FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Epic Martin Rev interview about his early life and the making of Suicide’s first album
07.10.2019
07:30 am
Topics:
Tags:

01suic.jpg
 
In 1922, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland was published in the Criterion magazine. It was read by no more than a handful of people. The poem was then republished in book form in a limited edition of 450 copies. Within a decade, The Wasteland was considered one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century and its modernist influence continues to this day.

In December 1977, the sound of the future arrived when a two-piece band called Suicide released their self-titled debut album to little acknowledgement or fanfare except from a few astute record critics in England. The American press mostly reviled it. Record buyers ignored it. Yet, within a decade, Suicide was considered one of the most important and influential album releases of all time.

Suicide consisted of Martin Rev (keyboards) and Alan Vega (vocals). This thirty-something musical pairing of radical mavericks stripped down rock ‘n’ roll into its constituent parts and reinvented it as a new, pulsating, minimalist, electronic sound with a reach that would shape and influence music from synth to techno for decades to come.

There was nothing comparable to this debut release which is why so many rock critics failed to grasp what had just happened.

Now, over forty years on, Suicide’s debut album is set to be re-released by Mute/BMG as part of their Art of the Album series.

In an exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Martin Rev discusses his life and work and the making of one of music’s greatest albums

Tell me about your childhood, what it was like, and what were your first musical influences?

Martin Rev: I think I was a fairly happy child as far as possible, you know, with all the ups and downs. I was very lucky to have the family I did. We all played music as it turned out, non-professionally. My brother played, was given lessons. My father played. My mother played, she had lessons as a young girl so she played in the home. They wanted their kids to definitely learn music. My father was one of the most distinctively talented musicians I’ve ever heard in my whole life. He played song after song on a guitar or a mandolin. Never read or studied a note. He was incredible that way. So, it was a musical family. That added to the richness of my childhood.

Otherwise, it was all the usual growing pains and doubts and dreams. It was a fairly lucky period to grow up in between war kind of thing. After World War Two and before Vietnam. America had probably reached its pinnacle of affluence. That whole generation for a while, well, a couple of generations, felt an incredible sense of future potential that anything could happen or be done and the whole future was wide open with possibilities.

A little different than it is now. There wasn’t the pessimism or the awareness of the dark clouds behind the covers as there is now. There was an optimism—even though I didn’t buy all that the country was selling even as a kid. I was a bit of radical rebel already as a teenager. But there’s no complaints there, it was what it was. I was lucky to be given room and the opportunity to discover music which was something I could be thankful for, you know, every day of many lives because there’s nothing else I’d better do.

I grew up hearing all the great songs coming off the radio as a kid. I was bitten, smitten by them as so many kids my age were.  The golden era of rhythm and blues, American rock ‘n’ roll. There was all the rhythm and blues groups at the time, there was the Paragons, the Gestures, Little Richard, Mellow Kings, Danny and the Juniors, the Silhouettes. I mean you can go on and on but a lot of them had only one great song and a few of them had many—the Flamingos, the Students, these were the groups that were really happening. That was the music of the times. That’s what did it.

Were you buying records at this time?

MR: There was 45s. There really wasn’t the album, there wasn’t FM radio. The price of a 45 then was 45c to a dollar. You could buy them easily and some people kinda got into collecting them so when there were parties, things like this, in people’s basements, there was always a couple of people there who had great collections who would be the ones who would spin the records all night.

When did you first consider the possibility of a career in music?

MR: I got serious about music about ten or eleven. At eleven I started figuring out the songs I was hearing on the radio on piano. I started improvising around that time or soon after like boogie-woogie and improvising towards jazz. I think about by twelve, I was pretty much set on making music my life. That’s the way I felt then and still do.

I just wanted to play and make music. I just saw myself as playing live. I envisioned it as a beautiful way to play in clubs and meet girls. That’s a typical thing when you’re twelve or thirteen. The vision of coming off a bandstand in a nightclub and how attractive that could be to girls. I guess the idea of whoever I have evolved into as an artist took shape and form over the years after that but I guess it was all there innately at that time. I just wanted to play, everything around me was great and exciting to me—rhythmically, vocally. I started hearing jazz a couple of years later and I just wanted to learn how to play that stuff and play in bands. I didn’t think much of recording until a little later.

