Music and Spirituality

Posted on April 16, 2009

I got this email in my inbox today:

Your Name	Justin St. Vincent
Your email address	——-@xtrememusic.org
Subject:	Emcee Lynx: Music/Spirituality Interview
Message:	Dear Emcee Lynx, I hope all is well – my name is Justin St. Vincent, Editor of Xtreme Music, and a new and exciting series exploring “The Spiritual Significance of Music”. I’d love the opportunity for you to e-mail your response, around 200+ words, to the question: “What do you believe is the spiritual significance of music?” For more information and a preview of this online portfolio, please feel free to explore Xtreme Music: where music meets spirituality: www.xtrememusic.org Blessings and Best Regards, Justin St. Vincent Xtreme Music ———@xtrememusic.org

So I went and took a look at his website.  Apparently he’s going through and systematically contacting as wide a range of musicians as he can in one genre at a time, asking them all the same question, and then posting al their responses.  I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that there’s a sort of general Christian slant to his project, at least Christian Musicians were one of the first groups he did an interview set on, but I figured it doesn’t take long to write a short article like what he asked for and – worst case scenario – I get a post for this blog out of it, so I might as well put something together.

Here’s what i came up with:

Read more

Battle of the Bands

Posted on April 3, 2009

Now anyone who’s been in the music business (and I’m sorry to say it is a business) for any length of time knows that’s it’s full to overflowing with slimy unscrupulous parasites who make their money by inserting themselves between musicians and their fans in order to take a chunk of the money, but I think I may have just discovered a new low.  There’s a new company that’s been advertising on Craigslist in San Francisco for an upcoming “Battle of the Bands” and bragging that they’re setting them up all over the country.  The battles (or rather series of battles) are basically marathon shows.   Starting at 5:30 in the afternoon 9 bands get to play half an hour each and the band that gets the loudest applause advances to a second round; the winner of which gets $500, a gig all to themselves, and the possibility of getting some free studio time or even a tour to all the cities where they’re hosting battles.  Sounds kind of cool, huh? Yeah, that’s what I thought too.  So I called them and asked what it would take for Beltaine’s Fire to get in.

And here’s the catch.

Each band gets 100 tickets for the events and is expected to sell as many as they can at $10 each, the more you sell the better your time slot in the battle.  And since the winner is determined by audience applause, the bands that sell the least will be playing to an empty house at 5:30 in the afternoon and lose.  That makes sense, they’ve got to fill the venue somehow after all.  Thing is, the promoters keep ALL the money.  The bands, who have to go out and convince their fans, friends, and family to collectively drop up to $1000 in tickets, get NOTHING.  Nada.  Not a thing.  So at the end of the night if half the tickets get sold the promoter walks away with $4,500 free and clear – and up to double that if the bands sell more tickets – and the “winning” band gets no cash, not even gas money, and their prize is the chance to do the same thing again for the elimination round, after which – if they win a second time – they get $500.

If the promoter runs four preliminary battles at $4,500-$9,000 each that’s $18,000-$36,000.  Add to that the final battle where only the best-selling bands will play (we’ll estimate maybe $6000-$9,000 for that since any bands that were unable to sell tickets have been eliminated) and the promoter walks away with $24,000-$45,000 in cash. From that they pay the best-selling winning band a measly $500 “prize” and the other 35 bands get nothing and are expected to be grateful for the “exposure.”

The worst part of all this is there are thousands of musicians out there who are desperate or naive enough to believe this is a good way to make a name for themselves and will sign up for this type of thing and make the promoter rich. (most of them won’t have read the fine print or figured out that they don’t get to keep any of the money until the night of, but that’s another story and an object lesson in and of itself).

And that type of shit, dear friends, is why the music industry is run by evil bastards.  Because too many musicians lack the common sense and self-reliance to work together to build a scene instead of relying on opportunistic creeps who are in it for the money.

Fiddlin’

Posted on March 30, 2009

I love the fiddle, always have,  and I’ve wanted a fiddler in Beltaine’s Fire from day 1.  unfortunately, we’ve never been able to find a good one that has a solid attitude and can deal with the fact that we don’t get paid reliably because we’re a local independent band.  so i’ve decided to learn myself.   which i guess means my slow but steady transformation into a bonified folk musician is destined to continue.  i don’t know if the world is ready for a rapping fiddler or a fiddling rapper, but that’s never really stopped me before.

anyway.

so far it’s a lot of fun and a *lot* of work.  kind of expensive too, so far I’m in about $300 for the violin itself, new strings, a new bow, and a few other odds and ends,  plus $50 a week for lessons.

my teacher (Michael Mullen – one of my favorite celtic fiddlers on the west coast and someone you may recognize from his guest appearances on my band’s first album) assures me it’ll be at least 5 years, probably closer to 10, of intense study before I should even think about bringing my instrument on stage.  which kind of defeats the reason I wanted to pick it up in the first place.  except that I’m just stubborn enough to think I can probably do it sooner if I’m as obsessive compulsive about this as I am about most other things in my life. we’ll see.  I’ve got a bad history of getting really excited about instruments, playing for a while, then getting bored and moving on to something else, but I think that’s partly because I’ve been so broke for so long I haven’t been able to afford lessons and there’s only so far you can get being self-taught.  now though I’ve got at least a little bit of financial security and can afford lessons so no excuses – I’m going to need to put some serious work in.

anyway, that’s all my news.  hope ya’ll are enjoying the sunshine.  it’s a beautiful day here in oakland and I’m gonna go spend some time outside before it gets dark.

I hate the Radio

Posted on March 24, 2009

So I made a habit a while back of setting my alarm clock to the most vile corporate drivel i could find in order to force myself to get out of bed and turn it off.  Previously i’d had it set to classical music (because there are no radio stations that play independent, conscious hip hop music or folk or trip hip or any interesting electronica or pretty much anything else I’m actually interested in listening too) but as it turned out classical was just too damn peaceful and I kept sleeping right through my alarm.

At first the strategy worked pretty well but this morning it backfired on me, big-time, because i woke up to a Jonas Brothers song.  Something about time travel and how the singer went to the year three thousand and “your great great great granddaughter, is doing fine.”  I swear they must have repeated that same banal chorus 16-20 times, it was practically the entire song.  And now it’s stuck in my head.  Fuck.  double fuck. It’s times like this I can see the attraction of religion because if i believed in a god at least I could derive some small sadistic pleasure by imagining them slowly burning in hell.

It’s not up there with the wholesale rape of the planet and the wanton destruction of everything beautiful, but for the morning at least crappy plastic disneypop is ranking pretty high up there on my list of reasons to hate capitalism and the ruling corporateocracy.

Bail us out

Posted on December 12, 2008

my response to the $700 bank bailout and the pending $35 billion (yes, 35, they raised it by $10 billion over the last week) bailout for the car companies. the finished version is gonna be on our next album but i didn’t want to wait a year to put it out for ya’ll so here it is. hella raw, recorded in 1 take, live in my living room.

If you’re as pissed as I am that banks that finance the rape of our planet and carmakers that produce gas-guzzling tanks that pollute our air and have outsourced most of their best paying jobs to other countries get billions in corporate welfare while the rest of us go broke, maybe it’s time we organize and DO SOMETHING about it.

www.workersolidarity.org
www.protest.net
www.iww.org

and, of course, www.beltainesfire.com for more music.