March 09, 2008

Benverine!

There are two kinds of people in this world.

There’s people who will look at the following images and ask, flabbergasted: “Why the hell would you waste your time making those pictures?”

And then there’s people who will look at the following images and ask, flabbergasted: “Why the hell weren’t these pictures the first images that were made immediately within seconds of the invention of Photoshop?”

So there you have it. Ben Vereen + Wolverine = Benverine. Yep.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 09:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 25, 2007

From the Wikipedia article for the band Urban Dance Squad

Urban Dance Squad - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But it all started in the Netherlands on the initiative of musicians who refused to be curbed by the pigeon-hole mentality of the time. The non-committal character of a jam session soon grew into the fixed form of a close group that laid the foundation for the band’s later international success.

UDS’s first two years were pretty chaotic. The band appears on a series of fascinating club performances, strategic supporting performances (with Red Hot Chili Peppers), well-chosen radio and TV performances and ‘special events’ (with Masters of Reality and De La Soul). The band’s live reputation grows. The word is out, there is a build-up of nervous commotion, everybody wants to be ‘on time’. In this ‘obscure’ period - no record yet, but live on MTV Europe - UDS sweeps the New Music Seminar NY (summer 1989) off its feet. Wherever the Squad appears there is disbelief and pure delight.

UDS’s first two years were pretty chaotic. The band appears on a series of fascinating club performances, strategic supporting performances (with Red Hot Chili Peppers), well-chosen radio and TV performances and ‘special events’ (with Masters of Reality and De La Soul). The band’s live reputation grows. The word is out, there is a build-up of nervous commotion, everybody wants to be ‘on time’. In this ‘obscure’ period - no record yet, but live on MTV Europe - UDS sweeps the New Music Seminar NY (summer 1989) off its feet. Wherever the Squad appears there is disbelief and pure delight.

The whole article is written in this tone. I have basically never seen a Wikipedia band article that was so obviously written by the band. Good show, Urban Dance Squad.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 12:21 AM | Comments (6996) | TrackBack

December 25, 2006

Come on, man…

Get up! Get on up! Get up! Get on up!

Ok, I guess it’s not working. He’s still dead. I just thought it was worth a try.

Rest in Peace, James Brown.

(Also, everybody who’s reading this, in case you think I have no respect, I beg you, for your own enrichment, to pick up that reissue they put out two years ago of James Brown live at the Apollo from the 50’s. It’s really really astonishingly great.)

Posted by Nate Kushner at 08:56 PM | TrackBack

August 03, 2005

A Concert Review of Kindness: The Wrens at Maxwell’s, Hoboken

Scarcely a fortnight after headlining Pitchfork’s Intonation Festival in Chicago in front of nearly 10,000 pairs of black-rimmed glasses and humans to whom those glasses were affixed, Indie-stalwarts The Wrens returned to Maxwell’s in Hoboken last Thursday to rock a sold-out crowd of perhaps two hundred people, your humble music-fancying AWOK member among them.

My friend Kevin and I hit the Washington Street Strip in Hoboken (like the Vegas Strip with fewer adults and casinos) around 8:00, and we didn’t want to show up for the 8:30 concert on time, cause we’re not losers, plus we didn’t want The Wrens to think we were too anxious, so we popped into a nearby bar with a chalkboard outside advertising $3 margaritas. This is important to the review not because we ended up getting drunk and stage diving or some predictable “oh-that’s-where-this-story-was-going” crap, it’s important because every minute the two opening acts were onstage, we were angry we’d chosen to see them and not to continue chewing on frozen strawberries.

We arrived at 8:50, not fashionably late enough, and by “fashionably,” I mean that the opening band, The Amber Jets, was not good. In addition to expending about three calories of energy moving during the entire set, the lead singer was distressingly old-looking—the word “Amber” perhaps referred to the singer’s having been trapped in amber for thousands of years before being reconstructed using the DNA of a frog that lacked lilly-pad presence. They finished at 9:45ish, and we found a place to sit at 9:46ish, but before we’d come up with a pun on Amber Jets that sufficiently described their mediocrity—“Lame-ber Jets” was about as close as we got—The Milwaukees hit the stage and we were instantly deafened and still are. It was the loudest non-Ozzfest performance I’ve ever been subjected to, and granted, we were right by the speaker, but there’s never a need for a wannabe Eve-6 / Jimmy Eat World foursome to ever be unleashed on the public anyway, much less at nine billion decibels per square suck. While the rest of the crowd pretended to be rocking, Kevin and I were sitting and had our fingers in our ears, which was less a statement against the band than it was pure survival instinct. So the Milwaukees weren’t good. And they were from Jersey, not Milwaukee. And Robin Yount wasn’t even in the band, which was bullshit.

