Nirvana’s Nevermind is singularly the most influential piece of art in my life. The very path my career, my personality and my interests have taken are a direct response to my listening to that album twenty years ago. The immediate effects were visceral and hard to articulate. But now I see why it mattered so much.

Sometime in September of 1991, I caught the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” To call me mesmerized would be an understatement. In the following months I would buy a guitar and begin teaching myself to play.

In retrospect, here’s what I really learned: creativity requires discipline and practice, production values matter, critical and commercial success do not have to be mutually exclusive, maniacal attention to detail is a must, talent is a myth, and you don’t have to be classically trained.

I also gained an appreciation for dressing punk rock in pop music’s clothing and moving masses. Which is why I now practice advertising every day, thanks to Nirvana.

“Everybody singing the same song for ten years.” This line from “Under Cover of Darkness” sums up the weight The Strokes have carried since resuscitating rock music in 2001. They, along with the newly-retired White Stripes, provided the soundtrack to the opening decade of this century. For me, at least.

Angles, the band’s fourth album, is out today. After a dozen or so spins (I’ve always found Strokes albums “growers”), there are a few standout tracks. On “Under Cover of Darkness,” the guitar work of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. is intricate, perfectly complimentary and absolutely listenable on repeat. Judging by the number of plays in my iTunes, “Gratisfaction” and “Machu Piccu” are also winners. Though I’m sure I’ll have new favorites by next week.

Angles finds the group more comfortable with a wider array of styles, which is probably a by-product of band member side projects and the handful of years since its last record. This makes for an interesting listen. After ten years, maybe the band is getting to a place where they don’t have to sing the same song over and over. Give it a shot.

Consider, for just a minute, the prolific creative output of Conor Oberst. The guy is 30 years old, has produced an incredibly diverse catalog of music and is widely considered the finest songwriter of his generation. So how does he do it? According to Oberst, he’s learned to become “a good thief.”

He doesn’t rip off other artists per se. Rather, he steals inspiration from just about anywhere he can get it. He is on high receive at all times, and I think this is a great lesson for anyone in our business.

Here’s an article from this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal describing Oberst’s creative process. Worth the read.

*I stole that headline. It was on the cover of the latest One Show Annual.

Recently Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, wrote a piece in the WSJ entitled The New Rock-Star Paradigm. The article is an astute summation of the present state of the music business, specifically how the business has changed in the face of maturing digital communications. The guy isn’t your typical rock group frontman.Kulash’s thoughts apply outside of the music industry. How’s your business model holding up? Are you prepared to alter how you self-promote? Can you change how you operate and still make the cash register ring? Something to think about as we begin 2011.

Note: if you haven’t heard of OK Go, see “YouTube.” If you haven’t heard of YouTube, see “the Internet.” If you haven’t heard of the Internet, see “Al Gore.” And so on.

The inaugural Hangout Beach, Music & Arts Festival was this past weekend, and what a success. Crowds from all over gathered on the very beautiful, very oil-free beaches of Alabama to experience an amazing event that was the culmination of the hard work of scores of people. Grace Potter said it best: “my God—it’s Coachella on the beach!”

Our creative/design and PR crews, led by Sarah Jones and Niki Lim, executed flawlessly. The designs, from the stages to the signage to the tickets, were killer.

As for the PR side of things, the Red Square kids worked like maniacs alongside our pals Music Allies setting up press conferences (note Alabama Governor Bob Riley giving the international sign of the fest), managing internal communications, coordinating live news shows, and dealing with the good people at Associated Press, CNN and other major media.

Congrats to all involved. We are thankful to have been a part of the festival’s success.

MTV changed their logo. So what? Fine. I admit I haven’t cared much about MTV in a long, long time, but I still feel a little funny. MTV was my Sesame Street. I was raised by Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter, Headbangers Ball, Kurt Loder, Pauly Shore—all of them.

I loved MTV.

So the logo feels like my cooler older sister just got a facelift. It’s still her, but she kind of looks off. Very simply, it’s a refreshing of the mark rather than a redesign. And a facelift is just a nip here and tuck there, right? They’ve dropped the “music television” descriptor, which is appropriate. The “M” has been cropped and widened, and the stroke on “TV” has been cleaned up, which is nice. Creative Review notes the updated logo allows MTV to house imagery within the widened “M” letterform:

The space in the new logo will be used more to push its programming and its endless procession of reality TV micro-celebrities than as a canvas for artists, and animators as it once was.

Sweetness! I was hoping they’d figure out how to incorporate Snookie in their logo.

Bobby over at Kitsune Noir has some good observations regarding the evolution of a 30-year-old brand:

MTV has become a household name, those three letters alone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call it Music Television before and I grew up in the 80’s. It’s the same as other major networks. You don’t get your news from the Cable News Network, you don’t tune into the Home Box Office to see True Blood and you don’t hate the National Broadcast Company for screwing over Conan. These three letter acronyms are culturally built-in at this point and after almost 30 years MTV deserves the same treatment.

Fair enough. I do think that many people will feel like this is absolute admission of a betrayal of the channel’s initial and core philosophy—playing music videos. Not that anyone has the patience to watch an entire music video these days.

Tina Exarhos, executive vice president of marketing and mulitplatform creative projects at the network, sums it up best:

I’ve been at MTV a long time, and as it was reinvented over the years and maintained sort of a fluid nature, we never touched our logo, which is sort of ironic. It’s a fantastic, iconic logo, but it wasn’t working for us in a way that we needed it to anymore. It needed to express more about what MTV is today, not what it was in 1981.

In other news, I am officially old.

One of our newest clients is the Hangout Music Festival. There’s not a whole lot we can say about this yet except: 1) it’s on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama; 2) it’s May 14-16; 3) the acts are going to be killer; 4) we’re handling the design, advertising and PR.

According to stories that have run in the press, the festival will be the surfside equivalent to the Rothbury Festival and Coachella.

Acts will be announced soon. You can read more here, and be sure to sign up for email updates.

There are lots of things that can make or break a television spot, and music is one of those things. It can set tone, create emotion, take the audience to exactly where you want to take them. And that’s what brands should do too: make people feel something.

So it’s poll-taking time: What are the current best ad/song combos? What are the worst?

The Ask.com jingle is immediately disqualified for being so bad that I kind of like it. I keep that bottled in a very secret place, where I keep things like my admiration for Justin Timberlake.

Okay. As a follow up to the last blog post lamenting the lost art of the mixtape, here’s something that was passed around the agency yesterday: the Mixtape USB stick.

Street cred for your digital music, I guess.

Here’s a great illustration of social media’s relevance. In Chicago on Friday afternoon, needing something to do for the evening, I go to Twitter and ask: Anybody know of any killer live music happening in Chicago tonight?

Within minutes I’m getting suggestions, and seven minutes after my post, @trdunn writes: Check out The Drummers at @Schubas. Awesome venue with an awesome band tonight.

Boom. Plans made. Thankyouverymuch. As for the show, Drummer was great. But I really liked the openers, Royal Bangs. In fact, to keep the organic mojo happening, I’m going to politely ask you download their stuff.

Pay it forward, social media style.