Entries associated with the tag "Punk":

I don't know if it exactly fits the theme of my column on crowdsourced videos and remixes, but it definitely fits the broader theme of fans applying their own creativity to the music they love: here's a video of the Blue Ribbon Glee Club singing "Waiting Room" synced up to old footage of Fugazi performing the original.

I'm not one to knock on someone else's hustle, and as a recovering sneaker addict I have a hard time bagging on any sort of special-edition shoe, no matter how ridiculous, but I can't really hang with Converse's Kurt Cobain signature series. It's not so much that the series includes prescuffed replicas of the shoes he killed himself in--which is at least as morbid and exploitative as the death-certificate T-shirts that came out within days of his suicide--but that the insoles of the death shoes have "punk rock means freedom" written on them.

Will some 17-year-old kids please start a punk band that is so obnoxious and shitty that no one as old as I am can get into it? Otherwise I'm afraid that after this atrocity the cosmic punk scales are gonna end up tipped the wrong way.

I finally picked up the latest issue of Arthur magazine, which has recently returned from the dead to resume entertaining us with its patented combo of unbelievable greatness and utter hippie bullshit. Go to their Web site and download the first chapter of the PDF version, skip the part about how you can use chaos magick to replace environmentally unsound cleaning products or whatever, and get straight to the cover story, where Ian Svenonius impersonates an alien and interviews Celebration. It's fucked up and strange and inspiring, as well as super fun. Reading it over brunch I fell in love with Svenonius for the 423rd time since I first heard 13 Point Program to Destroy America. 

I suspected that John Lydon would justify the Sex Pistols' involvement with Guitar Hero III with the same aren't-we-naughty-punks irony they used for their original reunion tour. Instead he claims--in this clip from a GHIII press conference--that he did it because he "fucking loved" the game. And then he goes on a profanity-laden tear decrying seemingly everything on earth that is neither Guitar Hero III nor John Lydon. Probably the most shocking thing about the video is realizing that Johnny Rotten for whatever reason still thinks that people will be actually by offended by f-bombs. 

The dirt-slinging-fest former Victory Records VP Ramsey Dean posted at AbsolutePunk.net about label head Tony Brummel is, er, compelling reading. The original post was taken down not too long after it went up, but the Google cache of it lingers here.

I haven't seen the Icarus Line in a long time, haven't heard their new record, and one of the best guys in the band isn't with them anymore, but I'll still tell you to go to their show at the Empty Bottle tonight. The couple of times I've seen them in the past have been strong on killer rock moves and good times. And the one show they played at the Hard Rock Cafe where their guitarist broke one of Stevie Ray Vaughn's guitars out of the memorabilia case and tried to plug it in has, I believe, earned them a free pass for life.

Local sonic deconstructionists Bag of Glass will open with what will most likely be a fascinatingly painful set. It's an early show, starting at 7 PM, which maybe will make you feel like you're at an all-ages punk show, even though it's not all-ages.

The bruises that I got at Saturday's thrash-centric Mauled by Tigers event at the Mutiny were mild and have mostly healed. The stains on my clothes—the residue of a liquid mixture of beer, sweat, and whatever oil-black substance that was on the Mutiny's floor—seem to be a little more permanent. And the memories, well the memories are a little blurry, but I think I had a good time. The crowd kept the Mutiny at capacity for most of the night, as bass-free locals Skullzone and the grind-ier Altered Beast inspired a small but furious pit, resulting in the aforementioned bruising and possibly toxic mosh-juice.

As with any sort of metal-based show, there was some requisite griping from the couple of tru-metalists hanging out near the back. "The reason why this metal is false," I overheard one of them saying to another, "is that their crowd keeps yelling, 'Metal!'" And he may have had something resembling a point. To the cynical eye—and it's hard to get more deeply cynical than a tru-metal guy—the out-of-left-field trend of reviving 80s thrash, with dudes hanging out in baseball caps with the bills turned up a la the Suicidal Tendencies, could look a lot like the recent spate of retro-hip-hop kids rocking limited-edition throwback Nikes: musical revivalism in the name of fashion, or at least so closely linked as to be nearly inseparable. But I have a hard time arguing with under-a-minute punk blasts, a hyperactive co-ed pit, and anyone willing to sweat through everything they're wearing, in any situation. And, seriously, did anyone even take thrash that seriously the first time around?

John Mayer's got a sneak peek of a Joe Strummer replica Fender Telecaster over at his blog, along with word that the company will officially unveil it at NAMM. It appears to be an exact copy of Strummer's guitar, down to the pattern of paint erosion, and the list price is almost $1,300 (though at least one place will sell it to you for $900). So if you want to honor a punk rock hero by purchasing a brand-new instrument carefully crafted to look like something he naturally wore down through years of play—at a sum that would probably feed a sub-Saharan family for a year—you can do that. It even comes with stickers designed by Shepard Fairey, who knows a thing or two about making real cash off of dead dudes.

