Save your receipts at The Buffering Stream, 1/25

Comments (6)

In honor of Brent Liles, I really hope someone plays something off of "Mommy's Little Monster" today... or maybe the Social D version of "Ring of Fire". I loved that band as an impressionable young punk rock girl.... anyone ever see "Another State of Mind"? About Social Distortion and Minor Threat touring together? Awesome. A study in contrasts in many ways.

Posted by Ali Lozoff | January 25, 2007 11:51 AM

I like to see a substantive discussion on what implications this "Merlin" business will actually have. It all seems good, with a collective of indie labels getting more "power" in various ways, but what are the downsides?

Posted by Steve Seel | January 25, 2007 1:41 PM

Steve--One thing I've been hearing is that this coalition may actualy force the majors to get serious about moving beyond DRM and embracing MP3 and other open source formats. This will be a huge boon to fans and listeners, cuz they'll be freer to use a variety of devices to listen to their music. (iPod owners know the frustration of buying stuff at iTunes then trying to transfer to their PCs or their Pioneer Inno, e.g.). It may make peer-to-peer trading possible again, true... but with every new release already hitting the stream at Pitchfork or Stereolab or wherever, how can it matter?

I for one have never understood the majors reluctance to embrace open-source and MP3. It's like the world's largest used record store: sure you're not getting any percentage on sales, but you're spreading the gospel of good music. Unless of course you are a label that produces nothing but crap meant to hoodwink somebody out of their 13 or 15 bucks...

Posted by Hans | January 25, 2007 8:00 PM

Ali--Couldn't agree more. That era of Social D. was seminal! Remember the album "Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In TOnight"? If I remember correctly, SD figured prominently on that great, early California punk rock compilation.

Posted by Hans | January 25, 2007 8:02 PM

Hans, this is enlightening. Many of us have that knee-jerk thing where we just automatically think "big = bad."

This is an interesting thread that is about two completely different things at once.

Posted by Steve Seel | January 26, 2007 2:42 PM

Mary played "Story of My Life" last night from Gluek's. Sounded great. I think SD gets short shrift sometimes, but they were pretty instrumental in getting that SoCal punk sound out into the MTV world. They kinda continued that cowpunk tradition that X started too. A guilty pleasure perhaps, but I'm okay with it.

Posted by Ali Lozoff | January 26, 2007 5:22 PM