Okay, I’d like to take this opportunity to make a public service announcement. Trent Reznor announced that he was giving away free downloads of his new Strobelight album, produced by Timbaland, on April first. This seemed both hilarious and topical as Blue Blood has covered goth-industrial music since 1992 and even the Blue Blood precursor BLT ::: Black Leather Times had press coverage in that vein.

Although the email collection form on the Nine Inch Nails site did not request any financial information, NIN.com did bear the statement, “Your credit card will be charged $18.98 plus a $10 digital delivery convenience fee.” Apparently there are a lot of savvy consumers out there because, after we posted the feature and told Blue Blood’s sixty thousand close personal MySpace friends about the NIN article and opportunity for the download, we were deluged with messages and emails from angry consumers.

It seems that a lot of you are able to figure out from the fine print that you may not be getting a free lunch. You are apparently not capable, however, of reading a calendar. Allow me to repeat my previous statement with needed emphasis: Trent Reznor announced that he was giving away free downloads of his new Strobelight album, produced by Timbaland, on April first. The Strobelight album download announcement was an April Fool’s joke and I thought it was an awfully witty one, particularly when you read through the track listing.

You know how you are clever enough not to be sold on a refreshing and tasty beverage by some slick television commercial with hot chicks in it? And you know how this means that the beverage industry has sent a fleet of hot chicks out to bars to pretend they like you while telling you they totally love Bacardi or Red Bull or whatever? Or did you think you suddenly turned into more of a chick magnet, like it used to be that gothic and punk girls loved you, but now trim blondes seem like they crave your dick and it is awesome. Although you have yet to close with one.

Basically, my comment on this is that sometimes, when you try to hard to be a savvy consumer, you miss the actual joke. Please stop sending me hate mail over your inaccurately perceived concerns about Trent Reznor’s fictional album release. It’s a joke, an April Fool’s prank. Trent Reznor’s comment on this is, “I may have to actually write “pussygrinder”! Anybody have Sheryl Crow’s #?”

Trent Reznor announced today that his whole new album Strobelight is available for download on the Nine Inch Nails web site. The following song list contains a who’s who of people who guest on other people’s tracks.

track list:

1. intro skit
2. everybody’s doing it (featuring chris martin, jay-z AND bono)
3. black t-shirt
4. pussygrinder (featuring sheryl crow)
5. coffin on the dancefloor
6. this rhythm is infected
7. slide to the dark side
8. even closer (featuring justin timberlake and maynard james keenan)
9. on the list (she’s not)
10. clap trap crack slap
11. laid, paid and played (featuring fergie of the black eyed peas and al jourgensen)
12. feel like being dead again
13. still hurts (featuring alicia keys)
14. outro skit

Here are the instructions from the NIN site to get your absolutely free free free goth-industrial album via download, before it is available anywhere else:

“To download NIN’s new full-length album Strobe Light, PRODUCED BY TIMBALAND, enter a valid email address . . . A download link will be sent to you immediately. Your credit card will be charged $18.98 plus a $10 digital delivery convenience fee. Your files will arrive as windows media files playable on quite a few players with your name embedded all over them just in case you lose them. You will also receive an exclusive photo and a free email account with our partner Google’s Gmail service.

Your email will be kept confidential and will not be used for spam, unless we can make some money selling it.”

So, per Trent Reznor, those are the sweet sweet terms you can get today for your very own free download of the new NIN Strobelight. After initially checking it out, I think “on the list (she’s not)” is my favorite little ditty, but let me know which you all enjoy most.

In response to the recent Adam Lambert photos post, Forrest Black commented on Adam Lambert’s performance during country week on American Idol, saying:

“I’m a big Cash fan and I really enjoyed Lambert’s rendition a lot. I thought it had the right level of heat. I expected something more Elvis country, but this was a version of the song I’d listen to again on purpose.”

On the show, at the time of the performance, American Idol judge Randy Jackson compared Adam Lambert’s rendition of “Ring of Fire” to Nine Inch Nails singing Johnny Cash. In point of fact, Johnny Cash sang NIN’s Hurt so Trent Reznor and Johnny Cash have collaborated. The cross-promo Johnny Cash and Trent Reznor did with the Hurt video was pretty awesome because it introduced a lot of each of their fans to great new music. The man in black and the man with a honey with head like hole black as your soul do have similar measures of anger and anguish and torment and insight in their work.

