• Chris Onstad at Achewood features an irreverent, but ultimately affectionate, strip explaining the basics of D&D to those who are unfamiliar with it.

• Giant in the Playground imagines Gygax’s arrival in heaven.

• Full Frontal Nerdity thanks Gygax “for saving us all a place at the gaming table.”

• Dork Tower remembers Gygax with an incredibly sweet, earnest cartoon.

• The undie band Uncle Monsterface (which defies description, but in a wonderful, wonderful way) offers a free download of their new song “(thank you) Gary Gygax.” (Via Wired.)

• At the Rooster Teeth blog, Burnie Burns writes: “He was born with a space alien’s last name; he was destined for nerdom at birth. D&D didn’t exist so he had no choice but to invent it.”

• Penny Arcade features an unbelievably touching, and perfectly executed, tribute to Gygax.

It’s easy to understand the outpouring of emotion from the undependents — Gygax was an undie pioneer, creating not just an original work of art, but an original form of art as well. He created D&D out of whole cloth, and he did it himself, releasing the very first editions of the game himself, without help from major distributors. He was almost a godfather to generations of creative types, and the undependent scene wouldn’t be the same without him. Rest in peace, Gary.

The point is — or should be — the relative acceptability of nerdiness is a somewhat recent phenomenon, and the Internet is helping the bespectacled and pallid among us finally convince the world that knowledge is actually pretty cool. There’s a whole slew of webcomics out there celebrating, and not apologizing for, their creators’ love of periodic tables, quadratic equations, obscure art history, and all other kinds of fancy-pants book-learnin’. Here’s two of them:

• XKCD bills itself as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.” Which sounds a lot like my college career. Except for the romance. Also, I failed math. Twice. But even if you score a zero on your AP Calculus test (yes, it happens. Hi! I’m Mike!) you’ll be able to appreciate physicist/artist Randall Munroe’s skewed take on dating librarians, Snapple, and poisson distributions. The XKCD store, temporarily closed, will hopefully return soon, enabling us all to get our fix of “Science: It Works, Bitches!” shirts.

• I’ve written before about Dorothy Gambrell’s brilliant Cat and Girl, but it’s hard for me to say enough good things about this innovative comic strip by the Tucson-based musician and artist. It’s not just because she’s one of the only ones with the guts to say that pirates are “an overworked Internet meme,” but also because of her shout-outs to figures as random as The Captain and Tenille, Count Vronsky, and Jasper Johns. She’s also a leading proponent of geek unity (which, as Girl suggests, could have saved Veronica Mars). Visit her store while you’re waiting for the deus ex machina.

Comics like these have a natural, ever-growing audience: folks who like to laugh and learn at the same time, and who appreciate the work of creators who are hopefully too witty to write a tooth-achingly earnest phrase like “laugh and learn at the same time.” Webcomics are a natural medium for this kind of humor, but you can also see it (very occasionally) on television (The Daily Show, No Reservations), in music (Sufjan Stevens’ history-laden state-themed albums), and — if my financiers come through — even off-Broadway musicals (the hopefully forthcoming Ewing!: The Crazy, Funky Odyssey of America’s First Secretary of the Interior, As Told by Mike). The nerdcore artists and writers of today are refusing to buy into the theory that the world is being dumbed down, and their audiences are rewarding them with not just attention, but ardent fandom.

The nerd revolution won’t be televised, but thanks to the nerdcore webcomic movement (such as it is), it might just be showing up in your RSS feed.

While there is no shortage of interest in the album cover medium, there’s no obvious web page out dedicated to the world’s first record cover. I’m apparently I’m not the only one looking for it (See: “Anyone have a scan?“) I’ve seen scattered images from articles about Steinweiss but I’ve not found anything resembling a Shrine.

Such a noteworthy artifact in the history of mass media screams for its own page. Google returns 300+ results for the phrase “Sgt Pepper’s Album Cover” but nothing definitive for the phrase “First Album Cover.” Here’s my humble stab at such a page.

For the complete history of the album cover and its creator, just hit Wikipedia or pick up a copy of “For the Record.” Alex Steinwess, a then 23 years old designer, convinced Columbia’s suits to create the first true album cover. Until then, 78s were sold in generic sleeves.Recently, I came across an apparently original edition of this album and was able to pick it up for almost nothing. Someone unwittingly dumped it onto eBay for chump change. I mean, if they’d known what they had, I would’ve at least expected the auction to include “World’s First Album Cover!” and a reserve price of $100, $500, who knows? Instead, I picked it up for less than $30.

I have been eager to get it posted for all the graphic designers, media theorists and vinyl enthusiasts out there googling “steinweiss +first album cover.” I wanted to get these images out into the world for broader circulation.

Front Cover Closeup

Marquee should read “By Rodgers, Hart and Steinweiss”

Album Spine

It looks exactly like a hardcover book when closed. Like they say, with any truly new medium the first thing people usually do is crank out simulacra of old, familiar media.

The 78

Before the LP (Long Playing) record, 78 records were usually 10 inch platters that held around 3 minutes of music!

In other words, this Rodgers and Hart collection of Smash Song Hits includes 4 separate platters! More bulk than a modern CD box set!

