Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Rachel Summers observes the fangirls:

Many fangirls seem to be suffering from the delusion that they know their idols; they've read every interview and seen every video clip of them possible, how could they not? The reality, of course, is that even with the most candid and accessible performer, one is often only seeing a fraction of who that person actually is. To believe that one's 'fan knowledge' of a person equals the knowledge that their parents, lovers, friends, doctors, lawyers, managers, etc, have of them is most definitely delusional.

The Sunday Times is granted an audience with Emmy The Great:

“If you look at someone’s entire songwriting output, if all those things happened to them, they’d be dead. If you write about only things that ‘happen’ to you, you’ll write, ‘I went to the post office today and delivered my package / And then I went home and watched television’.”
(Which kind of sums up some of the mockney-fied street poetry being peddled at the moment, but I let the thought go.)

Powells.com meets Oliver Sacks as he publishes Musicophilia:

Whether music piggybacks on speech or visa versa, or whether they were separate evolutions, people will argue every way. And of course Steven Pinker, after people like William James, see music as trivial and incidental, "auditory cheesecake," which I don't go along with. Music is central in every culture. So much of the brain is recruited in its service, for perception or imagination. Musical instruments go back fifty thousand years.

I think of what Mendelssohn said: "In some ways, music is more precise than language." It's the other form of communication.

As Facebook tries to get some MySpace style band action, Techcrunch compares the official offering with the iLike app:

So if you are a music artist, you now have to make a decision: Do you go with the iLike page as your main Facebook page (and take advantage of the nearly 10 million members who use the iLike app), or do you go with your own advertiser page on Facebook? Case in point: the new Facebook page for 50 Cent (shown left) had only three fans when it first went up just after midnight, compared to 1.2 million fans on his iLike page on Facebook.