Kick Out the Podcast Jams, Chickenpluckers

A Podcast about chicken. C'mon, give some points for originality!

Get it in iTunes, download it from the link or listen to it by clicking on the player on the I-94 Bar. There should be a player on this here blog, if you look down the right-hand side.

Here's the playlist:

Super Chicken (Toon Tunes: 50 Favorite Classic Cartoon Songs)

Cockblocked - The Jack Saints (Rock and Roll Saved Our Lives...But Now It's Trying to Kill Us!)

Chicken Scratch - The Raunch Hands (Learn To Whap-A-Dang)

The Greasy Chicken - Andre Williams (Movin' On - Greasy And Explicit Soul Movers 1956-1970)

Run Chicken- The Milkshakes (Rockabilly Psychosis and the Garage Disease)

Flight Of The Shit Bird - Six Ft Hick (Canetrash)

Thunder Chicken -The Mighty Imperials (Thunder Chicken)

Chicken Of The Sea - The Raunch Hands (Learn To Whap-A-Dang)

Chicken Head- Whiskey Daredevils (The Essential Whiskey Daredevils)

Chicken - Spark Plugs (Born Bad - Volume 4)

Kicks & Chicks - The Zipps (single)

Finger Lickin_ Chicken - Radors (single)

Chicken Thighs - Andre Williams (Movin' On - Greasy And Explicit Soul Movers 1956-1970)

Chicken Hawk -The Pink Fits (Fuzzyard Gravebox)

Barnyard Blues - 13th Floor Elevators (Bull Of The Woods)

Secret Track

Hey Hey, My My, MP3s Should One Day Die

Why do we put up with second-rate? That's exactly what MP3s are. Gnarly old Neil Young rightly says computer makers need to forget about MP3s and go for gold. And he's exactly right. MP3s devalue music by making it a too-easily trade-able commodity, plus they sound like shit.

All of the above said in the full knowledge that I have trawled blogs for interesting and obscure music (if I like a download, I buy it, OK?) and I do use MP3s for podcasting. Give me a lossless format anyday.

The evils of MP3

MP3s make sharing music easier. They also make a commodity of music and cheapen its value. And they sound shittier than lossless music.

Think you can pick the difference between MP3s of differing compression? Try this quick test.

Death of a download site

If you can't get your music illegally (technically speaking), get angry. This guy has some valid things to say about the need for a new music industry model.

Demogate Drive and The Eastern Dark

Been looking for an excuse to plug Melbourne guitarist Matt Daley's live/demo music blog Demogate Drive and here it is. Bill Gibson has given Matt's audience a compilation of live and outtake material that never made it to The Eastern Dark's posthumous "Girls On The Beach (With Cars)" album. Grab it here and have a trawl through Matt's blog for some other choice stuff.

Pssst...wanna copy of the World's Most Expensive Record?

By now you may have heard about the discovery of a Velvet Underground acetate for 75c that almost fetched $US25,000 on eBay. Far be it for me to interfere with the delicate balance of the collector scum free market but you can download MP3s of said acetate here.

Don't buy CDs? I thought that's what people are already doing.

Campaigns to boycott various countries, suppliers and industries are weird things, usually more symbolic than effective and often having unintended side effects. Take this one by a lobby group calling itself Don't Buy CDs. I share their hatred of copy protected discs, not so much because they make some duplication impossible but because they often end up with a one-second gap in the first track on various CD players. My Mac still rips most of the ones I've tried anyway.

There are other broader issues here, mostly to do with who's grinding the organ (record companies) and who's the monkey (artists) and why is it earning peanuts? My humble opinion is that MP3s sound like shit and their downloading and trading commodifies and cheapens the value of music. Live, lossless peer-to-peer file-sharing is another matter as it's mostly fans picking up warts and all gig recordings.

The bottom line here is that if no-one buys CDs, what company's going to invest money in emerging bands? This isn't rocket science.

Enjoy the Don't Buy CDs cartoon (below) from the folks at dontbuycds.org, even if I think they've ripped off Fred Negro.