So finally, the Wrens hit the stage at 10:50, then proceeded to set up their own instruments and undergo a sound check that took literally twenty minutes, prompting Kevin’s comment, “more like the Whens!” They kept starting songs and riffs and people kept cheering, but no one could tell if it was the actual concert or still the sound check; if Charlie Kaufman had written it, it would have been brilliant. Funnier still, the guitarist was, oddly, the only member of the band who didn’t look like a fortysomething guitar teacher, and I grew convinced that their new single, Let’s Start By Learning The Peter Gunn Theme, has got to be in the works. Finally, after singing the opening thirty-second track from the Meadowlands album (without the crickets, which made me instantly yell for my money back) the band ripped into the set at nine billion decibels, and the concert was off and running, or should I say, flying, because, you know, that’s what wrens do.

The venue was phenomenally fan-friendly and the band took full advantage; at one point, Kevin Whelan pulled a drunken frat-looking kid onstage and let him sing about half of Faster Gun and he absolutely nailed it, which was awesome enough, then Whelan punctuated it with the comment, “I’d like to thank my dad for coming up onstage and singing with us.” Later, Whelan’s triumphant proclamation, “we are from fucking New Jersey!” was greeted with massive applause and cleared up any doubts about the hometown origins of the band whose two albums are called The Meadowlands and Secaucus and were playing in Hoboken at a benefit for Jersey Beat Magazine. Needless to say, they owned the crowd from the opening millisecond well through Happy and Hopeless, their two best songs, and some scorchers from Seacaucus, which they delivered masterfully. After the last song, the band left the stage, and, since there was no backstage and nowhere to go in the packed room, they just sort of walked through the crowd, then back onto the stage for the encore, obliging shouts of “She Sends Kisses!” by playing the pseudo-ballad at nine billion decibels, then shooting into a finale at twelve billion decibels to cap off an absolutely stu-Wren-dous set. As much as I love the introspective, bitterly subdued Meadowlands album, hearing The Wrens live gave me a new perspective on just how angry and bleak they can be while still rocking harder than any other band on earth named after a type of bird. Unless, of course, you count the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

Overall, on my Indie-Concert-O-Meter, The Wrens’ performance at Maxwell’s scores three ironic T-shirts out of four. Well done, you adults!

Posted by Dan Hopper at 10:24 AM | Comments (4)

June 12, 2005

The Tonys vs The Grammies

Last week’s Tony Awards got me to thinking: which award is lamer, the Tony or the Grammy? In this writer’s opinion, there’s no contest.

It angers me slightly that anything thrown onto a live stage is endowed with an instant artistic vindication. The “Vagina Monologues,” for instance, is seen as a valiant feminine-empowering cry to society, when, in reality, the show is a sprawling, unfunny, uninteresting mess, and any person who finds it empowering probably doesn’t deserve to be empowered. The task of the Tonys is to reward one of the perhaps seven Broadway musicals that are produced in a year as the best, though in reality, the most impressive element of Broadway remains its magical ability to, say, garner critical respect for “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” or to make the songs of Abba even gayer. Save the sitcom, the Broadway musical is the only contemporary art form that makes no effort to improve or progress beyond its formulaic foundation, and any attempts to do so get obliterated like Gallagher melons on the Berlin Wall. In 1989. You know what I meant. On the other hand, though, there have been a multitude of extremely deserving straight plays which have been awarded Tonys, plus there have been plenty of good musicals over the years, so, as pissed off as I was to sit through the 2005 Tonys (though “A Light in the Piazza won “Best Lighting,” and that’s funny) there is no doubt in my mind that the Grammies remain far and away the most vomit-inducing yearly award spectacle.

First off, the Grammy Award is valueless. In 2005, there were 107 Grammy Awards and 535 nominations dished out. How many fucking songs could possibly get written in a year? Maybe, like, two hundred? By those numbers, I’ve concluded that any song that anyone writes in a given year has a 268% chance of getting at least nominated for a Grammy, and that percentage is considerably higher for corpses, women who play the piano (Zowee!), and for bands who consider the sound of a dead horse being beaten to be a viable rhythmic backbone.