When I was about fifteen, I started playing in little rhythm and blues groups doing one-nighters and things like that. Musically it was ecstatic. The agony and the ecstasy. The agony, it wasn’t difficult except in the economic sense. It was just finding a way to make ends meet and have the time to be free to make music which meant everything

What happened next, how did you meet Alan Vega, and when did you decide to form Suicide?

MR: I left home when I was eighteen. I was married with kids when I was twenty. I met Alan soon after that when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two. I was still very much totally involved in my own artistic evolution, you might say, as Alan was as a visual artist. We were totally dedicated which we both had in common. No risk factor at all. No future factor but to just evolve and create in our fields.

Alan had decided soon before I met him that he had to perform as a visual artist. That was after seeing Iggy Pop and the Stooges play in New York for the first time.

I had my own group called Reverend B when I met Alan. I was doing certain shows in the city. It was a very avant garde, free improvisational group that used electronic keyboard ‘cause that was the only thing available. You had to borrow it, there weren’t a lot of other keyboards in the venues we played.

Alan was working, well, not working but living, he was given the keys to the Museum of Living Artists which was a large loft that was designated for a co-op gallery of artists who did shows on a co-op basis like every month or two. He had the keys to that and that’s where we met. Because both of us were so much in that same place of total dedication. We were the only ones left there at night and talking and playing and thinking about art and music and trying to survive. We were the last ships in the night, so to speak, and we started thinking about putting something together.

Alan at that time was at a crossroads in his life because he was living with friends and he’d just separated from his wife of several years and he didn’t have a place to live either so he was living in the Museum itself. We were both pretty much in that same place and that space was keeping us off the streets. Although I was a little better advantaged at that point because I had a place to go but it was a good travel. Once I would get on the train and go up there that was the end of the night.

How did you come up with Suicide’s powerful distinctive sound?

MR: I think some of it is visceral, it’s just something that’s part of your fingerprint that is given to you by nature the way you approach music.

When I think back, if I was doing a show as a teenager in a jazz band say, as soon I saw the certain facility, it could be any kind of band, I played with a certain kind of an energy and certain kind of commitment. I always did.

Also, as an early teenager I started working in these resorts in the summer playing dancing—older people dancing—square stuff, but the way I played it was like they’d dance like crazy and they’d come over to the bandstand and say, “What the hell was that?” They were going around in circles the way I saw it. And that was kind of the way I am, the way I approach music, my energy. I am involved when I am inside music.

As far as Suicide for me was to work with the potential of electronics in terms of performance. Putting devices together, combining them, I mean really cheap, small inexpensive stuff. But I heard the potential. I heard what that was in terms of a total open frontier and that was a direction and everything I was going into that direction created a certain energy and then rediscovering my roots which was rock ‘n’ roll which was so innate because I was born into it before—it wasn’t something I could analyze it was just the music of of my time as a child. Coming back to that essential force or energy that made it work for me then and still did when I listened to certain things that appealed to me. One can analyze as a certain basic energy and rhythm which is the driving force that made rock work for us. Little Richard a perfect example of many. But able to do that now in a way that was totally fresh to me. Exciting because to me it wasn’t repeating what was done, it was finding a new way to express something that universal energy and drive.

I guess I was printed with a lot of that energy maybe from rock ‘n’ roll too and something who knows maybe ancestral, familial.

What were Suicide’s first gigs like?

MR: I think our first show was at the Museum of Living Artists, if I’m not mistaken. I was playing drums. There was three of us. I don’t think there were that many people there, enough to play the gig.

Alan said after that first Museum gig let’s go to the Ivan Karp OK Harris Gallery. Alan actually had very unexpectedly landed a room to show his sculptures in a group show by Ivan Karp. This was one of the really major galleries of the day, now downtown in Soho.

We always thought where can we go next to get a gig where nobody knows us and there’s very few places to play. Now a lot of the clubs from the sixties were closing, the whole scene is closing down, otherwise they’re too big like the Fillmore, they’re never gonna put us in. By 70-71, it began to feel like a transition as well. The sixties had kinda tapered off. The whole period of Haight-Ashbury, St. Mark’s Place, that was so incredibly vibrant in the sixties, was now starting to fade a bit like any other movement or form of thought. You had kind of a limbo period. Of course, I didn’t register all of that in detail, I was too involved in just me and my life and not that economically, theoretically safe anyway at that point. It was still a vibrant city to me.
 
