Rob Manuel

In Praise of CDs

robmanuel — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:43:33 +0000

I haven’t bothered with CDs for a good 10 years or so. I remember visiting a friend working for a music magazine in about 2001 and he gave me a pile of promo CDs and I was just looking at them puzzled – what possible use are these in the days of Napster?

But recently I’ve been experimenting with CDs again. I’m not claiming that this is better than iTunes/Spotify – but it’s been a fun quirky thing to do for a few weeks and there are definite differences about the formats which are interesting to think about in this era where we’re saying goodbye to physical media. No more physical media – this is no longer crazy futurism.

Just to be clear – I’m no technophobe – I’ve been downloading music via the internet since the mid 90s (first track I got was a KLF track called K Cera Cera that wasn’t available in the shops) – I even was sticking up my own music online in (blimey!) 1993 in formats that pre-dated MP3s.

Anyway, in my month or so of CDs here’s what I’ve learnt:

CDs end – this is a good thing. Say you type your favourite act into Spotify chances are it’ll keep playing until you’re sick of it. This is quite a negative emotion to be associated with your favourite music. “Get it off, my brain is going to explode.”

CDs are cheap. My local charity shop sells them for £1. Playing pot luck is a fun cheap hobby. Amazon has amazing deals on with 5 for about £10.

CDs are like buying MP3s with a physical back up.

CDs are higher audio quality than your average (not all) MP3. I used to think I couldn’t tell but then I got some better speakers, and blimey, I own some crappy MP3s that literally sound like the speaker is torn.

Put a CD in a player and it’ll still be in the player when you next enter the room. This encourages repeat listening. Repeat listening makes music familiar – and that’s how it becomes your favourite music.

Every single CD case – I can take them off the shelf and associate a memory with it. The Bjork single I bought in Mike Lloyds in Wolverhampton for £1 in 1994 – I used to buy singles as I had very little money. The Sisters of Mercy CD I accidentaly stole from the library (I took back the cover and didn’t realise I had the disk until years later).

If you pile up the CDs on your shelf the spines are readable and they say “listen to me.” They remind you of what they are and ask you to play them.

CDs don’t pause between tracks like your iPod/Spotify. This matters on albums that are meant to run together. Say Dark Side of the Moon. These records are BROKEN by this tech. If I was Roger Waters I’d take a shit in Apple’s office and refuse to stop shitting until this was fixed.

The medium is the message. The CD says “I covet this precious artifact”. The computer file says “this is disposable data”.

How do you stop fiddling with your gadgets whilst listening to podcasts?

robmanuel — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:51:58 +0000

I like listening to stuff – lectures on youtube are a favourite, podcasts too – but the problem is that I get distracted by the shiny screen and start checking my email / twitter etc and stop listening.

This can be solved by listening whilst cleaning or going for a walk but sometimes I just want to laze about – so what to do with my hands and eyes that are so tempted by that screen?

Recently I’ve found an notebook app that’s meant, well for taking notes, but I’ve found it’s utterly great to doodle away with whilst listening. I can really concentrate and at the end of it I’ve got all these great doodles which are probably worth £millions to any serious buyer of art.

Some thoughts on Blondie’s Heart of Glass

robmanuel — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:34:38 +0000

Found myself listening to Heart of Glass today and it caught my ear in a way it had never had before. I don’t claim to be an expert – just thought I’d share my thoughts.

So, I asked her, ‘Debbie, what kind of music that’s happening right now really turns you on?’ She said, ‘Donna Summer.’ I said, ‘OK, then how about us treating this song like it was meant for Donna Summer?’ Thay all looked at me as if to say, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s disco, right?’ ‘Yeah, it’s disco,’ they mumbled, but when Debbie then said, ‘I like disco,’ the others basically went along with it.
– Sound on Sound on Heart of Glass

The key is slightly ambiguous. It’s in E but the verse goes Emaj / C#min / C#min / Emaj – both perfectly valid chords for Emaj but those long stretches of minor pull my ear towards hearing the verse in a minor key. This gives the song a sense of longing and heartbreak not normally associated with major key songs.

