An open letter to BP’s PR department

Dear BP’s PR department:

First of all, let’s get one thing very, very clear before we go any further: your company has fucked up. Not “made a regrettable error” or “inadvertently” anything. You have caused a massive unnatural disaster. Right now, pretty much everybody on the planet hates your guts. There are guys in caves in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden, sitting around a radio playing the BBC World Service, going “Dude, seriously, fuck BP.”

I can’t imagine there’s anybody who doesn’t actually sit on your board of directors who doesn’t want to kick your asses right now. And by “you”, I mean “everybody who works for BP, including the PR department, the receptionists and probably the janitorial staff”.

So, now that we’ve got that out of the way….

I understand that it is your job to try and make BP’s relations with the public as optimal as possible. You want the public to love your company, to want to consume your products and make everybody a lot of money. You do this, by and large, by figuring out ways to make BP look like the coolest, most environmentally-conscious company in the world. This is a very difficult thing to do when you’re dumping gazillions of gallons of death sauce into the Gulf of Mexico. So you’re probably very busy right now.

One thing you might want to do, however, is to recognize that you’re going to have to ignore one of the basic tenets of public relations: what I mean is, you have to admit you’re wrong. Really, really wrong. Like, the only thing you could have done that was worse was to basically just light the fucking planet on fire while raping babies.

You also need to admit that you were completely careless and ignored your own engineers, who told you this was probably going to happen. You also ignored the fact that your oil well starting actually falling apart like Lindsey Lohan on a mescaline margarita in March, which might have alerted you to a problem.

We know why you did. You’re a corporation. Your job is to make money. And you were afraid you were going to not make as much money if you stopped and actually built an oil well that could actually do the job it was intended for. Let me underline that: there was never, ever any chance you’d lose money on this. You just might have made less money in the short term.

Look: you sell petroleum. You sell the one thing that every nation on the planet is willing to go to war to possess. You’re like Nino Brown in New Jack City, if the entire world was Chris Rock. You’re our momma, you’re our daddy, you’re our nigga in the alley. You’re our pusherman.

The worst that might have happened was that you spent a few million dollars shoring up the Deepwater Horizon, and then you would have gone on making lots more money because it wouldn’t have blown the fuck up. As far as the world is concerned, the only good thing about this spill is that every barrel of that oil is one less barrel you can make a profit on. You’re losing billions of dollars here.

Not that anybody feels sorry for you on that account, so don’t try that tack. It won’t work. In fact, there’s only really one strategy that will be at all effective in saving your company from a planet-wide boycott and bad press the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since Adolf and Eva did their William Tell routine in the bunker in 1945.

It’s very simple. It will work. Nobody will like you, but at least they won’t hate you to the point where they might actually pressure their governments into hounding you into bankruptcy and madness.

Just write a letter. I will even draft it for you. It needs to read something like this:

Dear Earth,

We fucked up. Badly. Very badly. We are completely and utterly horrified by what has happened. Every time we think of what our company’s greed for profit and carelessness has caused, we run to the toilet and puke. We drink a lot these days. Every time we see another picture of an oil-covered bird, we think about doing a full-on Jonestown thing here at BP HQ. Just put the toxin in the air vents and pump it into every office so we don’t have to live with the total horror and guilt for the incredibly awful thing that we specifically have caused to happen. Not to mention the people who died on the rig. That makes us sick whenever we look at ourselves in a mirror, which is why we’ve had all mirrors and reflective surfaces removed from BP HQ until this all gets resolved. We just can’t look at ourselves.

We have no excuses. We have no spin. We take full responsibility for this spill. It was our fault, nobody else’s. It was a completely avoidable accident, and we let it happen because we didn’t really give a shit. We figured that there was a pretty good chance this wouldn’t happen. We were so incredibly wrong. We are thoughtless and careless and greedy. We are grubby little pigs rooting at the teat of 21st century capitalism.

Here’s what we’re going to do to fix this problem: whatever it takes, whatever it costs, as quickly as possible. We are not going to try and save our own equipment or our revenue stream from this oil well, if doing so means that a single extra gallon of this shit burbles up into the Gulf. We know we’re simply going to take a massive loss here. We don’t care. Plugging that hole is our first priority. Everything else we do, all our business, comes second to this.