02suic.jpg
Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev.
 
 
More from Martin Rev and Suicide, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
07.10.2019
07:30 am
|
Genesis P-Orridge, Lydia Lunch, Martin Rev & more celebrate the music of Alan Vega and Suicide


 
This coming Wednesday night in New York City an event called Suicide Sally will celebrate the music of the late Alan Vega and Suicide, featuring Vega’s musical partner-in-crime Martin Rev along with special guests like Lydia Lunch, Kid Congo Powers, Liz Lamere, Cynthia Ross, Peter Zaremba and Keith Streng from Fleshtones, Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz, Mr. Pharmacist (Gregg Foreman), Jesse Malin, Luke Jenner from the Rapture along with many others, including Vega’s son, Dante Vega. They will be supported by the Art Gray Noizz Quintet.

Genesis P-Orridge will be DJing and the event (produced by Sally Can’t Dance) will take place at Bowery Electric, 327 Bowery on February 27. Doors open at 7pm. Tickets available at Ticketfly.com.

The event is also a record release party for “You Pay/Too Many Teardrops,” an inspired collaboration that sees Vega backed by the synthesizers of Mr. Pharmacist.The song comes in three sizes: the original mix, a remix by Jim Thirlwell and another by Bad Seeds drummer Jim Sclavunos.  It’s out on March 8 and you can order a vinyl copy or grab a download here.
 

Alan Vega and Mr. Pharmacist AKA Gregg Foreman
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
02.25.2019
04:11 pm
|
‘American Supreme’: Suicide regurgitate hip-hop clichés on brilliant post 9/11 concept album
01.04.2019
08:11 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
I don’t recall much of what I was doing when Suicide’s American Supreme came out in late 2002, but it definitely wasn’t listening to that particular album. Don’t get me wrong, being a big Suicide fanboy, I duly bought it, but it only made it into the CD player one time until a few weeks ago. I was not initially impressed and I just filed it away… for sixteen years. The opening number “Televised Executions” begins with scratching, a repetitive slap bass-style riff that sounded like a discarded Red Hot Chili Peppers jam and a fairly commonplace hip-hop sample (“The Champ” by the Mohawks). The hoary turntablisms and primitive drum machine beats would not have been out of place on a Schoolly D rap from 1986. What was this? I guess you could say that I didn’t understand it. 

Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Critics were decidedly mixed about American Supreme. Q magazine wrote: “They’ve unfortunately discovered dance music several years too late.” Pop Matters said: “American Supreme accomplishes little more than tarnishing their chrome-plated punk and sending it on a winding downward spiral.”

At AllMusic.com, Andy Keller wrote:

Is American Supreme—the first Suicide album in a decade—an update, a return to form? Yes and no. Those who hang on Alan Vega’s every streetwise grunt and growl will doubtlessly be pleased as punch with the results, as will anyone who hasn’t heard any music that has been recorded since 1990. Perhaps the strangest twist about this record is how much of it sounds more crude and antiquated than the duo’s first two albums, which were released over 20 years prior to this one. Those two albums did what few groups had done prior, and this one recycles hip-hop and dance beats that were recycled many times over by the mid-‘90s. The opening “Television Executions” is the worst culprit, using turntable scratches and a bounding late-‘80s funk groove that the Red Hot Chili Peppers would scoff at. It would be expecting far too much for Vega and Martin Rev to deliver something as revolutionary as those first two albums. A more realistic hope would be for this album to not be an embarrassment. Thankfully, due to Vega’s sharp-as-ever observations (he still sounds ornery and underfed), they narrowly escape that pitfall.

I can see why he felt that way. It’s a not unreasonable first reaction to American Supreme and is it similar to my own. But neither one of us got it.

For whatever reason (loyalty?) I never traded in American Supreme at the record store, even as I neglected to play it even one time during the intervening years. A few weeks ago, wanting something “new” to listen to in the car, I grabbed the CD and took it with me. Listening to “Televised Executions” again, I immediately recalled why I didn’t like it the first time. It was annoying, but I let it play. By the end of the song, I had started warming up to it. It was not only annoying on purpose, it was annoying with a purpose, something I’d failed to grasp.

