Ok, now back to business. I was tempted to keep the site of undercover black man to myself and just rip off his music recommendations as my own, but I figured it wouldn’t be too ethical. Instead, I figured it was probably best if I just relax the requirement that I find a new musical artist every  week for my 6 months music challenge. To be fair, how many people do you know (with a job outside the music industry) discover a new musician every week?

Undercover black man is an interesting blog. It covers more than music alone, with the broad theme being “everything to do with black culture”. Now, I’m using the term “black culture” loosely here. For one thing, there is definitely not, on a global scale, such a thing as a black culture. I think I was aware of that a long time ago, but it definitely became clear to me when I moved to the United States (of America) in 2005. I’d just moved to a smallish town in Illinois when I went to comcast to get cable connected. The person serving me at the counter was african-american and, I swear, she must have spoken to me for 5 good minutes before I could get a word in the conversation and let her know I hadn’t understood a thing she’d just said. She looked at me perplexed and proceeded to articulate in a way I could understand. While the slang used in everyday conversations is only but one aspect of the culture of a group, I’ve come to realize that I have very little in common, aside from the colour of my skin, with the black people of the USA. I’m the son of an immigrant who was never a slave, french is my first language, etc, etc. Historically, linguistically, financially I share more with my swedish office mate than with african-americans. So there you go. A long rambling to say that, while I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a single black culture, that’s how I’ll describe the blog I found.

Musically, there are, on undercover black man, links to many artists who distribute single songs and whole albums, covering many different musical styles. I personally wasn’t too excited by most of the artists presented there, but I still peek on there regularly as I found that once or twice, there was a suggestion I liked.

Enjoy!

Enjoy and with this, I’m back on track for this series… at least until friday.

And here’s a promotional video that was produced for the bastard fairies’ debut (and I think so far only) album, Memento Mori. Watching it again is making me want to go and buy it this time. It was really pretty good.

Coulton’s music distribution method is to let you listen to all the songs on his website in the music section. You can also download (as a no nonsense non-drm’ed mp3) a selection of his songs from his site. You can buy all the other songs directly from his site. [From the New York Times article linked to below, it appears that one can also buy CDs, although I've never seen such a thing. I know Coulton only through 'the tubes'.] In addition that that though, he posts online pretty much all the lyrics and most of the chords to his creations, so you can play them yourself if you’d like. His original creations are also licensed as creative commons (specifically CC-by-nc, so you can take his songs and play with them, remix them if you want, so long as you credit him and don’t make money off of it).

Coulton is not part of a big label. Until recently (2 years ago it turns out), he was a coding engineer by day, but now he makes all his money from his art: from shows, selling stuff (like t-shirts) and music (mostly sold on his website) and also from licensing (and recording) songs for different type of media. He recorded, not long ago, a song for the end of ‘Portal’, an extenstion of some sort of computer game I personally don’t know anything about.

If you’d like to appreciate Coulton’s dedication and relationship to his fans, here’s a really good 2007 article from the New York Times.

Enjoy discovering Jonathan Coulton and tune back this weekend for installment 3 of the 6 months challenge!

Here’s a link to an interview with the DJ.

Here is his myspace page with a link to a download page for his album “Feed the Animals”, which is pay as you want à la Radiohead. Interestingly, it’s a differential pricing scheme at the same time. (I guess Radiohead kind of had that too.)

• 0-5$ gets you the mp3s
• 5-10$ gets you mp3+FLAC (FLAC is a lossless audio compression)
• >10$ gets you mp3+FLAC+actual CD when it comes out.

I put 0$ since I wanted to listen to the album first and the websiste sent me to another webpage where I had to select an option to answer the question:

I selected 0$ because:

• I may donate later
• I can’t afford to pay
• I don’t really like Girl Talk
• I don’t believe in paying for music
• I have already purchased this album
• I don’t value musid from sampling
• I am part of the press, radio, or music industry
• Other reasons

As a bonus, here’s a link to a Danish documentary, Good Copy Bad Copy which apparently features Girl Talk. I haven’t watched the documentary, yet, but I definitely plan to. [EDIT: You can listen to the documentary online or download it via bittorrent. Donation through paypal is posible.]

On a legal standpoint, I was a little disappointed. Girl Talk’s music is made by sampling and reusing other people’s music in new and creative ways. There’s a text file accompanying the album I downloaded (Feed the Animals), which essentially lists the credits and the fact that the album was released by Illegal Art. Since the product is about sampling, it would be nice for Girl Talk to release his music with something like a creative commons license which explicitely allows relicensing. Maybe the fact that what he’s doing is illegal is kind of the point of the music, but I think Girl Talk’s creative reusing of other people’s works has merits on its own as music and not just as a social statement. I value more the fact that this is good and interesting music than the fact that this disturbs the established music industry. I would have liked to see this formalized by the artist in the form of an explicit license to sample his work. This would drive the point home that sampling is not copying and is ok.

For example, while I can get video going on msn using aMSN, I still haven’t found an msn client on linux which will easily allow me to use both voice and video. Luckily, between the phone and msn, I don’t boot windows for that reason very often.

Powerpoint is still an outstanding tool when it comes to presentations and the defacto standard at conferences, so I have to boot windows every once in a while to run powerpoint and prepare/show a presentation. All the supporting material though (plots and so on) are made on FOSS so I’m really only using powerpoint to make the actual slides.

Finally, some companies still haven’t caught on that it would be nice to just open up the protocols to interface with their devices, so I have to boot windows every time I want to upgrade the firmware on my gps or on my cameras (Pentax has this autorun archive thing I can’t unpack on linux yet, so I boot windows to extract the actual update and then reboot linux to do everything else. Garmin just ships you an actual program, so I have to run it in windows.)

Today, almost three years after embarking on this journey, I’m happy with the result. I only have legit copies of windows on my computers and I only run them when absolutely necessary…and even then I sometimes hesitate. Running windows just makes me curse and cringe now, which helps in no way my stress level when I’m at a conference and I have to give a talk.

Somewhere along the way of becoming windows free, I started to understand the subtleties of copyright law. I have been following one lawyer’s comments on the RIAA fight against their own customers and I think I’m now ready to make another change in my life. I call it the “6 months music challenge”. For the next 6 months, I will not buy a single CD. Not one. I will not pirate CDs either. I will find all the new music I will consume online for free. To show you my commitment to this challenge, every week I will write a blog post describing one new music album/group/compilation I have found online and listened to for free with the blessing of the artist(s). To be eligible, the songs will have to be downloadble. You should be able to download the songs in a convenient format and listen to them on your ipod/mp3 player if you want.So while I think it’s cool that artists put the little player applet on their myspace page, you’ll have to be able to do more. I’m not just looking for artists who promote their music online, I’m looking for artists who use their music as promotional material online.

So here at last, for my first submission, I bring to you Nerdcore Undercover and Old Nerdy Bastard, which I found following links from blog to blog onto, finally, the Hipsters, Please! blog, written by Z who, if I understand correctly, produced (?) the two compilation albums. Most of the music on there is hip-hop, more so on Nerdcore Undercover, while Old Nerdy Bastard is rather more eclectic. I’ve been listening to those 2 albums in the car for the last two days now and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. I’m going out of town with a few friends for the day and I’m going to introduce these albums to those same friends. Should prove interesting!

So here’s to the start of, I hope, a great blog post series!