At any rate, Blue Blood has been receiving emails informing us that Adam Lambert’s American Idol performance of “Ring of Fire” was not his rendition at all. These emails then go on to detail erroneous “facts” which the writers appear to fervently believe.

The Random House Dictionary defines rendition as “an interpretation, as of a role or a piece of music”. The American Heritage Dictionary defines rendition as “An interpretation of a musical score or a dramatic piece, a performance of a musical or dramatic work”. Princeton University’s WordNet defines rendition as “a performance of a musical composition or a dramatic role, the act of interpreting something as expressed in an artistic performance”.

On American Idol, Adam Lambert told country singer (and American Idol performer coach for country week) Randy Travis that he had “found” an alternative arrangement for “Ring of Fire” which he liked. Use of the word found implies that it is not his own arrangement. Given the whole point of a pop idol is for them to be capable of working with composers and stylists and directors and photographers etc., while still bringing a lot of their own to the table, I’m pretty sure everyone on American Idol every season has help with every musical arrangement they use. The American Idol contestants are singing cover tunes, so they are being judged on singing ability and charisma and not on songwriting, lyrics, or composition.

In the judging episode this week, judge Randy Jackson referred to it as the Jeff Buckley arrangement. Randy Jackson may have meant that the arrangement was reminiscent of Jeff Buckley. Jeff Buckley does not appear to have ever done any official version of “Ring of Fire”, although we can’t vouch for what might have happened during drunk karaoke some time. Some people feel the arrangement was by genre-bending Doors-like band The Tea Party. Although whoever put the Middle Eastern-tinged take on “Ring of Fire” together may have been inspired by the Tea Party’s song “Sister Awake”, the Tea Party does not appear to have ever done any version of “Ring of Fire”. Although, once again, we can’t vouch for what might have happened during drunk karaoke some time. Some particularly pissed-off people on the internet seem to feel strongly that this particular version of “Ring of Fire” was the Dilana version from Rock Star Supernova. Yeah, I didn’t know what they were talking about either, even though this references a show which runs on CBS and I usually see what they are plugging because I watch CSI (only the Vegas one). Apparently Rock Star Supernova was a show where otherwise generally gainfully employed musicians Tommy Lee (Motley Crue, Methods of Mayhem, Sex Tap), Jason Newsted (Metallica), and Gilby Clarke (I know I’m supposed to say GNR, but I fucking loooooved Kill for Thrills.) form a supergroup and then hopefuls compete for who will join them. Apparently, Dilana was not the winner of the CBS reality show, but they took the runner-up on tour anyway. At any rate, her rendition of “Ring of Fire” is below, so you can judge the similarities for yourself.

Now it is kind of poetic to see people freaking out over who did the musical arrangement for a particular performance of the song Johnny Cash made famous. Partly there is the humor factor of watching folks with no idea what an arrangement even is try to debate technical aspects of music. I know I’m not qualified to do that, not being a musician and all myself, but apparently there are a lot of non-musicians who feel passionately up to the task of such a debate.

Most everyone knows that Johnny Cash sang the best-known version (rendition if you will) of “Ring of Fire”. He did not sing the first published version of the song, however, nor did he receive a songwriting credit on it. Anita Carter, Johnny Cash’s then-future sister-in-law, released her rendition of the song well before Johnny Cash did. Songwriter/band manager Merle Kilgore and Johnny Cash’s then-future wife June Carter are officially credited with writing “Ring of Fire”. In the movie, Walk the Line, there is a scene where June Carter is penning the tune and she said in interviews that the song came to her while she was driving around trying to figure out what to do about her irresistible attraction to this bad boy who was already married. Some conjecture that, because of her religious beliefs, June Carter might have also been literally afraid of the hellfire that might consume her for stealing a married man from his wife. Now that Johnny Cash, Merle Kilgore, and June Carter are all dead, there is a ferocious legal dispute over who really wrote “Ring of Fire”. Johnny Cash’s first wife Vivian Cash says in her memoir, I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny, that of course Johnny Cash wrote the song and he told her, at the time, that he was giving June Carter credit because he felt sorry for how broke she was. Former Johnny Cash backing musician Curly Lewis has testified that Johnny Cash and Merle Kilgore wrote the song together and the lyrics refer to June Carter’s ladyparts in specific. Personally, I want to watch the estate hearing where the judge has to listen to a tape of Curly Lewis saying “We got a female part involved . . . vagina is the ring of fire”.

