The power-mad New York act Japanther—last year named "Best Live Band" by the Voice—has released a grimly awesome video for "Lil Taste," a manic track off their album Beets, Limes, & Rice. The video is by the Portland-based puppetry troupe Night Shade, which has been collaborating with Japanther since 2005, and it's barely 90 seconds long, but it's stuffed to the gills with drugs, knifeplay, and, of course, Japanther's potent brand of rock and roll. Watch below.

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Karen Plemons

​Rock Yard: The Growlers, Japanther, The Death Set, Cerebral Ballzy, The So So Glos, CSC Funk Band
The Morgan
Sunday, August 7

Better than: The all-ages punk shows you went to in middle school.

Standing in the dirt parking lot of The Morgan in Bushwick for yesterday's JellyNYC Rock Yard event, it was to forget all the nonsense that had brought the bands and spectators there. Here's a tattered toddler mattress being thrown around like a beach ball; there are some Jell-O shots available for free, more or less; all around are bands playing at ear-damaging volumes. Sundays in the summer have always been thus, right?

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Clownsurfing is a real thing. Pics by Rebecca, more below.

​The Rock and Roll Circus, a two-night spectacle at Lincoln Center that started Monday, was billed as a homage to the Rolling Stones' 1968 event by the same name, a multi-ring extravaganza scattering big-top attractions among sets in the ring by the Who, Marianne Faithfull, Jethro Tull, and a supergroup with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards. The first night of the 2011 version climaxed with a set by Japanther, whose overzealous fans compelled security to stop the show before it all got too reminiscent of Altamont.

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Once upon a time, there was an excellent hour-long music-video show on Bloomberg's city-television network called New York Noise. Dating back to 2002, the hour-long intern-spun idea predated YouTube, the music-vlog trend of filming bands playing in random locations, and nearly all MP3 blogs. And it was far better than anything similar that showed up on the Internet.

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The backing track for the Knifefight: No Rules trailer, posted below, is Murdertronics' "Get 'Em High." In this context, the Get 'em hiiiiiiiiiggggggggh/Get 'em drrrrrrrrrrruuuuuunnnnnk chorus--uttered more times than I can possibly justify counting, in a manner not unlike Yellow's belly-aching dinosaur-burp "Oh Yeah"--isn't an aspiration, but a manifesto. You see, Knifefight: No Rules is a short about a crazy-ass show that went on in a Greenpoint warehouse this past February. Put on by the eponymous Knifefight--the party-throwing moniker of Andy Smith, ex-Chief Magazine engine who also ran the dearly departed, DIY space Bodega--the two-night affair at 171 Lombardy starred the usual crust-crunk suspects: Ninjasonik, Japanther, Cerebral Ballsy, the Death Set, Boogie Boarder, Murdertronics. Project Fathom filmed the whole thing and whittled it down to 12 minutes.

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All photos by Rebecca Smeyne

Whatever you did this weekend probably wasn't as bezerk as the Bed-Stuy version of Hoodstock, an Oakland party exported to Willoughby Avenue on Saturday that brought New Orleans sissy bounce star Big Freedia to Brooklyn. Big Freedia and his airborne-booty dancers were the de facto headliners, but the usual Bikes in the Kitchen all-stars were also in the house (Ninjasonik, Japanther, Cerebral Ballzy). Ninjasonik used Sunday to ReTweet a flurry of misspelled praise ("long time since been 2 proper undrgrnd show, left soakin wet w/ legs bruised up like a crak whore frm da pit" wrote @SaintElasticat) and our photographer Rebecca Smeyne, who's basically seen the Japanther boys more times than their own parents, also couldn't stop e-raving about the party either. Even Matt and Kim testified: "If you were not at hoodstock tonight you missed out and I am sorry. It was an amazing show!" Sure looks like it. Full gallery here, selected photos below.

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Party Expo, late January. Photo via Superchief

​Brooklyn Vegan brings word of a new Brooklyn venue, Party Expo, which is seemingly going public with a Japanther show this Wednesday--$5, limited to 75 tickets, no alcohol, either for sale or BYOB. So what is this place, exactly? Well. Their first show was back in January, also featured Japanther--along with SXSW upchuckers the Death Set, Cerebral Ballzy, and others--and was a benefit for the space. It was most assuredly BYOB:

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Nate "Igor" Smith

Telli Gramz of Ninjasonik

Why isn't there universal shorthand for tracks in which rappers individually single out their loved ones, from God to Mom to the local corner slinger? Lupe Fiasco's "Outro" is a bloated example that comes to mind, with 12-plus Food & Liquor minutes of Cornel West's model citizen shouting out everyone he ever added on MySpace, but these things really do need a name. "Crew clip," "homie holla," "family props," or "posse cut," as one intra-office dialogue yields, don't quite seem right. Rap nerds, where's your clever?

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Can a show have an identity crisis before it's even on air? HBO's How To Make It In America debuts on February 14, not that you'd necessary know from its anemic promotion. There's a reason for that--sources say that the show is casting around desperately for a marketing angle that will appeal both to kids living on the LES and the middle of the country. That's a tall task. So what is How To Make It In America? Originally pitched as the East Coast version of Entourage, complete with executive production by Mark Wahlberg, the HBO show aimed to chronicle "two enterprising Brooklyn twenty-somethings who hustle their way through New York City, determined to make a name for themselves in New York's competitive fashion scene." But in New York, the douchbags are different, though the makers of this show evidently don't know exactly how.

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Leslie "The Opportunity" Feist

This isn't the dumbest way we've ever spent an hour in the workplace, but it's certainly up there. The most idiotically laughable meme of the past few days goes to Jerzify Yourself, the inevitable Jersey Shore personal-transformation site in the glute vein of such popular avatar reconfiguration hubs as Simpsonize Me and MadMen Yourself. The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-sized jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spraytan shade, pick your pose--and holy Freckles McGee, you're magically recast as a human meatball. Michael Cera already did this for real, so with the help of the Jersey Shore Nickname Generator, it seemed like a natural progression to run your favorite indie luminaries through the G.T.L. ringer. Certainly you can conceive better ones, and please do send them our way, but first, a few words of caution: beards look funny, as does Thurston Moore, and thin-faced folks don't adapt well to this interface, so Bradford "DJ Douchebag" Cox and Stephen "S-Tan" Malkmus were sent to the great Apple trashcan in the sky. So without further adieu . .

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