WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Plan B

The Rah Band

In 1977, the UK charts welcomed a really weird dance cut into their top 10: The Crunch, by the Rah Band. When the single's success propelled the "band" into the pop TV circuit, they were forced to improvise their appearance.

Perhaps the masks were employed because "Rah" simply stands for Richard Anthony Hewsen and there was no band at all. Just one very talented veteran session composer who knew his way around a stack of vintage synths well enough to pull off a album's worth of material by himself.

Hewsen had made his first big musical mark in an ignominious fashion: he arranged the strings that broke up The Beatles. Phil Specter tapped him for those legendary Long and Winding Road overdub sessions and one can imagine him motioning towards the strings with an expensive handgun held to his head.

The Rah Band went on to produce a few more dance hits in the decade to follow, but none with such brilliant timbral wrongness as The Crunch. In a stroke of sonic self-flagellation it says, "I'm sorry for what I did."

Twankle and Glisten

Man, I've run my chosen few vinyl sharity mp3 blogs RAGGED lately. My RSS reader had begun to seem like simply an inferior place to dig for new stuff. But then something like Twankle and Glisten comes along and renews my faith in the hyperlink.

It's a southern rap blog penned by Jib Kidder, a cut-up producer that has put out a few wonderful and genre-bending examinations of hip-hop. With Twankle, he's sharing with us the very weird and raw source of his inspiration.

Have you ever stared at a No Limit-era CD cover? No, like, REALLY STARED INTO IT? And imagined a future where we'll be bidding for this shit on Ebay?

Get deep enough with these weird mix tapes (kindly encoded at 320 kpbs) and you'll see this scene is good for way more than a few alienated laughs - the crudity of the samplers, consumer model digital synths, and preset arpeggios being employed by an increasingly brutal aesthetic sense has created a heavily inventive and under-appreciated scene. Yeah, you might think I'm getting off on a cheap kind of cultural tourism, but I can't help but enjoy this stuff - it's almost avant-garde.

ULTIMATE REALITY

Video artist Jimmie Joe Roche takes Dan Deacon's distorted posi-bleep sound to a whole new place with a multiplier effect collaboration titled Ultimate Reality. Horses, Schwarzenegger, jets and shit, neon-psyched out, all a paen to a fantasy sort of masculinity - it's certifiably rad:

Like Kenneth Anger hopped up on 7 bowls of Sugar Smacks, no?

Best YouTube Ad EVAR

The Whitburn Project: Hacking Billboard Charts

Ever heard of Usenet? Usenet was, and is, basically an unimaginably vast network of crude message boards that predated the web as we know it. And it is there, and not on Wikipedia, where the world's most anal musical research project EVER was produced: The Whitburn Project.

One fruit of the Whitburn Project's labor exists today in the form of a 21.8 megabyte spreadsheet. Which is huge. And that's what it takes to record, organize, and catalog every single "popular" song since the 1890's.

The Whitburn project is named for Joel Whitburn, a legendary researcher of popular music and author of several kinda ugly books on the Billboard charts. But the collective wisdom of hundreds of obsessive records collectors diverged from Joel's work several years ago (resulting from some wonky dispute about his column data) and now the project has a mind of its own.

This multi-terabyte collection of high quality audio files is an immense service to the public good, regardless of their illegality. But even the work done on the spreadsheet alone is bearing strange fruit. For instance, some bright kids in Portland just used it to make an interactive database of the top music videos for every week from 1980-1988.

I can't really post anything from this project to this blog without breaking the law. But if you want to look into all of this for yourself, you'll find the group's work spread over these tribes:

alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.pop, alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.pop.d, alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.country, and alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.country.d, alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.lossless and alt.binaries.sounds.whitburn.repost

Read more about the project on Waxy; get started with Usenet here (if you're using a mac).

Video Pizza

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The Scene; A Number of Names

The Scene was a television show aired in Detroit on WGPR, the first black-owned TV station in America. From 1975 to 1987 the show served as black culture's reinvention of the "dance show" format - and looking back on these amazing tapes now it hurts to understand why it remained a purely local phenomenon.

While white America was up to god knows what on American Bandstand aired Saturday mornings across America, The Scene was publicizing and helping give birth to Detroit Techno, a moment in American music that was so brililantly cross-pollinated, strange and compelling that it keeps presenting itself as safe material to bite on every like 4 years or so. (Lately it's more a matter of biting on Italians biting on Detroit who were of course biting upon ectomorphs in Germany but even that's working out pretty well.)

This clip from The Scene is choice. It features a track called Sharevari, a now-classic single by a group called A Number of Names. The song's title derives from an intentional misspelling of Charivari, a collective of young local promoters who were at the time making and flashing big bucks throwing parties in Detroit.

Can we bring back roller skates on the dance floor? Please? Here's the track; practice at home.

Letters from Billy

I often forget about the power of a real post-delivered letter. In the late 1990s Bill Geerhart penned dozens of letters to various pop culture celebrities, including several serial killers and other verifiable psychos like Dick Cheney. He got lots of personal responses and they've just beenpublished online.

