Get Ready: LA Weekly’s 1st Annual DETOUR Fest

Prepare yourself for this one — it’s gonna rock! Scroll down for details on ticket presale. The Inaugural DETOUR Fest will take place downtown on three stages, all day, October 7. Here are my personal highlights within the announced guests, and they’re among the best live acts out there today:

Beck
!!!
Queens of the Stone Age
Basement Jaxx
Blackalicious
Of Montreal
Nortec Collective
The Elected
Oh No! Oh My!

DJ sets by: VHS or Beta, Carlos D./Interpol, James Murphy/LCD Soundsystem, Steve Aoki/Kid Millionaire…

more to be announced.

Your tickets are HERE password DETOUR. reg. on sale Saturday. $35 + $9 ticketbastard surcharge still leaves it reasonably under $50. I can’t wait!

OH YEAH – and before I forget… the great Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings hits the Music Box Sept 22… dance partay!

Just Say No… to Downloading

From Boing Boing:

The RIAA has just released a back-to-school propaganda video called “Campus Downloads” that is full of lies, half-truths, omissions, and intimidation aimed at convincing students to stay away from file-sharing.

This is so utterly reminiscent of the Just Say No campaign of the 80’s and the pre-Bush-era policy of educating the youth on the importance of safe sex. I just began taking a grad school course on DRM and copyright in the Internet age, etc, taught by Cory Doctorow, who opened the class by screening the aforementioned video, interspersed with his own p.o.v., the facts and a brief introduction into the saga of DRM and emerging copyright implications and developments in technology and the internet.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal of all places pointed out the utter ridulousness of these so-called “legal” file-sharing systems to which access is purchased by Universities, and of course then factored into students’ tuition fees.

Assuming you haven’t already seen this scare-piece — produced by the RIAA’s own campus outreach propaganda wing, stylishly named CampusDownloading — at freshman orientation, it is provided below in the spirit of helping the blood-money-hungry RIAA (though they did drop their suit against a dead man) in illegally disseminating their BS.

And just in case they come for you, Grant Robertson recently published “A Layperson’s Guide to Filesharing Lawsuits.”

Music Got Soul

The Unger Report was brilliant this morning. Brian Unger, who was an original contributor to the Daily Show (pre-Stewart), absolutely railed on the cable news networks for their “breaking news coverage” of what John Mark Karr (the suspect in the JonBenet Ramsey case) was eating, drinking and wearing on his Thai Airlines flight into LAX yesterday. Listen to it Below.

After making a mix for a friend yesterday, I realized that I have deprived my readers of much great music that has been (or soon will be) released this summer. WOOZradio has had its strongest listenership ever with thanks to some strong music contributions/submissions sent in from around the world. SecretSquirrel has a zip file for you to collect the goods ranging from Kelis to Bob Dylan to Belle and Sebastian to the Roots for your downloading pleasure. Enjoy — and support these artists by seeing them live and buying their music! Check it (90mb)

And now, check out Unger’s madness for the day: Continue reading “Music Got Soul”

Radiodread is Now

I absolutely adored Easy Star All Stars Dub Side of the Moon, so needless to say, its with much anticipation that I finally get to hear Radiodread, Easy Star’s redubinated Kid A.

First listen thru and it is all good fun, what with Israel Vibration, Citizen Cope et al guesting. But this cut steals the show — Toots and the Maytals cutting up Radiohead’s “Let Down” two tone ragamuffin style. Check it.