"All I wanted was a Pepsi"

Today's playlist is all about bands from around here (liberally speaking):

Dead Kennedys -- Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables
Black Flag -- The First Four Years
Suicidal Tendencies (their early years, of course) -- Suicidal Tendencies
Circle Jerks -- Group Sex

The Dead Kennedys stayed an amazing band right up until some former members sued Jello Biafra for *not* selling out in his old age (circa 1998). Oh, please! I think his best quip explaining why he did not try to get their videos played on MTV was to point out that they wrote a song called "MTV - Get Off The Air," but the judge wasn't swayed by that remark. That's too bad. I think Biafra lost the rights to all the songs in that lawsuit. Well, at least we still have him and his label. Check out what he is up to here.

The next two bands, well, they were good in the beginning, but they both turned towards metal. Why do we lose so many good hardcore punk bands to metal? Is it the money? Is it MTV? "Doesn't matter. I'll probably get hit by a car anyway."

And then there was the Circle Jerks. I still love that I could fit their entire first album at the end of my cassette tape after the entire Black Flag album (all on one side). It was like putting a hidden track on a record - you would never know it was there unless you just let the tape play..

"(Bring On The) Dancing Horses"

Echo & The Bunnymen are still around, and they just put a concert video up on their website. If you missed them on their last tour, here's your chance to see everything you missed. And when I say everything, I mean it -- the video must be close to two hours long. Well, you can't really _see_ much because the lighting was, shall we say unfavorable for video, but it's great for playing in the background while you work on your blog...
Check it out here.

Digging Further Back

So I pulled out Joe Jackson's Look Sharp! album today (I can't remember the last time I played it, but I can still sing along with the hits -- Sunday Papers, Is She Really Going Out With Him? & Look Sharp!). Did he really write Got The Time?! That song is unbelievable! It has so much energy that I'm amazed the vinyl can contain it all. It should just break into pieces. He should have done the whole album like that. If he had, though, they would have labeled the record differently, and I would have grouped him with the Circle Jerks or the Buzzcocks instead of with Elvis Costello on today's playlist:

Joe Jackson -- Look Sharp! & I'm The Man

Elvis Costello -- My Aim Is True & This Year's Model

new band

I stumbled across this band on the Jesus & Mary Chain website:

The Meek

Here's a blurb from their myspace page (every band has one of those these days!):

"Whatever else you can say about the late-80s shoegaze contingent, they made good music to take drugs to. Bands like Jesus and Mary Chain and Spacemen 3 drowned their listeners in feedback with songs built of giant, unredeemable, slow-moving noise; washes of barely inflected sound with subdued drums and hollow voices. In the process, the shoegazers, like almost no one else before them, were able to marry the unadulterated blare of White Light/White Heat with the simple pop melodies of Brian Wilson and Phil Spector, navigating the space between the shyness of their manner and the clamor of their music.

"Its therefore good news for those of us who like music to accompany our drug usage that the Meek have taken up the shoegaze torch. Fronted by husband-and-wife team Jeff and Amy Lee, the Meek build swirling towers of distortion and feedback atop sturdy, well-worn drumbeats. Their noise-drubbed songs would come off as derivative if not for the consummate skill with which theyre written. The songs themselves are ominous and dark, captivatingly primitive in their minor-key melodies and steady drone; harking back to an older kind of rock and roll built on simple chord progressions and at the same time moving shudderingly into the future of pure, angry, mechanical sound. Wisely, the Meek never let the layers of fuzz entirely obscure Jeffs voice; bathed in reverb, it drifts from clarity to incomprehensibility as the song ebbs and flows. The band features two guitars, but neither can really be called lead, rather, they twist in and out, overlapping each other, slowing mapping each songs territory."

(my comment -- the music is good even without the drugs)

Here's the link -- they have four songs posted. Check it out.

My Hunt For Blogs Worth Returning To, Part III

If you're in the mood for some musical exploration and some nostalgia, this is a good blog for it:

Post Punk Junk

It has commentary, reminiscing, and lots of files and links (As a rule, I avoid zip files, so I cannot vouch for the safety of those, but I haven't had any trouble with the podcast links)

UPDATE: This page does not seem to exist anymore, but they have a YouTube account. See their regular "broadcasts" here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/postpunkjunk

Look deeper... deeper!

Optical illusions reminiscent of the LSD-fueled art of the 1960s (or, for that matter, of the X-inspired art of the 1990s) are a bit passe, but this optical illusion video does a trick I hadn't seen before that is pretty cool, so I wanted to share. Plus, putting this up allows me to post something other than music -- variety is good, right?
It takes a while for the effect to work, so it might get boring, but if you make it to the end you just might find it was worth it. The mind and the eyes are fascinating pieces of biology, aren't they?

Here's the link.

