Chinese Apple

4) Wilco has a comic book and it is printed with their won blood (ala KISS)

That is TOO funny! Did that really happen? Sick, but I like!

I was thinking more along the lines of when one or more of their songs are used in a Volkswagen commercial. Does that not just SCREAM "sell outs!" or is it just me?

Maybe it's just you? Taking from the rich (corporations) and then giving out downloads like "The Jolly Banker" to The People rather screams "Robin Hood."

(Let's discuss new, interesting ways for Wilco to sell out, rather than flog the VW dead horse.)

Yay! Oxfam and Doctors without Borders are two of the best run and most ethical relief orgs out there. What a terrific bonus to get free Wilco downloads.

None of the above and would still listen to their tunes even if someone casts the stone.

Actually, I would too. Except when other people cast stones about the above, I know I wouldn't be able to come up with any counter arguments, except to sigh and say, "The heart wants what it wants."

Having recently defended the use of Wilco's music in VW ads (by comparing them to Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Mozart who all had wealthy patrons) -- I was musing to myself at which point I would consider Wilco/Jeff Tweedy to be sell-outs.

Three points of no return might be:

1) Jeff Tweedy (or any of the band members) launching a "celebrity scent."

2) Any of the band members being a guest judge on American Idol. (Although, depending on their judging styles I would likely forgive this.)

3) Any of them starring in an MTV reality show. ("Meet the Miller-Tweedys," a la the Osbournes.)

I'm NOT saying that any of these wouldn't be commercially viable, of course...

I'm curious to see where everyone else draws the line. (Or whether that line was crossed long ago, but you still love Wilco anyway.)

At first I thought this was incorrect [double albums counting as two] but this article clears things up a bit:

 

http://idolator.com/5051293/toppling-the-wall-the-farce-of-double+counting-in-the-riaas-all+time-platinum-list

And by the same token, Kicking Television, also a double album, sold the least (hard)copies...

Are Being There's sales numbers boosted by the fact that it's a double album? Don't they count one sale as two, essentially?

Good point. Especially since it's priced the same as the usual one-CD albums.

Yeah, I guess it's been all of like three weeks since the last album ranking thread.

I am a sporadic participant on the forum; shoulda done a search of topics first. Oops.

But the poll graphic is informative, no? Especially juxtaposed against actual album sales figures, as a comparison of the fan forum against "real world" consumers.

Here's my ranking

1) Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2) Sky Blue Sky

3) Summerteeth

4) A Ghost is Born

5) Being There

6) Wilco (The Album)

7) A.M.

8) Kicking Television

Choosing a favorite Wilco album is like being asked to choose a favorite child. On different days I might favor one slightly more than the others, but I love each of them in their own unique way.

Could you add the option of "none of the above" in the second poll? It wouldn't let me vote unless I voted in both polls and since I've not met any of the members listed in the second poll, I can't vote.

Ok. Fixed it. Please cast your ballot!

(Sad about Massachusetts today, so felt like designing a couple of polls where I'll be happy with the outcome, regardless.)

Wilco has released a total of eight albums. Below are the eight, listed in chronological order, each followed by their ranking in terms of album sales. (Please note that in the age of downloading single tracks, album sales may not mean much, but are provided here for anecdotal reference.)

Please rank them in order of your personal preference.

1) A.M. (1995) --> #6

2) Being There (1996) --> #3

3) Summerteeth (1999) --> #5

4) Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) --> #1

5) A Ghost is Born (2004) --> #2

6) Kicking Television (2005) --> #7

7) Sky Blue Sky (2007) -- #4

8) Wilco (The Album) (2009)--> #8

I was listening to the Beatles a couple of weeks ago, and heard a riff in Lady Madonna that is used at the beginning of Hoodoo Voodoo. This musical reference is probably not news to many of you here, but that realization set off a whole chain of association that made a favorite song even greater for me.

I am a fan of Woodie Guthrie, and love his songs for children. My two little guys and I love "Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_to_Grow_on_for_Mother_and_Child) I know from the lyrics of Hoodoo Voodoo that Guthrie must have written it as a children's song. I love the way Wilco does it: we always do dance a goofy dance when we listen to it in our house.

