Category Archives: Music

Music

Down By the Golden Gate, Pt. II

The second day of Outside Lands started with a quick listen of Grooveshark playlists filled with the bands playing that day. What stuck out from the wave of dubstep and indie rock was Ana Tijoux whispering the hook, “mil noveciento setenta -“. That missing word is the number siete, completing the first single from her album 1977.A French-Chilean MC,  Tijoux mixes her down tempo voice with golden age of hip-hop beats. However, her performance was more a testament to her rapid-fire delivery in castellano. The aforementioned song sounds like a sped up South American take on Digable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick” (trumpet player and everything). The crowd (a mix of locals and affluent Latino graduate students) shouted in all sorts of accents.

Another new surprise was electronic/indie pop band Starfucker (which use the name STRFKR on tour). As you can see by the dress and leggings frontman Josh Hodges is rocking the band is one to see live, not just for the semi-transvestite band members, but for a good performance.

The trek through the camp surrounding center stage on day 2 ( The aging hippies now replaced by Black Keys and teenage Muse fans) was not worth it to see Arctic Monkeys. Their stage presence only went as far as the lead’s leather jacket.Luckily, Australian singer/songwriter Sia was delivering a better show on another stage during the Arctic Monkeys set. In between her songs, she would make casual jokes for the crowd. For example, she pointed out one girl sitting on top of someone’s shoulder, and told the crowd the girl wasn’t wear”It’s pretty cold out, huh? she’s got nipples like bullets out.”

The Roots put on a monster set, which is not surprising if anyone has seen the  Illadelph crew live.  ?uestlove was the first to get onstage,   sporting cornrows instead of his signature afro .At their  live shows the star is always “Captain” Kirk Douglas. Between his use of the vocoder on the extended solo he does when performing “You Got Me” and the medley of riffs he plays ( Immigrant Song, Sweet Child of Mine, Bad to the Bone), his part of the set always keeps your eyes fixated on him. Two of the VIP members got on stage, serving as impromptu hypemen surrounding Black Thought as he spit his verses.

As night fell, the glowing spectacle and light show of  Muse concert filled up the San Francisco sky. Besides the usual songs and image combinations, like the robot on-screen accompanying “Supermassive Black Hole”  (I know this because I’ve seen them two times before. It’s about time I call myself a Muse stan), the new images for song from The Resistance are also very interesting. A wall of head shot photos in a style reminiscent of a concentration camp/suspect mug shots filled the screen, zooming out and forming a mosaic of letters that were too hard to make our from the distance but were interesting all the same.

They performed a cover of The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun”, which I had only heard on a bootleg. Bellamy’s guitar turned the bluesy intro into a space rock grindfest. The set ended with the extended “Stockholm Syndrome” but the penultimate song, “Citizen Erased” was better if only for the Dominic Howard’s booming drums shaking the ground.

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Culture, Film, Music, Poetry, Sci Fi, Science, Writing

What I Really Want To Do On My Birthday ( A Self-Indulgent Wikipedia Facts Poem)

Saludo al coraje de los hombres de Puebla en esta dia,

But what I really want to do today

is go to Saint Helena  and throw a party in Napoleon’s cell,

and just to piss his spirit off,

 fly back to the States,

  and throw an original Memorial Day in our Waterloo.

When I get tired, I’ll make the trip international,

go to Ethiopia, see the second coming of  Haile Selassie,

have him lend me a few minutes to sit on his throne

  as he puts Kublai Khan’s crown on my head

while Marx takes my oath of office with my hand over On the Origins of Species,

before I throw it at William Jennings Bryan’s head before his opening statement.

Once I become a one-day king,

I’ll send a package of loaded Iranian guns to Oliver North’s house

snitch on his ass and laugh with my friends

as  the ATF arrests him on Fox News.

After the antics, go bar-hopping with Kierkegaard

 in a free West Germany,

get arrested with Sacco and Vanzetti after too many drinks,

and if I get too rowdy, take a caning on the ass by Singaporean dancers.

I want to start a one-man riot in Greece

just to get an article written by Nellie Bly and Bryan Williams.

I want to rock out to a band with me on guitar,

 Ian McCulloch and Adele on vocals,

 Bill Ward on drums,

and have the album produced by Delia Derbyshire.

I want to take acting lessons from Roger Rees,

 John Rhys-Davies, and Lance Henriksen

just so I can kick Henry Cavill out of his Superman gig.

And then, right before I go to sleep,

wave at Alan Shepard along con mi familia

as Mercury-Redstone 1 blinks its way  across the night.

– Note: I just wrote this and cleaned it up five minutes before midnight West coast time while  sober. Go me.

