I'm a weirdo

I will always defend the greatness of Prince, despite (and perhaps because of) all his eccentricities, but the Purple One should put down The Watchtower and pick up a copy of Wired.

That whole thing about suing YouTube and its users for posting his intellectual property was pretty bad, but now he's taking the time out of his busy schedule of purifying himself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka to block his performances of other people's songs... Namely, Radiohead's "Creep", which he added to his live repertoire at this year's Coachella, ostensibly to endear himself to the festival's young audience.

According to this article from Billboard, "Thom Yorke said he heard about Prince's performance from a text message and thought it was "hilarious."

Intrepid YouTube users continue to post the video, so here's the infamous performance at Coachella. The video totally sucks but the audio is actually not that bad for a bootleg.

Maybe if the artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince would cool it with the legal action he could stick to what he does best, playing the fuck out of the guitar... which is what he's stopping people from seeing. Doesn't make much sense to me.

Lost in the music

Not a bad week for your tax dollars after all: Enjoy these Bill C-10 approved musings on music from the CBC.

Q&A with David Usher

-Canada's favourite Mr. Usher talks about how his songwriting process has changed, the future of music performance and distribution, and his new career as a "social media consultant".

Dave also 'ushers' in this great quote:

I really feel the more things you create, the more creative you become.

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Top Dogg

The question is, how did a convicted criminal and acknowledged “pimp” become one of the most endearing figures in pop culture?

Fun.

Relying on each other, ah ha

The other day I tuned in to The Hour just in time to see Canada's indie sweetheart Feist get the interrogation of a lifetime from Strombo.

Of course, the first thing I did when the commercial break hit was run over to the computer, bring up the Arts & Crafts website, and listen to "Islands in the Stream". Whoda thought one of the highest selling singles of all time would make such a great indie rock gem, and early candidate for song of the year?

Then it occurred to me that this isn't the first time that Feist has covered/ co-covered a #1 hit song written by the Bee Gees... yes, "Inside Out" was also a Gibb-penned classic!

The way things are going, the next Broken Social Scene album could have a cover of Frankie Valli's "Grease". If we're lucky.

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Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers - "Islands in the Stream"

"Let's Hear It for Rock Bottom"

Apparently The Offspring are still making "music".

Too bad, because the well has run dry. The new single, "Hammerhead", finds Dexter Holland riding the cutting edge, with lyrics about school shootings. Someone should let him in on the secret... you know, the one about how he's no longer the most relevant pop culture 'Dexter'.
(editor's note: mind the volume...)
Probably time for a new pseudonym.

Tepid, un-listenable single aside, the new album & cover is a real piece of work. The title is Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace, which is dangerously close to the Foo Fighters' Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace...

and the plot thickens further. Check out the album artwork:

And check out the cover of another Foo Fighters album.

Is this just me being picky/paranoid, or do The Offspring wish they were spawned from Dave Grohl's perfect rock and roll sperm?

Stacey! Jane!

Warning: Listening to this may cause you to have this song stuck in your head the rest of the day. Right now, this is the #1 track in the UK. It's basically "My Sharona" mashed with "Hey Mickey", and it's way more fun than Rihanna's current chart topper, the Madonna-title-copping "Take a Bow".

The Ting Tings - "That's Not My Name" (single version)

Let's hunt and kill Miley Ray Cyrus

From Rant in E-Minor:



Bill Hicks is spinning in his fucking grave!

The dark philosopher could never have foreseen the terrors unleashed on us here in the early years of this new century.

You reap what you sow, and big thanks have to go out to everyone who bought a copy of Billy Ray's Some Gave All back in 1992. It was your hard earned dollars you sank into a shiny cassette copy of the nine times platinum album featuring one of the most efficiently evil memes in the history of pop music. AND it was your waning interest in the subsequent years that allowed him more time to raise his daughter, the new generation Tiffany, the demon spawn herself, Miley Cyrus.

Yes, it's all your fault for giving up on poor Billy Ray. If he hadn't experienced such a brutal backlash, he wouldn't have had so much free time to instill those hardcore Christian-capitalist values into his daughter, a little Debbie Gibson wannabe...

It may be too late for little miss Cyrus, but there's still time to prevent Michael Bolton from having kids! The very future of Planet Earth is in our hands!

Like a shot in the head

The Fall Out Boys dig deep, waaaay deep for their new single, a cover of Jackson's "Beat It" with John Mayer subbing in for Eddie Van Halen. I hope this one crashes and burns like the complete train wreck that it is, completely devoid of the irony it so desperately tries to evoke.

