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This Saturday is Record Store Day, which celebrates the role of local, independent record stores in music and local cultures. I haven’t run across a page that aggregates the Austin stores observing Record Store Day, so I’m posting a list here.

My favorite Austin record store, End of Ear is celebrating the day with swag giveaways and in-stores by the Shackeltons and Nic Armstrong. If you’re looking for a little eastside flavor, Music Mania has a celebration planned, and while Trailer Space Records is not on the record with an event, I definitely recommend this new store.

Other Austin stores observing Record Store Day include Waterloo Records, the dance-focused Backspin Records, Out of the Past Collectibles, and The Screw Shop, which is new to me, but I presume specializes in Texas chopped-and-screwed hip-hop.

Regardless of what record store you visit, I hope you get out Saturday, buy some hot wax, and meet new people on Record Store Day!

Update: Here’s another run-down of the event. It looks like Trailer Space will be celebrating it after all.

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Boy howdy, it is so nice to work in coffeeshops that play music I enjoy. I’m at The Green Muse, and I have no idea what they’re playing, but the barista is playing some shoegazey stuff I can’t identify. The previous CD had a shoegazey cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Jesus,” which caught my attention. Usually I want to tune out the music in coffeeshops, even if it’s music I sort of like. I really want to like Epoch, but, whenever I’m there they play folky stuff like Nick Drake. I like Nick Drake, but playing Nick Drake in a coffeeshop is way to cheesy. Music with a lot of space like Drake seems to add to the aural clutter of coffeeshops, while spacey music like shoegaze seems to dampen the sound of conversation and dishes.

I often hear music I like at The Green Muse. A barista named Austin often plays music that seems wildly out of context for a coffeeshop, like The Red Krayola and Add (N) to X. I enjoy these bands, particularly The Red Krayola, and they don’t interfere with my thought, so I do get a little excited to find another fan of the band.^1. I would wonder if music like The Red Krayola’s would turn off customers, but The Green Muse seems to be packed whenever I want to work there, so maybe the lesson to coffeeshop owners is to not underestimate patrons’ taste. And play more droney music.

1. Over the summer, I saw on the Drag City website that an acquaintance of mine from college was working on a documentary on the veteran experimental rock band. In our email conversation, Amy seemed pretty excited about the project and said that Red Krayola fans were really supportive in helping her find archival material for the flick. I can’t wait to see it.

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I’m currently in Norman, and driving up to Tulsa tomorrow to spend Christmas with my parents and sister. I imagine posting will be light over the next week or so, as my parents lack access to teh Internets or even extended-basic cable. It’s a hostile place for a guy whose life revolves around TV and the Web. Instead, I imagine I’ll be reading those heavy things made of dead trees.

In the meantime, I’ll point you to this Ocean Drive Magazine profile of indie rock heartthrob Cat Power. Here’s an overly long snippet:

…the Chanel freebies have already started arriving. “I come from a long line of nothing,” Marshall says of her peripatetic Southern upbringing. “My great-grandmother was a cotton picker. I never could’ve imagined my feet inside a pair of fine Chanel boots.” It’s a shift she’s still adjusting to. As she prepares to head out for a late-night karaoke session, she begins running down her chic wardrobe—belt by Louis Vuitton, Hermès swimsuit doubling as a tank top—yet I’m confused by the identity of the design team responsible for her olive-green military-styled shirt.

“It’s from the Boy Scouts of America,” she repeats.

Is that a new hipster line, like Imitation of Christ?

Marshall looks puzzled: “No, it’s a Boy Scouts shirt! From the Salvation Army!” Her sneakers are, natch, from Kmart’s fall Anchor Bay collection.

Of course, it’s her voice that matters most…

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If any readers are curious about the Velvet Underground acetate that recently sold for $155,401.00 on eBay, you can download mp3s of the early VU recording here. An acetate is a kind of phonograph record cut with a lathe; before tape recording was widespread, many studios had recording lathes to audition recordings or create masters for duplication. This acetate came from a 1966 session that led to the recording of The Velvet Underground and Nico that we know and love today.

