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Waterproof Jacket & Gonna Gay Marry You
Waterproof Jacket
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I’ve been working on this for a while, but I think it’s where I want it to be now. Made mainly from loop manipulations, most of which originally standard garageband loops if I remember correctly. It is contrived, but at least I mean what I’m saying.
Iggy Pop is angry and Johnny Rotten is Sigmund Freud.
I happened across this while doing a little research. I’m trying to get to the root of what separates the labels New Wave and Post Punk. Obviously they’re useless as a means to segregate music, but I think the way the labels are used and by who is significant.
In this interview, it’s hard to get past Iggy Pop’s intentional, passionate naivety, but I think the point he’s trying to express is strong, if cloudy and overtly confrontational. Which could also be said of the new popular music of that (and possibly this) era. More on this later.
Foam Rubber, USA
Chris Frantz thought of the titular chorus after seeing a Parliament-Funkadelic show where the crowd chanted “Burn down the house.” The initial lyrics were considerably different, however. In an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” aired on December 2, 1984, David Byrne played excerpts of early worktapes showing how the song had evolved from an instrumental jam by Tina Weymouth (bass) and Chris Frantz (drums). Once the whole band had reworked the groove into something resembling the final recording, Byrne began chanting and singing nonsense syllables over the music until he had arrived at phrasing that fit with the rhythms— a technique influenced by former Talking Heads producer Brian Eno— “and then I [would] just write words to fit that phrasing… I’d have loads and loads of phrases collected that I thought thematically had something to do with one another, and I’d pick from those.”
According to Byrne in the NPR interview, phrases he tried but ultimately didn’t use in the song’s recorded “verses” included “I have another body,” “Pick it up by the handle,” “You travel with a double,” and “I’m still under construction.” As for the title phrase in the chorus, one early attempt (as heard on a worktape) had him singing a different line, “What are we gonna do?”, and at another point in the process, “instead of chanting ‘Burning Down the House,’ I was chanting ‘Foam Rubber, USA.’”
Reggie Watts Is About to Explode
He just did a battery commercial and this Pepsi product tie-in. I have no objections because I think he rightfully deserves to be the most famous and well paid man in the American ecosystem.
The Sinking of the Titanic
A composition by Gavin Bryars. A year after first hearing it, it’s still my favorite piece of music. The recorded version is below, a live performance is available at the linked site.
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I am not a poster, but a positive toaster.
Watch as Lee Scratch Perry confuses Jools Holland:
Nick the Stripper
He’s in his birthday suit. He’s in his birthday suit. He’s in his birthday suit. He’s in his birthday suit.
The Quietus Reductive & Subjective Albums of the Year 2009
If you’re looking for all the interesting, challenging and great music you missed this year, this is the place to find it.
? and the Mysterians
The band’s frontman and primary songwriter was ?. Though the singer has never confirmed it, Library of Congress copyright registrations indicate that his birth name is Rudy Martinez. His eccentric behavior helped to briefly establish the group in the national consciousness. He claimed (and still claims) to be a Martian who lived with dinosaurs in a past life, and he never appears in public without sunglasses.
No Empty Space
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber […] a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.
Repent, Repent
From The (world famous for being the only good music writing resource†) Quietus:
We say first visibly, as of course Sioux was one of the Sex Pistols’ entourage who rocked up on Bill Grundy’s Today programme and was the source of the “dirty fucker”’s lusty comments. But this is the problem with laying into so-called hipsters. If Sioux ended her teens as a hipster, she started her adulthood as one of the best rock stars of the late 70s, the80s and beyond.In most cases the accusation of hipsterism smacks of jealousy and a tiresome obsession with authenticity or has come from a quasi-self aware ‘hipster’ journalist.
Every generation plays dress up. Though the recovery from the cyclical ironic self-awareness of the punk, or in our time hipster, culture would surely be a valuable process. Unless you never recovered and ended up doing butter advertisements. Still, you’d be in good company.
†: Of course I forgot about Wax Poetics.
And They Say Romance Is Dead
This has something to do with the Dead Weather, but who knows.
The 80/20 McCartney Split
The records Paul McCartney made in the first ten years after leaving The Beatles are eight parts ego-tripping superstar schlock to two parts outsider art. They have all the slickness of Seventies AOR, but at second glance they’re as disassociated as Wesley Willis. No other major rock star would make an album quite like Ram, so cosy and so conflicted. No other major rock star would think to write a song about his Land Rover, or Fungus The Bogeyman. While his peers were mining Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, McCartney was covering the theme from Crossroads. The man was in a world of his own.
Stamping Loudspeaker Bells
Philadelphia, 1925. Stamping loudspeaker bells at the Atwater Kent radio factory. Found here.
Nigel Godrich Talks From the Basement
An interesting interview with the great music producer Nigel Godrich in The Quietus.
I guess the obvious place to start is the inspiration behind From the Basement…
NG: It was quite a few years ago when I was having a conversation with Beck about Rock &‘N’ Roll Circus, the film made by The Rolling Stones in the 60’s. At the time they didn’t feel it was good enough because it was basically a little bit plotless, just them hanging out with their friends playing music. But now it’s really interesting to watch all these really great people - the Stones, John Lennon, Eric Clapton - just hanging out and playing. Beck and I both felt that somehow, something had been lost in the way that people film music. It was a lot more basic in those days, and now MTV has destroyed the way that people film performing because suddenly it became about the agenda of who’s filming it, the performance of the director, the shaky cameras…
The other thing, I got this old Whistle Test DVD that blew me away. It’s such an intimate atmosphere that comes over so well, and it’s a shame to think that of the great artists that are around at the moment, no-one is recording them in that way. It will be some sort of horrible, corporate logo embezzled version, which is a shame.
What are the benefits of capturing a performance in such an intimate environment?
NG: I think it provides something very, very direct between the performer and the audience. When Talking Heads did ‘Psycho Killer’ on the Whistle Test, when David Byrne talks to the camera and goes straight into the performance…it makes the hairs on your neck stand up, because you feel it’s just for you. You can tell they were comfortable, and that’s why it worked.