Music

Our Shields Can’t Repel Awesomeness of That Magnitude!

Okay, the title for this entry is a little over the top, but so is this utterly insane illustration I ran across over at Boing Boing:

I know, I don’t quite get it either… why would Batman be fighting a great white shark with a lightsaber, of all things? Who the hell knows… or cares? It’s Batman. Fighting a shark. With a lightsaber! It’s self-evident!

And on that note, I’m heading out in search of corned beef and Guinness… Happy St. Pat’s Day!

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Friday Evening Videos: “Cherry Bomb”

I hadn’t really planned on turning this “Friday Evening Videos” thing into a regular feature, but I find I’m having fun with it — tapping into my adolescent fantasies of being the next Johnny Fever perhaps — so I think I’m going to run with it for a while.
This week, I’ve got something a little different to show you, and it requires more background than usual. It’s a music video, yes, but it’s also a promotional piece for the upcoming feature film The Runaways.

I was only vaguely aware of the real-life Runaways until about six months ago; I knew they were the band that Lita Ford and Joan Jett had belonged to in their younger days, and I had an impression that they were teenage girls performing in lingerie, but that was about it. Then I started hearing about this new biopic (SamuraiFrog is doing his part to spread the word), and, around that same time, I spotted a greatest-hits collection at my local library. I gave the disc a spin for curiosity’s sake, and I liked most of what I heard.

If you don’t know, The Runaways were a short-lived, all-female rock band formed in the mid-1970s. They were indeed teenagers at the time, and their lyrics and visual style all played off the dark fantasy of underage, oversexed young girls giving the finger to the world and proving that they were every bit as debauched as their male counterparts. (I have no idea if they were really like that, or if it was all a carefully manufactured marketing gimmick. If they were a more recent band, I’d say it was an act — I tend to be pretty cynical about media these days — but back in the free-for-all, sexual-revolution ’70s, who knows?) In those days, female musicians tended to be a lot more demure, a lot more mellow musically speaking, and a lot more into victimhood — think of Carly Simon, Roberta Flack, Karen Carpenter — so a group of trash-talking, hard-rocking chicks was a genuine revolution. The Runaways are often credited as an influence on later all-girl bands such as The Go-Gos, The Bangles, and The Donnas, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Madonna took a lot of her trampy early look from them as well.

Musically, I found the stuff on their hits collection a little primitive, the sort of borderline-competent playing and simplistic lyrics you’d expect to hear coming from the neighbor’s garage on a hot summer afternoon. And yet… there is something compelling about their sound (which is somewhat reminiscent of early KISS), and several of their songs are insanely catchy. I especially like the ones that reveal a bit of vulnerability and even innocence lurking under the hard edge, songs like “Wait for Me” and the heartbreaking “Waitin’ for the Night.” But of course it’s the rowdy, bad-girl stuff that they’re best known for, and in this video — all footage from the movie — we’re going to hear their signature tune, “Cherry Bomb.” As unlikely as it sounds, Dakota Fanning is playing lead singer Cherie Currie, and I believe this is really her singing; Twilight‘s Kristen Stewart plays Joan Jett:


And now just for fun, here’s the original song as performed by the real Runaways:

Compare and contrast, kids!
The Runaways opens nationwide on April 9. Honestly, this and Iron Man 2 are about the only movies I’m looking forward to at the moment. My thanks to SamuraiFrog for finding the clip…

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Friday Evening Videos: “Fly to the Angels”

I was a commuter student when I was at college; that is, I lived at home on the south end of the Salt Lake Valley and drove back and forth to the University of Utah every day, a 50-mile round trip, for five years. I had my reasons for doing it that way at the time, but in retrospect, it wasn’t the greatest idea I’ve ever had. I certainly wouldn’t do it again, if I could live those years over. I spent way too much time on the road, and I missed out on too many of the social aspects of college life.
Even so, I do have some memories of those years that don’t involve driving or classrooms. My class schedules often had lengthy periods of free time built into any particular day, especially during my freshman year, and I managed to explore the campus pretty thoroughly during those gaps.
One of my favorite spots was a sort of lounge in the student union, a section of the main dining area that was elevated a bit above the rest of the room, and which boasted a big-screen TV, one of the old-fashioned rear-projection models that were about the size of a bank vault. Nine times out of 10, it was tuned to MTV… and this was back when MTV was still playing actual music videos instead of The Real World or whatever the hell they run nowadays. I spent a lot of time in that lounge… studying, watching girls, meeting friends, vegging out. That was the place where I developed a taste for coffee and bagels with cream cheese.
There are a handful of videos I very clearly remember watching on that massive old dinosaur of a television, songs that instantly remind me of what it felt like to be 18 and filled with vinegar and romantic notions. The soundtrack of my late teens, and the last few moments of my wide-eyed innocence. Here’s one of them…

