For nearly 40 years, Judy Garland was the icon of the Hollywood life and classed as one of the greatest entertainers of her generation. She was performing on stage and in movies from a very young age and at 16 she brought The Wizard Of Oz to life on the big screen. She followed this with many movies and a staggering amount of concert appearances that broke box office records.
Behind the scenes it was a different story. From an early age, MGM Studios had been plying its young actors with ampthetamines and barbiturates to keep them going through the back to back filming schedules required to keep new movies being released. This went hand in hand with the glitzy lifestyle and constant rotation of work/party/premiere/work that made up the backbone of Hollywood.
Despite a hectic work schedule and much critical acclaim, Judy Garland's personnel life was a shambles. By the early sixties, five marriages and a life long battle with alcohol and drug abuse had taken its toll on her. In a bid to get her back into the public's eye it was decided she would write an autobiography. Enter her agent, Irving "Swifty" Lazar. He supplied the ailing star with a reel to reel tape recorder and got her to use it as a way to get the book started as well as maybe come to terms with her problems.
What follows has become known as the "Judy Speaks" tapes. Still mainlining pills and a ludicrous amount of gin, she sobs and screams at ex-husbands, film executives, her complete distrust of the recording device and pretty much everyone who she believes led her to this point in life.
Bear in mind that its pretty heavy going at times. Her booze soaked rendition of Somewhere Over The Rainbow is pretty heavy. As legend goes, these tapes got confiscated after her death in 1969 and ended up locked away in a publicist's vault before getting a public release some years ago. Judy's family actually petitioned for them to be denied a release but the court ruled otherwise.
Its pretty heavy going stuff at times. Some brief moments of cohesion and happiness are soon washed away by Judy's gin soaked anger and vitriol. Be warned.
I've recently become obsessed with the now extinct genre of instructional rap videos from the 80s. I've been playing most of my findings on our podcast (which is live TONIGHT @ 10pm Pacific on FCCFREERADIO btw). The perfect combination of coked out CEOs making bad decisions and Reagan era crypto-racism (HEY OUR EMPLOYEES ARE POOR "URBAN" KIDS! LET'S SPEAK TO THEM ON THEIR LEVEL!). Here now I present to you my very favorites.
5. RTD Maintenance Department
Great example of "the man" trying to get on "our level" and speak "our language" through the power of "the music of the streets." I know if I was an employee of the Los Angeles' Rapid Transit Department in the 80s I would be nothing less than inspired to wake each morning and proudly crank on those buses after watching this inspiring video. Score: 6.8
4. Selling is Service
Nope. Nothing weird or awkward about these white people rapping here. Great work guys, let's put it out. 5.4
3. Pier One Imports LET'S COACHING
The most modern out of all our videos presented today. Detailing the process known as "Let's Coaching" from the geniuses ar Pier One Imports. "Let's Coaching" (Let's engage the customers! Let's make a sale!) is kind of perfect in the way it illustrates everything wrong with corporate upper management bullshit language. The awkward terminology, the emotional exploitation of their customers, the straight up lying they teach to their poor clerks. It's all there. 9.7
2. Wendy's COLD DRINKS
Wendy's are the KINGS (queens?) of instructional rap videos as you will soon see.
I'm not even going to lie. This song is fucking tight. Based around an 8 measure New Jack Swing loop Teddy Riley himself would be proud of. Reminiscent of TLC's earlier work or later DeeDee Ramone, this heartfelt lesson on how to serve cold drinks is sure to give any Wendy's employee the gusto needed to make the customer happy! Score: 8.5
1. Wendy's Burger Rap
The classic track that made a generation learn how to love again. Not patronizing at all, this lesson on how to make a fuckin' burger has gone down in history as the premiere instructional rap video. These hamburger ladies are literal throbbing gristle. Singing gristle even! Also: doesn't feature any embarrassing white people rapping. Score: 10.0
Very Very Very Honorable Mention goes to this very incredible track released by KFC in 1987 credited to "Colonel and the Gang" on flexidisc (yes!) teaches the importance of making Chicken Littles and Shoestring fries properly, complete with references to "golden showers." If there was a video it would be number 1.
