I know, I know, Holbo is random pop culture guy, but you seem to be the best candidate for CTer with (at least prior) affection for “Take Marx… Take Jesus… Take Hope.”
That’s probably right (and I like the gentle suggestion that I am the not-popular culture guy, or, as one of our readers said to me, the “archaic lower-middle-brow British culture” guy). I even saw the Housemartins once, which given my record of attending live popular music events demonstrates remarkable affection (none for 15 years, and only about 10 which didn’t involve Loudon Wainwright III or Richard Thompson before that). I’ve even got all their albums (well, both of them).
But, I thought, is there a song for today? Sitting on a Fence?; Get up off our knees?; Heaven Help Us All (introduced by Peely)?; We’re Not Going Back? (The Christians among you are bound to recognise the sentiments in Sunday isn’t Sunday — I have a “Antidisestablishmentarians for Obama” button, which I got because I figured it announced my membership of a vanishingly small minority group.. My friend told me I was being elitist. “Why, antidisestablishmentarianism is a non-elite view, here”; “Yes, but only elitists know what it means”. What can you do?)
Take your pick. And, sure, the world will be a little bit better tomorrow, but not enough better that you can’t make it better still.
Update: Doug K nominates Caravan of Love. I could go with that.
Amazon is giving away a a free ‘sampler’ album from Light In the Attic records. It’s drop dead fantastic, I say. It’s got “Katie Cruel”, by Karen Dalton [wikipedia]. Such an amazing song, and an amazing voice – like Billie Holiday decided to sing a perfect contribution to the soundtrack for “Deadwood”. Dalton’s In My Own Time was released in 1970, then only made it to CD a couple years ago. Then there is “An Elegy”, some kind of champagne trip soul hop remix of a Free Design track. Then another Free Design track, “Make The Madness Stop”. (Either you like Free Design or you don’t. It’s totally ridiculous stuff.) Then there’s a crazy great Betty Davis track, “He Was A Real Freak”. A fun ringer, “Sugar Man”, from someone named Rodriguez. The brief bio from the label is interesting. His 1970 album is “one of the lost classics of the ’60s, a psychedelic masterpiece drenched in colour and inspired by life, love, poverty, rebellion, and, of course, “jumpers, coke, sweet mary jane”. The album is Cold Fact, and what’s more intriguing is that its maker – a shadowy figure known as Rodriguez – was, for many years, lost too. A decade ago, he was rediscovered working on a Detroit building site, unaware that his defining album had become not only a cult classic, but for the people of South Africa, a beacon of revolution.” Also on the sampler are a couple of solid reggae/r&b tracks – especially “Chips – Chicken – Banana Split”, by Jo Jo and the Fugitives. The tracks by The Black Angels and the Saturday Knights are solid, too. Like I said: great album, and free.
I see that the Black Angels just played a Halloween gig with Roky Erikson. That reminds me of another free mp3 to pass along. A great cover of Erikson’s “You Don’t Love Me Yet”. I know about that one because I really enjoyed Jonathan Lethem’s novel – same title
– which didn’t get much attention. It’s kinda like Philip K. Dick wrote an episode of “Friends”. But in a good way. No, that’s not what it’s like, except for the names. What can I say? It’s a slight work, evoking aimlessly attractive youth. There are comic couplings and decouplings, and very nicely written it is.
I know what day it is. But every post can’t be about the election.
Yesterday I linked to an archive of free Leroy Carr mp3s. All well and good. Then I noticed that they are part of a much larger collection. Very nice. (Scroll down, down, little farther. There.) Today I listened to dozens of those tracks, while messing about in Photoshop. Dum de dum. Perfect Sunday, really. Turned out the one I liked best was Blind Willie McTell (two great, free mp3s). Interesting. It had never occurred to me that Bob Dylan’s claim that “no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell” was a proposition subject to empirical confirmation. Also, I hadn’t realized that the White Stripes “Your Southern Can Is Mine” was a cover.
I was going to say YouTube Saturday. But YouTube has only got a couple. Whereas you can download 10 free Leroy Carr mp3’s here. Says they are in the public domain. I recommend: all of them. But you might start with “How Long How Long Blues”, “When the Sun Goes Down” and “How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone”, later covered by the Supremes. Speaking of which: you can hear an unreleased demo of the Supreme’s version here.
The Les Paul and Mary Ford TV Show (there are 10 or so of these). Mary Ford is always petting the plant or spreading avocado on bread or something suitably domestic while she sings.
I’m sure there’s nothing to this so-called ‘financial crisis’ that wasn’t explained adequately in that classic Sutherland instructional video, “The Wise Use Of Credit”. If not, then in that companion volume, “What Makes Us Tick”.
We have a friend who travels on business to India a lot. He was discussing how maybe next week isn’t the best week to be away from home because if the whole system melts down he’ll get stuck in Bangladesh, with the airlines unable to buy gas for the planes because money has seized up globally. Getting back to Singapore would be like a cross between Burmese Days and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Not that he really thinks that. It’s just that everyone is thinking that. I mean: it almost definitely won’t happen.
I’ll just talk nonsense for a while. Because: what do I know? I praised Scott Morse’s art a couple weeks ago. Since then I bought a new collection of his stuff, Scrap Mettle [amazon]. You can check out this preview from his upcoming Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! . (If you missed my first post and don’t know who Scott Morse is, you can read his wikipedia entry, or check out this site. I linked to his blog above. He’s done animation stuff and other stuff.) [click to continue…]
I’m curious. How much music do you have on your computer? I just passed the 75 gig mark. iTunes informs me that is 49.5 days worth. That seems like a lot. But I don’t feel that I have too much. How much does the average blog reader have?
