Amanda Palmer

Nobody got hurt when Amanda Palmer made $1 million on her Kickstarter. Personally I think her popularity is a closed loop: Everyone who planned on buying her album has already given to her Kickstarter, and the kind of music she writes is unlikely to hit in a mainstream way. Most of the hate came from people who don't like her music. I don't like her music. But making music that doesn't appeal to me doesn't hurt anyone.

But then she asked fans to perform with her on her tour in exchange for... what exactly? Beer, hi-fives and hugs? The chance to say you performed with Amanda Palmer? Performing for Amanda Palmer for free doesn't prove anything about your talents as a musician. It just proves you'd play with Amanda Palmer for free. With that announcement, she is now hurting people. There are thousands of talented horn and string players in America who are teaching music or working some other day job to pay the bills. Considering the influence musicals and big band have had on her music, many of them are probably fans of Amanda Palmer. They might even be willing to tour with her for a reduced scale wage. But I guarantee right now there's dozens of A- and B-level singer songwriters and their managers waiting to see if this amateur volunteer orchestra will work so they can try it themselves.

Here's what I think happened: Amanda Palmer saw her Kickstarter grow bigger and much quicker than she anticipated, got even more ambitious, and really upped the ante on how she was going to use the money. The album packaging became more elaborate, only the best materials would be used. Then, maybe while choosing what texture of paper to line the limited edition vinyl case, someone showed her how much this would really cost. Careful planning would have kept her from seemingly getting in over her head. $1 million is a lot of money, a seemingly limitless amount. But as she said in her blog post, the breakdown of cost per unit adds up quickly. I think she was intoxicated by the generosity of her fans, and perhaps thought that if they think she's special enough to warrant $1 million, they would give her their talents as musicians so she wouldn't have to skimp on  her (incredibly elaborate) product. But be clear: She is asking for volunteers because she ran out of money. She had more than a million dollars and she ran out. 

Bon Iver's backing band is a small army of incredibly talented musicians (many of whom are popular in their own right) and he's been touring across the plant for the better part of a year. He's getting support from Jagjaguwar and potentially 4AD, neither of whom are known for blockbuster album sales. He's most likely losing a fortune on it, but at least he respects musicians enough to develop a band and pay them (I can only hope) a decent wage .

It sounds crass to say, but this comes down to money and how it's used. Her public persona does nothing to dispel the notion that she's a real-life Manic Pixie Dream Girl, lost in her own imagination and probably annoyed when her managers attempt to discuss budgeting with her. It's not fun to make budgets and plan how to spend your money wisely, but $1 million is a lot of money, and careful planning could have led to her hiring a really great group of string and horn players to accompany her on tour, instead of potentially setting a bad precedent for working musicians. 

Predictions on the next batch of 33 1/3 books

Andrew WK: I Get Wet, by Phillip Crandall
I can see this covering the album's media push, AWK's irony-free funtime persona, the subsequent flop and his ability to remain in the public eye.

Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Vol II, by Marc Weidenbaum
This is a classic but it was made by 1 guy in his bedroom and he rarely gives interviews and absolutely refuses to discuss his working methods. Perhaps it investigates how a double album of untitled ambient techno pieces has remained relevant after almost 20 years. Anything would be better than a first person narrative of the author's relationship to the album. 
Edit: Luckily, I discovered that one of my favorite electronic music bloggers, Marc Weidenbaum, is writing this one. You can read his introductory chapter here. I like his approach & I'm looking forward to reading this.

Beach Boys: Smile, by Luis Sanchez
This one's pretty obvious, but I can't help but feel like it'll just be a condensed version of any of the hundreds of Beach Boys biographies already available. 

Bjork: Biophilia, by Nicola Dibben
This came out in 2011, c'mon now. 

Bobbie Gentry: Ode to Billie Joe, by Tara Murtha
There's always an outlier in the usual indie-centric (or at least indie-precursor) albums the series covers (see Facing Future), but the mystery surrounding the title track, and it's author's subsequent success and retirement, could make for an interesting book. 

Danger Mouse: The Grey Album, by Charles Fairchild
This one will probably need to be subtitled titled Birth of the Mash-Up, even though it's really not.

Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, by Mike Foley
Like Slint, the lack of many Dead Kennedys biographies will probably result in this being a mini-overview of the band, Alternative Tentacles, and California punk in general.

Devo: Freedom of Choice, by Evie Nagy
There's a lot to mine in a song-by-song breakdown of this album, so hopefully it's just not a glorified biography.

