2005

My favorite new artist is Feist, the genre-defying Canadian singer-songwriter formerly with Broken Social Scene. Her album was released in France in mid-2004 but only found a U.S. release in April, and I’m in love with it. Like I usually do when I get obsessed with a musician, I went looking for any related media I could find about her.

It’s a bit disheartening that the only place I could find high-quality music videos of her were in Usenet, and even those were ripped from MTV2 UK’s “120 Minutes” show. After doing a little research, the state of music videos online is just generally poor. Music videos are promotional material to spur album sales, right? Then why do we need to suffer through postage-stamp video and buffering Realvideo streams to watch a well-produced advertisement? I’m not asking for DVD-quality here; just something on par with Apple’s movie trailers.

One reason could be the bandwidth concerns, but that’s getting cheaper every day (and there’s always BitTorrent). Or maybe the labels are worried they’d be giving something away they could potentially profit off of? I don’t know, but that seems desperate. There are exceptions, like the Decemberists distributing a music video over BitTorrent, but they’re very rare.

Anyway, I’m hosting high-res MPEG videos for “Mushaboom” and “One Evening” below. If there are record labels or legal websites distributing video downloads of this quality, let me know.

Download: Mushaboom (MPEG, 27MB)

Download: One Evening (MPEG, 25 MB)

Oh, and if you’re a fan, don’t miss the video of her live KCRW performance.

I know it’s strange to break a two-month silence for something like this, but I don’t care. This is my blog, dammit, and I’ll rant about six-month-old memes if I want.

For the last few weeks at work, we’ve been obsessed with House of Cosbys. So obsessed that other departments are starting to worry about us; it’s consuming our lives. I first linked to it back in March, long before the recent legal threats from Cosby himself, so I don’t know why it’s taken this long to infiltrate our brains. (I suspect one too many late nights on a recent deadline is ultimately to blame.)

But it has, so I want to share some Cosbyana for other potential Cosby-heads out there. If you haven’t seen the first episode, watch the high-res House of Cosbys pilot before proceeding.

To kick off Cosby Fest 2005, I’m hosting the entire Bill Cosby Talks To Kids About Drugs album from 1971. Don’t miss “Dope Pusher,” a song about hard drugs sung/screamed by Cosby and a choir of kids, backed by some serious funk. Download it now.

I’m Web-Surfing Cosby, You See

Outtakes from the Curiosity Cosby recording sessions

Amazing Cosby Team Triosby fan art one and two, from Episode 3

House of Cosbys exit theme song MP3s

Listen Up Theo, a not-safe-for-work House of Cosbys music video

Cosby Core tattoo

Cosby stencils and graffiti (and more) on Flickr

Cosby Show Season 1 was just released on DVD

Little Rascals/Bill Cosby urban legend on Snopes

The Bill Cosby Fun Game, Cosby goes on a murderous rampage

The Pac Man and Cosby Show, a comic apparently made by a blind man using MS Paint

Dear God, this has to stop now.