work and Eagles playoff games got in the way of us seeing Lord of the Rings. Eventually he gave up on calling and i gave up on waiting. Nothing new to us, really.

On a quick break from audio samples going live i stole over to the phone to confirm the reservations for dinner tonight, and when i gave my name the voice on the other line exclaimed “The Pete [redacted]” to which i kindly replied that, no, i was the Peter [redacted] and that Pete happened to be my father. The voice gave a good natured chuckle and confirmed my reservations, asking afterwards if i’d be coming with The Pete.

“No, just the one of me.”

He assured me they’d be on high alert nonetheless.


I am reminded of my father in the strangest ways.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85002133/

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Via Ernie, Via 37signals: Celine Dion’s new disc will not play in computer CD drives. I’ve been harping about this a lot recently, and there has been a similar amount of speculation in independent internet press on which overblown major-label artist would first allow themselves to play guinea pig to this particular corporate experiment. Ironically, Dion is one of the least relevant: music piracy is obviously most common on college campuses, but Celine is much more of an Adult Contemporary artist. It remains to be seen if labels are brave enough to similarly cripple a disc by Ms. Spears or even Metallica, as the ramifications on record sales alone are potentially horrifying — not to mention the nearly assured backlash by college-aged record buyers (and their potential to find an easy way around the protection).


Not to prematurely give birth to my aforementioned massive media essay, but record labels just don’t get the damned point. Students burns and rip discs because they aren’t realistically affordably. Record companies continue to raise prices to help maintain their profit margins, while they slash artist rosters at the same time. Maybe if brand new pop discs didn’t have an unbelievable list price of nineteen dollars they wouldn’t be so readily copied for under fifty cents. But, rather than assess their own corruption of the artistic process and of the artists’ own rights, the recording industry would rather point the finger at technology and punish buyers who listen to music at their computers. It isn’t the right way to solve things.

If any of this sounds totally ridiculous to you, then you need to boycott Celine Dion’s new disc as well as More Music from The Fast and the Furious , Universal’s first foray into infringing on our rights as record buyers. I’m sure songs from both of the cds already abound on internet retrieval services thanx to savvy buyers with a line-in function on their computers, so feel free to go and download them without any guilt; record companies have shown us that all they care about is the almighty dollar, so all we can (and should) do is withhold it from them.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/75059416/

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Just read: Ani DiFranco breaks out her pen and comes off as not only a credible artist but an apt critic of corporate bred media. I’ve been feeling a media-criticism essay welling in my boots for a few weeks now, but until that pans out try Ani’s opinion on for size. Also, while you’re reading media-critique, check out John Hiler’s witty article on how blogs both augment and interfere with more traditional means of journalism. And, while i’m linking to things, the musician i met on the street last week was just profiled by Rolling Stone. For the third time. RS doesn’t seem to be featuring the new mention online right now, but you can catch the other two on his site. So, um… i’m a little bit excited — hopefully he emails me back sometime.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/375059345/