People Are Wrong!

[mmcirvin]

I had heard of this strange musical co-starring John Flansburgh (with songs co-written by his wife Robin Goldwasser, perhaps best known as the lovely voice on "In The Middle, In The Middle, In The Middle"). But I just listened to some of the songs, and now I'm sorry I missed it.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah-- Goldwasser also sang "Dr. Evil," the theme song to the second Austin Powers movie.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I trust you've found Tmbg Radio, a tiny flash dealie they have at tmbg.com, courtesy of those fanciful orange-eaters at the Chopping Block. Unlike many radios, TMBG radio has AM (recorded music including TMBG album and DAS stuff, Mono Puff, People Are Wrong!, and State Songs), FM (live music), EBS (current news and items) and the mysterious FDR band, which doesn't seem to harrumph like I'd hoped.

So do you have People Are Wrong! on CD or something now?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

No, I just downloaded the free MP3s off the Web site and have been listening to them a lot. But they're also selling a "sampler" CD that has those six songs plus four more, as an unabashed benefit so they can actually get the play produced.

The funny thing about "People Are Wrong!" is that, being about a loony cult with a charismatic leader, it basically has the plot of 80% of all Seventies rock operas and concept albums, much as I parodied in "Brannock". The similarity seems to be intentional. But the songs are amusing.

(Aside: I think they might have given away too much of it. Just the title track, which really grabs me for some reason, might have been enticement enough. But I've never been terribly fond of ordering CDs through the mail-- as a person who is not a big music buyer, I'm not enthralled enough with the expectation of a piece of music to stand the wait for the thing to arrive. This is a fine example of why better solutions for paid song downloads need to come about. Never mind how free information wants to be, there oughta be a way that somebody operating on a shoestring can sell songs à la carte for instant Internet gratification. The iTunes Store is great-- the only such thing ever to actually get some of my money. But they started out with nothing but major-label music, and the indie content is promised but slow in coming, as is Windows support. Buy.com's venture could get the Windows market but it sounds like it's got serious teething problems. Still, things are looking up.)

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I subsc1rbed to emusic.com's TMBG Unlimited for all 12 months it ran, which was a huge promo for its new plan where subscribers ($10/mo?) got all-you-could-download as well as access to special tracks (TMBG Unlimited ended up being 161 TMBG tracks unavailable anywhere else at the time they were released-- early release of Mink Car, for example) as an alternative to its previous plan as money-per-track. You'd get 3 downloads of each track (when you bought per-track), and your license said you could keep as many copies as you want. Not as handy as iTunes, but close. I don't know if eMusic still sells by track, but I recall that they gave half the price to artists. (I also recall that eMusic was savvy enough to work with Napster to prevent the trading of their files through official Napster servers. This was a little before Napster could be run, by most people, using unofficial servers, IIRC.

I've bought 2 CDs from TMBG.com (well, its yahoo store) and they don't have good service-- no confirmation email I've come to expect, and one of them arrived in a broken jewel case, probably thanks to inadequate packaging. If you're looking for a positive early experience of mail-order CD-buying, skip TMBG.com!