Some people built this strange looking statue in England.

And this is what it sounds like.

Rob Zombie remembers the first time he saw Jaws. It was in 1975. He was a child at the time, probably in fourth grade by his recollections. “There wasn’t anything scary happening,” he remembers. Yet Jaws became a legend of the horror genre it was, in a large part, thanks to the music. “John Williams was really the master of making…those notes, become a tangible thing,” Zombie says. “You hear the music and there’s a shark even though there is visually no shark in the frame.”

[…]

“Nothing can stir your brain like a piece of music,” says Zombie. “It can be a piece of music you haven’t heard in 40 years and then someone plays it and all of a sudden you’re transported back to your childhood. You can remember specific, tiny things.”

Zombie laments the lack of big screen earworms in today’s hot films. “You can take a blockbuster movie, like The Dark Knight or Iron Man. Hum me the score,” he commands.

I’m stumped. “Superfans probably can, but the average person couldn’t hum you the score to most popular movies,” he concludes.

“I think that now because of digital technology and whatnot, people are so visually oriented,” says Zombie. “They’re cluttering the frame with so much insanity at all times that they forget that it can be simple.”

More: Rob Zombie Hates That Movie Scores Aren’t Catchy Anymore. So He’s Trying to Change Them - Los Angeles - Arts - Public Spectacle

… where, in the song, he enters a Synagogue wearing his grand father’s Iron Cross. When asked, the performer said, “It was just something that I thought people should hear”.

Love, heartbreak, patriotism, and partying have helped make country music the top-selling genre in the US. Segregation and slavery? Not so much.

Yet “Accidental Racist” fits into a long tradition of Southern musicians trying in good faith to reflect on the region’s complicated past. Whether it was the “hillbilly” music marketed to whites from Appalachia and the Ozarks in the 1920s or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s response to Neil Young in 1974’s “Sweet Home Alabama, Southern musicians have sought to address the outsider’s perspective that Southern pride is tied to the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.

… .

“I’m not sure if we were going to find any answers, but it was the idea we would ask the question. In the end, what I felt we had on tape was something we felt people needed to hear,” he told ABC News Tuesday.

CSM

Enjoy.

See the NY Times Obit

nytimes.com

Patty Andrews, the last of the Andrews Sisters, the jaunty vocal trio whose immensely popular music became part of the patriotic fabric of World War II America, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.

With their jazzy renditions of songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B),” “Rum and Coca-Cola” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me),” Patty, Maxene and LaVerne Andrews sold war bonds, boosted morale on the home front, performed withBing Crosby and with theGlenn Miller Orchestra, made movies and entertained thousands of American troops overseas, for whom the women represented the loves and the land the troops had left behind.

Reality TV star? That explains everything.

The reigning Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year and reality TV personality Blake Shelton made some disparaging remarks about traditional country fans in a recent interview with GAC as part of their Backstory series. The “Hillbilly Bone” singer and judge on NBC’s The Voice made the remarks as part of an update to the original GAC Backstory episode to include more information on Blake Shelton’s continued success. In connection with Blake’s first CMA for “Male Vocalist of the Year” award in 2010, Blake Shelton said,

If I am “Male Vocalist of the Year” that must mean that I’m one of those people now that gets to decide if it moves forward and if it moves on. Country music has to evolve in order to survive. Nobody wants to listen to their grandpa’s music. And I don’t care how many of these old farts around Nashville going, “My God, that ain’t country!” Well that’s because you don’t buy records anymore, jackass. The kids do, and they don’t want to buy the music you were buying.

The new version of Blake Shelton’s GAC Backstory aired first in mid December 2012, and will be airing numerous times in February.

Blake Shelton’s comments are not only hurtful to classic and traditional country fans, they are incorrect. According to a study of country radio conducted by Edison Research and released during last year’s Country Radio Seminar in Nashville, listeners actually want more classic country on radio, and the lack of it has been given credit for the contraction being experienced in the radio format. Edison Research President Larry Rosin last February said,

I believe that we as an industry have really made a mistake in our conception of our own stations. While many people don’t want to listen to classic country music, some still do, and we’ve let them float away…We run the risk that we just are more and more pleasing to fewer and fewer people until all we are is ecstatically pleasing a tiny, unsustainable number of people.”