So, anyway, everybody is clear that American Idol is a competition for who brings the best charisma, good looks, nice vocal timbre, and impressive range, right? Not a songwriting and composing competition for people who scorn covers. Good. I’m glad that is clear and I look forward to all your non-angry emails telling us you’ve seen the light.

Love is a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher

And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire
The ring of fire

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher

And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire
The ring of fire

The taste of love is sweet
When hearts like ours meet
I fell for you like a child
Oh, but the fire went wild

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
Cool new version of johnny cash
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire
The ring of fire

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down down, down down, down down
And the flames went higher higher higher

And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire
The ring of fire

And it burns, burns, burns

The ring of fire

The ring of fire
Oh yeah!
The ring of fire

Finding great new music is always a good thing. It seems like it should happen all the time in this glorious digital age we are living in. I mean, artists can go straight to fans without the intervention of stodgy labels and, because everybody can post their opinion online, the fans can be the ones to say whether they like something or not. That is the utopian ideal there anyway.

When people actually go looking for music today, I think it is actually often more difficult to find what one likes. Somehow modern distribution has made it so that a very few recording artists sell record-breaking amounts of swag and tunes. Many thousands of musicians who would once only have been heard by friends can now get out to hundreds of people who appreciate what they do. But the midlist bands seem to have disappeared. Where are the solid enjoyable bands, in the genres I enjoy, who once could definitely have charted high, but maybe wouldn’t be #1 on the charts?

Without major label support, mid-sized high quality bands can get really lost in a sea of user-generated content on sites like MySpace and YouTube. MySpace, for example, allows fan profiles, so NIN shows up five times on the first page of top industrial bands on MySpace. I enjoy Nine Inch Nails, but what if I am looking for similar bands I am not familiar with yet? More on YouTube in a moment.

Given how popular music magazines once were on the newsstand, why are music websites not more popular online? I know one thing I personally do not like is that most sites devoted to music are owned by one or another record label. While I realize that there are only really six significant media companies in the world and all, these record label-run music sites seem to only cover what is on their own labels. I do not know whether they think it would be unethical to seriously comment on music from multiple labels or whether they are competitive, but there are rarely reviews. There are independent exceptions to this, but most of them are very limited in reach. Generally, the only music news is about who is sleeping with who, who is in rehab, and who is having legal problems for their temper. If anyone has any good recommendations for music sites, I’d love to see them.

I admit that I usually come across new music in one of three ways. Number one, I get a press kit about a band. Number two, said new music is done by a friend of mine or occasionally a friend of a friend. Number three, I see a band play live with another band I already like or found out about via getting a press kit or a friend being in the band.

Today, I thought I’d cruise around YouTube to see if I could find some new bands to enjoy. I quickly discovered that there is no goth-industrial category on YouTube. The options, are rock, pop, indie & alternative, rap & hip-hop, R&B & soul, country & folk, blues, electronic, jazz, classical, world music, religious, and lastly more/other mostly for random soundtrack stuff and nonspecific lip-syncing. It is not terribly uncommon for there to either be no goth-industrial category or for a site like MySpace to have one category for gothic and another for industrial. But YouTube has no punk category either and that seems pretty odd.

So I guess the indie & alternative category is the one goth-industrial music videos would fall under. When I look at the most popular indie & alternative music videos of all time on YouTube, Marilyn Manson does make the front page with “Heart Shaped Glasses“. Yes, I know that if I were a “real” goth, then I would hate Marilyn Manson and say his music doesn’t count. Yes, I know that if I were a “real” Manson fan, then my favorite Marilyn Manson album would not be Mechanical Animals. Yes, I’ve heard that Marilyn Manson may have a bug up his butt about Blue Blood for not covering him way back when or something, but sometimes a PR agency called Nasty Little Man won’t get on everyone’s good side and I really did not care for the first track on Smells Like Children. I would have checked out the others, but NLM sent me a cassette instead of a CD at a time when CDs were the norm. But I digress. If one wishes to debate whether Marilyn Manson’s artistic and political motivations come from the same creative place as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry and Combichrist, that is certainly a discussion and a half. But I’m pretty sure that finding Manson in the indie & alternative category on YouTube means that is the cat where goth-industrial bands would be, if they had any traction on YouTube.