What is the chorus and what is the verse? The “Once I had a love and it was a gas, Soon turned out; I had a heart of glass” is one of the vocal hooks of the song (the other two being the nah nah nah bit and the ooh ooh, woah oh bit) but structurally you’d expect it to be the verse. Either the song starts on the chrous or the song has a catchier verse than chrous – again more ambiguity.

What I’m calling the chorus – the lyrically forgettable “In between, what I find is pleasing, and I’m feeling fine” – sounds like a keychange to A major. The bass walks to it and the melody explodes in major key goodness. Yet is it a key change? The chords are still all found in E Major. Really really quite a clever song.

Starts with a drum machine – the oomph-less rattle of the Roland CR-78 (available as the iPhone app Funkbox should you wish to have a play) – before live drums come in. I hear this as a battle between rock (humans) and disco (machines). Who wins? Well, rock wins on power – that bass drum would pin anyone to the floor – but disco wins by setting the tempo as tightly as any click track.
The component parts that make up the song:
- Guitar – probably the one element of this song that’s not obviously disco and says “this is Blondie”.
- Sequenced 16ths bassy bit – straight out of I Feel Love. The phased duh-duh-duh throughout the whole song.
- Live Drums – Bass, snare, bass, snare – the listener isn’t going to lose this beat.
- Drum machine – rattly but on 16ths to remind us this is spacey disco.
- Spacey keyboard wash – straight out of I Feel Love
- Bass – not very funky except when doing octaves to introduce chorus.

I’m reminded about what Guy Pratt said about disco basslines. Basically black ones are funky and white ones aren’t. Watch the below video from about 1min 20.

If this track was solely made for the dance floor it would have dumped the chorus – but the “nah nah nahs” are good for radio. But the whole rhythm of it is just too sashaying to dance to without looking uncool. Bill Drummond said it best in The Manual, “Serious groove merchants hate it when a song has a dynamite bass line for the verse and then when the chorus comes the chords change, dragging the bass away from its ‘bad self’ into having to follow those limp wristed chords. For them the whole movement of the song is destroyed for the sake of some nursery rhyme element they would rather see dumped.” Read the entire Manual here.

If you want more 16ths spacey disco obviously the starting point is Donna Summers I Feel Love. But it can also be found in other rockist tracks like Duran Duran’s Planet Earth and Japan’s Life in Tokyo.

This is the sounds of a rock band playing disco. Other bands that did this successfully include Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall and arguably I Was Made for Loving You by Kiss.

This is a record made in the studio. Lovingly made. The demos suggest a band that simply couldn’t play.

Final thought: Debbie was 34 in the year this record came out. In a world where pop music fronted by the young dominates – would this happen now?

Further reading:
Wikipedia: Heart of Glass Sound on Sound

What Sting could teach Facebook

robmanuel — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:17:19 +0000

I’ve tried to quit Facebook a handful of times. No big flounce and I’m off but a quiet retreat from something that I find myself looking at too much whilst shaking my head. Yes there’s privacy issues, yes it’s a creepy bit of tech that turns all our memories into mulch to sell us product but mostly I want to leave as it sucks time.

But when I’ve tried to quit I get a message about needing to stay out for 14 days else my account will be reinstated. This is the problem. As Facebook has become a reflex – I’ll often log instinctively when hit with a browser, staying logged out is a problem.

Imagine trying to give up cigarettes but Philip Morris made you sign a legal document demanding that you carried around a packet for two weeks. You’d quite possibly hit a trigger for sparking up (leaving tube stations was a strong one for me when I used to smoke), reach for the fags, smoke half of it before realising, “oh damn, but I’ve given up. Oh well, it’s obviously too hard, I’ll stay on the cigs.”

This is how Facebook operates. It’s the pusher of an addictive product that puts massive barriers in the way of leaving.

But there is a way to just say no to the cyber-cigs. Change your password to something awkward rather than that flurry of characters you’ve ended up using on half the sites on the web. Then you can’t log in by accident.