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Music, Review

Music Overdose: Atmosphere to UNKLE

It’s another edition of Music OD, and this time instead of waiting a few months, I’m dropping this in just one. Let’s  see what I’ve blasting from my headphones this month:

Atmosphere – The Family Sign: I must say, the opening two tracks are suicide-level depressing. The piano and guitar work (the work of Erick Anderson and Nate Collins, respectively) is on point throughout though, especially on “Became” which connects to Slug’s wintry narrative. His flow on that song is on par with “Lovelife” from God Loves Ugly.  By the time acoustic guitar on “Who I’ll Never Be” comes up, it becomes apparent that the solo guitar on “Guarantees” from the previous album has stepped up quite a bit. Just keep to those types of songs on this one; the others sound like failed Ant beats or feckless indie rock. Continue reading →

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Music, Review

Music Overdose: Aloe Blacc to Tricky

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, and with the ridiculous amount of albums I’ve grabbed  in the past few months, I think it’s time to OD on some aural goodness. Let’s begin, shall we?

Aloe Blacc – Good Things: Some of you may have heard some of Mr. Blacc’s work as the title for HBO’s How to Live In America, and after hearing his amazing cover of  The Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale”, I grabbed the rest of the album, and it is a damn good one hands down. John Legend fans should def. check this out, it’s soul music done right. Continue reading →

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Culture, Links, Music, Sci Fi

Precognition to Femme Fatale

Lately I’ve been reading  Feeling the Future, a paper from Dr. Daryl Bem from Cornell University that tries to put evidence for psychic precognitive abilities in people. MSNBC’s Cosmic Log has a pretty good story on it with a lot of links to other articles at the bottom of  it.  I’m gonna keep my eye on this story.

While I’m still on crazy sci-fi stuff happening in the real world, CERN has captured antimatter atoms. Let that one sink in your head for a bit. We made ANTIMATTER (OK, so they were only antihydrogen atoms and they don’t last very long, but still).

Also, from Warren Ellis’ blog: DIY exotic weapons. Now you can make that 9mm SMG you’ve always wanted using plumbing pipes! Seriously, this is becoming a Fallout 3 world day by day.

For all you alternate history heads: Mandela’s historic election victory almost didn’t happen because of hacking. Imagine a story that could be developed from that angle: a cyberwar in South Africa , sprinkled with apartheid and all the turmoil that was happening during that time.

To cap it off, here’s a great cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” by Aloe Blacc:

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Links, Music

Top Five Halloween Party Songs

Seeing as my favorite holiday is now upon us,  I’ve compiled a list of Halloween-themed songs for any party. Without further ado, here’s my Top Five Halloween Party Songs:

Nosferatu (Ft. Mr. Lif) -DJ Krush – Now while most hip-hop Halloween songs are somewhere between the darkness of Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts” and the silliness of the Fat Boys’  “Are You Ready for Freddy?”, this song by the turntablist samurai DJ Krush is actually a good mix of sick beats with a nice flow from ex-Jukie Mr. Lif. It’s cool to hear Lif spit about something other than politics, and still be able to hit you with lines like “numbers crunch your bone well”.

Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus – If you want to see just how cool Peter Murphy is, look no further than the above performance of the song at Coachella 2005. The song itself  is a goth rock masterpiece, and would definitely fit any party that has The Hunger playing in the background.  Another cool version occurred when he played the song along with Trent Reznor and TV on the Radio backing him up.

Red Right Hand – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Cave is no stranger to making spooky music when he’s with the Bad Seeds, and this song is a pretty good example of how dark it can get when he’s really getting into it. Like the Bauhaus song it’s been used in movie work, showing up in all the Scream movies and the first Hellboy.

Dracula – Gorillaz – If you’re like me who’s seen the “Clint Eastwood” video 5 million times, you know that the first Gorillaz album had a serious horror movie vibe to it. With a song that has lines like  “Everybody party time/
Some of us will never sleep again”, you know it’s about being a laid back, cool vamp. That or it’s about drugs.

Thriller – Michael Jackson – This one is pretty much a no brainer. I could go on about the amount of work John Landis did to make the video into what is consistently considered one of the best of all time. I could say it’s a bit more poignant now that Jackson’s gone, but honestly, I’m gonna let Dave Chappelle say everything I want to say:

Honorable Mentions:

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah – Tracey Morgan via 30 Rock

Dead Man’s Party – Oingo Boingo

Pet Sematary – The Ramones

Halloween – The Misfits

Wolf Like Me – TV on the Radio

Dawn of the Dead – Does It Offend You, Yeah?

