Today’s Flashback Friday is a popular tune from 1995: Folk Implosion’s “Natural One” off of the KIDS soundtrack. Folk Implosion was a side project from Lou Barlow, who previously was a member of the early 90’s indie band Dinosaur Jr, and John Davis from Sebedoh.
The side project band took its name as an homage to another indie group from the same period, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. They performed under several different versions of “Folk Implosion”, sometimes being called “The Lou Barlow Folk Implosion” as well as “The Deluxx Folk Implosion” when fellow Sebedoh band mate Bob Fay joined them for performances.
After touring for a few years, Barlow and Davis finally disbanded the side project. All we have left is this fantastic track. Enjoy!
Oh happy day!
I installed Google’s AdSense banners on this site back in February 2006, but took them down for a while while I was still in the midst of theme-switching. By that time I had accrued less than $20, so I really wasn’t concerned. I eventually added one back around November, and immediately I was making at least few dollars a month.
Around February of this year, the AdSense dollars per month was averaging out to be around $10 which is also coincidentally the same price of my web host. Basically The Daily Haggis was paying for itself, which pleased me to no end.
With the last redesign I added the additional ad banner on the sidebar and now it’s actually pushed the monthly earnings closer to $15-18. I’m actually making a profit off this silly website! (Roars with laughter)
Anyway, now that I’ve caught my breath, I’m excited today because I finally reached the $100 mark which is when Google will actually send you a check or (in my case) direct deposit right into your bank account. After the month of processing and such, today I noticed a $115 increase in my bank account.
Hooray! Now I’m going to go party on Google’s dime!
Of course I couldn’t do a run of 1990’s music videos and not immediately feature the Icelandic Mistress, Björk. Featured here is one of her biggest hits, Human Behavior off of the Debut album, released November 18, 1993. Björk had several other hits after this release as well as receiving a nomination for a Grammy award in 2003, but I’ll always hold the highest regard for this particular song.
I was but a scrawny 15 year old boy staying up late Sunday nights watching MTV’s 120 Minutes when I first saw this video. This was back when MTV was actually about music, not pre-teen staged reality TV. 120 Minutes was my adolescent introduction into the truly great music of my generation. It was there that I not only discovered Björk, but several others like The Pixies, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., Nine Inch Nails, and many more that line my CD case and fill my hard drive to capacity.
I truly miss that show. I believe that when they canceled 120 Minutes, and its sister show Alternative Nation (I love you Kennedy!), is when the MTV that used-to-be finally died. Later MTV2 brought the show back, but it was a shell of its former self and only lasted 2 years. If Matt Pinfield wouldn’t even host it, there was no saving it at all.
I present to you Christian and Jay, the Brothers Dewald, performing Deep Blue Something’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s for their Dad this weekend at his 60th birthday party. I took the video with my new digital camera (Polaroid i531 for $80) which lets me record clips in 320×240, perfect for YouTube hosting.
I also got the pleasure of designing a poster for the party, which you can see after the jump. Enjoy!
Today’s Flashback Friday is Space’s “Female of the Species” off the Spiders album released January 14, 1997. Thanks to MonaLisa for the great suggestion!
I always loved this song when it was released so many years ago. It’s a shame this band didn’t really do very well after the release of this track. They sort of fell into obscurity during the “Second Coming of British Music” that happened in the late 1990’s when bands like Oasis, Blur, The Verve, and others were all over the place.
The band eventually broke up and haven’t recorded since, but at least we have this gem of a track to remember them by.
Decided to clean up a few things and finish up some of the extra pages on the site tonight.
Make sure to check out the new Movie Reviews page, now that I’ve finally gotten the plugin working right.
The Archives page is now fixed and displaying every article broken down by Month and Year.
The Subscribe page is finished and offers a number of ways to subscribe to The Daily Haggis.
The links are back on the sidebar. Don’t quite know why I forgot to put them back in. Enjoy the traffic, neighbors.
The comments box has been redesigned slightly with bigger Gravatar icons, increased font sizes, and a few behind-the-scenes plugins to help me manage spammy comments better.
That’s it. Have a great weekend and enjoy today’s Flashback Friday!
GearLog has an excellent interview with They Might Be Giants‘ John Flansburg about the process they go through while recording an album, what technology they have used in the past as compared to today, and what their thoughts on the current music trends and gadgets.
TMBG is one of the few bands that will always have a place in my playlists. I was lucky enough to finally see them live a few years back in Houston during their tour for The Spine, and they put on one hell of a show. I’ve always been curious to see the steps they take to produce their music, and this article sheds a bit of light on that process.