Highlights: Getting Richard Ramirez to respond on "official Nightstalker" letterhead; Charles Manson's mysterious photo of a barn and his continued commitment to the phrase "far out"; Clarence Thomas' above the call of duty handwritten thoughts on the McDonald's menu. And yeah, that Dick Cheney trading card.

The Effect of Harsh Metal On the Vocal Chords

Recently a team of Dutch scientists conducted a totally grody endoscopic study on whether the habit of singing "harsh vocals" causes damage to vocal chords. This is certainly a very nurturing and Scandinavian topic, because if the Queens Medical Center in Nottingham isn't willing to look after our heavy metal vocal practitioners by dropping a camera down a paid participant's throat and asking them to stress their glotis, who is?

So it's resolved now: This behavior "can be done safely." I'd like to think that this fact will usher in a whole new demographic of death metal growlers who were previously sidelined due to concerns about harshing their biologies. If you still don't feel called by mother nature to this task, remember, you can always teach yourself. (Via.)

R. Stevie's It's My Life, 1988 [Video]

I recently found a video of one of my favorite R. Stevie Moore songs, an even more respectably adolescent cover of the Animals' It's My Life. It was shot at WFMU in 1988 during his tenure here on staff. Aside from glimpses of a bombed out proto-locale that a youngster like me will never know, you'll catch a few past WFMU luminaries, such as the late Frank Balesteri.

You'll find more of Stevie's video work on this YouTube page. I'm thinking of throwing down for the DVD.

Anger Anxiety

One of the challenging things about writing for the WFMU blog is that everything's already been written about before. Most everything. I just caught up with part two of the Kenneth Anger DVD and was moved to go back and revel in Puce Moment, a film he recut in some indeterminate time in the late sixties to an awesome score by... Actually screw it, Brian Turner wrote about it here.

The least I can do is to provide a functioning screening of it:

I thought that I'd get my two cents in for posterity after finding a copy of Kustom Kar Kommandos but I swear that I only just realized that Mike Lupica dropped mention of it even before Brian's post.

The only thing I can think to do is to reflect upon the anxiety of influence and the difficulty in getting out from behind what has come before us. But you don't want to hear about all that, do you? Me neither.

Why Does Fugazi have a Myspace Page?

The sale of social networking site Bebo.com to AOL last week for $850 million prompted Billy Bragg to write an editorial in the New York Times about how artists are getting shafted out of royalty payments by web 2.0 websites who use their work to build their businesses. Though it's true that every artist that creates a profile on MySpace or any other social networking portal is legally waiving their right to royalty payments, he raises a good point: musicians and record labels using these sites to communicate to their fanbases are underselling their own worth.

I just spent a week in Austin, Texas for SXSW and I observed two completely different business cultures at work; first, the "interactive" (internet) dudes held court, then later in the week most left and the town gave way to the music fest folks. The vibe in the conference center spelled out the different trajectories of the two industries. Venture capital is currently pouring cash into every half-baked disemvoweled idea set to a powerpoint deck, so the internet guys are whooping it up. But as the music panels began the central theme congealed fairly swiftly: abject fiscal despair.

This much is clear: the retail market for music is drying up. But that doesn't mean it's time to fold in cards.

Nick Jaina, Power (MP3s)

It's raining again and Nick Jaina's got a new album out; it's called Wool and he's going to be playing at the Knitting Factory in New York tonight to support it. I'm not sure if he has the means to pull of the album's chamber arrangements but dude has a really deeply doleful voice that would suit me set to plucked catgut alone.

Here's a cut from Wool.

Nick Jaina - Power

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John Maus (MP3s)

I returned from Austin, Texas only this evening, after being immersed in the information orgasm that is SXSW for an entire week +. The prospect of saying anything comprehensive about what went down this year is too daunting for a man fresh off a solid 24 hour stand-by airport sojourn, so I'll just drop a few mp3s on you for the moment and call it a post.

Ever heard of John Maus? He performed at the Todd P. showcase and verily scared the crap out of my friends with a very committed, intense and screamy lo-fi darkwave set.

He also played keys on a few Ariel Pink albums and your feeling about those songs will follow you here as well. They're much more mellow and 'verbed out than what he threw down upon us live.

John Maus - My Whole World is Coming Apart
John Maus - Just Wait Until Next Year

Nobody Knows Why

I hope that you reserve the use of the word genius for those who really deserve it. Don't just say "GENIUS!" as a casual exclamation; the word is too useful and needs to be reserved for when it's truly ready to deploy with force. I'm about to do that now: Why The Lucky Stiff is a GENIUS.

Great swaths of deepest geek Japan know him as a core contributor to the programming language known as Ruby. There are various cultural camps that gather around various programming languages and Ruby, a relatively accessible "scripting" language, has a reputation for bringing the creative types together, the bike mechanics, and the micro-brewers, the in-a-banders, and the creators and solvers of absurd problems.

