Monthly Archives: March 2012

The music of Baby Bird

Way back in the mists of time — 1996, in fact — I was living in dear old England, pondering whether to emigrate. One Saturday I wandered into my local CD store to trawl the discount rack for anything that looked interesting. On my way there, a CD on the countertop next to the cash register caught my attention:

I had no idea what the hell it was, but the cover photo had me intrigued. “Baby Bird”, it said, “The Happiest Man Alive”. A tiny infobox at top right promised “Disturbed Love Songs” in “ALMOSTEREO”.

I picked it up and looked at the back cover. A circle of stars, each with text, presumably track titles. Three paragraphs of text in the middle, telling a story, ending:

…He wants to be someone else. The radio crackles off. All the lights go out. A bomb has dropped. Like a siren slowly starting up, the power fizzles on, with a thing by Baby Bird. The kid’s head stops shaking. He picks up the Panasonic and throws it through the window…

A note at the bottom said “Any imperfections or crackles may result on this record as the vinyl has to be reconstructed from melted down Level 42 and Queen albums”.

It was a bit Paul Morley without the pretension, and it’s fair to say that it was calling to me on the basis of the cover alone. I asked if I could listen to some of the actual music. Here’s what I heard as it started:

A few minutes later the CD was mine. And so it was that I fell into the world of Stephen Jones, aka Baby Bird.

I listened to not much else for a week or so. The album sounded like it had been recorded on a four track in someone’s bedroom, and it probably had, but that wasn’t important. Like Sparks, what grabbed me was the lyrics. Intelligent, humorous, unexpected; sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes creepy. Here’s the start of “I Didn’t Want To Wake You Up”:

I learned that Baby Bird had quietly recorded five albums’ worth of material over the course of six years, and that each one was a limited edition of a thousand copies. Now I had a mission.

It may be hard to understand now if you’re under the age of 30, but back before the Internet became ubiquitous it could take years to find a particular album. Every time I visited a new city, I’d check out the record stores, just on the off chance. I still remember the excitement of finding an album I’d been looking for for five years, in the two quid sale rack in a record shop in Beaconsfield. I won’t bore you with all the details of my quest, but I eventually found all five CDs. Five albums of gems like this, an excerpt from “Hate Song”:

Then something totally unexpected happened: Baby Bird had become Babybird, and had a number one hit in the UK singles chart, “You’re Gorgeous”. A song sung by a middle-aged man, from the perspective of a teenage girl, about being seduced into nude modeling and amateur porn — and suddenly it was on Top of the Pops and playing on the radio everywhere.

I’m not used to having music I listen to appearing in the charts. I’ve learned that what I think of as approachably mainstream can often clear rooms. In the 90s I’d read NME to find out what they were slagging off, and then listen to that because it was usually at least interesting. Now here was something good, and so bizarre I would never have thought it would appeal to anyone, and it was a hit. I just didn’t understand England any more. And I left.

Apparently there had been some sort of bidding war based on rave press reviews of the lo-fi albums, and the hit single was the start of a new Baby Bird, contracted into a single word and expanded into a full band. I was lucky I’d managed to track down the CDs, as they were fetching ludicrous prices on eBay.

A full-band Babybird album followed. Initially I hated it, but I decided I was probably being hipsterrific and resenting the fact that everyone was now listening to something I thought was my secret. I gave it a second chance, and decided I still didn’t like it as much as the lo-fi recordings. Something had been lost in the slickness and professionalism; some of the songs sounded like they had been polished and re-recorded until all the life had been squeezed out of them.

The next album, “There’s Something Going On”, was much better — and much darker. The first track, “Bad Old Man”, is a case in point:

And that’s sweetness and light compared to “Take Me Back”, which I still find hard to listen to.

Every Babybird album since then has been a delight. Apparently it just took an album or so for Stephen Jones to learn how to bend a full band to his will. It was worth the wait, for tracks like this:

But if you want the grimy lo-fi originals, which I’d highly recommend as a starting point, pick up the boxed set of the remastered versions. It’s a bit tough to find now, but well worth seeking out. Alternatively, you can buy the albums from Google Music in DRM-free 320kbps MP3. If you want to start with one of the slicker more commercial albums, my personal pick this week would be Ex-Maniac.

In the mean time, you can catch up with Stephen Jones as @babybirdmusic on Twitter. He’s got a book out. That old guy on the cover of the album that first caught my attention? His dad.

Homeless hotspots

This week at SXSWi a Homeless Hotspots campaign has been causing debate. It seems there are plenty who approve of the scheme, so I thought I’d come up with a few more ideas for next year.

  1. Homeless Coffee Tables. It’s hard to juggle a Starbucks latte and an iPad. Let one of our homeless hold the coffee for you while you Tweet what you just overheard.
  2. Homeless Umbrellas. The weather’s been pretty bad, so why not make use of our special mobile umbrellas? While you focus on your conference program, a homeless will hold an umbrella over your head so you don’t get wet.
  3. Homeless Bike Racks. Place your front wheel between his legs, he’s been trained to grab hold of it. We’ve given him a six pack of Lone Star so he’s not going anywhere.
  4. Homeless Ashtrays. Some of you still smoke, but for cost-saving reasons we don’t have ashtrays everywhere in the convention center. Instead, we’ve equipped several homeless with asbestos-woven T-shirts with a pouch at the bottom.

