Frank Hamilton

Dan Deacon will play a free concert as part of tomorrow's May Day demonstrations.

Dan Deacon is one of several big name musicians playing a free concert in Union Square tomorrow at 4 p.m. We spoke to him recently about why Occupy Wall Street resonates with him and why he considers himself a political artist.

Village Voice: You're playing a free show in Union Square for May Day, along with Das Racist, Tom Morello, Immortal Technique, and Bobby Sanabria. How did you get involved?

Dan Deacon: Someone sent me an email.

Cool. Great interview! Thanks!

No, the main reason I wanted to be a part of it is because during the peak of the Occupy movement last year I was recording the entire time. I was in Baltimore, so I never made it up to New York, I never made it down to Occupy Baltimore, and I felt like a huge shit-head about it the whole time. I was very excited for winter to end, to get more involved because I knew I'd have a lot of time and I'd be able to be less of an armchair activist and more actually in the mix. So when I got the offer it was something I had to do.

More >>

occupy guitarmy

"Band seeking 1000 guitar players. Other instruments also welcome. Influences include Woody Guthrie, Tom Morello, Willie Nile, and Sergio Ortega."

Occupy Wall Street is raising a "Guitarmy."

For months, activists have been preparing for May Day, laying plans for teach-ins, bank blockades, marches and civil disobedience. But they're also looking to stage an enormous jam session.

More >>

DJ Spooky spinning at Work in Progress last night.

It was an unlikely marriage from the start.

When DJ Spooky invited the Occupy Wall Street Library to hold a book-party / dance-party at the chichi Vandam club Work in Progress, it was an open question how the revolutionary politics of the occupation and the glitz of the downtown nightclub scene would mesh.

The answer is: Not at all. The collaboration ended early with harsh words between the librarians and the club's management, as the occupiers packed up their books and left just as DJ Spooky was beginning his set for the club's well-dressed patrons.

More >>

If you have an email address, you've probably received at least one poorly written message that promises you a cut of some large sum of money if you'll just be so kind as to help out with a quick loan that will pay some of that windfall's processing fees. These attempts at fraud—known as "419 Scams"—have been in existence for centuries; the modern version arose in Nigeria in the 1980s, and was given new life when bulk emailing made it easy to send millions of solicitations to suckers worldwide.

419 scams' financial success in Nigeria is perhaps impossible to estimate. A 2006 report estimated that up to £150 million a year was stolen from UK residents via this sort of robbery, though the report did not specifically break down how much money went to Nigeria. A 2000 U.S. court case found evidence that at least several government officials were involved in a scam that defrauded one U.S. national of $5.2 million, though the same case found that the U.S. national was unable to sue the Nigerian government since he knowingly entered into a criminal enterprise. But they have come to loom large over Nigeria's pop culture. The resulting films and songs let outsiders know that what might seem like a joke to Westerners (like those people who correspond with 419 scammers as a way of whiling away an afternoon) can fuel revenge fantasies, enable lifestyles, or serve as a source of national embarrassment elsewhere. Three tracks are below.

More >>

Last night as part of keeping my musical resolution about not falling in the trap of listening to old music and not new stuff I ran a Spotify search for music from this calendar year, and topping the list was a song apparently called "Perry 2012." Being that my roommate is a political reporter who was awash in the news of the Iowa caucuses as I conducted my search, I assumed that the song was actually about Rick Perry, the Texas governor turned GOP presidential hopeful who was in the process of coming in fifth in the Hawkeye State as I typed. And so I hunkered down in my chair and listened, and... the song didn't sound that bad? It melded thumpy chart-pop bounce and the aesthetics of the the label Slabco's charming bedroom synthpop offerings in such a way that it reminded me of a somewhat more twee update of the word-light, yet catchphrase-heavy 1991 techno breakthrough "James Brown Is Dead." Clip after the jump.

More >>

For those people who adore Kelly Clarkson and hate Ron Paul supporters, the inaugural American Idol's Wednesday night endorsement of Paul's presidential candidacy was especially painful. The move might have been merely confusing in years past, when Paul was a web-specific phenomenon—the equivalent of Carrie Underwood using a ragecomic as her next album cover, or Perez Hilton having a record label—but the recent exposure of Paul's startlingly racist and homophobic newsletters from the 1980s shifted Kelly's gung-ho Paulophilia from quirky to offensive. It turned out that Clarkson (apparently honestly) didn't know about Paul's issues, but the course of excusing her endorsement raised a host of other problems. The resulting Twitfit played out like a weird kind of crossover special, including a co-sign from Michelle Branch, a sullen @-reply to music critic Matt Cibula, and Clarkson's revelation that she is a pro-Obama Republican. The stormy response was heartening, if also predictable (what books will Ron Paul supporters recommend I read in responses to this post? Leave your answer in the comments!), and both Clarkson's and Branch's responses to the criticism—that whether or not Paul was prejudiced, they certainly weren't—were helpful little distillations of the issues inherent in collectively supporting a presidential candidate who doesn't believe in doing things collectively.