As the next few songs played, what Martin Rev and Alan Vega were trying to do began to dawn on me. Lyrically the album is a reaction to 9/11 and the World Trade Center going down in Alan Vega’s own backyard (he was a longtime resident of lower Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood). His words reference sulphurous skies burning forever and being obliterated by a flash of blinding white light. It’s still the patented stream of consciousness ranting we expect from Alan Vega, but in the aftermath of the Al Qaeda attack his imagery became understandably even more violent and apocalyptic.
 

 
But then I got to track six, “Wrong Decisions” and at that point finally realized that it was my own powers of critical assessment that had fallen short of the music and not the other way around. Yes, my first reaction to hearing this album back in 2002 had been one of “they’re over the hill” after being confronted with the hackneyed hip-hop samples instead of the expected power drones (Martin Rev was about my current age when it was recorded I should probably inform the reader). How wrong I was. Listening to American Supreme in 2018, my ears had at last caught up to what they doing.

“Wrong Decisions” is, perhaps, now my #1 favorite Suicide number. What? Is it even better than “Ghost Rider” you ask? Than “Frankie Teardrop”? Than “Rocket USA”? “Mr. Ray”? I’d have to think about that, for a very long time, but it’s certainly up there with those classics. However it’s “Wrong Decisions” that I would DJ with. I mean, I can’t imagine DJ’ing, ever again, without being armed with this track. This is the heavy artillery.

But before you play the embedded sound clip of “Wrong Decisions” below, please play a couple songs that inspired it first.
 

“Different Strokes” by Syl Johnson.

Syl Johnson’s 1968 raver “Different Strokes” has been sampled by a lot of people. J Dilla, Mantronix, KRS-One, Michael Jackson, Wu Tang Clan, De La Soul, NWA, EPMD, Eric B & Rakim, Public Enemy, Kanye West, Jay-Z and countless others. It’s been, if anything, oversampled and should probably be given a rest, if not a proper burial. But here, in the hands of Martin Rev, “Different Strokes” becomes something else entirely, a flabby, pulsating, gurgling—but still funkier than neckbone—backing track for one of Vega’s wildest lyrics. The ULTRA LOW frequency sampled bass line turned my car into a bouncing lowrider and the speakers strained to keep up with it. Who the hell released a song with this much bottom end in 2002? Who had the subwoofer big enough to accommodate such a sound back then?
 
Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
01.04.2019
08:11 am
|
‘A Short Movie About Suicide’
07.20.2016
09:14 am
Topics:
Tags:


November 1970 poster for a series of Suicide shows at “A Project of Living Artists” on 729 Broadway

The news of the death of Alan Vega of Suicide came down over the weekend. As all such deaths do, it has given rise to an outpouring of heartfelt reminiscences, providing an occasion to reflect on what a blazing, contradictory, committed, special band Suicide was. Famously early in defining the possibilities of the term “punk music” (via 1970 gig ads, one example of which is above), Suicide became one of those rare bands you absolutely had to have a reaction to, as they perhaps learned to their chagrin when they accepted an offer by the Clash to open for the London-based punk band in Britain in 1978. Many of the punks in the audience despised Suicide, leading to an incident in Glasgow in which an audience member threw an axe at Vega’s head.

Living up to its name, “A Short Film About Suicide” (2007) lasts roughly 15 minutes. It mostly consists of Vega talking, which is an unimpeachable strategy. The movie opens with Vega recalling the September 3, 1969, gig at the Pavilion on 42nd St. when the Stooges opened for the MC5 and Iggy (and, improbably, Johann Sebastian Bach) changed Vega’s life forever. The movie features Vega and Martin Rev, of course, plus Chris Stein of Blondie, Mick Jones of the Clash, and others. Howard Thompson tells of hearing Suicide’s incredible first album for the first time (mistakenly playing side B first) and then realizing that he absolutely had to put it out in the U.K.

