But this video popped in my head recently. I had to really search for it but I found it. Remember seeing this over and over again on Nickelodeon? These are the things I think about at 445AM after going out all night. Welcome to my brain
So yeah, the above picture basically sums it up. It was awesome seeing them play essentially all of Rubberneck, but the running joke of reunion bands going "so we have a new album coming out, OMG we're back do you want to hear some of the new jams!" and everyone demurely mumbling "yeah OK" was in full effect. The weird thing about 90s bands doing the comeback thing is that it gives a lot of people license to wear the shitty grunge-era clothing they put away in their closets for the last decade. It's like I fell through a wormhole and suddenly I was in high school. This is not necessarily the nostalgia-fueled mayhem one would hope for.
I saw a Sub Pop shirt, a Lars Frederiksen shirt, and this dude with a billy goat beard wearing a 311 shirt (which as I've always said, is reassuring to see a living breathing stereotype). A full on mosh-pit erupted too! Christ I'm glad this idiotic nonsense no longer exists at shows. During the set-closer "Tyler" I was tossed around like a plastic bag and my thumb ended up in someone's mouth for a second. I was basically like "do these people WANT the 90s to never have ended?"
A few observations:
1. Todd Lewis' vocals sound alarmingly like Brian Johnson's. I was waiting for the deafening guitar peals of "Thunderstruck" to shred my ears at any moment.
2. The average age was 25-30. And still these idiots moshed around like Godless heathens! Have we learned NOTHING?
3. It seems the only people who DID learn something from the 90s were the bouncer/roadies, who were like minutemen waiting to pounce on any drunk hockey player dumb enough to crowdsurf onto the stage, and either shoving them right back into the crowd or tackling them to the ground and throwing them off stage.
OMG
I never knew this but apparently there's a video for 'Mister Love' too.
Also! Strictly for the die-hards! The 1997 never-released follow-up to Rubberneck -- Feeler!
*via xtrmntr
Big time love to Saheer who put me up on this track a few months ago. The way he described it was that he bought the record, brought it into A-1 and listened on the main system, and when Toshio heard it he fell into some kind of groove-induced hypnotic head wag, where he closed his eyes and swayed ever-so-perceptibly to himself. Any song that can do that obviously must be heard by everyone:
Tony McKenzie - Ha Chica (Instrumental)
Thanks everyone for coming out on Saturday Night at Trophy Bar... I'm a big fan of the fact that 90s radio dance shit is totally OK to play again, and also yay for Archie Bevins for popping his DJing cherry! Rok One made me yell OOOHHH SHIIIITT no less than 5x, and at one point I'm pretty sure I had pinned Sharif into a corner screaming "DO YOU WANNA DIE?!" over and over again as the Toadies played in the background.
Here's some jamz I remember getting big reactions:
ROK ONE / Crystal Waters ~ Makin Happy
ME / Black Box ~ Strike It Up
ARCHIE BEVINS / Nina Hagen ~ New York, New York
(so much better in video form)
I think the tipping point for YT videos is 50K views -- once it hits that you can't claim that you're on some "let me hip you to this" shit anymore. After that it might as well be that the Times and NPR did pieces about it and your mom is asking you about whether or not you saw it. By that token, I'm sorry to say that I just saw this for the first time, b/c it's at a million plus (YT platinum):
TRACK:
Plastic Bertrand ~ Stop Ou Encore
IN ONE SENTENCE:
Super smooth synthy pop opener in the tradition of Dollar Bill Yall -- pure blinding French sunshine.
ANYTHING ELSE?
They just reissued this 12, but I saw the OG at Shakey's this week... it was like $40. If I'm paying $40 for a 12, there better be a half-naked Morrissey on the cover, y'heard!
Better than a young-ass dorky Kanye West dressed up like a fratboy and hanging on Jay's every word,
Better than an old-ass Mike D randomly showing up to the Rick Rubin session and have Jay awkwardly call him an "architect of hip-hop,"
Better than that part where all the rappers are sitting around talking about whether it's ethically/morally right to rap about killing people/selling drugs and some guy's making some ambiguous point, and Jay tells the cameraman "point the camera at me,"
Better than Ghostface's bling manager pulling out 70 lbs of gold from a bag and and wrapping it around his neck, so that he can go onstage for 45 seconds and then leave MSG,
... is Timbaland (pre-scarily cut) drinking juice from a jug and playing Jay the Dirt Off Your Shoulder beat for the first time. Give the Potion to Luda!
Amazingly, these are all real.
Apparently all you need to be a "20th Century Master" is to have had one #1 single in your entire life. Also it helps if you masturbated to Cindy Crawford and had Beavis & Butthead think you were women:
It has oft been stated that genius languishes in obscurity, never to be discovered til long after that genius has passed (see: HP Lovecraft, Kakfa, etc), but sometimes genius and mastery over an entire century can be achieved in your (and my!) lifetime, and still I will have literally no idea who the fuck you are:
I had already purchased the Silverchair and Len installments in the "Unmitigated Geniuses & Iconoclastic Cultural Zeitgeist Champions of Modernity" series, so I couldn't pick up this little number:
Ahh and of course here we reach the apex of modern civilization. I speak not of the wheel, the cotton gin, the printing press, or harnessing electricity, but rather of a gaggle of dongbirds in the early 90s getting together and thinking it would be a great idea to play a bunch of horns but not be a ska band. Ahh Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, is there anything less cool than swing revival? Anything at all? Finally! A recycled genre of music that is unique to my generation! And by my generation, I mean my grandparents' generation!