Slaughter-Fly To The Angels
Uploaded by SirDroopy. – See the latest featured music videos.
Yeah, I know… hair metal. It’s supposedly the nadir of western civilization, mind-numbingly stupid and terminally uncool. Whatever. I’d still rather listen to this stuff than all those mopey guys from Seattle who drove a stake through the heart of real rock and roll. And this particular video includes a gorgeous old airplane and automobile, which is probably the reason why it’s stuck in my head all these years. I have no idea what kind of car that is, but I think the plane is a Lockheed similar to the one Amelia Earhart was flying on her final expedition.
Watching this again after all these years, I’m struck by how damn young the lead singer looks. I remember thinking back in the day that all those guys in the rock bands were so much older than I was… they were adults out there doing grown-up stuff, and I was just a stupid, punk kid. Or so it seemed then. I now realize that a lot of them weren’t much older than I was, and they all look like stupid punk kids to me now. Even the ones with enviable hair.
Incidentally, the leader singer of this particular band of punk kids, Mark Slaughter, has done some interesting things in the years since “Fly to the Angels.” He’s now a voice-over artist who worked on Animaniacs, among other things. That same series also employed Jess Harnell, who’s currently singing his heart out for the awesome (and very hair-metal-ish) Rock Sugar, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago. The entertainment industry is very small sometimes.
And I’m just babbling, killing time here at the office until Mr. Slate pulls the tailfeathers on that little dinosaur-bird. I think I’m going to get out of here… enjoy the music, folks. And if I don’t manage to blog again for a couple days, enjoy the weekend, too. Savor the few minutes of real life you can manage to snatch before The Man drags you back into whatever veal pens you’re locked in during the week…

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Kirsten Dunst: Akihabara Majokko Princess

Remember that photo of Kirsten Dunst in some kind of anime-inspired outfit that I posted a few months ago? If you’ll recall, it supposedly came from a music-video shoot in Tokyo’s famed Akihabara district. Well, the finished video has finally leaked out into the InterWebs, and, despite the best efforts of the corporate copyright Nazis to get it taken down, there are still copies floating around. Like this one, courtesy of the esteemed SamuraiFrog:
(Be warned before you hit “play” that there are manga-style cartoon boobies in this, so some people might consider it NSFW and/or offensive.)

I’ve found in my online wanderings that Kirsten is something of a binary proposition: people seem to either really like her or they really do not. Her detractors tend to become especially fixated on her uneven teeth, for some reason. Personally, I think she’s adorable, teeth and all. Not conventionally pretty, perhaps, but she’s got something that works for me. I especially like that sultry eyebrow-lifting thing she does sometimes — you can see it in this video at about the 2:37 mark. Is that TMI? Probably…
Anyhow, as you saw in the opening title card, this video was directed by McG, the guy responsible for the most recent entry in the Terminator series as well as those two Charlie’s Angels movies a few years ago; the producer, Takashi Murakami, is a Japanese artist who works in a variety of media. My understanding is that the video was played on an endless loop at the entrance to Murakami’s recent “Pop Life” exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.
Now, you may wonder what the heck a mid-list starlet in a blue wig singing a 30-year-old one-hit-wonder has to do with an art exhibition. I’ve read that it supposedly articulates the cliche’d Japan of Western imagination, i.e., Murakami’s notion of Anglo-American stereotypes about his native country’s pop culture. Or some damn thing. The really important point is that it gives us an excuse to see Kirsten Dunst in a blue wig and a really short skirt singing one of the most terminally catchy tunes of the ’80s, The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese.” Which is really not about masturbation, as the old urban legend we all heard in middle school claimed. At least, The Vapors say it’s not about that, and they oughta know, right?
Damn, she’s got long legs… and there’s that eyebrow thing again…

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Friday Evening Videos: “You Can Sleep While I Drive”

I’ve got some things in the works, but for right now, enjoy a song that was one of my favorites back in the early ’90s and which I’ve just rediscovered:

The song is called “You Can Sleep While I Drive” (if you hadn’t surmised that already), a somewhat obscure track from the 1989 album Brave and Crazy by Melissa Etheridge. As I recall, this song was my introduction to her… I have vague memories of hearing it on a short-lived but wonderful radio station called The Mountain (105.7 FM) not long after I returned from my summer sojourn in England, way back in 1993. Melissa broke out (and came out of the closet) that same year with the monster-selling album Yes I Am, but I’m pretty sure I first heard “You Can Sleep” before that happened. I honestly can’t recall for sure at this point, but no matter…

I’ve always loved the mood of this one, the plaintive earnestness, the restlessness, the slight tinge of wee-hours-of-the-morning desperation that seasons but doesn’t overwhelm the song. It was the perfect articulation of everything I was feeling after coming home from a big adventure that I knew even then was going to end up being a singular experience for me. I was struggling with going back to my movie-theater job, knowing that it was time to move on but having no idea what to do next. I was struggling with a lot of things, actually. And hearing a woman’s voice sweetly suggest that we shake off the familiar dust of home and just… drive… well, anyone who reads this blog knows that’s still an alluring fantasy for me.

