Poetry: “Out in the Arb”

How fanciful the dappled light
gracing chosen leaves.
Like the selective grace of God’s own sight
which old Calvinists believe
I smile at this analogy
My musings have received
‘til I sense a touch of pity
amongst the rustling trees
“Child, have you no dignity?”
The gnarled elm then asked of me
“Must you shelter yourself in endless thought?
Why can’t you simply be?”
“I am man, am I not?
My job is to encode
I must do, therefore, what I ought
for my mind is my abode”
“Your temples are mired in arrogance
for to God you sing your odes
when God is pure existence
he does not reflect like you
and we are of no consequence
nor with meaning are we imbued.
You think your thinking leads to ease
of lives that one day may be true
and though there’s little you cannot seize
Oh, lonely, twisted human
Just listen to the breeze”

With these words the place grew still
and magic left the air
shaken up, I sat down until
the settling of my hair
“What do you know, ancient fool
‘bout the thoughts behind my glare?
Through the weave of old time’s spool
Have you ever left this spot?
You just sit and stare and stare and drool
still you see things you forgot.
As for me, I’m duty-bound;
If I tried, I still could not
for consciousness is a boisterous sound
and will not be drowned out!”
Now, all by myself I found
the resounding of my shout.
The echo fades, the trees grow quiet
babbling brook then called me out
It was in the shade, so I sat by it
It told me the tale of the world
“If you’ll listen, we could try it”

—Alex Taylor 2 Comments

iPhone Battery FUD Corrections

Quoted from Alex Taylor’s linked item, Steve Jobs Is A Battery Fiend, from a few weeks ago:

The lithium polymer battery on the iPhone does not come out and wears out after 300 to 400 charges

That sounds audacious! Yet, if one were to do actual research and go to Apple’s very own website, one would come across this contradicting bit of info:

Each time you complete a charge cycle, it diminishes battery capacity slightly, but you can put notebook, iPod, and iPhone batteries through many charge cycles before they will only hold 80% of original battery capacity.

So, as opposed to your hypothetical iPhone’s lithiom ion battery being a suitable doorstop replacement after roughly two years of use (a rather bold claim), it turns out that it’ll only retain 80% of its original battery life…

Here’s Steve Johnson’s rebuttal to Nocera’s incredibly flawed piece of pseudo-journalism apropos the iPhone’s unremovable battery (just like how the iPod has an unremovable battery…).

Steve Johnson:

How ludicrous and superficial — not to mention consumer unfriendly — to think that people might like a smartphone that’s signficantly lighter and thinner than the competition!

For an extended correction of the media’s FUD, check out Macworld’s comprehensive article, The truth about iPhone battery lifespan.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 2 Comments

‘Song Stealing’ Avril Deserves A Break

Perez Hilton is reporting that Avril Lavigne (refered to as “song thief”) ripped off Peaches, of Fuck the Pain Away fame, in one of her latest compositions. Every few years some pop star gets accused of being a song thief, which is a ludicris idea in itself. One recent example is the Ice Ice Baby/Under Pressure riff tiff or accusations that Bob Dylan took lyrics from the poet laureate of the Confederacy. When something like this happens, blogs, fans and news organizations almost always get it wrong.

While Avril certainly should admit that she lifts melodies and beats, there is nothing inherently wrong with doing so and there’s precedent for it in most popular music. For example, the melody of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land is taken note for note from The Carter Family’s When The World’s On Fire. The ironic thing is that the Carter Family song was probably also lifted from a preexisting melody, as AP Carter was a “songcatcher” who would take songs from rural areas, songs that were at the time in the public domain, and then secure copyrights for them.

In 1930 the Carters had begun to put African-American sacred songs on record… Maybe the best was When the World’s on Fire, which had been recorded as Rock of Ages by Blind Willie Davis, a black singer-guitarist from McComb, Mississippi. On the Carter record, Maybelle played in Davis’s bottleneck-guitar style. Woody Guthrie would be so taken with that melody that he’d make it the basis for his American anthem to inclusion, This Land is Your Land¹

Then there’s the classic example of the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA which borrows extensively from Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen.

When the song was released in 1963, the original pressing listed Brian Wilson as the sole composer of the song. But according to Brian, as soon as the song became a hit single, ‘Chuck Berry claimed the melody was his, an inadvertent copy of Sweet Little Sixteen.’ According to Brian though, there are ‘plenty of musicologists who’d argue otherwise.’ Then after Chuck Berry accused Brian Wilson of stealing his melody, Murry Wilson ‘gave Berry the copyright’ without ever informing his son Brian. But what Brian Wilson didn’t realise[SIC] for more than twenty-five years was that Murry also ‘gave away [Brian’s] royalties for writing the lyrics, which clearly weren’t Berry’s’ [although Brian Wilson’s lyrics list several geographical locations in a very similar fashion to Chuck Berry’s original lyrics]. Despite there being tensions over the incident at the time, Chuck Berry later claimed that he actually liked the song. According to Carl Wilson, the band ‘ran into Chuck Berry in Copenhagen and he told us he loves Surfin’ USA.²

In almost any genre, be it sampling in hip-hop or Leadbelly’s song library, there are countless examples of musicians borrowing from other musicians, often with extrodianary results. More examples of good things from borrowing…

My Sweet Lord by George Harrison

Fight Test by the Flaming Lips

Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

The Work of Robert Johnson

Right at the outset it must be pointed out that Robert Johnson was no innovator in the true sense of the word. All his music was rooted in the music he heard and learnt from older musicians of his times. If you want to be polite, you say he borrowed from Son House, Charlie Patton, Willie Brown. If you want to be blunt, you will say he stole all the great licks from them. No man is an island, we all draw from influences. But like all great musicians, Robert Johnson borrowed music from others and made it his own.

The Grey Album by Danger Mouse

Even though Avril is less of an artist than a Bob Dylan or a Danger Mouse, she has a right to reclaim musical history in her own compositions. Or, at least, should have that right.

UPDATE: Check out Sampling Law Annex for more examples of the troubled morass of copyright we live in.

1. BlogJazz ↩
2. Wikipedia ↩

—Mark Elliot Cullen 1 Comment