Justin Bieber Needs to Learn Insight Marketing

I wonder if Justin Bieber’s marketing and production team ever read the news beyond the current chatter about their teenage star.  I would love to know what they made of this morning’s juxtaposition of articles on the BBC about young Mr Bieber keeping his very young audience waiting for nearly two hours at London’s O2 Arena last night and a rather interesting piece about Insight Marketing which explore some of the techniques used by some advertisers and companies to deliver added value about their products and services.

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Passion Flower: How a Lifelong Love of Swing Music has Finally Bloomed in the Bleak Nova Scotian Winter

Thinking Inside The Box
I was an odd little kid, about four-years-old, during the 1960s in California when my mom and dad got a new refrigerator. It arrived in a giant cardboard box. The box ended up in our living room and for a few weeks that summer (indulgent parents!) it became my private retreat.

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Hugh Laurie: Pandering in the Blues Ghetto with Let Them Talk

The Blues has lately become a “modern musical ghetto” for non-Blues performers like Cyndi Lauper and Hugh Laurie and their ilk who are bored with their current lot in life and so they take the next easiest route back to feigned admiration by “making a Blues album” as a one-off for fun.  Hugh Laurie’s latest musical miasma landed on September 6, 2011 and I am absolutely confounded by his mock singing style and his cynical delivery.  The guy cannot loft a tune, so why make an album?  Why did Hugh Laurie think we’d want to pay $10.00USD for his musical masturbation in the public square?

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8-String Guitar Player Charlie Hunter

Charlie Hunter is an amazing guitar player.  He’s most famous for playing an 8-string guitar with John Mayer.  Sometimes he plays a 7-string guitar.  His latest album — Public Domain — is a ton of magical fun as you listen to Charlie take on all the old musical standards that are now in the Public Domain while simultaneously playing the bass line and the melody on a non-6-string guitar.

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John Prine and Angel From Montgomery in Performance

One of the most beautiful, but tragically haunting, songs ever written is John Prine’s — Angel From Montgomery — because it is steeped with a bitter love-gone-lost yearning that is universal, irrevocable, and palpable.  The song is simple but harshly complex.  You can play the song with four guitar chords — G, C, D and F — but there’s nothing easy about the joyous melody that leaps from those four chords.

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Ray Davies Sings Waterloo Sunset in Performance Over Time

We love the Kinks, and we especially adore Ray Davies.  Ray has been making music for popular culture for over 45 years.  One of the more pristine songs Ray sings is “Waterloo Sunset” and watching him in performance of that song, over the years, tells us precisely what we need to know about longevity, historical station, and how celebrity singers must sustain their craft in performance over a decades-long career — and you do that by bringing something new to the song each time you sing it.

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When Gwyneth Paltrow Sings, Ears Ache

It’s always an immensely sad moment in entertainment history when a movie actor steps forward to pretend, and then claim in an unfortunate public, on-the-record, performance, that they can sing when they cannot.  We last saw that sort of faux singing in Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash movie and now, today, we have the same inglorious example in Gwyneth “The Goop” Paltrow’s incredibly bad turn in her new movie, “Country Strong.”  Here is a screenshot of Paltrow recently “singing live” at the Country Music Awards.  She closes her eyes throughout most of the song as she tries to land the right notes in a simple melody.  Gwyneth sings.  We cringe.

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How the 92nd Street Y Betrayed Steve Martin

Comedian Steve Martin tells jokes.  He acts funny in movies.  He also writes books.  He plays the banjo.  He’s an art collector.  All of those facets make up the diamond of the man — but not in the stern glare from the 92nd Street Y in New York City.  The 92nd Street Y wanted Steve Martin to be one thing, and one thing only:  Funny.

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The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society as Performance Piece

I’ve been listening to the magnificent album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society a lot recently, sometimes as much as a few times a week. I have come to regard it as sort of a performance piece — like a short play for the ears that I can enjoy wherever I am whether through the magnificent cigarette pack sized iPod or, more properly, spinning thirty three and a third revolutions per minute. It is a brilliant thirty-nine minutes performance although it usually feels longer than that, particularly when you think about the words being sung.

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Gregor Hilden Plays the YouTube Blues

Gregor Hilden is one of those Bluesman who — once you hear a single chord he plays — forever owns your sense of what’s good and your definition of what makes The Blues intrinsically real and beautifully human.  I’ve never met Greg proper, but I feel as if I’ve known him forever — merely because I drink in his daily GregsGuitars videos on YouTube.  Four days ago, I couldn’t bear my secret delight in his talent any longer, and I posted my very first comment on a video in my long history of using YouTube:

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