Just back from 21 Grand to hear Dos (Watt, ex-Minutemen and Kira, ex-Black Flag) jamming bass duets. They’ve been at this for 20+ years, through thick and thin, and play like it. Kind of humorous to watch Kira scamper and pogo as if drummer were present, and she’s a very good bass player, but stoic Watt is the amazing, fluid virtuoso. Not quite like anything you’ve heard before (if you’re thinking punk rock, stop). Watt:

dos (spanish for two, as in uno, dos, tres…) is kira … on bass/singing and watt on bass. that’s it – just two basses and her voice. sometimes watt’s voice too but not much. we’ve been together since the fall of 1985, this is my longest running band. I really dig playing w/dos. it started as an experiment w/making what’s commonly believed a backup instrument up front and paired off w/a twin, using pingpong-like arrangements to create a special space which is pretty much close to the deck but not smothered by competition. what we try to do is develop converstations between our two basses and create a landscape of low-end dynamic. in dos there is no hiding. this is both the challenge and the reward.

Standing room only, short show. Someone called nina put up a Flickr set of the evening.

Nate Harrison discusses the history of the legendary “Amen Break” – probably the most-used drum sample in all of hip-hop, jungle… and advertising. An entire subculture based on a 6-second loop from an obscure 1969 R&B record.

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drums beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Fascinating (relatively speaking) to watch how the progression of the needle across the LP inversely tracks the progression of your own QuickTime slider.

Lessig: “Culture is impossible without a rich public domain.”

Thanks Sean Graham

For The Huffington Post, David Rees, author of the Rolling Stone comic Get Your War On, posts an over-the-top tribute to the Minutemen’s D. Boon on the 20th anniversary of his death. “… my career as a political cartoonist literally began the night I asked myself “What would D. Boon do?” before clumsily trying to make the comic-strip equivalent of a Minutemen song.”

The tribute is way hyperbolic, but all true. The Minutemen changed lives, mine included. Happy birthday Boon. Let the products sell themselves!

No response from iTMS affiliates program on the POST problem. Total brick wall trying to contact a human there, but I’m not ready to give up on being an iTMS partner while iPod is king. Finally solved it with a workaround (which I hate): If user voted on the previous lyric, the vote is processed, then, rather than displaying the rest of the output immediately, the browser is invisibly directed to the next page through a location header rather than POST. User still gets the same page she would otherwise, but links to iTMS now work without throwing a confusing “Re-POST?” dialog in the browser.

Also signed up as a Rhapsody affiliate, so non-iTunes peeps are not locked out. Most lyrics now have dual iTunes/Rhapsody artist links. Thanks to mneptok for kicking my butt on that.

Love how trivial it is to create links to artists in Rhapsody, e.g.: http://www.rhapsody.com/PatsyCline — which means I can auto-generate the URLs. So what was a 10-hour database population job for iTMS was a 5-minute job with Rhapsody. Hey Apple: Cluetrain!