If you haven’t guessed from the frequency of posting, dear readers, I’ve been tied up with end-of-semester duties, but I thought VU-related news item was worth posting. If you haven’t realized it already, dear readers, my current tagline is a quote from VU’s “Some Kinda Love.”

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Much of the blogosphere is understandably outraged at Universal Music Group’s decision to send cease-and-desist letters to a variety of parties over a hilariously lame adaptation of U2’s song “One.” Produced by Bank of America managers, the adaptation celebrates BoA’s acquisition of student credit shark retail bank MBNA and replaces lines like “You act like you never had love” with banalities like “do you like the Yankees?”

I agree with the blogs that Universal is being ridiculous and that the leaked video is more of an embarrassment to the bank than it is any kind of viral marketing campaign, as the media conglomerate asserts. However, this blogger found something else about the blog-event to be grumpy about. I saw two blogs point to a cover of the BoA adaptation performed by comedian David Cross and guitarist Johnny Marr. Public Knowledge identifies Marr as “the guitarist from Modest Mouse,” and WMFU’s Beware of the Blog also identifies him as the Modest Mouse guitarist.

I’m probably the least hip guy in the blogosphere, but I associate the name Johnny Marr with the groundbreaking 1980s postpunk band The Smiths, as well as Electronic and The The. “Could there be two Johnny Marrs?” I thought, “One known for literate indie pop and one in Modest Mouse.” Of course, I queried Wikipedia for Johnny Marr, and the disappointing article on Marr revealed that the guitarist joined Modest Mouse earlier this year. While I suppose it is factually true that Marr is now a member of the veteran act, wouldn’t it be better to identify him as a member of The Smiths, which is surely one of the most influential bands of the 1980s? I imagine that the policy dorks and NPR listeners who read these blogs are more familiar with The Smiths (and perhaps even The The or Electronic) than Modest Mouse.

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One of the more successful projects I’ve assigned in the “Making Alternative Media” class I’m teaching this semester is research presentations. At first, I hoped students would have alternative media texts in mind to present, but, due to the lack of political engagement on the part of my students, I wound up assigning topics for my students to research and present. While this annoyed me at first, it’s also proven to be an opportunity for me to learn more about a topic without doing the legwork. While students didn’t surpass my knowledge on topics like The Church of the Subgenius, I learned quite a bit about The Realist and the “What Would Jesus Drive” campaign. It’s also nice to see the familiar from a different perspective.

I assigned one student to present on Houston’s Pacifica affiliate, KPFT. (I tried to assign Texas-related projects as much as possible.) Worried there might not be much information about the station’s history, I poked around the internet and found something quite interesting. Although I’ve studied Radio, TV, and Film in Texas for the past four years, I never knew that the station’s transmitter was bombed twice in 1970, KPFT’s inaugural year. The KPFT site has a short movie up promoting the station and discussing the bombing. Unfortunately, the video is so compressed that the viewer mostly sees artifacts, but it’s still an interesting view into the historical moment. One thing I find surprising is the use of lite classic rock like Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor in the soundtrack. I’m not sure if these artists were associated with left-wing political movements in 1970, but, although Houston was home to some amazing proto-punk bands like the Red Krayola, the connection between punk and leftist politics was yet to be made.

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I think it’s a little funny that I met the leader of Norman’s hottest new indiepop sensation in Austin. I met Evangelicals leader Josh Jones at a happy hour for a local arts organization. He had just moved to Austin from Boston, where he attended the Berklee School of Music, so when he remarked on the number of Austin High football fans filling the bar, I explained, “Oh, high school football in this part of the country is serious business.” I was about to explain how rabid fans in Oklahoma and Texas are, when he said, “Oh, I know. I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma.” Anyway, he acknowledged that my high school, Jenks, owns Oklahoma football, but it was fun when we learned we knew many of the same people in Norman.

