Courtney E. Smith

bookstalker:

Last fall I covered Courtney’s BookCourt event for the release of her book of music-related essays, Record Collecting for Girls. One of the things I noticed about Courtney was that even though she obviously knew way more about music than most, she never veered off into snobbery. In fact, she even read from her “guilty pleasures” chapter (which includes musings on the Pussycat Dolls). I totally admire Courtney for thriving in the still-mainly-male music industry—not to mention her mad music journalism skills and her ability to help discover/break new bands (Death Cab, Vampire Weekend, Justice). After the jump, Courtney shares some of her book touring tales, which include reading for her grandmother’s bridge club, discussing The Smiths with a cover band member, and feeling really bad for a certain children’s book author.

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So Nicki Minaj’s creative director for her Grammy performance is the women who used to be Lady Gaga’s creative director until they fell out last November, some think over an interview she gave admitting she’d created several of Gaga’s looks directly in homage to the point of ripping off Madonna.

If you were thinking Gaga or Madonna with the weird religious imagery when you saw Minaj at the Grammys, you were right.

Feeling rebloggy. And this is amazing. Linda was an Eastman originally, you know.

theswingingsixties:

Janis Joplin by Linda McCartney

J. Tillman “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”

Yes. Love.

Still writing this, all week long. Follow. I’m about to start telling really, really, really personal stories.

oneweekoneband:

If The Photo Album is, according to Ben Gibbard, one of their weakest albums (despite pushing the band to a wider audience than ever before) then The Stability EP is, according to me, their weakest EP. 

The band had became touring monsters in support of The Photo Album. More than press, interviews, or album sales their reputation was built on their live show. They released The Stability EP after a big tour with the Dismemberment Plan in 2002. Too much time on the road may have warped their sensibilities. The EP is a three-song dirge, ending with “Stability” — a whopping 12 minute track in which nothing much happens. It makes a second appearance, in edited and re-recorded form, at the end of Plans as “The Stable Song.” 

I find Death Cab’s recycling of material from EPs to albums (“Song for Kelly Huckabee” on the Forbidden Love EP and We Have the Facts, “Talking Bird” on Narrow Stairs and the demo reprised on The Open Door EP) to be an interesting sort of frugality. During the course of releasing Plans, bassist Nick Harmer mentioned to me how excited the band were to revisit “Stability”/”The Stable Song” so more people would hear it. There is a genuine sense of excitement among the band members about giving songs another look that makes the decision endearing. Put in the context of Plans, it’s not such a bad song.

And sandwiched in the middle of this EP is perhaps the strangest thing you can imagine. A cover of Bjork’s “All Is Full of Love.” Gibbard’s voice on it is so wrong that is might actually be right.

It is hard to think of a reason for this EP existing, other than as a new item to sell at the merch table.

oneweekoneband:

Thanks, Michelle!

Next week, we’ll take a look at veteran indie-poppers Death Cab for Cutie, and Courtney Smith will be our guide to do so.

Courtney was a long-time programmer at MTV and is the author of a collection of memoir-ish essays on being a music fan called Record Collecting for Girls. (And she’s on Tumblr as well…)

See you on Monday!

— Hendrik

R.I.P. Etta James, one hell of a lady. 

Just Pin me something interesting — pass along to a friend on Pinterest if you’ve already gotten yourself a copy. 

We love talking music with @JaredLeto of @30SecondsToMars. Very smart fellow…

— Twitter Music (@TwitterMusic) January 13, 2012

…and here’s a pic for all you @30SecondsToMars fans! cc: @JaredLeto twitter.com/TwitterMusic/s…

— Twitter Music (@TwitterMusic) January 13, 2012

…and that’s what’s wrong with Twitmusic. RT @TwitterMusic We love talking music with @JaredLeto of @30SecondsToMars. Very smart fellow

— Courtney E. Smith (@courtneyesmith) January 13, 2012

For the past one, maybe two, months there have been rumblings about Twitter having a new focus on music. I’ve kept one eye on it because I’m a person who has largely jettisoned Facebook in favor of Twitter for information gathering, although Facebook has drawn me back a little by integrating Spotify/Rdio/iheartradio because I’m nosy and I want to know what my friends are actually listening to as well as what they post that I should listen to. On the whole, though, I prefer to read Twitter. 