Hey, get off your high horse, they’re employment opportunities don’cha know?

Technology and morality

The New Republic recently carried an interesting article about Apple (the full text may be available via Readability). The piece started out as a review of the Steve Jobs biography (ho hum), but soon diverged into a discussion of the morality of design. It helped me to crystallize some thoughts.

There’s a famous anecdote about how Steve Jobs spent weeks making his family discuss what they wanted from their washing machine.

Jobs’s meticulous unpacking of the values embedded in different washing machines, and his insistence on comparing them to the values he wanted to live by, would be applauded by moralistic philosophers of technology from Heidegger to Ellul, though it may be a rather arduous way of getting on with life. But Jobs understood the central point that philosophers of technology had tried (and failed) to impart: that technology embodies morality.

Emphasis mine. Technology may be morally neutral in the abstract, but when we make technology choices, we are making moral choices, either because of the details of how the technology is made, or because the technology filters moral possibilities.

The problem was that Jobs, while perfectly capable of interrogating technology and asking all the right questions about its impact on our lives, blatantly refused to do so when it came to his own products. He may have been the ultimate philosopher of the washing machine, but he offered little in the way of critical thinking about the values embedded in the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPad. When he discussed his own products, he switched from philosophical reflection on the effects of consumer choices to his Bauhaus mode of the vatic designer.

I would put it this way: Towards the end of his life, Jobs took his passion for product design in the autocratic and paternalistic mode, and applied it to everything about the products he oversaw.

“Steve believed it was our job to teach people aesthetics, to teach people what they should like,” [one of his ex-girlfriends] said.

This is the real reason why the App Store exists. This is why iOS is locked down, and why the Mac is being moved to an App Store model. Sure, the revenue stream is welcome, but it’s really about paternalistic control.

“It just works”—Jobs’s signature promise at product launches—was soothing to a nation excited and addled and traumatized by technology. Nothing could go wrong: Apple had thought of everything. The technology would work as advertised; it was under total control; it would not get hacked.

This is the new Apple philosophy. Sacrifice control to paternalistic Apple, and you can relax. The benevolent leader will teach you what to like and what not to like, keep you safe from danger and ugliness. The fact that this philosophy is utterly opposed to the values expressed in so much Apple advertising is remarkable, and shows how cunning and slick their advertising and marketing people really are.

People fall for it, too. I know many self-professed libertarians who believe in absolute freedom of speech and say that they trust nobody to be a censor, but who nevertheless line up to buy iPhones and iPads and give Apple control over what software they can run on their phone, what books and magazines they can read on their tablet, even how they are allowed to arrange app icons. (Try removing Newsstand from your iPad.) Business travelers with iPads complain all the time about being forced to submit to the TSA when they take a plane flight, but what is the App Store if not the TSA of software?

Some iOS users engage in doublethink, recasting their lack of “freedom to” as a positive “freedom from”. (“Sure, I’m not free to download a wifi scanner… but I’m free from viruses!”) It’s true, all apps have metaphorically gone through the scanner and had a minimum-wage drone check their boarding pass, and you can be sure they aren’t carrying bottles of water that compete with the drinks sold by the gate, but that’s not how real security works.

Some iOS device owners ease their sense of guilt by rooting the device, ignoring that they’ve already cast a powerful vote for loss of freedom by buying it. Most, however, seem content to live in cognitive dissonance, apologetically pointing out that Apple hasn’t been that bad a dictator, and has mostly not eliminated competing services. I mean, yes, they’ve forced other magazine and book sellers to move their stores to web only to escape Apple control, but so far they haven’t blocked those web sites, so it’s OK, right?

Which brings us to the web. Criticize the lack of freedom represented by the iOS devices, and before long you’ll likely be told that it’s simply not a problem, because there’s a web browser. Sure, Apple says no porn on the iPad, but you can get porn on the web via Safari so somehow there’s no censorship occurring. But people are pointing out that Apple’s ‘app economy’ is increasingly threatening the web itself. Apple (and other corporate entities like Amazon) are managing to mold the web to be what they want it to be. And that doesn’t appear to be what I want it to be.

[...] Jobs outright rejected the possibility that there may be a multiplicity of irreconcilable views as to what the Web is and what it should be. For him, it is only a “direct-to-customer distribution channel.” In other words, Jobs believed that the Web is nothing more than an efficient shopping mall, and he proceeded to build his business around what he believed to be the Web’s essence.

Some people even claim that the web is dead, and that as we move into a post-PC era of tablets and phones as the primary Internet access devices, the web will be replaced by apps. And freedom will be replaced with complete corporate control.

Our choice is between erecting a virtual Portland or sleepwalking into a virtual Dallas. But Apple under Steve Jobs consistently refused to recognize that there is something valuable to the Web that it may be destroying.

