May 2012
2 posts
7 tags
LCD Soundsystem, Japan's Innovative Export
Originally, LCD Soundsystem wasn’t a band fronted by musician/producer/DJ James Murphy. It also wasn’t first heard of in the 2000s. Try the 1970s. And back then, LCD Soundsystem referred to a different kind of sound engineering.
The digital clock’s tagline, “Wake Up and Play the Hits,” was re-purposed fort he LCD Soundsystem concert documentary, Shut Up and Play...
9 tags
Synced Up With Censorship
The Canadian government has imposed some hefty measures to defend itself from foreign powers, but there’s no greater evidence of the country’s protectionist mentality than that which dots the maple-dappled northern shores of the Great Lakes. At first glance, one might think they’re a relic of the Cold War’s Distant Early Warning system, but the communication towers...
April 2012
2 posts
7 tags
WOMEN DEMAND VOTE, FRITOS
Guided By Voices paid homage to many of the Twentieth Century’s unheralded countercultural movements, but never did that creative tendency work so artfully as when GBV’s prolific songwriter Robert Pollard wrote his ode to “an extremist offshoot of the American Suffragette movement.”
The “Glad Girls,” subject of a cut from GBV’s 2001 release Isolation Drills,...
7 tags
Cornering the Japanese Garage-Folk Market
The shaken soda can sound of Japanese band Shonen Knife (in English, literally translated as “boy-knife”) owes a great debt to the stripped down sounds of ’60s garage rock, but there’s a deeper homage at work within the group. When the group was originally formed in the early ’80s by the Yamano sisters and friend Michie Nakatani, the put straight-ahead cotton candy...
April 2011
21 posts
13 tags
Riot Grrrls: Doing Their Part to Honor...
Despite the band’s claim that their name is derived from a road in Lacey, Washington, Sleater-Kinneyactually acquired their name after an agreement that resolved a 1860 territorial dispute between the British Empire and the United States.
The Sleater-Kinney Accord of 1860 followed a conflict that threatened to embroil the Pacific Northwest. The trouble began after three British soldiers...
11 tags
Ian Hunter-Gatherers
Amid the glam rockexplosion of the early 1970s, Mott the Hoople stood out for controversial reasons that stretched beyond the gender-bending images that other glam rockers used to characterize the genre.
While serving time for a drug offence, record producer Guy Stevens became a member of the prison gang known as The Hooples. The name, he discovered, was derived from a marauding...
12 tags
One Bad Marketing Trip
The psychedelic rock band The Electric Pruneswas originally formed in the mid-1960s for a California Fruit Growers Consortium marketing campaign which was designed to capitalize on the growing hippie market. The product the group was pushing: an experimental form of fruit cultivated with peyote to yield an “electric sensation,” according to advertisements. It proved to be one of the...
10 tags
Pushing, Violently Penetrating Boundaries
Not content with limiting his darker sensibilities to The Dave Clark Five’s musical output, the band’s drummer and namesake Dave Clark tried to follow on the heels of “Bits and Pieces” by leading the band in more unsettling directions. This new venture would see the band star in a film inspired by Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, of which Clark was reportedly...
12 tags
You Can't Rub Out the Biblical Influence
Although the term is somewhat outdated and employed mostly in literary writing, the Biblical story of Onan, the man who chose to spill his seed rather than impregnate his brother-in-law’s wife, begat the word “onanism,” another term for masturbation.
What has been lost in the haze of time, however, is the original Hebraic term, whose root consists of the letters סקי ט (S-K-Y-T). All...
9 tags
The Filth and the Fury
Ronald William Wycherley was a fifteen-year-old Liverpool stevedore whose diminutive stature never failed to piss off his fellow workers. For, in spite of his physical shortcomings, his work ethic was so great, his zeal so profound, the piss and vinegar pulsing through his veins – a symptom of his childhood bout with Rheumatic fever – so potent, that he emasculated the other longshoremen by...
16 tags
The Joys of Turning Japanese
Much has been made about The Vapors’ 1980 song “Turning Japanese” and its seeming lyrical reference to masturbation. Singer/songwriter David Fenton has been coy about the true nature of the song, but even a cursory look at the lyrics and Fenton’s long rap sheet of political activity obviously indicates much graver themes.
Ambiguous imagery,...
10 tags
Just a Simple New England Boy
The following text was excerpted from a 1992 press conference in which then-President George H W Bush addressed a question from (Minneapolis) Star Tribune reporter Toby Hunter that recent bestowal of awards to New England musicians – some of “strictly regional appeal,” according to Hunter – was solely an attempt by Bush to court youth voters whom had been polling much more positively for...
