If you don't listen to a 3 Chords & the Truth Christmas -- that's the big Yuletide Blowout Edition of the Big Show -- Santa Claus is going to shove a lump of coal down your Fruit of the Looms and set it alight.
And Buddy the Elf is gonna laaaaaaaugh andlaaaaaaaugh and laugh.
Have a blessed Christmas, now, y'all, y'hear? It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there.Aloha.
There's magic in the air -- it's almost Christmas, then there's the magic of the radio. On the Internet.
On a podcast that remembers the magic of radio and the magic of those Christmases of long-ago youthful exuberance. On this edition of 3 Chords & the Truth, we remember the magic. We bring the magic. You just listen and see . . . hear . . . whatever. Magic and a couple of curveballs -- how's that for a description of this week's show? This week's Big Show. Geez, how many ways can we say "It's great!" It's like being in junior high and trying to hit that magic 500-word benchmark for an in-class essay. Junior high . . . when we were young and exuberant. But not about in-class 500-word essays. Yuck. Well, the show's magic, we're simply having a wonderful Christmastime, and I've officially run out of literary bovine fertilizer. This, my friend, will have to do. It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
That's a new low price for the Nostalgio, our best entertainment center with full stereophonic sound. You'll find full details on Page 299 of this year's Christmas wish book.
As my wife and I wandered Sunday night around Omaha's Old Market, a couple of things became clear.
That is, besides it being chilly. OK, damn cold. It is December, and this is Nebraska.
Al fresco season is over until May, unless, of course, your name happens to be Alfonse Fresco. We've no intention of cheating Mr. Fresco out of a single day, which leads me to clarify that Al Fresco season would be the season for Al Fresco and not the season on Al Fresco. It is a sign of the times that this has to be made clear. Now, where was I? Seasons, I believe. And wintertime in the Old Market, Omaha's favorite downtown spot for sidewalk dining and people watching. The other thing what was clear as we walked down Howard Street -- apart from the unpleasant epiphany that I should have worn a coat, not a jacket, and that it might have been a good idea for my lovely bride to wear . . . socks -- is that Christmas is nigh.
We may do more than speak anachronism around here.
This week on the Big Show, the closest we actually come to "the NOW sound" is a new record from someone who's been in the music biz as long as I've been alive. Note: That's a looooooonng time. Otherwise, we have some 78s, some old LPs and some 45s that go back to the genesis of the format. Which was at least a couple of generations removed from how folks get their music now. At least. WE SPEAK anachronism -- hell, we live anachronism around here -- because apart from liking it, there seems to be less and less percentage in the present. And sometimes you just need a reprieve from it. OK, 3 Chords & the Truthneeds frequent reprieves from the present . . . the eternal NOW. Give us some good, old-fashioned Then now and again. And again. And again. Anachronism, c'est nous. Embrace anachronism. It's good.
AND, while I'm thinking of it, the tasty Christmas tunes continues apace this week on the program as we try to make the season bright. And hot chocolate, pepperminty, candy cane-y. So it's ho-ho-ho . . . and on with the show. It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
It started with the Grinch Who Muted Christmas Music.
It ended with the last straw for me on Facebook after a decade wasting way too much time and productivity there. Here is the one thing you need to know about everybody's favorite addiction: Facebookis the devil. Ask Parliament.
Make that co-devil. The incompetent, greedy conglomerates that ate the music industry are just as evil. I eagerly await the leak of their internal memos and emails.
I don't know exactly why it took me this long -- and why the last straw was a geeky string of muted Facebook videos shot on my iPhone -- to delete my account. But here I am. Last week, Facebook and Sony Music Entertainment decided that my 1936 Zenith, playing Christmas music in a video I posted last year, was a threat to the entire music-copyright regime. Thus, I was notified that, for all my Facebook friends and enemies, the sound of yuletide also would be the sound of silence.
