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Joan Jett is Over-rated. Pat Benatar is Under-rated. Discuss
11 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted in music
Category Archives: music
Brothers Moving in Paris
30 Thursday Dec 2010
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We saw these guys in New York a few times. One time when we were going down to the subway station in front of IFC Center. A couple of times at Union Square. Once at Washington Square Park. Their song “Show Me What You Got” is the only original song by a street performer that has ever actually got stuck in my head at random times, when I wasn’t even thinking about, you know, anything. It’s the one they’re singing in the video above, with its catchy but plaintive refrain, “One of these days, I’m going to make it all up to you.”
I didn’t buy the CD or anything. I guess I should get it online. I think I dropped some money in the guitar case that time we saw them outside IFC.
Anyway, they’ve apparently left New York. Just like we did. And are still rocking out in a different world capital! Just like we are! Amazing, the similarities!
What I Did This Weekend: Avett Brothers in Huntington, WV
26 Tuesday Oct 2010
Posted in music
Tags
avett brothers, concert, huntington, music, review, west virginia
Joe and I had tickets to see the Avett Brothers at Radio City Music Hall, but my change in job status and state of residence two weeks before the show screwed that up. I was determined to see them anyway, though, so I nabbed tickets to see them in West Virginia. I figured that the mountain/hillbilly vibe might actually add to the experience.
Apparently the Radio City Music Hall show was a once-in-a-lifetime event, with lots of special guests and a feeling of vindication/homecoming. See below:
The Huntington, WV show was plagued with audio technology glitches (they kept having to switch out microphones) and plain-old piss-poor hall acoustics. Every note echoed back off the opposite walls a couple of times. As for the hillbillies: they more closely resembled drunken fratboys. Who knew that drunken fratboy culture had spread so widely? Granted, they were like drunken fratboys from twenty years ago, wearing 90s fashions and sporting 90s goatees. But drunken fratboys all the same.
I couldn’t find any decent video from the show, but here’s an official Vevo release of a live performance of one of their bluegrassier/punkier songs:
Regardless of all the problems with the venue, the Avetts put on an amazing show, with as much integrity, commitment, and passion as any band I’ve ever seen on any stage, at any time. You would never have imagined that these guys had just come off two sold-out days at Radio City Music Hall, that they had already “made it,” that the half-full high school basketball gymnasium they were playing was any kind of a step down. The Avetts play every show like it is their one chance, their big break. That sounds like hype. It’s not. There is nothing quite like actually being in a room when they attack it with their awesomeness. If they’re playing anywhere near you, you should go. Even if you don’t think you like “that kind of music.” Even if you don’t think you like music.
Netflix Diary: The Nomi Song
17 Tuesday Aug 2010
Posted in gay, music, netflix diaries
Tags
80s, east village, klaus nomi, music, new wave, new york, post-punk, underground
If They Saw My Face, Would I Still Take a Bow?
Summer of 1983. Russellville, Alabama. My high school buddy Jeff handed me a homemade cassette tape with the non-word “Nomi” scrawled across the label. I don’t know where he came across it. I do know why he gave it to me. He and I were the “New Wave” kids of our class. We were also the class fags, though neither of us had acknowledged this obvious fact out loud to the other at the time. We passed hints by sharing music, I guess, a sort of flirtation via one-upsmanship. I had introduced him to Yaz; he countered with Laurie Anderson. I followed up with Nina Hagen. Deeper and deeper into the so-called “New Wave” so-called counterculture we went, borrowing records from older, hipper friends, making tapes, swapping them out, starting over. The B-52s gave way to Pylon. Romeo Void. Lydia Lunch. X. Lene Lovich. This “Nomi” thing was his final gambit before we both moved to Tuscaloosa, to go to college, and surrendered to the janglier, guitar-ier, more straightforward and straight tastes of our new surroundings — REM, Camper Van Beethoven, “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” blah, blah, the whole earnest gamut of pre-grunge hard pop that people called “college rock” back then.
For that one summer before college, though, I became obsessed with Klaus Nomi, the strange, strange (it is a simple word; there is no other word), strange performer whose life’s work was contained on that homemade cassette. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was in the process of dying, already, of AIDS — one of the first kind-of well-known people to come down with the disease, which most people still called “the gay cancer.”
I hadn’t thought much about Klaus Nomi since then. Every now and then one of his songs would get stuck in my head. The other day at work, I caught myself singing — aloud — his version of “The Twist,” while my co-worker Brian (who is not, shall we say, the New Wave kid of the office) looked at me like I’d lost my mind. I tried to explain Nomi to him, which led me to YouTubing some of Nomi’s performances, which, in turn, led to my finding out that this documentary exists. Popped over to Netflix, and sure enough, they had it, but only in DVD form.
Here is what I learned from the film:
- In the early eighties, St. Mark’s Place in the East Village was an affordable place to live for hand-to-mouth artist types. By the late eighties, (the first time I visited New York) this was no longer true, by the way.
- Cabaret performer and underground personality Joey Arias was just as ubiquitous a figure back then as he is now. Maybe even moreso.
- Klaus Nomi was a pastry chef when he wasn’t performing.