Like most people, I work a pretty shitty job that takes up far too much of my time. Unless your one of the very small ( and depending on your opinion, either lucky or annoyingly smug ) minority that loves your chosen vocation, I can pretty much guarantee that we all think about losing control from time to time.
One such person that did lose control was a man named Travis Bickle. He was a fictional character in the 1976, Martin Scorsese directed motion picture, Taxi Driver. You should all know about it.
The musical score to this great film was handled by this man......
Bernard Herrmann was a highly respected composer within Hollywood. Racking up a stupidly impressive body of work that included much radio work and live orchestration.. He scored nearly all of Hitchcock's films ( including The Birds, which doesn't feature any music. just electronically generated bird sounds) as well as creating the signature music for other classics such as The Day The Earth Stood Still, Fahrenheit 451, Cape Fear and The Bride Wore Black. He worked with Ray Harryhausen on Jason And The Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad. Composed and conducted the music for Orson Welles original radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds and the stirring and dynamic score for today's post, Taxi Driver. His final work before his death in 1975.
The score for Taxi Driver perfectly compliments Robert De Niro's portrayal of Vietnam vet turned New York cabby, Travis Bickle. The combination of traditional jazz instrumentation and discordant bursts of brass perfectly underpin his slide into psychosis and eventual vigilantism while painting a very dark and grimy view of 1970's New York.
I used to listen to this on a regular basis before work. Now, I don't know if that was really a good thing or not and I am pretty sure a lot of people would argue that it was. The version below is the 1998 reissue. It features all of the music Herrmann recorded for the film as well as a few extra pieces of background music. It also features this little number.......
This is the one I used to listen to the most before work. I hate working.
So hopefully you should enjoy this. Maybe it will help bring change into your work life or work environment, maybe it will just help you scare a few people. Hopefully you will just enjoy it.
We all know that there are plenty of things better than Star Wars and Illcon has made this public knowledge before. I mean, George Lucas has been shitting on his fans for quite some time now, what do you owe him? Nothing. Today's record is something that is also better than Star Wars.
The little dude above is a fella called Meco, Domenico Monardo to be exact. He was a pretty big name during the 1970's as a respected producer and trombonist. Playing on and producing records for Diana Ross, Neil Diamond, Gloria Gaynor and plenty of others. Things changed however, when in 1977 George Lucas released his cash vulture, Star Wars. Meco got pretty excited by this film. Even more excited by the stirring score courtesy of the always awesome John Williams. Meco hatched on the idea of creating a disco version. Of course, it was laughed at and not taken seriously. Who would believe that could work!
Meco believed and wouldn't let up. Luckily the score became a huge hit and the top brass relented, allowing him to see his idea through. Of course he would need a pretty sweet band to achieve this feat. The Sci-Fi Disco Band Meco was born.
Seriously
Despite looking like the outcome of letting Ming The Merciless assemble the Village People, the band managed to survive on the mean streets of New York for about 4 months performing live and providing a much needed visual element to this epic onslaught of disco. And it is an onslaught. The album contains the full 15 minute Star Wars suite encompassing the opening them, Imperial March, the cool flying music bits, all those schmaltzy parts and that stupid band in the bar. It also has robots dancing on the cover.
Warning: This post contains no metal and barely any prog.
Another Warning: I HATE whimsical boopty doopty Black Adder-Downton Abbey-Harry Potter British school boy BULLSHIT but this shit fuckin' rules.