On Technology and Electronic music:
Well, you know, two things can be happening at the same time in the world, and that doesn’t mean that they are in opposition to each other. We are very interested in technology. We’re very interested in experimenting with music, and one of the most exciting places to experiment with music is electronic music. But I think there’s kind of, even in the world of musical exploration, there can be a lot of orthodox thinking. It’s like your experiment has to be purely experimental–if you’re interested in pursuing electronic music, it should be purely electronic. An I guess we’re just… I’m loath to use the expression, but I think in some sense we are extremely post-modern in that case. We very freely mix up elements and don’t worry about it too much.
On overproducing songs:
The means to do anything in a slick way were so unavailable to us that it never really was an issue. We had very crude tools, for a very long time. We started out as a duo and used a drum machine. And something that I think we only became aware of, after we graduated to bigger studios and started working with live musicians, was how the sort of automatic, mad flava of the drum machines made our recordings exceptional-sounding.
Working with a drum machine, things come out sounding different, and less-familiar. Even when you’re just programming a simple drum pattern that’s familiar to everyone, there was this interval of time when it was the strangest way to do the simplest thing. And when we were working with drum machines, we thought is just sounded very immediate and normal. But listening to those recordings now, I realize that it’s sort of a more awkward sound than we fully understood.
On the evolution of their first electronically delivered music system, Dial-A-Song:
You’ve got to understand, we’ve been around for a long time. Dial-a-Song started as a piece of emerging technology. Dial-a-Song, when it started, was as odd as–maybe even more odd–than anything of the electronic gizmos that are coming out now. In the 70s, the only place where you encountered a tape recorder used with a telephone was with theaters, which had these devices that would give you the time of movies. There weren’t any places where you’d get a recording instead of busy signal. People didn’t have message machines of any kind on their phones. If they left the phone, it would just ring. The phone machine was really a late-70s/early-80s invention. The consumer phone machine was introduced then, and it was not very much after its introduction that we started Dial-a-Song. I think to a lot of people, it was as new-wave an idea as an asymmetrical haircut. It was definitely taking advantage of the emerging technology and using it for kind of a cross-purpose.
On their technology-savvy audience, Podcasting, and MySpace following:
Well, a percentage of them are technologically savvy. We have this podcast, which is extremely successful–it’s probably the most successful thing we’re involved in, simply because it’s free. We’re also managing this MySpace page.
What’s interesting about those things is how many people are doing it for the first time. A big problem we have with the podcast is that people don’t know how to do it. They don’t know the most essential parts of it. We’re introducing people to the applications that they need to do it, or simply to the idea that it’s not something that exists only if you have an iPod. Before you’ve done it, you don’t know anything about it, and that’s exactly where so many of these people are at.
The MySpace thing is interesting because of how many people are involved in that world but are completely outside of technology. They’re there for completely social reasons. It’s a brand new way to be social in the world, and their motivations for being there are entirely traditional. It gets back to what we were talking about before: You can use emerging technology, and it doesn’t have to be an expression of technology. In a way, that’s the best thing you can do with it: Find out how it’s good for you. Nobody knows what this stuff is good for until you actually use it.
Really an excellent interview with one of my very favorite bands. For the whole interview with They Might Be Giants click here for part one, and here for part two.
Trying something new this week: Flashback Friday.
(Hopefully) every Friday I will be posting a music video, tv clip, or film clip from the past twenty years that you may have forgotten about or just to make you a little nostalgic.
Today’s clip is from the band/man White Town, who produced their only hit song “Your Woman” back in 1997. On my way back from Austin last weekend I caught in on the radio and almost swerved off the road because I was so excited to hear it after ten years.
If you’ve ever wondered what the hell this song is about (being that a man is singing about how he can never be “your woman”), go no further than the artist’s FAQ page for a lengthy explanation.
Enjoy!
Conforming to Hollywood’s recent trend of raping our childhood memories, E! Network’s The Soup gives us an exclusive look at the next big blockbuster based off of another classic cartoon from the 1980’s: Rainbow Brite.
I predict already that it will outsell Transformers and Spider-Man 3 COMBINED. The casting decision to play Rainbow Brite herself is genius, and I couldn’t have picked anybody better.
I think i’m gonna have a nightmare about it tonight.
I wanted to do something special for my thirtieth birthday this year, which is no small feat in itself as my luck with planning birthday parties has always gone awry in some fashion.
It was also that much more difficult that I now have two cities that I call home: the current home of San Antonio, and my home town of Houston. It appears that I may also be turning Austin into my “weekend home” as of lately, but that’s a whole other story.
Despite all odds against us–and that includes some of the worst weather in Texas in the past twenty years–fate and good fortune were to shine upon us that day.
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