New music this week from many indie artists including my friend MOULE, Cable Ties, Ivy Green, VandeYork, Albert Hammond Jr, Lloyd Cole, plus Stewart Copeland, Portugal, The Man, The Hives, Crown Lands and much more. Enjoy!
As always, these songs have been added to the playlist at Radio Free California the Radio Station (embedded below). If you don't want to listen to this week's selection on Spotify, and some people don't and that's just fine, you can listen on the radio station at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm and 6pm PST This coming Wednessday. We will also be playing the album Western Cum by Cory Hanson, who are featured on this week's list, at 9am and again at 9pm PST on Thursday.
New music this week from Dolly Parton (flexing those rock and roll muscles), Peppy Castro, Queens of the Stone Age, Steve Lukather (with some help from old Toto friends), Gov't Mule, Steve Forbert and much more. Enjoy!
As per usual, these songs can be heard at Radio Free California the Internet Radio station (and app), which I'm embedding here:
Great week for new music starting with Dua Lipa, Ukraine's Death Pill, Dream Wife, Greta Van Fleet, Extreme, Leo, Death Valley Girls, Envy of None (featuring Alex Lifeson of Rush), Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, King Krule and much more. Enjoy!
As per usual, you can also hear these songs at the Radio Free California Internet Radio Station, and the playlist itself this coming Wednesday.
Cheap Shots:
I meant to watch the Tonys, because the daughter of a friend of mine is in the company of a show that performed. Aaaaaaand I missed it. I also missed "The Grand Wizard".
What a week for new music! This week we feature Foo Fighters, The Alarm, Cowboy Junkies, Extreme, lovelytheband, Comet Gain, Sakamato Maaya, Motion Sickness, Rancid, Peter Gabriel and much much more! Enjoy!
As always, the music on this playlist and my previous playlists can be found on the Radio Free California website and app!
A few thoughts about twitter:
I stopped using twitter as a place to meet people a few days after a right wing fuckhead named Elon Musk bought it. Up until that point it had been pretty good, and I had made a number of friends. The synthwave musician kiffie for one, whom I've collaborated with (Look for the album "Megapixelation" on bandcamp). I connected with musician David Baerwald, more than 30 years after unwittingly turning down joining the Tuesday Night Music Club, which I've discussed elsewhere.
Musicians Chris Trapper, Christopher Cross, Chris Franz, Chris Isaask and I even once got into a hilarious circular conversation about forming a new band called The Chris'. I would play keyboards and/or bass in said band.
I got to sing a line in a song by Kasim Sulton because of twitter.
And funniest of all is that Arthur Brown and I are now on-line friends. Yes, "I am the God of Hellfire and I bring you... FIRE!!!!" Arthur Brown himself. A truly pleasant gentleman with a wicked sense of humor.
That all went out the window once Musk took over the platform and invited all the motherfucking Nazis back. I moved to Counter.Social and haven't regretted it for making friends. I kept my twitter account though, for the sole purpose of promoting myself as a musician. Talk about new releases and so on.
But twitter got worse, and at the beginning of May I changed my password into a string of random characters, signed off and I haven't been back since. I lost the password too, when my computer died. I find that while I do miss seeing some of my friends there, I don't miss the platform one damned bit.
But the point is kind of moot because of something that is about to happen: twitter is about to get blocked in most of the European Union.
The European Union (EU) has something called the Digital Services Act. This declares that any company that can be defined as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) has to follow specific rules about content moderation. Specifically, they have to have procedures in place to prevent cyberbullying, illegal content, misinformation, ads targeted towards minors, hate speech, and more. Targeted ads based upon culled information regarding political opinions and religion are forbidden. AI manipulated content and deepfakes must be labelled. There's more but you get the idea.
These rules are voluntary, but all 19 companies that the EU calls VLOP's signed on. Facebook, Tik-Tok, twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon, Google, Bing, and yes even twitter signed on when the rules were passed. 18 of those companies are still signatories. Guess what one withdrew?
twitter withdrew from the agreement on May 27th, 2023 and that date is very important. It's exactly 90 days before the voluntary participation becomes mandatory and the EU can start enforcing the provisions by levying fines and getting directly involved in how companies implement their social media controls. Facebook has already been levied a fine of $1.2B about sharing user data overseas. Those provisions went into effect earlier.
twitter, by signaling that they will not abide by any ruling of the EU on how they run their business now has another problem. If the EU cannot force a company to be part of the agreement, they are obligated to BLOCK the app.
Now lots of people these days are pretty computer savvy, and know how to use a VPN. But for those who don't, which makes up a majority of all users, twitter will be unavailable starting the end of this summer - August 25, 2023. Exactly 90 days after twitter withdrew from the agreement.
It's that 90 day mark I can't get out of my mind. Musk isn't very smart - he's made missteps time and time again but he takes credit for the fixes and because he's the rich one in the group we tend to give him the credit. We really need to stop treating rich people like they're smart. Anyway, I can't help but feel that this 90 day withdrawal is intentional. 90 days notice.
90 days notice. That's the sort of notice you give when you have a professional reason to give notice. I firmly believe this is intentional. Musk has already shown a tendency to only respond to accounts in the United States when he does his "trolling" schtick. I think he's trying to refocus the app to be specific for the US.
Why?
Look at who he hangs out with, and what he does out of the limelight. He hangs with Ron DeSantis, a chubby schoolboy in a too tight suit with fascism fantasies who panders to the basest of the base in his political party. He's building a town in Texas just for people who think like he does. He's skirting regulations left and right. He showered a town in debris after the explosion of one of his rockets.
(And off topic here, but why the fuck is a private citizen of any kind allowed to have rockets?)
He's about to get fined like crazy in Germany because he doesn't moderate the Nazis who are using twitter, which is actually a crime in Germany. Fines and prison crime.
twitter, which has attempted to call itself the home of free speech absolutists like Musk (he's not one, by the way) is about to drop all pretense and move from being the Fox "News" of social media to becoming the "News"max of social media. It's not about the value of the company. It's not about the money - even after all of this crap Musk is still richer than just about anyone.
It's about the same thing that right-wing fuckheads always want. Power. Power over as many people as possible. They don't care about the how or the why, they care about the existence of power. Unshared power. Power for them and not for anyone else.
Power to tell you how to think. And you're going to think like they want you to think or else.
This is not an American thing but we Americans have just about perfected doing this. We have shown over and over again during our history that we are the best at taking the worst ideas and weaponizing them against ourselves. twitter is becoming the same kind of American, and it seems to me to be intentional.
I unfriend people like that. I don't need that sort of horseshit in my personal life. I don't need twitter.
I miss a few people there but funnily enough most of them are people who won't have access to it in a couple more months.
And maybe you will find that you don't need twitter either.
Quick, can you name all ELEVEN people running for the GOP Nomination so far? Don't feel bad if you can't. I just read the article in the link and I still can't.
