I saw Midnight Oil in concert twice before they called it a day – once at the Boathouse, touring behind Diesel and Dust, the other at Norfolk Scope, touring behind Blue Sky Mining (with Hunters and Collectors as their openers!) – but until I saw this clip, I’d somehow managed to forget just how damned disconcerting Peter Garrett was to watch on stage. At that Boathouse show, I stayed way at the back of the venue, mostly because he scared the shit out of me!
By the way, this is officially the first time I’ve ever seen any portion of an episode of Alan Thicke’s short-lived late-night talk show. Wow, he was as cheesy as an ’80s sitcom dad even then; no wonder it was short-lived.
When I first heard Bis, I was pretty sure I hated them. I mean, it was on a tribute album to the Smiths, fer crissakes. What on earth were they doing there?
I still don’t have a good answer to that question. Bis, after all, were the ‘90s equivalent of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which means they were the ‘80s equivalent of Berlin and the Human League. Do any of those bands have a single thing in common with the Smiths? No, which is what made their version of “The Boy with a Thorn in His Side” both fascinating and maddening. On the plus side, they gave the song the danceable beat that it begged for all along. On the other hand, they also stripped Johnny Marr’s lovely chord progression out, effectively turning the song into a dub mix. Not what this Smiths fan was looking for.
Fast forward three years, and Bis releases their second album Social Dancing. Somehow, it catches my ear – I’m guessing they landed a track on a CMJ compilation, as I was a subscriber at the time – and I find a promo copy cheap…and in the process discover a song that still pops up on Medsker mix discs. Short, fast, funny and insanely catchy, “I’m a Slut” gleefully pokes fun at gender roles – “Have I done something to upset you / Was my dress a bit too see-through” – but had a Shirley Manson badass-ness to it as well. In a musical climate that was still suffering a hangover from what Alanis Morissette hath wrought, it was a most welcome breath of fresh air.
The band’s 2001 EP, Music from a Stranger World, was even better than Social Dancing, but it wasn’t good enough to stop them from breaking up two years later. Wikipedia says that they recently reunited for a few gigs in England. You have to think that they’re watching this whole ‘80s retro thing and thinking, “WTF?”
I’m new to the Patton Oswalt bandwagon, but I think I’m going to stay here for life. One spin of his latest, Lollipops and Werewolves, and I knew that I had found my new Bill Hicks. Funny, remorseless and corrosively foul, Oswalt is funny in ways that I haven’t heard someone be funny since, well, Hicks. This routine, which pokes fun at a certain fast food item, is much better on the CD, since you get a complete jingoistic song at the end, but this’ll do in a pinch. Buy the album. Now.
John Mellencamp is vowing to make his current tour more about the songs and songwriting than about doing rousing choruses of certain songs. What? Does that mean he’s going to take that horrible “This is Our Country” song out of his set, or at least play a short version of it? How about just a verse and a chorus?
UK Brit Pop band Polytechnics are unsigned but have quite the buzz going, and this month will showcase for labels in both New York and Los Angeles. Here are the dates where you can check them out:
Nov 16 @ Mercury Lounge NEW YORK
Nov 14 @ Spaceland LOS ANGELES
Matchbox Twenty has just announced tour dates and their schedule is posted on the band’s MySpace page at www.myspace.com/matchboxtwenty.
Former Tonic lead singer Emerson Hart is on tour and playing acoustic sets with a stripped down three-piece band. According to Hart, this helps him relate to his own music, and offers a better concert experience for his fans.
The Donnas are on tour in support of their seventh album, Bitchin’. This month they are in Europe after finishing a two-month leg of US dates. Here is the current Continue reading »
As an old-time Apple apologist and–in one of my other lives–a computer journalist who’s closely followed the industry for a couple decades, I’ve become more and more fed up with the company over the years, as well The Man Steve Jobs. Used to be I thought Jobs was here on earth to save us from the massive geekdom his alter-ego Bill Gates would inflict upon us…and make our computers actually, you know, usable.
Old-time Mac mavens like me now see Jobs as less of a messiah and more of a Rasputin, more interested in hobknobbing with rock stars and music-biz money than making really good computers.
C’est la vie. Follow the money, right? Sure looks like Jobs is, and it turns out he didn’t have a passion for computers after all, but instead phones and MP3 players and in fact any gizmo that inflated the size of his already fat wallet.
But the zeitgeist he preaches, the Kool-Aid he serves, still touches some people and does occasionally foster innovations and open-minded thinking. That’s how we arrive at the new iPod commercial.
The story: This guy, Nick Haley, student and Apple freak, mocks up his own iPod Touch commercial and posts it to YouTube. Somehow, he discovers an obscure, grungy Brazilian power-pop band called CSS, fronted by a diminutive cutie nicknamed Lovefoxxx, singing this song called “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex.” Apologies to the Spice MILFs, but this song oozes hot as opposed to the processed corn syrup that comes from their latest lingerie ad (see below). Check out his original production:
That was great idea #1. Great idea #2 was an open-minded someone at Apple in the marketing department realizing its beauty, ringing up Haley, and adopting it for the actual TV commercial. Genius because it creates another YouTube hero, which feeds the fantasies of every Mac + iLife hacker out there and keeps them interested (and buying new hardware).
For the music fan, it beats the living crap out of trotting old warhorses like U2 out of mothballs for a round of TV spots, that’s for sure. That’s where the iPod commercials succeed: When they take little-known bands and pump them up, instead of padding the stats of the already-popular or on-the-decline dinosaurs. If I ever see a Sting iPod commercial, it might be enough to give my 160-gig Classic iPod the old-skool Jimi Hendrix treatment with matches & gasoline. (People who don’t know me think I’m kidding.)
Now, CSS is world reknowned, and its MySpace is going insane, from sleepytown to millions of plays on its other music. The iPod’s got its Touch, and Apple’s still got its King Midas touch for even the most obscure bands, literally, in the world. Music is my daddy, indeed.