If “A Short Film About Suicide” lasted 5 hours, no part of it would be boring.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
07.20.2016
09:14 am
|
Kill the f*ckers: ‘White Man,’ Suicide’s BRUTAL sonic attack on white supremacy
06.23.2016
10:17 am
Topics:
Tags:


Alan Vega, 70s, photo by Paul Zone

I plan to stand behind my front door clutching a baseball bat for the duration of this year’s Republican National Convention, but if I were headed to one of the “First Amendment zones” in Cleveland next month, I would carry a ghetto blaster that played nothing but Suicide’s “White Man.”

Born Boruch Alan Bermowitz in 1938 and married to a Holocaust survivor during the sixties, Alan Vega knows whereof he sings on “White Man,” an obscure late-period Suicide track that deserves a wider hearing. While Vega denounces the legacy of white supremacy in the barest language there is, Martin Rev’s music—drums, a single guitar chord through a tremolo effect and a three-note bassline, punctuated by keyboard noises—corresponds to an inner state between trance and fury.

So far, “White Man” has only been officially released on the DVD One Day + Live at La Loco / Paris, a pro-shot live show from January 2005 supplemented with interviews. (A used copy from Amazon will set you back about $5.) Though Suicide has been playing the song since ‘98 (according to this fan’s timeline), they left it off their last album to date, 2002’s merciless post-9/11 nightmare American Supreme.
 

 
It just so happens there’s video of Suicide playing “White Man” in Manhattan right after the 2004 RNC. The performance falls flat, but Vega’s ad-libbed tirade is much clearer than on the Paris tape:

White man
HRRRRAARUUGHGH white man
Goin’ ‘round the world
Killin’ everybody with a different color skin
Yeah, it’s the American race
Yeah, kill the fuckers

White man
You’re a fucking diseased fucker
You’re a fucking cancer
White man
HUH!

 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
06.23.2016
10:17 am
|
Suicide: The band that will always sound like the future
03.17.2016
09:09 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
I was late to the party, but I think many of us were late to that party. Suicide had been playing for about a decade before we started really noticing what was going on—and what we were missing.

When Suicide played in England during the 1970s they were pelted with bottles. The punk audience was horrified by this intense, strange band. This wasn’t punk. This wasn’t New Wave. It wasn’t. This was a glimpse of the future.

I never heard Suicide on the radio. Not once. Or in the record shops that blasted out The Clash, the Banshees or PiL. Or even in the clubs. When I first heard “Ghost Rider”—a long long time after its release—it was a visceral thrill. Mesmeric, powerful, unforgettable.

In fact Alan Vega best described the effect of hearing Suicide from his own experience of hearing Martin Rev. In an interview Vega said that he had never wanted to be on stage. He was a sculptor, an artist, not a performer. He liked playing around with tape machines and noise, sure. He liked listening to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, of course. But the thought of being a musical artist—the thought of performing on stage, I mean—scared him shitless.

Then one night Vega was standing at the side of a stage watching Martin Rev playing jazz funk fusion. Something happened. The sounds cut through him. He was no longer just a spectator. He was possessed. Vega started hitting a tambourine. With every beat he was getting ever nearer ever closer to being onstage. He was no longer scared. He felt alive. That’s almost how it felt the first time I heard “Ghost Rider.” It’s a powerful song.

But back to that night when Vega started slamming a tambourine: Martin Rev turned to him and said “We’re going to do something together.” They would commit Suicide.
 
ediciusveragev1.jpg
 
The group started out in 1970 as three piece band. The guitarist “who was like a free-sound guitarist and also a visual artist” soon left to make films. As Vega and Rev told Igloo Mag in 2008:

Martin Rev: We knew we weren’t going to keep a band together for that long based on what we did, the amount of space we might have for rehearsal, which was always limited, and the amount of money we had for equipment and the amount we gigs we had. We were starting from scratch.

Alan Vega: We started out with a ten dollar Japanese keyboard that Marty found somewhere. We could hardly get any sound out of it so we started introducing, was it an Electro Harmonix thing like bass boosters and treble boosters?

Martin Rev: Yeah.