The mysterious personage known as Why The Lucky Stiff wants to draw creative brains to this party from wider sources. And he's done so by publishing absolutely unique technical book works like The Poignant Guide To Ruby.

His work is informed by early 90s zine culture. And maybe British drug comedy. (And perhaps syphilis. That's just my theory.) And lately he's on a new kick that tops all of his previous manic passing obsessions: Hackety Hack. Ostensibly it's about giving kids an introduction to programming, though I know more than a few adults who have relived their Commodore Basic youths through his tutorials.

When he realized that he needed a better way to allow users to create user interfaces he decided to basically build his own programming language to suit the task. He's been working on it forever and now he's released the guide for free. It's called Nobody Knows Shoes. And taken as a new confluence of disparate cultures and as a social project for the common good, it's verifiably genius. Somebody call the MacArthur folks. I'm not even kidding.

"Underground" Computer Movie About CERN

National Geographic just published an amazing article about CERN, a particle accelerator research laboratory in France.

It's a (pretty) good pop-science read but props to our own Brian Turner for highlighting what should have been the big pull quote,

"The people running the LHC aren't in a rush to talk about all the things that can go wrong, perhaps because the public has a way of worrying that mad scientists will accidentally create a black hole that devours the Earth."

I don't know, I feel like they're probably fighting for the forces of good. More than the article, I'm persuaded by this "underground" documentary about the facility from 1974, just some few years before the the internet was birthed there by an English computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee. 

Megachurch Media

I went to CHURCH this weekend. No shit. In Spokane, a once-was industrial mining and logging powerhouse in eastern Washington state that has given way to suburban sprawl, methamphetamines, and yeah, HUGE CHURCHES.

Go ahead, laugh. But let me tell you something: if we are engaged in a culture war, these folks are kicking our ass. The Life Center church that I attended was one of four in the city, which qualifies it as a religious franchise on the make.  Capacity 2500+, which places it as one of rough 1338 megachurches in America. They conducted a full-on TV-quality broadcast of the sermon and bookended every section with a live Christian rock band. People cried and waved their hands in the air. The WB-friendly compositions were  licensed from a commercial firm.

They interspersed the even-toned vanilla moralizing with hallmark-specialesque videos played on dual jumbrons, and a little digging leads me to think that these pieces may have been farmed out from a company like this one (dig the Die Hard respect!).

Browse GodTube.com for a spell and one realizes that this culture must be experiencing a (gross) mass media renaissance of its own.

I know it's funny, but dudes, IT'S NOT FUNNY. Measured in brute numbers, this culture is outmaneuvering the left on a daily basis. The army of god is on the march, and they're already geared to mobilize en masse against whichever candidate our superdelegates (near arbitrarily) choose.

Y'know, sitting there under the influence of one or two of their 16 oz. Christuccinos, I came to the conclusion that the form they've chosen for mass communication may really have legs. Put people in a room and talk to them about what goes on. Deary me, I think we need a new weird church of our own to galvanize all our stray lefty sheep. (No Ted, not that weird.)

Amen. Anyone else up for Sunday service?

Cable Access Hits

Reading the High Places blog this week, I found this video of Subjects playing on an old episode of New Wave Theater (previously covered here).

Now that it's technically irrelevant as a delivery platform, cable access seems to be everywhere lately. Do you realize how many choice YouTube hits from the past year have sprung from the interlaced-licious VHS loins of this cultural institution?

The prospect of delivering one's selfhood over the boob tube is a prospect that has lost a little bit of its culture fuckery bite now that any old fool can upload a web cam vid and have it light up sallow faces around the world moments later.

But beyond the lighting racks and studio furniture, the cable access tradition has loads to offer. It's developed a true aesthetic of its own, and though it's easily mocked, its uselessness has begun to cast upon it a romantic glow.

(As I write this, channel 11 in Portland is showing something called Vortex Church, which involves a lot of woozy shots of cathedral ceilings multilayered over some dude sitting with a cat in his lap. As with radio, there is always this terrible pain at the knowledge of its transience. Thankfully, I have heard some good folks are currently organizing to alleviate this.)

Ok, enough talk. What's your pick for the next up and coming cable access weirdo hit? I'm putting chips down on Von Hummer:

NW Croon

Marriage Records in Portland, OR has a spiritual consonance with a lot of other record labels you know from the pacific northwest area. They've been around for a few years and have put out a lot of low-run handmade objects, tell-tale paper folded CD cases and some really Ghee-orgeous vinyl releases. They just put out new comp, their second (only $10!), and I want to play two tracks from it for you, both from dudes who possess a different kind of vocal swagger than I know of from dudes elsewhere. (I think it's weird regional soul music for the extremely pale complexioned.)

Adrian Orange (of Thanksgiving) comes along with the "young poet who's been cranking out two albums every change of the weather since he was fourteen" mythos but whether you've been a fan of his creakier early stuff you have to admit that lately, he's really on some soulful shit (and horn sections have helped). But this song's just him and that guitar and it's in the mode of an asshole Dylan breakup song. Adrian Orange -

It Ain't Me

Read on for another MP3.