It would be pretty lame to make a King Crimson megapost on Ill Con, especially in light of their recent battles with Spotify. Every dork on the internet knows and loves KC. You would be hard pressed to find a techy guitar player that doesn't worship Red and I know I've fallen into a YouTube rabbit hole or 3 watching old Crimson footage. So hey let's not be lame, let's be awesome and post these pre-Crimson all-killer-no-filler little known recordings by one of the greatest psychedelic rock outfits ever: Giles, Giles and Fripp.
Their first and only release, 1968's "The Cheerful Insanity Of..." is exactly that. Totally drugged out, blissful, trippy and silly. A bit Bonzo Dog Band, a little Beach Boys, A LOT of Monty Python, all Fripp'd out with his jazzy shreds all over. Just a complete awesome (non-brutal) listen.
I'm not going to get into a whole bio and life story on these guys because British people are hella boring. Basically these two bros (actual brothers) wrote a buncha songs and needed a singer and keyboard player. They took out an ad and this awesome guitar player that couldn't sing answered instead. They let him live with them and proceeded to produce a ton of home demos. Their demos kicked so much ass that they got a record deal and put out that thing I just posted up there ^^. These demos circulated in the underground prog dork circles for years and now I present to you THE BRONDESBURY TAPES for your listening pleasure. I like these a lot. Better than the actual album.
These songs are pretty much the polar opposite of the cold, bleak paranoia one feels when listening to early KC. Some say this has a lot to do with the poor reception/sales of "The Cheerful Insanity Of..." Fripp was essentially beaten down by the music industry his first go 'round. A lot of that negative energy was channeled into his new band a year later and is one of the reasons those first albums are so fucking magical.
Next time: PART 2 - After Crimson! The NYC Trilogy and lots of cocaine with Eno and Bowie!
Yes, this post is about surf rock, by that I mean Surf Rock and not that Beach Boys crap. Fuck that shit. That is "rock about surf" and not surf rock proper.
Surf rock is a mostly instrumental guitar driven music (except in the early days it was fairly common for surf bands to shit out a pop single with a vocalist). It places great importance on melodic guitar lines played with heavy reverb. Reverb is key to surf rock. Surf bands use reverb the way death metal bands use distortion. It is hard to make the case that something is surf if it doesn't have tons of reverb. Also tremelo picking, whammy dips and palm muting are vary common techniques. Since it is instrumental for the most part there is less standard song structure than the other music of its day, though certain lines or themes are often repeated.
Surf originated in the late 50's by artists like Link Wray and the Ventures. But it was Dick Dale that made it is what it is today. He used a clean guitar tone with maximum reverb, tremelo riffs and heavy use of the whammy bar. His style included melodious guitar lines and incorporated elements from Middle Eastern and Mexican music. Sometimes a saxophone would carry the melody; an electric bass and drums made up the rhythm section.
The first true surf hit was his "Lets go Trippin'" from 1961 which became a regional hit in SoCal. Soon the trend became a national fad with both The Chantays and The Surfaris making the top 10 in 1963 with "Pipeline" and Wipe Out" respectively. Soon surf bands started popping up around the country in such as the quiet beachside communities of Boulder, Colorado (The Astronauts) Minneapolis, Minnestota (The Trashmen) Baltimore, Maryland (The Fender IV, featuring future Blue Cheer guitarist Randy Holden) and Sydney, Australia (The Atlantics). There was also a surf scene in Japan.
Surf rock began to decline in poularity in the mid-60's with the rise of the Beatles and other British invasion crap. But it never really died in the hearts of the true fans, and guys like Dick Dale managed to hold on in the Dark Ages.
More recently with the release of Pulp Fiction and the internets surf rock is experiencing something of a revival, much like psychobilly and kiddie thrash. Much like psychobilly and kiddie thrash there is some element of dressing up, but fortunately surf rock fashion isn't nearly as bad as those genres, mostly just Hawaiian shirts. The clean cut look has died along with shitting out a pop song with a singer.
Heres a list of some of my favorite current surf bands:
The Aqua Velvets
One of the first surf revival bands, the Aqua Velvets have stuck with the genre since the 80's and are still kicking.
