A wise man once said: “Boredom indicates a temporary disconnect with the universe.” And well, since we’re trying to disconnect you with the universe anyway on this page, why not do it the direct way and bore you outright by telling about yet another leaked Internet video?
Warning: Some of the “information” below is made up. Reader discretion is advised, and so is a salt shaker at hand.
So on we go: the list of women—young, old, and in-between—who have tried to imitate Marilyn Monroe is quite endless: be it on stage, in music videos, porn flicks, etc. Why, even sweet little grannies have been known to claim that just by dying their white hair a little and putting on $599.95 dentures, they look like the original upskirt woman. (Salt! Salt!)
Kylie Minogue, after her long struggle with breast cancer, is back in the studios; she’s started recording for her upcoming album, called just “X”.
Now here’s the boring point of our story: two songs she wrote and recorded with a Scottish DJ who goes by the outrageously inane name of Mylo were already on the Net—and one of them was available from Mylo’s MySpace page. Silly of Mylo, but it gels with his name.
A single called 2 hearts, which was supposed to be her comeback song—Minogue’s first single since 2004—was leaked, too. This one had Minogue doing a pole dance. (Use the salt shaker.) The Austrylian Record Industry Associ-eye-tion (no, really; the RIAA does have competition down there), in a feeble attempt at order, removed copies hosted anywhere in Austrylia. Go ahead, mail them at ARIA@some.aussies. are.dumb that there exists such a thing as a BitTor-rent network.
$0: Human; P2P: Divine
When will the Internet community get mature? As in, when will they say “cease and desist!” to activities like the sharing of files (much in the manner of how young boys collect stamps) and actually use their proof-of-adult credit cards?
UK rock band Radiohead decided to find out. It was a fusion of many things: good music (we presume), the desire to get going with Internet culture (they spell the album name three ways on the cover, including “IN RAIN_BOWS”), the noble emotion of not charging $20 or so for a CD, and more. Here’s what they did: they released the album on their site—www.radiohead.com—and you could fill in any amount you wanted in the “pay” box.
About a third of the first million downloaders did the square thing and paid nothing. Some misguided fans paid more than $20. The average? An impressive $8.
(a) What those who paid more than $20 thinking, is our open question to our readers. Another open question:
(b) 2.4 lakh people got the album off BitTorrent on the day of release; why?
Lessons In Life After Linda?
We mentioned last month that Sir Paul McCartney doesn’t use ATMs or e-mail. But that doesn’t seem to stop people from listening to and playing his songs, and even imitating him. Now the mail-free Macca has signed a deal with NowPlayIt.com, a download-able video training service, to hold budding bass players through his tutorials.
The anti-Net Knight has already recorded his first tutorial for his song Ever Present Past, from his recent album Memory Almost Full.
Other artists who have contributed tutorials to the site include Blur, Athlete, Placebo, and KT Tunstall. (Like you’ve heard of them.) The tutorials themselves consists of 30-minute lessons—from the song-writing process to playing drum patterns, everything is explained in £4 videos.
So is this to aid the cause of his divorce compensation? £60 million is a reasonable figure, we must say. But then we have no idea, really, how much the man has in his right royal bank account, and besides, it could well be the simple desire to share sought-after knowledge. Whatever the case, one can now officially say one learnt it from Paul!