My friend Sean Bonner just pointed me to a wonderful music history project, put together by Brian Stefans: at lapostpunk.blogspot.com, an MP3 compilation of post-punk and experimental pop music in the Los Angeles area from the mid-seventies through the mid-eighties.
I kind of think of this as a portrait of the city at the time more than a collection of tracks that will change the world (though more than a handful I think are unfairly neglected). I’m wondering if someone like Rhino Records would want to do a Nuggets-type collection from the period? They already have one of Los Angeles from 1965-1968 called Where The Action Is.
Incredibly comprehensive. What a labor of love. There's a Volume one, and a Volume two.
BrewDog is a spunky craft brewer in Scotland. Diageo is a titanic owner of booze brands, a kind of Wal*Mart of booze. The British Institute of Innkeeping is their mutual trade association.
Last Sunday, the BII's independent judges awarded BrewDog a prize for Bar Operator of the Year. When Diageo found out -- just ahead of the ceremony -- that a company affiliated with them hadn't won the prize, they threw a tantrum and said that they would cease all sponsorship of BII events unless the prize was given to them.
So BrewDog -- who'd been told in advance that they'd won -- sat at their table at the banquet with jaws on their chests as their competitor's name was read out by the announcer, and representatives from Diageo's chosen bar got up on stage to accept an award whose plaque clearly said "BREWDOG: BAR OPERATOR OF THE YEAR." The farce has turned into a scandal, and Diageo has issued a non-apology of the "mistakes were made" sort.
BrewDog is pissed:
As for Diageo, once you cut through the glam veneer of pseudo corporate responsibility this incident shows them to be a band of dishonest hammerheads and dumb ass corporate freaks. No soul and no morals, with the integrity of a rabid dog and the style of a wart hog.
Perhaps more tellingly it is an unwitting microcosm for just how the beer industry is changing and just how scared and jealous the gimp-like establishment are of the craft beer revolutionaries.
We would advise them to drink some craft beer. To taste the hops and live the dream. It is hard to be a judas goat when you are drinking a Punk IPA.
Walk tall, kick ass and learn to speak craft beer.
Photographer Glen E. Friedman, widely known for his work chronicling the intersection between punk rock and hiphop in the 1980s, has posted some beautiful shots of MCA, Ad-Rock, and Mike D from that era: "why A you see H".
Jonathan Lethem's latest is a book in the 33 1/3 series, Talking Heads' Fear of Music, a tribute to Talking Heads brilliant, seminal album, one of the greatest records of all time. In Wired, Geeta Dayal interviews Lethem about his book and the approach he took, and leaves me drooling for the chance to read it myself:
Lethem chose not to take a journalistic approach with Fear of Music; there are no interviews with the band members, Eno or anyone else involved in the album’s creation. “I didn’t want this to be a kind of post-mortem reconstruction,” Lethem said. “I wanted the entire record to spring from my encounter with it — the tangle of ideas that continued to stick from that experience.”
The core characters in Lethem’s book are the band’s four members. “What I was arguing for was the sanctity of the foursome,” Lethem said. “The collaborative unit of more or less equal parts.”
Fear of Music, Lethem said, turned out to be “really slippery” as a subject. The album seemed to raise more questions than it answered.
“Is it the band? Is it Eno? Is it David Byrne? Is it 1979? Is it punk?” Lethem said. “I’m still really interested in unearthing, excavating in that book the feeling of that band, and what they signified. Even the dress and the haircuts and the weird clarity of the song titles, and the arty minimalism of their album designs — all of this seemed to be saying something.”
Lethem’s passion for the group comes through forcefully in his writing. “Talking Heads were the definitive New York rock band,” Lethem declares in the book. “Manhattan band, if you want to give the outer boroughs to the Ramones.” Later, he writes, “The violence of my identification with Fear of Music remains durably interesting to me even after I debunk it by shifting into this bland generational perspective, even after I admit it really isn’t violence, except in a there’s a war in my mind kind of way.”
Earlier this morning, Pesco posted the awful news that Adam "MCA" Yauch died this morning at age 47. Words here can't express how sad I am, reading that news. Hits home in part because I'm fighting the same disease, and in part because the Beasties were such a formative part of my subcultural education as I grew into my teen years.
