When we thought it was all clear and simple: banks owned the world, the financial crisis is their fault, the music industry is hurt but not dead and a new business model is on its way...But no, nothing is sure no more as The Sex Pistols have signed a new record deal with Universal for the re-release (35 years after the original) of an expanded version of "Never Mind The Bollocks, Here Are The Sex Pistols".

John Lydon, a very clever and articulate man when he thinks it's worth it, has these great words about the new deal: "Music can be great, when done by the great. The Sex Pistols are the greatest. Universal now has a trophy room, music is the imitation of nature, the Sex Pistols are nature, so please give generously. Thank you."
To which the Universal PR replies: ""To be given the opportunity to re-evaluate the Sex Pistols catalogue is every music lover’s dream. We’re looking forward to working with the band and celebrating their impact on worldwide culture."

My oh my, no doubt this signature is going to be blessed with a few funny ups and downs as these two are made to get on well !

When Punk came about, music in Europe was all about progressive...

It's not easy to be the ex-guitarist and founder from The Smiths (especially when the ex-singer Big Mouth can't stop act like one) or to look like a slimmer and healthier version of Trent Reznor, but Johnny Marr does very well these days and his brain is evidently clear and sharp.

A bit of history: Johnny Marr is a brilliant guitar player/composer, he put together one of the best rock band in history (The Smiths), then went on to play with one of the most underrated UK songwriter who's new work we miss a lot (Matt Johnson from The The), formed and played in the superband Electronic (Bernard Summer from New Order/Joy Division, joined by Karl Bartos (ex-Kraftwerk) for some songs) and has more recently enjoy success with Modest Mouse and The Cribs. He's currently working on a solo album but do find time to make very interesting university lectures and this is where we join him thanx to an article that came out in the Irish magazine Independent News.

In his lecture, Johnny (who i played soccer table against a few years ago and he did beat me, bastard ;)) goes back in memory lane to serve his point: if you want to have a real success (in my book it means being able...

Little did Steve Jobs know back then that Itunes would somehow sound the end of the album per se and having it digitalized, cut down into all its separate parts and sold on a track per track basis or as a full album, pushed people to alter their way of enjoying music by just buying a couple of songs off the album. It has to be said that, too often, albums are made with fillers holding together a couple of singles. Artists, you can do better. No, you NEED to do better !

This of course is a giant loss for artists and the music industry as we go from a system that sells singles taken from full album you would buy if enjoying the single to a system where you buy only the tracks you like...And this is like saying a movie should be cut to the only essential scenes (let's take away all the slow parts and concentrate on the action moments or the romantic gatherings). Might work for some movies tho, but in most cases one would lose the plot, the feel, the mood and end up watching nothing but a 10 minutes action pack trailer.... Albums in music are like that: you need the ups and downs, the slopes and the main straight to enjoy at full capacity all the assets the music comes...

Forget about New Wave and the eighties, seems like the 90's revivial is finally about to kick in serious.

Things rarely happen on their own, and even more so when things start to happen globally...If you take the success and seemingly unstoppable rise of dance music acts in the US (Deadmau5 and Skrillex) and find out that, at the same time, in the UK, Mancunian huge 90's band Stone Roses reform for some very highly paid gigs (and so are The Inspiral Carpets, the Happy Mondays and The New Kids On The Block. And so is Aqua. OMG can we survive yet another Spice Girls reunion Tour?) you can slowly but surely relay all the dots and see that, yes, there's something very nineties brewing up.... Archetype's 90 grunge band Nirvana still scores high thanx to Dave Grohl's Foo Fighters, Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails is present as ever in the movie world, De La Soul reforms...yes, the Nineties are back. If they ever leaved...

Here's a list of what seem to be the most notorious 90's bands

1. Nirvana
2. Pearl Jam
3. Radiohead
4. 2Pac (a reform is out of the question!)
5. Red Hot Chili Peppers
6. Beck
7. The Smashing...

In an understandably positive but interesting blog entry, Bandcamp establish how, from sources of Google searches, people have finally end up on Bandcamp and bought music they were initially looking to acquire illegally. All this cos they found themselves on a cool looking website page, set up by the band they wanted music from and said-music was available at a very decent price, and even sometimes a price them, the fans, could decide...

