JD Samson is the girl with the coolest moustache in rock’n'roll. Today sees the release of the debut album by JD’s band MEN, Talk About Body on Iamsound Records. MEN are a three piece that combine the best in dance-pop and punk rock with a definite queer/feminist outlook. JD already has form in this area - she is a member of Kathleen Hanna’s post-Bikini Kill/riot grrrl electronica act Le Tigre, and last year she worked with Christina Aguilera on her ill-fated Bi-On-Ic album., which saw the “Beautiful” warbler trying to break out of her pop/soul niche but not quite succeeding. Nice try though.
However, MEN is JD’s passion - they have been touring the globe for the past few years spreading their word to the masses from a beat up van, with just a laptop, a MicroKorg and two guitars, and collaborating with a host of different musicians and artists as they get their sound just right. This is from their Wikipedia page:
MEN is a Brooklyn-based band and art/performance collective that focuses on the energy of live performance and the radical potential of dance music. MEN speaks to issues such as trans awareness, wartime economies, sexual compromise, and demanding liberties through lyrical content and an exciting stage show.
It would be tempting to say that they are at the forefront of a new wave of electronic queercore, only that would distract from the music itself, something that JD has had to put up with a lot already because of her unique image. So let’s abandon all preconceived ideas for a little while and just get down to the sound of MEN:
Little Richard sings “Scuba Party” while frenzied go go dancers attempt to throw planet Earth off its axis with the sheer force of their hips. This is the highlight from the highly forgettable beach blanket dud Catalina Caper. For a few brief minutes Mr Penniman transforms this turd into gold.
January 30th was Richard Brautigan’s birthday. His writing had a huge influence on me when I was a young man.
I spent one summer in the late sixties living in a tipi in a ghost town in Northern California reading Brautigan and living off brown rice, rolled oats and Benzedrine. It was the rainy season. As I read In Watermelon Sugar, I felt as though I were made of those sweet volatile molecules so I avoided the rain and a nearby waterfall. I stayed nice and dry in the upside down cone I called my home.
I had a big bag of pot that I buried under the floorboards of a decaying dancehall in the ghost town. Rats ate the reefer. It killed them. I imagined the headlines in my imaginary newspaper: “Mice Murdered By Marijuana.” But they died happy. I found their rat corpses, plump and round, under the floorboards. They died with smiles on their faces. That’s the way I wanna die, I thought.
I was alone that summer, just me and Brautigan and that deadly waterfall. Occasionally I would go to the nearby village where there was a church called The Church Of Tomorrow. Inside the church were beautiful young girls who gave me LSD. I would eat the LSD and make love to the girls, melting into them like watermelon sugar.
When I wasn’t reading Brautigan or fucking or eating brown rice, I would just stare at the sky for hours and watch the sunlight curl along my optic nerve and splash against my brain like a tiny cloudburst made of watermelon sugar.
Ianthe Brautigan Swensen reads “One Afternoon in 1939” from her father’s book Revenge Of The Lawn. It’s a sweet video.
Stay pretty after a hard day of racist tea-bagging!
Of all the prominent woman I can think of to give celebrity beauty tips, I must admit that lemon-faced Republican church lady Sharron Angle, recently defeated in the Nevada Senate race because she’s fucking nuts would not be one of them. Nevertheless, on Janurary 21, Angle was the special guest of SeneGence International at a beauty seminar they held in Las Vega:
Sharron will be sharing her beauty and makeup challenges during the campaign and how she overcame them! She had confidence that she would look great with 14 -16 hour days & with numerous appearances daily… so can you!
Please be our guest… you will be glad you did!
* Girlfriend time
* Chat with Sharron
* Learn some new make-up tips & techniques
* Find out about an amazing revolutionary skin care line (guaranteed to take 55% of your fine lines and wrinkles away in 8 weeks!) NO kidding
* Free gift for all who attend
“Sometimes each of us would be thinking “Oh god, I know where we’re going,” and both of us would race to get there first.”—Mike Nichols
Over the weekend, Tara and I watched a 15-year-old PBS America Masters documentary on the incredibly brilliant 50s/60s comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Titled Nichols & May: Take Two, it features thoughtful discussions of the pair’s work by the likes of Steve Martin, Jules Feiffer and Tom Browkaw. What made the hour-long piece so especially exciting to watch was, well, finally getting to watch them do these great routines that I have listened to over and over and over again on records. Most of it was new to me (visually speaking, that is) and I was just ecstatically happy to see it. (Not to mention how absolutely stunning Elaine May was! Wow! What a fox!)