Man or Astro-Man?
One of the higher profile revival bands, they started off as fairly trad surf, but gradually became more abstract.
Gary Hoey
Not exactly a true surf rocker, he started out as a heavy metal shredder. He tried out for Ozzy in 88 but lost to Zakk Wylde. He did some solo type shred stuff in the 90's. In 2005 he released Monster Surf, a collection of hard rock covers of classic surf songs, pretty fuckin rad if you ask me, even if he is an Affliction tool now.
The Madeira
Very progressive surf with heavy middle eastern influences. They display more dynamics than the average surf band, with acoustic passages and brooding intros.
Secret Samurai
In my opinion the best of the modern surf rockers. They play a progressive style of surf with influences from exotica and spaghetti western soundtracks. No fucking around with samples and intros, just rippin surf.
There are plenty of other good surf bands out there, just search myspace, youtube and bandcamp.
Unfortunately, the surf rock community has not figured out MediaFire and stuff like that, and there is almost nothing out there to download, and no surf mp3 blogs. Anyhoo, here's The Secret Samurai's first album, Gun Sho Gun:
Metal and surf rarely come into contact, but it does happen. Examples: the aforementioned Gary Hoey, Satch's Surfing With the Alien (not metal, but close enough), the intro to "Craving Illness" by Deceased and Agalloch's "Our Fortress is Burning... I" sounds pretty surftastic to me.
A sort of white elephant in the Swedish death metal scene, Seance didn't seem to fit in with the rest of their countrymen. While the rest of the country was turning all the knobs on their HM-2s all the way up, Seance were aping Deicide. Their debut, Fornever Laid to Rest, though decent, is just not as good as Glenn n crew.
Seance must have realized this cuz one year later they came out with this filthy beast of an album. The first thing you notice about Saltrubbed Eyes is the bass sound. It's phat az phuk. Since everybody likes to use weapon analogies to describe the guitar sounds like "buzzsaw," "chainsaw" or "laser beam," I'll say that it sounds like a baseball bat covered in razor blades, because it does as much damage by cutting as crushing. It has a perfect combination of low end, treble and distortion, the closest comparison I can think of is the bass sound on The Erosion of Sanity, but better. On top of that it's LOUD in the mix, so much that it dominates the album. The bass sound on Saltrubbed Eyes becomes its defining feature. It's like the whole album is a sick bass drop. Which isn't to say the music isn't good, it is. Still heavily Deicide influenced but slower and groovier. The band is branching out, evidenced on the menacing "Angelmeat pt II" and "Hidden Under Scars." Also since the bass sound is so strong, the mix doesn't need the guitars to support it, allowing the guitars to do their own thing now and then. Some times they drop in and out of a riff, do an open chord while the bass plays the riff or go for their own leads in addition to the bass part. Drums are well played, with a great sound: nice and loud bass drums with enough pop to stand out but not klickety-klakety. Seance broke up a couple of years later, and members went on to form Witchery,Satanic Slaughter and The Haunted. They got back together a few years back, and recorded a new album Awakening of the Gods, which is surprisingly good, but not as good as this.
Anybody who's been a party to any sort of music writing at all knows that well-worn descriptors like “unique” and “original” are by and large a fucking joke. Ninety-nine percent of everything that's ever had that title slapped upon it fell so short of deserving the honor that terms like that are cheap, tawdry husks of the higher creative impulses they supposedly describe. This isn't to say that unique forms of creative expression are impossible, but they require a retreat into either the feral or the cerebral that most people are unwilling to attempt (though the nagging optimist in me would suggest that anybody is capable, given the proper motivation). The former has birthed well-loved aesthetic concepts as disparate as grindcore or (the lamentably-titled) outsider art, and it often seems that artists who fly by the seat of their pants in the direction opposite that of convention are often afforded more appreciation than those who take a more studious route. And while the more carefree approach might be more immediately gripping and viscerally satisfying, there is something to be said for those whose intellectual pursuits place their creative output in a league beyond anybody else's.
