One of the zanier aspects of the Internet is how people who would otherwise be disenfranchised are continuing to discover how it allows for thoughts, images, videos and sounds to be disseminated to nearly anyone at a cost that nearly everyone can afford. Welcome to the future: an egalitarian and global marketplace of ideas. Sounds great, right?
Well, not really. Far too often, the wonder of what the Internet could be is tarnished by its less glamorous reality: spam, viruses, pop-up ads, search engine manipulation, inarticulate rantings by basement-dwelling troglodytes made brave by way of anonymity, pornography, flamewars, reclusive cyber communities with arcane systems of communication that exclude outsiders as effectively as any gated community’s army of rentacops… It’s a scary place out there, one filled with minds that maybe, just maybe, you don’t really want to have a meeting with after all.
Then there are wonderful artists like the musicians listed below.
The Flaming Lips
One of the hippest of the hippest Indie bands, The Flaming Lips are probably still most famous for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. But they forever gained an even larger place in my heart when they put up a short album called Fearless Freaks online, available at no cost. It consists of a number of live tracks compiled to be given away at the premier of a documentary about the band.
Black Kites
It’s called All Wrong, but it sounds all right to me.* Trippy.
* Sorry. I could not resist.
Various Artists
Kill Rock Stars is one of those labels that can do no wrong, and it certainly does not hurt that reputation when they go and do things like posting a number of covers of Deerhoof songs up on their site.
Harvey Danger
I remember downloading this when it first came out a few years ago. It looks like their site has not been updated in a while, and that makes me sad. But the music on the album Little by Little is still pretty darn catchy, and a couple of the tracks are excellent.
Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot
Their album, Compensator for the Accelerator, is electronic, and I don’t really do electronic. But people seem to like them. Maybe you will too.
(Note that the name is not misspelled; they are indeed called Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot.)
Various Artists
Here we have OKX: A Tribute to OK Computer, an album consisting of covers of songs on Radiohead’s famous album OK Computer. So go get ‘em while the getting is good, okay?
(Computer.)**
** Sorry. Couldn’t resist that, either.