Reading this refutation of an ironic assessment of Animal Collective’s new album and internet gaga stardom, and came across this great quote:
"I have this relationship with music. There is this cold and dizzy feeling that overtakes me sometimes, when a song or a passage of a song happens to gun it to my heart. And I am addicted to this feeling–I seek it out, sludging through days upon days of music, much of it very objectively "good", for those moments capable of the cold and dizzy."
I know that feeling, though I wouldn’t describe it as cold and dizzy…more like warm and mind buggled.
And for what it’s worth, I’m finding the new Animal Collective album to be pretty great, maybe over-hyped, probably stunning live, and psychedelic as all get out. Gotta listen to it more, I think there’s patterns in there I haven’t heard yet…you can feel it from the cover:
fun bit from "The Future is Unwritten:. Julien Temple’s solid doc on Joe Strummer…this clip is about Joe Strummer’s first band, and it’s told in a cool-looking pen and ink wash animated style…the film is def worth seeing, I came out of it wanting to know even more about Strummer…
First of all, Johnny Rotten has done a commercial for butter. It’s below, so you can check it out, and yeah, it’s a fine advert I guess, but damn it feels tough to have those sell-out feelings about Johnny Rotten. Granted, I guess the Pistols were a manufactured band to a certain extent, so they were always about selling out, and I guess JR is all about pushing people’s buttons and showing them that they’re never as free-thinking as they think they are, but still, damn, a commercial for butter. [via]
The youtube comments are as divisive as possible, with people condemning and defending on both sides. My favorite though, is this filmed response. I can really feel what this guy is saying! He means it! I love that filmed responses can happen, and so quickly, and so well done.
I like The Knife, but there’s something about their use of voice fx that reminds me of Ween. So even though it’s supposed to be (and kind of is) spooky as heck, it’s kind of silly too. This is the single from The Knife’s Karin, recording as Fever Ray.
It’s been a long time since I saw something on the internetz that made me say "I must blog this immediately!" This is simple and great. Those of you who have to deal with B&T will especially dig it.
For Christmas I got a bunch of 33 & 1/3’s, (also, Gamera does a good job of explaining them here) but without a doubt the most interesting one was on Celine Dion’s "Let’s Talk About Love". Not so much a critique of the actual album (although it is that), it’s more a critical examination of taste, and what it means to like something or dislike something. How our tastes develop (along economic lines, social lines, cultural lines), what is meant by the social currency of cool — all this interesting snooty critical theory stuff with Celine Dion as the springboard. It’s pretty great.
One of the more interesting lines of thought in the book was our fear of liking things that are overly sentimental, or tacky. He posits a theory that part of our dislike of these things is that they make us feel too much, they threaten to pull too much emotion out of us, and that we resist this so that we can still feel we have a hold on our emotions, that we are in control of our feelings. But maybe this isn’t the best thing for us, maybe it would be good for us if we could feel things strongly, really let ourselves go and feel the emotion that certain works of art are trying so desperately to make us feel.
The great thing was that I was reading a lot of this book in LA at our hotel pool — a pool that was too close to the freeway so they blasted middle-of-the-road rock to drown out the traffic noise. I’m reading this stuff about maybe giving in to the emotion and I’m listening to "Livin on a Prayer" and "Blinded by the Light" and so on. I tried to feel what it felt like to give in to these songs and it was interesting as anything. Reminded me of going to church and saying to myself "just for fun I’m going to feel what it would feel like to really BELIEVE. How does it feel? Just give in…" There’s something to it, it’s valuable somehow.
So recently whenever I see or hear something that makes me cringe a little, I try to let go of that feeling and just embrace whatever it is that’s making me cringe. This seems to be particularly effective when dealing with new pop culture stuff that’s right on the border of cool/lame. I love seeing things where I can’t tell if it’s great or if it’s weak. This guy Juiceboxxx is right there. I def appreciate the energy, and I can tell part of it is a goof, and part of it is super serious, but I just can’t make up my mind about it. I know I don’t need to have it on my ipod, but I like watching the video (it’s also a great video). Plus he’s 21, and from Milwaukee, and it seems like so much of his vibe is about being for the kids and I love that. What do you think?