A prime example of this is Harry Partch. Partch studied composition from a very early age, amassing a substantial body of work for an artist as young as he was. He grew impatient with the limitations of the equal-tempered scale, the basis for the vast majority of Western music, and began to look towards microtonality, a process of dividing the octave scale into smaller components – his most famous take on this being the forty three-note scale (the equal-tempered scale is divided into twelve notes), though he employed a substantial number of variations on this. These ideas were all expounded upon in his 1949 book Genesis Of A Music, a product of twenty-six years of writing, that railed against the numbing conventions that centuries of inculcation in the equal-tempered scales had produced, instead favoring the ratio-based tuning scales of Greek philosophers like Pythagoras.
The problem, however, is that the majority of musical instruments from the Western world were designed for the twelve notes of which its music is most commonly comprised. Partch's necessity then spurred his inventiveness and an arsenal of odd instruments was born, pieces with monikers like the Cloud Chamber Bowl, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl that occasionally drew inspiration from violins, pianos, and marimbas, but often bore no resemblance to anything that had come before. He was, as he humbly put it, “a philosophic music man seduced into carpentry,” the builder of strange creations, as much sculpture as functional musical instrument. The music for which these had been produced was equally staggering, both in the breadth of the influences from which it drew and for just the sheer peculiarity.
Partch pulled from a variety of sources over the course of a life filled with extremes. His lifelong engagement with Pythagorean tuning was possibly the most readily apparent of his sources, but the hobo graffiti that he witnessed riding the rails during the Depression held as much sway over his later work. Prior to his destitution he had consulted with William Butler Yeats regarding an experimental opera treatment of Yeats' translation of Sophocles. His homosexuality, in an era in which it was largely considered aberrant (at best), was occasionally touched upon. The influence of music from Polynesia, India, and Africa occurred decades before the West began to look seriously towards those cultures' music.
What he did with those influences is the notable part, because few are easy to spot. Partch had his precedents, but his take on those elements had no direct predecessor. It's an eerie, sensual music, one that reaches across large swaths of the temporal and the geographical, plucking disparate strains of the arcane and blending them into a seamless whole, a junkyard opera on the edge of perception, a subversion of rarely-considered social fundamentals, a leap forward into a distant past. Disorienting and disarming, it is among the only bodies of work that deserves the tag “unique.”
Seems that everybody else is doing a thing on mid-90's DM post so I figured I oughta hop on the bandwagon. And I gotta quit the dolphins: the gayest cetaceans known to man. Plus my metal was challenged. I give you Salt Lake City, Utah's Wicked Innocence.
They are one of the first bands to inject a special kind of weird to their music, and not just regular weird, like say, Atheist or even Demilich do but the kind of abstract, bizarrist weird that Cephalic Carnage or Dripping would come to do.
The foundation is 90's death metal: Suffocation, bits of Atheist and hints of what Brutal Truth was doing then. But what they do with the influences is what makes them so weird. They don't rely on extraneous effects or carnival music. It's all songwriting, arranging the riffs in such a way as to give the whole thing a surrealist vibe:
Slam riffs give way to lurchy tech-ish parts then to melodic solos then to lilting twisted blasts. Riffs stop and start then start again. Sometimes they never go anywhere. This is all put together for maximum unpredictability and top awesomeness. Abstract bits of clean, droning vocals, jazzy fills, and spoken word are mixed in to keep it even weirder. Sometimes it becomes unwieldy, buy they always redeem themselves quickly. Atmospheric Death Metal this ain't. Unless the atmosphere is Suffocation peaking on mushrooms. If that's what these guys were going for they got it right on the mark.
This all combines for a masterpiece of surrealist brutal death, so hop on the crazy train. Here's their second Album, 1995s Omnipotence:
and rumours have abounded for years of the infamous Abominable Snowman, or Yeti of the Himalayas,
but NONE of these creatures have terrified the local populace so much as the local mythical beast of where I grew up, the all-too-real man-beast known as... ...PURPLE AKI!