Gang of Four: Entertainment! by Kevin Dettmar
This is the post-punk album that more people know of than have actually heard, but focusing on the band's politics and how it influenced their music (and vice versa) could make for an interesting look into working class 80s Britain. 

Hole: Live Through This, by Anwyn Crawford
I can't see this being anything other than voyeuristic considering the mess that is Courtney Love, but the mainstream explosion of female-fronted punk bands (and Hole's early noise releases) is fertile ground. 

J Dilla: Donuts, by Jordan Ferguson 
I kind of wish Weingarten had written this after his pretty much perfect volume on ...It takes a Nation.

Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, by Kirk Walker Graves
While the album is an undeniable classic, it's hard to put Kanye into perspective without the benefit of hindsight. 

Michael Jackson: Dangerous, by Susan Fast
Or, 1991: The Year Pop was Broken. Topics it could touch on: The rumor that kids returned Dangerous to buy Nevermind, Jackson's problems with fame, and the Emperor's New Clothes style of a record company just saying that an album is good and assuming everyone is going to buy it. 

Oasis: Definitely Maybe, by Alex Niven
The mainstreaming of Brit pop (aka it finally hit in the states), the band embracing rock n roll excess in the face of grunge's misery, the Blur thing. 

Richard Hell and the Voidoids: Blank Generation, by Pete Astor 
Expect cameos by most of NY punk's Class of 77.

Serge Gainsbourg: Histoire de Melody Nelson, by Darran Anderson
Hopefully it won't just focus on Gainsbourg's lecherous persona, but that would be better than a first person account of the author's sex life in relation to the album.

Sigur Ros: ( ), by Ethan Hayden
Jeez is this album already a decade old? A post rock album sung in a made up language by a bunch of polite Icelanders sounds like the recipe for a book where the author tells you about how the album changed his life (aka Boring)

They Might Be Giants: Flood, by Alex Reed and Philip Sandifer
FINALLY.

Prometheus review

1.Why would a trillion dollar space mission not have all of the crew get to know each other before they leave for an alien world (and possibly never come back)? I guess if the orbit of the Earth was such that they had to leave ASAP in order to not waste fuel, it kind of makes sense, but with a state of the art spaceship, what's a couple light years?

2. David can watch the dreams of the sleeping crew (and even communicate with a sleeping Weylan), but nothing really comes of it. The video of the girl playing violin (presumably Shaw) kept popping up: David tries to send the video of the girl in a message (to Earth?) and gets no response. After the crew is awakened he tries again, with Shaw and Holloway present, so it wasn't a sneaky move on David's part. At the end, when Shaw enters the damaged lifeboat, the same video is playing on the giant screen in the main room.

3. How the hell did Fifeld and Millburn get lost anyways? Couldn't they have asked the ship to triangulate their position with the pups so at least they were close to the exit when the storm passed? Wouldn't any place be better than the weird room where a bunch of Engineers died?

4. Janek has a pretty laid back attitude considering two of his crew is lost in a giant dome where something violent happened. Any space mission would have something similar to a black box, so even though Janek was conveniently banging Vickers, he should have been interested on what happened while the bridge was empty. Also, why was the bridge empty? 

5. Nobody cares that Shaw was impregnated with an alien and removed it herself. She manages to get into the lifeboat and use the state of the art surgical robot with nobody noticing, and when she stumbles upon Weylan, nobody questions her appearance or the fact that she's in her underwear and covered in blood. And what was with her diaper-style panties and bra? Did she forget to pack her own undies?

6. Janek, Ravel and Chance decided to sacrifice everyone in order to destroy the Engineer's ship, as if none of the other crew matter. Speaking of the rest of the crew, with all those extras there's way more than 18 people on the ship (including Weylan).

7. There are earthworms in the alien temple, probably for no other reason than Ridley Scott thought that looked cool.

8. At no point in the movie do any of the characters express surprise that a) they discovered alien life and b) there is a real android in the crew. The former is simply bizarre, but the latter has precedent in Alien. When the crew discovers Ash is an android, they say that it's not normal WY protocol to put an android on the ship.

9. When Ash and Bishop's heads were removed, they died soon after. When David's head is removed, he can not only survive but pilot a ship.

10. There was literally no reason for the Vicker's character to exist in the movie. The only thing of consequence she did was kill Holloway with the flamethrower, which could have been done by any of the other anonymous crew members.

11. There were at least 3 other domes behind the one they entered, each with a C-ship under it. How do David and Shaw know the one they took at the end doesn't also have a giant cargo load of alien goo? How is Shaw going to survive on the ship with a cryo tube made for a creature 3x bigger than her, with no food or water?