Are you a blogger? If you are, you may be interested in the post I wrote today for 40tech.com on how to access your site’s log file. You can see who’s looking at your site, and what they’re reading, all in real time. You can also check out your error log to figure out why something on your site isn’t working. It’s pretty nifty, and it’s a good foray into accessing your site directly via the command line.
Also, I found a link that explains how to read the contents of the Log file. Some of it seemed obvious to me, like the numbers are the IP of the person checking out your site and the GET: postname.html is the page they’re looking at. But this was something I wouldn’t have intuited:
The sixth piece of information is a status code. This tells you whether the request was successful, or encountered some problem. Most of the time, this is 200, which means that the transfer was successful, and everything went well. Hopefully. I’m not going to give the whole list of the status codes, and what they mean. You need to look in the documentation for that. But, in general, a status code that starts with 2 was successful. Starting with a 3 means that the request was redirected somewhere else for some reason. Starting with a 4 means that the user did something wrong, and starting with a 5 means that the server did something wrong.
Good to know. Both articles are very easy to read and understand even for someone with absolutely no experience using the command line.
Hey dudes: if you’re looking for a song to sing at your woman while you jump around the dancefloor–this is the one.Try dancing like a maniac while mouthing “I’m gonna take you back to my house! I love the feeling when you touch me baby!” and surely you will get laid.
This sounds like it should have been the lead single on the Tron soundtrack. After releasing countless albums, M83 is finally starting to get radio play with this song. No wonder, as the beat makes it a little less dreamwave than most of their other stuff. It’s hard to tell where the vocals end and the synth begins. And the passioned cry, “The city is my church!” never gets old.
Remember when Arcade Fire won that grammy and everyone was all, “Who’s Arcade Fire?” Strange times we live in. They wouldn’t let me on their selection committee, but I suspect one of the reasons they won was for the lyrics that explore suburban angst. Arguably the best of these is this song, “The Suburbs,” a song I can’t seem to get tired of.This cover slows it down for a sexy groove that makes the beauitful lyrics easier to understand.
Another fun cover that’s a bit easier to sing along with than the original. If you haven’t heard of Kreayshawn yet, just-you-wait. She’s an up-and-coming Oakland rapper, who courts controversy by being not only white, but having a uniquely Oakland-hipster style. Far as I can tell, she doesn’t seem to give a fuck, which is the best way to be. The original “Gucci Gucci” is in my collection, but I recognize that it can be a bit too…boldly obnoxious for many. 2011 was a year for sexy slow-downs, and this one contrasts nicely with Kreayshawn’s brazen and clever lyrics.
There’s a lot of weird, delightful little sounds in “Polish Girl.” It’s easy to get lost in wondering what toys he’s using to create this-or-that sound. Then I remember the lyrics, and get pulled back into the story of the song, until I hear that sound that’s like Mario just won a green 1-up shroom, and I’m pulled back into the swirly goodness. When there’s too much greatness to concentrate on at one time, you know it’s a song that’s going to stay on the heavy rotation for many months.
Pure, perfect electro.So happy, it almost sounds like calypso. Yet it manages to avoid sounding too sacharine. Maybe it’s because of the emotion in his voice, but it all just works. If you like this song, get this album. One of the year’s best.
No really, you should get their album. Listen to “Sunshine Eyes” and get a lesson in how a perfect new wave song is built. Pure delight from beginning to end. Sounds like: the montage music for your summer romance.
The heavy beat on “Stunts” would have made this a good fit for the “Best Dance Music of 2011” list, but the lack of vocals takes some of the energy out of it, so I put it here instead. If you’re a fan of Ratatat and Caribou this may be the fix you need.
I was very excited to hear the new Rapture album, and while I can’t recommend the whole thing, this song is a winner. Part of what makes the Rapture so great is Luke Jenner’s emotive vocals, and this one is no exception. Four cocktails down, you will have trouble not singing “How deep is your love!” not as a question, but as an exclamation to be shouted to the fullest.
At the beginning of the year, I was obsessing over their new song “Dystopia (the Earth is On Fire).” Well, I overplayed it and now I’m sick of it. But then I discovered that “Paradise Engineering” is even better. Both songs give a nod to the catastrophic state of the world channeling it all into blissed out disco denial. It’s a soundtrack for oblivious consumerism in a broken world, which makes it more than good pop: it’s the zeitgeist of the 21st century.
So begins at last my list of the finest songs of 2011. Last year I was all upset about the whole idea that one could even begin to honestly determine the very best songs put out in a year. Not because tastes differ too greatly, but because there’s just too much good music.
