The YouTube account with the handle TheParodyQueen is dedicated to Christian parodies of popular songs. As the Queen describes herself, she’s “a wacky blonde who loves writing parodies of all genres with Christian lyrics.”

In fairness, the covers aren’t bad at all and she certainly doesn’t seem very censorious or forbidding about any of it. It’s evident that the Parody Queen and her guitarist know David Bowie’s “Fame” inside and out and even seem to be grooving to it.

Here’s a sample of the lyrics:

Shame
Keeps a man from the mirror
Shame
Steals hope from tomorrow
Shame
Makes you weep and brings you sorrow
Shame
A ball and chain through your veins is entertained by bringing you ...
Pain

-snip-

Is it any wonder
It infects and hurts?
Shame
Is it any wonder
How Jesus took the curse?
Shame

 
The curious are welcome to peruse the account, which has Christian parodies of songs by Led Zeppelin, the Bee Gees, Gloria Gaynor, CCR, and so on.
 

 
via Christian Nightmares

 
I’ve been fairly unabashed in my praise of Toronto-born rocker Slim Twig. Two of my very most favorite albums of the the past two years are his creative handiworks, A Hound At The Hem and its worthy follow-up Thank You For Stickin’ With Twig, both out in America on DFA Records. And so without any further preamble—you can read my past ruminations on Slim Twig here and here—it’s my great pleasure today, here on the sacred herbal holiday of 420 Day to debut this video for Mr. Twig’s slinky, smoky cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s ode to “Cannabis.”
 

Slim Twig goes casual at the bowling alley

“Cannabis” comes from the soundtrack to a 1970 French film of the same name which actually stars Gainsbourg as well, portraying a hitman for the mafia who falls in love with Jane Birkin, the daughter of an ambassador. The original number was performed and written by Gainsbourg and orchestrated by his future Melody Nelson collaborator Jean-Claude Vannier. Cannabis, which was amusingly retitled French Intrigue for the puritanical US market, was uploaded in its entirety to YouTube. It’s in French, with no English subtitles, but you still get to see Serge as a gun-toting, rabbit-fur coat-wearing badass causing mayhem, smoking a lot of cigarettes and je t’aiming Jane Birkin as often as possible.

DFA have set up a special Weedtransfer site for legally purchasing “Cannabis” in digital or physical formats.

“In a scene like this, you get a contact-high!”
 

 
Forget about bath salts, there’s a new weird drug craze in town… I found this article from Pakistan’s daily news service Dawn really fascinating. The topic? How smoking dead scorpions is the new dangerous drug “thing.” I had no clue you could smoke dead scorpions to get high. Did you? Apparently the addiction is way worse than with opium and a lot harder to get off of.

[Seventy-four-year-old Sohbat Khan’s] addiction to opium doesn’t bother him as much; Sohbat says opium’s affects [sic] are far safer than scorpion smoking. He knows his body is too old to bear the high, but there are days he still feels the pull.

“Chars aw powder kho asi gup dai,” Sohbat says in way of explanation—“Hashish and heroin’s so-called relief is nothing in front of scorpion.”

~snip

During his years of addiction, Sohbat remembers madly roaming around his house and village, hunting for scorpions. Often, when the need was too overwhelming and there was no scorpion in sight, he would make his way to Peshawar. “It’s a worst form of addiction,” he says in Pashto.

“I would inhale the smoke coming out of the fire,” Sohbat says, although it is the tail that addicts really want—its poisonous venom makes for dangerous addiction.

Kids these days. What will they think of next?

 
via Boing Boing

 
J.G. Ballard was a 20-year-old medical student in his second year at Cambridge University when he jointly won a crime story competition organized by the local student newspaper Varsity.