I found my way to following @Tatiana, the lady who identifies herself as working for Twitter handling music. But that seemed to be largely her personal account with some pictures of herself and artists. It simply wasn’t very interesting to me so when the official @TwitterMusic account appeared, I switched to following that. Thus far it seems to be a lot of far-away Twit Pics from concerts and a series of @ signs. If that’s the plan well okay, but you’re not doing anything to make me feel closer to the music. I do have the impression you’re all having a lot of fun and that’s nice but…what is all of that doing for me? Or any music fan?

I feel like I’m frustrated about this in the same way some people are irritated that Spin is dropping album reviews (or at least were irritated by the way it was announced when they had a moment to go think about it for awhile). I want more. The new stuff Twitter is doing that exports their platform to artists is pretty brilliant. But the way you’re handling music on your own platform so far is shallow and dull. And if anything, Christopher Weingarten’s @1000TimesYes album reviews account showed that talking music on Twitter could be entertaining, if not always informative, given the contraints of the medium. There’s very little that’s interesting or universal about “hey we’re at the M83 concert in LA tonight here’s a picture of where you’re not,” unless you’re someone I know personally. Also, isn’t that what Instagram is for? Not only are you vastly under utilizing embedded video or audio on Twitter for stuff like talking to artists but you don’t even seem to tap into the trending music topics on your own site. I spent Grammy announcement night on Twitter, talking about that show live with a lot of music critics and it was oh-so-very fun. I don’t think any of us knew you existed. You haven’t live Tweeted your reactions to an episode of Glee or The X Factor even once. Do you know how many fake Beatles and Beatles facts accounts there are on Twitter you could be RTing? I seriously hope you’re going to at least start conversing with Blake Shelton. This could be so much fun and so far it’s so…not.

@courtneyesmith talk to him about digital marketing and you might change that opinion. he knows the industry better than most.

— Twitter Music (@TwitterMusic) January 14, 2012

Okay, this is a little more interesting. Except saying someone is smart about music and saying they’re smart about music marketing/the industry are not interchangeable ideas. But I’m just relieved to get some insight into what the hell you’re talking about. But like…still, what did he say? What am I supposed to take away from this? How does it help me, the user, get to know Jared Leto better?

@courtneyesmith and what do you suppose I listen too?

— TruMofo₪ ø ||| ·o. (@heartofariot30) January 14, 2012

Hey Jared Leto, how’s it going? (Not Jared Leto) It’s been a few years, but we’ve met before — when I worked in music programming at MTV. In fact, I was your talent escort a few times for interviews you did for MTV2 and mtvU. I’ve sat there in person and heard to you talk about music and yet…I have no idea what you listen to. Nothing about this exchange cleared it up. So I got curious and Googled it. Apparently you take inspiration from Pink Floyd, Bjork, and Radiohead. And you know what I’d rather find out from Twitter? What you listened to today. Or what you said about marketing music. Or anything at all, absolutely anything that offered me some insight.

* I learned none of that from Twitter. And that is the problem with @TwitterMusic thus far, in my opinion. But you’re just getting started. Maybe this will get better, by and by. Or maybe not and I’ll just go back to my own universe on Twitter. I’ll be watching.

Just when I was thinking of them, Death Cab premiered a new video on Wired for “Underneath the Sycamore.” 

It features an animated hipster private eye. What makes him a hipster, exactly? 

Death Cab for Cutie “A Movie Script Ending”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this band because I’ll be writing about them for One Week, One Band soon. I’m in the early days at the moment and I can’t stop remembering the week when this video came in to MTV. I had to explain who they were and which show we should accept the video for. I had no idea such huge chunks of my career would come to hinge themselves around the success of this band.