And once we finally do that, we’re going to spend as many billions of dollars as it takes to clean up our incredibly massive mess. We don’t put a limit on how much we want to earn, so we’re not going to put a limit on how much we’re going to spend. We’re going to usher in a new century of corporate responsibility.

In return, we hope that you understand that we fucked up, and that we’re going to do better in the future. We’re not going to cut corners, we’re going to be careful, and we’re going to keep bringing you this substance that you all rely on in a safe and ethical fashion. We hope that if we can make you truly believe that we’re doing everything we can, you might still buy our product.

Your friends, Beyond Petroleum

So, uh, yeah. I’d go with something like that.

Vaguely Mediterranean Vegetarian Barbecue Thingy

Main Ingredients

2 Portobello mushroom caps 1/2 onion (your choice of color) 1 red pepper 1 cup large couscous* 2 cups chicken broth 2 tablespoons real butter 1/4 cup oil (olive or corn will work)

1/2 cup of yogurt, plain

Barbecue Sauce 1/2 cup Worcestershire sauce 1 small can tomato paste (not sauce) 1/3 cup brown sugar five or six cilantro leaves Cumin Garlic powder Onion powder Black pepper Balsamic vinegar

Directions

First of all, let’s talk about the couscous. You don’t want the couscous they sell at Wal-Mart, the kind where the actual couscous bits are tiny like Malt-O-Meal. You want the kind where each individual couscou or whatever you call them are about the size of the pellets you load in a pellet gun, the kind you shoot vermin with. You can buy this at any reputable Mediterranean market. Look for places with names like “Marrakech” or “Abdul’s Market”.

Once you’ve obtained this, continue with the recipe. Go ahead. I’ll be waiting.

[…]

Ready?

Okay, first you want to slice the Portobello caps into strips about 1/3″ – 1/2″ wide. Think of how you’d cut steak or chicken for fajitas. Like that. Then chop the onion into rings and cut the rings in half. Finally, cut the red pepper into thinner strips.

Now, here’s the thing with the barbecue sauce — once you’ve got the Worcestershire, the tomato and the brown sugar, the rest is basically to taste. Throw it in a bowl and mix it thoroughly. It isn’t rocket science. Mix things until it tastes good to you. If it’s too thick, add a little more vinegar or Worcestershire. Balsamic vinegar is the Auto-Tune of cooking. It makes everything lovely.

Get a saucepan. Put it on medium high heat. Put the butter in it. When the butter is melted and sizzling, put the couscous in it. Yes, I’m serious. Sauté the couscous a bit, making sure to shift it around so you get all the sides of the little balls. When you feel you’ve accomplished this to a reasonable degree, pour in the two cups of chicken broth and cover it. Turn it to medium heat and let it cook. It will be done when the water is gone and the couscous is soft like rice.

Now that you’ve done this, take a big cast iron pan and put some olive oil in it. Put it on medium high heat as well. When the oil is all thin and shifty, throw the mushrooms, onions and red peppers in it. You want to sauté this stuff fairly well.

When it’s nice and sautéed, pour the barbecue sauce into the cast iron pan and mix everything around so it’s covered with sauce. Here’s the weird part — raise the temperature to high.

What will happen is that the sauce will begin to caramelize around the veggies. Be vigilant here. If you burn it, it will suck. Watch it the way you’d watch a junkie around your jewelry collection.

When it’s nice and thick and caramelized, turn off the heat and remove the cast iron skillet. The couscous ought to be done by this time, or pretty close.

When the couscous is done, take a big ladle and put a pile of it on your plate. Then take a big wide spoon and pour the barbecue sauce and veggies on top of it, like you would put spaghetti sauce on spaghetti.

Put a dollop of yogurt on top. Repeat for each diner in your party.

Enjoy.

Current Status: The New Album

I’ve started writing (which, since I use computers, also means “recording”) the second Red State Soundsystem album, which will probably either be called SPQR or The Big Darkness or possibly Senatus Populus Que Red State Soundsystem. (Probably not, though. But maybe.)

