Entrepreneurial successes this summer alone include Crooked Fingers, who raised over $12,000 to pay for recording and manufacturing a limited-edition vinyl 12” of cover songs–twice his goal.

Amanda Palmer realized her goal in mere minutes, selling $15,000 worth of merchandise in 90 seconds with the release of her ukulele-based Radiohead cover album. Not bad for someone who recently left a major label.

Put simply, musicians need a business sensibility when they’re done creating. We’ve interviewed Crooked Fingers, Amanda Palmer and dozens of others who are now taking all aspects of their careers into their own hands.

Check out how Andrew W.K. breaks down the financial sense in spending money, Jakk Frost stresses the importance of saving it, Melissa Auf der Maur thinks long-term, The Decemberists skip MTV for BitTorrent and Matt & Kim view the internet as their personal distributor.

Lucy’s most notable commercial success was her 2003 hit “Dumb Girls,” but just as she was gathering steam, Atlantic Records pulled a corporate fast one, merged a bunch of shizzle and showed a roster of promising artists to their gleaming door–including Lucy.

No matter. She grew up singing in jazz cafes around New York for tips and/or a meal, so she probably was never particularly interested in following the typical “crank out a few chart-toppers; get seen at all the right nightclubs in NY/LA; date a bunch of douches; have a sex tape leaked online; suffer a breakdown; enter rehab for drug addiction; emerge and start talking about healing to Life & Style magazine/launch a perfume line” career path most aspiring songstresses stick to these days.

Lucy’s style is decidedly more ephemeral and simultaneously grounded. She sounds like her vocal cords have been sprinkled in lavender fairy dust. She looks like a sophisticated version of what Miley Cyrus’ publicist totes hopes she’ll look like in five years, but she acts like that enigmatic, super-smart, sweet sprite you knew in high school who is just as likely to go for “foreign affairs” as she is to run out and help build an Ashram in Goa, India.

But her kaleidoscope style, music and lifestyle are all part of her charm, right? She’s the CBGB-loving punk next door, the sextress who may or may not bite and the jaw-droppingly pretty smartass who’s always two steps ahead of you.

Below, check out Lucy’s perspective on traveling through passion-infused South America; the importance of holding onto your drunk-ass dance pants for two seconds on occasion; and of course, the joys of salsa-ing your way toward dawn.

Appropriately, the Last Shadow Puppets seem to enjoy Flashioning Backward themselves: Their aesthetic is early ’60s era Beatles floppy (but not yet scandalous) ’dos, velvet and pop-art-era smart suit silhouettes. Somehow, they maintain enough retro-mod stylistic tension to prevent themselves from looking like sad also-rans in desperate need of an E! Entertainment style intervention.

Their “spellbindingly elegant pop songs” on The Age of Understatement seem like the product of a full-time, totally cohesive, decades long effort, despite the fact that it’s really just a side project between Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner and The Rascals’ Miles Kane. While many expected the album to be a one-time, beautifully warbled swan song, rumor has it they’re working on a new album. I just hope they employ the same brilliant writing techniques.

Below, see how these non-ironically retro (but totally modern) gentleman managed to produce their last album…while skating downhill. You know, as one does!

Wesleyan College alums–notorious for their outré fashion sense, oh so zany leftward political leanings and bizarre penchant for cranking out ridiculously talented and wildly successful indie bands (see: MGMT, Amazing Baby)–have surely added Bear Hands to their roster of famous grads for their semi-annual donation drive.

Like their Wesleyan cohorts, Bear Hands seemed to profit from blossoming in relative isolation away from the self-consciously hip land in which they eventually landed–NYC. Their early ability to sort out their sound without subjecting themselves to the cacophony of aggressive attempts at unique avant-garde tonal poems that all end up sounding pretty much the same (which all too often passes for a music scene in my dear city) ultimately produced an album that sounds “splashing” “in the way a sort-of ethnic Talking Heads meeting an unusually relaxed Velvet Underground might sound. The voice is defiantly American, the backing defiantly invigorating.”

Bear Hands’ tambourine and cymbal accented music is as unpredictable, delicious and refreshing as their fashion sense is not. But who cares if they wear standard issue vintage wear, cigarette pants and mildly puffy jackets? While their hats, bad surfer hair and tongue-in-cheek attempts at looking “eccentric” fall as flat as a B note, in their case, I’m giving ‘em a pass.

