Simon Reynolds: Postpunk 1978-1984
Mo Pitkins
February 28
Almost didn't get into this one--oversold a few weeks ago I heard. Must-read peanut butter blogger Mike Powell and I admitted to ourselves we really just wanted to see James Chance, who had teased us with TV Party simulacra and a skronky cameo in Downtown 81. Happy to hear him talk too but you know.
The panel was of/for/by shoptalkers, the weird catch-22 being that you couldn't have really followed the dialogue entirely if you hadn't read Reynolds's inquiry into post-punk and new pop, Rip It Up & Start Again, but if you had read the book, some of the panel's bigger points were rehash, and Reynolds discussed them far more eloquently and far less flippantly in his pages.
But we came for flip. We were there to see Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly taking swipes at the Strokes and remembering NME stories about CBGBs and the New York post-punks, Blondie and Talking Heads and Television, and being so angry he couldn't actually hear them--New York for him was a "locus of the imagination." We came for James Chance recalling a time he was mugged: He was walking around downtown in the early 80s and had a dollar bill sticking out of his coat jacket pocket, and somebody yoinked it right out. UK Post-punk journalist Vivien Goldman wondered aloud whether one day the music industry will regress back to medieval times, democratized to the return point of regional heroes, town bards, etc.. When Reynolds said the no-wave band Mars was the most punishing of the scene, China Burg, the lead singer of Mars who last night was going by another name last night I think, said, as if after the fact, "We weren't looking for followers."
Since the book does tease out differences between the UK and the US at the time, we got some of that too, specifically in regards to race relations. While Daly spoke fondly of Northern Soul's reception or how "reggae records could be top ten hits," Burg recalled Bob Marley getting booed off the stage at Max's Kansas City. There were boundaries, is how Chance put it; beyond racially they extended through genre, where Chance had trouble fitting into the avant-jazz loft scenes in Soho because jazz musicians refused to play with rock musicians. Tit for tat, UK's Goldman said the avant scene was much more welcoming by comparison, less jazzcentric and more "whimsical."
A strong but gentle host, Reynolds kept the speakers concise and moved them to share time, but in the end these are all people I would assume who do better expressing themselves musically than verbally. Otherwise we wouldn't have seen Green Day skewered or heard the phrase "geography is destiny" or other half-rockisms about when and where the music died (George Michael apparently built his career on "rock and dole.") "We need a general societal collapse," said Chance at one point, on something of a rant about New York's lack of creativity, high of cost of living, the usual. But then he said "Creativity is not democratic." Hey, he did write "Contort Yourself."
Killah Priest dares you to download a Killah Priest album
The "New" MP3 Blogs
Jumping off the mp3blog co-optation paranoia, I got yet another email this morning about yet another new blog that doesn't just do the two-sentence setup, yousendit link punchline, funny rapper photo posts--it offers downloads for entire albums. The relative speed increase on web-based filesharing sites like Rapidshare and Zshare and a bunch others has helped this post one song--->post entire album transformation along, and the more lax these sites get with repeat downloads (i.e. site like Yousendit "expire" the link when it's been clicked enough times), the more we'll see of them.
Opinions are assholes, but some of these guys don't even go past the one-sheet, cutting and pasting album descriptions onto blogspot templates for what's often boiling down to sloppy, visionless file stashes. The pride is hit counts:
1000 users!!!!!
Filed under: Music
CONGRADS EVERYBODY!!!! we’ve hit 1000 users!!! and congrads to the user cvantez who is the lucky guy! Keep the good comments comin’ and we’ll keep the music playin’
Not really looking to get into the morality discussion, or the "what blogs can and can't do, what's a blog's real function, etc" one. We can take for granted that upping a new album from a living, breathing artist who supports himself off this stuff or wants to--that's pretty shitty, even if you disclaim that "All music posted here is for a 24 hour testing period. It is not my responsibility to make sure that you follow these rules, it is your own. I will not be held accountable."
MP3song blogs can rationalize teasing an album, drumming up interest, etc. The best of them have focus past NEW SHIT NEW SHIT, either curating old with new or taking advantage of the internet's collective memory to preserve some random seven-inch or mixtape freestyle nobody will remember if someone doesn't decide it should be.
But mp3-album bloggers barely get past a genre name. One blog, after putting up a rapidshare link for The Knife's Silent Shout LP, ripped Mark Pytlik's Pitchfork review completely, no credit. Other blogs barely move past the Amazon or AMG descriptions, since both websites are good spots to pick up album art too.
"A bunch of kids with lots of access but they don't know shit about music"--we've heard this before, and it's weird for me to be on the speaking side of it here, because I can't vouch for the "know shit about music" part anyway. But at least people are trying to process all this information, this horrific glut, trying to carve a path or a personality or their own genre even, branding themselves, etc. There's something to be said about the proper channels not because they were proper, but because they were channels at all--graduations of difficulty to score music that slowed down consumption, demanded processing.
What does interest me is that, we all laugh at the "24-hour testing period" line, but of course that's exactly the lifespan these albums might face now. Unfairly, since some need more time and others less, and the move could potentially be that good album=one that sounds good on computer speakers and is entirely legible on first listen. I'd be excited to see musicians keeping up those standards, the sorts of innovations they need to make. But here's yet another instance of information glut, with not enough gluttons. We're awash in sound but nobody's listening.
Missed stretched-songers Belong, frustrating because that album is tops and would have loved to feel out the warm red and orange Fenneszian fuzz in real space, not just on headphones or in my sardine can apartment. Reports appreciated below.
Let's be reasonable about Ariel Pink. LA's backwoods/backwards DIY madman is not an idiot savant, not particularly backwoods or madmannish either. He's an artiste, and his put-on is that he dwells in the AM radio kitsch we've all forgotten about or given up on for the next big Next Big Thing. To another, he's something along the lines of a real-life Weekend at Bernie's where Pink is Jonathan Silverman and Bernie Lomax is decades of now-listless chord changes and spent turns of phrase and once bleeding-edge keyboard and drum sounds. I don't know where this leaves Weekend at Bernie's 2, but I'm pretty sure it probably has something to do with grime.
There's a place for this sort of crooked institutional memory, but it's uncomfortable, a little brute, on-the-nose. Pink's songs make it clear how quickly pop's tropes turn over, what a ruse timelessness actually is. The reaction itself is kitschy, like thinking about all the old Legos you had to take down and Brio trains that you just gave away, just so you could move in your Quadra 610 or new stereo speakers. But it is affecting, unsettling, and I imagine that's why some people really love this shit, and how it fits into others' endless fountain of the new agenda.
