Big Balls

Celine Dion is responsible for the world’s worst cover version, a poll of music experts has decided.

The Canadian star’s rendition of the AC/DC track ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ was given the dubious honour in the Total Guitar magazine survey.

Editor Stephen Lawson said Dion’s cover was “sacrilege”.

Chain Of Fools

D.A.N.C.E.

I just found out this morning I was accepted to the Cultural Analysis research master’s program at the Universiteit van Amsterdam!  It’s been two years since I was last in Amsterdam, and I’ve been trying to get back there ever since; now I’ll be living there for the next two years!

So what is Cultural Analysis and why the heck am I going to the Netherlands for grad school?  Well the program is an incredibly interdisciplinary adventure that studies and creates inquiries into several phenomena surrounding the production and circulation of contemporary culture using objects and artifacts (in the broadest sense) as a point of departure.  More specifically, the faculty encourages students to

analyze cultural phenomena - such as social systems of belief and value, works of art and literature, film and the new media - and their conceptual underpinnings as well as their aesthetic and social-material structures. We emphasize textual, visual and historical details and also the implied normativity and the ways in which identity, difference and otherness are negotiated across the various media.

Pumpkin Soup

Check out the San Francisco duo The Dodos. I up and bought a 12″ of their new album Visiter this morning, after hearing just a couple bars of the opener. They’re incredible–at most songs, it feels as though Donovan Frankenreiter or Sufjan Stevens hooked up with Rodrigo Y Gabriela to create some amazing rhythms. With his Weakerthans-like boyish voice and love for fingerpicking guitar strides, singer Meric Long brings both atmosphere and placement to his counterpart, Logan Kroeber. And Kroeber is what launches this band up and outwards. The way he so easily slips throughout time signatures and backbeats slams the album with thunderous percussion, but his control keeps a bouncy taste of quirk. ‘Fools’ is definitely on my morning playlist now–it’s totally happy, kind of if Jeff Tweedy were to remake some ELO slasa-style (and had John Bonzo Bonham’s reincarnation on drums). Have a listen to ‘Paint The Rust,’ to get a White Stripes-esque grunge with pure psychedelic bang (there’s Bela Fleck love peeking through Long’s plucking on that one too!).

Kroeber’s stomping tambourine bangarang really recalls The Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker, and her ass-kicking violence towards instruments; he embraces his progressive metal background, and meshes it with Meric Long’s trippy bluegrass attitude.

Good shit!

The Dodo’s video for ‘Fools’:

Bold As Love

I forgot to post this, but I bought Nina Simone’s ‘Protest Anthology’ album from iTunes just the other day. The album is an incredible collection of bootleg and rare recordings such as Mississippi Goddamn, Four Women, Strange Fruit, and Backlash Blues with short audio interviews preceding each song. It comes with an eight minute video of live performances of Revolution and Strange Fruit as well as a video interview with Simone about her ideas of art, artists, and how they interact with social change. Some of the sound quality is pretty bad; the recording of ‘Why The King Of Love Is Dead’ is inaudible at some places and sounds as though someone placed a microphone by a wind tunnel, but its included in this anthology for the simple reason that its overwhelmingly powerful and vulnerable.

Nina Simone has been an incredible influence on both my musical tastes and personal identity. The deep colors of voice, and the humble voyeuristic emotions about her musical activism resonate so much throughout my adolescence. Her version of ‘Feelin Good’ was with me when I was coming out, and today it still makes me skin electric just to hear her build up that particular joy of emergence thats so reflective of her life.

I’m so happy this LP was released. It provides an intimate listen and discussion with a woman who infused her artistic abilities with the rage and grace of the timely politics going on around her. The many frustrations and inequalities within the world only moved her to make something beautiful from it. That is her voice; distinct, crass and always with a smoky elegance.

Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter

Jon Stewart teases out the bullshit and calls out Clinton’s campaign for what it’s actually become: hilarious and dangerous.

