What’s that sound? The sound of sanity.
Apple won a legal victory today when a US appeals court ruled that the American technology group was not to blame if iPod owners damage their hearing by playing their music too loudly.
Now if we can only put an end to these frivolous lawsuits, of lazy people trying to earn a quick buck.
The goodist-scabships who head the EU want to control how loud Europeans can listen to their music:
The European Commission is calling for a suggested maximum volume to be set on MP3 players, to protect users’ hearing.
The commission wants all MP3 players sold in the EU, including iPods, to share the same volume limits.
This follows a report last year warning that up to 10m people in the EU face permanent hearing loss from listening to loud music for prolonged periods.
Conservative MEP Martin Callanan, who sits on the European Parliament’s Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee, thankfully offers a dissenting opinion:
Kids have always listened to their music loud and this is not going to stop them. . . . You have to educate them to the risks but ultimately you have to allow personal responsibility and personal choice.
Unfortunately, goodists don’t believe in personal responsibility or choice . . . they simply believe that they know better than you—even when it comes to raising your children.
Ten million partially deaf Europeans is a small price to pay for freedom of choice.
. . . And freedom of stupidity.
The naysayers are in a sunset phase with a spectacular climax just before they subside from view. This is a race between common sense and unreality.
Hubris, thy name is Al.
I almost miss the good old days when his equally hubristic wife attempted to parent all the children in the USA. (And here’s a wonderful quote from Dee Snyder to Mrs. Gortikov in case you don’t remember: “The full responsibility for defending [our] children falls on the shoulders of my wife and I, because there is no one else capable of making these judgments for us.”)
When will people learn that politicians don’t believe we’re capable of running our own lives . . . that politicians truly believe they know better how to manage our lives in every aspect?
From All About Jazz, Theo Travis on prog and jazz:
I think there’s a lot of connections between progressive rock, rock generally and jazz. In terms of having a music that involves composition, improvisation, a bit of an edge, sometimes long-form writing. Take John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1964). If you said there’s an album in four sections with a bit of a concept and its long with lots of improvisation then some written bits—sounds like prog to me. There are strong connections in terms of approach to music.
I suppose that’s why prog and jazz dominate my music collection. Not a day passes without a little John Coltrane or Henry Cow . . . Art Blakey or Amon Düül II . . . Miles Davis or Miriodor.
A fantastic review/overview by All About Jazz’s John Kelman of two of my favourite Canterbury Scene albums: National Health’s National Health and Of Queues and Cures:
Esoteric’s timely reissues of these two National Health discs are a strong reminder of just how important [keyboardist Dave] Stewart was at a time when there were few, if any rules and it was not just acceptable, but demanded to pursue all avenues to their logical conclusions . . . and, often, beyond. Esoteric’s forthcoming Hatfield and the North reissues will, no doubt, bolster this belief even further, providing further evidence that it was and remains possible to create music of great compositional depth without resorting to excessive self-indulgence or over-consideration.
At a time when national health is on every yanqui’s mind, the only national health that anyone should be paying attention to is of the musical kind from late ’70s England.
Canterbury-born Hugh Hopper—bassist and founding member of the Wilde Flowers which split into two legendary bands: Caravan and Soft Machine—has died at age 64, in Kent, England.
The “Canterbury scene” remains to this day completely unknown to most who grew up with progressive rock’s late ’60s and early ’70s royalty—ELP, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Yes.
A heady amalgam of whimsy, psychedelia, and modern jazz, the Canterbury scene produced many of progressive rock’s finest albums, the McCartney-Lennon school of pop meeting the Davis-Coltrane school of improvisation.
A primer, then, to essential Canterbury recordings:
If you want to hear something new, turn to the past.
With newspapers dying—and the Fourth Estate in general undergoing a crisis of relevance—is it any surprise that illnesses become pandemics overnight . . . that Al Gore’s siren song is preached from news desks with apocalyptic fervour . . . that minor blips become major crises before “crossroads” or “points of no return” are in any danger of ever being reached?
Maintain your sanity by never forgetting the Fourth Estate’s philosophy: “Shriek the loudest to reach the biggest audience!”
Funnily enough, the louder they shriek, the more I shut them out. After all, silence is golden.
Know how the dinosaurs figured out they were extinct? They never did; they just were.