Pink is funny too occasionally, which excuses the headiness of this whole affair, and which goes back to the artiste thing--he knows exactly what he's doing. I don't know the song, but whatever one the scruffy, long-haired Pink--he was wearing something of a muumuu, thus casting himself as the Cobainish character from Last Days--but he just kept singing "Night time is GREAT! Night time is GREAT!" over and over, maybe ten minutes over the same keyboard loops (he had ditched last time's guitars and backing band, the Haunted Graffiti). At one point though, while pulling back his mane so he could see, Pink smirked a little, delighted in our discomfort. We don't get that smirk on the record obviously, but it really moves the "who's taking whose piss?" debate from Paw Tracks/Animal Collective curatorial hee-haw to Oh, Pink Has a Schtick, and I think I'm more excited about the latter than the former, even if it means the live performance was dogshit.
He played "For Kate I Wait," a few of the first songs from the first album of his everyone heard, all of them stretched out and always too long, letting the pop he redeemed destroy itself via overexposure, yet again. Pink had a few Gary Wilson moments (if we're generous), karoake moments elsewhere, ad-libbing falsettos and Idol posing, and that's all cute. But for so conceptual an act his mere physical appearance on stage really distracted. On record he's possibly brilliant, but live it's like seeing a porn star in street clothes, no makeup, boobs deflated, struggling to carry bags of groceries she bought for her family. Do you help her?
I think you can buy that dress at Urban Outfitters
Spilt Milk?
The 21st annual Rock And Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony happens March 13 at the Waldorf Astoria--big ticket $$$ to foot the Waldorf bill prob but also because the Rock Hall is non-profit, no? You'd think they'd throw the media a bone (or a sandwich); instead, if you're covering this event, you're stuck in some backroom with TV monitors beaming in the ballroom blitz and (if you're lucky) ad hoc press conferences whenever any of the inductees choose to accept an invitation to meet the press. Right, like the Lynyrd Skynyrd dudes are gonna accept an invitation.
Inductees this year include Lynyrd Skynyrd, then a usual list of tokens: Black Sabbath (metal), Blondie (disco; woman), Sex Pistols (punk), Herb Alpert (not really rock and roll but "understood the spirit" dog), and Miles Davis (black; trumpet).
Weird thing we were tipped to this morning, Davis's first son Gregory--who if you've read the Miles autobios was the son who stuck close to his father around the Bitches Brew years, 68-69-70 and beyond, right when Davis was flirting with rock and funk and crazy sunglasses and wah-wah pedals and all the stuff that's getting him into the hall of fame--is apparently having trouble getting comped for the induction. "I was with him at an early age traveling with him, and as he got older and he got sick, I was the one that he called upon," says Gregory over the phone. He currently lives in the city, plays trumpet in a Miles Davis tribute band, owns 25% of the publishing rights for post-63 Miles material.
"The very period Miles is being acknowledged for is the period when Gregory was most closely associated with the music," says Gregory's lawyer Lloyd Jassin. "We were not asking for Gregory to receive the award, merely to be part of the cocktail reception. They were quite rude in dealing with me." Tickets for the event, report Jassin, cost about $2000 each, which Gregory just can't afford.
"It's a charity event. We're a not-for-profit organization, and this is our only fundraiser," says Elizabeth Freund, who handles the event's PR. The Rock Hall's policy is that each inductee only receives two comps, expectation being hey, these inductees are famous rock stars, they have the money to buy tickets for the people who want to come. They gave those two tickets to the Davis estate. "I heard they bought seven other tickets," says Gregory, "but none of them coming to me or his grandchildren."
Gregory blames his half-sister, Cheryl-Ann Davis, for systematically keeping him away not only from the Davis induction, but the Davis estate purse period--he was left out of the will. "They haven't offered me a penny that they've made off of Miles Davis's name," he says, pointing out that Cheryl-Ann isn't even Davis's daughter--she was born to Gregory's mother during her marriage to Davis, but by a different man. "There are no Davises in that institution that they call the Miles Davis estate. They're just throwing his music around, selling it for what they can get. Cheryl-Ann, she even said it out of her own mouth, she don't even like jazz, and he never did anything for me, which is a lie."
If Gregory was so close to his father, why was he left out of the will? Gregory says it's an elaborate conspiracy. "My father was told a lie on his deathbed," says Gregory. "I talked to his girlfriend, I had just entered Long Island University Brooklyn Campus, and I needed to buy a roundtrip ticket, I didn't have the money. His girlfriend talked to me and said, 'Gregory you really need to be here, tell the office to send you a ticket.' But they wouldn't give me a ticket. Two days later he was gone."
He just wants to raise a glass of champagne to his father, says Jassin--he'll even stand in the back and bring his own champagne. Gregory has a different way of putting it. "Why shut me out? I'm not a crazy person."
Been a while since we've talked about the intersection of health and music here at Riff Raff--not that it isn't important. Since the concept of ripsters has moved past a hilarious thing I saw happen at gyms to a slightly less hilarious thing I watch myself do in front of the mirrors by the stretching area, I've been forced to think more about how--and, crucially, why--health and music should intersect when I'm ripping it. I'm talking about making exercise playlists.
Lots of short songs vs. one long song, rock music for jazzercising vs. jazz music for rockercizing (i.e. butt busting)--these are the exercise world's two big debates, and different people are going to tell you different things. My advice is: Take advice from your fattest friend--he never gets to the gym probably because he can't stop thinking about stuff like this.
New ripsters have found the short songs approach to work best, idea being, you are rewarded with a new song for every two minutes you keep going. It slices the workout, particularly in a cardiovascular situation, into small, manageable battles--sort of like cutting a pizza into eight slices, or cutting a pizza into four slices but remembering to do the napkin-grease thing too. 2manyDJ's As Heard On Radio Soulwax Vol. 2 seems to be a big hit in the short song circles; Haunted House Sounds Volume 4, a collection of 168 Halloween sound effects including four separate sounds made by ghost spiders, does not exist yet--but that hasn't stopped ripsters from ripping it on the treadmill to Volume 2's suite of angry snakes singing showtunes.
But say you've never ripped it. The worst possible thing to happen is: You've made it through 12 songs, but you've only been at the gym for about five minutes, which means you've gotten zero out of your workout. Take it from somebody who listened to snakes belting out the overture from Damn Yankees twelve times in a row--it's pretty disheartening.
If you're like that, might I suggest a different exercise playlist: one long, awesome track. The idea is to pick a song that can take you through your gym time start to finish, from swiping in at the door, to hiding your stuff in an unlocked locker because you don't want to pay an exorbitant locker fee, to ripping it, to yelling really loudly because the maintenance people stole your shit out of the unopened locker again.
Hey though, that's just cardio--that's where the big debate is. The weird thing is that everybody in gyms agrees on the music you're supposed to listen to for different exercises: rock music (benchpressing), Eiffel 65's "Blue" (hanging out in the locker room), microhouse (biceps), deep house (punching stuff), grime (returning the towel to the front desk), Wu-Tang Clan (eating sandwiches at the snackbar), Wu-Tang solo albums (hitting on girls), Daft Punk's "Harder Better Faster Stronger" (complaining about how expensive the gym is), "Harder Better Faster Stronger (Neptunes Remix)" (cancelling your membership).
And because I love all you crazy Brits threatening how you're going to beat me up the next time you see me on the BBC: Now's your chance to weigh in. What's your exercise playlist strategy?
After "I'm Sprung" got him on the Billboard Pop 100 charts, Florida "hard & b" artist T-Pain is back again with a new hit, "I'm N Luv (Wit A Stripper)". With the help of Mike Jones,T-Pain weighs the pros and cons of this love. Pain also reports he's produced Trick Daddy's first single from his next album, that Charlie Wilson/Snoop track, and recently wrote and produced a few tracks for Britney Spears--today, he catches up with Riff Raff.
I've been in love with strippers for a while. When did you catch the bug?
...
Wait where are you?
I'm in Miami!
I remember loving strippers there. What are some of your favorite strippers there.
I like Diamonds down here in Miami. Disheveled Fox, Magic in Jacksonville, Florida--man, I'm pretty much stripped out.
In your free time I bet you come up with some pretty great parody stripper names.
The most popular stripper name is Destiny. I definitely remember that one.
She's never a great stripper though, is she.
No, never. It's always the one that has the great name that's the suckiest stripper.
The name of your album is Rapper Ternt Sanga. Have you thought about naming the follow-up Rapper Ternt Sanga Ternt Stripper?
I haven't really thought about that one.
Right, but the thing with "I'm N Luv (Wit A Stripper)," is that it's not just funny, it's serious too. Think about all the strippers out there, and then think about all the men who fall in love with them. And then think about us.
And there it is.
It's very personal. Mike Jones is on "Stripper" too; did this make you sad?
He's one of my best friends. I was definitely happy about that. And no matter how much you guys are friends, it's hard to get other artists on a song.
On the track, you guys come up with a few reasons why it's good, encouraged even, to love strippers. Tell me about that conversation, the brainstorm session. Where were you?
He was in Houston. We were just talking about a song that's coming up on my album that he can get on. It was brainstorming what kind of song we should do together, and we both like strip clubs, so that was the concept.
Hey so we were talking about strippers. You're in love with a stripper in the song, but there are probably some things that bother you about them too.
Strippers are--they show off a lot, like, I want everybody to know I'm a stripper, I'm gonna try to seem happy in front of everybody. But then they go home and cry and don't know why... blah blah blah. That's the thing I hate about strippers.
And beyond that, it seems like strippers are always taking their clothes off. My question is, you're in the club, you're with some strippers--do they start taking their clothes off?
It's the things that they wear, period. They don't have to take clothes off, because they don't have much on to begin with. That's the problem with me.
So your problem is there's not enough stripping.
Like, I know you're a stripper. But I don't want people to see it when I'm with you.
If you were a stripper, would you keep T-Pain as your stripper name?
Probably, since it's already out there.
Do you think the "Pain" of T-Pain would scare people off? How about T-Bone?
...
You have that line on "Studio Luv": Stroke your body like I do my keyboard." As you may or may not know, I was wondering whether you've ever used that as a pickup line.
No, I haven't used that one before.
How about "I'd like to kiss your mouthpiece like I do my clarinet?"
Ha! Definitely not.
"I'd like to hit you with sticks like I do my drum kit?"
SNAP MUSIC: A style of music originating in the Dirty South. Unlike Crunk music, Snap music has a slower tempo but still talks about clubbin' and strippers. It is characterized by the finger snap effect in place of the snare drum. Different people may be able to take credit for originating this style from Fabo, D4L, & Dem Franchize Boyz.
To go along with the music, Dem Franchize Boyz have invented a dance, the "Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It" (video here), which also happens to be a song on their new album, On Top of Our Game. I got one of the Boyz on the phone yesterday to talk about the dance's popularity, and the future of snap.
I want to talk about the dance.
What's going on.
Just the dance.
What about it.
It's the best dance I've ever seen.
We're trendsetters.
Did this come to you in a dream?
No it came from the "White Tee" song. That's what we used to do around the neighborhood. I like to think I added a twist to it, came over the song and everything, and the rest is history. It is what it is.
That's awesome. But why lean wit it first and then rock wit it? Why not rock wit it first?
Because in the dance you lean first, then you rock wit it.
So you're saying it would look pretty funny if you rock first.
Yeah it would look funny if you rock first.
Who's the best at this dance?
Parlae outta the Franchize.
How about among your friends, who's the best?
Oh yeah! Friends, fans, celebrities, athletes, everybody's doing it their own sexy little way. Ain't no exact way to do it. You do it how you want.
Right, like if you want to rock wit it first.
Add your little flavor to it.
Jermaine Dupri is probably pretty bad at this dance.
Oh yeah! He got his own little flavor. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Parlae do it the best.
Do you think the Lean Wit It Rock Wit It is better than the Macarena?
I mean, yeah. You really got to get sweaty, but if you want to get sweaty, you can.
One of the things you say in the song, gangsters don't dance--is that true you think?
Well, some gangstas don't. They just lean wit it, rock wit it. They might just set in one place, moving back and forth or moving side to side--or leaning and rocking.
It just seems like gangsters would want to dance. Like, you're a gangster--dance. Do you have any dances in the works for gangsters?
It just came about. In "White Tee", we were leaning and rocking. Folks started catching on. So Parlae figured out: Name the dance and perfect it, and expose it to the world.
People are calling your dance the Electric Slide of the South.
It's something like that.
Other people are calling it Atlanta's hokey-pokey.
Atlanta's hokey-pokey.
Yeah.
I ain't gonna agree with no hokey-pokey.
Snap music is big now; what's the next snap?
What's the next snap?
Do you think people will start slapping each other on the butt?
Something says this wasn't for too public of consumption, this show, more of a who's who of Brooklyn musicmakers than a what's what, so inveterate and clustered a fuck Cake Shop played host to. "It's difficult, because I like them all as people--as human beings," was the most a man stepped into out-of-sympathy, which means I must have seemed four steps further gone, what with my scribbling and bottom-lip biting, the weirdo who shows up at the local grade school piano recital or scours iMesh for college marching band mp3s.
Singer-songwriter in scare quotes Rusty Santos, jesus fucking christ. He's a genius behind the boards, by no means the Animal Collective svengali but he knows how to make guitars sound awesome, electric mimicking acoustic mimicking electric, box-inside-box production that's both prettier and noisier than it ever lets on. But on his own, blame his boyish looks and lopsided mop, Santos tries for misunderstood Steding-type, bratty turned batty, something like a pop star past his prime and discarded on arrival, mascara running and tuxedo shirt untucked, his lovelost cliches piling on with frequent recourse to "heaven" and "hell" and "we will be one" and "touching the sky" which rhymes with "lie" and Santos is totally "wondering why."
He's clearly taken some cues from Ariel Pink, but at least Pink has the celebrity-obsessed Hollywood recluse backstory to sell his records and more practice dicking around the audience, mania, etc.. If Santos is going meta lo-fi, maybe even parody, he could stand to oversell it. But that's a terrible idea, since Santos does have a knack for dr. sampling, his first song a steady compounding of kneetaps and wordless coos, then later guitar scratches I could have listened to forever if Santos's words didn't get in the way.
As for Gang Gang Dance, tonight they were debuting new material post-God's Money, further away from the sludge and drudge of their self-titled Fusetron drones and the relentless percussion breaks of Revival and Survival of the Shittest, more into New Age, hipster Enya type stuff. Maybe it's adult-oriented reappropriation--the double drumming, part electric part acoustic, definitely keeps the Gang's jammier, more ethereal parts moving, and the lead GGDancer's vocal melodies have more form to them than not anymore, less reliant on the echo box, more blunt melodically--but I don't know. Maybe it's some bizarre take on "world music," Babel rebuilding project, pre-national even. There's a lot to talk about, of course, but other things--like how the night turned into a tall person pissing contest, tall douchebag after tall douchebag filing up to the front so nobody past them could see anything, and yes I'm talking about you, Snoopy-looking dreadlocks dude who would occasionally nibble on the tip of one dread like you were toking from your own brain--were more revealing.
Not the most popular opinion, but I loved that second Liars album, front-to-back, all the parts people said were unlistenable and all the others people said weren't unlistenable enough. Much was made of the band's lineup change before Drowned dropped--they lost bassist Pat "Nature" Noecker and drummer Ron Albertson, two Nebraskans who had responded to a Liars bassist/drummer want-ad around Brooklyn--and that shuffle crux'd too many reviews, that Nature and Albertson were the band's straight lacers, technically talented but meat-and-potatoes, while Liars' Angus Andrews and Aaron Hemphill were the artistes, brains of the Liars project, etc. Their relationship was symbiotic, the line went, and when the band split Hemphill and Andrews frumped about while the other two just disappeared.
All around, sorta not true. Come 2004, Noecker and Albertson along with voxist/guitarist Christian Dautresme started playing around as No Things (or n0 things). Given the split you'd think the band would go for some sound that's wildly different from their Liars work, but weirdly the tracks I've heard are uncannily like what Liars themselves have been recording without them--a move away from smart-alecky disco-punk and DANCING towards heavier "tribal music" and more tom-toms, yelps, interest in ambience, and so on. Curious is all, and shit, when Dautresme gets into falsetto for "Nina Pinta Maria" (linked above), he's dead-ringing for Andrews on the upcoming Drum's Not Dead, maybe even a little more convincing theatrically. No slight, Andrews's appeal is his amateurism, the discomfort he seems to give off in that range.
The other two songs No Things have up for download fall in that glorious region between Liars' first LP and the Fins to Make Us More Fish-Like EP, the last songs Noecker and Robertson cut with them. Which is to say, they're somewhere in neighborhood of dance-skronk or disco-noise, lyrics strung out an inch too far, so they start sounding deep or just crazy depending on how you handle incomprehensibility. It's not roundabout pop, but it is some sort of roundabout or freakish approximation of it; haven't ever heard a simple line like "I need your love" come off so goddamn creepy and desperate, the emphasis not on the "your" or "love" but on the "I" and "need" especially, bottles breaking in the song's background, cowbells a given.
Which means Code Red must involve some sort of assassin spider
Thanks, Mom
TMI, but my mother still sends me packages on Valentine's Day, even though we broke up several years ago. In addition to the Blue Mountain e-cards she seems to be drafting me every hour, I just got an email that says she has finished putting together an iTunes iMix Valentine's Day mixtape, with some new songs she thought I might like. I've copied/pasted her email below verbatim, with mom's personal notes on why she chose the songs she did. Apologies on her behalf for any grammatical/formatting errors; she's not technologically adept, but she means well.
Riff Raff Exclusive: Riff Raff's Mom's Valentine's Day Mixtape for Riff Raff
HAPPY VALENTINES DAY MIX!
BY MOM
BEYONCE FT SLIM THUG: CHECK ON IT !! YES! THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO, CHECK ON IT (YOU). HOW ARE YOU? YOU HAVE SO MUCH MAIL AT THE HOUSE
JAMES BLUNTS: YOURE BEAUTIFUL THIS SONG IS SO TRUE, WHEN I HEAR IT I THINK I HOPE YOU HEAR THIS AND HOPE YOU KNOW I AM THINKING ABOUT YOU WHEN I HEAR THIS. YOU ARE MY OLDEST SON I LOVE YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH
NELLY GRILLZ!!: GRILLZ THIS REMINDS ME OF SUMMER WHEN I WOULD COOK STUFF ON THE "GRILLZ" AND LISTEN TO THE RADIO HOPING THERE WOULD BE A SONG ABOUT HAVING SONS. IF YOU COME HOME I PROMISE I WILL CLEAN THE GRILL SO YOU DON'T GET SALAMANDER POISONING
ALL AMERICAN REJECTS: DIRTY LITTLE SUCRET I THINK YOU KNOW MY DIRTY LITTLE SEUCRET! [I LOVE YOU MORE THAN YOUR SISTERS]
NATASHA BEDDINGFELD: UNWRITTEN PLEASE COME HOME
CHRIS BROWN: RUN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I KNOW YOU THINK THIS SONG IS MEAN BECAUSE OF WHEN I USED TO MAKE SURE YOU WEREN'T ALLOWED TO PLAY SOCCER FOR MORE THAN HALF THE GAME BECAUSE I WAS WORRIED ABOUT YOUR HEART MURMERS, BUT I HOPE YOU ARE 'RUNNING IT' IN THE WRITING SENSE (AND NOT SPORTS) PS DON'T JOIN YOUR FATHERS FANTASY LEAGUE
FALL OUT BOYS: DANCE DANCE DANCE!! (DONT DANCE TOO FAST NICK)
KELLY CLARKSONG: BECAUSE OF YOUBECAUSE OF YOU I AM A MOM! THIS SONG IS SO HONEST
NE-YO: SO SICK MAKE SURE YOU LISTEN TO THE LYRICS TO THIS SONG NICK, THEY ARE ABOUT SONGS! I LOVE SONGS
EMINEM: SHAKE THAT I KNOW YOU LIKE THAT PEEDI PEEDI SONG 'SHAKE' BUT SHAKE WHAT? I DO NOT LIKE UNCLEAR SONGS. THIS SONG IS MORE CLEAR, ALSO I WOULD MUCH RATHER YOU SHAKE SOMETHING, NOT YOURSELF. WHEN YOU ARE NOT HERE I SOMETIMES CALL THIS SONG 'SNAKE THAT'
BLACK EYE PEAS: PUMP IT LIKE A SOCCER BALL! PLEASE REMEMBER WHAT I TOLD YOU ABOUT SPORTS
T PAIN/MIKE JONES: I'M N LUV WITH STRIPPERS THI S IS A FUNNY SONG THAT YOUR SISTERS LIKE, I DO NOT LIKE IT BUT I HOPE YOU KNOW WHOEVER YOU BRING HOME IS FINE AS LONG AS SHES CATHOLIC
Iggy had peanut butter breath, Big Black had Albini, but as far as confrontation's gone, I've never seen a band that exists solely to mock the idiots who fall for them. 'Joy Division rip' doesn't give LA electro-rockers and must-be industry joke She Wants Revenge enough credit. These songs are JD disco edits, the glum signifiers merely on loop (eighth-note downstrokes; one-note vocal melodies; minor thirds--the math checks out), the lyrics so remarkably inane ("I know I'll have regrets, but that's the price of lessons learned"), but the fans--oh the fans--twisting and date-ignoring along, some so zonked out I couldn't tell if they were sleepwalking or winking at me with their mouths.
I am not being a dick here. Almost every song title references a specific Joy Division number: "Out of Control" ("She's Lost Control"); "Disconnect" ("Isolation"); "Tear You Apart" (!) ("Love Will..."); "Someone Must Get Hurt" ("Atrocity Exhibition"), "These Things" ("These Days"), "Us" ("Colony"); "She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not" ("No Love Lost"); and, god bless SWR, "Broken Promises for Broken Hearts" ("Candidate" [!]). If the band isn't in on this Kaufmanesque stunt, then somebody has to be writing their lyrics too, so autobiographical it actually mortifies me to think they may end up in Facebook profiles: "I'm a mess but it's all right," but better, "It's not that it's my fault / it's just my style."
Hey. This is 2006. The Dance Card still works if bands want to write off mediocrity. In fairness the first five minutes of opener "Red Flags and Long Nights" did kick my ass, as SWR jammed on one chord while their drummer, a step up from the chintzy metronome on record, kicked out double-time on the bass drum. But when the ski-hat wearing frontman Justin Warfield accidentally knocked his mic stand down on (seriously) "Out of Control," broke from his brood trying to catch it, then decided 'play it cool, Justin, you did that on purpose' and hovered near the stagefloor, I felt a chill. "We're slaves to the DJ!" everybody would soon shout along (JW, fyi, was a DJ pre-SWR), then count off 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 with Warfield, whose soul must have died just a little bit from the laughter inside.
Don't even get me started on Crazy Snake Collective
Don't Bury the Hatchet Just Yet
Story is, really quick, that this 18-year-old kid from New Bedford, Mass., Jacob Robida, went ripshit through a gay bar with a hatchet, chopping dudes for thirty seconds, really gritty stuff. After that he fled the state and made his way down to Arkansas, got caught up in police shootout, killed a cop, then lost his own life.
Piecing together his family history, interests, apparently nutso myspace profile, etc., and making connections from the crime to the symbology, detectives et al. found out Robida was an enormous ICP fan--considered himself a Juggalo. The term means "ICP fan" more or less, and according to the wiki entry, it debuted when one of the ICP members asked the audience at a show if there were any juggalos out there; somebody decided yes, there are juggalos out here, and it took off from there.
Despite the band's insane clown shtick--serial killer clowns who kill those who deserve to be killed--juggaloism's a self-reportedly non-violent music-centric subculture, no code except to "stay true to yourself" and other sorts of truisms. They paint their faces like clowns, which to me seems like a good self-selecting mechanism--if you like a band so much, get them, that you're willing to walk around town looking like that, writing Dark Carnival on all your school binders, and calling the "condition you get for eating too much pussy" (love it) "Pink Eye." The fact that the band lets the fans dictate the terms of Juggalodom, giving them "Joker Cards" (their albums, which comprise the teachings and prophecies of the Dark Carnival, which is ICP's supreme being) but not explicitly laying down the law--this is nothing but good business sense, especially when you're in the business of fantastically violent lyrics and anger unmanagement--Shaggy said it best.
Thing is, Robida's was a hatchet gig, and the logo of ICP's label Psychopathic Records is the Hatchetman, "seen on everything Psychopathic Records." Psychopathic Records also throws big parties, has whole lines of Hatchet Gear, and even its own wrestling league (Juggalo Championshit Wrestling)--they are, in their words, "the label that runs beneath the streets."
Too strong a connection, which is probably why the band made sure to play the "we're just entertainers!" card, and felt obligated to distance themselves from the Robida incident. Band manager Alex Abbiss posted on their website:
ICP has sold millions of records, and when you start dealing with numbers that large, it's not that unlikely that one of those purchasers may have already been suffering from some form of mental illness.
and
The perpetrator of this crime may have thought that he was a Juggalo. But clearly, after further review, it's quite obvious that this guy had no clue what being a Juggalo is all about. If anyone knows anything at all about ICP, then you know that they have never, ever been down or will be down with any racist or bigotry bullshit.
and as for "what a Juggalo really is":
Juggalos are just like any other kind of people. They share a common bond, through their music and culture. They like to gather together all the time and hang out with one another. They do this among themselves, and they also come out in hordes for our annual Gathering of the Juggalos. They rarely fight or have problems with one another. They stay down with each other and consider one another to be family. Even though many of them have started off with very little, or nothing at all, they do the best they can to live their lives each and every single day and in general, they are very good people, not to be looked down upon but to be respected by the rest of society.
And even beyond that, the Juggalo wiki entry curiously makes no mention of the Robida incident, as if the information is quickly removed so as not to indict the other Juggalos--a pretty great example of the factual dangers/history vs. his-story stuff that Rachel Aviv talked about in her big wiki roundup a few weeks back.
Even if ICP were Robida's inspiration for the style of violence, obviously we can't blame them, fair enough. Naturally people point out the similarities, trying to make sense of how and why this happened, and it must be at least somewhat flattering to ICP for the media to think that "Night of the Axe"--with that "I went psychopathic/ Chopping throats with a hatchet"--inspired something more than a headbang or away message.
But maybe I do have issues with this "killing those who deserve to be killed," "punishing the wicked" look ICP pushes--slippery slope to be on just aesthetic terms, when they refuse to flesh it out into a bona fide creed. They want the benefits of being cult leaders/prophets ($$$ power respect) but shirk the responsibility, defining themselves negatively, as happened here: so apparently gays aren't part of the wicked. Check.
Meanwhile it's this total Lord of the Flies moment on Juggalo Island, nobody excited about setting rules for membership beyond the face paint and "getting what ICP are really about," such that hey, maybe it is completely believable for a Juggalo to take punishment of the wicked into his own hands, set his own terms, etc.--I just don't see why this isn't a logical conclusion of a cult that indulges in self-ostracization, puts a few extra chips on its shoulder and revels in violent imagery but also being true to yourself... if the Robida had gotten away with it, would this have been some sort of triumph, expression of devotion to the cause, etc.? What if it wasn't a gay bar, but a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan--would that have made this ok? Turns out, maybe Juggalos don't designate what being a Juggalo is about too concretely, precisely so they can say, when the choppers crash their fantasy land, "that's not what being a Juggalo is about."
Industry gigs mean free booze and lots of sneers, but here it just meant everybody had advanced copies of Six Demon Bag and knew all the words before the album's release in a few weeks. Also i-gigs mean dark rooms or scum bars or black turtleneck waiters carrying huge app trays with just six pieces of sushi; Caroline offices though are totally an office, the walls a collage of new and old album posters from artists they're distributing now (Broadcast), bands that have fallen out of popular grace for some time (Fatboy Slim), that Sondre Lerche dude I like pretty good, and an old Urb cover with a teaser that reads: "Happy Hardcore: 180 Smiles Per Minute."
Just saying, all around us a nasty reminder of how quickly music turns over, how anxiously we move from one artist to the next, discarded sounds picked up again, etc. It'd be too pessimistic a setting, say, for Editors or Bravery or whoever's the lastest trendfucker band, but Man Man made more sense here than the desks and chairs. A mess of junk sounds, ripped-up electric pianos and makeshift percussion and dented horns and klezmer changes and party favor horns and wet noodles--the band's already ramshackle, a jarring mix of old and new and cool and uncool, and I can't remember the last time the visuals complemented the audio so well.
Mostly new stuff; they played about six too many songs but can't fault the songs necessarily. Also didn't occur to me until last night that "Black Mission Goggles" is "Come Together" but very approximated, cartoonish, like what those kids whose parents locked them in the basement with musical instruments might come up with, but with more screaming and la-la-la and the polar opposite emotionally.
Honus Honus, the band's lead singer, had wanted to stay away from the guitar completely, but no luck and for the better: "Push The Eagle's Stomach" is their heavy metal number, very roundabout obv and not guitar heavy, but exciting to see them touching different stones here. Like, you look at these guys--white shirts, white football sunblock, bug-eyed and beardy and so attention-deficit they'll just jump away from their instruments and scream and flip over a table and remember at the last second they're playing a song too--they know they're weird enough that they can go for familiar and it'll still come out strange.
The silences, breaks from mayhem and breath catchers, they were the toughest, because that's when it clicks how debilitating and dead-on creepy most of these songs are. No percussion, they sing campfire: "You should always run with a loaded gun in your mouth," all the goofy smirks and Chris Powell bug-eye faces still in force; they knew what they were advocating. Too bad they didn't do "Van Helsing Boombox," the band's big breakup tune and probable breakout too, because, as Honus explained before the show: "It's liking watching your life falling apart over and over again--but it's a pop song." Mizzle, who played bass mostly last night, speaks up: Yeah, but that's why we have to play it."
It's one thing to applaud a man for wearing a bucket hat that fits both sandwiches and spiders; it's another thing to applaud that man when you know the spiders in his hat are deadly, and the sandwich is actually just a weird looking spider.
So my question is two-part:
A. If he's found to have a hand in the shooting, should Tony Yayo be allowed to continue wearing his bucket hat?
B. What rapper is most deserving of taking up Yayo's bucket hat-wearing, spider-taunting responsibilities?
I look forward to resolving this issue--together, a/k/a Yayo style.
Ghostface + Fort Minor
Nokia Theatre
6 February 2006
If Chuck D's right--that rap is the CNN of the streets--then goddamn did these openers bring the news: Bush planned 9/11. Josephus ghostwrote the Bible. That eye over the temple on the dollar bill--yes, says Immortal Technique, that's an alien spaceship. Bonus news: If Technique was President, promises Technique, he will "replace every raped virgin's broken hymen." And we thought tax cuts were awesome.
Not that Ghostface has ever run low on nonsense, but at least he's smiling. Hyped by his protege Trife, Ghost worked twenty minutes through better known verses from "Run," "Wildflower," and "Ice Cream" off Raekwon's Cuban Linx, half-hoping this crowd of Linkin Park t-shirts, what with their Ws thrown up and camera phones out, might rap along and redeem themselves for initially mistaking Trife for him. No dice, but at least Ghost got a chance to explain why he always asks light engineers to "change the light game up": If they just stick him with one color, Ghost says, "that fuck with my emotions."
Maybe that's why Fort Minor featuring Mike Shinoda, a/k/a Linkin Park featuring Black People, kept their lights moving. Forget emotions; if Minor's stage had stuck to one color, we'd realize their songs are ciphers, barely accounting for their own existence. "The first thing I need when I got a new beat / is to see how it sounds echoing off the street," Shinoda shares on "In Stereo"; who knew he'd be so excited about becoming a real rapper? But it ain't all glory for Fort Minor. Just ask minor Minor MC Ryu: "My life's like swallowing a pine cone." As if he's not still raking in those Tony Hawk bucks.
