Breaking news: Tori Amos’s new disc will be titled Abnormally Attracted to Sin.
Like, duh, Tori.
However, in the “un-duh” department, each song on the disc – will be paired with a “visualette” shot in HD and Super-8. Amanda Palmer did a YouTube version of same on her last disc, which I dug. And, Tori never does anything half way.
Abnormally Attracted to Sin is the first disc in Tori’s deal with Universal Republic Records, which is primarily for distribution – she won’t be signing away masters or publishing rights ever again.
First disc of a newly freed Tori, who ended her last tour with a full band in fierce form and is coming back with her first integrated multimedia product launch. Preliminary verdict? Probably awesome.
Good luck getting into the SXSW showcase featuring the debut of new tunes – as of this morning it just became the hottest ticket of the entire festival.
Personal Tori-worship aside, I’d probably hit PJ Harvey’s instead.
In other news, yesterday my old-skool blogging pal Martha enthused about BSG and Malcolm Gladwell, two things I can very much get behind.
Except, the NYT dinged Gladwell’s newest, Outliers, right out of the gate – causing me to back off my haste to snap it up. (Later another NYT writer liked it more, and Gladwell responded.)
Martha claims the book is enrapturing, causing her to miss her bus stop twice. Coming from Martha, this is a sufficient endorsement. However, one of her commenters felt the need to respond with a general debunking of his Tipping Point.
The debunking employs my favorite example from Tipping Point (“Broken Windows“) versus Freakonomics (crime v. abortion) – a book I panned as being superfluous.
I’m not sure the debunking convinced me in one direction or the other. Yes, Gladwell skirts direct links to causation in Tipping Point, but that’s anecdotally the point of the whole anecdotal book – causation isn’t a single, lonely factor.
That said, the debunking did convince me that A Smart Bear is a rare sensible and practical marketing blog. Sample their intelligence for yourself: ignore the wisdom of crowds or act like your price just doubled.
Oh, Tori. She never fails to blow me away.
(As an aside: your link to the price doubling bit has some extra punctuation. And I was disappointed to click through and find that the other article was about the wisdom of crowds, not crows. I’m really curious now about the wisdom of crows.)