Ballard’s story “The Violent Noon” recounted the events of a violent and gory terrorist attack on a British officer and his family during the Malayan War. It has been described as a “Hemingwayesque pastiche” allegedly written to please the judges. According to “an an unsigned summary of the judges’ reasons for picking” Ballard’s story:

‘Violent Noon’ was the most mature story; it contains patches of high tension, the characters come to life, and the ending is brilliant in its cynicism. The author should, however, avoid a tendency to preach.

“The Violent Noon” was Ballard’s first published work. When it appeared in Varsity on Saturday 26th May, 1951, the paper printed a profile of the author—which included Ballard’s first ever published interview:

J. Graham Ballard who shares the first prize of ten pounds with D. S. Birley in the “Varsity” Crime Story Competition is now in his second year at King’s and immersed in the less literary process of reading medicine.

He admitted to our reporter yesterday that he had in fact entered the competition more for the prize than anything else, although he had been encouraged to go on writing because of his success.

The idea for his short story which deals with the problem of Malayan terrorism, he informs us, he had been thinking over for some time before hearing of the competition.

He had, in addition to writing short stories, also planned “mammoth novels” which “never get beyond the first page.”

 

 
What these “mammoth novels” were about one can now only imagine. It was four years since Ballard had returned to England from internment at a Japanese P.O.W. camp—the horrors of which were filtered through his work as he later said:

The experience of war is deeply corrupting. Anybody who witnesses years of brutality can’t help but lose a sense of the tragedy and mystery of death. I’m sure that happened to me. The 16-year-old who came to England after the war carried this freight of ‘matter-of-factness about death’. So spending two years dissecting cadavers was a way of reminding me of the reality of death itself, and gave me back a respect for life.

Ballard harbored plans to become a psychiatrist. But this was quickly dropped after his success with “The Violent Noon.” He quit his medical studies at Cambridge and enrolled at Queen Mary University, London to study English Literature.
 
More on young Ballard plus full documentary, after the jump….

 
This letter reads as something Andrew W.K. would have written as a six-year-old! Any child who can articulate a desire to “bring our parties to another level” deserves the damned disco ball!

Get this kid a disco ball!

via The Kraftfuttermischwerk

Robert Smith of The Cure on the front cover of Japanese music magazine ‘8 Beat Gag,’ 1988.
 
I’m really into these sweet manga illustrations which were published back in the 80s in a Japanese music magazine called 8 Beat Gag. Written in Japanese, most (if not all) are likely by the the rather prolific manga artist Atsuko Shima—but she wasn’t the only artist that created the cartoons that featured popular musical acts in weird situations that Japanese youth were obsessing about.

The fantastic cartoon of Finnish band Hanoi Rocks, which may have also been published in 8 Beat Gag, did show up as a surprise insert UK pressings of the band’s last record 1984’s Two Steps From the Move. Which makes me want to hunt a copy down just so I can have one of my own. When it comes to finding copies of 8 Beat Gag, good luck. As when they do pop up (which they occasionally do), they will cost you a tidy sum. The comic featuring The Cure (where Robert Smith Inexplicably morphs into some sort of goth Yeti. Because, Japan), follows in its entirety as well as a few others featuring Siouxsie Sioux going up against Girlschool in some sort of track event involving vegetables, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, Marc Bolan, Peter Murphy, Morrissey and 80s New Wavers Ultravox.
 

A manga cartoon about The Cure from Japanese music magazine, ‘8 Beat Gag,’ 1988.
 

 

 

 
In the wake of significantly renewed activity from the politically-charged post-punk funk agitators The Pop Group, it seems like recordings of their early years, many once considered “lost,” are finding their way out of the woodwork with increasing frequency. Only a few months ago, DM shared the video for the band’s signature single, “We Are All Prostitutes,” which had been missing for decades, and which turned up in an amazingly timely manner—just before the song was released as an add-on to the reissued LP For How Much Longer do we Tolerate Mass Murder? (We expressed some cynicism about the timing of that coincidence when we posted the video, but we’ve been assured that its discovery at that time was a genuine fortuity.)

