Observation, comment, and all the things usually filed under “miscellaneous”.
On Saturday morning I made some tweets, inspired by yet another tweet I saw. “Remember when all pop was throwaway and ‘indie’ was better than anything else?” I pondered. “Now, there’s such a thing as ‘indie pop’, and even the ‘bad’ pop is now getting cool kid cred. So, you know, it’s all fluid. But we want to be icy cool. Icy cool to the point of frozen.”
Honestly, there really isn’t a lot of story to tell, unless I decide to act like a really big thing and insist that the mundane things earthings! has done over its five years of existence is worth telling. But isn’t it fun to be able to post a photo album of scenes captured from those five years – at least scenes that don’t involve me writing paragraphs in front of a laptop from my so-called desk, or sometimes at various hotels across the region – and say something about the “story” of earthings! across its five years of existence? Yes, right? So, well, here it is – a slightly random compendium of photos, of the people we met, the people we became friends with, and in between, some photos that didn’t quite make it to these pages. This is, after all, a personal blog masquerading as a music blog. You get the idea. [NB]
There was a time Niko and I never ever talked about Asian pop, even though we are both Asian. We were always talking about stuff like the Mystery Jets, Suede, and Ocean Colour Scene. This article is dedicated to our musical origins; and we must never forget them, EVER.
Why are Public Access TV compared to the Strokes in EVERY ARTICLE written? Perhaps it’s just lazy journalism on the part of music critics because the differences between the two bands are fairly stark. All of the Strokes have had a well-heeled Manhattan upbringing; the members all met each other at the Dwight School, Lycée Français de New York, and Le Rosey in Switzerland. The success of the Strokes may or may not directly correlate with their pedigrees, but you cannot deny that it’s a factor.
(Update: GoodVybes released an extended statement, admitting that while there is a “disputed amount of additional costs”, they have paid 86% of the total Passion Pit is owed, and added that “to say that we have not paid them is not only dangerously reckless, but libelous and slanderous.” Michael isn’t happy: “How this is being handled pretty much explains it all.”) This morning Michael Angelakos, aka Passion Pit, started some sort of thunderstorm, tweeting that he has yet to be paid for his appearance at the GoodVybes Festival last year. The festival’s organizers, Vybe Productions, have told Bandwagon that they have, in fact, paid his agency, and raised the possibility that the agency has not paid Michael. (As I write this, we’re still waiting for an official statement from the outfit, but we have a couple of tweets.) It’s a weird situation, at least from my viewpoint. The story took a while to be picked up by some media outlets; I am pretty sure Bandwagon is the only music-centric outfit that has written about it. Manila Concert Scene deleted the tweet – an innocuous one, marking a year since the festival – that Michael replied to. But that’s trivial stuff. As a country that’s looking to be a stop for all these foreign acts – and at the risk of sounding like I’m taking sides – why the hell is this thing happening? Nobody’s sure what the real situation is, but there can’t be no fire if there’s no smoke. There is a deeper story here, I think, but ultimately, in the world’s odd way of doing things, it wouldn’t matter much to the public – what matters to them is that they get to watch their favorite acts live here. All that said, this kerfuffle becoming public is a reminder that there is a lot of work to be done, and constantly. [NB] (Photography by Jobelle Natividad.)
