Last night, three local bands attracted a huge turn-out in the basement of the Beta House on 114th Fraternity Row. The event, Beta Jam, held every semester, provides opportunity for local bands to get some decent exposure on campus.

The line-up started with Beta’s own The Stolen Cars (pictured left) who did well to warm up the event with some up-beat, catchy tunes.

The next girl had all eyes on her. Sarah Dooley, who spends most of the time watching goonies at her house, performed some of her originals and four well-received Sarah Dooley-esque covers of Nelly’s Hot in Herre, Aretha Franklin’s Natural Woman, MIA’s Paper Planes (although Dooley regretted not having a gun to make the gunshot sounds in the chorus) and an interesting cover of the great Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The show wrapped up with indie/folk-y band The Kitchen Cabinet, with lead vocalist Ashraya Gupta, Cindy Lou Gooden, Rob Stenson and Michael Molina. Their performance marked their first anniversary since the band started up. The band’s unassuming sound and ability to get the crowd tapping their toes and at one point, joining in with the singing, made for a great community atmosphere (which also let the band laugh off a few entertaining mess-ups).

Sadly, Columbia does very little for local bands trying to get onto their feet. Lerner recently opened up Live at Lerner, but they are asking us to show the ends without the providing the means. That is, Columbia is slowly opening up to bands performing more often on campus, but without providing them the means to practice. On campus, you are only permitted to use a practice room with a drum set if and only if you are part of Washburn’s Jazz Program. If not, tough titties. Go find a practice room somewhere else and have fun lugging around your kit. Why Columbia does not feel compelled to accommodate for the musical community here is a question I ask myself everyday.

So you don’t have money for Netflix or iTunes but you really want to see the latest episode of Gossip Girls and you’re not “a computer person”. I feel your pain. I do.

I am not about to scold ye pirates or preach morality, but the phenomenon that is quickly becoming the norm for most college students may not be as necessary as common perceptions decree. Whether you belong to the Robin Hood school of thought or the folks that wouldn’t steal a purse, there are many FREE and LEGAL ways to watch your favorite TV shows and movies. Most of these simple and easy to access tips tend to be faster and safer than downloading random files to your computer or buying DVDs off the local street corner.

The best and fastest way is to go to the network’s website and watch it via streaming video while only suffering through minimal commercials if any (the best I’ve seen so far is ABC). The shows are typically available about a week after they initially air, and many sites now even have old seasons of current shows for your viewing pleasure.

Another way is through third-party websites that use advertising to pay for the show or movie that you’re enjoying: check out Hulu or its cousin ShareTV. Or enjoy concerts at the one of the up-and-coming Archives.

For free music mp3 downloads, you can check out websites like download.com and discover some incredible talent before the rest of your friends. You can take this one step further with Pandora, where you create your own customized channel and relax to songs that are found for you based on your taste. If you’d rather just create your own radio station then a very simple one to use is Yahoo’s free service LAUNCHcast.

If you have your own favorites, I’d like to hear.

Good luck and happy procrastinating.

New York hasn’t totally lost it’s soul! At least, not yet…

NOT! From the “Essential Reading” section of the sidebar:

On piracy, the compromise adopts the House’s requirement that colleges develop plans to “detect and prevent” illegal downloading of music and videos on campus, including offering alternatives to illegal downloading. But negotiators provided a possible out for colleges, adding the phrase “to the extent practicable” to the language.

Now this probably won’t change anything. The RIAA will continue using Soviet-style tactics, and colleges will continue to let them. Meanwhile, “legal” means of downloading music are by-design inferior to the illegal ones, and are more concerned with granting deniability to univerisites who are themsleves afraid of getting sued than providing music to the students who are typically at the recieiving end of the recording industry’s bullying.

What this does do is make at least some federal funding contingent on schools tayloring their network contracts to the demands of the recording industry. Even on higher ed it seems our Democratic congress isn’t quite as progressive as some would hope…

Now that North Carolina has become a major battleground in the never-ending race for the nomination, and Barack Obama is paying more attention to UNC Chapel-Hill than he likely ever will to his alma mater, Canadian indie prophets The Arcade Fire have announced two free concerts in the Tar Heel State to encourage young voters to get out.

Funny considering the band is Canadian! Actually, frontman Win and drummer Will Butler, brothers, grew up in Texas, but have lived in Canada since their respective graduations from Phillips Exeter. Win Butler has publicly expressed his support for Obama before, but it’s really hard to imagine Obama rocking out to the Arcade Fire’s antics.

It’s been little reported-upon that the CU Dems have finally, yet quietly, left the rails. Well, “left the rails” is probably the wrong choice of words here: It’s probably more like “left its moderate base behind in a hail-Mary bid for left-wing activist support under the guise of partisan activism.” Because in the last week or so, the Dems have gone from partisan appendage to thinly-disguised ISO co-affiliate–although I suspect (and genuinely hope) that the switch has more to do with the cynical realities of campus politics than with the views of the Dems e-board.

