Fuck Dad-Rock Revivalists

To the delight of Boomers everywhere, folk-rock revivalists (ugh) Mumford & Sons are having (have had? are poised to have? whatev) a breakout year: the September release of their second album Babel is currently the fastest selling album in the UK after debuting at #1 on both the Billboard Top 200 and the UK Top Album Chart.

But if you aren’t a member of the NPR-listening, latte-swilling, bleeding-heart, Obama-worshipping, nearing-retirement-with-a-healthy-401K set  and are a music fan then the chart success of Mumford et al is the latest iteration of a somewhat beguiling trend. That is, the revival of a vaguely folky heart-on-your-sleeve Americana-esque (whatever the fuck that means) aesthetic raising the inevitable question: did they just get classic rock radio in London?

To anyone forced to spend a morbid Saturday afternoon in an American department store Mumford’s (feel free to sub-in Edwarde Sharpe or the Lumineers or whoever pisses you off the most) slickly produced, irritatingly sincere brand of “rawk” recalls memories of Jackson Browne and the Eagles pushed through paper speakers in Mervyn’s fitting room. And while “Jack and Diane” may sound like the Hallelujah chorus to a 7-year-old kid who has never heard pop music before the fact is that when you hear it more than once it starts to sound exactly like what it is: some paint-by-numbers bullshit.

That’s not to denigrate pop music (I fuckin’ love pop music) it’s just that if you’re going to write rote pop songs, have some fun doing it, and don’t act like you invented the fuckin’ wheel. Ultimately, the authenticity of the newest set of dad-rockers is belied by the perfectly manicured image, undoubtedly invented by a New York PR group with a million-dollar contract. Unfortunately thanks to Rolling Stone, the Grammys, and other organizations as sclerotic as a Baby Boomer’s arteries we’ll have to endure this generation of dad-rockers for decades to come.

 

The Coachwhips, FIDLAR, Pangea @ the Lobot Gallery

Gettin’ risque

Just caught The Coachwhips at the Lobot Gallery, it was hella tight. For those of you who may not know The Coachwhips are John Dwyer’s band from his pre-Thee Oh Sees days. I got in for free cause I’ve got a bunch of friends who live at the gallery and let me in through the side entrance, which is cool.

Coachwhips were  good, but it was FIDLAR who really stole the show, they had just played with local kids and personal friends, Meat Market, down in LA so I was pretty excited to see what they had to offer. They must have brought their entire entourage cause it seemed like everyone in the audience was singing along despite the fact that their new record Cheap Beer doesn’t drop until January 22nd. They’ve released the title track as a single and have a new video that I saw on Stereogum just a few minutes ago. It’s funny it features a biker taking out his rage some bougie motherfuckers who drink fancy wine and Chimay, so I guess I whole-heartedly approve.

Check it out:

Kanye’s Cruel Winter Trailer

Kanye & Kim “not” posing for the camera.

So Kanye is making a movie and wants everyone to know. I guess he just doesn’t want anyone to know what it’s about. The film, entitled Cruel Winter, has a new cryptic trailer which is just shots of a snowy forest in winter with George H.W. Bush’s “new world order” speech dubbed over the background. Will it be a paranoid rant about how the Council on Foreign Relations is actually an evil plot by Jew bankers to take over the world? Maybe. Given the shit Kanye has pulled in the past that would hardly be the most surprising thing to come out of this venture.  

EDIT: FAKE AS FUQ! Lol.

Catch the trailer:

Death Grips Tells Their Label to Fuck Off

Death Grips, No Love, Deep Web

Update: In the surprise of the century (#sarcasm) Epic Records looks to drop Death Grips from their contract.

The saga of Death Grips vs. Epic Records as the Sacramento rappers released a confidential cease and desist letter sent to their manager by Epic Records VP Heath Kudler. In the letter Kudler expresses how “upset and disappointed” the label is with them. The conflict between the band and its label began when Epic pushed back the release date of their album No Love Deep Web to 2013, back from its originally scheduled October 24th drop date. The band felt like they were being taken advantage of (remember they had cancelled a large part of their tour in support of The Money Store in order to finish it) and subsequently went on to leak the album to several file sharing sites and on their personal website. When the site crashed, probably from the high volume of traffic it received, they went on to accuse Epic Records sabotaging them.

I’m all for artists controlling their own distributing rights and telling the corporate oligarch to fuck off, but I worry that we might have seen the last of the angry iconoclasts. Hopefully they’ll fight through the blacklisting their sure to receive and make it back to the top, whether on a major label or not.

Kendrick Lamar Tops the Charts

Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city

Boom! That’s how it’s done. Rap prodigy Kendrick Lamar topped Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop and Rap charts this week by selling 241,000 copies of his new album good kid, m.A.A.d city. He also premiered at #2 on Billboard’s Top 200 behind Taylor Swift’s Red.

I’ve already called Lamar’s major label debut perhaps the best hip-hop concept album, and now critical success has met with commercial success as the 25-year-old had the best opening week for a solo male artist since Eminem dropped The Eminem Show all the way back in 2002. Lamar’s thrown down the gauntlet, let’s see if everyone else can step up their game.

Smashed Bass from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for Sale

That awkward moment when you meet Charles Barkley.

Remember that little band from Seattle that one big hit back in the early 90s? Of course you do. Apparently Christie’s auction house got a hold of the bass Krist Novaselic smashes up at the end of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. Reportedly one of the extras in the video, who was just a teenager on a trip to with his parents to Los Angeles at the time, ended up going home with the body of that bass. Little did he know that he was walking away with something that would become a piece of rock & roll history (lucky bastard). The body of the bass is expected to fetch anywhere between 15,000-25,000 pounds (that’s 24,168-40,280 dollars for us ‘mericans).