Luckily, there are the demon netizens of YouTube who will help keep this one alive. As the brilliantly named 'sk8ter4233244'(I'm guessing that's her phone number?) claims, "this song is awsome i love it falloutboy does a much betetr job!!"
I couldn't have put it better myself.

Also from the shot in the head category, George Michael brings 25 Live Greatest Hits tour to North America this summer. Insert 'third leg' joke here.

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Links:

Fall Out Boy - Beat It

Iron man revolution

Tom Morello, the trail-blazing guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, appears in the new Iron Man film as an extra. Mr. Axis of Justice appears as a terrorist (or, 'insurgent', as imdb credits him), and is blown away while attacking the iron machine created by Tony Stark. No help from his rage here.

He also appears on the soundtrack with 'additional guitar', which would have been good to know going into the movie, not after. This is kind of like how Mike Patton did all the vampire/zombie voices in I Am the Legend of Bagger Vance.

Good to see Billy Corgan and Michael Stipe showed up to the premiere in rock solidarity, and nice to see the producers offering tickets to the personality-challenged.

Pretty good movie, though.

"Um,"

Check out Allmusic's album of the day.

I hope it's as exciting as the cover makes it look.

Barbershop of Seville

Check out this awesome musical blend that can hardly even come close to the description of "genre-busting", Hip Hop-Opera. A CBC Arts reporter checks it out... here's the description from the Editor's Choice podcast site:

"Hip Hop and Opera are not the music titans they once were. Rap music sales dropped last year by more than thirty percent, and the future of Opera appears to rest with an aging audience. The Canadian Opera Company in Toronto is running an experiment called "Hip Hopera" to see if the two genres can help each other out. CBC Arts Reporter Eli Glasner was at the premiere."

This is really cool, and great to see people forging ahead into the unknown, and taking musical risks. It's these early steps of experimentation that musicologists look back on in the future as, possibly, a turning point. Of course it's foolish to say that this is any sort of revolution, for all we know, hip-hop and indeed rock and roll itself may just be one tiny blip in the musical cosmos. In any case, this is a very interesting musical nugget, and something to keep an eye on in the future.
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MP3 Link: CBC Editor's Choice - May 9th: Hip Hopera (Runs 2m 45s)

Canadian Opera Company - Free Concert Series

Faith restored

In response to my previous post...

Leave it to Mr. Ben Rayner to bring out the sunshine for a rainy Sunday. He says the Queens concert last Friday totally rocked.

"One for the books, this show. Seriously."

Fuckin' A! Still totally jealous though, but also totally cool with it.

Fickle me El Mo

EYE: Queens Of The Stone Age @ El Mocambo, May 9

"the crowd weren’t as into it as they might have been had it not been a once-in-a-lifetime show...the band cut their set short as a result."

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Toronto fans weren't into Queens rocking out at the fucking El Mocambo... hmmm... why is that not surprising? The band had every right to cut their set short for a group of ungrateful rock poseurs who were only there for the trend factor. And when Josh Homme says "let's get drunk", he's not talking about grabbing a second ice cold domestic, but the thirteenth or fourteenth. A couple years ago, it seemed the band loved playing here... the big guy's comment was something like "last time we were here, we drank the whole fucking bar"... and now it's come to this. Maybe the Hummingbird Centre show from last October made most of this city's tepid rock fans forget what the band is all about. Shame on you all.

But I guess last night all the cool kids were over at the Phoenix for the Cut Copy show... it was probably only the second time I've actually seen a whole room full of T.O. fans bouncing along and actually having a good time, the other being the LCD Soundsystem/M.I.A show at the Opera House back in 2005. This was a great concert, helped in part by the fact that there was a third, unannounced band that opened, Mobius-something or other, who came on before the oh-so-hip Black Kids (the group is actually made up of kids of assorted ethnicities).
This allowed for extra time with my good friend, beer.

Before the concert, Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" came on... maybe it was just a coincidence, but it foreshadowed not the show we were about to miss, but the show we were about to experience.

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ROCK!

Queens of the Stone Age - 3's & 7's

...and controversy for all

CBC: Designed to Shock - 10 Most Controversial Videos of all Time

On May 1, French electronic music duo Justice unveiled a video for their new single, Stress... [the video] is notable for its depiction of extreme violence, which is causing debate amongst music fans and in internet circles.

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It's a pretty good list of controversial videos, though George Michael's "I Want Your Sex" seems a bit tame in comparison to the contemporary run-of-the-mill hip hop video. Now it's only controversial because George Michael appears in the video.

Marilyn Manson gets a token election here too. I'd never even seen the video before, but it's closer to self-parody and manufactured controversy than something concerned parents groups should get riled up over.

