The third greatest band in my mind, Jim's Big Ego
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Jim Infantino, Daniel Cantor, and Jesse Flack make up the band Jim’s Big Ego. Infantino sings and plays guitar for the group. Cantor is the designated bassist, and he plays the double bass. Flack is the drummer and effect maker, effects as in sounds, not flames and light etc. Jim’s Big Ego is from Boston, MA and plays many of their shows around the area. They call their genre, “Unpop,” but after listening to their music a bit, I can say with 75% certainty that their genre is indie, seeing as their bassist uses a double bass, and their drummer uses many sounds, not just drums. As for their copyrighting matters, they use Creative Commons to make sure their songs can be played widely, but not commercially. It’s as if they want people to play and edit their songs so everyone can know them, but I feel that that was a bad idea. They should have copyrighted through something that would advertise their music, seeing as they have a lot of talent compared to other current bands and artists. “Our Scrabulous Affair” is a special tribute to Scrabulous, an online scrabble game on Facebook, and the game was addicting. Just for a piece of information, the game was erased because Hasbro said it infringed on its game Scrabble (the games were almost identical, and Scrabulous was owned by Facebook). The song “Mix Tape” seems to be about a guy who gave a mix tape to a girl and ids wondering if she likes it. Mix tapes, as everyone knows, are a standard name for anything that has music and is not a regular album by a band; it can be anything that is able to be recorded upon, like cassettes, CDs, playlists on an iPod. It seems to me that the song “Free*” implies that Jim’s Big Ego is either mocking or loving fine print. Being an album name, it might have nothing to do with anything at all, but it’s also a song. Listening to it made me think, “This band loves freedom, and hates those people who place ads and really just lie to you, like many things these days.” It actually made me realize that, today, people abuse footnotes and other asterisk related things. Daily, people get scammed from what they want due to little fine print that nobody ever sees. As you can see, I just got incredibly inspired by these songs. Slabster is a website where one can purchase products from Artists using Slabster. Today, thirty artists use Slabster to distribute their music and other products, such as stickers. Jim’s Big Ego, when I first heard of it, seemed like the worst name for a band ever. After reading why they call themselves Jim’s Big Ego, I understand how important a band name can be, and that something funny can actually help someone with certain forms of stage fright. But, when I read that the band uses Creative Commons, I began to think, “Why did they do that?” I never learned why throughout my research, but I do think it was great for the band. Under law of the band’s copyright, my band can play any song belonging to Jim’s Big Ego, but neither I nor my band can make money off of it. This allows for the music to go far away, even going to a world wide scale, as opposed to only being heard world wide on the internet, which is a shaky thing to do. People can easily get songs playing on a band’s site, ways of which I do not know, but I do know it can be done. Overall, Jim’s Big Ego is now one of my top five favorite bands, and mainly because of the album “Free*” being a great album. Without this assignment, I would not know the joys of “International” and “(I Don’t Know) How to Party” which are great songs.