A virtual Dallas, a prospect that will make every Austin web developer shudder.

So I now realize that this is where I parted company with Apple. When the Jobsian paternalism was restricted to matters of hardware design, I mostly appreciated it. I wish my laptop had a replaceable battery and anti-reflective screen, but mostly I’m happy with what I was told I should like—the large trackpad, the solid metal casing, and so on.

But when the paternalism was extended to books and movies and video games and applications, and when it started to threaten the web—well, that was several steps too far.

Everyone says they love freedom, and that freedom is important. But as the cliché says, “freedom isn’t free”. Freedom means ugliness. Freedom means danger. Freedom means complexity. Apple, in a stroke of marketing genius, offers you freedom from those things. And by accompanying that promise with images of freethinkers and a ‘think different’ message, it manages to make you overlook the fact that what you are really doing is giving up your freedom, and financially rewarding the very entity you are giving it up to.

So what’s the alternative? Well, sadly you won’t find a mobile platform with a rich ecosystem that doesn’t require ceding some control to others. Many people have said to me “Well, since that’s the case, what’s the point? I might as well go with the best.” But I’m not an absolutist; I don’t believe in the idea that if you can’t be perfect, you might as well not try. Rather, when it’s time to make a choice, I’ll choose the imperfect option that’s better.

Even Google, with its naïve technocratic ethos, is more committed to questioning the impact that it is having on the Internet and the world at large. They fund a bevy of academic and policy initiatives; they have recently launched a Berlin-based think tank dedicated to exploring the social impact of the Internet; they even started a quarterly magazine. [...] Apple, by contrast, holds itself above the fray. It seems to believe that such discussions of meanings and consequences do not matter, because it is in the design business, and so its primary relationship is with the user, not with the society.

And then there are things like the Data Liberation Front, AOSP, and the periodic table of open APIs. You can even run Android devices without Google, pretty much. Try using a new iPad without an Apple ID.

So until something better comes along, I’m going with Android for my phone and tablet needs. Freedom is too important. Google might not be perfect, but in the specific area of mobile platforms, they are a lot better than Apple.

Root of all evil

There’s no root of all evil these days. You’re supposed to create an EvilContextFactory to obtain an initial EvilContext, use that to get an EvilEnumeration, and then iterate through the EvilBindings in a thread-safe manner.

Steam in a box?

As you’ve noticed from my postings about Apple, I don’t believe in locked-down hardware. People have asked me what I do about video game consoles. My answer is that I buy them, even though they are locked down, because there’s no good alternative. Yes, there’s PC gaming, but then you’re financially supporting the Microsoft empire, and that’s even worse. Plus there are the endless DRM and driver problems, the software updates, the periodic reinstalls, and all the other things that make Windows miserable.

So I have a Wii and a PS3, until such time as someone makes a decent open console.

Now a new report claims that VALVe is planning an open console. This makes me very excited. Team Fortress 2, Portal and Portal 2 are some of my favorite games. (The original Half-Life was good too.)

There have been leaks suggesting Steam for Linux. I’m thinking those leaks are related to this Steam Box project. It wouldn’t make sense to require a full Windows license for every console and introduce DLL hell into console gaming; game programmers don’t want most of Windows anyway, they want access to the bare metal. It would make sense to have a standard Linux or BSD image to support Steam, and then provide direct access to a standard set of hardware components for the games themselves.

Anyhow, if VALVe does release a Windows-free open gaming console, I will definitely buy one. Even if it doesn’t come with a copy of Half-Life 3.

Regarding Rush Limbaugh and contraception

Rush Limbaugh’s comments on contraception have shown that he doesn’t understand how people respond to basic economic situations.

The contraceptive pill is something you have to take every day. You don’t only use it when you have sex. So if you think you might have sex once, you need to go on the pill and stay on it.

This means that the cost of contraceptive pills purchased by the user is what economists call a sunk cost. Humans are loss-averse, so when they are faced with a sunk cost, they tend to try and make more use of whatever incurred the cost, so as to minimize the perceived loss.

This is most often encountered when considering transport. Suppose I spend $6,000 per year to maintain an automobile so that I can commute to work. Now suppose I’m faced with the desire to go to a restaurant downtown. I could pay a couple of dollars to get the bus, but since I’ve already paid the six grand to have a car available, chances are I’ll go by car in order to get more use out of it.

So if people have to pay for contraceptive pills, then economics tells us they’re likely to view the sunk cost that way. In other words: if you have to pay a fixed amount per month for contraceptive pills, chances are you’ll want to have more sex, so as to reduce the apparent cost per sexual encounter.

On the other hand, if contraceptive pills appear to cost you nothing, because you get them covered by insurance, there’s no motivation to have more sex.

So if conservatives wanted to encourage people to have sex more, making them pay for contraceptives would be the perfect way to do so.

There are similar economic motivations around condoms, of course. If you buy a box of 12 you have an economic incentive to use them up before they expire. If you get them for free, you don’t care if they go unused.