Substance over style, is after all, the name of their well-played game. Below, check out their educational rant against Rock Band.

Indie folksters Wye Oak (named after a 460-year-old tree in Maryland, their home state) have always managed to temper their earnest, reflective lyrics with a dose of bittersweet, poignant edge, saving them from the degrading horrors of existence on lite radio. (Perish the day)!

Fans and critics alike gobble up their pretension-free collision of reverberating noisy fuzz and friendly, naked emotionalism. They seem like the kind of sweet/eccentric duo who would randomly invite you over for a snack after hitting it off at the laundromat, then proceed to serve you PB&J with the crusts cut off and a glass of organic milk while chatting about their pet hamster. And then they’d whip out the pot brownies and Pabst and suggest a game of Twister.

(Check out their latest song of innocence and experience, then check out their new album on July 21).

Below, it sounds like their approach to life hasn’t changed for Jenn and Andy since high school–though Andy’s fashion sense may have improved, and their alleged status as cripplingly embarrassing dorks certainly has. But actually, I’ve always found huge fros, Hawaiian shirts and the practice of playing in a steel-drum band to be rather charming.

Thanks to the UI-Approved, must-see CMJ Marathon Artist Blonde Acid Cult, I’ve now got an unbelievably confusing definition of a vice. One of my favorite vices is trolling my friends’ Facebook pages to see if they have cooler friends than me, then poaching their friends to be my friends.

It’s a system ThePerryTrain has put into effect in many areas of my life. When I’m at a friend’s house I’ll look in their fridge to see if they have better food than me, I’ll check out girls on the street to see if they have cool style ideas and I’ll straight up copy them, and I peruse the artist list on the Uncensored Interview homepage to see if they have any new cool bands I didn’t know about before.

I don’t like to call it stealing. It’s more like an appropriation of sonic judgment. Besides, isn’t taking somebody else’s cool band “find” and pretending you liked them all along the sincerest form of flattery?

B.A.C are so good they make me want to eat a baby. Now, I just found this other awesome UI-Approved, must-see CMJ Marathon artist Bear Hands on the Blonde Acid Cult MySpace page. It looks like Bear Hands also have certain vices that they indulge in, which I may or may not decide to copy.

Make sure to come back to Blog.UncensoredInterview.com during the Marathon itself for Poingly’s man-on-the-scene coverage, and to check in with CMJ.com for Uncensored Interview clips filmed during the Marathon.

What I am not okay with is PJPJ implying that people who don’t agree with them are stupid.

It’s great to show some respect for musicians who “do the right thing” (whatever your definition of that is), but their personal and professional respectability has little to do with how awesome their jams might be. Do I support R. Kelly’s actions as a person? No. God, no. But will I sell my first born to see the next episodes in his hip-hopera “Trapped in the Closet.” In the words of Gov. Palin, “You betcha!”

As horrifying as rape allegations against an indie musician might be, I am still going to sing “Trucker’s Atlas” at the top of my lungs whenever it comes on in my proximity. That doesn’t make me dumb, it makes my appreciation of music devoid of interest in the politics of the people who create the music.

For many people, their personal and economic politics goes into their musical choices. But for the majority of people, it has no bearing on what music sounds good and what music sounds bad. I may respect Yoko Ono as an artist, but I will never put her albums on my record player during a party. Listening to what aesthetically pleases you isn’t stupid. And this is why I love Phil’s (of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin) confession of his love for Contemporary Christian Music.

The telling thing about this is that even though Phil KNEW he liked this music, and he knew it was better than indie music that was popular, he couldn’t tell people, just because of its cheesy niche popularity. And that kind of judging an album by its marketing and politics and not by the aesthetic awesomeness of the music, is what I disagree with.

In the above clip, A Place To Bury Strangers ramble on in an attempt to explain the Do-It-Yourself [DIY] mentality. It’s sort of hard to do, and for those not in the know, when I’m not blogging my ass off I take to the stage as a totally DIY performer (neither of which ever makes enough to cover rent). Heck, Uncensored Interview even spoke with me about my on performance months ago before I ever expected to be a blogger here.

One such performance this weekend took me to Wilmington, NC (the place where they film a lot of teen drama shows like Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill), to play the second annual Be Yr Own Hero Fest.

