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Archive for December, 2011

A few nice dance images I found:

Some recent pop auctions on eBay:

US $7.99 End Date: Friday May-18-2012 20:12:14 PDT Buy It Now for only: US $7.99 Buy it now | Add to watch list

US $12.99 End Date: Friday May-18-2012 20:12:23 PDT Buy It Now for only: US $12.99 Buy it now | Add to watch list

The cover of the Beets’ Let the Poison Out is a cartoon drawing of a female gang dressed sort of like Native Americans beating up a gang of people in ghost costumes in the park. The Native American ladies have a mischievous look. Their eyebrows are angled and violent, their teeth are bared.

The ghosts are not faring well. One is getting cracked on the head with a baseball bat. Another is having his throat slit. Another is having a beer bottle smashed in his face. His forehead is an explosion of blood. One of his eyes is sailing through the air. All of them — even the one on fire, with his face melting — are flashing peace signs.

I loved the cover for its simplicity, its humor, its violence, its sweetness, so I found out who drew it. His name is Matthew Volz. I emailed him and told him I wanted one of his drawings on my wall. He wrote me back with his phone number. “Also,” he asked, “what kind of drawings are you into? Wrestling, gory, landscapes, etc.” This is how things get broken down in the world of the Beets: I do wrestling, gory, landscapes, and et cetera.

Let the Poison Out is 27 minutes long. The songs on it are confident and amateurish, with clean lines and no embellishment. The Beets play their four chords with heavy hands and no doubt. There is one bass, one, acoustic guitar, and a drum kit. There are no cymbals in the drum kit: shiny things do not belong in the Beets.

I’ve heard them compared to the Ramones. I get it. The comparison isn’t in the sound, but in the spirit. The Beets, like the Ramones, seem like dumb people with low values who play the music they do because their pea brains couldn’t conceive of something more grand, more important.

In actuality, the Beets and the Ramones are bands that romanticize simplicity as a challenge to the gross ambition that makes art boring. “Don’t be afraid, you will not die,” the song “Doing as I Do” goes. “And if you die, whatever.” Whatever: this is the word the Beets use to prove they’re no more special than anyone else. This is how they sing about death and dying but acknowledge that singing about death and dying is a chore for the listener. The Beets seem to inherently understand that lightness is no less of a challenge than darkness.

My favorite song on Let the Poison Out is called “I Think I Might Have Built a Horse.” It’s two minutes and one second long. “There’s only one horse and twenty riders / only one of them will get to ride it,” part of the first verse goes. “All of the rest / will have to see it go, go, go.”

The idea, I think, is to remind you that you probably won’t get famous. You probably won’t be great. You’ll probably be on the sidelines, watching someone else ride the horse go, go, go. At the beginning of the second verse, though, Juan Waters sings, “I think I might’ve built a horse out of the bones you have left behind.” Crucially, he’s not sure. Crucially, whatever he built was out of the bones you left behind—the things you thought weren’t worth your time or energy, the things you left wasting away in the margins, the scraps.

I want to call the Beets ambitious because I think it’s hard to stay as humble as they do. It’s hard to admit that you’re probably not going to ride the horse, but you still want to start a band anyway. It’s hard to go to sleep and not dream big dreams. There’s something Zen about “wrestling, gory, landscapes.” There’s something rebellious, almost prayerful, about staying small. Sooner or later, most people will want guitar solos. Sooner or later, most people will want remixes. They’ll want thunder and pain and all that transformative, supposedly important stuff. They’ll want cymbals. The beauty and promise of the Beets is that they won’t.

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Video Rating: 4 / 5

A disused correctional facility re-imagined into a mental asylum, threats of using someone’s “intestines for [sneaker] strings,” and a rapper rocking a t-shirt with cats on it. Yep, it’s standard stuff from the wonderfully mentally-unbalanced creative world of Game, who’s taken time out from advising us to “eat a dick” to release a video for “Martians vs. Goblins,” his collaboration with Tyler, The Creator.

Shot at the now-closed Fred Nelles Youth Correctional Facility in Game’s home town of Los Angeles, the Matt Alonzo-directed flick is an entertainingly disturbing slice of rap theater. After checking himself into the asylum while wearing his best “Bitch, I’m a motherfuckin’ martian” sweater, Game pops in some white contacts and, er, eventually succumbs to a lethal injection. Tyler, who accessorizes his cat t-shirt with a real life feline perched on his neck, puts in a sober performance by comparison, while Lil Wayne‘s role in the song — which involves yelling about being an extra-terrestrial — is played by a series of inmates maniacally hollering at the camera.

While Game’s last project, The R.E.D. Album, was met with a muted critical response, the 1500 or Nothin’-produced “Martians vs. Goblins” is a potent reminder that the Compton-raised rapper is still capable of crafting ballsy, brooding hip-hop as well as fantastically twisted videos.

Oh, and if you were wondering, Tyler’s cat makes it through the video unscathed.

