Am I the only one who thinks that dude Antony from Antony and the Johnsons has a really creepy, unnaturally-modulated voice? Like if Buffalo Bill from Silence Of The Lambs decided to start a musical career, instead of just tucking his junk between his legs and dancing to The Fall? Or if you just took a recording of, like, a good operatic tenor and played it at 1.3x speed? Creeps me out. I can’t listen to it. I don’t even care if it’s a result of his whole transgendered/postgendered/maybe-still-has-a-dick-maybe-not thing. None of my business. But brother man ain’t getting on my iPod with that creepiness.
I now love Bat For Lashes. Thanks, Scotty, for recommending them, and thanks to Anders Trentemøller for giving them a shoutout in an interview I read today. Definitely my speed.
Speaking of iPods, I’m thinking of starting an online music store where all of the songs have been secretly dubbed over with whispery voices saying things like “Kill everyone you see wearing a sport coat and a trucker hat” and “Strap ten pounds of C4 to yourself and run out onto the starting line at Talledega on race day”. Hipsters will think their iPods are telling them to commit murder. iSon of iSam. Not very profitable financially, but I could definitely rid the world of some evil this way.
Dr. Who Christmas special? Brilliant. Especially the joke about how Londoners desert the city now during the holidays because horrible alien shit seems to happen around Christmas every year now….
No, really. Stop trying to beat Guitar Hero and go buy a guitar. Stop trying to tap buttons in time to the solo from “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and go learn some Robert Fripp shit. You will be making the world a better place.
Hip-hop acts have finally beaten metal acts for Worst Illiteracy In Artist/Group Names. Now they’re just calling themselves by a series of grunting noises. You thought it couldn’t get any worse than “Cum On Feel The Noize?” This dude calls himself Yung Joc. Makes Prince’s whole symbol thing seem positively Duchampesque by comparison, doesn’t it?
Hip-hop still has the best beats and the worst lyrics.
Dear Planet Earth And Music Critics Thereon: Um-ba-rella rella rella rella rella rella yeah yeah yeah and that’s the best pop single of 2007? Fuck y’all. You’ve lost your critical faculties entirely. You might make a case for Amy Winehouse or “1234” or even that Andy Griffith song by Peter, Bjorn and John, but “Umbrella?” Out of your fuckin’ minds.
My thirtieth birthday is in March. Someone work up the courage to have sex with me by then. Someone with a vagina, and only one vagina. I ain’t starting my fourth decade on the planet by becoming a friend of Dorothy or getting into mutant fetishes. (Well, I’m open to the mutant thing, really.)
Kucinich is a pimp and probably ought to be Emperor of the Earth, but he can’t win. I’d probably vote for John Edwards second place, but as it stands, I’ll probably actually be voting for Obama. It would be awesome to have a female president, but I don’t trust Hilary Clinton very much. And no, I won’t vote for Ron Paul, so stop asking. No Republicans in the White House, I don’t care how cool you think they are. Fred Thompson appears to be as reactionary and scary as every character he ever played, so fuck him.
I’m still planning to have the Red State Soundsystem album finished in January or February. I’m considering trying to get label support, but I’m very picky about what I’ll cede control of and what I won’t (like digital sales and publishing rights). I do want to license some of these tracks for commercial use, though. Fine. I’m a whore. I’m a whore who would like to afford a copy of Ableton Live, please.
If I lose as much weight this year as I did last year, I’ll be able to do this by next summer.
And nerds are still encouraged to get the fuck out.
‘that Andy Griffith song by Peter, Bjorn and John’ made me spit my coffee, you bastard!
The Umbrella dance remix by Seamus whatshisface is a passable buttshaker, but the original song is fucking terrible. How could anyone like that tripe?
And I think the fact that one of hip-hop’s most popular acts, 50 Cent, talks in a constant illiterate mumble because he can’t move half his mouth says volumes about the state of hip-hop.
Secret dubbing? Awesome. Hey you could always just seed the P2P networks with your versions… you could be the Shepard Fairey of audio…
My favorite single for 2k7 was D.A.N.C.E., by Justice. Maybe I was overcome by the cool video.
Grampa Fred was great in ‘Hunting Red October’! Hehe.
On the Ron Paul thing: the good news is, Iowa proved conclusively that Ron Paul has about as much chance of being elected President as he does being of picked as starting forward for the Minnesota Timberwolves. This makes me happy because, as we all know, Ron Paul is a lunatic.
These days libertarians scare me more than fundamentalist Christians do. And that’s saying something. Shit, at least the fundies aren’t talking about outlawing public schools and turning libraries into Borders outlets. It’s the Let Them Eat Cake party.
Frank, the fundies don’t even bother to send their kids to public schools, being obsessed with homeschooling — i.e., cheating their kids out of an education in the real world. Also, the fundies would ban half the books in the libraries, so on the whole, they and the libertarians are proffering the same tainted Kool-Aid, just in different flavors.
It took me weeks to learn a Fripp solo (Elephant Talk, not something difficult). . . that’s nearly mean advice, except every time I go to Guitar Planet some pimply 14 yr old showoff will play Paganini’s 24th Caprice just to warm up to play something difficult . . . I hate youth, I tell you, just hate it . . . wasted on kids . . . thirty, eh? I think I’ll get back to my one-legged Cuban transvestite bank robbers now. Statlivi Novi Rok, as they could say in Bratislava.
Don’t count Ron Paul out just yet (for good or ill). Clinton hadn’t carried Iowa in ’92.
antony is even more frightening live and in person.