If you live in a lead-lined cave and somehow missed the 2005 Grammies, I’ll bring you up to speed, even though I missed them too and have seen no evidence they occurred. For starters, Bill Miller took home the coveted “Best Native American Album” for his magnum opus “Cedar Dream Songs,” but, while Billy’s “Cedar Dream” came true, his “Dream of an End to Reservation Alcoholism” remains in an Axl-Rose-esque stasis of incompletion. “Best Hawaiian Music Album” went to “Slack Key Guitar Volume 2,” which is not a compact disc but rather an actual pineapple, though it was deemed to be more a pineapple than the four other nominees in the characteristically stacked Hawaiian category. Brave Combo scored “Best Polka album,” Jack Renner grabbed “Best Engineered Album, Classical” and Tom Chapin pulled off the upset to take “Best Spoken Word Album for Children,” and you know I’m not making these up, because none of them involve 1920s moustaches. To save time, no speeches are allowed at the Grammies, and the statues are given out by an elderly ballgame peanut vendor who strolls down the aisles and tosses out awards and peanuts as the winners are announced.

The greater argument against the Grammy is its flagrant irrelevance, evidenced annually by how poorly the awards reflect significant modern music. In addition to defendable wins by Outkast and Lauryn Hill, Grammy’s “Album of the Year” winners since 1990 include Tony Bennett, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Santana, Steely Dan, a bunch of dudes playing bluegrass, and, in 2005, Ray Charles. Where should I start? Since its 1992 Grammy win, “Clapton Unplugged” has collected more dust than “The Joshua Tree” and “Best of the Doors” combined. Steely Dan’s “Two Against Nature” isn’t ballsy enough to function as a paperweight, and that’s from a band named after a dildo (no joke) which was named after me (joke). Now it’s Ray Charles, a man who hasn’t written a song that’s not about Pepsi in 25 years, appearing as a blue Jedi ghost to beat nominees Kanye West and Greenday for “Best Album,” though Greenday still took “Best Impersonation of The Clash Impersonating Greenday.” Etta James won a Grammy this year, she’s 67. Herbie Hancock won one. Henry fucking Mancini won one, and he’s been dead since 1994. Zach Braff won one for the “Garden State” soundtrack - I’ve made mix cds with Nick Drake on them, where’s my fucking award? The Grammy is nothing more than a meaningless ego-perpetuated trinket that reminds us year after year that not everything worth doing is worth rewarding.

Now that’s a rant. Think I got a shot at the Criticism Pulitzer?

Posted by Dan Hopper at 07:44 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

May 09, 2005

Fuck Pick Withers!

Here’s a funny story to tide you over while we finish the tinkering we need to do to get the newest video up.

There has been a sign posted on the inside of the elevator of my building that I have been following with interest. for a week:

Hey Neighbors

I have a friend who is in
DIRE STRAITS
and needs an apartment
ASAP
as in today or tomorrow.
Please Email her (Krystal)
At (handwritten e-mail address)

If you can assist her.
Thanks Liz from (Apartment Number)

Well, hell, I had a pen on me, and I’d had a little to drink the first night that I saw this in the elevator. So of course I wrote a little something right next to the Dire Straits part:

I’d room with Mark Knopfler, hell yeah!

A few days later, someone else had written under my comment.

Fuck yeah, I would!

A few days later, in a different handwriting:

But not Pick Withers, fuck him.

Later, a note that I think was by the “Fuck yeah, I would” guy:

Fuck Pick Withers!

The sign had been taken down this morning by the time I could reply/steal it.

Video coming soon, I swear.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 06:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 23, 2005

The Ten Greatest Albums of All Time

…as selected by various institutions

VH1

1. The Beatles – Revolver
2. Nirvana – Nevermind
3. The Beatles – Rubber Soul
4. The Beatles – Abbey Road
5. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
6. Nirvana – Bleach
7. The Beatles – The White Album
8. Nirvana – In Beatlero: Nirvana Sings The Beatles
9. The Beatles – Come Together As You Are: The Beatles Guess What Nirvana Will Sound Like In the Future and Plays That
10. Nirvana - An Interview With Krist Novoselic In Which He Mentions the Word “Beetle” When Coaxed Into a Tangent About Insects

Q

1. The Smiths – The Queen Is Dead
2. The Stone Roses – Stone Westminster Abbey
3. Radiohead – Take the Lift to the Thames
4. Oasis – Kilometres and Kilometres of Overratede
5. Manic Street Preachers – Bangers n’ Mash? Cheers.
6. Blur – Birds Who Love Blokes Who Love Bobbies Who Love Crumpets
7. The Libertines – Shine Your Boots, Guvnah?
8. Muse – We Claim India In the Name of Figgy Pudding
9. The Futureheads – Blimey!
10. Various Artists – Music to Synch Boobs to: The Benny Hill Soundtrack