Inside Front Cover and Platter 1 Sleeve

Generic Inside-Back Cover

I’m guessing the above back-inside-cover was the original. Let’s call it the

“Let’s not spend any more money than we already have on this @#$% thing by adding even more images and hifalutin’ design this 23 year old punk is probably going to cost us all our jobs with his crazy idea anyways“

Shelf-Aware™ Version

I’m guessing the ABOVE version, spotted inside an otherwise seemingly identical version of Smash Song Hits is the “I can’t believe this whole album cover thing worked and we’re selling four times more of these than the regular covers, the punk was right, hey, why not give EVERY album a cover and hey, whaddya know, we’ve got ourselves a built-in billboard here, we may as well USE it!“

Shelf-Awareness, incidentally, is a term we coined at Amplifier. It describes the publisher/label/studio-centric pattern of encoding a particular work of art(?) with advertisements for other like-minded comparables available from the same entity. In other words, it’s the endless tendency to make content into an advertisement for other content. Whether it’s trailers in front of movies, endorsements by same-publisher authors on backs of books, or in this case, ads for other albums by the same label, it’s a recurring phenomena and it’s one that often signifies a wasted artistic opportunity.

So what does a medium from 1938 have to do with Internet-based content?
Everything.
78s shipped in brown kraft paper sleeves for years before someone thought to change this. Today, most orders still ship in brown corrugate boxes. It’s only a matter of time before this generic wrapper is completely transformed into a new medium altogether.

It turns out that Madonona wants maximum money and doesn’t care about Undies, which is of course quite fine. She’s just, err, expressing herself.

Live Nation, formerly of Clear Channel, is about as far away from undependent friendly as you can get. They are co-Dependent central.

For more info on Live Nation / Clear Channel, please see:

• The Wikipedia entry on Clear Channel;
• This profile of Live Nation;
• The documentary, Before the Music Dies (buy it);
• These Salon articles.

Undies can now thrive in all kinds of exciting ways. As always, new opportunities present new challenges. We will continue to discuss trends, developments, industry structure and economics, and related topics of interest to Undependents. The seismic shifts in music reveal lots of cool stuff; Madonna, though, lives in another world.

Yet Radiohead are singularly about to demonstrate the true paradigm shift taking place in the music industry, and it has little to do with technology: that the artist is, and always has been, the most powerful player in the business.

Simply put, only the artist has a direct relationship with their fans! Everyone else is simply along for the ride.

Of course, for a long time the cost of recording, manufacturing and distribution was prohibitively expensive; marketing remains so. While digital technologies have changed that paradigm what is becoming clearer is that the relationship between the artist and fan is a quantifiable, valuable asset.

Something that Despair, RoosterTeeth, and Undependents could have told ‘em.

Also: Radiohead are plural?

The music industry has its own unique characteristics and severe issues.  However, many lessons can be learned by following it.

Lefsetz Letter on Madonna/Live Nation
Bottom line, the majors have lost their clout. Their monopoly was always distribution, and they used this to get talent to sign. Eventually they owned EXHIBITION also. So, if you wanted to play, you had to sign with them. The fact that they weren’t hip enough to know this wasn’t going to last forever is astounding, especially since trends come and go so quickly in the music business.

Lefsetz Letter on Radiohead

You can’t make a TV show by yourself. Certainly not a movie. Not that anyone can see. But you can make a record all by your lonesome, it doesn’t cost that much. And you can say exactly what you want, you don’t need to clean it up for Wal-Mart. And, you can distribute it yourself online. That’s what Radiohead is doing.

Will they make a deal with a major for physical distribution? Will they do it themselves? Or will they leave ALL that money on the table?

Undies are already very familiar with saying what they want to say.  And they already distribute themselves online.

If you can attract a growing audience for what you create, you hold a massive amount of power in this emerging space.  Use it wisely.  Learn how to make the most of these new opportunities.

All these music industry moves comes at the expense of the former financial and physical infrastructure intermediaries between Artist and Audience.

Labels provide either (usually both) start-up capital and the physical distribution network for musicians. Both those come at an extremely high price, naturally.

But when the internet enables digital and physical distribution, and musical publishing tools can be bought off the shelf for lawn-mowing money, labels lose their monopoly on access to Audience.

Radiohead has decided to self-release their next album and allow fans to pay whatever they want for it. It think it is safe to say that they’re going to make a killing in both real and social capital (“Not that that’s why I did it…”, “No God forbid you should lose your standing as a cult failure…”,”You think I’m a failure George?”,“I will NOT get sucked into this conversation.”)

From Wiki: “The band are currently without a record contract, having fulfilled their six-album contract with EMI in 2004. In interviews in 2006, they admitted that “for the first time, we have no contract or release deadline to fulfill – it’s both liberating and terrifying”

Others Musicians have gone down the Internet-as-Road-Less-Traveled path but few have done so have been this big at the time of their “departure. “

Radiohead to give away new album – Telegraph
Radiohead, the internationally renowned band, has taken the unusual step of telling fans that they can pay as much or as little as they like for the band’s new album In Rainbows.