August 31, 2006
VMAUTOPSY
brandon flowers : can't sing
xtina : can
tenacious d : strong
this old houseberlake : stronger, very stronger
rock music : trying
jay-z & beyoncé : kramer vs. kramer
rihanna : not allowed at 825 8th for a little while
pink : all like what?
lou reed : all like rock (and post-facto, rapp)
jack white : needs to see zz top as future, fast
john norris : pimp my nostalgia, best new scalp & teeth
axl rose : extension/chords
panix at disco : so missing the fall out boy kerfuffle
chamillionaire : [go koopa]
james blunt : is "underdog" how?
j.c. penney : the new target
sway : beyoncé, can i have the digits?
beyoncé : ....
ludacris : pls find my hair
pink : lou loves me, he really loves me
pete wentz : all your cape are belong to me, plus, girls are the new baseball cards
jack black : [would introduce me to my chair every day, if I had my druthers]
brendan benson : [all, like, let me sing one]
pharrell : [funny, here I am as a producer, yet I recently released a record of my own]
kanye : [funny, here I am as a presenter, yet I am always release records in my mind]
hype : [funny, here I am]
missy : ...
red hot chili peppers : ...
sarah silverman : [watch me redeem all penis jokes, byaah]
August 30, 2006
BERSERKER AND BERSERKERER
Joe Gross with an oral history of Scratch Acid, the band I will be most sad to be missing when I miss this.
August 25, 2006
MORE ON THIS IN A WEEK, ON THE MAIN STAGE
How many people have turned around their performing game like this, a full 180? To those who bet on Chan early—good look.
DRUM ROLL, PLEASE
Details will be on The New Yorker Festival website, but not until September 4th. If people sign up for something called Festival Wire, they will get access to the information on Monday, August 28th.
Here is the official, in-house announcement:
"The New Yorker Dance Party
hosted by New Yorker pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones
with special guest DJ Michael Mayer
Opening set by DJ Ezekiel Honig
Date: Friday, Oct.6
Time: 10pm – 2am
Place: T New York, 240 West 52nd Street (must be 21+ to enter)
Tickets: $20, available through Ticketmaster. On sale 9/7 at 12 noon EST. (Be aware that tickets to the Festival sell out very quickly.)"
August 24, 2006
MOTHER COURAGE, MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, AUGUST 23, 2006
Best rap moments:
Jay-Z, enjoying other people's concerts more than his own.
Mariah—rather than asking DJ Clue? to play a recording of "We Gonna Make It"—has Jadakiss and Styles come on and do the song, live, while she's backstage changing. "I was so busy, I didn't event get to say hi to them!"
Was Puffy's entire purpose to wait around for fifteen years so he could do a thirty second walk-on for Mariah? Yes. Or: it was the first time I've ever been happy to see Puffy.
Tributes:
Luther Vandross, courtesy of Trey Lorenz, who would like you to know that he has an album coming out September 19th.
O.D.B.
Best songs:
"Vision of Love." ("Can I take my time with this one?")
"Hey DJ," The World Famous Supreme Team.
"The Body Rock," The Treacherous Three.
"Genius of Love," Tom Tom Club.
"We Belong Together."
"It's Great To Be Here," Jackson 5.
Most entertaining moment: When Mariah stopped the show for two minutes so her pastor could be located to deliver two lines of dialogue.
Worst merch call: Buying small instead of medium. (Everything in the Garden looks big.)
August 23, 2006
MOTHER COURAGE, DELACORTE THEATER, MONDAY, AUGUST 21, 2006
(This wack photo is the only evidence I was at the show. When I pulled out the PowerShot—on its last legs, held together with tape and announcing "memory card error" every other time I turn it on—an usher scuttled over and hit me with the visual cockblock. Good thing I didn't photograph that big empty stage.)
So. "Mother Courage." Is long. Repeats self. Re-states Brecht's evergreens: People suck, and they suck most at precisely those moments—e.g., war—when you'd like them to kick it up a notch and rise above their inherent suckiness. The promise of sex or money will trump any moral convictions, all of which turn out to be loosely held anyway.
Kevin Kline is Kevin Kline, which means that if you've seen a Kevin Kline movie, and you've seen a Brecht play, you know what he does. Austin Pendleton has one nice comic turn with an ax. Except for Mother Courage's son, Swiss Cheese, the rest of the cast mostly just gets their lines right.
But there's this other person on stage. Meryl Streep. I am not sure why an actor would agree to be on stage with Streep. It would be like challenging a supercomputer to do the Sunday crossword. Her acting contains an infinite number of folds: when a line needs to serve a purpose—highlight Brecht's distrust of spectacle, hammer home a filthy double entendre, simply be loud—she just pulls out a little more fabric. When she acts, it seems as if nobody else on stage has read the script.
WHO'S THE BOSS?
Get over to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square—they're selling copies of Kelis’s “Wanderland” for $4.99. And remember that Danity Kane came out yesterday.
August 22, 2006
NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL __________!
We can argue about the word. I am not sure we can argue about this track selection, though.
August 21, 2006
VANS
Wanted to take a picture of the D-Shep promo van for J-Shep, but D's van and my rental car were both going south on 75/85. Photo op was not the safety-first move.