Here’s my point: my friend, a grad student at OSU’s political science college, and Clinton regional activist, recently responded to the PA primary by saying, “if someone tells you you ought to quit, it’s because they’re afraid you won’t and if someone tells you you can’t win - it’s because they know you can.”  I think that’s pretty much the sentiment Bush attaches to our Iraq ’strategy’ these days.

Rush Limbaugh can see through the shit, too:

“We’re the only ones in charge of our affairs…We don’t farm out our defense, unless we elect Democrats. We don’t farm out our protection against attack and national security, unless we elect Democrats. We don’t farm out our economy and tear it up in the name of a hoax called global warming, unless we elect Democrats. Riots in Denver at the Democrat convention would see to it we don’t elect Democrats – and that’s the best damn thing could happen for this country as far as anything I can think: Don’t elect Democrats!”

So why are there so many Hillary-Democratic-Machinists steadfastly promoting a person who can’t even balance the budget of her own campaign, and supports the fucked-up oligarchic investment conglomeration mentality toward our economy which got us in the mess we’re in now.

European Son

I just downloaded a sick cover of ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ (Velvet Underground) by the Belgian band Été 67!  The group primarily sing in French, and channel a Dandy Warhols/Cafe Tacuba approach with contours that bring to mind Kings of Convenience.  Definitely worth a listen if you’re looking for something new and guitar-crunchy!

Unfortunately, I can’t locate any way to access their music without iTunes.  An interview with the band on French radio OUIFM with an acoustic set can be found here,  and SHIFT magazine has an (English) interview with them here (includes some fascinating bits about language and trans-national performances in that corner of the EU).

Check out the bootleg excerpt from their live show last May–the singer is really fucking cute!  That, and the band launch into the song completely

Freak Out

Gnarls Barkley’s new single ‘Run’ has been banned by MTV (as if they fucking play videos anyway…) because it fails the Harding Test, and may cause epileptic seizures.

The video is trippy sweet near the end!  As my student worker, who watched the video with me, reacted, “That’s censorship!  Even if it might kill people!”  I’ve taught her so well.

Also, to Justin Timberlake: you’re annoying as fuck, go back to slaving for Disney where you belong.

Part Two

This is certainly the (hilarious) appropriate response to the previous post:

I want some Desolation Roe!

Sex Sells Out

A couple posts ago local Cincy music blogger Each Note Secure directed readers to commercial advertisements featuring music from current lesser-known bands. One of them was an Axe ad featuring a favorite band of mine, Brazilian Girls.

If anyone has some information regarding the ‘uncensored’ tag at the YouTube clip, pass it along; I can’t seem to confirm any information about it being censored in regions of the world (Although I wouldn’t be surprised if networks chose not to pick it up because of its Jesus-hating rompiness).

I know bands need to make money, but I tend to die a little when the music I experience and discover is later used to move a few crates of, say, overpriced soap. The most disheartening, personally, is the double-whammy my lover Bob Dylan did after his famous Victoria’s Secret commercial, selling SUVs and anorexic downloads. (Actually, I find the strangely juxtaposed lingerie incident, set to ‘Love Sick’, pretty hilarious. Why? Aside from the timbre and salty reverb of the actual song, it makes absolutely no sense to hear it in the context of the commercial. What shoppers is Les Wexner eager to attract–aging hipsters expecting a sea of boobs? Dylan did it for the shooting of the commercial, not the money). The Torygraph had a take on it back when.

For the Brazilian Girls, an MTV News (ugh…) article may have some insights into their decision to sell out to Axe (Sabina Sciubba is the band’s frontwoman and singer/songwriter):

“I hope through my words that I am not coming across as vulgar,” said the Italian-born Sciubba, who was raised in Munich, Germany; Nice, France; and Rome. “Sex is being used to sell everything. It’s part of the joke of being called the Brazilian Girls.”

…
Sciubba says she doesn’t watch television, but she doesn’t seem to mind capitalizing on it. “If I would make lots of money that would be great,” she said, evidently not worried about going mainstream.

Cheeky?  I think I might have bought her words if she were actually involved in the commercial.

I’m going home to listen to Pete Townshend.