In retrospect, though, the endorsement makes a depressing amount of sense, and not just because Clarkson and Paul are fellow Texans. For all the supposedly progressive politics of rock and pop, the structure of the business is incredibly entrepreneurial, with musicians required to front a remarkable amount of their own money for instruments, travel, and recording before they see any sort of return on their investment. There's no large-scale structure that can provide steady employment (and health insurance) while nurturing innovation, just a produce-or-die ethos that receives no subsidies or grants. In America, at least, one of the few areas of life in which government really does have minimal involvement is pop music.

More >>

You may have heard that Rick Perry's mind-meltingly horrible anti-gay campaign ad has more dislikes on YouTube than Rebecca Black's "Friday." The story has been covered by Time, the Today Show, and the Huffington Post, among many others. There's only one problem: that's not actually true. The current version of "Friday" has only been online since September, even though the Internet's interest in the song clearly dates back to March. That's because the original YouTube upload of the clip was removed in an aborted attempt to put it behind a paywall; when that didn't work, "Friday"'s creators re-upped the original clip, thus resetting the counter on views and dislikes. That current version, it's true, only has some 250k+ dislikes, less than Perry's now-400k+ figure. But before it was taken down, the original upload had more than three million dislikes, far outstripping what Perry's video has accumulated. (Some outlets got it even more wrong, trying to claim that passing Black's video made Perry's the most-disliked in YouTube history, even though two Justin Bieber clips and Black's other video have far more dislikes than Perry's.)

While some outlets have issued corrections, the "fact" has gone viral, leaving the more interesting question of why, exactly, it's important that Perry is more disliked than Black (or Bieber). On one level, of course, it's just good news for liberals, a nice confirmation that their repulsed reaction to Perry's ad is shared by lots of others. But it belies a deeper anxiety about the relationship between politics and entertainment. In the last few years, YouTube has taken a weirdly major role in our political campaigns, serving as the central clearinghouse of everything from campaign ads like Perry's to major campaign speeches, career-ending gaffes, and even presidential debates, to say nothing of all the reaction videos and remixes voters produce.

More >>

Third Eye Blind.

This afternoon at 12:30 or so, Zuccotti Park will host a concert starring activist/rocker Jackson Browne, the still-potent-to-the-kids Third Eye Blind, and the Los Angeles retro outfit Dawes. And this isn't one of those "omg Radiohead is on the way down there now" fake-outs, either; not only has the Third Eye Blind twitter semi-obliquely confirmed that they're going to be at the gig, but Browne and Third Eye Blind will appear on the forthcoming album Music For Occupy alongside Yo La Tengo, Toots and the Maytals, and Michael Moore. Third Eye Blind's rallying anthem for Occupy, the peppy "If There Ever Was A Time," after the jump.

More >>

Here is a fun sentence to type: Miley Cyrus released a video in support of Occupy Wall Street! The clip, posted Saturday, pairs a remix of her 2010 song "Liberty Walk" with footage from the Occupy protests, and is so incongruous that when I first saw it I spent about five minutes verifying that it was an official Miley production. If the song hadn't gotten such wide coverage, I'm not sure I'd still be able to say with complete certainty that the former Disney Channel star was responsible for it. The clip looks like a tribute video (fan-made clips that take, say, a Taylor Swift song and put it over footage from Twilight or Glee to emphasize the deep emotional relationships between the characters); it even opens with the suspiciously iMovie-looking white-text-on-black-screen epigraph "This is dedicated to the thousands of people who are standing up for what they believe in..."

In truth, it's not so out of character. Cyrus is a longtime vlogger, and her ability to use new media in an accessible, authentic-seeming way has been a huge boon to her popularity. But for those more used to the image of Miley Cyrus as a slick, corporate pop star, the apparent sincerity and homegrown flavor of the video were hard to process.

More >>

Via our friends at Beyond Gold: The video for "Don't Fuck With My Money," the latest single by by electropop singer (and former Shelter subject) Penguin Prison. Talk about timing—the clip was shot on location at Occupy Wall Street last month, and its release comes hot on the heels of last night's raid of Zuccotti Park. Watch below.

More >>