Via Boing Boing

Local retro-ish rockers Bang! Bang! aren't so much concerned with discovering new sounds as they are with kicking around a bunch of proven punk ideas. But singer/guitarist Jack Flash is breaking out some next-level sartorial/merchandising schemes with the introduction of his Bang! Bang!-branded lightning bolt-shaped neckties. The press release that popped up in my inbox today lays out the unconventional neckwear's evolution:

"Originally Jack cut his ties from pre-existing thrift store ties. This new line of ties, however, are professionally made from a pattern cut to Jacks' specifications. 'I was laughed at when I first came up with the idea....and I never thought I'd actually find a way to produce these,' admits Jack, 'but the reaction has been awesome so far, people freak when they see them....no one has seen anything like them before. And I figure, hey, if Hip Hop performers can have their own clothing line, why can't I?'"

Actually, I don't know how many rappers have fucked with neckties. I have a vague memory of Fonzworth Bentley doing it, but that could have been just a beautiful dream.

The bad news just came down the wire that Chicago-based politics and music journal Punk Planet is no more. The magazine's been on shaky ground ever since it ran into distributor-related financial problems in late 2005, but in an open letter on the Punk Planet Web site, editor/publisher Dan Sinker acknowledges that drop offs in ad revenue and subscribers finally did it in:

"[W]e could blame the Internet. It makes editorial content—and bands—easy to find, for free. (We're sure our fellow indie labels, those still standing, can attest to the difficulties created in the last few years.) We can blame educational and media systems that value magazines focused on consumerism over engaged dissent. And we can blame the popular but mistaken belief that punk died several years ago.

But it is also true that great things end, and the best things end far too quickly."

I'll admit that I haven't picked up an issue of PP in a while, but it was by far one of the biggest influences on my formative hardcore years, and the magazine's righteous fury in the lead-up to the 2000 presidential election still stands in my mind as a prime example of how passionate, effective, and emotionally moving political writing can be. 

Sinker says that punkplanet.com's forums and blogs will keep on keeping on as "a social networking site for independently minded folk," but I sort of prefer the image in my head of PP in magazine heaven, being pissed off among the angels.

Shellac's next record, Excellent Italian Greyhound, doesn't come out until Tuesday, but it being an eagerly awaited album by a much-loved indie rock institution, and this being 2007, it's already been leaked on a few blogs. The music news aggregator site The Daily Swarm—a great addition to your RSS feed, in my opinion—asked Steve Albini his feelings about his first unapproved premiere. Unsurprisingly, he's a little grumpy about it. He calls downloaders "harmless," but only after harshing on them: "Downloads reach those people who don’t really like music enough to be participants in it as a culture, they just want to consume at their leisure, casually, the way my mother would have the kitchen radio playing while she did housework."

For the record, the track in question, "Steady as She Goes," would only be a good accompaniment to housework if you do yours with a sledgehammer and a heart full of rage.

Albini's dismissal of worthless downloaders marks a record-breaking 10,000 disses in his underground-music career, the highest by any one individual and second only to the combined staff of Maximumrocknroll. In an imaginary press conference after receiving an entirely fictional award for his accomplishment, Albini said of the honor, "Bah."

In tackiness news, Dr. Martens has enlisted the aid of four dead counterculture icons to hawk footwear from beyond the grave. Like the old advertising adage goes, nothing moves units quite like nauseating your consumer base.

Beyond the general ickiness of the campaign, I've been thinking all day about what these pictures say about Saatchi and Saatchi's particular view of the afterlife. Apparently heaven is really fucking boring. If you take the images at face value, it looks like Kurt Cobain is spending eternity sitting around being bummed, Joe Strummer's so bored to tears that he's about to collapse (or marybe he's just practicing his poses for a comeback as a Calvin Klein model), and Joey Ramone is spending his eternal reward whistling and tapping his foot, waiting for something interesting at all to happen. I'm taking Sid's apparent good humor as proof to my theory that if you die while you're wasted you arrive in heaven still high, and you stay that way forever.

The only upside I can see to the whole situation is the potential for getting an outraged and probably incoherent Courtney Love back in the news. It's always so drab when she's away.

Earlier this week Touch and Go Records posted the first of 31 video clips shot at its 25th anniversary fest in September. For the next 30 weeks there'll be a new one every Monday. The current one is the kind of opening montage that every concert video needs, with bits of interviews, short clips of performances, some shots of guys setting up the stages, and a nice, vaguely epic-feeling piece of footage shot from a car heading down Elston towards the Hideout. From what I can tell, the people that did the shooting knew what they were doing--it looks pretty pro-style. Touch and Go says they have no plans at the moment to put the footage together into a proper release, so for now their site will be the only place to catch it. I can tell you right now the Negative Approach footage will make bookmarking the page and checking up on it every week completely worthwhile.