It’s a lovely first video.

Who’s got two thumbs and can’t wait for 30 Rock to come back? THIS GIRL.

Hey 2012, nice to meet you.

What do you think this guys does if I say, “Sure, sounds good”?

Looking for just the right thing over the holidays while you watch the Yule Log on TV with your parents? I made a Spotify playlist of Xmas Oldies. Enjoy, get your mistletoe on traditional PG style.

I got to do something really cool last week. I produced a 2 hour long live online web show. We had six bands, live and semi-live. A host and two guests who co-hosted. 

I’ve worked at 5 VMAs in various positions (talent escort, running like a crazy person for performance approvals, red carpet interviews, once shadowing the show’s main talent exec) and 5 mtvU Woodie awards (again talent escort, identifying red carpet bands for the press, random running around, oh and I developed the concept for that whole show) so I’m not unfamiliar with the large scale live production with semi-live elements, but I’ve certainly never produced one entirely on my own. Making a rundown was more of a trip than I can tell you and it was pretty fun when the whole thing got thrown out the window and I started making it up as we went along.

But here’s what struck me the second I put my comms on: I had only met most of the crew that day and was having a hard time telling their voices apart. Because they were all men. No one had a problem recognizing my voice. I was the only woman on the headset. After the fact I realized all the bands on the show were all-male also. One of our guest hosts, who showed up unexpectedly and jumped right to work in front of the camera, was a woman. The demo for this show was by and large young females.

The production crew being all male is largely unremarkable, to be honest. You’ll get a female producer or director now and then, but by and large the crews most places I’ve worked have been all male. Except when I was in college and worked as a live camera operator for our local NBC affiliate on the local news. Of the 3 cameras, 2 were manned by women. Our director was often a woman, who let me also learn the chyron equipment. It is certainly avoidable if you put enough effort into it but that was the only experience I have had where production was even near to equal, when it came to gender. And it was in the summer of 1999.

At any rate, after last week’s event I got to talking with one of the guys on the production and we developed a show idea we want to pitch to VH1. Maybe I’ll insist they hire an all-female camera crew for that.

Yes yes, there will be music. If you’d like to see my top ten albums of 2011 list, point yourself to The Dumbing of America. They’ve got my list, as well as interesting ones from Peter Hook (New Order, Joy Division), Tyler Williams (The Head and The Heart), Ritzy (The Joy Formidable), Home Video, and several others.

Once I committed to that list, however, I couldn’t stop myself from making a playlist of my favorite songs in 2011 (subscribe on Spotify or Rdio). As we all drift back towards listening to singles and not albums, it’s a nice way to recognize things that were good but not good albums (er, M83 that means you). By far the best song of 2011, in my opinion, was James Blake’s “The Wilhelm Scream.” Masterfully arranged and produced. I find myself getting more into the b-sides of some once favorite artists and that is how a random Death Cab track ended up here. And yes, propers must be given to Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Beyonce for the absolutely great pop songs they released this year. 

I’ll have to give the crown of best movie in 2011 to Midnight In Paris. Which is saying something considering that I don’t even like most of Woody Allen’s oeuvre. Lambast away at that if you must.

In TV I’ll give my biggest nod for a new series to Game of Thrones. 

In books my favorites this year included Married to Bhutan by Linda Leaming and a slew of country music books I started in on for a project that weren’t released anywhere even close to 2011. 

Favorite Twitter feeds discovered this year include @brainpicker, @smithsonian, and @pulmyears.   

1. That Sam’s parents thought DQ paid as much as being a stripper.

2. That the Irish exchange student knew all (or any) of the words to “Red Solo Cup.”

3. That teenagers could quote lyrics to “Jack and Diane” by John Cougar Mellencamp. Or would even know that song.

4. The entire number by The Unitards.

5. That the audience was so enthusiastic that they gave multiple standing ovations before numbers were over.

6. That a Jackson family medley could change everything about a family’s value system. The irony alone is killer.