As a songwriter, one of the biggest problems I have is getting over my abject horror of being pretentious. My inner Colin Meloy is constantly getting the shit kicked out of him by my inner Iggy Pop. “But I want to write songs about Ada Lovelace!” says Colin. “Shut the fuck up and write some ROCK AND ROLL, YOU FUCKIN’ PUSSY!” says Iggy, and gives him a Glasgow kiss. So I always end up somewhere in between — as my buddy Alex points out, I mainly write midtempo gloomy shit.

It’s scary, though, to go for the grandiose stuff, because you run the risk of just looking like an asshole. (Freak-folk people, I’m so looking at you right now.) But the response to the first album has been pretty good, critically if not necessarily financially. So I’m feeling a bit encouraged to let my more baroque tendencies take hold.

And so we have a bunch of new songs: “SPQR”, which is a Pogues/Gogol Bordello sort of track about a bastard of a Roman soldier; “Entropy” which is a sneering electro track sung from the perspective of Lucifer (“Where were you when the world was made? I was still drunk from the night before”); “702” which is about living in Las Vegas and how tourists all suck the big fat hairy sweaty cock; you get the picture. I’ve even got one song I’m playing around with that deals with a star-crossed love affair from the point of view of the man’s dog. And I’m orbiting the idea of the Ada Lovelace song, because I love her.

I’m also going to be including final versions of a few songs I’ve been kicking around the Net for a long time: “After The Ice Age”, “Invisible” and “Country Dress” will almost certainly be on the album, as will “The Big Darkness”, which I’ve tried in a couple of permutations but never actually released. After this, I don’t have any more old songs at all; future albums will all be new stuff.

(If it seems like I’m recycling, well, consider this: most of the songs from most bands’ first couple of albums are made up of songs they’ve written long before. I just threw stuff out on the Net rather than waiting to collect it. And as Elvis Costello once said, you’ve got twenty-five years to write your first album and six months to write the follow-up.)

Musically, it’s probably going to be even more eclectic and all over the place than Ghosts In A Burning City. I’m not interested in making an album of songs that sound alike; I’m interested in writing whatever the fuck I feel like writing, and in this case that’s electronic and country and world beat and chamber music all mixed up. If that turns you off — if you like the comfort of knowing that all the tracks on the record are gonna sound like the Big Hit Single (except the inevitable One Slow Song), may I suggest you pick up the new Interpol album?

We’re considering setting up a Kickstarter project to help fund the recording. We need some new gear for this one; a good microphone preamp and a new recording interface for starters, an upgrade to Ableton Live 8, other refinements. In return, we’re thinking about offering Kickstarters access to a private making-of blog, some sort of video diary, and free copies of the album and other stuff (b-sides, remixes, etc.) when it comes out. We’d basically like to do this one in public, and get some money for it.

We may still release the Indie Rock Is Easy EP I’ve mentioned on Twitter, though we’ll probably just drop it for free on the Red State website. If we do, that will include a cover of the Big Friendly Corporation’s “LOL” and a secret song that I can’t talk about except that it’s going to have a special guest vocalist and it will make Kieron Gillen giggle.

So know you know as much as I do.

120 Minutes and the value of curatorship

I was delighted to find on Metafilter a link to The 120 Minutes Archive, a site dedicated to preserving the history of MTV’s long-defunct underground music show 120 Minutes, which was, back in the early 1990s, my gateway to the world of alternative music. (For example, I recorded this show from the summer of 1992 and dubbed it onto a C90 cassette tape by holding my little boombox with the built-in microphone up to the TV’s speaker. I’d walk around listening to the Soup Dragons and Daisy Chainsaw and thinking I was the coolest kid in the world. In point of fact, I still do that, actually.)

A lot of people who bitch about how MTV doesn’t play videos anymore seem to have conveniently forgotten what MTV was actually like in the days before The Real World and Road Rules. It was completely full of horrible, shitty, disposable shlock back then too; it’s just that the shlock was musical rather than reality-televisual in nature.

The first time I saw the video for Nirvana’s”Smells Like Teen Spirit”, it was buried in a block of videos from acts like Poison, Guns ‘n’ Roses, MC Hammer, The New Kids On The Block, Extreme, Mr. Big and C+C Music Factory. Despite the fact that bands like The Pixies, Public Enemy, The Smiths, De La Soul, Nirvana, Mudhoney, and The Happy Mondays were all putting out records and videos at the time, you were far more likely to see the video for Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” or Extreme’s execrable slow jam “More Than Words” every half-hour than “Here Comes Your Man” or “Bigmouth Strikes Again” or “Me, Myself And I”.