After hearing the Lady Madonna reference, I started to "hear" the lyrics of that Beatles' song, about a single mother in poverty trying to feed her kids, when I listen to Hoodoo Voodoo:

Lady Madonna, children at your feet

Wonder how you manage to make ends meet

Who finds the money when you pay the rent

Did you think that money was heaven sent

...

Lady Madonna, baby at your breast

Wonder how you manage to feed the rest

Lady Madonna, lying on the bed

Listen to the music playing in your head

And that, reminded me of the fabulous iconic Dust Bowl photograph "Migrant Mother" (1936) by Dorothea Lange.

Lange said this about the photo:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960)

Woodie Guthrie is also known as "The Dust Bowl Troubadour" -- and that seven-or-so seconds of Beatles' reference did something magic for me, contextualizing the sad economic times that happy song was written in. It makes me want to give my kids a hug. Now when I listen to Hoodoo Voodoo, I think of how Guthrie must have loved his kids, though thick and thin, and wanted them to have a happy childhood even in the worst of times.

I don't even know if it was intentional on Wilco's part, but anyway. I love that song even more. And I was loving it way too much as it was. My heart can hardly contain it. I had to share.

I would cast Jason Bateman as Glenn Kotche in the Wilco Rock-u-drama.

I have a feeling Twitter is holding things up. There are still a LOT of bugs with it. Last week it was apparently hacked by Iranians: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/18/twitter.hacked/index.html.

I entered some haikus via Twitter, and my username (like_a_version) was hijacked, so I ended up removing all of my tweets.

Here is my favorite of my own entries. It wants an audience.

To tenderize steak,

try pounding the cold, raw slabs

to "Bull Black Nova."

(Is that you, Mr. Jorgensen? In drag?)

Wow! That screenshot says it all.

I am convinced that we are breeding a new race of cyborgs, whose nervous systems are connected to the physical world via electronic gadgets. Reminds me of something I read by Marshall "the Medium is the Message" McLuhan.

Here is his interview in Playboy (March 1969):

http://www.playboy.com/articles/marshall-mcluhan-playboy-interview/index.html

Back then, people DID buy Playboy for the articles! And, a reminder that our grandparents, who were around when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, probably thought TV and rock and roll were the harbingers of the apocalypse.

"Every generation thinks it's the last, thinks it's the end of the world."

I'm guilty of it also, its rubbernecking basically, and the better stories tend to be the ongoing car crashes like the bald, lunatic Britney / Lilo / Brangelina /Tiger Woods / Casey Anthony / etc. It's hard to turn away from lives that are spiralling out of control

When I interned at a major network news magazine show a few years ago, I researched potential stories and wrote up pitches. They told me that the best stories (for ratings) were "when bad things happen to the rich or the beautiful."

Story pitches about bad/sad things that happened to ugly, poor people would be shot down, and never make it to air. Some stories about good things happening to poor people were OK'ed, but not if they were distractingly unattractive.

I went into TV hoping to make good TV, but in the end, the ratings trumped superior content. We can't simultaneously blame (verbally) and reward (with our eyeballs) people for making what we like to watch in a capitalist/democratic system.

I've also lived in countries where the government made TV, and it was all propaganda, all the time. That was poor in content and entertainment value. Where there IS a choice, I blame the viewers for bad TV.

So, I blame myself, for people videoing at Wilco shows then putting them on youtube, because, dang, I love watching it.

Isn't that what this thread is about, someone not being able to tape their experience for later reflection.

 

 

Meanwhile, while autoethnography may be a new thing (it sounds sort of bogus to me...), what is not new is autobiography, which is basically the same thing and is suspect as well, but terribly entertaining and enlightening about someone's state of mind.

 

Wanted to clarify, for the record:

I started this thread NOT to justify reliving my own concert experiences through badly made videos, but because I find it interesting to look at other people's badly made videos.

The main difference between autobiography and auto-ethnography is, if members of Wilco make a video about Wilco, or a fan films him/herself (not Wilco), that would be autobiography.

That does not make it any less worthwhile as a document to be studied when doing an ethnographic study of a group of people, just one that you need to treat with caution and skepticism.

They don't give an accurate picture of individuals. But taken collectively, auto-ethnographies reveal the values of a community or society precisely because they are self-censored and self-edited. Officially sanctioned videos or publicity materials are edited to represent the ideals of the artist or the record companies. They all paint parts of a bigger picture of the times we live in.

