I hadn’t been to The Brewery in what seems like forever. Last night they had 8 bands playing so, finding myself with nothing better to do, I bopped on down.

The first band that came on after I got there was Though He Slay Me. They were pretty tight but lost points on the non-metal looking front. I know, I know, the music doesn’t really have anything to do with the look but is it reaqlly that hard to change out of your street clothes?

The next band up was one I’m going to call The Band After Though He Slay Me because they never said their fucking name. Anyway, the set was tighter and they had the look down better (although its pretty hard to look like a really BAMF when you’re a 17 year old suburban white kid) but I didn’t like the music quite as much.

The next band was Steryle from Roxboro. These guys rocked. The performance was tight and the music was good. I’ definitely planning one catching these guys again.

After Steryle was on, something else came up and I left before the last bands played. Sorry. Shit happens sometime.

Stan Schroeder posted an article on Mashable titled If Free is the Enemy of Good, Then Color Me Bad a couple of days ago about Paul McGuiness and him being a bitch. That’s not what Stan said because he’s considerably more cultured than I am.  Paul McGuiness, for those of you out of the loop on such things, is the Manager for U2. I’m going to make the first of what will probably be many ugly comments now and ask —have you ever noticed that the bands or band apparatchik or clingers-on that are constantly bitching about the Internet or peer to peer file sharing or people stealing music are from bands that haven’t been relevant in 20 years? Bono is as swell a humanitarian as they come but how many people can name a song they’ve recorded from this century? Metallica–ditto.

The problem is that all of these people have stopped making music (if they ever were) and become part of the general whoredom that is the “recording industry”. They have been at it sooooo long that they believe they are entitled to drink Cristal poured over the breasts of $10,000 a night hookers. So they don’t want people to listen to their “music” unless they’ve been paid for it. When the actual music in the world is almost completely made by people who would gladly give it away just so people can hear it (BTW, Thanks, Trent. The Slip was the bomb). I’ll bet there are 50 bands in Raleigh that would pay to have people hear them play*.

At any rate, this is not the first time Paul has opened his hole and said something stupid. The funniest part is that he’s the fucking manager which means that he doesn’t have any talent and he’s basically sponging off U2′s success.

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*In fact, I knew a guy in a band a few years ago in Raleigh and that’s essentially what they did… after paying for the rentals on equipment and assorted expenses they were lucky if they split enough money at the end of the night to cover their bar tab.

So Johnson and I went to see Hollywood Undead and Framing Hanley last night.

The Norva is a really nice venue. It’s right on the edge of being too big for my tastes  but pulls off the bigness nicely. There’s a second level that’s only available to VIPs that purchase a membership for a year which is kind of a cool idea if you’re seriously into music.  I didn’t move around much since we got there a little late and wanted to hold on to our place in front of the sound guy. One tip that I will pass on is that I got my tickets through Ticketmaster (discussion of which is going to come in a later post) and had them held at Will Call. So when we got there, I’m guessing there were 300 people in line but the Will Call line had maybe 5. So we got in that line and saved probably 15 minutes in line.

Framing Hanley was pretty good. I’m really only familiar with their cover of Lil Wayne’s Lollipop although I’ve heard several of their other songs. Judging from the crowd response that was the song that most people were familiar with. They went on at about 8:50 and did a set that lasted until just about 10.

Hollywood Undead came on some time after 10:30 ( I forgot to look. Shoot me). They opened, as always, with Hollywood Undead (the song). They kicked ass just like they did at the Lincoln. Maybe it was me but the energy level didn’t seem as high as it had in Raleigh even though the crowd last night was probably 5 times the size (it was a sold out show last night). It’s possible that my perception is based on the size of the Norva though since we were significantly farther from the stage than we could have been in the Lincoln. To be that far from the stage at the Lincoln, you’d have to be in the street and possibly the parking deck. The funniest moment was when they did Bitches. There was a youngish girl next to us with her dad and they both just stood there looking really uncomfortable for the whole song.

Definitely worth the trip.

According to this article over on TechCrunch, the current stupidity amongst the leadership of the RIAA and the record labels is all part of the master plan, they’re really geniuses that are making money by suing their customers but then at some point they’ll stop and we’ll all forget what assholes they are and start paying them again for whatever it is they think they do.

That’s possible, I suppose. About the same time, I expect everybody to start paying me for being so smart. What they don’t really understand, apparently, is that for most things they don’t serve any function anymore. In the old model, they took a cut of a band’s revenue because they spent a lot of money promoting  bands that never had any revenue to speak of. So if my band made it big they’d take some of my money to cover development costs for bands that nver made it. Today, if you have a band and an ounce of motivation you can promote your own band. Sick Puppies is a perfect example. They promoted themselves with their self-shot video.

A band can gain a following via youtube, myspace, facebook. They can sell their music online on Amazon and book their own gigs. Why, exactly, if I have done all that would I want to give part of my money to  a label? What function will they serve? Answer me that and I’m willing to grant them a part of the pie.