(I particularly remember that grating month or so when MTV played Guns ‘n’ Roses’ incredibly pompous, idiotic, tedious, endless video for “November Rain” quite literally every hour and a half. I think they only stopped when the UN issued some sort of proclamation on the use of media as torture.)

For the first few years of its existence, 120 Minutes was produced and hosted by a fellow named Dave Kendall, and it’s hard not to see the show as uniquely a product of Kendall’s taste and choices; why else the constant playing of videos by relatively obscure British acts like The Wonder Stuff and World Party and XTC, as well as industrial groups like Severed Heads and Skinny Puppy who couldn’t get within a light year of MTV’s constant rotation?

But this is precisely what gave the show its value; a great part of the charm of 120 Minutes was that it didn’t focus on a specific genre or style of music; rather, the playlists seemed to be based on Whatever Dave Kendall Thought Was Cool At The Moment. For example, check out this playlist from January 1991:

  • Happy Mondays “Step On”
  • Iggy Pop “Candy”
  • The House of Love “I Don’t Know Why I Love You”
  • The Stone Roses “Fool’s Gold”
  • The Pixies “Dig For Fire/Allison”
  • Cocteau Twins “Iceblink Luck”
  • The Jesus and Mary Chain “Head On”
  • Nine Inch Nails “Head Like A Hole”
  • World Party “Way Down Now”
  • The Soup Dragons “I’m Free”
  • Concrete Blonde “Joey”
  • The Cure “Never Enough”
  • Midnight Oil “Blue Sky Mine”
  • The Charlatans UK “The Only One I Know”
  • The Sundays “Here’s Where The Story Ends”
  • Sonic Youth “Cool Thing”
  • Sinead O’Connor “Nothing Compares 2 U”
  • Peter Murphy “Cuts You Up”
  • Jane’s Addiction “Been Caught Stealing”
  • Depeche Mode “Enjoy The Silence”

That’s a fairly genre-busting little romp through the world of alternative pop circa 1991: you’ve got Madchester, light industrial, wall o’ noise, gloom pop, East Coast alternarock, psychedelia, and, er, Iggy Pop.

Pandora and Last.fm would never generate this playlist: the bands and songs contained within it have very little in common, except that they’re not mainstream music. But it’s still obviously an intentional set of items; anybody who knows the history of pop music would look at this and nod their heads and recognize it as a reasonable and coherent collection.

You can say the same of any random playlist of Santa Monica public radio station KCRW’s legendary Morning Becomes Eclectic show, which is a sort of Apollonian audio-only version of 120 Minutes geared at Angelenos with refined musical sensibilities. These days, those playlists are designed by MBE host Jason Bentley, who used to be the soundtrack supervisor for Six Feet Under.

Bentley and Kendall (who’s still working, so far as I know) are subjective curators of music; they provide unique, individualized filters for music. You either like what they like, or you don’t; but if you do, they serve as nodal points for finding new stuff you wouldn’t find otherwise.

Algorithms can’t, as of yet, find cool; there’s no objective connection between The House Of Love and Nine Inch Nails. It takes a Dave Kendall to find it. And that was why 120 Minutes was so amazing…and the fact that MTV ditched it years ago says pretty much everything you need to know about the state of that particular cable channel.

The Indelicates – Songs For Swinging Lovers

UK group The Indelicates are that most endangered of species — a band with intention. They defy the current notion that rock and roll songs should be about, y’know, whatever you want them to be about. Every song on their first full-length album American Demo was a thesis, a statement of purpose from the band’s principal songwriters and vocalists, Simon and Julia Indelicate. And the same holds true of Songs For Swinging Lovers, their second album, released yesterday via their new net label, Corporate Records. (More about that in a moment.) It’s a polemic against stupidity, complacency and venality as it exists in Great Britain circa 2010. And it’s very, very clever — another adjective that doesn’t get bandied about often these days.