As sort of a bonus feature, Touch and Go also has a song from the upcoming Ted Leo and the Pharmacists album, Living With the Living, available for your listening pleasure. I just got my copy of the CD the other day, and I still need time to let it sink in before I can come up with a coherent opinion of it. But I will say that after only a couple of listens it makes me want to drink whiskey, buy a Conflict shirt, and write strongly worded emails to my elected officials.

Ever since the news came out that Cal Robbins -- the infant son of incredible DC rock people J. Robbins and Janet Morgan -- has a terrible and most likely fatal disease, a bunch of people have gotten it together to help them out. Apparently doctors and hospitals don't accept scene cred as payment for their services, so on top of individual donations to the family, benefit shows have been announced all over the place. In Chicago, the first one's happening on January 27 at the Empty Bottle. Eleventh Dream Day, Chin Up Chin Up, Bobby Conn, the Life & Times, and Red Eyed Legends are playing, and Reader contributor Jessica Hopper has helped put together a raffle with prizes ranging from Pitchfork Festival VIP passes to a platonic dinner date with hers truly at Lula Cafe. I'll be contributing a mix CD to the raffle. I'm trying to secure a Nas exclusive for it, but it looks like that is actually impossible, so I'm moving to plan B: secretly taping someone from Kill Hannah karaoke-ing a Christina Aguilera song.

Tickets for the show are $15, which is a hella deal considering the lineup. And seriously, when was the last time you got drunk and felt good about yourself? 

For the past couple of weeks my playlist has taken a turn for the bipolar, whipping back and forth between black metal (Mayhem, Spektr, the first Behemoth record) and some of the new wave of psychedelia (White Magic, MV & EE). It may be that I've just absorbed enough of each to start messing with my mental faculties, but I see a lot in common between the two styles. Bands on both ends tend to value texture over melody, to view their music as a means for spiritual exploration, and -- if you listen to them in large enough doses -- to be sort of tiring to listen to. Which may explain why I find myself loading Lost Penguin's MySpace page as often as I do. They isolate the snottiest elements of riot grrl, electroclash, and screamo and combine them into little blasts of brilliance with what seems to be the intent to define as precisely as possible the razor-thin line between good punk and absolute obnoxiousness. Or they're just trying to be the funnest band around. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

Some of their accomplishments so far:

• Jacking the title from an R. Kelly inspiration jam for a song about getting dosed with LSD.

• Incorporating an image from the Clint Howard horror movie Ice Cream Man into the artwork for one of their singles.

• Being the first band I've ever seen described -- accurately -- as a cross between Aphex Twin and Huggy Bear.

• Having the funniest MySpace URL of any band I've ever seen.

It's possible that the American indie scene's been sufficiently primed by CSS to give Lost Penguin some success over here, but given my horrendous record in calling the next underground UK rock band to break through here, I sort of doubt it.

There's good news and bad news today for all the Jawbox fans out there. Idolator recently discovered that the band's out-of-print emocore classic For Your Own Special Sweetheart is now available for digital purchase at iTunes and eMusic, but there's bigger and infinitely sadder news as well. J. Robbins -- who played not only in Jawbox, but also hardcore pioneers Government Issue and the post-Jawbox project Burning Airlines -- and his wife, Janet Morgan, who plays with him in the band Channels, recently found out that their infant son has type 1 spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that severely hinders the development of even the most basic voluntary motor functions. It's usually fatal, and even if little Cal beats the odds, he will still be wheelchair-bound for his entire life. There is no known cure for SMA.

It would be hard to overestimate Robbins's contribution to independent music. Beyond his own music, his production work for bands like Texas Is the Reason, the Promise Ring, Against Me!, Bayside, and the Dismemberment Plan has helped to define the sound of post-hardcore music. Beyond that, his generosity and his commitment to the best parts of the hardcore ethos -- for instance, his willingness to do shit like drive hours to work on a four-track session in someone's parents' basement -- are legendary.

Like most working musicians, Robbins has a variable income and less-than-stellar insurance coverage. There's no known cure for SMA, but there are alternative therapies that the family should have the right to explore. DeSoto Records' site has more information on the family's situation and  how you can donate money via PayPal. If you're one of the countless people who've been impacted by Robbins's work, you might want to try to give something. 

I'm currently on my eleventy-jillionth listen to Fucked Up's Hidden World, which came out on Jade Tree this Tuesday. They're from Montreal, they all have terrible stage names, and they write hardcore songs that regularly pass the five-minute mark without getting boring, which I don't know has ever happened before.

The other big talking point on Fucked Up is that its members are all seriously mentally ill -- or, at least they want you to think they are. They supposedly get into big fights with each other, and they can't fly on planes, and all this other stuff. Which I could really care less about. If they're really crazy, that would probably help explain why they decided to write seven-minute long punk songs, and if they're not it's just another made-up band gimmick. Whatever. Half the reason people put bands together these days is so they can make up catchy fictional "band facts." The other half is coming up with a good band name, and if coming up with a good band name was a video game, I think Fucked Up may have gotten the high score.