This year I realized I could have thrown together a list in late December, which is what everyone wants. No one gives a damn about 2011 in February, right? But for some reason I couldn’t stop myself from pouring through everything I’d played on my radio stream, in search of something I’d missed. Some time in January, I realized that I don’t do this for you (sorry, readers). I do it for me, so I can be sure nothing gets lost in the music world’s relentless drive toward newer-better-bolder. So these songs of 2011 may be five minutes ago, but they’re worth looking over twice.
The Best Indie Rock of 2011 PART I
There’s just too much goodness to fit in one post. In no particular order…
At last, the best electro of 2011. I’m not ranking these, they’re in alphabetical order. Forthcoming is the second half of this list, as well as the Best Indie Rock and the best Dance and the Best Chill Music. It’s about time, eh?
This morning the 9th Circuit Court overturned Prop 8, the proposition that outlawed gay marriage in California. There was one dissenting opinion from Judge Randy Smith. He argued that traditional marriage can be harmed by changing the definition to include same-sex couples. I’d like to argue the opposite: opposing gay marriage harms the sanctity of traditional marriage.
When I was dating women, marriage was never a possibility. To take the relationship to the next level was to move in together, and in typical lesbian fashion that happened pretty quickly. We didn’t give any thought to whether we wanted to be together for all of eternity because we’d known since the time we came out of the closet that that wasn’t an option. If being queer meant being swallowed in a lake of fire, so be it. We’d accepted it.
Now I’m in an entirely hetero-normative relationship. One man, one woman. And guess what? I still don’t think about marriage. I know that it’s an option, but I don’t fantasize about wedding gowns and bridal showers like some of my straight friends do. To them, marriage has always been the measure of love, because that’s what people do when they love each other. To prove they love each other. But it is hard to believe in the sanctity of marriage when you’ve been in love, and done just fine without it.
But that’s a young person’s game. What every queer wants, even a Godless heathen like myself, is equal rights. The right to leave our pension to our partner, the right to visit them in the hospital, the right to add them to our health insurance, the right to file jointly on our taxes, all of the rights that straight couples get when they sign that piece of paper. Most Americans, even those who support the sanctity-of-marriage argument, recognize this as an injustice that should be rectified. Arguing against giving queer couples the same rights as married couples is a losing argument. Too many people saw If These Walls Could Talk II I suppose, or they have a gay friend, or they get their hair cut by a friendly-but-opinionated gay stylist. Over and over statistics show that the younger generation has no problem with gay people, thinks they aren’t going to stop being gay just because you guilt them, and believes they deserve equal rights.
Enter civil unions. Civil unions seem like the perfect compromise to keep our grubby, queer, little hands off your precious wedding rings. But it seems obvious to me that civil unions are only going to further destroy the sanctity of marriage. Let me tell you why. Continue reading Legalizing Gay Marriage is the Only Way to Protect Straight Marriage→
It’s possible that this is all a trick of the lighting in the club, but even if his mixer were turned off, I still wouldn’t buy that Guetta is a total fake. After all the guy’s been live Djing since he was seventeen. Surely if he didn’t know how to operate a mixer, someone in that time would have noticed. Even if his mixer is completely turned off, it’s possible that he had technical difficulties and had to throw on a mix CD. These things happen.
But the very existence of this video and the support it’s received tells us that for every one of Guetta’s fans there’s a hater. He may not be a fake DJ, but is David Guetta a sellout? Let’s examine the evidence.
It seems he will collaborate with anyone, on his last album alone he worked with Usher, Sia, Taio Cruz, Snoop Dogg, Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown, Lil Wayne and Timbaland. He even collaborated with a fifteen-year old kid famous for lip-syncing on YouTube …but hey, maybe he’s just a friendly guy…and all his friends happen to be the biggest names in pop music.
Actually, it’s unfair to say this is all happening by accident. Guetta was told that dance music would never succeed in the American market, so he sought out the biggest names in pop. Now you can’t turn on the radio without hearing “Tonight’s going to be a good night” or that “Sexy Bitch” song he did with Akon, or whatever Guetta’s next single is. Instead of complaining about the lack of electronic music on the Billboard charts, he saw an opportunity and he took it.
Selling out can be defined as making music for money instead of answering the call of your artistic muse. Guetta described it this way: “The more melodies and chord changes, the less good it is for the clubs, but the better it is for radio, because it makes it really emotional…Yet, what gives dance music energy and drive is that it’s hypnotic and repetitive. My battle is to find the balance between the two.” Here he’s freely admitting that he changes the music he makes to appease the radio drones.
This all comes down to the age-old battle between professional and amateur artists. Whether you’re a dancer, poet, or photographer, if you want to make money practicing your art, you’ll have to learn to craft work that fits the needs of the person paying you. If you’re a writer, this could be cutting your profanity out of the articles you write for the local paper. If you’re a film-maker it could mean using the producer’s band for your soundtrack. And any DJ who’s ever worked a wedding can tell you the booking where you snub “The Hussle” and only play underground dance music you won’t be getting a referral from the bride. Maybe David Guetta truly believes auto-tune is the sexiest thing ever, but it’s more likely he puts up with it to have an opportunity to make Lil Wayne’s next hit a little less R&B and a little more four to the floor.
