The Smalrus Web Site

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. Tag along if you want…

The challenge: do this in fifteen minutes; as if nobody is judging your answers…

1. Magical Mystery Tour – The Beatles — This is where I started my musical foundation – on a 45. It’s also where my fave Beatles song came from (I am the Walrus)

2. 12 Greatest Hits Vol. 2 – Neil Diamond — I spent a lot of my early childhood driving around to stores with my mom. This cassette was always on in the car.

3. Totally Krossed Out – Kris Kross — If not for this, I may have listened to those 3 Neil Diamond tapes forever.

4. Doggystyle – Snoop Doggy Dogg — I was probably already listening to the radio at this point in my life, but for some reason rap was big, so I bought my first parental advisory tape.

5. Sixteen Stone – Bush — After already buying my first CDs (Ace of Base, Boyz II Men, TLC), I switched to my first passion, rock. This was during middle school and every song was a gem to me.

6. 311 – 311 — This was during the start of high school and again, every song was a gem. It was me listening to popular music, in the face of everyone thinking I was truly a nerd.

7. Cracked Rear View – Hootie and the Blowfish — This got me to buy my first guitar and learn to play that soft-pop-rock (a la Goo Goo Dolls, etc). I knew this album inside out and it brought me to my first concert.

8. Third Eye Blind – Third Eye Blind — Semi-Charmed Life was a huge single in High School and this album got me to buy my first electric guitar. During the time, I found it was musically different and lyrically great.

9. Dig Your Own Hole – Chemical Brothers — This album inspired my willingness to accept electronica into my life, as a new form of Jazz. If not for this, I probably wouldn’t have accepted New Deal, Tiesto, Disco Biscuits, or any number of other artists.

10. The Best of 1980-1990 – U2 — Sadly, I never really grew up with U2 in my life except for what was on the radio. This was the second U2 album I bought (after All That You Can’t Leave Behind), but it’s the body of songs that’s responsible for me into U2. I love Edge’s early guitar work.

11. Kid A – Radiohead — The start of my formative college years brought the explosion of alternative music to my collection. This was my first Radiohead, experimental, innovative, and sonically blowing out anything I’ve heard. I singularly owe the past 8 years and expansion of my musical tastes and cd collection to this album.

12. Tourist – St. Germain — The only album I can think of in my collection that I could listen to on repeat for the rest of my life and not go psychologically insane. I’ve spent countless hours studying and chilling to this album and it never gets old.

13. Parachutes – Coldplay — I never really got into Oasis beforehand because I found them Beatles-imposters (but reversed course about 3 years ago). This album was Britpop phase 2 and was sweet, acoustic, well-placed music. It’s still a stand out, eight years later.

14. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – Wilco — I bought this album because it got good reviews and it wasn’t bad. But I watched the documentary of the making of the album, and between hearing the business side of the album and the writing/recording side of the album, I gained a completely new appreciation for how Wilco worked.

15. The Bends – Radiohead — After starting off with Kid A, I went backwards through the Radiohead discography to see what I was missing out on. Although OK Computer was one of the most seminal works since The Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s, The Bends was really the core of what Radiohead was doing.

I could easily put another solid 5, but they said 15, so I put what I’ve listened to most of my life, in chronological order. And I’ve left rane off the list because that wouldn’t be fair.

RT @gapperblog : Psychiatry as New York’s counter-cyclical industry http://tinyurl.com/cf9gh7

Setlist:  I. Love at the End of the World, With a Bullet, Lions of the Kalahari, Fixed to Ruin, Up Sister, Sundance, Bridge to Nowhere, Hard Road, Dead End, Words on Fire, Brother Down, Them Kids.

E: Detroit ’67, Mind Flood (~16 min)

Pictures (credit: Marc)

I’ve seen the Sam Roberts Band four times now. The first was a hometown show in Montreal back in September 2003.  Having just launched a tour with American band Guster, Roberts danced around the stage with his Jack Daniels, knowing he was on the cusp of total domination of the anglo-Canadian music scene.  

The second time I saw SRB was a November 2006 show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York with Jason Collett (of Broken Social Scene).  All the McGill people came out of the NYC woodwork, creating a larger-than expected crowd for an international show.  Roberts didn’t disappoint.