Blake Shelton also specifically mention “records,” but statistics shows that older music listeners are the ones that still by music in physical formats, while younger listeners (aka “kids”) tend to download music illegally, stream it at very low margins for artists and their labels, or purchase individual songs……..
UPDATE! 1-24-13 (11:43 CST): Country music legend Ray Price has just responded to Blake Shelton’s comments through his Facebook page.

It’s a shame that I have spend 63 years in this business trying to introduce music to a larger audience and to make it easier for the younger artists who are coming behind me. Every now and then some young artist will record a rock and roll type song , have a hit first time out with kids only. This is why you see stars come with a few hits only and then just fade away believing they are God’s answer to the world. This guy sounds like in his own mind that his head is so large no hat ever made will fit him. Stupidity Reigns Supreme!!!!!!! Ray Price (CHIEF ‘OLD FART’ & JACKASS’) ’ P.S. YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY AS US OLD-TIMERS. CHECK BACK IN 63 YEARS (THE YEAR 2075) AND LET US KNOW HOW YOUR NAME AND YOUR MUSIC WILL BE REMEMBERED. – Ray Price

More: Blake Shelton Calls Classic Country Fans ‘Old Farts’ & ‘Jackasses’ (Updated) « Saving Country Music

You be the judge:
Johnny Cash, classic country singer, in 1955

Blake Shelton, yowling suburban yokel and self-parody:

We’ve all been there: you’ve rushed out the door and realized you’ve forgotten to sync your phone. You were really looking forward to listening to that new album on the way to work, but now you’ll have to settle for talk radio, or worse, an album you’ve already played out.

The introduction of cloud music storage makes this small problem an issue of the past. With services like iTunes Match, you can simply purchase or upload an album and have it available on all your iOS devices in an instant for $24.99 a year. As an added bonus, you can also save space on your hard drive by permanently storing all of that music on Apple’s servers, which helps if you’re downsizing to smaller computers with flash storage or hopping from computer to computer without a permanent place to keep your music. Cloud storage is now an essential component for music libraries, and although it hasn’t completely eliminated the need for hard drives and local libraries, it’s certainly made it easier for users with mobile lifestyles.

Apple isn’t the only company to provide this type of service. Google and Amazon also offer similar cloud-locker music storage services. Amazon switched to scan-and-match after a year of offering purely storage and streaming for its users, while Google Music recently tweaked its upload-and-stream service to allow users to do more than just store music files. Both services come with most of the same features as iTunes Match, and Amazon’s service costs as much as Apple’s per year while Google Music is completely free.

With all of this choice, it raises the question of which service to use. Does Google’s completely gratis scan-and-match service win out over Amazon or Apple’s paid offerings? Does Amazon’s Cloud Player offer something over iTunes Match that Apple may never be able to offer? Or is sticking with Cupertino the way to go?

More: Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Take on iTunes Match. Who Wins?

I’m hoping some hip readers stumble upon this. Once upon a time, all the way back in the 80s, a DJ at WYSP in Philadelphia would bring in some of his own stuff and play it. He called his show the Ricky Mess. I loved it. I would get home from work at midnight, get myself together and then not go to bed. It ruined my life. Not really, it was already a wreck, but I really enjoyed it. Anyway before I would fall asleep I would put a cassette in my boombox and hit record so I could listen in the morning. (Anything to avoid listening to Howard Stern - ugh) Anyway I wound up with a treasure trove of tapes and great music that I would never have heard if it weren’t for this Rick Allen. Sometimes the tape would run out before he would come back on and say the names of the songs he played. Over the years, I have been able to piece together just about everything I heard, either from him saying the name during the show, from satellite radio (it shows the title and performer - that was huge) even a couple from youtube. I had three songs left, and I stumbled across one from some RWNJ blog “Proof Positive”. But there are two songs left. My tape has long ago wandered off, but the songs are still vivid in my head. One is “The Viper Song” but performed by a guy with a very familiar voice with a band that sounds like the kind you would find on David Letterman, with a couple of solos in the middle. It ran around five minutes or so. It was a really cool version (to me, anyway). The second one is a more subdued number. If I had to guess the title, it would be “I Really Want to Turn the Whole World On”. It roughly followed the tune of an old Chicago tune “Wishing You Were Here”. If either of these sound familiar, please let me know. I would really be grateful.