The Leak Culture

                      Of all aspects of the music blog world, nothing is more obsessive and dedicated than the leak-o-sphere. Usually I’m all for music obsessiveness, but this is probably the logical conclusion of so much lusting after the hippest thing. What happens as a result of this lifestyle is you know about every release before anyone. You gain a few perks as a result of this, for one you become elevated into a position of ultra-coolness. Suddenly people can feel your aurora of musical relevance. Friends begin asking you what you’ve been listening to, but there are downsides as well.

                A result of following this entire buzz is you become excommunicated from people with normal, healthy (mainstream) tastes in music. Lady Gaga, who the fuck is that person? I don’t have time for her; I just got the leak of Black Dice’s next album. Even bigger is the amount of time you spend hounding various bit torrent sites, in an attempt to remain more relevant than other people on the internet you’re probably never going to meet. Think of it as a pissing contest but without the wholesome ingredient of piss and you’re halfway there. 

                I speak from experience. For a while, I ended up constantly chasing the dragon. Yes, the obsession with music gets really bad for this particular approach to music. Usually there needs to be some form of detox for those who fall into this lifestyle. All the coolness of bestowing the gift of new, unreleased music on the unsuspecting internet people becomes addictive. 

You don’t know where to stop, people on the internet tend to be bad at giving others constructive criticism. Usually you’re just told to continue doing it. Unaware of this obsession, you forget shaving; try to do music research wherever you can, during a party using someone else’s computer, on your phone as you commute to work on the train, wherever. Pitchfork is lame; it becomes time to dive into seriously bleeding edge music forums; the kind of music forums where the members have a room dedicated to music in real life. But it doesn’t stop there.  Finally you reach the end of your addiction, where you’re manually splicing together little samples of the actual album from Amazon.com. And an even worse end is what follows: disguising yourself as a lowly janitor, you pretend to be just cleaning out the recording studio at a pivotal time. With a recording device hidden in your thick-framed glasses, you have your recordings saved, cut-up and edited on your computer. 

These scenarios are scary. But you can back away from this before you start hiding underneath desks waiting for the next big thing to drop. You can prioritize. Understand you’re not the only one waiting for this album; there are countless numbers of other people who can do your dirty work. Keep in mind you don’t need to be on the vanguard, being on the edge can become unnecessarily stressful. Care about those artist you think deserve your care. As tempting as it may be to discover a band before they release an album, remember how much time and energy you’re expending for this task. Might it perhaps be more important to interact in real life rather than constantly trying to find new leaks?

So, as someone who has been there, done that, sent leaks via Gmail, via AIM to various friends and comrades, I wish you’d step away from that edge my friend. Think of what are the most important artists to you. Wind down from there. You don’t need to be the guy who gets everything before anyone. There’s no reason why record store guy can’t just up his game onto the internet.

Relax. Breathe. It is going to be ok. Artists will continue releasing stuff. You don’t need to be the first one. Enjoy life. Don’t let the leak-o-sphere suck you in. I mean, hell, do you really want to end up like Julian Assange? You probably don’t. Simply remember Animal Collective’s universal appeal to reason: 

I don't mean to seem like I

Care about material things,

Like a social status,

I just want

Four walls and adobe slabs

For my girls

Rules of Karaoke

If you happen to someone in a major metropolitan area this will be something you’ll no doubt get subjected to at some point. You may be sitting in front of a cheap laptop. You may be doing dishes. You may be doing any number of things when you get that call. The call to arms, the call to bring your voice out into the open, unleashed on an unsuspecting populace will happen. It is only a matter of time. 

Oddly, your ability to sing is the least of your worries. Karaoke is not taken seriously in the United States, rather it is a way for people to bond and see how they act. Think of it how businessmen view golf. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, but your actions as the game is played. Can you keep cool if you make a bad pick? Do your songs reflect a hope to engage others in song, or are they more selfish choices? In case your singing is particularly awful, are you aware of this or woefully ignorant.

Nothing I say or do can fully prepare you for when this day comes. Keep in mind that this is a very interactive sort of activity so you may want to be attuned to some of those surrounding you. Since it is Karaoke, you usually have never been to the place before and you’ll only know half of the people there. My personal experience has varied between being a fun work-related gathering to a way to hook me up with other people’s friends. But whatever your circumstances, you might want to follow these basic guidelines:

1.       The 80s – For whatever reason, 80 pop songs brings out the best in any group. Picking out a band like Wham!, New Order, The Human League, and various 80s pop hits strike a particular chord among people. Mostly this is due to people’s familiarity with the material, but also due to that decade’s insistence on fun and accessibility.

2.       Avoid contemporary pop hits – I can’t stress this one enough. Just because you listen to the radio on your way to work doesn’t mean everybody does. In fact, most people don’t. That’s why the older the pop hit, the better. Older pop hits mean that the audience will know it, from when they didn’t have a choice and had to listen to the radio. 

3.       Bohemian Rhapsody – Everyone knows this. It is like in humanity’s DNA. Your group might consist of a Yak herder from Mongolia, an Amazonian tribesman who’s never had contact with those outside a 5 mile radius, and an Amish farmer, and they’d all be singing along with this. Don’t ask me why this works, I feel like Freddie Mercury might have engaged in some serious genetic testing in the 70s to come up  with something that appeals to literally every living thing on Earth. When I told somebody that people just knew this, he stated “That’s nonsense”. When I saw him on Monday, he said the song kept on finding him on the radio and he was hooked. People just love this song.