Rolling Stone

1. Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
2. Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On, Token Black Inclusion? (1971)
3. Elvis Presley – The Sun Sessions (1955)
4. Frank Sinatra – Singing the Twelve Songs That Exist Now (1946)
5. Robert Johnson – Good Because It Sounds Old (1935)
6. Hick Playing Bluegrass – Got Moonshine On Me Banjo (1922)
7. Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand (1912)
8. Samuel Morse – Telegraph Signals Captured On Wax Cylinder (1846)
9. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Sonata in G for Harpsichord, Violin (Flute) and Cello (1764)
10. A Trilobite Fossil From the Paleozoic Era With Trapped Air That May Have At One Time or Another Contained Sound (550 million years ago)

Spin

1. Kanye West – The Next Big Thing
2. Franz Ferdinand – Check That, the Next Big Thing
3. The Streets – A Thing!!! And Big and Next!!! Ahhhh!!!!
4. Modest Mouse – Oh Whoops, How’d We Forget These Guys? No, Really, It’s Them.
5. The Killers – Yo, Dudes, What About Us?
6. Interpol – We’re The Next Thing, Only Bigger! What’re You Guys Gonna Do, Kill Us? Ooooh…
7. Bloc Party – Sorry, Interpol, 2004 is Interp-over
8. Interpol – Oh Yeah? Your Mother.
9. Loretta Lynn – Oh For Christ’s Sake, Grow the Fuck Up. Oh, and Also, It’ll Be Me.
10. Elliott Smith – All Right, This Is the Magazine Again. No More Bull. We Swear, This Guy’s Going to be Huge. He is a Thing, and Next, and — Wait, What? Really?? God Damnit.

Scientific American

1. Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
2. King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King
3. Genesis – Paintings of Dragons by Dragons
4. Yes – Nine Synthesized Hours
5. Kansas – The Book in the Window of the Tower in the Castle of Dreams
6. Traffic – Solos That Never Actually End, You Have to Manually Hit Stop
7. Moody Blues – Flutes Over 8th Grade Poetry
8. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer – Hourglass Sands of Crushed Crystal Dragons
9. Rush – You’ve Just Purchased This Album and that Fact Can Never Be Undone
10. Mike Oldfield – Never Seen a Vagina? Listen to This

Pitchfork

1. The Pixies – Dolittle
2. Arcade Fire – FYI, There’s Some Kissing Space Left on My Right Cheek
3. Word UnrelatedWord – Incoherence Equals Respectability
4. Punk;Tuation!@ – I Can’t Believe It’s Not Coldplay
5. The Plural Nouns – Cover Art and Twenty-Eight Minutes of Static-Filled Crap
6. Obscurey McGee – The Obscure Album
7. Hp (Hip) – Melody Is For Sellouts
8. Guy With Dictaphone – Memo to Self: Doctor’s Appointment on the 12th
9. Band You’ve Heard of – Desperate Plea For Relevance
10. Who the Hell? – Even We Don’t Know Who We Are or What This Is

Juice

1. The Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
2. The Ramones – Ramones
3. Rebel Against the Mutiny – The Way Things Are Should Fucking Change
4. Black Item – Decapitating Goats Then Having Sex With the Hole In the Neck
5. The Dead Persons of Authority – Irony Is For Robot Raves
6. Lexus Painsaw Ass-acre – Eye Before Me Except After Spree
7. Servers of Death – Our Special Tonight Is The Grilled Lamb Top Sirloin Wrapped In Applewood Smoked Bacon, With Gorgonzola Walnut Ravioli, Pearl Onions, and a Side of Death
8. Spina Bifida Havers – Your Misfortune Is Our Fortune, Miss
9. Joe Prick and the Cocks – Bloody Cunt Rape…There, Got Your Attention?
10. ConvicXted – This Isn’t an Image, We Really Will Fucking Kill You

NME

1. The Strokes – Is This It
2. The Hives – Tyrannosaurus Hives
3. White Stripes – Elephant
4. The Strokes – I’m Never Going to Get Tired of This Music, EVER
5. The Hives – Why Has Every Other Band Not Given Up Yet?
6. White Stripes – They Sound Like Led Zeppelin…If Zeppelin Touched the Talent Ball From Space Jam!!!!!!!!!!
7. The Strokes – The Second Coming of Christ? In the Form of Many Christs?
8. The Hives – I Would Let This Band Fuck My Wife
9. White Stripes – I Am Having This Album Surgically Implanted Into My Ear Canal to Ensure That I Will Hear Nothing But the White Stripes for Every Moment of Eternity Henceforth
10. Fellating The Strokes (not an album title, just the act)

Posted by Dan Hopper at 06:01 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

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