The European Commission is calling for a suggested maximum volume to be set on MP3 players, to protect users’ hearing reports the BBC. One proposal is to have a limit of 85 dB, which can be overridden as far as 100 dB. This is a bit daft for three reasons. Firstly, it’s a bad idea. [...]

Every generation gets to change the world sings Bono in a new advertisement. Is the U2 singer leading a new campaign to feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Will he lead us into a world without the scourge of war? Can Bono take us into this new, golden age? No. He’s trying to sell [...]

The original from 1941. xD.

Norm ‘Normblog’ Geras is running a posterity collection poll. The story is that, civilization approaching its possible doom (not really, but it’s the premise of the poll), the normblog readership has been assigned the task of assembling for posterity a representative collection of the Arts of Humankind, to be preserved in a sealed container so [...]

Spinnerette. Some people might remember the Distillers; lead singer Brody Dalle has set up a new group, Spinnerette, and they’re rather good. Admittedly, somewhat different to the Distillers, but nevertheless you should listen to this: and this: xD.

Eight years ago, almost to the day, I was in Washington, DC, and attended the inauguration of George Walker Bush as the forty-third President of the United States of America. It is premature to make judgments on how good Bush’s presidency has been; we are too close in time. It’s probably fair to say that [...]

Robert Earl Keen is one of my favourite singers. I heard this song, Shades of Grey, for the first time last night. There’s a studio version on last.fm. xD.

I have commented before on the singer, Soulja Boy (see Video killed the radio star on this blog), with regard to people playing music out loud on their mobile phones: The speakers are rubbish and any sound that comes out (quite apart from the lyrical delights of Soulja Boy’s wonderful hit, Crank Dat (Soulja Boy), [...]

I haven’t been this excited about a music release since Garbage’s ‘Bleed Like Me’. Bauhaus were one of the most influential bands of the eighties and spawned, by accident, the entire gothic rock genre. Their first single, Bela Lugosi’s Dead is a masterpiece – ten minutes long, recorded in a single take – that you [...]

I love Eurovision and so I’m glad to see that we’ve chosen a halfway-decent song this year – ‘Even If’ by Andy Abraham. It’s an awful lot better than the travesty that was Scooch. I’m not sure that it has enough oomph to win, but I think it might do well; Andy comes across well [...]