This was my entirely unconvincing appeal of patent insanity . . . or Digital Millennium Copyright Act insanity, to be precise:
It's background music played on a bloody antique radio, for God's sake. This is absurd.
If anyone is using this video to bootleg music, he is a moron. This is just insane. Stop it.
THIS WEEK, Russia's favorite social-media platform, some other bunch of music charlatans muted a nerdy, geekly little iPhone video of a 1949 7-inch single playing on my 1957 Zenith record changer. I thought it was a bit of audio-enthusiast fun with sufficiently not-good-enough-to-pirate audio.
Which no one was making a penny off of.
Corporate America thought it was a mortal threat. You know, like women smoking cigarettes are for the Islamic State.
And last night, after the copyright Nazis yet again muted the audio on a video of another exceedingly old 45 I got at an estate sale, the reason for my disgust crystallized in my mind. Short version: Facebook is the devil. Long version: It seems that Facebook is a corporate entity dedicated to eating the capitalistic and societal seed corn. I think you reach that point on a couple of levels -- you successfully addict people to your product, then spend years abjectly exploiting them while you destroy, bit-by-bit, the product's value and utility. The second level? A good example is the virtual impossibility of posting genial little videos like those of mine that keep getting muted (because ambient-sound music on iPhone videos obviously will destroy all music sales on every level). It illustrates a larger issue about Facebook that doesn't bode well for our country (anyone's country, actually) or our society. Basically, it's a crapload easier to post the worst kind of racist propaganda and hatred, then have it stay on the platform and spread like a metastasizing cancer than it is to post a geeky, innocent video of a radio or a record playing that's more likely just to make people smile and wax nostalgic. Then we have Boris and Natasha. Has it not been extensively documented how simple it was for Russian saboteurs to flood Facebook with abject fakery and disinformation in order to steal an American presidential election and perhaps fatally undermine the world's greatest democracy?
THIS IS what happens during the terminal stages of capitalism and capitalistic societies, when human beings -- citizens of advanced Western nation states -- are nothing but pieces of meat whose utility ends at the point some corporate entity extracts their last dime. Bigotry and hatred, corporate America can monetize via platforms like Facebook in much the same manner Donald Trump turns it into political capital. Stupid little videos of old record players playing old records -- or old radios playing Christmas music -- are not nearly so profitable for the platform or those to whom it sells your personal information. Indeed, some music-industry megalith sees your stupid little video as imperiling the extraction of the last nickel from an industry mortally wounded by those self-same corporations' overarching greed and lack of marketing vision. Not to put too fine a point on it, when you find that you're spending too much time somewhere that expressly makes it easier to do bad than good . . . run. Run far away. That's what I'm doing -- running. Plus, if I'm exposed to much more of the average level of language-arts proficiency on Facebook, I'm gonna regress to communicating via clicks and grunts. I suppose one could write strongly worded letters to our corporate overlords. That, however, would take years and cramp millions of fingers. It also, I betting, would avail us nothing.
Or . . . you starve the bastards. Tragically, the only universal language (and common value) today is money. If they can't sell my eyeballs to advertisers, Facebook is diminished just a little. If Facebook can't sell 500 million eyeballs to marketers, it's screwed.
I mean, how many f***ing selfies can you take and overshare? Am I right? Bye, Facebook. I can feel life becoming simpler (and less overshared) already.
The last of the Thanksgiving turkey has gone into a sandwich. It's cold outside, and we're waiting on the snow. Christmas is around the corner, and I may have had a drink or two.
You would even say I glow . . . it glows. Something glows. Happy ho-ho-ho to you, pally. Where was I? Oh, yeah. The latest edition of 3 Chords & the Truth. Well, this is it. The show is back after a Thanksgiving break, and we're trying to get in the holiday spirit -- such as it is these days. The Big Show will do its best, which your Mighty Favog is confident is on display with this present episode. It's festive. Yeah, that's the ticket. Ho, ho, ho. Listen to the show. It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
Pour me another martini, will ya, Jackson? (Thud.)