So, from rather cold and blunt searches with phrases like “lelia broussard torrent”, “murder by death, skeletons in the closet, mediafire" and even “maimouna youssef the blooming hulkshare”, the fans were directed from torrents and affiliiated grey sources to Bandcamp where they can nicely sit down, listen to the tracks, not having to care for virus or governamental spys, and calmly take the decision to open up their purse and buy the music. Cos Bandcamp offers a real alternative to grey markets: the music is there, you can experiment it and enjoy it, and the share going back to the band is big as up to 85% goes back to the artist ! The band has a transparent page that goes by bandname.bandcamp.com: easy as pie !

So, bands...

Yes, it's a scandal ! And nothing for The Artist either ! ;)

2012 has seen the obvious success of Adele, and it's rather refreshing altho not utterly exciting but it has to be said that, besides the dress of Nicki Minaj, it's all well sedated and organized in Grammysland.
And why wouldn't it be ? When an industry is accepting Pop Idol or X Factor as a decent way of finding out new "talents" and mistaken 6 small weeks of reality TV for 3 years of musician apprenticeship, it's pretty normal we get to see and hear what the Industry deems as success and talent...

But, once you pass the fact than Lady Gaga didn't take home anything shiny, you get to discover interesting winners in these Grammy 2012. Cos everything isn't happening in only 5 categories, there are 78 different categories (down from 109 last year) and some boost real talents and success that are both in terms of sales and in terms of artistic values. (on a sad note, let's not forget the Academy has decided early this year to edit out the Latin Jazz award and cut down the Latin field from 7 awards to only 4 - a huge thing in the USA where there's a striving latino scene).

- Best CD package of...

We had a little column on monday about the musical intermezzo from the 2012 Superbowl and how empty, hollow and ego-histerical were the performances of the two entertainement divas on that stage. There are ways to make yourself heard in 2012, but maybe there are more important things to do than just piling up another million dollar in a secret bank account in Caymans Islands, no ?

Artists, musicians in particular, have always been at the forefront of mass movements and (r)evolutions. One cannot deny the latest crisis on the planet, with the 2008 demise of some US banks being the iceberg tip of a worldwide financial domino catastrophy, has taken its toll on all aspects of the economy, and the music industry really didn't need that. But there you go: one can pretend all is well and parade like nothing happens and some others, like Tom Yorke from Radiohead, can go out and use their fame and public side to emphasis on issues that are socially and humanly important.

In an interesting interview in superb internet mag Dazed, Robert Del Naja (of Massive Attack fame) explains how the attitude to revolts and mass manifestations have changed recently, especially in the...

Making a video can go multiples ways...but all of them are time-consuming and most of them imply a rather large amount of money that needs to be spend in order to get something of good technical quality. There are enough rather technically unacceptable and very, very low-fi looking videos around and if you want yours to come across the ambiant deafening noise, you need something that will touch your fans, make them fall in love with your song, make them buy the song, or the album it's on, having people talking about your and your music and attracts new fans as well

There's now a new possibility to have great looking videos made by technically savvy image people: outsource them to the biggest movie industry on the world: Bollywood !
Drew Smith, a canadian artist, did just that: he commandeered a Bollywood director to shoot a video on his latest song and the result is of very good quality, whether you like it or not: images and sounds lare top notch, and while the plot is frankly derivative from the idea of the song in the first place, the end result is charming, pleasing to the eye and the mind and..Drew has people talking about him! And frankly i don't see...

There's no doubt we need music as much as we need artists that are above us mere mortals. When confronted to the boys next door's band or to the Pop Idol of last year, we can only gasp and ponder what it is all about...People can dance to a great tune on saturday night, but ultimately what they want is gaze the entire week on a great looking picture of a REAL artist, someone who has things to say and say them loud, someone that will frankly makes us travel much further than the cash-out page on Amazon or Itunes: artists that makes us dream, us humans, that we're better than what we really are.

Undoubtedly, Lana Del Rey has been the mystery artist of 2011. Everyone has heralded her as the Indie Comet of the year, that she made it on nothing but a great song and an eerie video. That she didn't need a major to succeed or agents with zillions of network to make it. We're all so wrong. To make it clear: no, she didn't make it overnight, no, she isn't an indie dazzling phenomena coming from nowhere, and no she isn't even indie. So what ? She is a hard working artist who slowly but surely made it cos she successfully added up all the right ingredients (whether you like her...