Wow, and that video’s kind of great too, right? I have this real soft spot for Robert Earl Keen. When I was living in England, from 81 – 86, I used to stay up late and set my tape recorder recording when John Peel would start his show. That was the only place to hear hip hop and I was so into rap and breakdancing and stuff. I would dub the rap tracks of the show and build these great 80’s hip-hop compilations. No clue what happened to these tapes.
I couldn’t care less about all the other stuff he was playing, I was just waiting for the rap. The other stuff was "really weird". Years later when I was in high school and really into listening to Top 40 radio, I came across one of those tapes of John Peel’s show. At that point I wasn’t really into the hip-hop OR the "really weird" stuff. But there was this one song that I couldn’t stop listening to. I put it on a mix I made for myself and listened to it over and over. I knew I didn’t like country, but this didn’t seem like country, even it did have that little voice-break bit when he sings a few of the phrases. And it was a waltz. And it had a TROMBONE!
Even now when I hear it it speaks to the ridiculous high school romantic in me; it just totally hits that late-night feeling, and it’s old-timey and sweet, and the narrator is obviously more confident in his story-telling than his romantic prowess. But by the end, all is right with the world. Damn this song is sweet.
So this is the fourth year that DJ BC (the guy responsible for the Beastles) has put out a compilation of various artists’ Christmas mashups…under the "Santastic" banner, this year’s is called, cleverly enough, Santastic 4, and includes a great tribute to Kirby-era Fantastic Four art (above). I got each of the three previous ones, and they were pretty hit or miss, but from all 3 I’ve been able to cull about an hour’s worth of solid Christmas mashups. Last year I was so looking forward to this year when I could add more and finally get it to the level where I could give out a full-length Christmas mashup CD…
but this year’s is crap! I don’t get it. There’s really only one on there that is any good, and mostly what it is is delightfuly weird:
So have you noticed the commenter named "oointgroov"?
Back in 1998 (I think) I was working at BBC America, painstakingly cutting out the swear words and nudity from British programming to make it palatable for American audiences. We would also cut up their programs and put in breaks for commercials. It was early days for BBCA and they didn’t really know how long it would take an editor to cut an hour of programming down, so they would give us tons of time for not much work. Which was great.
So I had all this time there. I would crank out my work for the week, and then parcel out delivering it, made sure I looked busy, and worked on all sorts of personal projects — mix CD’s, party flyers, personal films. I would hang out a bunch with one of my best pals, MR, who was working there at the time. We’d take these 2-hour lunch breaks and watch series that weren’t assigned, and just generally ahve a good rockin time.
The drummer for my band in college was working on a solo project called T Groove. He did this thing where he posted a bunch of solo split tracks for one his pieces, called "Robot Dance Party", and invited people to remix it. So MR and I spent some time remixing it on the AVID editing system I was using. This was kind of painstaking. I would put in the tracks from T Groove, and then download drum samples from the drum machine museum (site since taken down). Since we couldn’t control the speed of any of the audio, I would have to try each sample out individually, and then use the ones that just happened to be at the same tempo as the original track. Took a while, but damn fun.
Then we went to AT&T Labs’ text to speech demo and put in a bunch of lines for the speech synthesizer to rap over the track. This part was a blast. Something about the way "he" would read the lines, emphasize weird syllables, stretch sounds out in odd ways. Awesome. We made the chorus the refrain of "who put the ‘oo’ in T Groove". MR posts as commentator oointgroov. A while ago, I asked T Groove if he still had the remix but he said he didn’t.
Then out of the blue last week, he found it! I listened to it one morning, and it was the best part of my day/week. It gives me a good good feeling even now to listen to it.
"The beats T kicks are funkity fresh/ kicking the shit out of old John Tesh."
if this is your thing, you should grab Clipse’s new mixtape over here. I don’t know why I like Clipse so much, something about their flow, the way they rap about drug dealing like it’s international playboy stuff, the spare but tough beats? Dunno, but it works.
I don’t care how your Monday morning has been going so far. I don’t care where your energy level is. I don’t care if you work in an open-plan office-space cubicle. I don’t care if you hate electronic, dance-y music. I command you to play this vid and crank the volume up. Then dants your pants off.
Chicken. Moose. Rhino. Monkey. What more could you want?