Clocking in higher-ranked than “Heart Shaped Glasses” are My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Boys Like Girls, Boys Like Girls, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Good Charlotte. For me, My Chemical Romance has their moments and I like some of the later styling on their lead singer, and Lord knows not enough bands dress like that today, but I would never have expected that the most watched indie & alternative music video ever would be a song about fearing teenagers by Warner Bros recording artist My Chemical Romance with 54,130,096 views. I occasionally slow down the TiVo fast forward on video countdown shows on FUSE to watch Fall Out Boy videos. I find the stuff by Universal Music Group recording artist Fall Out Boy much more visually interesting than most of what plays on those shows, but they seem to view the world as a bleak place where nobody has anybody else’s back so you’d better just look out for number one. I find Fall Out Boy’s worldview negative in a depressing way. I’m not familiar with Sony recording artist Boys Like Girls. I enjoy Sony recording artist Good Charlotte. I’ve been ironically amused watching them evolve from “Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous” not understanding how any successful musician could complain in the Rolling Stone to “The River” where they realize that Hollywood tinsel is not genuine precious metal.

I suspect that, if I were to go down the whole all time countdown for indie & alternative on YouTube, I’d be seeing a lot of Warner, Universal, and Sony. This is not to say that tools like MySpace and YouTube can not greatly increase the social and professional reach of the individual and the little guy. They can and they do. They just also increase the reach of the big guy.

I’m okay with this. I’ve worked on a lot of successful web sites and magazines, so it makes sense that I’ve learned some things along the way and would be likely to be successful with future media projects. A record label which has worked on a huuuuuuuuge number of successful bands has probably learned some things along the way and would be likely to be successful launching future bands.

But I am troubled by the big guy pretending to be the indie little guy to make sales. Sometimes fans seem to have the notion that, because modern emo music deals with themes of feeling like the underdog, then emo bands must all be underdogs. I know that, in the movies, audiences are supposed to want the person who has worked hard all their life and always been successful to fail and the longshot who just started training to succeed. News bulletin: Warner Bros, Universal Music Group, and Sony BMG are not longshot underdogs looking for their first big break.

Maybe, if consumers did not ask large media conglomerates to be misleading and present faux underdogs, then they would not. Maybe it would be helpful if record labels and bands approached music press like professionals. Maybe it would be helpful if music journalists behaved like professionals instead of like envious gossipy children or corrupt businesspeople. Then it might be easier to find new good music. Or maybe humans are just evolutionarily incapable of adapting to the intense infostream of the internet and we are going to go the way of the dinosaurs and get extinct now.

Sorta felt like listening to some cool new music tonight. Oh well. I wrote this instead. (Note to illuminati: it might be advisable to send me some good new stuff to enjoy (or a gold parachute), before I give all the secrets away.)

In recent years, I realize I have shied away from talking about certain topics such as feminism or sexuality or even actual products. This is kind of odd as these were certainly pretty cornerstone issues which were, not only covered in Blue Blood in the past, but were instrumental in why I wanted to do it in the first place.

I feel like feminism on the net, particularly when associated with the site genre dubiously dubbed altporn, is pretty much a mockery. The language has been so co-opted by people who don’t mean it, or even understand it, that the whole thing pretty much makes me sick. It definitely makes me want to disassociate myself from the whole thing, but do I really want to change my life and who I am because someone fake pretended to be like me? Probably not such a good idea.

One of the difficulties involved with feminist politics in 2007 is that it seems to be in vogue to attack people on a personal level, rather than to debate the issues. I see that most people deal with personal attacks by either defending their personal lives or correcting misimpressions about their personal lives. I think that people should pay attention to and debate the actual point and not deconstruct details which are merely specific to the person bringing a broader feminist or other issue up.

I think any artist has to give of themselves, to a certain extent, in order to create. But the global communication networks we live with today make it so difficult to maintain the slightest shred of privacy. Reality show programming and tabloid journalism put into the zeitgeist the notion that the world is entitled to know really personal things about anyone remotely famous. This makes me want to, not only avoid being famous, but move to a farm in Montana. The main thing which prevents me from doing this is the knowledge that it is terribly cliche for a Los Angeles person to buy a spread to get away from it all. That and the simple fact that pretty much no place today is really remote enough to truly get away from it all.

But it is difficult to talk about sex in this type of media climate while maintaining one’s personal privacy and avoiding becoming a public figure. But sharing any private moments in this world is like entering into a BDSM relationship with a room full of strangers who don’t believe in safewords. Sometimes, I believe a person should be entitled to say, hey, this is just for me and not the public. I believe in a fundamental right to privacy.