The third time was a 2007 Canada Day celebration in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, featuring an all-Montreal (and personal faves) lineup of SRB, The Stills, and Malajube.  This was a tougher show to watch because of the audience logistics (and the fact that beer bottles weren’t allowed inside the fence).  But given that the lineup was fantastic as a whole, Roberts didn’t break out the same way.

And once again, I saw them play at the Bowery last night, in celebration of the US release of their latest LP, Love at the End of the World (released a year later than in Canada and six months later than in Spain).  Unlike a lot of rock bands, SRB never disappoints to put on an excellent show; his frenetic energy is as comfortable with an intimate American crowd (though largely ex-pat and McGillies) as it is with his hometown crowd 5 1/2 years ago.

See, for Roberts, it’s all about the music, it’s all about rock and roll, it’s all about having a good time.  Credit is equally due to Roberts’s backing band, who carry his same energy through the rhythms and melodies that make the live show that much more sublime than listening to the studio recordings. Which is why the down-tempo songs have the ability to entrance the crowd into swaying with the rhythms as much as the up-tempo songs catch the crowd bopping and jumping with similar levels of freneticism.  

Roberts himself is the ultimate in showmanship-as-musician; a quality that lacks in most contemporary frontmen.  Want proof?  All you had to do was watch Roberts move the crowd from one extreme to the next during his 16-minute rendition of “Mind Flood.”  Even newer LATEOTW songs such as “Up Sister” and “Them Kids” got the crowd flailing.

The fact that Sam Roberts is on his third LP and has yet to cross into the American mainstream (beyond Buffalo, which gets Canadian radio stations) still boggles my mind.  It also leads me to question exactly how American mainstream music is determined.  After all, Roberts has developed a refreshing blend of Zeppelin, Stones, and Floyd — the type of music that evokes a nostalgic, classic rock feel, without all the pop/production pretensions.

I still maintain that Roberts will find success here in the United States, though it will require him to get a better distribution deal and marketing muscle.  At the point where his mainstream Canadian success has shown that the music alone isn’t sufficient to break into the American market, it will be a shame if he doesn’t continue to breakout here.

Early leak of new #U2 album seems to indicate one of the year’s best and it’s only February. “Magnificant” is the archetypal U2 song.

Facebook ‘withdraws’ data changes – 18 February 2009, BBC News

The Value of Human Readable Deeds – 18 February 2009, Fred Benenson, Creative Commons

This group [Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities] is for people to give input on Facebook’s terms of use. These terms are meant to serve as the governing document for how the service is used by people around the world.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with us [regarding changing Facebook's terms of use].

Here are responses to some of the things you’ve written below:

1. You own your information. Facebook does not. This includes your photos and all other content.

2. Facebook doesn’t claim rights to any of your photos or other content. We need a license in order to help you share information with your friends, but we don’t claim to own your information.

3. We won’t use the information you share on Facebook for anything you haven’t asked us to. We realize our current terms are too broad here and they make it seem like we might share information in ways you don’t want, but this isn’t what we’re doing.

4. We will not share your information with anyone if you deactivate your account. If you’ve already sent a friend a message, they’ll still have that message. However, when you deactivate your account, all of your photos and other content are removed.

5. We apologize for the confusion around these issues. We never intended to claim ownership over people’s content even though that’s what it seems like to many people. This was a mistake and we apologize for the confusion.

On point #2, why can’t Facebook adopt Creative Commons licensing? This would achieve four ends:

1. It would start educating Facebook users en masse on how to license personal works out to the public domain. This would include photos, videos, and other content shared on Facebook.
2. By selecting/unselecting the “noncommercial” option, this would allow/disallow users the rights to grant Facebook (as a commercial entity) its own ownership of user content. Such an option could easily be trackable to Facebook’s database either through electronic fingerprinting or basic coding.  Noncommercial licensing should be the default, with users able to opt-out (thus, opting into commercial licensing).
3. With regards to eventual expansion over an “open platform”/OpenID, CC commercial licensing would, in the future, enable Facebook to share user content over networks, while ultimately retaining the content creators’ approval for the content to be shared elsewhere.
4. Facebook would throw major weight behind this licensing standard, ultimately forcing other user-created content-based web sites to reevaluate their own approaches to licensing.

This seems like such a no-brainer, simple, transparent solution to Facebook’s terms of use problems in dealing with user-created content.