It’s Earth Day, and MANKIND, the remix, is now live on the streaming services! Originally conceived in 1976, with music borrowed from a certain unofficial American anthem and sung by ducks, Mankind was conceived and created by a certain maverick record producer using a one-man band on a calliope-meets-player-piano contraption. The YouTube video for the song has been played a bunch since we launched it a year ago, and Pete and I thought this Earth Day would be a fine Earth Day to launch the track onto the Apple Musics and Pandoras and Spotifys of the world.
A motto here is “Every day is Earth Day,” and it’s obviously an attitude that all hoomans should take. As custodians of this planet we have largely failed, and we should do the best we can to correct that while we can, and time is running out fast, and we know this. To be kind to our web-footed friends is really the same as being kind to ourselves, as without nature we are nothing, and every habitat we destroy leads to our demise. I think Pete put it well in this song, and while he may have second thoughts about the duck voice, I LOVE it! This leads me to a tangent, which might get a bit ranty:
This track is unique, and that’s something I like about it, and it’s part of what inspired me to do a remix. In the streaming music world, as with movies on Netflix etc., and basically all of the algorithmically programmed Interwebs, there’s this whole business about recommending things that are somehow similar to other things people have viewed or liked. I find this as ridiculous as it is prevalent. Our tastes can be FAR broader than that and I think we are, by nature, eclectic in our tastes. Meaning, we like lots of different types of things. Which is why I favor curation by thoughtful and knowledgeable hoomans over AI-based programming. Current automatic content programming methods try and push us into little piles surrounded by familiar things, making our intellectual and artistic horizons shrink ever-smaller in little echo-chamber jails. It’s part of what is wrecking public discourse and leading us to despair and societal collapse.
On this Earth Day we at Berkeley Cat Records celebrate our diversity and uniqueness, AND the things that bind our interests and loves together, like, the need for clean air and water, and our desire for peace and prosperity for our kids. And FOR all that, we had better be kind to our web-footed friends.
OK, maybe that wasn’t so ranty after all. Here’s Pete, with a question:
