I'm getting kinda tired of the whole killer-guy-from-Twin Peaks-look schtick. It's been a number of months since my project reached fruition and I've done nothing about it and I'm now thinking of something new. In fact, after a comment from a friend a few weeks ago likening me to Allen Ginsberg (R.I.P.) and then seeing the brilliant fantasy scene featuring Ginsberg and Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, I think I will look in that direction.



Of course that's David Cross playing Ginsberg in the film, not the man himself. I probably can't manage that degree of hirsuteness; I may have to go for a more senior Ginsberg a la his 1985 self-portrait (right, via the Village Voice).

I feel I will also have to lose a bit of weight to get there.


It's Saturday today. Last night at a Mexican restaurant I realised that there is still a lot of very nice tequila about that I haven't yet had the pleasure of drinking. I immediately resolved to rectify this situation. Hopefully this pursuit does not turn out to be mutually exclusive with the Ginsberg project. More soon...


New album out recently from Wiley. It's called Grime Wave.

Wiley - Local Lad (1.84 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

The sound is STRONG, yo.

Labels: art, heroes, music, tequila, youtube

If you read some of the comments on YouTube regarding the version of My Little Red Book posted yesterday, there's some conflicting opinions as to who did the best version:

A Burt Bacharach song recorded by Manfred Mann and later murdered by Love.

I'm a Love fanatic, but I do think this version (and the film version) captures the essence of Bacharach much better.

this is the definitve [sic] version. reminds me of my childhood growing up in swinging london.

etc.

Say what?



That was horrible.

GrigoriSom (1 month ago):

Manfred Mann never did the definitive version of anything... including The Mighty Quinn.

Thank you. Goodnight.

Labels: music, youtube

I'm pretty disappointed that super-awesome guitarist Bo Diddley has died. This video is a fantastic tribute, though:



German freak-psych-rockers Guru Guru named a song after him on their second album, 1971's Hinten:

Guru Guru - Bo Diddley (6.85 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Labels: heroes, music, youtube

Boy oh boy, I surely love this song:



That's Love performing Burt Bacharach and Hal David's My Little Red Book.

Over at MOG you can listen to Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach performing the song in a style more in keeping with the original intention, you might say -- as in, it's not all Nuggets '66 West Coast garage punk rock.

Labels: music, youtube

The Stumps live at Happy, 2007:



From The Noise Machine.....

Labels: music, stumps, youtube

I'm partially blaming this on Martha:



Thought that was weird? Check this out!

Labels: heroes, music, youtube

Fuck Fall Out Boy. Srsly, fuck them. Fall Out Boy, when yr old(er) and fucken burnt out and fucked up and shit, I hope you google yourselves and somehow find this. Remember, get fucked. Get fucked, alot. And I don't mean "get laid". That would be a blessing, not a curse. I mean GO AND GET FUCKED YOU ASSHOLES.

...

What, you may ask, the hell are you on about, drinks-after-worker? Ok, let's do this in bullet-points:

• I love David Bowie. A lot.
• I hate your band.
• I love David Bowie's album Station To Station.
• In the opening, title track on Station To Station there's a lyric which goes It's not the side-effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love.
• Fall Out Boy -- your band, whom I hate (above) (I mean, they're so bad it's comical) released an album (or was it an EP? Who fucken cares) in 2004 called My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue. Stupid, stupid name. It gets worse (what, you hadn't guessed?)
• On MHWABTBSTMY there is a song called It's Not A Side Effect Of The Cocaine. I Am Thinking It Must Be Love.

I don't really need to go on, do I?

Here is a "fan video" for the song, which is insipid crap (the song, not the video.) (Although the video is not shit hot either.)



This is much better. It's a (seemingly impromptu) a capella rendition of the section of Station To Station that is in question:



I've heard that if you so desire, you can download a copy of the Fall Out Boy release here: I appreciate comments left! DO NOT STEAL MY LINKS D: \

FAIL Out Boy, if you read this: Fuck You! Also don't forget to GO AND GET FUCKED YOU ASSHOLES.

Ta to Robyn for inspiration.

Labels: misanthropy, music, youtube

Michael Bracewell has written a new book on Roxy Music. It's called Re-make/Re-model, published by Faber & Faber (London 2007) and Roxy's sensational, amazing first album gets the book (and book review) it deserves.

I'd never seen or heard anything so clearly made for me and my art-school manqué world-view. The cover, with Kari-Ann Muller in classic 1940s' pin-up pastiche, all pink ribbons and silver platforms, was Big Biba Rainbow Room. The contents covered all the bases: the Warholian ones, the art history ones, the Ladbroke Grove, gay-friends-of-Hockney ones. Of course, Bryan Ferry looked fantastic and, despite all the unbearable cleverness, the music went like a train - plangent sax, driving drums - offsetting Brian Eno's synth weirdness. They played at the Royal College of Art that year and then at The Rainbow, a Low Deco kitschfest in itself. This really was Tomorrow Calling.

Check the essay; watch the videos; buy the book. Wowowowowowow

Labels: music, props, youtube

Stuff.co.nz: Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow found dead from unknown causes at his home in Las Vegas. He was 52.

Bugger it. I'm saddened.

Best known and loved for their 1983 cover of Slade's Cum On Feel The Noize, Quiet Riot were pretty huuuuuuuuge for me there for awhile.

Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear The Reaper (2.92 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

I wish these rockstars and musicians would stop dropping dead. Here's the video for Cum On Feel The Noize.

Labels: eulogies, music, youtube

Hey.



You still coming here?

It's been pretty quiet, aye? I've been pretty busy, is why.

Hope to get back to regular blogging shortly.

Labels: slackness, youtube

I wee while ago I finally got around to re-watching Christiane F. (a.k.a. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a.k.a. We Children of Zoo Station) -- and featuring the stunningly beautiful Natja Brunckhorst in the title role as the teenage drug addict/prostitute -- and lots and lots and lots of footage of David Bowie in concert as well as gorgeous Bowie choons on the soundtrack -- and ever since I have been completely obsessed with his 1976 album Station to Station.

Especially after this bit, which I find myself watching over and over:



It's quite patently, ridiculously obvious that this man is a silly man, and kinda cheesy too:

The return of the thin white duke / blowing darts in lovers eyes x several

I mean, what?

But then, look at him. He's a freakin alien. He's a lost little boy. He's a demon lover. He's a chameleon, a changeling, whose appearance alters every-which-way you look at him. He's the Thin White Duke and he's blowing darts in your eyes. And, on the other hand --

Here are you / you drive like a demon / from station to station

is a pretty bloody good line.

So it's also quite obvious to me that as far as I am concerned, if you're talking about the 1970s, David Bowie, and Berlin/Germany -- and to a lesser extent makeup and smoke machines -- that he can bloody well do no wrong whatsoever. And by the way Station To Station, from which the above clip is the title track, is really, really farking good. Despite all it's.. oh.. I dunno.. cocaine-fueled conceit and bizarre lyrical themes and (what very possibly should be awful) "white-boy" funkin' and all that stuff... it's claustrophobic and paranoiac and sociophobic and agrophobic and detached and alien and arcane and it's the hottest thing to come swirling off a platter of crackly black vinyl since the LP reissue of Brett Easton Ellis reading his own short-stories.

David Bowie - Wild is The Wind (3.73 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

And Wild is the Wind is a seriously incredible love-song.

You can 'listen' to the rest of Station To Station here, only be warned that track 3 Word on a Wing is corrupt. But you don't really need track 3. Oh, Station To Station is his album which immediately preceded Low, dontcha know.

So:

[1] from henceforth his "famous Berlin trilogy" or if you will, Low, Heroes and Lodger (allmusic), has become in my eyes his famous Berlin quadrilogy, including on its front-end Station To Station.

[2] I really, really want a David Bowie soundtrack to my life. I'm serious. This is one way I have identified that I can become generally happier with my lot.

...

This is what Natja Brunckhorst looks like these days (above, left).

Or this:


She's alive and well, and writing screenplays and so on (click images to follow links).

Labels: heroes, music, youtube

Holy god............. (via For Your Entertainment):

Labels: miscellany, youtube

This is so great, I have to post it here like I discovered it or something, but really I just cribbed from The Mahatma X Files:


Mea Culpa, from Brian Eno & David Byrne's classic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts link.

Labels: heroes, music, youtube

Street poet Gil Scott-Heron (wikipedia) gets a lot of props for being a right-on brother and so on; his 'song' The Revolution will not be Televised is played and covered and referenced and quoted often, and rightly so -- it's a cute li'l slice of invective -- although to be honest it has become a little too much like a Ché Guevera tshirt/poster to carry too much cultural significance any more.

The album that track is taken from -- Small Talk at 125th and Lennox (allmusic) -- was recorded live in a New York nightclub with only bongos and conga as backing, and it's regarded as "a volcanic upheaval of intellectualism and social critique". However it is blighted by the inclusion of a stupid, confused, and rancidly homophobic track called The Subject Was Faggots.

Gil Scott-Heron - The Subject Was Faggots (1.91 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using player below)

...

A guy called Chris Crocker got pretty (in)famous pretty damn quick for his Youtube video slating the critics of Britney Spears after her MTV VMAs debacle.



God, check out some of those comments. 40 years older, nothing's changed. (It was even worse in the comments on the follow-up video, which was pulled down by Chris after only a few hours.) And even worse was that when Fox news covered it, a good deal of time was spent making derogatory remarks about Chris' sexual androgeny.

My comment to America, the so-called "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave": shut the fuck up about freedom, until gay people are safe from your hateful "freedom-loving" "christian" "patriots".

...

Check out and even download the Gil Scott-Heron album here.

Labels: christian-baiting, freedom-hating, Friday farce, misanthropy, music, youtube

An Open Letter to Kanye West

Dear Kanye West,

Please shut up. Nobody cares. Sure, you're probably a marvelous producer and, according to white kids everywhere, you're a fantastic rapper.

more...

LOLz. Count it.

...



Even better than Britney Spears' bizarre performance on the MTV VMAs was comedienne Sarah Silverman's opening stand-up routine, which included her impersonation of Britney's "hairless" vulva. An utterly surreal moment of sublime physical comedy. I think.

Full transcript here.

In other news.. it happened again...

Labels: miscellany, youtube

Check this out: a post at "Dylan, etc." about the big Dire Straits concert in Syddo in 1986. I remember the TV broadcast well (it was live to Australia and New Zealand), introduced by a young-ish and nervous Molly Meldrum blathering on from a teleprompter and fluffing most of it. The concert itself is good enough, but it bears little relation to anything I like about Dire Straights; the dude at Dylan, etc. likes it a lot more than me, though. Lots of people recorded it on top-loading VCRs onto grainy domestic quality-VHS tapes with lines and blown-out reds and it got dubbed a lot and passed around people's parents and it sat on little shelves under their TVs for up to 10 years.

The post I linked to above has links for downloading the audio from the concert; if you go here you can download individual tracks. It's not available commercially, so don't worry about that.

I quite like the track Industrial Disease:

I go down to speaker's corner I'm thunderstruck
They got free speech, tourists, police in trucks
Two men say they're Jesus one of them must be wrong
There's a protest singer singing a protest song - he says
They wanna have a war to keep us on our knees
They wanna have a war to keep their factories
They wanna have a war to stop us buying Japanese
They wanna have a war to stop industrial disease
They're pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and blind
They wanna sap your energy incarcerate your mind
They give you Rule Brittania, gassy beer, page three
Two weeks in Espana and Sunday striptease
Meanwhile the first Jesus says I'd cure it soon
Abolish monday mornings and friday afternoons
The other one's on a hunger strike he's dying by degrees
How come Jesus gets industrial disease?

I'm still trying to work out which war they're talking about, though. Maybe they're talking about all wars. (Lyrics from LyricsFreak; if you wanna know more about industrial disease, you can read about it here).

But this is all a long-winded way of saying that I gotta get me one of them headbands. Seriously.

Labels: music, youtube

The camera adds pounds, or whatever, as they say, but does the camera add a high collar, a pair of hollow-bore fangs and a coffin filled with dirt in a castle somewhere east of Bohemia?

I found this stuff on Kiwiblog. I can't be bothered with all the guff comparing Helen Clark with Robert Muldoon (pictorially OR politically), but this short morpho-tastic clip (below) is truly unsettling.

Who the hell is that at the end there? Frank-n-Furter?

...

You're gonna want to get the bad taste out of your mouth: so here's Tony Conrad with Faust -- From the side of man and womankind - part 2, first track of the album Outside the Dream Syndicate (1972).

Labels: miscellany, music, youtube

In response to Wanda Harland's U Can't Touch This Sunday post.....

Labels: miscellany, youtube

The fantastic and inimitable Axemen on TV3's Saturday morning show Yahoo in 1992:



I love the Axemen. Bob Brannigan. Little Stevie McCabe. The other guy. Yes, I love the Axemen.

More reading:
Shaft (Wikipedia)
Get yer Botts off - The Little Stevie McCabe / SleekBott / Axemen Home Page!

Labels: music, youtube

YouTube comes up with the goods again; One of Midnight Oil's best songs from arguably their best album (Head Injuries) and a perfect illustration of the weird hybrid sound they had at the time -- a perfect combination of pub-rock and frantic New Wave.



I love this tune.

Labels: music, youtube

Buried deep in this week's Wellingtonian is a press-release puff-up on Wellington mature girly pop-duo Pearl. You may remember them from having supported uh.. Elton John and uh.. Eric Clapton. Anyway they've just launched a new video clip on Youtube and are justifiably pleased with racking up over 80,000 views inside a month (100,000+ by now).

While the tune is by no means to my taste, I enjoyed the clip with its irreverent take on the modern relationship, and subtle nods (and no doubt winks) to less widespread sub-cultural sexual practices such as fetishism, sex toys, "dogging" and "seagulling" (right).

Dogging (Wikipedia; sex disease risks) is a relatively well known phenomenon, due in part to column inches and tabloid outrage, but its mutant evil bastard spawn seagulling is perhaps less so. I can't find anything definitive to link to but the UrbanDictionary is a help; you'll get the idea through a combination of defn's 2 and 8.

And no one ever actually believed Eddie Vedder when he said that his band name Pearl Jam was a reference to the preserves his grandmother made. Did they?

...

NP: Alice Coltrane -- Radha - Krsna Nama Sankirtana (BBC Jazz Review)

If a burglar stole the first four tracks from this cd in the night, I doubt whether I'd mind, but take that fifth track and I'll be calling the cops....

Labels: miscellany, youtube

Today's Friday Farce takes on a little bit of a twist from the usual FF formula of "some gimp makes terrible version of great song by beloved artist"; it's more along the lines of "beloved artist makes unnecessary version of song by some wretched gimp". Now normally I wouldn't bother, y'dig, but this one is special.

I was frankly horrified when I learnt that Johnny Cash had covered perennial angst-bucket and dork Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails song Hurt on his American IV album. I can't speak highly enough of Johnny Cash, and my love for him and his music; conversely no insult, no offense is too harsh for Reznor and his music. He's the godfather of emo, the great high-priest of screamo, the progenitor of most in popular music that I can think of that is horrid and loathsome. And Johnny had to go and cover his song.

Johnny Cash - Hurt (3.34 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)

This isn't just random spewing of bile, either. I'm affeared that this will give credibility to Reznor, that people (sheep?) will feel able to feel like "if it's good enough for J.C., it's good enough for me". Nooooooooo people, don't do it! Don't give creedence to the self-pitying fucktard. Don't validate him.

My last, best hope for humankind is that they -- like me -- and even the NIN fans -- will listen to this tune with new ears and realise -- like me -- what a goddawful piece-o'-shit songwriter and lyricist Reznor is.

I hurt myself today
to see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
the only thing that's real

*puke*

the needle tears a hole
the old familiar sting
try to kill it all away
but I remember everything

*gag*

what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end

*retch*

you could have it all
my empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

*yawn*

I wear my crown of thorns
on my liar's chair
full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair

*looks at watch*

beneath the stain of time
the feeling disappears
you are someone else
I am still right here

*slap* *punch* etc.

And on and on and on and on it goes. Fuck man, what are you -- a fourteen year-old girl? (Apologies to fourteen year-old girls everywhere.)

(lyrics reproduced without permission)

Watch music vid for Johnny Cash's version:




Watch footage Reznor performing same in concert:

Labels: Friday farce, misanthropy, music, youtube

Post-rock is a done-to-death description but as a semaphore of intent it still serves a certain purpose. First coined by music-journo Simon Reynolds as a term to describe progressive music "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords", it's use was rapidly spread during the 90s by breathless writers suddenly overwhelmed by seemingly-infinite possible music-futures. Reynolds further expounded:

perhaps the really provocative area for future development lies... in cyborg rock; not the wholehearted embrace of Techno's methodology, but some kind of interface between real time, hands-on playing and the use of digital effects and enhancement.

... which in itself has turned out to be suitably ambitious, as in general attempts at an amalgam of real-time instrumentation and digital frippery have turned out to be a big horrible mess (with notable exceptions, of course).

However some have managed to find a kinda cautious way-forward through this experimental minefield, and on Saturday night four progressive musical groups take four individual post-rockin' approaches to deconstructing sound within the codified meta-language of rock music:

...some of Wellington's greatest rock explorers...

The Postures will have you shakin' yer booty and shaking in your boots with their disco/doom rhythms combined with piercing tones and a punk delivery. The Stumps are quite possibly the Grateful Dead for the 21st century... noxious jazz-fusion is administered a good spanking to within an inch of the (current) law. Join The Dukes of Leisure on an idler's stroll through huge spaces of gentle melodies surrounded by walls of violent and engulfing noise. And Black Boned Angel is uber-ambient doom-metal created from massively overdriven instruments... the aural equivalent of a tequila and opiates-bender followed by a five-day crying jag.

SATURDAY APRIL 14th
SAN FRANCISCO BATH-HOUSE
10$

The last Black Boned Angel performance:

Labels: black boned angel, gigs, music, promotions, youtube