January 2010 Archives

I'm gonna go see Karl play tomorrow night at the final D.O.S. show, and I have seriously been listening to this song over + over the past 24 hours.  like, as soon as the video ends on youtube, I hit the "replay" button, and will keep doing that for 40 minutes or so.  until I realize that I've been listening to the same song on repeat for the better part of an hour.



there is serious weird stuff with all of these cold-climes (white) Americans adding sounds that are super African to their repertoire.  there's the obvious ones (Vampire Weekend, Dirty Projectors- who are maybe less regionally-specific, more the general "Africa" vibe) and the more under-the-radar guys, like Karl Blau and Angelo Spencer, who channel, like, Ali Farka Toure and North African desert blues-type shit. 

it feels like the whole "Under My Thumb" phenomenon- the groove is so, so good, but you feel so, so conflicted about enjoying it.  but you do enjoy it, you can't pretend you don't.  and by "you," I clearly mean "me."

because I, at least, can't stop listening to "Dark Sedan." 

(I can't really say the same for VMPR WKND, but it's so trendy to bash those dudes right now that it's kind of dull.  somebody's gotta call 'em out, I guess, since they've made themselves such easy targets.  though I'd rather tangle with the gnarlier, less cut-and-dried ones, to be honest.  something that I can sink my teeth into.)

so I guess this is the rockstar lifestyle: me + my bandmates, post-show (okay, it was a super-early show, but still) sitting around in my living room after unloading the amps from the car; my clock reads 9:22pm on a Friday night, and all of us are too tired to keep a train of thought.  sit on the couch + fall asleep watching She-Ra: Princess of Power again?  sounds like a plan.

listening to these back-to-back is a way of pretending that July is closer than it really is.

just heard that the Department of Safety is closing.  no details yet.

there have been so many dreams wrapped around that place.  the magic there has always reminded of what is possible, what we can work for and achieve.  like Kevin says, "the radical potential of incubating DIY cultural resistance in small communities."  the DOS looked, to me, a lot like twee utopia for awhile.

I don't wanna say "rest in peace," because that energy has to go somewhere.  it's hard to convince people to move into a big cold concrete building in a small isolated coast town in the middle of Washington winter, and I'm sure that probably has a lot to do with it.

but oh, for a bit, it looked like living the dream- ride your bikes down Commercial, hang out at the Business, late-night donuts, records and cake upstairs, lake swimming at Cranberry, Gus, puppies, the weird Calvin mural, Fontee Fount, the signs everywhere.  Heck Fest.

so once upon a time, I was a wee rural high schooler, and ordered some mix tapes in the mail from a dude who is now in a moderately famous rock and roll band.  I've talked about it before- hearing Delta 5 for the first time, my 17-yr-old mind being stretched and expanded into entirely new understandings of "music," etc.

well anyway, aforementioned now-famous musician has digitized a bunch of those songs- which were otherwise COMPLETELY unfindable- and now I can listen to Danny + the Dressmakers any time I please.  the download is here- it also has fIREHOSE, Scars, other incredibly brilliant tracks.  if yr interested.

this band is like northwest huggy bear 2010 edition.  not "GAY AS IN HAPPY" but "QUEER AS IN FUCK YOU"- be still, my heart!

"It's like if they made something that was the best thing in the world, it would be the Smell.  And they've already made it."
"So what is there left to do?" 
"Play it!"

re: La Roux:

IF we imagine that "I'm not your toy" could, in one long-shot interpretation, be about Elly Jackson falling for a straight girl,

could we please make another, even longer leap, and dream that it's some sort of overdue answer to Katy Perry?

"it's all false love and affection/you don't like me, you just want the attention."

HOOT HOOT

UK keeps cranking 'em out, sweet young androgynous girls who reek of gay.  Mica Levi doesn't leave much to guessing, but Elly Jackson, who's to say?

either way, this is all I've been listening to for the past 24 hrs, because jane dark nailed it- there IS something eerie + delicious about a girl getting a man's falsetto so right.



EDIT: my roommate hypothesizes that this song is about Elly falling for a straight girl.  BEST INTERPRETATION YET.

I just heard the news: RIP Mary Daly.  One tough broad.  Right up there with Andrea Dworkin.

meet RHOMBUS

neon floral spandex takeover






(photo stolen from facebook)

"This must have been pretty ridiculous. There we were, a tiny prep school of absurd pretensions and almost equivalent wealth, 125 students for grades 9-12, every year the headmaster would accept a couple black kids on scholarship, I was on a scholarship too but I was a white kid, we were almost all white kids who would start companies and clerk Supreme Court and if the headmaster took a real shine to you, you could get a summer job after graduation learning international arbitrage at one of his offices because he was also the head of Merrill Lynch, Charlie Merrill. And we all shook our fists, Johannesburg.

But I think there was something true about that. I think it worked, I think Gil Scott-Heron worked, I think every single one of us believed that what was happening in Johannesburg, as best we could tell, was an injustice and a travesty, and shouldn't be tolerated. No one reversed this verdict ever, I'd bet. The song convinced us without our thinking about it, convinced us of things we would have articulated passionately and poorly, about what it meant to feel this urgent solidarity with someone's fight but see that it was not your fight, not exactly, see that you might belong to it but it didn't belong to you, and if the song taught us that not every single thing in the world belonged to you, well, that was news to us."

(joshua clover)

punk girls cover Mariah