August 18, 2006
August 16, 2006
DON'T GO OUT OF BUSINESS
Stay in business. Don't go out of business. Stay in business. Stay on your grind.
IS CALLING A CD "UNAPPRECIATED"
and then selling it for $6.99 a redundancy; a loss leader move; a self-fulfilling prophecy; an indication of the state of music as a physical commodity; or all of the above?
August 15, 2006
QUERY
Has anyone noticed that the keyboard pad and chord sequence used in Madonna's "Get Together" are almost identical to the keyboard bits in The Streets' "Blinded by the Lights"? Yes—sort of.
GEORGIA PEACH
Why leave the finest weather of New York's summer to fly into the hotbox of ATL? To do my one-two, step, of course.
(I taught myself how to play bass by copying Phalon's father's work on "Holy Ghost." This song made me think that "holiness" was a concept that had something to do with me. I decided that the bass had something to do with me, though traces of The Beyond stuck to the idea of the practice. [See also Prince.] If you don't have a copy of "Holy Ghost," please get up off your cakes for goodness sake and take care of this NOW. Get the longest version you cand find, invite your dancing people over, and play the song five times in a row, as loud as you can. ALL YOUR PARTY ARE BELONG TO BAR-KAYS.)
August 11, 2006
EARL GREYHOUND, MERCURY LOUNGE, AUGUST 10, 2006
See them ASAP. Matt Whyte played guitar and sang. Kamara Thomas played bass and sang. Ricc Sheridan beat the holy hell out of a beautiful Ludwig set with a 97-inch kick drum. This man is the rock drummer in New York you need to see, NOW. The next closest drummer would rank, proportionately, at #14.
August 10, 2006
August 09, 2006
DOUBLE DISC
Hearing OutKast's "Hollywood Divorce," two things came to mind, and they will come to many minds, quickly: Could Andre 3000 be more disappointing on this track? Could Lil Wayne be any better? Is he going to get better, and what will that be like?
A QUICK ONE WHILE HE'S AWAY
Good to see the title track from Julius Hemphill's 1972 album "Dogon A.D." made available here. As stated in the Destination: OUT post, "Dogon A.D." and "Coon Bid'ness" are at the peak of the underdeveloped but potentially bananas free funk genre. All of these tracks should be easily available, but they never were, even when they were "in print." Those Arista/Freedom titles were always disappearing, leading me to believe more than once that I had imagined a record that didn't really exist.
August 08, 2006
MANU CHAO, PROSPECT PARK BANDSHELL, AUGUST 7, 2006
Summer in Brooklyn is hot, but "the winter is very long where I grew up, in Paris. Nothing to do. Like the punks in 1977 said, no future. That is more true now, for these kids. But we will play anywhere, anyway."
August 06, 2006
August 05, 2006
METS VS. PHILLIES, SHEA STADIUM, AUGUST 5, 2006
A close one. This guy made it bad, early. Late, Endy Chavez tied the bow and completed a comeback. Mr. Chavez seems to be eating all the Wheaties that Lastings Milledge refuses to eat.
The need to complain is as fierce as the need for ice cream in an upside down plastic baseball helmet. When Mike DeFelice dropped a pitch, with little at stake—no runners in motion, nobody advancing—a man behind me shouted: "Piazza woulda had that! Carter woulda had that!"
August 02, 2006
DIXIE CHICKS, MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, AUGUST 1, 2006
Look above and you will see what the crowd does when the band plays "Not Ready To Make Nice." (The signs read "THANK YOU," if it's not clear.) Here is Natalie singing that song, and here are Emily, Natalie and Martie playing a song which did not make anybody hold up a sign.
Natalie gave Mel Gibson a shout-out, and remarked that if she had entered rehab and said she was drunk at the time of The Incident™, she'd have gotten off the hook.
The lights went down after every song.
One wonders what would have happened if The Beatles had sulked for three years after John's "bigger than Christ" comment. Or, put another way: If this had been rap beef, the Dixies and Toby Keith would have put out their songs right away—oh, wait, he did—and the whole thing would have been wrapped up in a few months. As it is, their self-regard (WE ARE ALL WEARING BLACK) has extended an interesting moment past its interestingness and lost them a chunk of their audience either by a) boring the core lefties to death; or b) not being the right form of contrite for the rightists.
DESMOND CHILD, MARION RAVEN, MEAT LOAF, AVALON, JULY 31, 2006
What happens at every press conference: The people on stage take turns saying that the other people standing (or sitting) on stage are actually, really, the people who are responsible for the fact that the product they are promoting is so good and buyable.
What was different about the press conference for Meat Loaf's "Bat Out Of Hell III":
1. We heard Meat Loaf talk, which could go on for a good, long time and not be boring.
2. We saw Marion Raven, who seems to be what a machine in Norway has done with Alanis Morissette. (On the cover of the 2005 Raven album I own, "Here I Am," she exhibits no preference for leather.)
3. We saw Desmond Child, which was like seeing Oz.
4. We saw Nikki Sixx be the median, not the peak.
5. We heard a song called "The Beast Is Loose" seven times, the point at which any song will wedge itself in your head.