The first time I heard them, and Adam Yauch, was when a friend from middle school handed me a home-copied dupe of this cassette tape EP [YouTube, and you can still buy copies on Amazon]. I played it over and over until that little black ribbon wore right out. Some of you may not know that the Beasties were a hardcore band before they became a hiphop band. Now you do.
I've embedded some Beastie videos from that era below. Fuck you, cancer.
On Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of watching Perhaps Contraption ("a twisted brass, art punk marching band") at Saturday night's White Mischief steampunk night in London. They've got a shitload of horns onstage, rhythm for days, and some badass vocals. Perhaps you will enjoy them, as well.
Amy worked in the record business at Enigma, Elektra, Virgin and Sub Pop before she got sucked into the technology vortex. She co-founded the Backwards Beekeepers, a chemical-free urban beekeeping collective in Los Angeles. She runs digital marketing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and The Hollywood Bowl.
Sound it Out # 23: OFF! - "King Kong Brigade"
OFF! is a band full of Southern California punk rock royalty: Keith Morris (Black Flag, Circle Jerks), Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides), Steven McDonald (Redd Kross) and Mario Rubalcaba (Hot Snakes/Earthless/Rocket From The Crypt). Their new, self-titled album comes out on May 8. It has sixteen songs and is sixteen minutes long. So at 1:36, "King Kong Brigade" is relatively epic.
The OFF! record also boasts excellent cover art by Raymond Pettibon.
Download "King Kong Brigade" and rock the fuck out.
Faith Erin Hicks's new graphic novel Friends With Boys launches today. It's the story of Maggie, who is about to follow her three older brothers to the town high-school after a lifetime of home-schooling. Maggie is understandably nervous, because everything in her life is unsettled: her mother mysteriously left the family at the start of the summer, her twin brothers have begun to fight with unprecedented viciousness, and the ghost that she's seen off and on all her life has begun a much more persistent haunting than ever before.
What follows is, in some ways, a classic story about misfits in big schools, but it is handled with such deftness and charm by Hicks that it feels fresh. In any event, the fitting-in-at-school plot is just a skeleton which Hicks hangs with fresh tissue: a series of mysteries about simmering rivalries, her missing mother and the ghost that haunts her are the real tale.
As with Hicks's earlier work, Friends With Boys shines in part due to the engaging and lovable character work, personified with a fine and expressive illustration style. Maggie's best friend, a daffy punk girl called Lucy, has my vote for one of the great punk comic characters, right up with Tank Girl. This is a great comic for young people and grownups alike.
I've been a fan of Hicks's work since I picked up her graphic novel Zombies Calling, and it's a pleasure to find her continuing to produce top-notch work. You can preview Friends With Boys in its webcomic incarnation.
Don’t care about what other people think about what you’re doing, if you’re inspired to do something, if you want to do something, if you have some kind of feeling that you should do something...then you should just do it; don’t let what other people’s preconceived ideas of good behavior, or whatever it is, limit you to thinking what you should and shouldn’t do.
From Ethan Persoff's ongoing chronicles of vintage weird ephemera: COMICS WITH PROBLEMS #7 - MADONNA ON AIDS. This public health pamphlet was handed out at one of her concerts, one night only, in 1987. Her image appears on the cover, and inside, a handwritten note urging for greater awareness of AIDS and an end to prejudice against those who contract it (or who are HIV-positive).
On Buzzfeed, a gallery of "punk" (more generic goth/emo/punk/industrial subculture) Disney princesses, ganked from an unspecified Tumblr (anyone know which?).
Quote of note from Futurismic's Paul Raven, writing on Makers and Breakers: "If there’s any lesson to be taken from punk, grunge, rave and any other subcultural scene that went mainstream, it’s this: the aesthetic is not just a veneer. If you start changing the box to make it more appealing to more people, then what’s inside the box will start to change as well, because otherwise you’ll start getting a lot of returns; simple market forces."
Lethem chose not to take a journalistic approach with Fear of Music; there are no interviews with the band members, Eno or anyone else involved in the album’s creation. “I didn’t want this to be a kind of post-mortem reconstruction,” Lethem said. “I wanted the entire record to spring from my encounter with it — the tangle of ideas that continued to stick from that experience.”
Faith Erin Hicks's new graphic novel 