In an effort to "jazz up" or "hip-hopify" the Linkin Park sound but not too much, Shinoda brought out a drummer, three sensitive male singer types for the oohs and ahhs, a string trio called Black Violin, more rappers, and a turntablist who mostly just triggered guitar samples. It was a big fat sound rap execs think Park kids think rap is about, but after all that the only line that stuck was Ghost's: "Every time you go uptown, you get gipped."
"If we all put our hands into this explosion, we will finally defeat the internet"
Blue States Lose
Ain't irony, ain't rock & roll--and granted, most of America tunes into this Super Bowl gig to get amped about grown men doing things with muscles and balls, not to see whether the camera hides Jagger's facial lines, particularly the vertical indentations that look like dental floss holding up his lower jaw.
But goddamn, if any crackpot wanted more proof for his "sports are the pre-militant arm of Biblebeat, USA" conspiracy theory, here it was: the most sexually charged ("they brought the sex that the Beatles forgot," says mom), rock&roll lifestyling (inventors of the cliche?) youth-wasters of forever, invited onto a televised stage to make emasculated examples of their emasculated selves, their dollar-billed skin and bones one of the more mind-melting commercials in Bowl history: Seriously, Just Say No. Forget the censored lyrics stuff--nothing new there--what better way to stick it to liberals than let the Stones, those avatars of something surely, hang themselves in front of the biggest television audience of the year? Unclear whether those shots were more vicious than the cuts of old drunk women with boob jobs jumping around with their daughters saving up for them, but glad to know this morality play certainly had room for a supporting cast.
Janet may have been the most rewound moment in TiVO history, but people forget, that was also a pretty great half-time show before the malfunction. So much energy she and Timberlake amassed, their body-rocking toeing the line, sure, but what a fantastic if not fantastical assertion of youth / freedom / pop as age-defying, race-defying, universally relevant medium, etc. Even the year after, when the NFL asked McCartney to perform, there was a bit of self-parody involved, as if to say "look, if we're gonna play it cool, we're gonna play it really damn cool--cool as ice." And then somebody in the NFL board room would make the sound ice makes.
But however much Jagger was in on the joke of his skin flailing about in the Detroit wind or the irony of old bitch Britain entertaining cornfed America on its most cornfed, most American day ever, this performance was good proof that comedy and tragedy share a bloodline, and no number of lucky charms stuck in Richards's hair can fend off the fates.
Well OK yeah, the performance wasn't completely humorless, what with Jagger's aside before "Satisfaction" (something about being able to have played it at Super Bowl I) and the retractable tongue thing which retracted literally seconds after my friend Chris said, concerned, "I think there are people trapped under that tongue." Maybe people will buy A Bigger Bang after hearing "Rough Justice," which the band snuck between the out-of-breath "Start Me Up" and the shamelessly prophetic "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction," as obvious and predictable of choices for the set as any. But the thing about those two songs, and the thing about the Rolled Stones playing them then and there, was how poorly they've aged after decades of overexposure, and how nastily that point was made a visual. And you thought the Dove commercial was too much.
Maria, don't these two look like Nicole and Mary Grace?
Friday Grapeshot
Call it Friday's Mixtape Mondays, or Wednesday's DVD Mixtape Thursdays--just in time for the weekend, industry news is getting awesome. Here's what we got for you:
Beyond the obvious and onerous--$$$, after the public didn't embrace Corgan's solo bedroom shoegaze debut, dude needs to eat, and I'm sure there are weird legal publishing rights issues w/r/t playing Smashing Pumpkins songs as, say, Billy Corgan & Friends, etc.--there's something pretty special to how Corgan's spun the reunion. From the Tribune ad, to his antagonistic relationship with the band, to Chamberlin signing on immediately and the others ranging from intrigued and a bit hopeful to "no comment," I dunno the whole thing feels very prodigal son to me. Corgan's more or less admitted he needs the band, desperate to bring it back for his own mental livelihood, "this is all I have" Jake & Elwood type stuff. Again, it's same old same old with these reunion tours, and I'll probably pay however much to go see them play "Rocket" again because it's like that (I like rockets), but intentional or not this seems warmer than, like, the Pixies reunion.
But hey! This is as good a time as ever to plug NOISEBUSTER Pro Tech NB-FX Noise Canceling Headphones!, a pair of which the company sent me for review about a week ago after my first iPod piece caused a ripple in the world of cancelled noise. Seriously, go buy a pair and tell them I sent you, or they'll probably make me send them back and I can't find the box.
PLUG Awards
Happened last night, covered in great detail here. The real jam was backstage: two kinds of pita bread, lots of hummus, and a man I'm told was C-Rayz Walz. This guy and I were snacking when all the sudden a ball of trash materialized in his hand and Walz decided we were playing one-on-one basketball, the trashcan behind me the net. He tried some fake-outs (eating more snacks) but then did the thing where you pretend to throw the ball in the opponent's face and say "in your eye!" but then actually shoot the ball into the net. C-Rayz's version of this move was to say "in your eye," accidentally spit cracker crumbs in my face, throw the piece of trash against the wall, then pick the trash up the ground and leave the room indefinitely.
Beyonce [ft. Slim Thug]: "Check On It"
#1 again this week, and it's OK enough, certainly not an outrage like "Hollaback Girl" was for me. At this point it's less about songs, more about Beyonce's New Single. But the more I listen, the more I realize how sub-par of a sub-par "Goodies" this song comes off--the sentiment too half-assed for me to care about let alone respect either B or Slim Thug here, the tease of it all not particularly hard-to-get at all, and hard-to-get is the only thing worth getting. Compare Beyonce:
Ima let you work up on it and I can be a tease but I really wanna please you and if you don't go braggin, I'll make sure you have it
to Ciara:
No you can't call me later
Or the dudes, Slim:
I'm checking on you boo, do what chu do
And while dance I'ma glance at this beautiful view
I'm keep my hands in my pants, I need to glue em w/ glue
I'm in a trance all eyes on you and your crew
to Petey:
I got a sick reputation for handlin broads
All I need is me a few seconds or more and
I'm the truth and ain't got nothin' to prove and
Hey shawty you think you bad
but you ain't bad
I'll show you what bad is.
To say nothing of the Goodies squelch vs. Swizz's phone-in. Song or bar, when has nice ever worked?
Good of Hardly Art Fennessey for keeping this 50 Cent/G-Unit vs. Game beef on the map--he had retired his number one spot to start Clockwork, so we delight in his hardly permanent return to first form.
