Korn has a new video, and while I haven’t listened to Korn since back in the ‘Follow the Leader’ days (trendy, I know, but the video from ‘Freak on a Leash’ remains one of the greatest music videos of all time, to my mind), this video is fucking great.
Sorry. Fuckin’ great. I know the letter G isn’t all that popular these days. Except when it’s made of gold and hung around for neck for the purposes of bling. Or blin’.
Back to the subject, the song is of questionable quality (that much must be made clear) and hell, let’s just say the song sucks and get it out of the way… but the video is brilliant. The continuing backlash against the RIAA and the rest of the industry, now coming from the side that matters (sorry, but as a consumer you don’t matter. You’re old enough to know that now), fills me with hope for the future. For the benefit of people without DSL, or those who just don’t want to hear the words “y’all want a single say fuck that. Fuck that, fuck that” over and over and over again, I shall transcribe:
One corporation owns the 5 major video channels in the US.
Is that OK?
Last year the big 5 record labels together sold about $25 billion dollars of music.
90% of releases on major labels do not make a profit.
Britney Spears’ last video cost $1,000,000.
This Korn video cost $150,000.
You have seen $48,000 worth of video.
Will any music channel play this video?
The music “industry” releases 100 singles per week.
Only 4 songs are added to the average radio “playlist” each week.
Hit songs on Top 40 are often repeated over 100 times a week.
Is that all you want to hear?
Why is a song worth .99¢
Do you download songs?
Steal this video.
This is a single.
Two radio conglomerates control 42% of listeners.
The record company wanted to change this video. We didn’t.
90% of all singles get to “the hook” within 20 seconds.
98% of all #1 singles are less than 3 30 seconds long.
Does this seem like a formula to you?
With all this said…
We love making music.
Is this the music “business”?
Is that OK?
Thank you for your 3 minutes of time
Love, Korn.
[This surprisingly eloquent rant
brought to you by Cory, who found it on MeFi. Great how everybody’s tightened up on their attribution lately, isn’t it?]
[Not that Cory or anybody else over at BoingBoing has ever been lax with their attribution… but you know what I mean]
Posted by Chris Clark on March 14, 2004 at 1:42 AM
There seems to be quite a market for iPod peripherals these days. Not content with crafting rubber sleeves and cassette adaptors, companies like Griffin and Belkin are building voice recorders, FM transmitters, media readers, and backup batteries to complement and extend Apple’s miniature beatbox. The product is the platform, as they say, and things can only get more complex from here.
In the proud tradition of armchair tech analysts proffering advice to those who have not solicited it, I present the Quietune. Anybody willing to or capable of bringing this little baby to life has my blessing; Belkin, Griffin, Apple, I don’t care. Go nuts. It’ll be no mean feat, I’ll guarantee you that; and a viability study might prove it a fruitless and expensive venture, but this is my weblog and I’ll invent whatever computer peripherals I please. After all, USB–powered mug warmers are all the rage these days, aren’t they?
Moving on…
The Quietune might look like the bastard child of Griffin’s iTrip and iTalk add–ons, sure, and given the origin of my clearly–photoshopped image that’s understandable, but the functionality of this unlikely device is where the fun is at: it shuts everybody up.
All this time we were looking for a way to mute the world’s unruly hordes of megaphone–heads, and all we really needed was a good pair of ear–plugs. Put simply — the Quietune is active noise reduction for your iPod. Walking through a party, a crowded room, a concert hall, a construction site; nothing disturbs you and your music. Your personal space is preserved completely; and sure, it’s antisocial, but most fun things are. Even when you aren’t listening to your music, the Quietune is your own portable silence generator… it’s like a library in your pocket, except without the modestly hot librarian shushing everybody.
Put more technically — the microphone on the Quietune is constantly monitoring environmental noise, but instead of capturing it or amplifying it (as per a microphone’s normal modus operandi), this microphone feeds the noise through an internal processor, inverting the wave and mixing it with the signal headed for your headphones. When the inverted–wave ambience meets the regular ambient noise your ears pick up, the waves cancel each other out; the end result — silence. It’s physics, baby. Clean and clear.
There are a few caveats, of course, like the whole “when the iPod is in your pocket the Quietune’s fancy little microphone won’t be picking up any ambient noise, so it’ll be inverting the rather unique sounds of inside–your–ass” thing and the “the components required for a device like this are horribly expensive, the performance won’t be as great as you’re hoping” issue… but next time you walk through a crowd and have to turn your music up to drown out the noise, you’ll remember this device. With the Quietune, the crowd’s noise isn’t a problem… it just doesn’t exist.
Posted by Chris Clark on March 14, 2004 at 11:28 AM