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Justice - "Stress"
Watch for the boom op getting into the car, around 4:43... and he gets set on fire at the end too. The wrath of these hooligans knows no bounds! Oh the humanity!




Justice - "DVNO" (four capital letters)

Before it's too late

Here's a clip from a song I've been listening to quite a bit lately (and a song they didn't play at the show last night), Cut Copy's "Going Nowhere". It's a one-shot video directed by Kris Moyes, who has also directed clips for other uncomfortably hip artists like Sia and the Presets.

Concert woes

The other day I learned that Queens of the Stone Age, one of my all-time favourite bands, are playing a surprise show in Toronto on Friday. At the El Mocambo! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Trouble is, I'm already going to see Cut Copy on Friday. Bahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahh well. There's absolutely nothing I can do, as going to both would be a logistical impossibility. The last time I missed a Queens show, I think it was a private show for a beer company, and I wasn't interested in giving them a bunch of demographic information, email, etc. just to see the band in a venue filled with the stench of mooks and Molson. And the time before that they hadn't started playing all ages venues.

But back to Cut Copy, they're streaming the first five tracks (in order) from their new album, In Ghost Colours, up on their myspace. The album is a marked progression over their previous LP, Bright Like Neon Love, and features awe-inspiring production from DFA's Tim Goldsworthy.

Portishead is also back with a dark, progressive trip-hop album (can they make any other kind), and while the video for their first song isn't anything special, stylistically, it fits the mood of the song well, with punishing aggression in the foreground and fragile beauty filling the background.

Free bird

It was Free Comic Book Day Saturday, and here on Monday, it's Free Album day.

Yes, all the hype is true, Nine Inch Nails dropped a very free yet unnecessary album to the utter delight of fans today. Only a few tracks short of a yawn-fest, things don't really start cooking until the third track, "Letting You", by far the most interesting thing on the album. The track is a continuation of the thread along the "Wish"-"March of the Pigs"-"Starfuckers"-"You Know What You Are" line. Mr. Reznor also goes into the old bag of tricks for a "Pinion" re-write to lead off the disc... wait, it's not a disc yet. That'll be in July. It's also his shortest major release since Broken.

Perhaps having Trent Reznor loose without a label isn't such a good thing. I think this whole adventure could have been more successful simply as an EP of strictly the electronic driven stuff, leaving out the painfully pedestrian "Discipline" and "Echoplex", both of which are getting radio airplay for some reason. The shortness of the EP format, mixed with the experimental (for him) nature of the music would provide a perfect jumping off point for whatever his little heart wants to do next. Just like Ghosts I-IV, this album is more interesting in terms of its delivery and distribution than on the merit of the music itself.

but let's hope the final three tracks on the album, beginning with the wicked-cool and tripped out "Corona Radiata", symbolize the rebirth of a star. Otherwise, this is simply a black hole.

Like they say, you get what you pay for.

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Suggested Playlist: The Slip EP

"Letting You"
"Head Down"
"Lights in the Sky"
"Corona Radiata"
"The Four of Us are Dying"
"Demon Seed"

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Haha... "Demon Seed", like "Discipline" are songs that sound like would-be b-sides of his from the early 90s. I'm reminded of the Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs from a couple years back. The group took the same sort back-to-basics approach to scrape the bottom of the well, and since then have ostensibly quit the rap game.

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The great thing about being Trent Reznor is having your very own personal Weird Al. The dark prince himself seems to have come to terms with it too, embedding this very video on the official page days after its release.

And live in hilltop houses driving zero cars

CBC: 'Everyone makes mistakes,' Nickelback singer says after sentencing

His lawyer, Marvin Stern, said the driving ban will make a significant impact on Kroeger's life since he lives in rural Abbotsford and the conviction could also affect his travel to the U.S.

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Sounds like the police were just waiting to catch him. I wonder if he'll be hitting up Theory of a Deadman or Thornley for rides.

The worst part about this, of course, is that Chad will have more time to spend in his studio, pouring his heart into songs about how he fought the law and the law won, or something to that effect.

Love 'im or Hate 'im, it's good to see someone at least trying living the rock star life in Canada.

Alannah & Andy

Alannah Myles - Black Velvet (#1 Billboard Hot 100, March 24, 1990)

&

Velvet Underground - Black Angel's Death Song

Cool classical

So I'm going through the Coast to Coast bumper music list, putting together a mother of a mixtape, and I'm reminded of Mason Williams' classic track, "Classical Gas". It's one of the rare instances where Rock, Pop, and Classical music are blended seamlessly together.



Links:

Classical Gas [Wikipedia]