Lastly, various marketers have disseminated the notion that, if anyone you’ve heard of either endorses or slags a product, then they must be corrupt and inaccurate. These are marketers who of course utilize something called WOM or word of mouth marketing. Just one example of what this often boils down to is a solitary lonely dude posting two hundred reviews on Amazon, with sixty different usernames, of a dozen books, not one of which he read. But, if someone with an actual journalistic pedigree gives an opinion, it is often dismissed as envy because they also wrote a book or some such nonsense. Note to the world: known journalists really do tend to have more valuable opinions than anonymous posters. For real.

I could probably have written three long treatises in place of this article. My primary point here is that feminism, sexuality, and pop culture products news and reviews used to be the main things I wrote about. The current media environment is one where the producers have become cynical and manipulative and the audience has become jaded and betrayed. It is difficult to express true and heartfelt opinions, knowing that marketers may be rushing to either pirate or discredit what is said and readers may be looking for spin in all the wrong places.

So, if I sounded like a feminist, would you hold it against me? If I talked about sex and sexuality, would you feel compelled to pry beyond my comfort zone? If I reviewed products I like, would you assume it was just for the advertising dollars? If I reviewed products I don’t like, would you believe that I was just envious?

I used to be above it. Now I’m down in it. But I don’t really want to lose my voice.

Over the years, I think Rolling Stone magazine has maintained a higher standard of journalism than most music rags. The majority of music publications are written by writers in the employ of publicists and most rarely have an article on topics other than a performer’s favorite color or fictional creative process. Although their musical tastes and mine are not always precisely the same, Rolling Stone is usually an example of what journalism ought to be.

A week or so ago writer Elizabeth Goodman did a brief piece for Rolling Stone’s online incarnation where she really blasted Trent Reznor. Full disclaimer: The Nine Inch Nails album Pretty Hate Machine pretty much changed my life. When the “Get Down, Make Love” single came out, I drove from DC to Chicago, partly so I could get it from Wax Trax before it was widely available. Some of this is a topic for another article, but I wanted to fully disclose where I’m coming from on this.

In the recent Rolling Stone piece, Elizabeth Goodman chortled about Trent Reznor not being allowed to be giddy with happiness, being goth and all. Reznor apparently confided to Rolling Stone that he had perhaps taken so long between albums because he had sort of lost his confidence and was too worried what people thought of him. The goth-industrial icon went on to explain that he felt he was developmentally past that and was likely to only improve as an artist. The writer quoted what he said and summed it up saying, “After tiring of patting his own back, Reznor went on to pontificate on another of his recent epiphanies.” A little harsh. Apparently, Reznor’s second epiphany was realizing that he didn’t care much for the twenty bands playing overly-generic, over-produced, whiny-ass emo songs he had heard on the radio and that he couldn’t much tell them apart. (Bad news Trent: most radio stations don’t really have a whole twenty bands in rotation at any given time.)

The artist went on to say that he was suspicious of the motives of why a guy might be trying to start a band today: “Is he trying to change the world and do something different and express himself…or is it because they want to fuck Paris Hilton and be photographed outside trendy restaurants?”

I think Trent is right. The nature of celebrity has changed so much. For example, I used to get so excited when a channel like HBO wanted to come shoot at my punk rock group house and interview me and Forrest Black, even though none of us had cable at the time. But HBO was not secretly trying to set up cameras in my house to catch me breaking it off with a lover or having an argument with a housemate about whose dishes were in the sink. (The dishes were mine; I use plastic now.) At the time, if HBO sent a production crew over, they were going to let me outline which areas were public and which were private, they were going to respect my wishes, and news was a straighforward interview, and not getting photographed with the wrong sex partner in a trendy restaurant.

The really cool thing about the Rolling Stone article is that it has enough rawness to be journalism. The cynic in me wonders if maybe it is not just a very very clever placed article, something designed to appeal to the sort of people who liked Pretty Hate Machine. But Elizabeth Goodman’s article feels like actual music journalism. She didn’t just write the same nonsense bullet points from a publicist which one normally sees in music articles these days. She held my interest. She may not have personally liked Trent, but she wrote her article in a way where readers could actually get a human feel for both the journalist and the journalistic subject.

So, kudos to Rolling Stone and Elizabeth Goodman and Trent Reznor for all still flying the flag.

Incidentally, Trent has been on the cover of Rolling Stone at least twice. I’m just sayin’.