Decades (or centuries) from now, people might look at Youtube videos and get an inkling for the sort of things that had cultural credibility among the population that used that medium.

And by the people. Check it out. PM me if you want anything; I'm Lauren from the "Aquiring Discs" section of the site.

O brave new world!

Thanks.

It's either footage from The DVD Project, so I already have it, or if the video and sound aren't both bad, one of them makes the footage unwatchable.

What is "The DVD Project"? Is it for The People?

 

This must be the most self absorbed generation ever.....

 

Indie rock culture is faux culture. Studying Bruce Springsteen, all good I suppose, fun enough, but please, I really don't need to know in any depth how people feel about Wilco, particularly in some bogus academic terms.

 

Time to reintegrate your personality and get on with it, and maybe find a cure for cancer or a way towards world peace, not question why Jeff Tweedy doesn't want crappy vids of himself passed around. That seems pretty self evident.

 

I don' think indie rock culture is "faux" culture. As an outsider, I find it quintessentially American and absolutely fascinating. I like it, but don't feel a part of it. I study it, the way some Americans study kabuki, or haiku (!) in its original form.

English is not my mother tongue. I feel bad that these "academic terms" exclude you. I forget who I am talking to on these here internets: the default assumption is that we are talking to someone much like ourselves, in our own heads.

I am sure you are not as "self-absorbed" as I am.

I'm surprised that you assume I am not doing my part to promote world peace. For all you know, I just might move in diplomatic circles here and abroad.

Peace to you, LouieB., and happy holidays.

If someone doesn't want you auto-ethnographying in certain places - which so many policies and laws prohibit you from doing - then you don't. Too bad.

I agree with this part. But disagree that "everything we do is auto-ethnography." Ethnography entails documenting. If you take a crap in the toilet, for instance, that may be future fodder for archeologists, but is not ethnography.

Let's not deny the hypocrisy of poo-pooing people for videoing, but then watching them ourselves on Youtube. Being the "demand," and then turning around to blame the "suppliers" feels as wrong as denouncing prostitution if you are a john. I look it up, and I like it. I feel badly about harshing on people who tape, for that reason.

So, great for anyone out there who's never looked that stuff up. How Christian of you!

I think devotion to popular bands in certainly worth anthropological study if you're into that (I did my senior thesis on Jandek fans, in fact), but there definitely comes a point at which studying them is more than a little absurd.

Would love to read your thesis. And thanks for the book recommendations. I love deconstructing Western popular culture through anthropology.

And, here, from Oliver Sacks' (neurologist who wrote The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) book Musicophilia:

"In all societies, a primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together. People sing together and dance together in every culture, and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago. This primal role of music is lost today, when we have a special class of composers and performers, with the rest of us often reduced to passive listening. We have to go to a concert, a church or a musical festival to reexperience music as a social activity, to recapture the collective excitement and bonding of music."

American Samoa

Andorra

Argentina

Australia

Austria

Bahamas, The

Barbados

Belgium

Belize

Bosnia and Herzogovina

Brazil

Bulgaria

Canada (Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island)

Chile

China

Costa Rica

Croatia

Czech Republic

Czechoslovakia

Denmark

Ecuador

Egypt

Estonia

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Guam

Guatemala

Hong Kong

Hungary

Iceland

Indonesia

Israel

Ireland

Italy

Jamaica

Japan

Jordan

Korea, North

Korea, South

Kyrgystan

Latvia

Liechtenstein

Lithuania

Luxemborg

Malaysia

Mexico

Monaco

Morrocco

Netherlands

New Zealand

Norway

Peru

Philippines

Poland

Portugal

Romania

Russia

San Marino

Serbia

Slovakia

Slovenia

Spain

Sweden

Switzerland

Syria

Taiwan

Thailand

Turkey

U.S.S.R.

United Kingdom

United States

Uruguay

Vatican City

Vietnam

Virgin Islands

Wales

Yugoslavia

**************************

Added: Hong Kong, Korea (North and South), Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam.

where did you naturalize from?

I was born in Taiwan (a former Japanese colony populated by ethnic Chinese from Southern China), but grew up all over the place, chunks of it Connecticut and California.

I've been based in Dublin, Ireland for the last four years, though.