In case you don’t have enough music, I kinda enjoyed Grizzly Bear “Two Weeks” (live on Letterman) – downloadable from Stereogum here.
bq. Oh by the way: “Country First” is a fascist idea. There ought to be a fairly large number of people, things and groups that are more important to you than your “country.”
Well, as a Brit, I oughtn’t to intrude, but I can report that within seconds of reading Jim’s post, a certain Woody Guthrie song was going through my head …..
Sitting here in the UK, I have no idea whether you people in other places can see everything that the BBC is putting out on its iPlayer service. If you can’t, then tell me in comments. If you can then enjoy Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story and the Stax/Volt tour of Norway (1967), both broadcast in the UK a week ago. Superb stuff, and good reason to think of Booker T and the MGs as one of the top bands of all time.
Quiet around here so I’ll keep up the weekend nonsense posts.
I really like Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch”. It’s a great single and a fun video. However, it is disconcerting to me, on some level, that the song is basically a cross between Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” all runway cold and post-electropunk. I think that a mash-up of those three songs would be great, if anyone wanted to go to the trouble.
Furthermore, I would like to inquire: what do you think of The Talking Heads? I’ve been listening to a lot of old Heads and I’m puzzled. The first big concert I ever went to was the Heads on the Stop Making Sense tour. It was very early in the tour and Byrne didn’t even have the big suit yet. I would sort of like to be able to claim that this very influential band somehow defined a musical moment, and I was there. But, on reflection, they don’t seem to have had all that much lasting influence. It seems like they matured from a spare, NY-style art rock outfit into a pretty good disco band, sound-wise, with Byrne as flamboyant nerd-showman. But there’s only one David Byrne, so it’s not as though subsequent bands have copied that. And it’s not as though indie music subsequently went the pretty good disco band route. So they were, oddly, an evolutionary dead-end. Am I just talking nonsense?
I’m organizing a book event for Doug Wolk’s Reading Comics [amazon], which is now out in paperback. The event will be nominally hosted at the Valve. I got to know Doug on the strength of mocking him with my masterful New Skrullicism post of yore. Then I read this great book of his, which only made me like him more. I posted about it here. Anyway, this post is mostly a heads-up that the event is going to happen round aboutish July 10. I’ve already got participants lined up, but several people are going to participate just by posting on their own blogs so you are welcome to show up in the usual ‘I’ve got a blog too’ way.
In other news: I’ve really been enjoying a lot of music by people named Finn. The two albums currently on heavy rotation are The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive (lead singer Craig Finn) and Liam Finn’s I’ll Be Lightning. A couple YouTube links: Liam Finn’s “Second Chance” and The Hold Steady’s “Little Hoodrat Friend” and “The Swish”. But the one you really need to listen to and watch is “Stuck Between Stations”. Bruce Springsteen wishes he was as awesome as vaguely Randy Newmanesque Craig Finn. Who is apparently starved for groupies. I’m not really eligible myself.
A short appreciation by Phil Jupitus available for a short time here.
For newcomers, here are renditions of You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Life on Mars (beautiful, actually), and, for the many Dick Barton fans out there, the Devil’s Gallop. I can’t find Anarchy in the UK, I’m afraid, you’ll have to see them live for that.
This ArsTechnica write-up of some recent research of mine has received numerous votes on the recommendation site Digg in the last few hours. I wonder if it will make the front page of Digg, although as a Twitter contact of mine noted, since it’s not a top-10 list (nor, if I might add, does it cover Google or Apple), that may be unlikely.
The post reports on a study in which we found that male college students are more likely than their female counterparts to share creative content online even though both men and women in the sample are equally likely to create such content. However, when controlling for online skill, the gender differences in posting go away.
Gina Walejko and I published the paper “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age” this Spring in the journal Information, Communication and Society. We examine the extent to which college students share creative content online and whether we can identify any systematic differences by user background. In particular, we looked at whether students create and share the following types of material: poetry/fiction, artistic photography, music, and video (both completely own and remixed in the case of the latter two), including both private and public sharing. [click to continue…]
Eurovision isn’t really my bailiwick but you can learn history reading about this stuff. From Reuters UK:
“Other countries got support from their neighbours. Germany didn’t get any support at all from its neighbours.” …
“Russia won thanks to considerable help from its neighbours. The Russian song wasn’t bad but it wasn’t any better than the rest.”
Even though Germany shares borders with nine countries, it has a turbulent past – having invaded most of these nations.
I guess this is Russia’s reward for always being nice to its neighbors. Discuss.
Or watch some classic J-pop. This one is from the 3rd episode of “Pink Lady and Jeff”, a show that perhaps did not fail due to lingering resentment about that Pearl Harbor business. This is “Chameleon Army”, sung to the tune of “Rawhide”, give or take. (Note the changing colors of the outfits.) And “Monster”. Very Discozilla Chic. The ladies are still looking good. Here they are in 2004, remaking “Pepper Keibu”, which is – I think – Japanese for “Viva Las Vegas”. I couldn’t think of a good title for a Pink Lady post, so Belle suggested that one. How do you like it? (Honestly, until an hour ago we had never even heard of Pink Lady.)
. It’s drop dead fantastic, I say. It’s got “Katie Cruel”, by 
[amazon], and I think it’s fantastic. Here’s 
[amazon]. I just bought it and, boy, am I happy.