It was clear with American Demo that The Indelicates were acolytes at the temple of Luke Haines and his various projects (The Auteurs, Black Box Recorder); while that’s still evident here, they also move into more expansive sonic territory, channeling Brecht, Village Green-era Kinks and Carter The Unstoppable Machine in equal measure. Much of the band’s distinctive sound is formed by the back-and-forth between Julia’s lovely and almost formal soprano and Simon’s rasping, sneering baritone, which recalls Haines and Carter USM’s Jim Bob Morrison. In terms of production, Songs is a bit more ambitious than American Demo, and it pays off. All of the members are extremely competent musicians, and every song is arranged with the care of a film score. It would be interesting, though, to hear the band expand upon their sound a bit — to mine slightly more exotic territory.

Really, though, the highlight of Songs For Swinging Lyrics are the vicious, cruel and utterly hilarious lyrics, credited to both Simon and Julia. These aren’t feel-good tunes, unless (like me) you’re the kind of person who would be cheerful at the burning of Rome. “Hey doc, take a knife to me, scar my snatch into a smile,” sings Julia on “Flesh”. “Strip me and dissect me, take my tears and tap my bile…Beauty isn’t truth, it’s just youth and it’s adaptive, and it’s elastic.” This is confrontational music, asking questions and rubbing the listener’s nose (or ears) in the hideousness of the world we’ve made.

There isn’t really a context for The Indelicates right now. Indie music is in love with the superficial now, with the pure pop masterpiece. Songs For Swinging Lovers is pop music on its surface, but it’s not anything The Kids are going to be dancing to in the discos any time soon. Not that The Indelicates mind — they hate the kids. They seem less interested in making tons of money and getting on MTV than in using their considerable talent to start cultural fires.

One of those fires, in fact, is aimed at the traditional record industry. The Indelicates have created a net label called Corporate Records, which any band can use as a platform for releasing their own work, for whatever price they choose. You can buy Songs For Swinging Lovers from Corporate for whatever you feel the album is worth.

This is a divisive sort of record. You’ll either love it or hate it. And I suspect that’s just the way The Indelicates like it.

Things I have discovered in three days of selling my album online

  1. People are willing to buy online music via PayPal from your website.

  2. Not all of these people are my mom. Or actually people I know. This is encouraging.

  3. Not having a label or distributor means the music goes directly into my PayPal account. No quarterly reports, no sending my boys to the label accounting office with shotguns and slide rulers to make sure I’m getting my full 6.7% of wholesale revenue. Which brings me to…

  4. I’m getting roughly 95% of the revenue for the album, minus PayPal’s cut. This means that I have now earned more from album sales than, say, U2 did until at least The Unforgettable Fire and possibly Pop. (That was a joke. U2 probably got royalty checks after War.)

  5. If you keep 95% of your revenue, and ten people buy your album at $9.99 every day, it’s entirely feasible for you to actually do this for a living. (Assuming you have more than ten friends, and that new people keep buying your album, and that you also keep making new things for people to buy.)

  6. Uploading MP3s to every possible site whose URL ends in .fm is exhausting.

  7. Promoting via Twitter and Facebook seems to work fairly well, but I’m not sure it’s enough.

  8. Magazines want physical copies of your CD to review. I suspect that sending them a burned CD in a paper sleeve with the words ‘REVIEW THIS, MOTHERFUCKER’ is probably not a way to gain their positive attention. Therefore, I’m probably going to burn a hundred or so to a) sell to people who don’t buy music online, b) send to reviewers, and c) sell at any live shows.

  9. Even people you know, by and large, don’t mind paying for the album you spent hundred of hours over several years and made them listen to rough mixes of and bored them to tears talking about. This is quite wonderful to discover.

  10. Some of the people you know will swear they’ll buy the album the second it comes out, right up to the second it comes out. Then they will not buy it. Not everybody is sitting around waiting with bated breath to buy your album. It might take some of them a few days, or a week, or a month. Some of them won’t buy it at all. Do not take this personally.

  11. Publications are also not waiting with bated breath for your self-produced, self-released album to come out so that they can write rapturous reviews of it and make you rich. You have to put together a press release, press photos, etc.

  12. I can’t figure out a way to do press photos of myself without actually being in them. So I’m either going to do a lot of speed for a month or find a photographer who knows how to hide chub from the lens.

  13. Buying a cup of coffee and a Buffy The Vampire Slayer comic with money you’ve earned from selling your album is one of the best feelings ever.