Also on sale at this auction is a yearbook signed by Robert Zimmerman, or as he’s better known by his fans, Bob Dylan. The then 17-year-old wrote “keep practicing guitar and maybe some day you’ll be great.” The signature is expected to sell for 4,000-6,000 pounds ($6,445-$9,667).

All of this is making me nostalgic for my sophomore year of high school when I’d walk around campus with my Walkman with In Utero on full-blast. I probably never would have made it through Geometry without Nirvana to support me. 

Foxy Shazam- The Church of Rock & Roll

Foxy Shazam, The Church of Rock & Roll

When I first downloaded The Church of Rock & Roll I expected something on the order of The KDMS neo-disco-funk, “Foxy Shazam,” after all, did sound like a character from Dolemite 5: Return of the Son of Dolemite. I had come across it after seeing the title in AllMusic’s new release a few months back and found it intriguing enough to hunt it down. After letting it languish in my Downloads folder for a few months I finally sat down and gave it a listen.

Little did I expect the full-throated embrace of 70s guitar rock ethos that blasted from my earbuds. Echoes of Aerosmith, Bad Company, and Cheap Trick run through The Church of Rock & Roll, but their closest bedfellow is undoubtedly the paragon of operatic rock, Queen. On “Holy Touch” it sounds as though they are downright channeling the legendary four-piece. Complete with polyphonic choruses, melodic guitar solos, and saccharine sweet breakdowns replete with falsetto, the track is an anachronism that sounds undeniably fresh in a decade paralyzed by hyper-self-awareness and ironic distancing. “Forever Together” is the requisite road-life-is-hard-life a la “Find Me (Somebody To Love).” And the album’s closing track “Freedom” is an unabashed embrace of rock & roll’s libertarian virtues. Though not as consistent as their forefathers (the second half is particularly dull until the aforementioned title track), Foxy Shazam is nothing if not fun. That’s enough for me enthusiastically plumb the archives for their first three releases.

New Video: Das Racist- “Girl”

Das Racist released a hella funny new video directed by Aristotle Anthiras for their single “Girl” from Relax. Fahim Anwar plays Lance Cantstopolis, a bad mof who uses his unstoppable moves to woo his potential paramour. Also, for reasons unexplained, he fights some big-ass biker.  This is just the sort of brilliant shit we’ve come to expect from our favorite rap crew. Props to the guys at Goatface Comedy for producing the vid. Lookin’ forward to seeing what they have in store for the future.  

Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d. city

Lamar’s new album probably has the strongest narrative structure of any of the new releases dropped this year. Interspersing an album with short vignettes is a tried and true tradition ever since De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, but rarely are they so unaffected and poignant.

m.A.A.d city‘s only shortcoming is that it lacks creativity in its production, puzzling given the fact we know Lamar is surrounded by some of the greatest producing talent (Dr. Dre, Pharrell Williams) in rap history. Perhaps it’s because of Dre’s influence that it sounds like an album that could have come out in 1997 not 2012.

The seriousness of m.A.A.d. city feels oddly out of place in a year where Schoolboy Q and A$AP Rocky shot to the top tier of the rap game with a combination of unbridled machismo (“There He Go”) and unabashed fuck-the-world-let’s-do-drugs attitude (“Purple Swag”). Only Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music reaches a similar level of social consciousness. Even then, Killer Mike’s political outrage is nothing like m.A.A.d city‘s slice-of-life Boyz ‘N the Hood style narrative.

In m.A.A.d city we witness Lamar’s descent into violence and his eventual conversion to Christianity on the streets of Compton. If it all seems familiar it’s because it is. Not that Lamar or any of his collaborators are unaware of this. In fact Dr. Dre stops by on “Compton” to remind us just how little things have changed. Not that the album is totally devoid of humor, Lamar admits that he hopes his “dick grows to the size of the Eiffel Tower so [he] can fuck the world for 72 hours” (“Backseat Freestyle”) and he has “a swimming pool full liquor,” (“Swimming Pools (Drank)”). But for every moment of levity there is an incommensurate reminder of the bleakness surrounding Lamar’s mien: his mother misses her county appointment, his friend is shot dead while he watches.

Lamar may have created rap’s greatest concept album to date – a brutal reminder of the hopelessness that pervades too many neighborhoods in contemporary America. We would do well to pay attention.

A$AP Rocky, Schoolboy Q, Danny Brown

A$AP Rocky

Just caught A$AP Rocky, Schoolboy Q, and Danny Brown at the Fox in Downtown Oakland. It was pretty sick, though I gotta say it a while for me to warm up. At first it was coz I missed Danny Brown’s set, probably my favorite of the three, so it was just Q up there by himself, and the crowd wasn’t really feelin’ it. Second there was some drunk-ass motherfucker right next to me who had be carried out in a wheelchair by security. He was really putting damper on the whole vibe. But things picked up once Kendrick Lamar came out and joined Q on stage. They did “Swimming Pools (Drank)” from Kendrick Lamar’s new album good kid, m.A.A.d city which just dropped. Then A$AP came out and he’s a live wire, such a great performer. The entire A$AP Mob joined him on stage and things were gone from there. The entire night culminated with guest appearances from Too Short and E-40, so tight. Oh and I did eventually get to see Danny Brown do  a guest spot on “Coke and White Bitches.”