My post yesterday about the disposable inserts from blank cassette tapes got me thinking about this interesting album from 2000. It’s by the now defunct Argentine band Reynols and it’s called Blank Tapes. Starting with a solid three minutes of truly blank tape it then moves through a monochromatic rainbow of different processes with blank cassette ness as the root source. Hear it in its entirety right here:
The band Reynols itself is fascinating. Consisting of a few special education teachers and one of their star pupils, Miguel Tomasin, who happens to have Down’s Syndrome, Reynols released tons of records to much acclaim within the experimental music community and even did a few collaborative recordings with the great composer Pauline Oliveros. Legend has it the name Reynols was arrived at by allowing a pet Chihuahua to step on a TV remote which randomly brought up an image of Burt Reynolds. Can you make things like that up ? I suppose so, but I’m still buying it.
Reynols - 10,000 Chicken Symphony 7” also from 2000
So the Beastie Boys are back, with their new album Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.
There’s an interesting/confusing story about this release - the first Hot Sauce Committee record was due to drop in 2009. At the same time as HSCPt1 was being recorded, the ever-prolific band recorded a bunch of extra material for NSCPt2, and scheduled the release of the sequel for early 2011. Unfortunately the release of HSCPt1 was delayed when MCA discovered he had cancer (which he thankfully pulled through), but HSCPt2 remained on track for a spring 2011 release. And so here it is - but now with the track list swapped for that of HSCPt1. The real HSCPt1 is scheduled for release later this year, presumably featuring the material that was recorded for HSCPt2. Those Beasties, they so crazy.
So what does it sound like? Well, listen for yourself:
Poly Styrene (Marian Joan Elliott-Said) has died at the young age of 53 on the eve of the release of her new album Generation Indigo. She had been battling cancer and, unlike other battles she took on, she lost it.
After an afternoon and evening of reading rumors that Poly had died, and hoping they weren’t true, the sad news that she did indeed pass away was just confirmed on several news sites and I’m having a difficult time writing this right now.
There will be more from me and DM contributors on the death of the beloved Poly later today. There’s not a single one of us that haven’t been enthralled by her magic.
I saw X Ray Spex perform at CBGB in March of 1978. It was among the most exciting rock and roll shows I’ve ever experienced. Poly was 21 years old at the time but with braces on her teeth and bows in her hair she looked 13, as did the other Spex. The remarkable thing about her and the group was just how fucking good they were. They played with a ferocious intensity that was raw, undisciplined, and yet totally confident and glorious. And as good as the band was, it was Poly that demanded your attention, got it, and rewarded it. She was a powerhouse. I was overwhelmed.
Poly upended every stereotype of the female rock and roll front person. She looked like an innocent school girl but when she opened her mouth she had a soul searing wail that made John Lydon sound like a squealing mama’s boy with his dick stuck in a zipper. Poly had one of the greatest punk rock voices in all of rock and roll. From banshee to wounded vulnerability, Styrene emoted with a range far beyond her worldly years. Within this woman was a fierce siren drawing liars and fools to crash upon the rocks of her uncompromising feminine power. Feminist? I don’t think so. That’s a label that Poly would find too limiting. Poly could, like Walt Whitman, claim “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
“Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” is one of the great “fuck off” anthems in the history of rock and roll, an unequivocal declaration that no one was going to restrain the power and glory that was Poly Styrene.
From the documentary The Punk Years:
X Ray Spex live at CBGB, March 17, 1978 (audio). Crank it the fuck up:
In January of 1968, a couple hundred Caltech students gathered in front of NBC Studios in Burbank to protest the impending cancellation of the “Star Trek” TV series.
While a war was raging in Vietnam, these proto-hipsters (check out the fashions, man) felt compelled to deal with more pressing matters, a shitty TV show.
The uprising to save “Star Trek” worked. NBC picked up the series for the 1968-69 season.
In Vietnam, two months after the “Star Trek” protests, Charlie Company entered the village of My Lai and the slaughter began. This time, the trekkies stayed home and watched TV, contented as cows on Venusian plains.
Between 1985 and 1989, I saw the Butthole Surfers play several absolutely unforgettable gigs in New York City. They were a swirling, lysergic tornado onstage, producing a dirty, unholy wall of sound that was so utterly unhinged and deranged—and yet weirdly beautiful—that I feared for the sanity of the musicians making it. Few acts I’ve seen before or since have achieved anywhere near the sonic or psychic intensity of an 80s Butthole Surfers gig. With their demonically-possessed go-go dancer Kathleen Lynch (who I have written about here) and the violent bedlam of the music, no other group of the era came close to the brutal skull-fucking they subjected their audience to (except for maybe the Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten, although I’d still give the Surfers the edge).