Feeling emboldened that I’ve managed to get out of Facebook I decide to close as many sites as I can – well not Twitter as I’m not ready to shake that addiction – but all the sites I faffed around with and then got bored with. It says something very clear about the ethics of a site in the ease of letting you leave. These things should be fun, not prisons.

Google plus – very easy. Nice and clear. No weird psychological pressure. +1 for Google.

Flickr. No trouble. One of the good guys.

Ebay – easy but won’t let me leave properly for 180 days in case there’s problems with my transactions. Hmmmm.

Posterous – very difficult to find the leave button but emailing them got a prompt response allowing me to bugger off out of there.

Linkedin – won’t let me close immediately and says it needs a moderator to approve my decision to leave – apparently having over 250 contacts is significant. Later I get an email saying. Still remanded in cyber-custody as of writing this.

Quora – like Facebook makes a distinction between closing and deleting your account. A deletion can only be obtained via emailing an admin. Waiting on this as of writing.

Obviously, all these sites have potential for almost infinite abuse of your data but I suspect the willingness to let you leave represents some level of respect for you as an individual. As that great philosopher Sting once sang, “if you love someone set them free.”

Dissertation on ‘animated GIFs in web culture’

robmanuel — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:07:28 +0000

Just had an email from Connor Clark who writes, “I’ve rather foolishly decided to write my dissertation on ‘animated GIFs in web culture’ looking at its history on the early web to its recent renaissance. as part of this i would like to interview some relevant artists/curators.”

Connor has give me some questions, but I thought it might be interesting to throw this out to the internet for comments? Please add your thoughts.

When you started the B3ta message-board in 2001, did you consider it as a community for just sharing images, rather than animations?
Neither. We saw it as a community for encouraging people to create web projects.

However, animated gifs were part of the message board tho pretty much from the start. I was mildy obsessed with them and used to make tributes to my favourites.

Like a bunny in an ascii mirror:
http://www2.b3ta.com/_bunny/

And my tribute to the crappiest / best animated gifs at the time. It already was a world tinged with nostalgia and I was saying goodbye in 2001
http://www2.b3ta.com/videokilledtheradiostar/

Many viral animated GIFs have originated on the B3ta message-board, is there one which is particularly memorable for you?
I liked the Halifax one which had Howard shagging a girl from behind. Two frames – utterly changed the meaning of the slogan, “who gives you extra?” Halifax’s lawyers got in touch and made us remove it but they’ll never remove it from my mind.

Do you see animated GIFs as purely nostalgia for old technology, part of a wider trend of retro-fetishism?
Maybe. Mostly I think it’s user interface thing. They play inline without anyone having to press a button. Handy in messageboards etc.

GIF animation was arguably made obsolete by technology such as Flash and streaming video, why do you think it continues to thrive on content sharing websites such as Tumblr/Reddit?
See above. They also loop which Youtube doesn’t. Some jokes are better for being repeated endlessly without having to press play.

The recent closure of Geocities highlighted how easily web content can disappear forever, do you feel that the visual history of the Web (user generated content rather than web design) should be taken more seriously?
Of course. It’s a crime that so much primary source history gets flushed down the memory hole in the name of saving a few quid on web space. Let’s burn libraries. No? Exactly. @Textfiles is good on this subject – talk to him.

‘Web 2.0′ saw a drive to professionalise the Web; Facebook for example does not allow animated GIFs. Does the often purile/lo-fi aesthetic of many messageboard posts represent an anti-professional ideology?
Web 2.0 wasn’t a drive to professionalise the web. It was just marketing speak to glue together a bunch of sites that centered around user created content rather than paying a load of journalists.

BTW: Twitter does allow ani gifs if you are careful. 128px square and less than 1mb.

Anyway – please feel free to answer Conner’s questions yourself. Please do.

How to edit the Daily Mail website

robmanuel — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:32:39 +0000

Click for biggy.

The twitpic version.

And as a bonus joke: What’s the difference between Jeremy Hunt and an orange? Nothing rhymes with orange.

