As artists nowadays many of us spend a lot of time updating social sites, building our followerships and driving traffic to them. A few events recently have given me reason to think twice about this practice. The first was when Masalacism, friends of Dutty Artz, had their free blog shut down by Google. The second was this recent article by online marketer Glen Gabe whose stuff I like. In short he was trying to talk about a similar event on Facebook where a guy’s page with 47k fans was shut down due to a trademark dispute. Gabe was trying to post a link to a story talking about it on a blog to Facebook and Facebook blocked him from doing so saying there was a technical error (see image above). Welcome to the world of social media censorship.
One of the main reasons this is possible is that in fact, as much work as we invest in promoting our profiles and their sites at the end of the day legally we don’t own them. They do. And if they decide they don’t like how you’re using their site, they can zap you. The defense against this is not avoiding these sites but instead creating your own piece of space on the web that you actually own. In my case, you’re looking at it. I use my social sites, mainly Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic back here and if I lose both those profiles this is still a place for people to come find me that I actually own.
I setup this site for about $6.00 US a month in hosting costs and am enjoying running it. Its running the free blog hosting software WordPress which I like because it’s designed to be easy to update often. If you’re interested in doing the same I wrote a how-to post here that has step by step instructions.
Has anything like this happened to you? Have you had a profile deleted? What was your response?
“creativity was the ability to bring to life an image or idea regardless of resources”
- Chief Boima, Interviewed by Eddie Stats
Eddie Stats has a great interview with Dutty Artz familia Chief Boima and Vamanos from Ghetto Bassquake over at his blog Ghetto Palms for the Fader (linked below). In it came the above quote which Boima mentions in the context of film theory.
I love this idea and it brings me back to a concept that I try to bash my friends and students over the head with all the time.
Creativity is what happens IN SPITE of things like equipment, time and resources. A lot of people I know cling to the idea that as soon as they get this next plug-in, keyboard, piece of software, money, time or whatever it is that they don’t currently have that they’ll be able to accomplish their creative goals.
I am sorry to report that this is absolutely not the case.
I saw this recently over at Peter Kirn’s Create Digital Music blog. I just watched the video below and read the interview Peter did (link below) and I was very inspired by what I saw of Soundprism. I would definitely like to give it a try once it get’s through Apple’s strange and opaque app store approval process. It’s been submitted already and hopefully will be approved soon. Basically it’s a way to visually organize tones that’s not a keyboard, set up based on the circle of thirds making it intuitive and easy for you to play musical patterns that sound ‘correct’ on the iPad’s touch screen. Check out the demo (4:39):
Adding a MIDI or OSC output to this is an obvious next step which would make it terrifically useful. They say that they’re working on MIDI out but with no promised date. In the meantime it might be fun to record this, sample the audio and mangle or process it. I could definitely see using it to create some interesting melodic and harmonic raw material to work with. As a no-keyboard-skills-having musician I am always excited by ways to compose new original stuff that don’t relying on intense keyboard skills.
In this quote from Peter’s interview with Sebastian Dittman of Audanika, the company who make the software, Dittman says this:
The reason we are able to actually use these concepts now is that we finally have interfaces that can change visually and aren’t static. I see SoundPrism as knowledge poured into a dynamic interface that enables users to just use that knowledge without having to acquire it first.
I love this idea and I think that the touch-screen as a visual, dynamic, fluid interface is actually a lot more revolutionary than we’ve all completely figured out yet. Just the possibilities opened up by something like TouchOSC and being able to create your own controller layouts was incredibly inspiring to me and lead me to get an iPad. I think as we see brilliant people like those at Audanika starting to approach these interfaces we will see some very interesting things start to come out of it. I’m excited.
Some guy on Soundcloud called Shamantis took Justin Bieber and slowed him down %800. And it sounds great! Apparently taking strange pubescent elvis-ian boy pop divas and slowing them down produces glacially beautiful digital sludge. Who needs drugs?
Now as great as this may be it cannot compete, in my mind with the original slowed down codeinated epics of people like DJ Screw, Michael Watts and the whole Houston screwed and chopped movement. Stuff like this:
Learn more about DJ Screw in this short YouTube documentary:
My lady K sent me over this today and it really resonated with me. This is a great pre-emptive strike against NIMBYism ( = Not In My Back Yard ism) where every one needs power lines and the electricity that comes from them (unless you live off the grid I guess) but doesn’t want big ugly powerline towers in their back yard, which I totally get. Turning them into beautiful and mysterious giant skeletons is a really imaginative and fun solution. The figures were designed by Choi + Shine and are positionable so that they can be posed to appear to respond to their environment or situation.
The pylon-figures can be configured to respond to their environment with appropriate gestures. As the carried electrical lines ascend a hill, the pylon-figures change posture, imitating a climbing person. Over long spans, the pylon-figure stretches to gain increased height, crouches for increased strength or strains under the weight of the wires.
There is the whole school of thought that functional objects can be beautiful, things like Calatrava’s bridges:
But what about making things that are functional beautiful? I love the idea of this approach too. Function doesn’t have to be the final determinant of form. People are smart and certainly by issuing the challenge to make boring, ugly utilitarian objects that fill our man-made landscapes look cool we could find ways to build them for as cheaply but make them fun and interesting. I would love to see more of this going on in the world, in both urban and non-urban environments. I think you’d see people’s attitudes and behaviors towards these things shift as well.