Anyway, the often-ridiculed indie-music site Pitchfork has an interview with Josh today, which discusses the Norman/Oklahoma City music scene and The Evangelicals latest record. In the interview, Josh offers readers a bit of advice I have to contest.

People should quit their jobs, move to Oklahoma, move in with 34 people, pay $100 a month in rent and start a band or start painting. That way you’ll feel like you have a purpose if you lose your mind, and you’ll have some fun on the way.

Um, no they shouldn’t. In my experience, you will lose your mind, but you’ll be bored and suffocated all the while. Josh clearly has had a different experience, finding success in Norman that he didn’t find in Austin, and I do think Norman is better now than it was in the late nineties. In particular, The Opolis provides Norman’s indie community with a place for shows and visibility that the suburb lacked when I lived there.

Update: While I’m linking to Pitchfork and not saying anything snarky about it, I’ll point to two dead-tree articles about the online music publication. The September issue of Wired focuses on changes in the music industry, and has a feature about Pitchfork. The Austin Chronicle also ran a piece a few weeks back about the origins of the site. Both articles discuss how the economics of Web publishing allow Pitchfork to make money writing about relatively obscure bands, while developing a reach that allows it to take bands like Broken Social Scene and The Arcade Fire to a more mainstream audience.

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The Hype Machine is an mp3 blog aggregator I came across via a Google search. Not only does it track what songs are being blogged on mp3 blogs, but its search functionality allows you to search for songs that may be posted as mp3s on other blogs. It’s not really a substitute for file-sharing systems, but it’s a good way to find songs that are available online legitimately or at least finding mp3s people have posted to the web illegitimately. It looks like they have a policy in place for de-listing artists who don’t want their material found through their service. I’ve been remiss in learning about the world of mp3 blogs, and The Hype Machine seems like a good place to start.

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Although it’s probably the hipsterest music site online, I do enjoy reading Pitchfork from time-to-time to catch up on what those whippersnappers are listening to. The site has long gone without any RSS feeds for either its news or its record reviews. I hoped that they would add feeds when they launched a redesign in early 2005, but apparently they’re too indie for metadata, leaving me months behind in my Arcade Fire news. Lately, I’ve been using an RSS feed that a reader created that scraped titles and permalinks from the news section, but today the feed included a post from that user’s blog informing me that Pitchfork has added what it regards as RSS feeds. Unfortunately, “they are not actually XML, but broken XHTML pages,” so they’re at least as dicey as the scraped feeds. (I’ve never coded content management servers, but, dang, outputting valid RSS or Atom can’t be that hard, can it?) Regardless, the underground feed is going down, so I’ll have to switch to the approved Pitchfork feeds.

Valid markup or not, Pitchfork’s feeds take an approach I find a little irritating, segregating different content into different feeds without offering a master feed. In total, there are six different feeds for news, record reviews, features, “best new music,” free downloads, and reviews of individual tracks. I mostly just want the news and record reviews, but I would settle for a master feed that includes all six. In particular, why are news and features in separate feeds? Features come out so infrequently that it seems ridiculous to subscribe to a separate feed. Anyway, congratulations Pitchfork, you’re bringing back 2001 like it never went away.

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It’s been a long while since I’ve posted an image on this here blog, so I’m posting this older image I ran across last night. It’s a shot from last summer of the demolition of the building that housed UT’s student radio station KVRX. The studio was in the basement of a former medical building that was demolished to make space for science classrooms. The station now occupies cramped quarters in the communication complex. I’m told that the record library is down the hall from the studio, so DJs have to hustle to find a record while they’re on air.

Last night, I was listening to KVRX when Pavement’s “Gold Soundz” came on the air. KVRX has a policy of playing music that’s ignored by mainstream radio. Although I like “Gold Sounds” quite a bit, I was tempted to call the station and complain that Pavement was insufficiently indie. Although Pavement is on an indie label, I heard “Gold Sounds” so many times in college that it might as well be The Rolling Stones. Of course, the DJ was probably in elementary school when the record was released in 1994 — for her, she was probably unearthing a forgotten classic..

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