4.       Avoid too many Musical references – Let me explain. I like musicals but I do not love them. How I feel about them is generally most people’s opinions. What happens when a musical nerd gets hold of that remote and programs in a bunch of musicals no one knows, oh geez. Prepare yourself for a harsh, difficult night. One of these may be acceptable, but do multiple ones and people will get drunk off their ass to numb themselves.

5.       Use Irony – Irony was made for Karaoke. People don’t pick their favorite songs for Karoke, they pick the corniest ones. I’m not a huge Doobie Brothers fan, but singing their contrived nonsense is great fun. Taking any popular AM hit and singing it works wonders. Plus, another approach is to take a song and have a ridiculous singing style to it. Do these only once, once is all that is needed for the joke to work, otherwise it gets stale.

6.       Don’t do Karaoke in the Philippines – This one is the only real one I have on here. People take it very seriously there, like life and death serious. A New York Times article described how one could get killed for poorly singing a Frank Sinatra song. So yeah, you might want to sing in Malaysia or something.  Getting beaten up for being a crappy singer seems like a poor evening indeed.

7.       Inflection – Use it. Even the most monotone of us has some kind of inflection. By not using it properly, you might embarrass yourself. I have an example: one of my friends can’t sing to save his life. Rather than realize this, he continued to pick out songs that specifically required important inflection on key words. One song came on, the Rolling Stones’ “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction”. As he was singing the “noes” he inflected incorrectly and made it sound like he just had an orgasm. Seeing what happened after he did that, please make sure to use it, at least a little bit.

8.       No Lady Gaga – Maybe this is a personal pet peeve, but whenever I’ve been out with friends and someone picks one of her songs, a few people decide that’s a good time to go to the bathroom. After enough time has passed, you can use her songs maybe. But right now, her music in particular is trashy without the fun needed to make it likable. I know I’ve stated “no contemporary” earlier, but this one is a definite buzz killer. Everybody does know her work, that’s not the problem. It is that it is still all around us and we have to deal with that garbage infecting our eardrums enough. So please, grant us an hour or two of salvation away from it.

9.       Pay your share – Uh, this one is after the singing. Karaoke translates for some people into “Leave early and have the host pay $400”. Thankfully this has never personally happened to me, but I’ve seen it done to others. It ends up putting people in a tough situation, and makes you less likely to be as close of friends in the future. So be kind, please make sure to pay your full amount before you depart into the night.

10.   Do this at night – I have no idea why this would be in the daytime. Apparently some people do that. That just looks like you’re currently unemployed or particularly bored. Wait until 5pm at the earliest. Just use the same cutoff time you have for alcohol. 

Hopefully this will guide you on the path to pure Karaoke enlightenment. I’m not guaranteeing that you’ll find perfection with this, but you can avoid a lot of the pratfalls that worry so many others.

I listen to bands that don’t even exist yet

The expression the wearer has is not necessary, but it helps.

Yes, you know those kids who seem to listen to the coolest bands you’ve never heard of? Well, there’s now a time machine created, allowing those very children to travel forward in time to be at the fringe of all the hippest, most relevant trends. Then they come back from the future ready to lord over all others their extensive knowledge on bands that haven’t been born. Preposterous you might say. I thought so too until I saw the future of music. Let me try to give you this rare ‘sneak peak’ into the future.

Obviously there are a few problems with forward time travel. For one, you can’t exactly go back in time because that would mess up the whole time/space continuum. Also, all those really memorable ‘I was there’ moments would go out the window, and that can’t be allowed to occur. Rather, the preferred way of doing things is to say ‘I was already here’. If back in time this happened, we’d be pretty doomed. The loft holding the Velvet Underground’s first performance wouldn’t be big enough. And after you’ve been there you can only go back from whence you came. Waiting too long will force you to live in the future forever. 

Powered by an assorted amount of rare vinyl records in a Red Hook basement, this Time Machine has a few amazing talents. By seeing into the future, you could theoretically try to alter the world, but generally music snobs do too much music-related research to ever make this a serious issue. Rather, a bigger talent is the ability to purchase relevant merchandise and wear it to impress the other hip lads. 

A few things happen in the future that make sense but might not seem obvious to the casual listener. I’ll explain them as best as I can.

1.       In the future, Carsick Cars from Beijing, China are referred as the creators of the indie rock scene in China.

2.       In the future, there are a million Jaap Blonk cover bands. Apparently in the future the only people who breed in large numbers are noise heads. They live in secluded villages in the Idaho wilderness waiting for the world to end and brew their own Kombucha. Most of them are actually really nice.

3.       The world does end but the soundtrack is mostly Lady Gaga, which is a bit of a let-down. It is meant ‘ironically’ I think. Or rather, I hope.

4.       Nostalgia for the 90s occurs. I was right about this. It is mostly grunge based unfortunately, but there are pockets of shoegaze and Post Rock. The most relevant city in the US becomes Auburn, Alabama which creates a band to rival Slint’s weirdness. They are called “The Okie Dookie Corral” and it consists of former Jesuit priests. 

5.       Detroit becomes the center for the highest level of art. It blooms and flourishes following the end of the world. The end of the world doesn’t really end the world but rather marks a new era. That era is kind of like how we live now but with more art, thin-crust pizza and a steadier supply of blog-gable MP3s. 

6.       After the end of the world, the genre I created “Polka-Noise” really takes off. 

I’ve seen the future with my two eyes and am vaguely indifferent to what happens. Just as an FYI, if you ever decide to follow through and visit the Time Machine’s keeper, make sure to take your shoes off before you enter her house. She’s really particular about it. 

After you’ve traveled forward in time, you get a free t-shirt as well. Use it wisely.