Dropbox is cool. I just started using it and I like it. It’s way cooler than a lot of the dumb file hosting services out there as a way to send links to people and it has the added bonus of allowing you to synch up multiple computers, including your phone. I’ve been getting promos from other labels and artists via it and the experience is very pleasant and easy.
You make an account, download their software and create a folder, which appears on your computer and looks like a regular folder. You add stuff to it, and then if you synch up that to other computers you can access the files as if they’re on the same computer or a local network. You get 2GB of storage to start for free and can go up to 8GB if you refer your friends, best of all it’s FREE. Here’s a link to sign up, get a free account and give me some extra gigabytes.
[originally posted at Mudd Up! by DJ /Rupture, that's not me referring to myself in the third person. Matt Shadetek doesn't do that, usually]
On today’s Matt Shadetek! The top-notch producer (& my partner in all tings Dutty) just released his debut solo album, Flowers, and he’ll be treating us to a live DJ set followed by talk about production, new bizness strategies for creative folk, family man music, and more.
Check us live: Monday Aug 16th from 7-8pm EST, 91.1fm WFMU, streaming on internet & iPhone. If asynchronous event participation is yr thing, delve into my show’s deep archives or catch the podcast a week later…
In the meantime, here’s ‘Nightshade’ – I first used this in last year’s mix album, Solar Life Raft, and it resurfaced on Flowers – Matt’s instrumental album built from fresh beat momentum and a playful post-grime melodic sensitivity.
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EDIT: Here’s the link to listen back to the show, with tracklist and many different ways to access it courtesy of the awesome WFMU site. I played some new stuff of my new Build An Island, Look Inward album including the first track in the mix which is called ‘This Is Love’ give me some feedback! Also there’s an interview at the end with me talking with Rupture about music, and stuff.
Very cool new video for Los Rakas directed by Aris Jerome. Nice photography, many pretty young women and a cool portrait of San Francisco in 2010 through Los Rakas eyes. The riddim is a remix of Ricky Blaze’s hit Hold Yuh riddim for Gyptian by Dutty Artz own Uproot Andy. Big big tune. Download the song over at the Dutty Artz blog.
I love this tune. This is an old grime instrumental by Ruff Sqwad sometimes called ‘Havana’ and sometimes ‘XTC Riddim’. I tell people that my album Flowers was strongly influenced by grime and a lot of people give me the ‘huh?’ face. This is the kind of grime I’m talking about. Beautiful plastic melodies and little droplets of bass. Ruff Sqwad, Wiley and sometimes Jammer really drove this sound for me. Not sure where you can find this besides file sharing sites, white label twelve inches and of course, the jukebox of the world, YouTube.
Haters. Got some? Good! To paraphrase the great and funny Katt Williams: If you don’t have haters, you’re doing it wrong. Having haters means that people are noticing you, engaging with your work and having an emotional response. If that response is to get on the internet and call you a racist or a no-talent, well… First let’s look at some tactics for just processing all that acid that someone just spat at you. Timothy Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week which I reviewed below, wrote a great post about this on his blog. In that, there’s a video, check it out:
He talks about Seneca, bad reviews and crazy people leaving you voice mail. He’s clearly very happy with himself and that can grate a little, HOWEVER, he’s dropping MAD SCIENCE. Absorb it.
The next is an interesting post I found at AudibleHype.com. This one is quite relevant to us as musicians who are on the internet a lot. In the post he interviews many underground hip-hop musicians and talks to them about their approach in dealing with criticism and negative feedback. This is especially interesting because if you know the internet hip-hop scene it is an INCREDIBLY toxic, testosterone soaked, hater packed environment. I personally would rather hang out in that water filled trash compactor room from Star Wars. For whatever reason some of the braggadocio that is in the genes of hip-hop has mutated into an incredibly ugly set of behaviors on the internet that you can see on YouTube comments, various forums, basically any web 2.0 space dealing with hip-hop. This may also be that your average hip-hop listener and internet user is young, male and filled with vague feelings that they are being ‘slept-on’.
He starts with some nice and simple bullet points:
1. This is a business, not a talent show. That’s real simple but 90% of rappers will still complain about their skills getting slept on. There are seven billion human beings on this planet and every single one of us is going to die. Getting over yourself is the best business investment you can make…and it’s not easy.
2. Life is not fair because there are no rules. The main test of character you face in life is what you decide to do after you finally realize that. Is that an opportunity or a tragedy? Your call. Nobody is there to referee the game. You will have triumphs, you will have setbacks, but the game itself is never over.
3. If you really thought you were the shit, you wouldn’t need to prove it. Arrogance is actually not confidence, it’s insecurity.
As artists nowadays many of us spend a lot of time updating social sites, building our followerships and driving traffic to them. A few events recently have given me reason to think twice about this practice. The first was when Masalacism, friends of Dutty Artz, had their free blog shut down by Google. The second was this recent article by online marketer Glen Gabe whose stuff I like. In short he was trying to talk about a similar event on Facebook where a guy’s page with 47k fans was shut down due to a trademark dispute. Gabe was trying to post a link to a story talking about it on a blog to Facebook and Facebook blocked him from doing so saying there was a technical error (see image above). Welcome to the world of social media censorship.
Dropbox is cool. I just started using it and I like it. It’s way cooler than a lot of the dumb file hosting services out there as a way to send links to people and it has the added bonus of allowing you to synch up multiple computers, including your phone. I’ve been getting promos from other labels and artists via it and the experience is very pleasant and easy.