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Some cool dance images:

Pop on eBay:

US $1.49 (0 Bid) End Date: Friday May-18-2012 20:12:05 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

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Friendly Fires’ second album has come and gone with the kind of fanfare that suggests there won’t be a lot of people waiting on a third – it peaked at #152 on Billboard’s Top 200 and to put that in perspective, Real Estate debuted at #52.  That’s totally understandable. These things tend to happen when you wait three years to capitalize on your fleeting buzz, especially if most of that buzz comes from something they were only debatably responsible for (the Aeroplane remix of “Paris,” originally from their 2008 self-titled debut) and an astoundingly awful video for third single “Hurting” wasn’t, um, helping. And yet, the inclusion of Pala on this list feels like it has to be some sort of mistake, a malfunction of XL’s major label machinery. Are we sure that “Blue Cassette” and “Hawaiian Air” and “Hurting” weren’t worn into obnoxious ubiquity all summer?   How did so many people decide that a Daft Punk & Oates hybrid wasn’t exactly what the game’s been missing in 2011?  It wasn’t for Friendly Fires’ lack of trying, and while I can explain its chart failure no more than LMFAO’s chart success, it’s that eagerness to please that likely kept Pala away from year-end lists besides this one: this record is just not cool.  At all.  Not even “anti-cool” cool.

But that’s sort of the point of an album that begins with a song called “Live Those Days Tonight,” and continues to be every bit as guilelessly joyous as a high school kegger that inspires you to say things like “live those days tonight” and mean it.  Indeed, blurring  lines between samplers and guitars, and club and rock music wasn’t novel in 2008. It surely isn’t now.  But Friendly Fires distinguish themselves by never forgetting their prior incarnation as an emo band – thrills like this can only come while skirting the edge of embarrassment.  Listen to similarly-minded dance-rock acts like Cut Copy and Delorean. They’re grounded in the kind of electronic music appreciated by connoisseurs of the genre, and it they off as earnest and humorless jetsetters.  Friendly Fires made a ridiculously catchy single about getting loaded on a commercial flight and watching a movie about a talking dog.

The only catch is that you simply need to meet Friendly Fires on their own profoundly extroverted, maximalist terms. Ed MacFarlane almost always belts out the title in a breathless rush of falsetto, song structures bottle up and explode to megaton choruses and all of it’s tricked out by overblown but absolutely perfect production from Paul Epworth.  You just don’t get populism of this magnitude anymore from rock bands, which is why they can get away with clear nods to “One More Time” (“Blue Cassette”), bob-and-weave disco (“Hurting”) and total Jock Jam nonsense powered by bleacher-stomping drums on “Show Me Lights.”  Best yet is the foolproof sequencing, which follows the blueprint set by Bleed American (another classic from a highly unfashionable band that made terrible videos): banger x5, slow jam, banger x5.  This isn’t rocket science and yet few records really shot for the moon as shamelessly and successfully as Pala.

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After midnight, and inside a nearly empty Atlanta nightclub, a pair of 20-somethings sat side-by-side on a red loveseat – VIP seating on most nights. With dry paintbrushes on hand, they shot smoldering looks straight ahead as they “touched up” eachother’s outfits –- liquid latex leotards bearing the names behind BAYTL on their stomachs.

Liquid latex touch-ups would prove to be a critical part of last night’s music video shoot for “Let’s Get Faded,” the first single featuring east Oakland, White Mob Crew member V-Nasty alongside her favorite rapper, East Atlanta, 1017 Brick Squad founder Gucci Mane. It was a back-to-basics evening, at least in commercial hip hop terms. Lasting from 4 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., it was fueled by Grey Goose drinks, cheese pizza and a few dozen young, aspiring video vixens. (One, painted from neck to ankle in black latex paint, drove away in a car bearing an Alpha Delta Pi sticker on its back window.)

Weeks ago, hip hop blogs cried foul once they laid eyes on the white, female, fake-spectacled emcee pictured on the mixtape cover and remembered all the times she’s dropped the n-word on tape and YouTube. (Her squeaky response on BAYTL: “High now, flying in the spaceships / Y’all know damn well V-Nasty ain’t racist.” Fine!) V-Nasty then publicly vowed never to drop the n-word again, just weeks before Gucci Mane was released from Fulton County Jail on Sunday. He vowed that his most recent sentence — for counts of battery, reckless conduct and disorderly conduct — would be his last.

The goal of the Benny Boom-directed shoot, in sum: Promote their fun-fueled collaboration in a way that allows the BAYTL duo to act as tame as possible. Probably a wise move: We need to know these are fun loving, liquid-latex-loving rappers, after all. They nodded and lip-synced in front of the club’s double doors and on the downstairs dance floor. Inside an emergency exit hallway around 10 p.m., V-Nasty sauntered down the stairs, shook hands with one dancer and then rubbed the ass of another vigorously, as if hoping a genie would come out. (A female onlooker: “Aw, she looks good!”) Several hours later though, Boom had to demonstrate how she should move around, swaying as if he was cross-dribbling down the court. Lesson learned: Pace yourself. Or, be more like Gucci, who’s more than a head taller. As the dance floor scene unfolded, he raised his barely-fisted hands and sleepily swiped at the camera. It all looked pathetic when stared at straight on –  but on camera, in front of flashing green lights, these lazy flourishes had suddenly morphed into enviable swagger, effortlessness.

After a few slices of pizza, Gucci Mane disappeared between takes. V-Nasty retreated to sofas at a back corner of the club, though before the last takes outside, she posed with some of the dancers for pictures and raised her eyebrows confusedly in each shot. They sat back as a crew member touched up the body paint jobs on a few ass cracks, as dancers took turns posing on the Big Dog street-style motorcycle inside. Toward the end of the shoot, as men peered at the young pair of painted girls, one reached in front of herself and grabbed the other’s ass, popping it up as if she was opening the hood of her car.

“Whoooooooooooo, aw man!” the camera crew yelled. Gucci and Nasty aside, liquid latex clearly stole the show.

Gucci Mane & V-Nasty – BAYTL Listening Party by GucciMane

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