When I was a kid I absolutely adoredNichols & May. As Steve Martin remarked about their albums, there was really something quite musical about their comedy that leant it to repeated listens. Robin Williams compares the dance of their wit to a beautiful ballet. What they created together wasn’t really like anything else, either before or since. Their comedy albums weren’t stand-up comedy at all, of course. Nichols & May were actors and writers performing their own material, often the result of improvisations (a hallmark of their live act). Both of them have really great, expressive voices and their classic routines are absolute perfection, as honed and as precise as language can be used. Much of their material begins with seemingly random, meandering or nervous conversation that eventually comes into sharp focus. They were great at portraying pompous idiots with nothing to say and no qualms whatsoever about saying it. Although hardly risque, Nichols & May were “grown up” and probably the first satirists to include riffs on post-coital pillow talk and adultery in their repertoire during the Eisenhower administration.
A large part of the appeal for ardent Nichols and May fans was the cultural signifiers they—well, their stuffy, insecure characters—would casually drop into their routines. College-educated, upscale fans who made the high IQ duo such a success on Broadway would feel a part of the “in crowd” when presented with material referencing Béla Bartók or Nietzsche, although no one was exactly excluded by their brainy comedy, either. Routines about phone calls from foreign countries, getting ripped off by funeral homes and psychotically nagging mothers could be enjoyed by anyone, but the high falutin’ grad school references were the dog whistles that garnered them their staunchest fans. Amusing to consider that these “sophisticates” were usually the very people skewered most savagely by the double-edged sword of Nichols & May’s humor.
Often, it was Elaine May’s characters who set about psychologically torturing the hapless male creations of straight-man Nichols. Gerald Nachman relates several examples of May’s emasculating wit in a pre-feminist era in his book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s. One tale is told of May getting wolf whistles and noisy kisses from two guys who followed her down the street. “What’s the matter? Tired of each other?” she asked. One of them yelled back, “Fuck you!” and she fired back, “With WHAT?
Get a copy of Nichols & May: Take Two at Mod Cinema.
Below: “Aren’t you even curious about me?” “No, not at all.”
In their famous “Telephone” sketch, Nichols plays a hapless man, stranded and down to his final dime, trying to use a pay phone with disastrous results. May plays three different telephone operators, none about to give him his “alleged die-yum” back. To SEE them do this… Ah! I was in heaven:
Much, much more classic Nichols & May comedy after the jump…
After a hard night of playing music, attending after show parties, and working on a script, Nick Cave, renaissance man, sat down with Australia’s Triple J radio to discuss his art, his nipples and performing with Grinderman at the Big Day Out festival.
This is a new upload to Youtube and it came with no description. I’m reticent to post something without a bit of background on what I’m sharing, but this kind of speaks for itself.
The world’s biggest Scott Walker fan? He’s certainly got a fascinating collection.
Update: Dangerous Minds readers are schooling me today. The Walker mega-fan is Arnie Potts and this clip is an extra on the DVD release of the Scott Walker documentary 30th Century Man. Thanks Plastic Palace Alice for the heads up.
Harry Muskee of Cuby And The Blizzards with Van Morrison
In March of 1967, after leaving Them, Morrison toured the Netherlands with Dutch group Cuby And The Blizzards as his backup band.
Here they are doing “Mystic Eyes” in a video clip that I wish were longer.
Update: Dangerous Minds reader Knickerbocker noted that the audio portion of the video is taken from the original 1965 release of “Mystic Eyes” by Them. Good ears, Knickerbocker.
In 1974 heavy duty German classical label Deutsche Grammophon issued a 3LP over-view of European improvised music (pictured above) featuring a full two sides each from a French combo (New Phonic Art), A British trio (Iskra 1903 led by guitar titan Derek Bailey) and the focus of this blog posting, the German ad hoc ensemble known simply as Wired. The truly notable thing about Wired is that it featured super-producer Conny Plank conducting the entire very delicate and minimal affair from his mixing desk. The other players here are Harry Partch disciple Mike Ranta on percussion, guitarist Karl-Heinz Böttner on stringed instruments and Mike Lewis on Hammond organ. Have a leisurely listen to the entire thing, it’s quite a lovely and slowly unfolding bit of primitive soundscaping :
Wired Side One
Wired Side Two
The reason I sought out the above rarity is that the above rather handsome box-set has just been released. Recorded a mere month after recording the Wired LP by the same group (minus Böttner) but previously unreleased, this sounds pretty wonderful. Then again nearly everything Conny Plank had a hand in is worthy of celebration.
