Tinariwen - Live At Womad 2004

Bonus documentary after the jump...

♪♫ Tinariwen - Tenere Taqhim Tossam

Features TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone

Jerry Leiber RIP

Jerry Leiber, one of the most important songwriters in the history of rock & roll – whose 60-year partnership with Mike Stoller produced "Stand By Me," "Hound Dog," "Jailhouse Rock," "Young Blood," "On Broadway,"  "Yakety-Yak" and countless other classics – has died of cardiopulmonary failure. He was 78.
"When Jerry and I started to write, we were writing to amuse ourselves," Stoller told Rolling Stone in 1990. "It was done out of a love of doing it. We got very lucky in the sense that at some point what we wrote also amused a lot of other people."
Leiber met Stoller in Los Angeles in 1950 when he was still a senior in high school. They had a mutual love of R&B, blues and pop, and began writing music together almost instantly, with Stoller mostly handling the music and Leiber mostly handling the lyrics. "Jerry was an idea machine," Stoller says in their 2009 memoir Hound Dog. "For every situation, Jerry had 20 ideas. As would-be songwriters, our interest was in black music and black music only. We wanted to write songs for black voices. When Jerry sang, he sounded black, so that gave us an advantage . . . His verbal vocabulary was all over the place – black, Jewish, theatrical, comical. He would paint pictures with words."
In the early days, they pulled 12-hour days writing on an upright piano in Stoller's house. "We're a unit," Leiber told Rolling Stone in 1990. "The instincts are very closely aligned. I could write, 'Take out the papers and the trash,' and he'll come up with 'Or you don't get no spending cash.'"
Within three years of meeting each other, Leiber and Stoller were the hottest songwriters in the business –writing hits for the Drifters, Coasters and the Robins and many other R&B groups of the era. In 1956, their career went to a higher level when Elvis Presley took "Hound Dog" – which they wrote for Big Mama Thornton four years earlier – and turned it into a gigantic hit.
Leiber was extremely irritated by the changes that Presley made to the original lyrics. "To this day I have no idea what that rabbit business is about," he said in 2009. "The song is not about a dog; it's about a man, a freeloading gigolo. Elvis' version makes no sense to me, and, even more irritatingly, it is not the song that Mike and I wrote. Of course, the fact that it sold more than seven million copies took the sting out of what seemed to be a capricious change of lyrics."
Despite their success with Presley, most of the acts that Leiber and Stoller worked with were black. "I felt black," Leiber told Rolling Stone in 1990. "I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people."
Not all of their songs were as innocent as they seemed. "Pure and simple, 'Poison Ivy' [a 1959 hit they wrote for The Coasters] is a metaphor for a sexually transmitted disease – or the clap – hardly a topic for a song that hit the Top Ten in the Spring of 1959," Leiber said in 2009. "But the more we wrote, the less we understood  why the public bought what it bought."
The hits continued into the early 1960s with such classics as "Stand By Me" and "Spanish Harlem," but when the Beatles broke in America in early 1964, the music industry changed very quickly. The duo never stopped working together, and in 1972 they produced "Stuck In The Middle With You," which was recorded by Stealers Wheel. In 1995, their catalog of hits was turned into the Broadway musical Smokey Joe's Cafe, and this past May, American Idol devoted an entire evening to their music.
Andy Greene @'Rolling Stone'

Tom Waits - Bad As Me

LISTEN

Jeff Tweedy - Dawned On Me (New Wilco Song)

The Taming of the Fans

Bon Iver - Holocene

Australia Steps Closer To 3-Strikes for Pirates

Last month we reported on a threat made by AFACT to Australian ISP’s – talk to us on a ‘graduated response’, OR ELSE. Since no-one apparently took the offer up, the ‘or else’ has appeared, in the form of the Australian Attorney General.
The Australian has confirmed that Attorney-General Robert McClelland will be holding a meeting with copyright advocacy groups next month and has invited some ISPs to take part. The meeting will reportedly be to negotiate more copyright ‘protection’ laws.
A letter, obtained by The Australian, has stated that the meeting will allow stakeholder (read: Copyright Industry) views to be pitched to the government, as ‘advice’. While ISP’s have been invited, no invitations have apparently been sent to groups looking out for the public interest.
Telstra has already confirmed it’s attending, as will AFACT. Time will tell if the meeting, scheduled for September, will end up with the same whitewash as has characterised the introduction of such laws in other countries.
Ben Jones @'Torrent Freak'

Snowflakes Simulated in 3-D

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wikileaks WikiLeaks 

If you think getting rid of #Gaddafi was hard, wait till you see what happens when Libyans try to get rid of NATO.

Famous Lives in Minimalist Pictogram Flowcharts

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WTF???

IMPORTANT @wikileaks @rixstepnews @m_cetera @ChrisStoecker
WTF DDB now states to a heise "journo" he DIDN'T! delete the files but the Keys! translation: To all my readers: according to Daniel Domscheit-Berg some minutes ago: His statement: "Right now only the key material is deleted. regarding the ongoing of this action there will follow an extra, extensive statement which will also explain the origin of this data backup" link http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/S-Fuer-alle-meine-Leser-nach-Auskunft-von-Daniel-Domscheit-Berg-vor-paar-Min/forum-207712/msg-20673342/read/
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As Britain's alienated young rose up, where was the NME? Watching Wild Beasts and worrying about indie stock, sadly

Riots: Metropolitan police planned to hold all suspects in custody

Patti Smith Co-Writing ‘Just Kids’ Film

Patti Smith’s excellent National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, might become a feature film, as Smith herself has reportedly teamed up with Tony Award winner and Oscar-bait heavyweight John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator, The Last Samurai) to pen a screenplay based on the book’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. No distribution deals are in place as of yet, so the project is very much in its beginning stages. Meanwhile, Smith has a number of other ambitious projects on her plate (in addition to covering Adele): an extension of her first memoir, a detective novel, and a new LP inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi, the home of Dylan Thomas, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1967 novel The Master and Margarita.
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