Despite my long affection for this song, however, I’d never seen this video before today, and it’s really kind of a trip. The pre-coming-out Melissa looks like a tougher version of a friend’s wife, and she also has a certain something that reminds me of a girl I used to know a long time ago and still think about sometimes. If I’d seen this back in ’93 (or earlier, since the video was apparently made in 1990), I probably would’ve developed a big crush…

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Smart Kid

So, let’s say you’re a small boy who has gotten separated from your parents in some big, crowded place where you’re surrounded by strangers. Who are you going to turn to for help?

How about the nearest pair of superheroes?

If you're ever lost, try and find the nearest superhero...

His dad must’ve been very proud of his son that day. I know I would’ve been.

I spotted this charming photo — which supposedly was not posed, but actually depicts a lost kid asking Wonder Woman and The Flash for help — at Byzantium’s Shores; Jaquandor, in turn, took it from Cal’s Canadian Cave of Coolness. And I imagine it regresses back into the reaches of the Internets from there…

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Pop Rocks!

So, where to begin? The week-long outage has really put me off my game, I’m afraid, and I’m not quite sure which pieces to pick up first. Oh, let’s see, maybe… this one:

A few years ago, The Girlfriend and I had a semi-heated discussion over mash-ups, those songs in which two or more well-known tunes are digitally blended together to produce something new. Her favorite radio station had recently begun a new drive-time feature, the mash-up of the day, and she was pretty enchanted with them for a while. Anne argued that the ones that worked, worked very well, and on their own terms as actual songs, not merely as interesting or amusing novelties. She was impressed by the artistry behind picking just the right elements to combine in order to achieve a certain effect. While I didn’t (and still don’t) dispute that there is a certain skill involved in a successful mash-up, I was (and am) pretty uncomfortable with the basic concept of it, i.e., using pieces of someone else’s work to “create” one for yourself. Anne (and other friends I’ve discussed this with) have asked me how this is any different than George Lucas borrowing much of the plot of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress for Star Wars, or why I enjoy those YouTube videos that put scenes from well-known movies to theme songs from ’80s detective shows. I don’t have a good answer to that, except that the examples feel different. In the latter case, the end result is obviously intended to be nothing more than a joke, while in the former case, Lucas wasn’t splicing together actual footage from The Hidden Fortress with clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Being inspired by someone else’s story while creating your own similar-but-different story feels more legitimate to me than mashing up (or whatever the verb form is) bits of existing media. And YouTube gags seem harmless to me in a way that mash-up songs do not.

(For the record, I don’t care for sampling, either; I remember being infuriated by the popularity of “Ice Ice Baby” and “U Can’t Touch This” because no one seemed to realize — or care — that the backing instrumentals were from Queen’s “Under Pressure” and Rick James’ “Super Freak,” respectively.)

If you’ll notice, though, my hang-up seems to be with the use of existing recordings. I’m not nearly as troubled by the idea of someone re-arranging other people’s music if they record the final result themselves. Which is the loophole that enables me to think the following is a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of total awesome:

An insanely unlikely melding of ’80s pop and ’80s hair metal, done so skillfully that if you didn’t know the source material, you’d swear it was an original song? Oh, hell yeah! I’ve already ordered the CD. Yes, actual physical media. Because I’m old, and the website didn’t offer a download option anyhow.

I thought at first that Rock Sugar must be a cover band that came up with a clever marketing gimmick, but a little digging reveals that lead singer Jess Harnell is the voice-over artist who played Wacko on the early-90s TV series Animaniacs, among many, many other things. This leads me to believe that there was a bit more calculation involved in the birth of Rock Sugar than just “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we started playing a Metallica song, but you started singing Journey lyrics instead?” However Harnell came up with this idea, though, I think it’s bloody brilliant. And they’re playing it to the hilt, too — check out the band’s website, read their insane story and member bios, and listen to the rest of their music. If you like the ’80s the way I like the ’80s — or even if you hate the ’80s and just like to snigger at the excess and schmaltz of that decade — you ought to be amused.

Via Scalzi, who may have just made up for all the snarky shit he’s said about Night Ranger over the past year.