Meanwhile, those of us not out there making money can turn our nose up at those who do. Is David Guetta a sellout? Yes, and he probably has been for almost as long as he’s been making money.
It makes no difference to me if you hate on Guetta, what bother me is the idea that becoming a world-famous DJ and producer is somehow easy, if only you’re willing to sell out. The comments are along the lines of “All you need to become the next David Guetta are iTunes and swagger.” This marginalizes the hard work DJs are out there doing every day. Dammit, selling out his hard work.
This is song #3 of a playlist for my LYLAS Kat. The subject is great indie lyricists. Each week I’m focusing on the lyrics of one band and why those lyrics are worth delving into.
Hi Kat,
Since you’ve been obsessed with the Mountain Goats lately, we’ve been talking about who some of our favorite modern lyricists are. This playlist was made specifically to answer that question. Today’s band is Metric.
It’s no secret that Metric is one of my favorite bands of the decade. One may compare them to chick-fronted rock bands like Blondie or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But Metric wins bonus points in having captivating, socially relevant lyrics. I first got hooked on the mysterious “The Police and the Private” and became fanatic with “Patriarch on A Vespa.” I say it’s socially relevant but it’s more poetry than preaching. She’s writing about the world she sees, and as a socially aware person, this is reflected in her writing.
Take the aforementioned “Police and the Private”. She sings:
Didn’t make this up I learned, I learned it from a friend
My friend is coming clean, she told me
Keep one eye on the door, keep one eye on the bed
Never expect to be sure who you’re working for
It’s clear she’s talking about some black market world. Is it drugs? Prostitution? Does it matter which, or does it matter more that the larger point is that “the whole world wants what we’re on…the police and the private, the doctor, the lawyer, the garbage collector“? The tone is desperate and dangerous. Never once does she ask why something the whole world wants is outlawed, as that would be preaching. I liken it to the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime,” in that capturing the dangers of the lifestyle is more telling and more interesting than a sermon about the morality of those who choose to live in the underworld. The clincher in “Police and the Private” is the last line, Got to get to you the orphanage is closing in an hour. Such a haunting line. Does the character in the song live this dangerous lifestyle in the hopes of making enough money to get her child back? It’s unclear, merely suggestive that criminals lead desperate lives because there are other more innocent lives at stake.
Another example is “Gold, Guns, Girls.” The lyrics All the guns, all the gold, in the world…couldn’t get you off seem to be directed at a certain president and his cabinet that were in power when she released the song in 2009. Did she sit down to write a song about a particular politician, or does her pen naturally gravitate to such subjects because they interest her? Would the song be better if she namechecked Bush or Cheney? No, the song is better because it is about a certain type of person that Cheney happens to be an example of.
The lyrics to Patriarch On A Vespa wouldn’t be out of place in the latest urban literary magazine. I’ll print them in full so you can imagine them not in a rock song but within your favorite poetry anthology.
Patriarch On A Vespa
Promiscuous makes an entrance
Her mouth is full of questions
Are we all brides to be?
Are we all designed to be confined?
Buy ourselves chastity belts and lock them
Organize our lives and lose the key
Our faces all resemble dying roses
From trying to fix it
When instead we should break it
We’ve got to break it before it breaks us
Fear of pretty houses and their porches
Fear of biological wristwatches
Fear of comparison shopping
Dogs on leashes behind fences barking
Pretty little pillows on floral couches
Until our faces all resemble dying roses
Stop trying to fix it
Patriarch on a Vespa
Runs a red and ends up
Crushed under the wheel
I can imagine this getting high marks at the next Berkeley poetry slam, can’t you? But on the contrary, she sings this while playing the keyboard solo and kicking her legs in the air in total bad-ass fashion. The “it” she refers to I presume to be bullshit suburbia and when she shouts “Stop trying to fix it…we should break it” she has created a couplet not matched in the history of rocking out since The Who first shouted “Meet the new boss! Same as the old boss!” If this song had been popular enough to hit heavy rotation on corporate radio, surely it would have inspired some chair throwing and bra burning.
If you want to see some chill-inspiring rockage, check out the thrills she throws down at 1:40. It will give you a sense of why Emily Haines is one of the goddesses of indie rock:
Bonus: If this rocks a little hard for you, check out Emily Haines solo career with her backing band The Soft Skeleton. Or if you just can’t get enough, she’s also a sometimes-singer for Broken Social Scene.
Nooooo! Etta James died today. Leukemia.
