AFTER ONE LISTEN THE QUESTIONS THAT COME TO MIND INCLUDE:
1.)Does the guy from The Black Eyed Peas save his half
decent compositions for his own band?
2.)The last rapper his size was Biggie Smalls and
we know what happened to him
3.)Can’t a zillionaire like Dot Com afford more than
a crappy photo-shopped video?
4.)With all those billions of songs uploaded on-to
Megaupload surely Herr Dot Com could have rifled through some files and plagiarised
something better than this dribble?
5.)My money is on John Banks to don a lead-guitar
and do a better retort. The good oil has it it’ll be a cover of ‘Leaving on a
Jet-Plane’ with a B-Side ‘I Fought the Law and the Law Won’
6.)Is it physically possible for someone to sit
through the whole thing?
I must be getting old. I’m finding it bloody hard to get excited
by N.Z Music Month. Previously I had looked forward to the event with an
element of childhood-like excitement. Maybe it’s the line-up, post-earthquake
malaise? Either-way I can’t get into N.Z Music Month 2012. Perhaps it’s a grand
exercise that worked at one point and is now working its way to inevitable extinction?
To use a Kiwi colloquialism “it’s done its dash”? Is it too long? A month is 8 per cent of a year, at least when I was at
school. Rounded-up that’s close to 10 percent, inclusive of pre-publicity. Over-kill? Could not the worthy
promotion of home-grown music be condensed into say two weeks? Two full on
weeks which I’m sure even the most sober and Philistine Radio Stations could
buy into. Two weeks of quality. Two weeks that exhibited N.Z Music in all its derivatives.
My bet is punters would still attend gigs in the same numbers if it was
scheduled over two weeks as against four. As a libertarian I can’t buy-into
quotas = you must play more N.Z Music. The market must decide what is played
and not some grey-shoed bureaucrat in Wellington. Two weeks or four won’t mean
radio-stations or the media will promote N.Z Music any more than currently –
that’s to say mediocre levels. So may be the powers that be behind N.Z Music
Month should look at re-packaging the event. Put their emphasis behind even ‘exporting’
acts, fund a tour or two to Australia over this period? Get N.Z Music into
schools with bands playing lunch-time concerts. Run competitions for ‘New
Zealands Best Two Piece.’ N.Z Best Home-Made Song Video. The opportunities to
promote local music are endless. They don’t necessarily need to be confined to
nominated ‘months’. Irrespective of the vehicle to promote local music the best
way to support these artists still remains buying their music and attending their
gigs. Just watching a local bands You Tube Video gives artists a boast.
Tune into the best of N.Z Alternative Music on ‘Ground Zero’
Internet Radio.
I’m gutted. I’ve just learnt that Volume Mag will soon be no
longer. Issue number 33 will be the last. This was a worthy addition to the
local musical scene, full of interesting stuff, reviews, eclectic shit. Of the
32 issues that came out I guess I got to scan say 20 and there wasn’t one I could
point to and say I wasn’t edified in some way. Clearly it can’t have been
making $’s for its masters, media moguls APN Group. ‘No money in it’ is probably
overall the theme-song for N.Z Music as a whole. In its seven month existence head
honco Sam Wicks and his team of writers did a splendid job and deserve our accolades.
Let’s hope someone takes this ball and runs with it.
Remind me again; are sedimentary sports of golf and bowls at The Olympics these-days? It pays to ask these things given the song chosen as N.Z’s Olympic theme-song (above) sounds like it was penned by someone living in their seventh decade and a closet fan of Harry Connick Jnr?
Let’s cut to the chase here – who the fuck can take a lyrics like "Through sweat blood and tears, you followed your dreams" seriously?
Say one of our athletes looking for motivation?
Kiwi fans looking for a hum-along pick me up?
On the motivation scale this croon ‘Stand Tall’ fails to register, is as inspirational as a headmaster telling the assembly to “pick-up your rubbish at lunchtime.”
Why not do a re-make of ‘Climb Every Mountain’ and be done with?
No I’ll go one better and suggest a re-make of Craig Scott’s Commonwealth games tune from 1974.
The song ‘Stand Tall’ was apparently penned by Sam RB who frequents Queen Street along with humanities flotsam and jetsam.
Unbeknown to you and me the streets of N.Z are a hotbed of busking talent and not just the haunt for some drunk doing a rendition of ‘Ten Guitars’ on ukulele.
Wellington’s Blanketman’s posthumous rap anthem “Gotta Dollar Ya C==t”?” must surely be in the pipeline?
But back to ‘Stand Tall’ and who the fuck decided this was a worthy song to fire-up the troops at the front and the masses at home supping coffee to stay awake in front of their telly’s?
You don’t need to be a T.V detective to follow the blood-trail on this one.
Scraping the surface like a sandfly it appears Sam’s benefactor, the man behind his meteoric rise to fame and a free trip to London on the tax-payer, was one Eddie Rayner.
You’ll remember him as the keyboard player from Split Enz.
That’s the same band the ‘Play it Strange’ chief executive Mike Chunn, the people who organised this song quest, played bass for.
Chunn is quoted as saying “Sam RB was a major talent who hadachieved against the odds.”
With all these odds and strange’s getting bandied around here you’d be forgiven for being confused how ‘Stand Tall’ could have possibly been the best offering from the 300 entries received?
Sadly looking at The Finalists like ‘Rise Up Your Flag’ (video below) which Viagra have picked-up on – the answer appears to be resounding yes!
I remember distinctly when I heard Frank Zappa had died. I had just comeback from a long-weekend on the piss down south (1993) and was to say the least very jaded. A week earlier I had imported a couple of his more obscure titles that were next to impossible to get locally and they were both playing in the car. I also remember the first Zappa album I got ‘Apostrophe’. It came from a long-since defunct record shop in what was then the Whitcombe and Tombs Arcade (Christchurch) Buying an autographed photo from a dealer in London in 1985. Zappa was put simply a musical genius, more-ever he was an astute and insightful human, a libertarian battler. The first clip is dead on the money why modern music is so ‘vanilla’ bland, how the rot set-in. Rather spookily it came out in 1989 (as best I can google)
