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August 31, 2004
Two fictional names for bands who are like an artier version of The Replacements.
1. Hubris Bock 2. Perhabst (Which reminds me: Mr. Merlin Mann, the funniest human being in cyberspace.)
August 20, 2004
Ladies and Gentlemen, you're about to see
A pastime hobby about to be Taken to the maximum "Slam Bush is looking for a national champion; someone whose voice could represent Hip Hop in a face-to-face debate against the President, either in the streets or behind the podium...Hip Hop can help send George Bush back to Texas where he belongs..."
August 19, 2004
Unabashed? Try Unreconstructed
This Chromeo video goes down as smooth as an Orange Julius screwdriver. Vocoder tube as the new fashion accessory; synth-patch dial-up as podium-tap! (via Scissorkick.)
August 18, 2004
Hey ya! Barack Obama takes time off 2012 presidential campaign trail to sing "Let's Get It On" on Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien!
From interview with Michelle Obama [Chicago Tribune, 7/26/04]: Q: What's your husband's favorite music? A: If you were to go into his car and see his CD collection, he'd have some Sting, Eminem, Latin popular music…He loves Thelonious Monk, He loves Miles Davis. He just took my Outkast because I can only play one song on it because I usually have the kids. There's too much cursing...Marvin Gaye is one of his favorites. He loves to sing "Let's Get It On." You need to get him to get up and do that. He's not shy, if you sort of coax him.
Radio Free Europe in Reverse
"Music, often pumped through tank and Humvee sound systems into individual helmets, has become a soldier's chief means of personalizing, justifying, heightening and denying the experience of war...The Army's own psy-ops is said to play AC/DC to energize the troops." Hopefully the "punk" guy left behind some desert survival music for his cohorts.
August 11, 2004
A rough couple one hundred words re: Death Cab
Transatlanticism [City Pages] Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism is music for airports. Not in the Brian Eno-sense of music to be played in airports (though the band has named Eno’s "Oblique Strategies" as a recent influence), but music with the emotional atmosphere of an airport. Like the ambivalent spaces in Ben Gibbard’s songs, they’re places that were cool when you were a kid but took on a weirdly adult mixture of tension and ennui somewhere along the way that belies the excitement of being in motion. Transatlanticism isn’t so much the fluorescent "You wake up in Sea-Tac" psychogeography of Radiohead as it is the suppressed lonesome-in-a-crowd howl of Simon & Garfunkel’s "Homeward Bound," breakup e-mails as love ballads. "Company Calls" [Seattle Weekly] At some point in the past you spent company dime hiding from your boss in a vacant office, psychoanalyzing your soon-to-be ex over the phone. You’ve lived a portion of "Company Calls," but the rest only happens in pop songs when the company boy takes a call from his nostalgic future self. It’s hard to dissect: distance is to Ben Gibbard what cars are to Springsteen, too common to be a song’s real subject. His distances cross-talk like party lines, and you start to wonder if the call was ever connected, which it wasn’t: pop songs are self-absorbed, great ones fall in love with themselves while you eavesdrop.
August 03, 2004
Stunningly Omnipresent Masters make minced meat of memory
Back from NYC and the MOMA QNS, where there's a model of and exhibit about the awesome CCT building in Beijing. Put down that Reynolds Wrap, Frank Gehry, and get back to work. Your stuff is car-porn, and you do not rock. Is it an essential element of being American to think that all heroism is fascistic while all sensuality must be not just sexual, but crotch-grabbing? Crotch-grab as heroic civic formalism. Vomit-as-vomit. Baby boomer postmodernist--->'ignore' mode. I want to work in a glass oroboros donut toy! On the real Anyways...Other highlites of the city: amazing repast with Fred at Lombardi's, America's first and oldest brick pizza oven; catching up with Hamish & Lisa; Schneider Weisse; fancy lunch at Chanterelle; street vaudeville by black teenage twins in Washington Square ("I'll try to talk slower for those of you from Jersey...Oh, you're from Jersey? I'm sorry. I'm sorry you're from Jersey!", ba-doom-boom from drummer on PVC buckets); getting into a cab at 7th & A and finding a large bag of cocaine sitting on the back seat; picking up a sweet fake Rolex in Chinatown; Lee Bontecou; hot dogs on 2 am streetcorners; gypsy limo driver at LaGuardia who was a Jamaican version of Lite from Repo Man (and drove like it).
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