Kool Herc, the legendary Jamaican-born DJ famous for “inventing hip hop” during South Bronx dance parties in the early 1970s is ill, and in dire need of financial assistance. According to a story that’s appeared in places from The Source’s website to The Guardian, Kool Herc, now 55, was discharged from a Bronx hospital yesterday, but still needs desperate help to pay for his medical bills. The cause of his illness has not been disclosed and it’s unclear whether he’s had the needed surgery or not.
Armed only with dual copies of James Brown and Jimmy Castor Bunch albums—not to mention a couple copies of “Bongo Rock”—and as many turntables as his mixer would allow for, DJ Kool Herc was the first turntablist to isolate the instrumental “break beat” from hard funk songs and turn them into five to ten-minute long extended workouts for the “break” dancers at his parties. Later these same beats became the musical backdrop for the toasters of the nascent “rap” scene. Kool Herc’s style on multiple decks was soon copied by Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa.
Donations for DJ Kool Herc can be sent to Kool Herc Productions PO Box 20472 Huntington Station, NY 11746
Below, DJ Kool Herc explains how he came up with the idea for isolating the break beat, in the process helping to birth hip hop culture.
Dangerous Minds pal Curtis Mead says, “You Don’t Deserve is quite an interesting study of what people have going on in their heads. Anonymous rants from frustrated industry types… gotta love it.”
This was brought up in the comments to Marc’s last Iggy-centric post - it raised some interesting points, so I thought it would be good to expand on, and to fill in the details.
He may be one of the greatest performers in modern music, the definition of a rock’n’roll animal, but to a section of the planet Iggy Pop is now best known as being that guy in those car insurance ads. This wasn’t a simple case of Iggy licensing music to an ad (as has happened before) - he actively participates in the adverts. The fact that he did them is not news but the campaign has had a few twists and turns along the way. For the benefit of the folks who don’t know the story, here’s the low down.
The Iggy Pop/Swiftcover insurance adverts debuted on British TV in January 2009. In February 2009 it was acknowledged that Swiftcover didn’t insure musicians (who were part of a “danger group” that also included gamblers, bailiffs, professional sports people, bouncers and, um, models.) An investigation was launched by the Advertising Standards Authority (after a grand total of 12 complaints - not a lot but, hey, they made a good point) and in April 2009 the ad was banned for being misleading. The company weakly claimed that they didn’t hire Iggy Pop as a musician, but rather as an actor who “loves life.”
Well, either Swiftcover turned punk fuckin’ rock or they decided to protect their investment in Iggy as, in May 2009, they changed their minds and started covering musicians in their insurance policies. Unfortunately they still don’t cover gamblers, bailiffs, bouncers, sports people or models. It’s not clear exactly why the firm won’t cover these professions, but at least now musicians can claim with them, thanks to Mr Pop. Pity about those models though - perhaps their dainty little feet don’t contain enough muscle power to properly work a set of pedals? A company spokesperson gave this statement to the Telegraph:
Tina Shortle, marketing director of swiftcover.com, said: “Insurance premiums are based on a number of different data, including the historic claims costs for specific occupations. This means that we do not provide cover to some professions that, according to that data, have a higher level of claims costs.”
The adverts returned to the telly, and 2010 saw the appearance of the “Little Iggy” puppet. The puppet is meant to symbolize Iggy’s wildman rock’n’roll past, and how the Iggster is constantly battling to keep it under control when all he wants to do is have a quiet game of golf.
Now, regardless of your views on whether respectable artists and musicians should sell anything except themselves, credit should be due to the technical side of this campaign. The “Little Iggy” puppet is so close to the real thing that it’s creepy - the first time I saw it on a billboard I had to do a double-take and if that’s not effective advertising, I don’t know what is. The hair, the hang-dog face, the knotted muscly torso - it’s incredibly like him. Who would have guessed that in the 21st century Iggy Pop would have gone from iconic rock’n’roll wild child to insurance salesman to being at the vanguard of uncanny valley?
There are plenty of people out there who are still upset about the cancellation of Arrested Development (ahem…me included). In an attempt to keep the show a hot online topic (and hopefully feed the demand for an Arrested Development movie), Pleated-Jeans gives you the Arrested Development themed Clue board game, complete with box art, game board, suspect cards and weapon cards.
Go to Pleated-Jeans to see more hysterical Arrested Development board game images.
