Ramsayings

Last Thursday was a banner night for this beer lover. I met my friend Adam and we strolled on over to Memphis Taproom to enjoy a great Dogfish Head stunt tapping for their 75 Minute IPA. We got there a little early thinking we might have to twiddle our thumbs for a minute before they tapped the cask, but no, we were just in time to knock down a few pints of this great IPA.The 75 Minute IPA blends their trademark 60 and 90 Minute IPAs, resulting in a remarkably smooth IPA that will still knock you flat if you’re not careful.

Adam and I ended up having a wonderful conversation with my friend Derrick, another Memphis Tap regular and amateur beer aficionado like myself. We discussed the merits of Dogfish Head’s approach to brewing and how great it is to be sandwiched between so many great breweries, all of which are doing different, distinctive things. Dogfish Head really does a great job of brewing signature IPAs, complemented nicely by great seasonals. I think their spring and summer beers, both of which feature great fruit flavors, are among the most refreshing I drink, without being sickeningly sweet.

As an aside, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention Jay Hinman’s great beer blog, Hedonist Beer Jive. Some of you may recognize Jay from his legendary music blog, Agony Shorthand. Now, instead of debating issues of race with Black to Comm, he’s telling you why he won’t pony up for expensive bombers of Russian River Consecration (and I don’t blame him!) Jay’s always been a great read, and his beer writing is just as fun and engaging as his music writing ever was.

The answer’s easy: it doesn’t work for music. Unless you were living under a rock on Friday, you probably read Techcrunch’s post, “The Sorry State of Music Startups.” Without going into great detail, Arrington’s completely right, and for once, he doesn’t resort to the whole “music just wants to be free” argument so common among Web 2.0 types. Instead, he writes that “free streaming music” is about as sensible as trying to douse a burning pile of money with a gallon of gasoline.

With all due respect to Bruce Houghton at Hypebot and Andrew Dubber at New Music Strategies, the dream is over. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. (more…)

Blender’s print edition is finished. You probably already know this if you spent any time on the Internet yesterday, but it’s just another instance where a music mag completely changes its appearance to remain “relevant” (whatever that means now) and ends up closing shop anyway. As Matos wrote on his blog, “It’s hot, it’s sexy, it’s dead,” which sounds like the sort of thing one might say about the premature death of a rock star.

Part of my music crusade has been to say how impactful events like this are for the music industry. There’s a great comment in the Idolator post on Blender’s closing from the friend of an anonymous flack who doesn’t know which outlets will be left to pitch by year’s end. It’s that bad. That outlook, coupled with the industry’s retreat from promotion in the name of revenue, viz. videos holed up on Youtube with no embedding privileges and the like, music will soon be harder to find than bin Laden!

Heck, even the thing people seem to enjoy most about music online is changing. Last.fm announced this week that they’ll be changing their streaming policies in many parts of the world, setting off a tidal wave of outrage. Powerful music search engine Seeqpod will begin charging developers for its data, too. Ominous noises are coming out of the Imeem camp, too, no matter what they’re telling Michael Arrington at Techcrunch.

Those of us who foresaw the end of Music 2.0 can only shake our heads. Chris Anderson’s “freemium” dream is over. The blue sky mines are collapsing around our ears.

What’s ahead? No one knows. I’m talking to my friend Jason Herskowitz almost daily about the future of music on the web, especially around music discovery. He’s been working on some cool stuff lately, most recently Playdar, an idea I urge you to check out. Nevertheless, he fears that Darknet will soon replace anything remotely legitimate for content sharing online. It’s a frightening proposition for rights holders who have any interest in protecting their properties in this brave new world, and equally scary for those of us who care about music as part of our cultural fabric.

I finally finished reading The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (TKATVGPS) Andy Miller’s contribution to the 33 1/3 books series. It’s not a long book, but it took a minute for me to actually get into it, even though the Kinks are probably my favorite band of all time, and this album is of particular importance to me. Why? Well, like many of the books in the series, it’s not exactly the smoothest read.

The book’s structure is strange. It first tells the story of how the album is made and the various stumbling blocks that the Kinks — or rather Ray Davies — ran into along the way. That’s the sort of story I’m interested in reading and it was an engaging one. However, once that story ends, it begins again, this time as a painstaking account of each song that was written and recorded during this period, along with some speculation about why it had or hadn’t appeared on the final version of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. It doesn’t sound as bad when I write it here, but trust me, reading the same story told two different ways smacked of a witness perjuring himself on the stand.

Such is the reputation of the 33 1/3 books series. Every author approaches his or her book differently, and even the most adventuresome  music fans approach the series with trepidation. These are beloved albums after all.

Now comes word that the series itself has hit a snag due to the current state of the economy. I’m not sure anyone would be surprised considering how both the music and publishing industries have fared lately. I just hope that Geeta Dayal’s Another Green World book sees the light of day. (Of course I’m rooting for Christopher Weingarten‘s It Takes a Nation of Millions book, too, but that’s in the more distant future.) As author Douglas Wolk once (infamously) wrote of 33 1/3, “the series that more people want to write than to read!” I guess that makes the 33 1/3 series the Velvet Underground and Nico of microniche music books!

Last year I attended my first South by Southwest Music Festival. It was a big deal! It was on the company dime! I lead a team of four people on a musical journey that took us from Rachael Ray to 2 Live Crew. We met a ton of interesting artists and talked to as many as we could on camera for comcast.net. I was really proud of what we accomplished in our first time out. Before we left for Austin, I fully expected that SXSW would be an annual event on my editorial calendar.

What a difference a year makes. (more…)