Zombie-Zombie- A Land For Renegades

Iggy Pop’s Nightclubbing is undeniably the anthem of creepers in the night. It’s sinister drum line and piano chords give you the feeling that cavorting in the darkest of back-alley watering holes in the wee hours is when the good life really goes down. The French electro night-crawler duo, Zombie-Zombie conveys the same sentiment; the night is ALIVE.

Cosmic Neuman and Etienne Jaumet are clearly inspired by horror, ghouls, and Goblin, the experimental trailblazers of the most deliciously terror-inducing film soundtracks. Their themed brand of electronic music is not the only element that sets them apart from today’s saturated genre; they follow the old zombie school of analog recording. Using drums and analog synthesizers, Zombie Zombie rejects the wave of digital influx that has taken over in the recent past and embraces a new sound with the old equipment.

The opening track, Driving Until Death Sets You Free, evokes the energy and heart palpitations of driving 90mph on a pitch-black road with no other cars on it, and sets the tone for the rest of this Parisian team’s first full-length album. Other feelings you might get from listening to Zombie Zombie’s resonant reverberations and psychotic disco beats are wandering through a dark creaky room of an abandoned mansion, dancing at a club full of living dead people who want to eat your brains, or the urge to join the zombie nation yourself and walk like a ghost. When Zombie Zombie does their cover of Nightclubbing, singing in monotone drawls, yelping and breathing heavily onto the track, the fast pulsating beat and organ-like sounds added to it has succeeded in making this already dark tune even darker and this time, the night is alive, but the club goers aren’t. Do the dance of the dead.

Because I Like You: Jay Reatard

Memphis Punk: did you know? 'Cause I didn't, until now. The Elvis capital isn't the first place that comes to mind when sourcing the locational cauldrons of Punk music, but now thanks to Goner Records, a collective scene has been assembled and revealed to the rest of us. Goner started as a label in 1993 by Eric Freidl of The Oblivians, who opened up for Rocket From The Crypt in 1995, where a young high school drop-out named Jay Reatard left before the headliners began and decided he should start writing music. Today, Goner Records is the shogun of deep south punk rock and Jay Reatard is it's salient disciple with his 2006 release, Blood Visions.

Blood Visions is a low-fi garage punk triumph. Reatard, despite what his moniker suggests, is a gifted and full-bodied songwriter with a penchant for that which is fast and loud, and holds a pop sensibility as well. Some have categorized Reatard's sound new-wave, which fits as it resembles the British output of the 70's and 80's when punk morphed into it's proceeding manifestation. In other comparative observations, his aforementioned propensity for the fast and loud as well as repetitive lyrics can lead to citations of The Ramones (as almost all punk that came after 1976 does). If you like (former Jay Reatard tourfellows) Japanther, The Wire, Misfits, and/or The Germs, you will like, but more likely love Jay Reatard and Blood Visions. Allegories aside, Blood Visions is an album of it's own and is a victory for modern school of Punk. 

Read: http://turnit-down.blogspot.com/2007/10/jay-reatard-interview.html

Listen:

Sesame Street Cred

I just spent the last hour YouTubing Sesame Street songs because I occasionally get The Word is No stuck in my head and the more I sing it the more I realize that it's a really good song. Like, a song I would listen now by my own volition. Sesame Street was and is a purveyor of fine taste for the seeds. By bringing in current musical guests to perform their hits but changing the words to lyrics about counting or monsters, the young ones are ushered into the world of popular music with lyrics they can relate to the way we adults relate to Morrissey or Madonna (depending on your mood). The Street boasts bringing in acts like Stevie Wonder to perform Superstition and REM singing "Furry Happy Monsters", and more recently, Feist came in to sing 1,2,3,4 (monsters walking 'cross the floor). They also managed to incorporate more sophisticated varieties, such as Itzhak Perlman and YoYo Ma, and a refined artistic lesson in geometry to the music of minimalist superstar composer Philip Glass. Lastly (but not least-ly), the songs that were exclusively written for Sesame Street educate, entertain, and endure. I Got A New Way To Walk  is cool (especially when Destiny's Child did it), but the Pointer Sisters' Pinball Number Count is eternally funktastic and my personal favorite, The Word Is No sounds like a Cyndi Lauper song that never made it onto She's So Unusual. These jewels were an important part of my childhood musical lexicon and could be part the reason why I love a good hyper 80's synthesizer to this day. Below is the link to the YouTube The Word Is No. Listen and learn. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_celebrity_guest_stars_on_Sesame_Street

RIP: MTV the Brave

Thank you so much, dear Defamer.com, for encapsulating every 20-something's lament for the MTV of yesteryear. Featuring such 90's zeitgeist superstars as Pedro Zamora, Tabitha Soren, Kurt Cobain... and oh, music videos, the article is a eulogy for the once groundbreaking network that was so near and dear to our insubordinate teenage hearts. The network who sprung to popularity by being the first channel dedicated to music videos went from being an incendiary messenger and purveyor of alternative youth culture to a caterer of mainstream jock-culture and glorifier of the spoiled brat.