"I wanna be your dog"

VH1 is airing a history-of-rock-music documentary in 10 parts. Right now they are running the punk episode. Admittedly, they haven't said anything I didn't know 20 years ago, but they have a lot of footage that I have never seen before, and some of it is great -- really raw and in good condition. The VH1 website sucks, but it at least tells you their schedule, so here's the link. Maybe it'll run again sometime:

http://www.vh1.com/channels/vh1_classic/channel.jhtml

Look for:

History of Rock 'n Roll, The: Punk

My Hunt For Blogs Worth Returning To, Part II

Is It Nepotism If It's My Own Alter Ego?

It loses points for not being updated as often as it should be (I have a rather large backload of articles waiting to be read, commented on, and posted), but "the auther" promises to catch up sometime soon. Stay tuned for that.

Blog number 2 has to be Ember's Light. It's my rational & happier side, so it's full of articles on sociology, psychology, & gender issues; environmentalism & civil liberties; news and politics; science and discoveries; theory & philosophy; and a little playful pop culture. Or, at least, that's what it is supposed to be filled with. It's still a work in progress (or a dream I don't really have time for). But give it a chance -- there might be a few gems hidden in it every once in a while.

Ember's Light

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And I Thought Shonen Knife Was Cool

"Japan's bands are by turns bracingly experimental and jubilantly retro, a land where our own greatest music returns with an alienated majesty. How else can one describe the King Brothers' "100%," a song that could make the Black Crowes eat Humble Pie? Or Syrup16g's Elvis Costello-esque "I Hate Music"? Or "Johnny Depp" by Triceratops, an amp-crunching reanimation of Physical Graffiti-era Zep? And you'd swear that the Pillows' "Degeneration" was a hidden track on Matthew Sweet's Altered Beast."

Explore the world of Japanese pop that you can't find in the states in Paul Collin's latest article in Slate Magazine.

My Hunt For Blogs Worth Returning To, Part I

This is the start of a new series exploring the blogging world, looking for the ones worth checking on again and again. My first entry is no big surprise -- there's a permanent link to it on the left. It's the blog maintained by the Late Adopter. His blog covers a range of topics: history & historiography, music & pop culture, politics & current events, and anything else the author wishes to post. It's mostly a collection of great links to interesting articles from all kinds of online publications, with little biased commentary getting in the way. That makes it a good resource of interesting topics that have been popping up amongst the online intellectual community.

You might cry foul over my top choice because I happen to be related to the author of this blog, but frankly, I find myself drawn back to this blog on a regular basis independently of that -- I happen to actually want to read most of the articles he posts. That's pretty cool. This shared interest might be the product of a biological or common experience link, but that cannot be helped. It's still a great blog. Check it out:

The Late Adopter

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"We're a garage band! We come from garageland!"

A mixture of media make up today's playlist (an old record, an old tape, and a new CD):

The Seeds -- A Web of Sound
The Clash -- Clash On Broadway, Vol. 1
Various Artists -- Nuggets Box Set, Vol. 1


And have you heard about Goodstock? It's a 3 day festival of old garage bands taking place this summer. It might be too far away for me to get to it, but I can dream. Read about it here.

Only For People With A High Speed Connection, Unfortunately

If you want to see some great footage of music fans and their favorite bands from the '80s, check this out:

Garage Bands On YouTube

"...and out come the records"

today's vinyl playlist:

Dukes of Stratosphear -- psonic Psunspot
Adam and the Ants -- Kings of the Wild Frontier, Prince Charming
Adam Ant -- Friend or Foe
(It's middle school all over again. Adam Ant is still hilarious & fun, and the Dukes are still as enchanting as ever)

Food For Hoping

"When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

-- Martin Luther King
(Thanks for the quote, Ghost In The Machine)

Read more about Martin Luther King here.

Louder Than Retirement

Anyone want to hear Johnny Marr playing a new song? Last year he agreed to record with the Seattle-based band Modest Mouse. Their first release is coming out. Listen to it here on the All Music Considered website.

And don't forget -- Morrissey is on tour! If you cannot see him this time around, then go get your fix at his myspace page.

Food For Thought

"Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words
directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning
they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and
gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of
the plants that grow in him."

--Nietzsche
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It's cold out...

...so let's wrap ourselves in distortion. Today's playlist:

BRMC -- 1st & 2nd albums
Jesus & Mary Chain -- Psychocandy
Sonic Youth -- Mixed Tape
The Morning After Girls -- Online Song

1, 2, 3, 4

Music to re-organize an office space to (it's a new quarter, after all):

Nuggets Box Set -- disk 1
Left Of The Dial Box Set -- disk 3
No Thanks! The '70s Punk Rebellion -- disk 2

"... And I Feel Fine"

Hat's off to my old fav R.E.M., who will be inducted into the Rock And
Roll Hall of Fame this March. Read about it here.