Given the increased interest in the reactivated band, the worthy material culled from all those basement tapes has naturally been compiled for releases—in 2014, Cabinet of Curiosities assembled unreleased live tracks, Peel sessions and alternate takes. This year, The Boys Whose Head Exploded will feature live tracks, mostly from 1980, recorded in Cologne, Milan, Sheffield, and Helsinki, with a video adjunct—footage shot by no less a notable punk archivist than filmmaker Don Letts of The Punk Rock Movie and Big Audio Dynamite fame. Letts shot segments of the band in performance at the Beat the Blues Festival, held on June 15, 1980 at London’s Alexandra Palace. A sound recording of that performance was released as part of the Japan-only live 2xCD comp Idealists In Distress From Bristol, but the video has never been seen before.
 
Keep reading after the jump…

 
Ah the hangover! A state that needs no introduction. C’mon on, we’ve all been there at least once in our lives, right? Laugh all you want at these poor folks. You know you’ve have done the exact same thing… at least once.

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Although she’s somewhat of an obscure figure today, beautiful Marva Whitney was known as “Soul Sister #1” during her stint in the James Brown Revue as the featured vocalist. The Kansas City-born belter—singing with her family’s gospel choir since the age of three—stayed with Brown (the two were in a relationship) and the Revue for three years before leaving in late 1969 or early 1970, exhausted by the schedule kept by the hardest working man in show business with whom she toured America, Asia, Europe and Africa.
 

 
Whitney’s first solo single, “Your Love Was Good To Me” was recorded for Brown’s King Records label in mid-1967, but was not a success, nor were two follow-up attempts at hits. Her first chart hit came with “It’s My Thing (You Can’t Tell Me Who to Sock It To),” a “response” from womankind to The Isley Brothers’ hit “It’s Your Thing,” which reached number 19 on the Billboard R&B chart and number 82 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969.
 

 
Whitney followed up with two lesser hits, “Things Got To Get Better (Get Together)” and “I Made A Mistake Because It’s Only You, Pt 1.” All told, she recorded three albums Unwind Yourself, Live and Lowdown at the Apollo and It’s My Thing, along with 13 singles with James Brown as producer and writer or co-writer. After leaving the Godfather of Soul’s stable, she wasn’t really able to book the big venues as a headliner and left the music industry to raise a son, working sporadically in the music business after that.

In December 2012, Marva Whitney died at her home, aged 68.

First up a SEXY performance of “Things Got To Get Better (Get Together)” on ABC’s Music Scene TV program in 1969. If this woman is not hotness personified, I don’t know who would be…

 
More Marvellous Marva Whitney after the jump…

 
On October 20, 1982, The CBS Evening News, hosted by Dan Rather, ran a segment about a fellow in New York City who was currently upending the typical view of graffiti artists as untalented thugs. Charles Osgood did the report on the artist, who of course was Keith Haring.

Haring’s practice during that time was evidently to use chalk instead of spray paint, which (it seems to me) calls into question the fundamental law-and-order premise of whether Haring had actually damaged any property (Osgood says something vaguely similar). My guess would be that public hysteria over graffiti was just unreasonably high during the 1970s and 1980s. During the segment Osgood says that Haring sometimes gets arrested for his graffiti, and then, weirdly enough, that’s exactly what happens. (It almost feels staged.)
 

 
Osgood points out that the sentences are never very harsh, and that Haring is willing to assume that risk in order to bring his art to regular people. The segment makes a lot of hay on the idea that hoity-toity people in the art world pay high prices for artworks that you can see for next to nothing on the subway, but that irony seems like a big shrug to me.

Early on you can catch a glimpse of a large advertisement for the most recent issue of Penthouse (“Special Back to School Issue!”). All you New Yorkers out there, when was the last time you saw an ad for a porno magazine on a subway platform? 

After the jump, watch the CBS news report, followed by a gallery of Keith Haring stalking the subways…