Here’s a wonderful bit of darkly lysergic quick-cut photo collage for “Scum of the Moon,” the new single by Berlin-based Montreal trash-punker King Khan’s side project The Black Jaspers.
Posted by the charmingly named YouTuber LSD210SCUM, this rather incredible vid captures the extreme spirit of Khan & Co.’s ditty, and is pretty fun to just watch and randomly pause. As one commenter noted, “If you watch this video three times, you’ll be declared legally insane.”
Unfortunately, there are no shots of our King’s Cannes nightclub dalliances with a certain constantly rehabbing and self-reinventing starlet, but hey, can’t have it all…
This really happened today: Somewhere “in the middle of Ohio,” the aptly named New York-based indie rock band Here We Go Magic picked up film director John Waters who had stuck out his thumb on an interstate highway ramp. Via DCist:
Update 2:45 p.m.: Band member Michael Bloch tells us, “There’s a hydro-fracking boom in western Pennsylvania. You can’t get a motel room. We had to drive til 4AM, and finally found a Days Inn in eastern Ohio. Getting back on the highway this morning, there was a man at the side of the on-ramp with a sign that read ‘to the end of Rte 70.’ Jen wanted to pick him up, but we drove past him. As we passed by, our sound guy said ‘John Waters.’ Luke said, ‘Yep, definitely John Waters.’ We got off at the next exit and circled back. He was still there. We pulled up, opened the door and asked where he was coming from. ‘Baltimore,’ he said. And we said ‘Get in, sir.’ “
Ya snooze ya lose. This was sent to Dangerous Minds a few days ago and somehow I missed the submission! Now it’s a viral sensation. I’m a fool for not checking Facebook!
Anyway, if you haven’t seen it already, please enjoy this wonderful tribute to the late Adam Yauch made by James and Kjirsten Winters.
This rough version of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” by Bob Dylan & The Band is clearly a work in progress. Dylan’s improvised lyrics are exceedingly surreal, even for him. It’s quite funny and a fascinating peek into the way songs often get made - do the vocals on the fly as you shape the tune around them.
“Now look here deer soup, you best feed the cat
The cat needs feedin’, you’re the one to do it…”
“Look here you buncha basement noise
You ain’t no punching bag..”
Rolling Stone magazine’s website is streaming the new Joey Ramone album, ya know?. It’s his second solo release and consists of tunes that he wrote during the last 15 years of his life. On first listen, it sounds good to me - a little slick and tamer than The Ramones, but still a worthy addition to the long glorious history of one of punk’s pioneers.
Check out ya know? here. The album hits the streets on May 22nd.
Various editions of “This Charming Man” single release (including the Francois Kevorkian remixes on the left) courtesy of Share Some Greased Tea With Me.
So there I was, casually browsing through some Johnny Marr-plays-guitar videos on YouTube, when the thought struck me that remixing the Smiths in a dub style (essentially stripping Morrissey’s warbling right back and pushing Marr and the rhythm section up to the front) would be a wonderful thing.
You see, I may rag on the Smiths a lot (to me they represent everything that can be deemed wrong about “indie” or “alternative” music) but there’s a niggly wee corner of my teenage heart that will always belong to them. Those years we spent together were beautiful indeed, around the age of thirteen or fourteen, but then I grew up a bit and discovered sex and drugs. And a whole bunch of other music that was way more exciting, dramatic and sexy.
As the years have gone by, on the odd occasions that I feel brave enough to confront my embarrassing teenage angst and revisit the Smiths, I have fallen more and more in love with Johnny Marr’s incredible playing (in direct relation to falling further and further out of love with Morrissey’s “unique” vocal style.) Hence the idea of the Smiths in dub - a silly, facetious notion for sure, taking one of the whitest bands of all time and daring to process them through a hash-clogged Black Ark desk.
You can imagine my surprise then to find out that this actually once happened.
The acclaimed New York-based dj and producer Francois Kevorkian produced two dub remixes of “This Charming Man” for a limited edition release at the tail end of 1983. Unsurprisingly Morrissey hated the mixes (“hang the dj” and all that) and apparently so did Marr (though I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt: after all he later went on to form the dance supergroup “Electronic.”)
Thanks to that miracle of the modern age, the Internet, once this was brought to my attention I was able to go online and track these elusive remixes down straight away. Both have been uploaded to YouTube by TheStaticAirwaves, who adds some more info in the description box:
In December 1983, DJ François Kevorkian released a “New York” mix of the single on Megadisc records. Kevorkian geared the song for nightclub dancefloors, and the track was intended to be pressed in limited numbers for New York club DJs.
However, Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis liked the mix and gave the release wide distribution in the UK. Morrissey publicly disowned the mix, and urged fans not to purchase copies. Travis later claimed, “it was my idea, but they agreed. They said ‘Go ahead’, then didn’t like it so it was withdrawn.” He also said, “Nothing that ever happened in The Smiths occurred without Morrissey’s guidance; there’s not one Smiths record that went out that Morrissey didn’t ask to do, so there’s nothing on my conscience.”
How exactly this record escaped my notice I don’t know. Francois Kevorkian (aka Francois K) is a legend in disco and deep house circles, both for his early remix work for the classic Prelude label, but also for his own tech -and-house productions for his own label Wave. That’s not even mentioning his legendary all-night dj sets that are a fixture of clubs around the world.
While I can’t really imagine what clubs this would have been played in at the time, I can easily see the “New York Instrumental” remix of “This Charming Man” closing a classic John Hughes 80s-teen movie that never was.
Apparently John Peel once played this version of the song at the end of his Festive Fifty (a show where the public voted on their favourite songs, and “This Charming Man” had been voted number one song of the year.) Needless to say the Smiths fans were not amused.
But then, are they ever?
The Smiths “This Charming Man (Francois Kevorkian New York Instrumental Mix)”
The Smiths “This Charming Man (Francois Kevorkian New York Vocal Mix)”
Happy Birthday Brian Eno, who is a Beatles song today.
Born Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno on the 15th May, 1948, Eno almost has a job description for every one of his names as a musician, a composer, a producer, a visual artist, a writer, a collector of pornography and an innovator of different musical forms. But Eno is more than the sum of his parts, he is a great inspiration to go take a-hold of life and do as much is as is possible. As he suggested in the documentary Another Green World:
“All of the encouragement from modern life is to tell you to pay attention to yourself and take control of things.”
Though he does go on to say we can also surrender, get by, and transcend, I prefer to opt for the starring role, rather than being an extra in the crowd scene or exiting stage left, chased by a bear. And so should we all, for this is your movie, and you are its star.
For me, that’s what I like best about Eno - he’s a concept to do better, to try different, to learn more. And perhaps to be a little nicer on the side.
Brian Eno: Another Green World is a profile of Eno, made for the BBC’s Arena series.
From the schoolboy who would cycle to the seashore to look for fossils, Eno has been driven by the search for the connections between things. Here, he gives an insight into his fascinating and unique take on the nature of music today. Eno discusses what music means to him, and how he uses it to create an alternate reality, as well as the influences of modern technology in changing the way we are able to understand and develop both music and sound.
You’ll learn bits and bobs from this documentary, though it never really seems to get much further than dusting the surface of this complex and talented man.
Bonus clip of Brian Eno interviewed on ‘The Tube’ from 1986, after the jump…