Other mind-blowers include:
THREE volumes of Kiss
one for LA Guns, but none for GNR
one for Donny Osmond, one for Donny & Marie Osmond, and one for the Osmonds
New muxtape up! Listen anywhere there's internet.
ABBA / THOM YORKE / SANTOGOLD / TEDDY PENDERGRASS / DE LA / MUSCLES / FEIST / MORRISSEY / NATHAN HALPERN / TED LEO RX
UPDATE:
Muxtape no longer.
My 17th iPod just died. I'm seriously considering buying a Zune just so I can stop dealing with this shit. Does it bother anyone else that the shelf life on these things is literally 8 months? Even if you buy Applecare they just swap it out with a refurbished one and the life expectancy plummets down once again.
After importing 97% of my library the thing gets stuck and I have to shut down my computer and hope all the songs make it because the import gets stuck on Terry Jacks "Seasons In The Sun" or whatever. And when I finally yank it out, this is all that's on it:
So apparently Fatman Scoop has his own TV show called Man And Wife and they set up their offices right next to mine in the MTV building. Even though it's all "unprofessional" and whatnot, I'm totally going to bring in my 12 of "Be Faithful" tomorrow for him to sign, which is unquestionably the GREATEST PARTY BREAK OF ALL TIME DUH. It's one of those songs that is so obvious but also such an unstoppable elemental force. I have literally seen people shit themselves and get in a fistfight during "bass drop!"
I don't know if you know, but it also has an appropriately awesome video (featuring a King Kong Fatman Scoop climbing buildings, a semen spurting radio tower, and if memory serves me correctly, cannibalism) that I didn't see until Kevin bought the CD single for it in a Serato purchasing frenzy:
This dude gets linkage purely because of his banner pic:
George DeLarge son
Is there anything more omnipresent than a 90s-era hiphop tape? I feel like there was a period of time where I was listening to nothing but DWYCK remixes and Black Sheep album cuts, with the inevitable "skratch interlude" (usually over a smooth 70s fusion jazz sample), before going into Award Tour for the millionth time. Especially working at the Lab there'd be like 20 of these tapes coming in a week you have no idea. Usually they had white paper xeroxed covers, and the tape was like a Maxell (Type 1, son!) tape with some shitty graffiti scribbled over it, by dudes with names like DJ Real-One or DJ Reality Czech, or DJ Realness Face etc and they always (always!) had drawings of some terminator robo DJ skratching so violently that the turntables were literally falling apart.
Many of these tapes were crappo, but there were a lot of really good ones too. Every single one of them had "Tried By 12". I remember hearing a J-Love tape that was cool because he was skratching over Tori Amos' "Caught A Lite Sneeze" (y'heard it correct!!!).
Anyways one of my favorite hiphop tapes were from the west coast's Top Rawmen crew, a bunch of skratch-nerd/club DJ AZN Brothahs that I found out about because I saw one of their crew members Jay Slim do a really good set at the DMC that year in NY (wow I am seriously racking up points here. I might as well say that can pretty much recite Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from memory too). I used to listen to this a lot in college -- at that time I knew zero hip-hop and this was probably the first hiphop style tape I ever heard...
DJ Nando VS Mike C "My Side's Better... Naw Mine Is!"
*via froo
Summer's here, my bruhs! I left NY this weekend (neatly avoiding the PR Day Parade) and went to a cabin with some homies, and as we arrived at the cabin I threw on the best summer song ever written by anyone:
Mungo Jerry ~ In The Summertime (plus the awesome video)
Also, did anyone else ever notice that Riff Raff from Heathcliff was literally a pimp? Not only did he drive a Cadillac, he walked around with a cane and wore a scarf and a preposterous hat. Plus he had a goon squad surrounding his trashy cat girlfriend and enforcing his will. Just sayin.
Back in my "diggin" days, I used to go to flea markets in the city all the time to get records. There was probably a full year where every Saturday I either went to the one in Chelsea, or the one on 10th street in the East Village. Unfortunately, because people buy up all the empty parking lots to build gleaming glass eyesores for young kids to move into, flea markets in the city now are pretty much extinct -- with a few exceptions (brownstoner, artists & fleas).
Still it was rad to find the random Lord Finesse 12 or Robbie Tronco record from dudes who were unloading their epic collections from the 90s. Most of the crap I got here were shelf-fillers, but every once in awhile I would pick up a decent find. Wow, remember when you would find out about records via buying them based on their label or who produced it, and sometimes were surprised?
Nighthawk ~ Eye Of The Tiger
Bombers ~ Shake
ps- coincidentally, I played both 2 songs when I did that epic roller rink party in Shanghai with Michna.
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