The FCC Strikes Again!

Posted on September 29, 2009

So,  I haven’t’ mentioned it here yet because i’ve been too busy to write much in the way of blog posts recently – get at me on twitter for regular updates if you’re interested in that – but I’ve been doing a weekly show on OzcatRadio.com every monday night.  The show is called ‘To the Roots’ and I play protest music from all genres and all over the world.  For now it’s pretty heavy on hip hop, folk, and celtic music just ‘cuz that’s the bulk of my personal music library but I want to flesh it out more and I especially want to play independent music from folks like me who put out our own stuff for the love of the music instead of just the love of money.

The problem i’m running into is they’re subject to FCC rules that prohibit profanity, which wipes out most of my hip hop collection.  after all it’s hard to say “fuck the police” if you can’t say “fuck.”

The upshot is that I need more music and especially more music without curse words.   So if you know someone i should be playing and where i can download radio-edited versions of their stuff please hit me up; and that goes double if you’re the artist.  I’ve spent enough years in this business to understand how much independent artists need radio play – that’s part of why i started doing the show in the first place – so hit me up with your mp3s and if i like it i’ll play it.

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.

Who am I voting for?

Posted on April 11, 2008

My last post, On Anarchism, prompted a couple questions. I responded to one of them there but wanted to create a new post to address the other because it’s a pretty important topic. Read more