Meh to Cookie law

robmanuel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:51:45 +0000

Written for The Times in May 2011 but they didn’t use it. Luckily I’ve broken the jinx and they have published my most recent effort here, but I can’t stick that online for a week or so for paywall reasons.

If proof were wanted that the Eurosceptics occasionally have a point, let me direct you towards a new bit of legislation covering websites in Britain and other EU countries. It comes into force on 26 May 2011 and requires UK websites to get consent before storing or retrieving information on users computers.

The law covers cookies, a term that might need explaining. Named after fortune cookies it’s a small bit of data that a website leaves on your computer. And like a fortune cookie, if you open it there is a message. Not, “too much Chinese food has given you indigestion” but often “this person has visited this site”.

The tech is widely used to generate stats about site visitors so the owners can make decisions about what do next. Say if The Daily Mail gets a lot of traffic on a story about some celeb has gained a few pounds, then it’s a hint to commission more stories to make women neurotic about their bodies.

However cookies CAN be used to track people, most often used to make sure people are shown a variety of banner ads based upon their browsing history rather than getting the same advert for Easyjet everytime.

So in a ham-fisted attempt to improve people’s privacy on the web, the EU has forced a directive onto our parliaments to make sure that EU sites have to both explain “informed consent” and get it, probably by sticking up a pop up box with a checkbox for every site you use.

Fixating on the role of cookies is not only an incredibly dated perspective – the last time most people cared about this issue was in about 1995 – but also wildly missing the point. It’s like saying there should be a warning on bricks because violent thugs throw them through windows – the bad bit is not the brick but the violent behaviour. Likewise, the cookie should not be blamed for people who want to track other users online – it is this kind of behaviour that should be tackled. Legislate against the crime not the tool.

Making a big deal about cookies will do zilch for privacy, as there are other nefarious ways to track users across the web. The most obvious one is using the user’s ‘digital fingerprint’. This consists of the unique combination of the specifics of your browser, IP address and what plugins you’ve got installed.

Privacy issues aside, the potential for this legislation to damage UK websites and users is enormous.

Firstly it makes it confusing to use websites – the first thing that you get when you visit a new site is an irritating message about cookies rather than information about what the site offers. This would be very off-putting for anyone who is not very tech-savvy.

Next, the EU laws would give a competitive advantage to American sites, which would not be burdened with a load of annoying pop-ups? This is incredibly unfair to any UK based entrepreneurs attempting to start a new company. This gives UK businesses yet another reason to move their operations offshore. If your business is registered outside the EU then these laws do not apply to you.

One of the real losers from this legislation will be the BBC, which is one of the few genuinely
world class websites run from the UK.

The advice currently given by the Information Commissioner’s Office (the body that regulates how information is stored on computers) is not very specific. A look at their website reveals statements like : “it’ll be a challenge” and “you need to think carefully”, suggesting that they don’t have a clue what to do with this stupidity either, despite a potential £500,000 fine for non compliance.

My hope is that we all ignore it and the law falls flat on its cookie-doughed bottom.

How taboo it is nowadays to appear unashamed in the face of scandal?

robmanuel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:49:15 +0000

Written for Word Magazine (buy it in your newsagents, it’s wonderful) in March 2011 – this was the first draft.

In between the horror of Japan and the misery of the cuts has been a little ray of celebrity sunshine: Charlie Sheen has been caught using prostitutes, taking stupendous amounts of drugs and best of all bragging about it. This isn’t the script. If you get caught up in a scandal, you’re meant to go: “Sorry! I’m off to rehab!” and then carry on exactly as you were before, but behind closed doors.

The media is (amongst other things) a huge machine for the celeb classes to broadcast the word “sorry” along with the the second unsaid implication: “please don’t kick us out of celeb club, we wish to continue clawing in mountains of cash from the proles.” Although sometimes they manage to append a useful marketing message like, “Two and Half Men, Tuesdays, 9pm.”