Alan Vega: This keyboard would be lined up with five or six of these things and that would jack up the sound because we almost couldn’t get any sound out of this thing. That in a way created the sound. As Marty was saying, it was out of a necessity thing. We had to jack up that keyboard, man, and out came this incredible rush of sound that no one has ever heard before or afterwards. The sound was created just out of necessity and we ran with it, man. It’s also more than that. I mean, Marty and I, we were both hearing electronics. In the late 60s I was already fooling around with just noise, just radio static and shit. It’s our musical taste. We like to hear noise, you know?

They spent years of gigging. Working on their own distinct sound. A psychotic, yelping Gene Vincent vocal over a mix of repetitive pounding synthesiser beats, white noise and menacing throbbing, pulsating psychobilly.

In 1977, Suicide released their eponymous debut album. It took seven years of trial and error to create the songs, then just four short days to record. As Martin Rev told the Guardian last year “We started like sculptors”:

“With a big piece of stone, pure clay, pure sound, big lumps of sound. We started from scratch, and then out of that we carved out the songs. After a year or two, we were playing the earliest, “Ghost Rider,” “Cheree” and “Rocket USA.” Also, when I was finally able to get a rhythm machine, that changed things a lot. I was able to delineate songs more clearly. The first year or two was a pure wall of sound.”

Hard to believe now, but this stunning debut record failed to chart in either the US or the UK. Both countries were too hung up on punk and disco and new wave. Some critics loved the album (as did Bruce Springsteen who made a hit of “Dream Baby Dream” and film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder), but others were literally terrified by their sound.

In the end Vega and Rev won.

Since those heady days Vega has most recently come through a heart attack and a stroke. He still performs with Rev and still produces artwork—last year he exhibited a series of new and old paintings at the Armory Show in New York.

Rev is “always looking for the next cool instrument or pedal. I’m not using software, live, so not everything works for me; I don’t need everything.”

“You bring your life with you….The way you are in the present, what you’ve learned, what you know.”

 
Killer videos to live for from Suicide, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
03.17.2016
09:09 am
|
‘23 Minutes Over Brussels’: The legendarily confrontational Suicide concert, 1978
05.20.2014
10:17 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 

“SHUT THE FUCK UP! THIS IS ABOUT FRANKIE!”
—Alan Vega

“23 Minutes Over Brussels” is a recording of an incendiary performance given by Suicide in Brussels, Belgium on June 16th, 1978. Martin Rev and Alan Vega were opening for Elvis Costello and the audience, let’s just say, didn’t like them very much. In fact, they hated their fucking guts and let them know it in no uncertain terms, including booing loudly, snatching the microphone from Vega’s hands and even breaking his nose!

Suicide hated them back and the result was performance art meets a full-scale riot, perhaps the most legendarily confrontational ur-punk moment this side of Iggy and The Stooges’ Metallic K.O. After Suicide escaped with their lives, Elvis Costello and The Attractions came onstage, but Costello was furious at how the crowd had treated Suicide and played an extremely short set that was also short on pleasantries. The crowd went nuts when they refused to return for an encore and the riot cops were called in armed with teargas.

All in a day’s work for Suicide. When the band toured with The Clash that same year, Vega was physically attacked several times:

“I got my nose busted in Crawley… In Glasgow someone threw an axe by my head! In Plymouth The Nazis got me in the dressing room.”

The Brussels set was recorded on cassette tape by a friend of the duo and it was released as a legit bootleg (with a Berlin show from same tour) and as a flexi-disc. Eventually it got released on CD as a bonus track. Vega and Rev once referred to their music as “punk, funk and sewer music.”
 

 
Below, Suicide on Paul Tschinkel’s legendary InnerTube cable access program doing “Ghost Rider” in 1978:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
05.20.2014
10:17 pm
|
M.I.A.:  Another perspective
07.15.2010
07:51 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Marc can say what he wants about M.I.A.—we’re an anarchist collective here at Dangerous Minds—but I love her. if you ask me, her performance of latest single Born Free on The Late Show with David Letterman positively tore the roof off the sucker. I was absolutely blown away by what she did on that stage. And with Martin Rev of Suicide playing beside her? Playing his synth with his fist? We’re not worthy.
 

 
Kudos to M.I.A. for bringing Martin Rev out on to the stage with her. I found it sad how so few of the blogs, of all the many that wrote about this performance, even mentioned Martin! Kids! What’s the matter with kids these days?!?

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
07.15.2010
07:51 pm
|