Y'see, back in the days before the internet, it was a lot easier to be mysterious and for unsubstantiated gossip to spread and mutate like wildfire. So it was with the shadowy figure known to us kids as Purple Aki. He was used as a bogeyman figure (yes, BOGEYman, not BOOGIEman like you fucking septic tanks use...seriously, are you THAT ashamed about disco?) by unscrupulous parents in the eighties in order to bend children to their will..."If you don't get to bed/do your homework/eat your greens, Purple Aki will get you!"...and stories were often told about him and encounters other people had with him, mostly bullshit we figured, but scary nonetheless.
As a kid, I heard the name around and learned the following 'facts' about him - that he was a large black man who was from Toxteth in Liverpool (A predominantly poor, black area where I spent half of my life living. It's a ROUGH place and is mostly famous for rioting and heroin) but was often seen around the St Helens area (Near where I actually grew up. It's a pus-filled canker sore on the face of existence and should be bombed into oblivion. It's famous for....umm....glass). That he would follow and accost young boys, especially those who worked out or went to the gym a lot, ask if he could feel their muscles and then offer them the choice of either being raped by him OR to have his initials carved into their buttocks, leading to the alleged bone-chilling question he was said to have asked his victims..."POP OR SLASH?".
At no point did I find out ANYTHING else about him - what he looked like, aside from being huge and black, why he was called 'Purple' Aki, or if he was ACTUALLY real. To me, he was a spook, an imaginary ghoul, who would appear to friends of friends of friends and ask his question, only for them to run away and escape his rapey clutches. A friend of mine who was a well known bullshit-artist swore blind that Purple Aki had accosted his brother, but, well, I didn't believe him. To be honest, I was pretty damn sure he didn't exist.
I was WRONG.
The story that I had heard most often in connection to Purple Aki was that he had approached a boy at a train station and so terrified the boy that he ran onto the train tracks and was electrocuted in his mad scramble to escape. Again, it all sounded like some kind of scare story told by parents to stop their children from going out at night alone or something...but in 1995 I moved to a flat in Toxteth and met people who actually KNEW Purple Aki. Then, I read about him in the local newspaper.
The bogeyman was REAL.
His name was Akinwale Arobieke, and he was known as 'Purple' Aki due to the colouration of his skin giving him an almost purple hue. He was six foot five and weighed twenty stone. He'd been charged over the death of the boy who was electrocuted running away from him but had gotten off due to lack of evidence and possible racial discrimination in the trial. This was the only crime he had ever been charged with, as far as I knew.
It turned out that the whole 'pop or slash' rape thing wasn't true, and his ACTUAL perversion was FAR stranger than that. He hung out around gyms and suchlike and would ask people about their muscles and general fitness in the guise of being a fellow enthusiast, offering advice and so on, until he would whip out a tape measure and ask if he could touch and measure the hapless victims muscles. If you were particularly unlucky he would either ask you to do push-ups whilst he lay atop you - in the guise of 'providing extra weight to make it harder' - or, his signature move, "inverted piggybacks" – where the victim would squat so he could lean over their backs with his face by their buttocks and his junk on their necks, while squeezing their quad muscles.
Yeah. Now, you're probably wondering exactly HOW he managed to get such rough 'n' tough big-ass guys to DO this kind of shit? Well, it was a combination of his own intimidating stature, knowing that men are way less likely to talk about this kind of thing to the police, and the personal information he had in his 'Stalkers book'.
His WHAT?!?