- Almost everybody who knew Nomi was pissed off at him when he died. He had “sold out,” taken on a record label contract, and dropped a lot of the musicians and other hangers-on who felt like they had gotten him to where he was. This is a common situation. Scratch any pop star and you’ll find disgruntled former associates — but Nomi’s death occurred at precisely the moment between cutting the hangers-on loose and finding new, more professional connections. So he had nobody. Presumably, Joey Arias (who ended up executing his estate) stayed close by, but his point of view isn’t represented on this subject, weirdly.
- Iggy Pop smokes big cigars and helps David Bowie make promises that won’t be kept. Surprise!
If you have an interest in the New York underground arts/performance scene as it existed in the “New Wave” period (that is, after the glory days of CBGBs, but before the rise of Soho) this documentary has lots of nice little historical bits for you. If you are a Klaus Nomi fan, of course, you’ve definitely got to see the thing. Otherwise, I’m not sure it has any value to anybody else. I loved it — but for purely subjective reasons.
Lady Gaga as a Latter-Generation Chinese Opera Stage Persona
10 Thursday Jun 2010
Posted in music
It’s possible that I might have misunderstood at the time — and I haven’t seen the film since it came out, so intervening years may have introduced even more misunderstanding — but I think I took away from Farewell My Concubine, the 1993 film about the Chinese cultural revolution, a belief that celebrity, in the form of a specific stage name and a specific kind of performance style and even a specific way of life, is passed down from generation to generation in the Peking Opera. The characters onstage are passed down from generation to generation in all theater, of course. I’m talking about the offstage persona. So imagine that there were still somebody calling himself Laurence Olivier today, who inherited the name from the prior actor, and who specialized in the kinds of roles that the original played, and who behaved in public and in private exactly the way that the original did. Except instead of Olivier, only one generation removed, it would probably be an actor’s name and persona from twenty or thirty generations ago, passed down from actor to actor, a backstage, real-life character “performed” as thoroughly and faithfully as Hamlet or Othello is “performed.”
Or, to put it another way: Lady Gaga should just buy the rights to the name “Madonna” and stop messing around.
Constitutional Earworm
07 Monday Jun 2010
Posted in music
I’ve had this on my mind all day. Now, you can too!
Netflix Diary: The Rhythm of My Soul
25 Tuesday May 2010
Posted in music, netflix diaries
Feeling homesick for Kentucky, so I watched this short documentary, which was funded by the South and Eastern Kentucky Tourism board. I learned that bluegrass is not, as most people would guess, a traditional folk style, but a recent innovation, circa 1945 or so, the result of fairly sophisticated professional musicians like Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs blending the instrumentation and harmonics of “mountain music” (mostly descended directly from Irish jigs and the like) with the arrangement styles and improvisational strategies of jazz and the blues. All of this makes it much more interesting to me, and I was already kind of interested. So when old-timers talk about “old-timey” music, they are specifically saying that to exclude bluegrass, pretty much. Cool.
Surpassing Even Bob Dylan’s
21 Wednesday Apr 2010
Posted in music
Oakley Hall’s “Landlord” is the best song ever in the genre of “passive-aggressive notes to landlords.”
OK Apartment by the Oranges Band
17 Saturday Apr 2010
Posted in music
This song reminds me of something I would have heard once in a mix tape at a weird older friend’s house in the 80s and then tried to find on my own unsuccessfully. That it is original, and new, does not change anything. New Wave lives!
Loving the Free Music Archive
15 Thursday Apr 2010
Posted in music
Free and legal-to-download indie music has been at least as much a part of the Internet’s transformation of the entertainment business as pirated music has, though it’s a less-talked-about phenomenon. From IUMA to the original version of MP3.com to hundreds of thousands of individual band and artist websites, MySpace profiles, and blogs, unsigned musicians have jumped at the opportunity to distribute their works for free in the hopes of attracting a following that can take them to the next level (whether that’s a major label contract, or an ongoing status as a self-sustaining indie).
The problem for somebody like me — not particularly hip, not particularly educated about the various “scenes,” and not particularly energized enough to sift through the hundreds of thousands of available songs, but with a very low tolerance for boring music — is not that there’s too little free stuff out there. It’s that there’s way too much, and I can’t efficiently find free music that I like without finding engaging gatekeepers and curators first. And those guys are harder to find than you might think.
That probably sounds frustrating to many indie artists, who are probably distributing their work online precisely because they want to bypass middlemen and gatekeepers. But, as a listener, that doesn’t matter much to me. I know what I like, and what I like is having educated, opinionated people telling me what I might like (or, at least, making a convincing case for what they like, and why) in a way that is more subtle and intellectually stimulating than some algorithmic hoo-ha robot.
Very happy to discover The Free Music Archive for this reason. It was started within, and is directed by, WFMU, one of the more well-known freeform radio stations in the country (headquartered in NJ but available for listening everywhere via streaming). They’re not the only curators, though — they’ve pulled together a wide range of curatorial voices, including other public radio stations, indie music festivals and labels, community website managers, and a bunch of other kinds of people and organizations.
So far, my favorite artist find is the most unusual Theo Angell, but I’ve only listened to about 1/10 of everything I’ve downloaded (twenty albums so far, by fourteen artists). Since you’re reading thought-provoking essays and blog posts that direct you to music, instead of just clicking random genre names and finding random things, it’s all just a little bit more interesting and satisfying than what you’d find at a random open-mike free music portal like Jamendo. At least, that’s been my experience.
