HOME | BIO | MUSIC | JOURNEYS BY DJ | STUDIO BLOG | POLITICAL BLOG | BOOKING INFO | CONTACT

Via Andrew Sullivan, it looks like the urban legend about Van Halen's infamous "no brown M&M's in our dressing room" rider is actually true. But that's not the best part. This is:

While the underlined rider entry has often been described as an example of rock excess, the outlandish demand of multimillionaires, the group has said the M&M provision was included to make sure that promoters had actually read its lengthy rider. If brown M&M's were in the backstage candy bowl, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance--lighting, staging, security, ticketing--may have been botched by an inattentive promoter.

I honestly don't know why I didn't think of something like that for my own rider back when I was a touring DJ. It's absolutely brilliant. Include some small but symbolic request, an use it as your canary in the coal mine. Given how often things went wrong once you got to the venue, its a brilliant strategy.

I can't help but wonder if some of the nutty riders other DJs used included these sorts of provisions. Boy George, for example, was famous for including a very rare brand of yoghurt that no one ever actually saw him eat. But maybe eating it wasn't the point.

You're not dreaming. This is for real:

Obvious joke made by everyone today: Martha has spent more time in prison than Calvin.

Also: Why don't I have a robot chain?

And: I've got to transcribe "Snoop's Tips on Fatherhood" for future reference:

1. Know when to lie to your kids.
2. Know when to be mean, and know when to be a friend.
3. Always stay in control.
4. Serve 'em juice, but hold the gin.
5. When the kids give you attitude, pop 'em like its hot.

And: Did Martha understand why he laughed when she said "We don't have black pepper. We have white pepper."

Last but most certainly not least: When do I get my recipe for Snoop's chicken wings? I mean, c'mon.... don't tease!

Best music video I've seen in a long time. Big up Hospital massive!

All Hell Is Breaking Loose from Hospital Records on Vimeo.

Best Drum & Bass album since the last London Elektricity album. Don't sleep!

I'm watching the Cosmos marathon on the Science Channel today, and in the episode about the Voyager spacecraft I learned something that I somehow missed up until now. And now that I know it, I don't know how I could have possibly missed this before.

I knew that Voyager carries with it a small pictogram with basic information about our planet. I did not know, however, that this pictogram is etched into a gold record sleeve, and that within that sleeve is an actual gold record

Here's how NASA describes its contents:

The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music.

Wikipedia, of course, has the full tracklisting. The two selections from the US? They're tunes from Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson. Well done, Dr. Sagan.

But here's what might be the very best part:

Sagan had originally asked for permission to include "Here Comes the Sun" from the Beatles' album Abbey Road. While the Beatles favoured it, EMI opposed it and the song was not included.

In the future, whenever I try to explain to someone why the corporatization of music is one of the worst things to happen in art history, I now have the perfect anecdote. If ever there was a story that demonstrated just how evil major labels truly are, this is it.

Unbelievable. And it was even EMI....

Ta-Nehisi, my new favorite blogger, has a hilarious post about "the scared art of giving dap." Here's a small part:

...one of the more awkward moments in black life occurs when two brothers greet each other and one isn't sure whether to use the open hand or the closed fist. You can end up with some pretty awkward exchanges--like shaking a dude's fist. Anyway, the place where "dap" is most likely to be transmitted to other ethnicities is in athletic competition. So the mere fact that many of the cats who are questioning its origins are citing their encounters with dap in competition kind of makes me think I'm right.

When I got my first job around white folks, in the mid-90s, I had to stop myself from shaking my co-worker's hands every time I saw him, as was normal among the brothers. This has changed over the years, I think, with black culture going mainstream. So when I was working at TIME, for instance, I had some white friends who I shook hands with every time I saw them, because they were acculturated. Others I didn't because they weren't. But I shook hands with every brother I saw, whenever I saw him for the first time during the day. And then maybe again during the course of conversation. And then maybe again when I left. It just depended.

You think shifting from a culture of hand shaking to non-handshaking is hard? You should try moving in and out of the rave culture in the mid-1990s. This is before the cultural transformation that he's talking about here. And among ravers (and yes, there were many more of us out there than you might think), we didn't shake hands with everyone. We hugged them. Hug to say hello. Hug to say goodbye. Hug. Hug. Hug. It was automatic.

And not just at raves, either. Inside or outside, on the street, at work, it didn't matter. It was normal and expected. For us. But, well... not for the rest of the world. You want to know awkward? Try hugging a fellow raver/co-worker when you run into them at a corporate meeting. I promise you that you will only make that mistake once.