The most egregious evidence of this (aside from their opportunistic support for the hunger strike) was the Dems “flag-washing” event and its accompanying op/ed from media director Jonathan Backer (linked above), which included this line:

Over the past five years, the United States has exposed its flag to undignified associations. The Iraq War has claimed the lives of over 4,000 American soldiers and over one million Iraqi civilians.

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I’m considering a move to San Francisco or Portland after graduation–planning ahead pretty far in advance, seeing as I’m just wrapping up my sophomore year. After thinking about this for a while, the thought of living that far away from New York seems suddenly terrifying. I’ve never lived more than four hours from the city–that was during my boarding school years. And although I lived outside Boston, I made frequent sojourns to the soul of the world on breaks and braved the Fung Wah to escape some weekends.

So I wonder: what is it about East Coast Living that has me so scared to leave? I was nearly jumping for joy as I prepared to break from my New England roots and move to New York, but I almost cried when I realized I would likely never experience a full New England autumn again. Turns out I am an East Coast woman, through and through.

A brief interlude before I begin my diatribe on the importance of geographical origins: singer/songwriter and Boston native Jonathan Richman has an apt tribute to the little five states that could. Listen to it here. Actually, I would encourage all my readers to listen to the song whilst reading the rest of this column.
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Yes, I’ve fallen in love with them so much that I am taking time out of my studying for my two consecutive (I’m not kidding! 12-1:05 and then 1:10-2:25!) exams (for which I am royally screwed) to post about them (betcha didn’t think I could fit that many non-sequiturs into a single sentence!). I’ve been intending to research them for ages, but after finding–or rather, not finding–a dearth of information on the Internet, I bookmarked them on Pandora and left it at that.

They’re called the The Peanut Butter Conspiracy and they were a late 1960s psychedelic California band with a cult following. The song for which I initially fell head over heels is called Free off their album “Spreading From the Ashes,” which I am buying–a rare event for such a dedicated music pirate. Oh yeah. Listen to those harmonies. Tell me they don’t OWN the wall of sound.

As for the supposed dearth–it’s not so bad as I thought. You just have to get the right Google search terms. On a side note, apparently Jimmy Buffet has a song called The Peanut Butter Conspiracy but I didn’t want to get near those sites to see if it was a tribute.

Well, dear readers, go forth and conquer. The internet is waiting, those midterms will wait.

Move over, Keith Richards, the cool new thing to snort is no longer your father’s ashes, but good ole vodka!

Apparently rehab is like going to Vegas–what happens in rehab, stays in rehab, including sobriety.  Amy Winehouse, who has run out of productive things to snort, spent the weekend at London’s Bungalow 8 playing the game “Gas Chamber,” which is where a circle of people go around snorting vodka shots.  (At least it wasn’t crack?)  Prince Harry was caught playing last year (hopefully while not in his Nazi Halloween costume)  She was playing with her merry group of super-duper role models, Kelly Osbourne, Kimberly Stewart, Miquita Oliver and Mark Ronson.

It’s pretty obvious that “Gas Chamber” is really dangerous because it shoots alcohol directly into the bloodstream, so as tempting as it sounds, please don’t actually try it out tonight.  And can we also acknowledge just how painful snorting vodka sounds?

As all music blog junkies probably know, this month marks the 10th anniversary of one of the best albums of the ’90s. If Sublime’s What I Got is the musical common denominator for every college student in America, then surely every indie kid can sing along to the eponymous song from Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Slate calls Jeff Mangum, the front man of Neutral Milk Hotel, the J.D. Salinger of indie rock because after the critical success of the band’s second album, he disappeared, resurfacing only for the occasional acoustic show.

Neutral Milk Hotel’s brilliance lies in more than their songwriting, though they have written some of my favorite songs: they’re really gorgeous and ethereal. In the Aeroplane is a concept album dreamed up by Mangum after reading Anne Frank’s diary. The lyrics are mysterious and captivating and the sound is distinctive, featuring combinations of instruments that I can never quite pin down. The album–like every single one of my favorite albums–is cohesive, with one song flowing into the next with little fanfare. And the songs are simple: guitar lore has it that the album uses only four chords (G, C, D, Em), but I don’t buy it, having played many of the songs over and over again in the privacy of my room.

No, part of the band’s magic lies in their live performances, which I was never able to see. It takes versatile musicians to perform equally well in live and studio recordings. One of my boyfriend’s favorite songs by the band was never laid down in a studio, only played live. (Blatant self-promotion: we’ll be covering that song together at my Postcrypt Coffeehouse concert on Friday, March 7. 10pm.)

I plan on listening to the album straight through tonight. If you haven’t heard it, I recommend you do the same.