Monster (Ft. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, and Bon Iver) – Kanye West

Superstition – Stevie Wonder

So Haunted – Cut Copy

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Links, Music

Music Overdose: Broken Social Scene to The Roots

Alright so, It’s another audio onslaught of the latest albums I’ve gotten to see if they make it to my library. For your review we have albums from a bunch of acts. Let’s start, shall we?

Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record: I’m starting to think that there are times that BSS needs to go back to their more low-key instrumental  roots. The opener, “World Sick”, is a good example: it really can do without Kevin Drew’s vocals on it. Thing is, not even Emily Haine’s vocals on “Sentimental Xs”  saves the fact that most of the songs on this album sound like bloated hippie messes to me. Continue reading →

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Music

Lost Mention: Res’ How I Do

In the last couple of months since I did my End of the Decade Edition of Top Fives, I’ve been going through my media library and finding things that might have slipped through the cracks in the whole malaise of writing them. This became very apparent to me when I added a couple of songs to my mp3 player from the album How I Do, by Res.

Released in June of 2001, this album epitomized, maybe even helped craft, my love for artists who take great experimental leaps in their work. The album has tried and true hip-hop,jazz, and soul influences that you would expect in an album that would want to classified as R&B, but the inclusion of alt-rock, psychedelia,folk, and reggae influences among others is what makes this album great.  The best part of this is, of course, is that this was her first album, so that she swung for the fences as hard as she did was impressive. Continue reading →

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Music, Sci Fi

From 3030 to Lazerfaces: Sci-Fi’s Influence on Hip Hop

To continue on my unofficial “things that people don’t associate with science fiction” series of articles, I have decided that it’s about time I wrote on the effect science fiction has had on hip-hop. Now, there are a lot of differences between the music of  The Notorious BIG with the writings of Isaac Asimov, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have some sort of overlap. Both genres have a thing for pointing out sociopolitical undertones via a narrative, be it through the lens of a robot on a generational ship or a crack dealer through his Pyrex. Both have larger than life characters that have to deal with “the struggle,” whether it’s an intergalactic war or the five-o. For my examples, I’ll present two different artists who have used SF elements: producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura and rapper/producer Jaime Meline, also known as El-P.

The idea of a connection between a part of black culture and sci-fi in music is not a new one. Continue reading →

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Literature, Music, Sci Fi

On the Subject of the Twelfth Album

I am a huge fan of alternate histories, whether massive or minuscule in its scope. Most people turn to Harry Turtledove, and with good reason, but other people have done interesting takes with the concept. Take Stephen Baxter‘s short story  The Twelfth Album.

The story starts with two dock workers stumbling onto a mysterious black album with the word God written on the lower left hand corner. In it was a shocker: An album by the Beatles from an universe where they made one more album after Abbey Road. The songs in the album are (in our universe) ones from their solo albums, so some of the titles sound familiar, but the way they were arranged  are definitely something different. Take into account the last track on this incredibly peculiar album, in  Baxter’s words ( thanks to user  Necanthrope from  everything2):

This would be the the ultimate track–the twelfth track on the twelfth album.

The last new Beatles song we would ever hear.

Because, of course, by now we both believed.

It was recognizable from the first, faded-in, descending piano chords. But then the vocals opened–and it was Lennon.

“It’s ‘Maybe I’m Amazed,'”, I said, awed. “Mcartney’s greatest post-Beatles song–”

“Just listen to it,” said Lightoller. “He gave it to Lennon. Listen to it.”

It didn’t sound like the version from our world, which {McCartney], battered and bruised from the breakup, recorded in his kitchen.

Lennon’s raw, majestic voice wrenched at the melody, while McCartney’s melodic bass, Starr’s powerful drumming, and Harrison’s wailing guitar drove through the song’s complex, compulsive chromatic structure. And then a long coda opened up, underpinned by clean, thrusting bass, obviously scored by George Martin.

At last the coda wound down to a final, almost whispered lament by Lennon, a final descending chord sequence, a last trickle of piano notes, as if the song itself couldn’t bear to finish.

The stylus hissed briefly, reached for the run-off groove, and lifted.

That is pretty powerful, at least to me, growing up watching the Anthology documentary and knowing all the turmoil the band was going to at that point in history. As it stands, some people aren’t fans of the story, but opinions are like..well, you know. I want to get my hands on the story myself to get the whole deal. Oddly enough, people have taken this idea and run with it. This guy here might have taken it a  little too far, but I do want to see if he gets a cease and desist from EMI. Hey, it happened to Danger Mouse, right?

As a side note, I wonder if Kieron Gillen has ever wondered about tackling the Beatles for his Phonogram stuff, but that’s another thing altogether.

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