A quick search for “apologise” in Google news reveals a plethora of grovelling messages concocted by desperate PR departments who are now punching their own faces in at the idiocy of allowing their clients unmediated access to the public.

Hugh Grant recently tweeted: “I discovered it hurt less if you tackled hard than if you tackled like a queen” and the headline soon spun out “BBC apologises for Hugh Grant’s gay rugby comment‎.”

Family Guy script monkey Alec Sulkin managed to offend pretty much everyone with the comment: “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google ‘Pearl Harbor death toll,” revealing an ignorance shared by many of Twitter users as Pearl Harbour actually trended, but the contrition swiftly followed.

Even Sarah Ferguson is sorry for her “gigantic error of judgment” in letting Prince Andrew’s paedophile friend pay off £15,000 debt. Yes, Sarah, I’m sure you’re sorry – sorry that you’ve been caught.

The lesson is simple: do what you like, say what you like, but apologise like your career depends on it if you’re rumbled.

And your career does depend on it, as fellow actor Alec Baldwin (no stranger to druggy controversy himself) publicly demanded that the errant Mr Sheen should polish up his act. As Alec says: “Suck it up and apologize or risk losing a winning career.”

Sheen, instead, has been oddly authentic and shouted loud and proud that he loves drugs and hookers. This is against a backdrop of being sacked and having his kids taken off him. But who’s complaining when the story has given us a new set of catchphrases: “winning!” and “tigerblood!”

Sheen reportedly earned $2m per episode of his hit comedy Two and a Half Men, though quite what he does with this money is anybody’s guess. Actually not quite. He uses to the money to fund a hedonistic life of smoking crack and having sex with porn stars. Who wouldn’t if they had the money?

Well the taboo in not saying sorry is exactly that: money. There’s cash, both the celebs’ personal wedge and the millions they make for the corporations that own them. Not saying sorry deals a death blow to both the celeb and their paymaster; it means endorsement deals shot, adverts pulled and worst of all the DVD box sets removed from Wal-Mart.

And who wants to join the list of other celebs that refused to say sorry? Who wants to be Gary Glitter, condemned forever to wander the globe, only to pop up occasionally in the papers as a bogey man. (A round of contrition on the chat circuit and a confessional reality show about paedophile treatment would have paid the shrink’s bills for a bit at the very least.)

Jonathan King never said sorry, meaning we lost his always interesting opinions from contemporary culture. Somewhere he’s probably saying very clever things about Simon Cowell and X Factor but we’ll never get to hear them.

As Elton John once sang, “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word”. However, not saying sorry is the most expensive thing a celeb can ever do.

O2 mobile paywall

robmanuel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:45:15 +0000

Originally written for The Times in March 2011 but they didn’t use it.

This Thursday morning I started receiving tweets saying that people couldn’t access the site I run – B3ta.com – via their O2 mobile phones. It’s now blocked under an age verification scheme requiring phone users to pay £1 to prove they’re over 18.

B3ta, to be clear, is not a porn site, but a forum for people making comedy pictures somewhat in the spirit of Viz. If you’ve ever had images of cats in headphones or Amy Winehouse standing next to a tube sign saying “High Barnet” emailed to you, then they probably originated on B3ta.

And we’re not the only site blocked; the filter is creating a myriad of false positives and categorising innocent sites as smut.Twitter user @weareglitter writes: “I couldn’t look at a link Victoria Coren posted to her book, which has ‘poker’ in the title.”

Google Translate is having problems, as is urbandictionary.com – a compendium of slang – and bravissimo.com,a bra shop for large boobed women.

O2 is putting a paywall on sites it doesn’t own and pocketing the cash – they are giving their customers £2.50 credit on their bills, but this is funny money internal accounting nonsense. Your average phone company gets 6500 per cent mark up on texting for example. They are swapping your very real £1 for magic beans.

Their hollow message is: “we’re doing this to protect children who use mobile devices.” Anyone with children old enough to use phones will know their kids are cunning enough to “borrow” their parents credit card and get round age restrictions. It’s a security measure that’s as about as childproof as a wrapper on a bar of chocolate.