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Elvis at 75

Elvis at age 21

I was just shy of my eighth birthday when Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. His was the first celebrity death — possibly the first death, period — that I can recall being aware of and understanding as death, i.e., the permanent state we’re all doomed to achieve sooner or later, which those we leave behind experience as loss and pain. It was, with no exaggeration, a transformative event in my life. You want to know the origins of my compulsive obituary-writing? Blame Elvis Presley. Or more precisely, blame the way our culture responded to his passing.

I actually wrote my very first dead-celebrity tribute for Elvis. I had this red leatherette agenda book, the sort of thing businesspeople scribbled their appointments in before the advent of Day Planners, PDAs, and BlackBerries, a piece of branded corporate swag. It was given to me by our neighbor’s adult daughter, who worked for an airline. I imagine she thought I’d enjoy looking at the photos of jets that were interspersed between the calendar pages. (She was correct, of course.) But even at that early age, I was trying to express myself in written words, to record the things that seemed to matter. In other words, I was dabbling at keeping my first diary in that book. And on a page dated August 16, 1977, I was inspired to write the following in the shaky, block-printed letters of a young boy who hated to practice his penmanship: GOODBYE ELVIS, WE’LL MISS YOU. (I think I probably stole that from Walter Cronkite’s evening broadcast that day, but hey, I had to learn how to say these things from someone, right?)

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Music Meme

Between the earlier entry on soul music and spending much of the afternoon ripping my CD collection into iTunes (have I mentioned that I finally got around to getting an iPod?), I’ve been thinking a great deal about music today, so it seems like a good time to do this musical meme I stole (yet again) from Samurai Frog
List 10 musical artists (or bands) you like, in no specific order (do this before reading the questions below). Really, don’t read the questions below until you pick your ten artists!!!

  1. Rick Springfield
  2. Linda Ronstadt
  3. The Eagles
  4. Boston
  5. Bonnie Raitt
  6. Bob Seger
  7. Jimmy Buffett
  8. B.B. King
  9. The Bangles
  10. Buddy Holly
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A Little Bit of Soul

As my three Loyal Readers have probably gathered from the handful of entries I’ve written on the subject, my favorite type of music is guitar-based classic rock and the catchy pop-rock of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But this is by no means the only kind of music I enjoy. I was lucky to have a mom who loved a lot of great popular music while I was growing up. She used to begin each morning by placing a stack of LP records on her massive old hi-fi console, a stereo appliance the size of your average sofa (no, really!), which would then play throughout the day, one platter after another. Her main man was Elvis Presley, but she also liked country — the ’70s pop-country crossover stuff in particular — as well as soft rock, what we now call “oldies” from the ’50s and ’60s, and, yes, even disco. (Oh, stop! It was the ’70s, people, and Mom liked to dance.)

As I got older, I naturally started developing my own tastes and I eventually drifted into acts with a much harder edge than she liked — Mom never appreciated the coolness of Boston, for example — as well as genres that she never explored at all. Nevertheless, a lot of her music has stuck with me over the years, including a love of vintage soul. Like every other musical category, “soul” has a somewhat slippery definition, depending on who you talk to; when I use the term, I’m referring to mid-60s Motown, Memphis-based artists like Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, and early-70s R&B types like The O’Jays, Al Green, and Marvin Gaye. The soul sound I like didn’t survive beyond the mid-1970s, sadly; it morphed into funk, disco, and a lot of other threads I know little about. What’s called “soul” these days strikes me as a degenerate form comprising whiny vocals, bland (or nonexistent) melodies, and hip hop-derived rhythms that frankly set my nerves on edge. The sound of classic soul, on the other hand, has the exact opposite effect. Even the sad songs somehow just make me feel good.

All of which is a very long introduction for a video I ran across this morning. Allow me to present “100 Days, 100 Nights” by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings:

 

Isn’t that great? Sounds like something Auntie ‘retha might’ve recorded around ’66, doesn’t it? Guess again, though… that’s modern. It’s the title cut off an album that was released in 2007. (The video looks vintage because it was shot using a pair of old TV cameras reportedly purchased on eBay for 50 bucks each.) And its apparently not a one-off gimmick, either, but rather a whole revival, at least on a niche level, of ’60s- and ’70s-style R&B, soul, and funk. Sharon Jones’ label, Daptone Records, claims that its artists “channel the spirits of bygone powerhouses like Stax and Motown into gilded moments of movement and joy,” and its offerings are even available on vinyl.

Much like the classic soul sound itself, this little tidbit of information has made me effortlessly happy.

Thanks to Graywhale, my local independent music chain, for bringing this to my attention. You guys rock!

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