Delightful video made by Joe Humpay for his girlfriend. I like the Beach Boys A LOT and I really like this video, too. I just wished he would have used the a cappella version instead, but that’s a small complaint, of course, for such goodness.
(via Testspiel.de)
The Who celebrate New Year’s Eve on French TV December 31, 1968.
Yeah, the band is lip-syncing but the dancers are absolutely live.
Happy New Year!
Jimi and Band Of Gypsies play a scorching version of “Fire” on New Year’s Eve 1969 at the Fillmore in New York City.
Buddy Miles on drums. Billy Cox playing bass.
Happy New Year!
To get in the New Year mood, here’s Blondie performing live on groovy German pop show Musikladen from 1977.
01. “X-Offender”
02. “Detroit 422”
03. “A Shark in Jet’s Clothing”
04. “In the Sun”
06. “Fan Mail”
06. “Little Girl Lies”
07. “Rifle Range”
08. “Cautious Lip”
09. “Contact in Red Square’
10. “Kung Fu Girls”
11. “Goldfinger”
Previously on Dangerous Minds
More poptastic moments with Blondie, after the jump…
Image from the English riots, the defining moment of 2011 for me
So here it is, what I just know you’ve all been waiting for - a round up of 20 of my favourite tracks from the past 12 months. It’s just over 60 minutes, meaning that some of the tracks have been edited to fit, and it’s in 192kbps resolution to make the file size manageable for download.
This mix is pretty eclectic and features a ton of acts I have covered over the last year on Dangerous Minds. I’m sure there’s tracks on this mixtape that the other DM writers will hate, but that’s part of the fun. One of the points of Dangerous Minds is that we have not set out to push some unified, all-encompassing, easily-packaged view of the world. We’re all different, and at the end of the day debating stuff is healthy.
As for the music itself, well I’m with Andrew Dubber on this - the past 12 months have seen some fantastic music, and some very interesting trends in both the artform and music consumption. I mean that stands to reason right? As the amount of music that becomes available increases, the amount of good music increases. It might not come to us through the traditional channels, but it is out there. So here’s twenty of mine (and before you say it, yeah, some of these tunes came out in previous years, but those tracks are also featured on albums released this year):
Fucked Up - The Other Shoe
SIlverclub - The Goldener Reiter
Atari Teenage Riot - Black Flags
SSION - Feel Good (4 Ever)
Den Haan - Metamorphosis
Black Devil Disco Club ft Farris Rotter - Distrust
Ali Renault - Dignitas Machine
John Maus - Keep Pushing On
Neon indian - Halogen (I Could Be A Shadow)
MEN - Who Am I To Feel So Free?
Azari & III - Into The Night
Midnight Magic - Beam Me Up
Dam Funk - Forever
Destroyer - Chinatown
Grace Jones - Devil Dub
Mungo’s Hi Fi - Super Sharp Roller
Beyonce - Who Runs The World (intro version edit)
Ben Butler & Mousepad ft The Niallist - Infinite Capacity
Arthur’s Landing - Bobby
Andrew WK - Vagabond
You can download my Best of 2011 mixtape here.
BONUS!
If I had to pick just one record from the past 12 months, it would have to be We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves by John Maus. It’s glorious, genuine outsider music that’s also genuinely brilliant. If you dig Ariel Pink, don’t mind a bit of lo-fi hiss and have a soft spot for early OMD, then I can’t recommend it enough. Here’s a fan vid for the album’s opening track featuring a scene from Abel Ferrera’s Ms. 45:
John Maus “Streetlight”
EXTRA BONUS!
I originally uploaded my Best of 2011 mixtape to Soundcloud as it’s my music sharing site of choice, but oddly it was blocked because of the inclusion of Fucked Up’s track “The Other Shoe”. That’s not very punk rock, now is it? But hey, I don’t blame the band, rather their label Matador. What’s even funnier is “The Other Shoe” is widely available freely, and legitimately, from the label itself. I considered taking it off the mix, but as it’s my single of the year I decided to upload the whole thing to Mixcloud, intact, with a separate download option .
So just for you dear readers, here’s a link to the free download of my single of the year:
And here is the mixtape minus Fucked Up.
And here’s to an exciting and eventful 2012!
Sorting through the massive amounts of musical goodness that flowed through my home wirelessly at 130 mbps in 2011, I would be remiss in not pulling The Death Set from the digitized stream to hold up like a glistening electronic baby in all its punkish glory for DM readers to behold.
Brief bio: founded by lead singer Johnny Siera and guitarist Beau Velasco (Black Panda) in the town of Gold Coast, Australia in 2005, The Death Set eventually ended up in Brooklyn after a period of time spent in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Their debut album Worldwide was released in 2008. The U.K. music magazine NME proclaimed them “the #1 biggest hope of the future.” But the future got heavy. The band’s name became sadly prophetic when Velasco died of a drug overdose in 2009.
Resurrection: Velasco’s death crushed Siera, but instead of throwing in the towel, Siera soldiered on and created one of 2011’s best records, Michel Poiccard (named after Belmondo’s character in Godard’s Breathless) - seventeen seering tracks in 36 minutes. Produced by XXXchange (Spank Rock, Kele, The Kills), the album is an onslaught of fast, thrashy, exhilarating mini-anthems that recall The Beastie Boys at their hardest-core, Buzzcocks, Minor Threat, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, The Skids and The Clash on Ritalin. Good solid punk rock with a dose of synthesizers, rhythm machines and hip hop samples.
