The Bad News First ...

There’s been much ado about the decision earlier this month by the Library of Congress’ Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) to significantly raise the per-song royalties paid by Internet broadcasters to copyright holders and performing artists. The ruling would raise rates from .07 cents per performance (or streamed song) in 2005, to .08 cents affective retroactively beginning Jan. 1, 2006. The CRB also stipulated that these rates increase over the next three years, peaking at .19 cents by 2010. Crucially, these new rules provide no exemption for small commercial webcasters seeking to pay royalties based on a percentage of their revenue rather than on a per-song basis. Nearly all involved, except of course SoundExchange, the non-profit organization who receives each webcaster’s royalty payments and distributes them to artists and copyright owners, agree that CRB’s ruling, if unchanged, marks the end of today’s internet radio boom. (See David Oxenford’s Broadcast Law Blog for insightful commentary. Oxenford is a partner at David Wright Tremaine, the firm who represented internet radio broadcasters in the recent debates with the CRB.)

Much less has been said about the investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) into the payola practices of media bad-boys Clear Channel Communications, CBS Radio, Citadel Broadcasting and others. The FCC is very close to administrating fines in the ballpark of $12 million for these companies’ long-standing “pay-to-play” transgressions. As part of the proposed settlement, stations owned by these media conglomerates would also be forced to open up 8,400 half-hour blocks of air-time to musicians from independent and small labels. (See Paul F. Roberts’ recent Salon piece, “The fate of indie music as we know it” for more details.)

While the CRB’s ruling may strike terror in the hearts of webstreamers like Pandora, and rightly so, at least the FCC proves that the federal government isn’t entirely heartless, at least when it comes to traditional radio.

Slim Shady and Your Medial Prefrontal Cortex

In a limited sense, we all have an idea of what happens to us when we listen to our favorite (or most hated) pop music. We understand the “what” in physical terms – the hip thrusts, air drumming, or the great and glorious rawk face. (You know you’ve seen them along St. Mark’s, those insurgent grimaces, those yearnings to plug in. Or maybe I’m giving myself away here.) We also understand it in psychological terms. Led Zepplin or Prince may not rule your iPod these days, but every time you hear “Heartbreaker” or “Raspberry Beret,” you’re helplessly returned to your high-school bedroom or your buddy’s basement.

But according to Dr. Daniel Levitin, this common understanding doesn’t even scratch the service. In a recent Rolling Stone piece entitled “Music Under the Microscope,” author Even Serpick chronicles Levitin’s efforts to reveal the precise neurological response to musical stimulation. At Montreal’s McGill University Levitin used MRI machines to monitor people’s responses to everything from Beethoven to Ludacris in an effort to track what parts of the brain are engaged by which tunes. His conclusions are compiled in his recent book, “This is Your Brain on Music.”

Serpick takes one for the team and goes under the MRI as he listens to Mozart, James Brown, and Eminem. The results aren’t particularly surprising: Mozart lights up the primary auditory cortex, the part responsible for interpreting pitch and timbre; Brown ignites the cerebellum, the branch in control of basic motor skills and emotional response; Eminem sparks the parts of Serpick’s brain responsible for language (and, one imagines, hate speech). Still, anyone working to uncover the connection between neurology and pop music, particularly one who has a background in the industry, without reducing music’s incomparable pleasures to mere chemicals should be applauded.

Unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me find the article online, but you’d do well to pick up the latest Rolling Stone (if for no other reason) and check it out.

And now . . . well, I couldn’t resist. This is an MRI scan of a child’s brain tumor (poor kid):

Pump “Fergalicous” into my ears and you’d see the same damn thing.

Harmony on the Bowery

I suppose it was a reunion of sorts – my first show at the Bowery Ballroom since moving to New York last summer. That fall, I had seen Oslo’s Serena Maneesh act out their sordid heroin-chic-cum-psych-rock fantasies all over the Bowery stage. The bass player looked like Nico – but taller. She played three notes. Lead-singer and guitarist, Emil Nikolaisen, divided his time between wrestling with the scarves that kept getting tangled in his six-string and the guitar-player that kept rolling into his mic-stand. It was a great shambling mess, and not a bad show either.

Last Wednesday, I returned to the sold out Bowery to see Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear play the last show of their tour. The quartet was as tight as a Boeing’s cabin at 30,000 feet, and it was a phenomenal show. The boys play a technically ambitious brand of folk which they strap to the chromatic melodicism of a Danny Elfman film score. On records like last year’s beloved Yellow House, this comes off as lo-fi freak-folk experimentation with oodles of horns, tape loops, and found sounds burbling in the corners of their eerie tunes. One wondered how Grizzly Bear would ever pull it all off live. Their tour-capping gig at the Bowery certainly answered that question.

While Serena Maneesh looked like Burberry models checking themselves into rehab, the four mild-mannered guys in Grizzly Bear looked like boy scouts checking themselves into choir practice. And they sang like it too. At the Bowery, guitarist Daniel Rossen and multi-instrumentalist Ed Droste tossed off towering harmonies over a sea of reverb as easily as they could have tied a figure-eight not – which is precisely what Rossen did with his exquisite guitar-playing. In their sweaters and collars, the boys seemed as homey as your mother’s milk ’n’ cookies (which is not surprising given that they recorded Yellow House in the living room of Droste’s mom’s place just off Cape Cod), but they played like road-callused musicians. Grizzly Bear never let the inherently woozy material wander off course or the reverb drown out the pop hooks gleaming in each tune. We all stumbled into the frigid night humming and happy.

Née-met at Night

I usually listen to WQXR (96.3 FM), the New York Times’ classical music station, when I’m working at home. This isn’t embarrassing. When I’m being “productive” I don’t want to be “distracted” and the yawning gaps in my classical music knowledge ensure that all those lilting strings and bleating horns stay firmly in the background. But WQXR has a late-night dj. Her name is Nimet Habachy, she knows four languages fluently (English, Arabic, French, and Italian), and she pronounces her first name with the care and delicacy of a waitress in a $100-a-plate French restaurant listing the final, crucial ingredient in some obscure white wine sauce - “Née-met.” I love her. I find her very distracting. This is very embarrassing.

Her show is called New York at Night and it runs from midnight to 5:30am every weeknight. Ms. Habachy (I will call her respectfully “Née-met” for the remainder), born and bred in Cairo, has been gracing New York’s insomniacs with her deliciously cosmopolitan voice since 1982. She generally spins the standards – Debussy (“De-bú-see”), Mozart (“Mo-zart”), Chopin (“Cho-pa”) – and admirably so. But it isn’t the music that’s interesting about this former language coach. It’s Née-met’s super-sophisticated affect, her un-self-conscious self-consciousness that makes her seem like some relic of 1940’s Manhattan. She’s straight out of some Bogart or Clark Gable flick. Her on-air presentation is as blissfully archaic as a soft-focus wedding photograph of your grandmother . . . And so is her bio photo online.

Née-met speaks of using those wee hours to comfort people in great periods of mourning or sickness. This is admirable I suppose – whatever it takes to justify heading in to the office at 11:30pm every night. As for myself, neither grief-stricken nor bed-ridden, I prefer to use Née-met for a different purpose – as a healthy, though no less guilty, distraction from the pains of graduate journalism school. I wonder how Née-met would pronounce “query” . . .