Cam vs. Jay is still the hot topic (kids must have read Xgau's essay), so this pair of new(ish) disses might stay only on Sirius and of particular interest to bloggers with deadlines and nothing to write about. Nevertheless here are two examples of how dis tracks can be suicide.
Over Yayo's "I Know You Don't Love Me," Game rolls out 240 bars on Spider Loc ("Spider Loc is a joke"), G-Unit's West Coast fill-in after Game got kicked out (though Game insists, "You say you kicked me out the group, nigga, I left"). It's part in response to "G-Unot Killer," which was on that Tony Hawk mixtape from forever ago, the one with Hawk explaining how when he walks to Sirius Radio he wears a bulletproof vest--dude it's in midtown! Relax! Loc also had some air time on the "300 Bullets" (or whatever) response to "300 Bars," an alley-oop for Game who reduces Loc's performance to "50 gave him a 100 bars / all he did was smile."
There are some funny enough lines here ("you the reason niggas press mute when they play Madden") and some fun with time dates ("I rather be at home listening to the Cam'Ron dis" could mean either Cam's dis on Jay or Jay's future dis on Cam, which is pretty heady shit). But other than that Game comes off a bit of a herb here, the bully no longer feared, eventually committing to the most boring of rap game rug pulls: "Your life is a movie you ain't a factor you an actor / 50 gave you a script." Extending the Wrestlemania metaphor, nobody likes watching Hulk Hogan beat the shit out of Junkyard Dog or Skinner; the Texas Tornado isn't really a tornado.
Who are we kidding though. Game's entire post-Documentary career has been predicated on G-Unit's goings-on, down to the off-the-cuff disses he makes on tracks that aren't explicitly dis, to the fact that Kanye had to cut his verse off "Crack Music" because he's completely lost without G-Unit as a negative compass. Dis is his livelihood--Rap Watchdog but not even that since he's so one-track.
Loc's crack on Game--"I talk bad about you and you like my lines"--only hinted at what 50's done here on "Not Rich Still Lying," simultaneously taking pleasure in the duel but saying he's above it all too. For one he didn't jack a Game beat--and this doowop stutter is actually pretty great too--so 50 doesn't posit himself in relationship to Game, no subservience. Better than responding though, 50 just imitates Game for the whole thing, delivers the verses in Game's nanny nanny character while occasionally dropping out to pepper the track with interlocutions ("I even fucked Mya / [50: I fucked her first, Game] / 50, you lyin'!"). The effect is he's letting Game drown in his stupid boasts ("I'm Hurricane Game!") and playground roasts ("I hope the police get you and you go to jail"), when in actuality 50's speeding the process along.
And better than Game just playing the authenticity card, 50 reduces it even further to he-said she-said, dangerous for Game since words can't just be words here. He's deflating Game's hardness to just a matter of personal assertion--you only are what you say you are, and if someone says you aren't something, then you just aren't until you say you are. 50 lets on to this attack in his self-introduction--"It's sorta autobiographical," a nice enough 50-plays-Game curtsy so Oprah doesn't get too angry with him--but then lays it on thick when he talks about Game crawling out his 2001 coma: "Your brother says you never were in a coma!"
Status had said here how the relationship is pretty symbiotic between the two, that 50 will always do stupid stuff and Game will always call him on it." But it's parasitic, really, and the fact that 50's even removed himself from the situation of the dis, we just watch Game shrivel up. For Game this is how he eats, these tracks; for 50, "This is too much fun, man."
Riff Raff is excited to bring you an exclusive Pazz & Jop podcast mp3: Village Voice Senior Editor, Dean of American Rock Criticism, and Pazz & Jop Grand Poobah Robert Christgau presents "Jop'd in the Closet," a history of the Pazz & Jop Critics Poll as sung by Robert Christgau.
Via Jamie via Matt, apparently lots of SF performance art gigs turn into electric kool-aid pissing contests over who's the most "chill." Seems a slippery rubric, a little too feel good and everybody's above average for me, but if you wanna grab nuts we'll grab nuts: The David Cross-looking motherfucker with the guitar and the cut-out props and the "I have just one more song" which he said at least three times and the 16-year-olds brainwashed by "isn't he hilarious" audience participation--this was the most chill thing I've ever seen. And yes, I did see the Colburn films and the Ants in Pants spoken word and dance theatre or whatever group was gyrating in half-tandem to the sounds of dogs eating electricity.
As for Deerhoof, they'reanOKband (I guess). Maybe it was an accident, maybe their tracksuits were drying out, but just saying, last night was their Bowery debut, and it was the first time I'd ever seen them wearing collared shirts--not sure I want to believe "American indie is aging" but maybe. Also maybe because they heard Bowie was there?
Hey, since Bowie got a mention for getting snubbed at the Arctic Monkeys show, this seems a good time to unveil a heretofore secret blogger cheatsheet used to determine how great a concert must have based on which celebrity rockers were in attendance. Don't tell the other blogs I told you this:
When David Bowie shows up: pretty awesome
David Bowie + David Byrne: still pretty awesome
David Bowie + David Byrne + Lou Reed: you are at the Donnas
Lou Reed: backstage at the Donnas
Bowery soundtech spreads the mix out, really great separation, and in other words the exact opposite of what tends to work for Deerhoof live: huge swells of sound, not so much compressed as congealed and combobulated. Sorta makes sense why they liked the Northsix so much.
To compensate, Deerhoof just upped the contrast on the dynamics, both within the songs and the setlist period. The night had an arc--which you never see people talk about anymore--mostly because they weren't afraid to play out loud when they had to. Chris Cohen's solo pirate ditty "Odyssey" worked as well as the explosive "Wrong Time Capsule," pin-drop quiet for the verses. "The Last Trumpeter Swan" from Reveille, an 8-minute modern classical monster stuck in a crib, must have been the winner though, and most definitely for people who only know the band's latest LP.
At this point I don't know what I've written about Deerhoof yet and what I haven't, so apologies for repeating myself if that's the case next. When they came out for the encore and did "Bunny," one of their earliest songs, a live staple from their Shaggsy days when Saunier would have to jump out the set to tune Satomi's bass, the song played measuring stick for how far they've gone from that sound--when they were almost as much a performance troupe as the acts they had open for them last night. Not that Deerhoof's onstage shticks from before meant an uncomfortability with their songs, just that the show now is almost strictly musical, no whimsy to cut any losses. The opposite of chill, or just turned inside-out.
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