So if it’s so easy to get round, why do I care? Age verification schemes create a two tiered internet. You won’t be able to look at sites like B3ta in your office, in schools and so on – no business or educational establishment will turn off these filters. Advertising revenue will naturally go away; this is because it is a numbers game and traffic will drop once these sites once restrictions start to be felt.

However, any sites run by large companies will sail though as they’ll be able to lobby any blocks put on them. These days the Daily Mail website is an endless breast-fest – not a day goes by without a sighting of Kelly Brook’s near naked baps. But it would be unlikely that the mouthpiece of Middle England will be classified as over 18 content, because an organisation like the Mail has too much financial muscle.

We can all point to occasions when individuals have tried to censor the internet, but the internet sticks up two fingers to the censor and finds a way round the problem. This is known as the “Streisand effect” after photos of the singer’s house appeared by chance in a scientific survey of coastal erosion. Babs went mental and demanded their removal; the public responded by copying the images and posting them to hundreds of different sites.

However, creating a barrier to usability is far more destructive than individuals openly censoring content. Whereas the latter acts as a spur to defy, making something a bit clunky will make the user just think “nah” and reach for the back button.

Welcome to your new internet, where the sites run by big business are readily available. Anything that’s not liked by the authorities is placed in a walled garden, starved of sunlight to wither and die.

Radiohead

robmanuel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:42:19 +0000

Originally written for The Times and published here. This is the first draft.

Radiohead have announced that their new recording The King of Limbs will be available to download from Saturday for the princely sum of £6.

This is difficult second album syndrome – Radiohead got so much attention for their “pay what you like” pricing stunt for In Rainbows, what could they do to top it? The answer is they can’t and that this represents a retreat from a bold experiment to a new conservatism.

Radiohead never released figures for their honesty box pricing strategy, but one thing is for certain, if it raked in oodles of cash then they’d be doing it again.

Let’s face it, £6 is an unremarkable price for a new album – the average for the current top 10 CDs on Amazon is £6.30. Presumably Radiohead are looking for an improvement on the £3.88 per paid download (not including freeloaders) estimated by the Record of The Day survey in 2007.

Hopefully this signals the death of people sitting in marketing meetings going: “well Radiohead said the community would set the price”. What’s interesting is the bit they are doing again: a poncey second edition for the super-fans at a hugely inflated price.

In Rainbows offered a “diskbox” version for £40 featuring two 12″ records; this time the die-hards can buy The King of Limbs, “the world’s first newspaper album” for £33, containing lots of bits of artwork, and possibly a bitter reference to the similarly struggling business model faced by the newspaper industry.

But this quick turnaround – five days between announcement and release – is smart. It might even get their official product to market minutes before the
pirates pounce.

This is a launch on Internet time. There’s less opportunity for this to be leaked, and less time for excitement to fizzle out.

Expect to see more of this in the future from other bands as these ideas prove themselves: shorter release times, and more expensive physical packages for the hardcore.

Frankly, my tip to Radiohead is to run a cut price version of the service other artists provide for Russian Oligarchs. If Amy Winehouse does private gigs for Roman Abramovich at £1m a pop, then for £500 Thom could phone you up and warble his paranoid conspiracy theories for 10 mins. Or sell you a wink with his good eye for 50p. Kerr-ching.

But as a music lover the one bit missing from this DIY approach is the lack of co-operation with streaming networks. In Rainbows was not available via Spotify and no one knows what is going on with this new offering. Which suggests a role for record companies yet, a sort of capitalist trade union for acts to thrash out deals between all the places a modern music fan expects to find their heroes: youtube, last.fm, pandora et al.

Still, the whole package makes them still look cooler than Prince, who coped with the disintegrating CD market by suing his fan websites then giving away his music with The Daily Mail. And let’s hope, once the marketing fluff settles, Radiohead’s new music is as thought provoking as their business models.

The King of Limbs is available as an MP3 download via www.thekingoflimbs.com on 19th February 2011.