My friend Achterom introduced me to Etta James. Of course I knew who she was, like everyone else I knew she was the old broad who sings "At Last." A pretty enough song, with very little spunk. I wasn't too impressed with it. But he went to go see her live, and wouldn't shut up about it. There she was, a woman in her late sixties, making raunchy stage jokes and treating the microphone like a dildo. She was feisty and larger than life, like a queen of the Blues should be. Having (at last) upped my respect for the the Matriarch of R&B, I started playing her more rockabilly songs in my DJ sets. Somehow tracks like "In the Basement" seem to fit in just fine along with heavy dance numbers with thumpin' bass. Maybe that's why Avicii's chose to sample her song "Somebody Got A Hold On Me" for their huge 2011 dance hit, "Levels."
Etta remixed:
Etta James – 7 Day Fool (Whiskey Barons Edit) Avicii – Levels (feat. Etta James)
Etta served straight:
Etta James – In the Basement (Part I) Etta James – the Wallflower Etta James – Tell Mama Etta James – Spoonful (WMA file) Etta James – I Just Wanna Make Love to you (WMA file)
Fun facts about Etta James:
It's rumored that she dated BB King when she was only 16, and that the song "Sweet Little 16" was written about her.
She is believed to be half-white, though no one can say with certainty as Etta never knew who her father was. She suspected it was the pool player, Rudolf "Minnesota Fats" Wanderone.
She was a heroin addict and one of the many celebrities who received treatment at the Betty Ford clinic.
After Beyonce inaccurately portrayed her in a movie, Etta James said she couldn't stand the singer and threatened that "she would get her ass whooped," though her children claim this was said because she had begun suffering from Alzheimer's.
James has received more than 30 awards throughout her life, including six Grammys and entry into The Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, The Rockabilly Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame.
Etta claimed to have written many of her songs, but didn't take the credit for tax reasons.
Nicholas Carr has an article in The Wall Street Journal about the malleability of e-books. Because a digital edition can be perpetually edited, it is never officially finished. He muses on how intrusive school boards and dictators will tinker in otherwise “published” e-books.
The section that interested me most (as I’ve pondered the article’s subject before) was this:
What may be more insidious is the pressure to fiddle with books for commercial reasons. Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, publishers may soon be awash in market research. They’ll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book.
I can absolutely see publishers doing this. It could create a world where books are tailored to fit a majority, in the same way market testing has resulted in a bevy of cookie-cutter movies. On the other hand, one could argue that this isn’t so different from the modern writers’ workshop.
One issue the article doesn’t delve into is how editable e-books can encourage more collaborative reading. One could imagine people trading versions of the Bible annotated by Christopher Hitchens or popular novels with erotic fan-fic written in, or copies of The Da Vinci Code with embedded photos of the art mentioned in the story. You’d end up with a variety of specially named editions floating around.
This would all serve to add to the notion of the physical book as a collectors item. With e-books as ephemeral, the printed book may continue to exist as the authority on what the final, official draft is. In the future when print runs decrease dramatically, having a personal copy of the rare, unchanging, printed book will give its owner a certain authority on the text and having a personal library will again become a status symbol.
I finally submitted my electronic signature to the petition to congress to oppose the bill that will remove our Internet freedoms (SOPA). I thought I’d share with you the letter I wrote under the section, “Tell your story”…
I’m the sixth most popular DJ on the music site Blip.fm. My station gained this popularity because I focus on playing things that are underplayed, be it under-the-radar indie bands or long-forgotten b-sides of yesteryear. The music I play is primarily not music you will hear on commercial radio, but it is protected by copyright. I do this for free–it is my passion to help people discover these fantastic bands, as so many have tired of the repetitive and trite options available through commercial radio. In order to comply with the demands of record labels, the site does not allow file uploads so most of the songs are streamed from YouTube uploaders who are violating copyright by posting the vidoes.
If the SOPA Bill passes, the site where I play music, and any streaming site like it, will be outlawed. Moreover, I would face a ten-year prison sentence for hosting my amateur radio show. This despite the fact that none of the songs I play on my station are available for download, and links are provided to Amazon and iTunes for those who are ready to purchase. Professionally, I work in publicity and marketing so I understand that these bands need the publicity sites like Blip.fm provides. Sadly, many bands willingly sign detrimental contracts so they can gain access to the corporate labels’ big-budget publicity campaigns. It is absurd that a label will pay millions of dollars to have “street teams” that give away free CDs at hip bars in major cities–all while claiming that sharing music is hurting their business model.
It is equally absurd to put the sentencing guidelines for copywrite infringement in the same range as child rape or armed robbery. I find it hard to believe that even the most willfull copywrite infringer on the planet is committing the same harm as rapists and robbers, nor do they represent a danger to society. I should hope that if SOPA passes and I am charged with a felony, someone can explain to me how the payola-backed radio DJs are upstanding members of society and those with streaming radio stations are criminals.