Let me put it to you another way, who except the Butthole Surfers would hire GWAR as their opening act without fearing in the slightest that they would be upstaged? That’s an achievement! It’s well-known that Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love met at a Butthole Surfers concert and this makes perfect sense.
I saw the Butthole Surfers at the Pyramid Club, Danceteria, CBGBs, The Cat Club, The Ritz, The World, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A “typical” evening with the Butthole Surfers involved nudity, tearing stuffed animals apart, strobe lights, Gibby lighting his own hand on fire with lighter fluid (he’d stare at his flaming hand like a drooling moron before putting the fire out by sticking his hand down his pants) and then the drumkits.
The last time I saw the group live, it was at The Lyric Theater, a faded 42nd Street porno palace that was about to be torn down. It smelled of semen and bleach and the floors were sticky. The fact that this fleapit was going to soon be leveled seemed to give the band—and the audience—the license to destroy it early.
I have it on good account that the promoter of the show gave lead vocalist Gibby Haynes six hits of acid before this performance, thinking he was giving him enough for the entire band, only to see him pop them all into his mouth at once. Watching him on-stage that night, as the group played a berserk version of Gordon Lightfoot’s folky epic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” I wondered if he, or the audience, would ever recover.
Gibby screamed into a bullhorn, the dual drummers hit flaming cymbals and they projected 16mm films of bloody operations, people with Down’s syndrome dancing in top hats and tails and a man with a gigantic sombrero that was revealed to be much larger than a house. If Beelzebub himself would have come out to jam with the band for the encore, no one would have been the least bit surprised.
If the music they made in the 1990s is anything to go by, the bad-living caught up to them. After 1987’s Locust Abortion Technicians, they quickly became an uninspired parody of themselves, tarting up their sound to appeal to MTV’s 120 Minutes audience. I’ve had copies of all their albums since and I could seldom get past one listen.
Sadly the brain-crushing early work of the group has become somewhat obscure and I don’t think a lot of younger people know much about them. This is a real pity. Their Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac (1984) is a flat-out masterpiece. A stunner. Nothing—and I mean nothing—else sounds like it. 1986’s Rembrandt Pussyhorse and Locust Abortion Technician (1987) are also quite amazing albums. Here’s a sampling of some of their finest moments
“And son, if you see your mom this weekend, be sure and tell her….” Listen to one of the Butthole Surfer’s most infamous numbers, a tongue-in-cheek Black Sabbath tribute called “Sweat Loaf”
My favorite Butthole Surfers song, the bone-crushing “Cherub”:
Below, a moment edited from the laugh-out-loud funny “Bed In” interview from the Blind Eye Sees All live video. (See complete video below)
This video somewhat captures the infernal, chaotic insanity of a Butthole Surfers show and you can (more or less) see what Kathleen Lynch got up to onstage with them at about 30 seconds in. Shot in Bremen, Germany in 1987.
After the jump, backstage with the Butthole Surfers and live in Detroit, 1985.
It’s that time of the year again for inflatable water slides, foam kickboards, Super Soakers and Motörhead beach balls. Yes, Motörhead beach balls. They’re $9.99 a pop over at Motörhead’s webstore.
This buffoon deserves whatever we can throw at him. What an asshole. I never imagined that he could actually become more unlikeable than he already was.
Your dad didn’t give a fuck before you did. He smoked, drank, fucked, fought, and pissed into the wind of life. Then one night, while jacked on mescaline, he screwed your mom. It was just supposed to be one night. But, that tryst became bastardized when you were conceived from it. Your dad had to settle down. So hipsters, next time you’re out drinking on a Tuesday night or biking without a helmet, remember you’re the bastard love baby of your dad’s not giving a fuck attitude.”
“Dads: The Original Hipsters” is a compendium of photographs culled from the net that illustrates that hipsterism ain’t nothing new, in fact it’s ancient. Check out these shots of dads being cooler than you.
You can view more of these groovy artifacts at “Dads: The Original Hipsters” website. The captions are often much funnier than the pictures themselves.
Your dad wore Chuck Taylors before you did. Those were his “Just do it” shoes. He could run faster, jump higher and ride your mom longer because of them. The only training you hipsters have done in those shoes are Natural Spirit chain smoking marathons and smug bike rides to dive bars. I wish time travel was real, just so your dad could kick your own ass for wearing the shoes that he made a legend.”
