When Apple introduced the MacBook Air and its lack of a CD/DVD drive, a lot of people snorted with derision. With the amount of free streaming video content on the web swelling exponentially, the snorters no longer have to wait to exhale. Blogs such as the scrappy new Best Free Documentaries are just as crude as the early MP3 blogs in terms of layout, but the sheer volume of great stories that often don’t find their way to DVD makes them potentially just as revolutionary. Of their music-related selections, both the 1997 doc The Great Hunger: The Life and Times of Shane McGowan about the legendarily self-destructive Pogues singer (pictured) and the “punk” episode of the BBC’s 7 Ages of Rock are worth your time, and your bandwidth. (http://bestdocumen
taries.blogspot.com)
A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE
Does anybody else remember when a certain rock-crit site had its own message board called Bitchpork? If you thought arguing about fractions of ratings points was unintentionally hilarious, check out Joshua Allen’s “Two Minutes and 42 Seconds In Heaven” on long-running new-media mag The Morning News, where Allen argues that the aforementioned number is the ultimate length of a pop song, pointing out that when The La’s‘ “There She Goes” is over (at 2:42 exactly), “I guarantee absolutely no one in the room goes: ‘Jesus, finally.’” Amen. (http://tinyurl.com/47kzzt)
THE SADDEST BLOG...
…is one that’s been ditched two posts in, but On A Bad Trip’s bootlegs of Black Moth Super Rainbow and The Black Lips’ recent Chicago shows pretty much justify its meagre existence. At least nobody posted the cat. (http://onabadtrip.blogspot.com)
MP3 OF THE WEEK
Busta Rhymes, “Don’t Touch Me (Throw Da Water On ‘Em)”: Is it too cynical to wonder whether this possibly unintenionally brilliant single has only an old-school break for a backing because it was hastily recorded between court dates?