The Death Set currently are Siera on vocals and Jahphet Landis playing drums and Daniel Walker on guitar and vocals.
Here’s “Chew It like a Gun Gum” from Michel Poiccard.
Video NSFW.
More of The Death Set after the jump…
Joni Mitchell and Mary Travers appear on The Mama Cass Television Show recorded on Jan. 18, 1969. This was a pilot for a weekly series. It was produced by Chuck Barris of Gong Show fame.
Joni and Mama Cass radiate the last glow of the flower child era. Both will move on in different ways. Travers does Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die,” which Nyro sold to Traver’s group Peter, Paul and Mary for $5000. As much as I appreciate Travers as a vocalist, her folky take on the song just can’t touch the gospel feel of Nyro’s version.
Joni Mitchell: ‘Both Sides Now”
Mary Travers: “And When I Die”
Cass, Joni and Mary: “I Shall Be Released”
Laura Nyro 1966 demo of “And When I Die” and short interview after the jump…
From 2004, Johnny Cash: The Last Great American was the first major TV retrospective of the singer’s life and times. Featuring contributions from his daughter Rosanne Cash and son John Carter Cash, longtime manager Lou Robin, and fellow musicians, Little Richard, Cowboy Jack Clement, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard and Elvis Costello. This documentary contains incredible archive and some superb performances, and is a fine testament to The Man in Black.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Considering how much I love the shit out of Daevid Allen and Gong, I’ve only posted about them once before on DM??? How can that be?
Well then, here’s to making up for that grievous oversight with something so fucking good it might cause you to have an out-of-body experience: Two insanely great live Gong performances from French television in 1973 on a show called Rockenstock.
First, the band do a ripping version of “I’ve Never Been Glid” that sounds extremely close to the studio version on Angels Egg
I love the way that Allen’s trippy hippy dancing seems to “conduct” the group. Dig Steve Hillage’s “lewd guitar, Pierre Moerlen’s drums (the man was a god of rhythmic pounding, up there with Jaki Liebezeit), Tim Blake’s spacey VCS3 and synth-work, the great Mike Howlett’s booming, tight, bass-lines and Didier Malherbe’s anarchic sax riffs. This is Gong at the height of their power and they absolutely crush it..
After the jump, “space whisperer” Gilli Smyth performs a mind-melting version of “Witch’s Song/I Am Your Pussy” from Flying Teapot
If you’re not familiar with the work of the British music writer and academic Andrew Dubber, then this is a perfect place to start. He’s a man of many talents, with a very future-positive outlook to make all the current music industry doom-sayers blush. Rather than me boring you trying to sum up all he does, here’s his bio as appears on his website andrewdubber.com:
Andrew Dubber is an academic, author, public speaker, blogger, music reviewer, radio and music industry consultant, whisky writer, podcaster, record collector, DJ, broadcaster and record producer. He is Reader in Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University, an advisor to Bandcamp and Planzai, manages half a dozen blogs, and is the founder of New Music Strategies – a pan-European music think tank and strategy group. In his spare time, he coaches productivity and time management.
Mr Dubber has just published a new article on his blog called “Music Journalism Is The New Boring” where he takes to task the notion that nothing interesting has happened in music in the past 12 months, a stance currently being pushed by some of the world’s major publications such as the New York Times and the Guardian. Dubber positis that the problem lays not with music culture or musicians themselves, but rather with the old stream media and its failure to adapt to these exciting new internet times:
[...] while “beige against the machine” is a cute and retweetable one-liner, it’s nothing more than a cheap shot based on a faulty premise: that something went wrong with music in 2011. That musicians gave up en-masse and just made safe, ineffectual and dull music.
There are quite a few problems with that idea. I’m just going to mention just three here, but you’ll no doubt think of your own too.
1) You can’t complain about a dull year in music if all you do is report on the pile of CDs that ended up on your desk as a result of public relations and major label marketing. If you were looking for urgency, relevance and innovation in that lot, you’ve misunderstood the process. No matter how much you shout “Challenge me!” at your stereo, it’s not going to oblige if you keep putting Coldplay CDs in it.
2) Even if you are looking outside the pile, chances are you’re still looking in the wrong places. Things that sound like (or aspire to sound like) the music that did make it to the minor landfill of compact discs cluttering your desk are not likely to be any better. After all, it’s no longer the job of rock music to be urgent or important. And it’s certainly not the job of mainstream rock music. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but guitar, bass, drums and vocals is no longer by default a counter-cultural lineup. The same can be said for R&B and mainstream hip hop. It’s possible to do radical stuff in those musical domains, but it’s certainly not the norm.
3) IF IT’S BORING, DO NOT WRITE ABOUT IT. In fact, write that on a post-it note and stick it to your laptop screen. Writing about boring is contributing to the boring.
The guiding question for interesting music journalism needs to be “Yes, but what else is out there?”. More than ever before there is the opportunity (even the need) for major publications to employ investigative music journalists and people with genuine curiosity. We all know what can happen when people with these kinds of qualities are given a decent platform.John Peel-ism should be the norm by now.
You can read the rest of the article here - it’s worth it. It’s also worth checking out the comments section, where some of the journalists being criticised in the article get to have their say. Andrew Dubber has some very enlightening things to say about the music industry and new technology, and he says them very well. If you have any interest in these areas (and music culture in general) or even if you’re late to the online party and just want to find out what the hell is going on, then be sure to check his website for regular updates.
Thanks to Joe Muggs.