11 tags
The Bomb at the Heart of London
Paul Wellerbecame known for his outspoken views against the United Kingdom establishment (and, perhaps more than any other ‘anti-establishment’ artist, the anti-establishment itself) throughout his career dating back to the 1970s. Interestingly, the most controversial commentary he ever released arrived early on in the career of his punk/Mod revival band The Jam. On the 1978 album All Mod...
8 tags
An Explosive Song in So Many Ways
An earlier column of mine detailed the sinister subtext found in an earlier version of The Dave Clark Five’s “Bits and Pieces.” It was far from the first song of mass appeal to draw on unsettling subject matter. The 1954 doo-wop song “Sh-Boom (Life is But a Dream)” also demonstrated songwriters sticking to their convictions and refusing to flinch in the face of humankind’s .
Racial...
8 tags
Reading by Example
An odd sort of literacy campaign in Ireland employed the services of Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan. Beginning in 1988, the infamous musician’s craggy smile graced posters all over libraries and elementary schools in the Republic of Ireland championing literacy with the slogan, “Shane Reads!”
In so many ways, the greatest Irish hero
Even though reading and writing aptitude of Irish youth...
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The Word of Jay HOVa
While Jay-Z may have been known for having 99 problems, without “a bitch” being one of them, he was not the first to describe his troubles this way. As the Biblical story of Lot (Genesis Chapter 19) goes, after leaving the city of Sodom to escape its impending destruction at the hand of Yahweh, Lot’s wife defies the orders of God and turns to look at the destroyed city. For her transgression,...
11 tags
Universal Declaration of Love
Despite the outward appearance of a sprightly little song featuring a prominent driving drumbeat, “Have I The Right?” by The Honeycombs was one of the earlier politically-oriented pop songs of the 1960s.
A pet project of the band’s staunchly feminist drummer Honey Lantree, the song’s lyrics ostensibly refer to somebody wooing a prospective lover. The actual subtext of the song,...
9 tags
Dark Dave Clark
It’s easy to think of the era of golden oldies as one of peppy pop melodies coupled with bland subject matter. Amid the scores of songs about insipid declarations of love, broken hearts, and dance crazes, The Dave Clark Five pushed boundaries with “Bits and Pieces,” a 1964 hit which, in its original form, showcased subject matter much darker than the typical fare of those days.
The...
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Bush League Rock
George H W Bush was often perceived as a stodgy old man, one out of touch with the youth of America, especially when compared to Bill Clinton in all his saxophone-playing, pot-smoking, “first black president” hipness. But this image does a great disservice to a public figure who went out of his way to express admiration for New England-based rock bands.
For his 75th birthday in 1999,...
11 tags
Because, in the music industry, everyone gets...
Even though the interaction between Bob Marley and Bruce Springsteen was extremely brief, two album covers, released about a decade between one another, stand as testament to the great respect which transcended their bitter, though fleeting encounter.
Overcoming the two musicians’ original animosity, public reconciliation was achieved upon the release of Marley’s posthumous...
8 tags
Come and Sweat
At the height of new jack swing’s popularity in the early 1990s, Keith Sweat was a figure who loomed large, his shadow surpassed only by that of his very own throbbing member of passion. It was at this peak of interest in the genre that Mr. Sweat decided to capitalize on his name and image.
After releasing Keep it Comin’ in 1991, the recording of a follow-up was put on hold...
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Ever the Rebel
Political co-option of popular music is nothing new. When Muammar Gaddafi took power in Libya following a 1969 coup, the song blaring over the national airwaves was the colonel’s rallying cry used over the preceding weeks: The Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel.”
Colonel Gaddafi, casual day at the office
There was initially some disagreement among...
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Divinely Inspired Insult
It’s Sunday, and on this Christian day of rest, I don’t find it appropriate to deal with matters of music and dancing. Notwithstanding Kevin Bacon’s enlightening citation of Scripture in the 1984 documentary Footloose, I think it’s better to take an overtly religious turn on the Lord’s Day.
That said, in keeping with my “lesser-known history” theme, I will expound on a well-known...
8 tags
Sigur Ros Saboteurs
The Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros might have conquered critics and audiences worldwide, but their pre-musical aspirations revolved around something much more malicious: conquering Europe. In 1992, the four young men who would comprise the band’s original lineup were high school math prodigies in Reykjavik. Overconfident in their collective skills, they set out to create what...
10 tags
A More Sinister Side of Sloopy
The McCoys
The popular garage rock song “Hang On Sloopy” has earned a well-loved place in the hearts of millions, particularly Ohioans. But despite the enduring popularity of the song - The McCoys’ lone #1 hit on the Billboard Charts - its little-known political subtext always threatens to undermine the frat rock classic’s good feelings.
A collaborative effort by record producers and pop...