I refuse to believe that I am just stuck in a time that I liked better by thinking that showing vapid programming that is based on jacuzzi hookups and your average adolescent civilian who isn't famous desperately try to do so is actually cool. I truly believe, deep in my heart, that the post-millennium, reality-TV era teens who are the demographic viewers of today's MTV have been weaned on such crap, and now value it as entertainment. They never saw the days of Headbanger's Ball and Yo! MTV Raps. They were but young cherubs when music videos, the very salt of MTV's vast earth, still occupied a respectable amount of time slots on the network's roster. The experience now is the fruit of the marketing generation, the spring break generation, and the celebrity-as-god's children. 

Here are my disclaimers: I'm not saying Bevis and Butthead were the svengalis of intellect. I'm not saying I don't watch The Hills. I'm 25 years old, so speaking in a "kids these days..." framework is probably a fresh stamp on my license. But, being 25, I managed to escape being a teenager in the days of internet everything and paparazzi pop culture, and watched it spill out in front of me since the start of my second decade. Being at the bulls-eye age of the pop culture target, those in their 20's and 30's have seen a more drastic and rapid change in a short period of time than the more gradual climb of trend experienced by those of Gen. X and their predecessors, and from that, we have all been left a little bruised and confused. The values of the institutions that existed in our lives 10 years ago have drastically changed. 

MTV markets by doing direct "ethnographic studies" of their prototypical viewer, by visiting the homes of whom they consider to be a typical suburban American teen and closely monitoring what "cool" means to them. From these studies they have determined two archetypes to base their shows and the characters in them around; the female "midriff" and her male counterpart, the "mook". These are the characters whom reflect the teens of MTV and are mirrored back to them in all aspects; from TV shows to music selection, or lack thereof. The names speak for themselves, saying "Spring Break" and "Jackass". PBS' Frontline, the TV special which featured a section on MTV's marketing technique described the "mook" as such; "Characterized mainly by his infantile, boorish behavior, the "mook" is a perpetual adolescent: crude, misogynistic--and very, very, angry." The mook and the midriff preserve the infantile alpha-male and his Jane as the leaders of the mainstream teen dream, and forever annihilate the reign of anti-heroes such as Daria in favor of Heidi Montag. It's a sad reality for those who hail from the cutting-edge content of end-of-the-century MTV. So, to answer the question for Defamer... no, I don't want my MTV anymore. But thanks for the memories.

Read: http://defamer.com/5039774/7-mtv+defining-stars-who-wouldnt-be-allowed-on-mtv-anymore

Watch: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/

Because I Like You: Super Furry Animals

Super Furry Animals 2007 release Hey Venus is on heavy rotation in my life this week, especially Run- Away and Carbon Dating, neither of which were released as singles, both of which stand out from the rest of the album. Run- Away is Spector-esque and Brit-pop in the best way possible, while Carbon Dating is a slow and haunting lover's lullaby.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

Everything Counts

This is the first blog. The very first blog. I needed to start doing this, basically, because  I want to talk about music and other thing that fall into the category of that which I love, and this is the modern way to do such things. I have a jumbled brain full of media that I have stored up over time like a little chipmunk with its mouth full of food, never knowing when to swallow it. Or spit it out. RockNRollHighSchool is my spitcup.  

Right now I am reading Please Kill Me, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, and it's getting me more excited about things that already happened than I ever thought possible. As an oral history, PKM presents the reader with a range of viewpoints excerpted from interviews done mostly in McNeil's Punk Magazine, as well as other publications. It's brilliantly arranged; chronologically grouped by era, leading you through time and telling the stories of the bands that collectively started punk music in New York and the hows, whys and whos of the scene, told through anecdotes of those involved. It makes my heart all atwitter to add the gems which PKM provides to my encyclopedia of useless knowledge. Nico gave Iggy Pop his first case of the clap. The Sex Pistol's song, Pretty Vacant was copied directly from the New York Doll's Blank Generation, after Malcolm McLaren went back to England after managing the Dolls. And so on and so on. Is it weird that this book is changing my life?

I have always been a fan of nostalgic material. When I was a kid I watched Hair and listened to Jimi Hendrix and romanticized on hippiedom, so sure that I was born in the wrong era. I fell for the whole thing so hard. It took me up until I was about 19 or 20 to realize that though the 60's had it's moments, the whole "free love" and "free your mind" axiom was partly a movement and revolution, but also a big excuse for teenagers to dose themselves silly and bang their privates together without feeling remorse due to society's constructs. Fuck the man!! Anyway, even though I am now aware of the tendency for anything that takes a look back on a moment in time to accessorize with rose-colored shades, I still fall for it over and over again. It's hard being a realist and a lover. Please Kill Me is doing it to me again, and forcing me to imagine my own little pseudo- exciting life being retold as an important moment in time to an audience who reveres it as history. 

I wonder what percentage of people who take part in these magic moments in cultural history know its going to matter later. With today's instant celebritizing and the narcissism provided by the internet, mostly anyone can deem themselves noteworthy the night after their photo was taken at a club and posted for the world to see. I'm not criticizing it; its the result of technology meeting the social universe. It just makes me curious about who and what will qualify in significant discourse later. The romantic reminiscent inside of me longs for the far more innocent days of art when fame wasn't at the layman's fingertips and people didn't receive so much feedback on themselves... but then again, there goes my blog.