What’s revealing about playing DIY venues or DIY festivals like Be Yr Own Hero is the exposure to the vast amount of energy and talent in a region. There were about a dozen free zines (for those that may have had concern about the death of the photocopied genre), and daytime activities included instructional seminars on basket weaving, Qi Gong, and canvassing. Music blasted into the night from generally unknown performers. Folk, rock, electronic–the genre didn’t really matter, but the bands still managed to all come together in their spirit more than their sound.

Be Yr Own Hero Fest marks the fourth time I have come down to Wilmington over the course of two years (two other times were more the much larger, yet also DIY WE Fest), and it gives you exposure to a town in a different way than when you just sort of pass through and play on tour. You get a glimpse of the artistic community of the town coming together as a collective. And despite the self-centered “yourself” at the end of the DIY acronym, it’s actually this large collective that fuels and sustains the DIY spirit.

Marie may or may not know this, but she has broached upon a larger linguistic issue. People are throwing around words and phrases with such reckless abandon nowadays–so much so that it has caused the denigration and/or the nullification of a word.

Then again, I suppose I’m guilty of being a bit careless myself. Immediately after watching this clip I thought, “That is straight up racial profiling!” And when a secret admirer started leaving me bottles of sake…What? Just because I’m Asian, I have to love sake? Folks, I couldn’t have made this up even if I wanted to. I mean c’mon. Who leaves sake?! You had better believe the first thing I cried was “Racial profiling!” (I do enjoy my sake every now and again, for the record).

I found myself attributing all sorts of random things to racial profiling–not in a wholly irrelevant manner and oftentimes in jest–but I realized I had let this phrase roam too freely throughout my vernacular. No one would take me seriously when it really counted because I had inadvertently rendered the phrase powerless.

I had flashbacks to my childhood when I was being read the classic fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Granted, the moral of this story is that if you lie all the time, when it really matters, no one will believe you. But allow me to extrapolate a bit. What does this story also tell you about the significance of words and how we use them? A-ha! Pretty compelling isn’t it?

So friends, I think you may know where I’m going with this. Why do we label some music as “World” music, make it a pejorative, and relegate it to some god-forsaken nether-region in our minds? In many Ameri-centric minds, this must make perfect sense, but remember that to the rest of the world, we are the foreign element. And trust, there is a lot more rest of the world than there are of us (Americans).

This also gives us a lot to think about as an indie-music site and especially as the people who are constantly raising the question, “What is indie?” Think twice before you answer this question next time, and think twice before you start calling things “world music”, “racial profiling”, or even “wolf”.

Left-leaning politics and music, particularly of the indie variety, aren’t exactly strangers (see above). In another recent post here theshark claimed that the indie crowd are a lot like New Yorkers, Democratic to the core. However, the candidates’ passing over of this demographic is often not so much to do with their reliable affiliation, but rather due to their apathy: Young people are the most likely to stay away from the polls.

There have been political groups that have tried in the past and even met some success. Rock the Vote claims that in 2004, the youth vote (ages 18-24) saw a higher increase in turnout than any other age group. But because the organization has clear links to MTV, it’s hard to classify Rock the Vote as “indie,” and the organization is non-partisan, which means that it’s still not one of the candidates’ camps reaching out to voters.

After my post about LA bands last week, I found out that maybe the indie community was starting to wise up and make some noise about politics and that noise sounds sort of like random dissonant tones in a non-rhythmic pattern.

I was first tipped off to “Noise for Obama“ by Brian Miller from Foot Village. No surprise there, as he started the site along with Brian Chippendale from Lightning Bolt/Black Pus. I probably would’ve forgotten about it had I not seen the website later that night again via one of the ticket-takers at New York’s Knitting Factory.

Thanks to the internet, in less than a day “Noise for Obama” spread over 3,000 miles through old friends and fiber optic cables. Already containing quotes supporting Obama from members of bands like Russian Circles, Lightning Bolt, Deerhoof and more, it’s clear that artists aren’t afraid to speak out for a candidate in this election.

Knowing that a politician can’t be everywhere, these bands could easily act as unofficial surrogates as they travel around the country on tour in the days leading up to the election. Even though the Obama campaign is not involved, he probably appreciates the help to rally his base.

Sadly, I couldn’t seem to find anyone making noise for McCain.