Well, when he was most recently arrested in 2008 - after already having gone to jail in 2001, then again, almost as soon as he got out, in 2003, until 2006, when he was released on licence and had the following piece of legislation levelled against him, he was "...banned from touching, feeling or measuring muscles, asking people to do squat exercises in public, entering the towns of St Helens, Warrington or Widnes without police permission and loitering near schools, gyms or sports clubs" - one piece of evidence brought up against him was a book containing "...details about victims' body measurements, contact numbers and families." It was alleged that Arobieke would "do research into his victim, confronting them with such details as their father's car registration number or sibling's place of education.". Yep, he may be a sexually perverse weirdo, but he does his homework.
Now, these brushes with prison and the 'muscle-touching ban' only seemed to serve as encouragement to him as almost as soon as he was released from prison following his 2008 sentencing, he was jailed for another two and a half years for defying the 'muscle-touching ban' in North Wales. So, his notoriety had spread across the whole of the North-West of England and into Wales. He was now internationally infamous, in a small way.
With him safely ensconced behind bars for a while, weightlifters and fitness enthusiasts need not fear dropping the soap in the showers, and entire rugby teams will go unmolested - yep, I shit you not, he actually stalked an entire rugby team. you may be unsurprised to know that while he ws inside, even the prison hardmen were terrified of Aki. Of course wild stories still circulated - such as the one about him being the inspiration for Clive Barker's 'Candyman' character, but mostly he has just faded into the local culture as a figure part bogeyman, part figure of fun...
This banner was seen as the Glastonbury festival back in 2008 - it's phrased in the Liverpool, or 'scouse', vernacular, with 'Arrr mate!' meaning 'What-ho fellow', 'gripped' meaning 'accosted' and 'portaloo' meaning 'portable john' - and can even be found on MySpace, Twitter, and in multiple places on Facebook. There is a Purple Aki website, is STILL widely discussed on bodybuilding sites, sites about urbanlegends and local weirdoes, hell, he's even on wikipedia!!
There have been a few songs written about him by local bands, and he gave his name to this wonderfully twisted composition by my good friends, and fellow infamous local weirdoes, a.P.A.t.T....
...and there are a number of 'tributes' to him to be found on YouTube, of which these two are prime examples - not only of what a well-known twisted weirdo he is, but also of exactly how fucked-up the local humour is where I grew up...
...oh, by the way, the opening of those cartoons is a reference to classic british 1970's kids TV show 'Bod', for all you septic tanks scratching your heads in confusion...
It's funny how an infamous sexual predator can become a cultural icon isn't it? The only other one I can think of is Freddy Krueger, except the child molestation thing was conveniently swept under the carpet after the first film, wasn't it?
Mind you, we do have a history in the UK of embracing well-known criminals and lunatics to our cultural bosom - train robber Ronnie Biggs ended up making a record with The Sex Pistols, and a frankly FANSTASTIC movie was made about notorious prison-addict Charlie Bronson.
So there you have it, yet more evidence that us limeys are a bunch of fuckin' weirdoes.
Now, I couldn't think of anything decent that was appropriate to give you as a download, so here is 'Dropped', the second album by Mindfunk - a criminally underrated record made by a mostly reviled band who saddled themselves with a shitty name - for no other reason than that I like it.
Oh man, do I have a treat for you guys today. Killer Fox (also known as Killer Foxx) are an enigma trapped within an anomaly enshrouded within a vortex of mystery--a mindfuckingly awful yet compellingly listenable experimental/techno/death metal trainwreck replete with Vocoded narration, frenzied screaming, drum machines, extended acoustic guitar passages, and a confusing medieval (above)-meets-Motley Crue (below) visual aesthetic. Quite simply, Killer Fox defy any sort of tidy categorization, existing in the esoteric realm of Outsider Metal, where they rule as undisputed Kings. Although it's exceedingly difficult to extract any sort of coherent storyline from the Killer Fox continuum, it does appear that they released an impossible-to-find debut album entitled Going Under (also known by the titles All You Can Eat and The Night) in 1986, at which point half of the band (Vivian Fox and KK Fox) promptly died in a car accident, leaving the surviving members (guitarist Mick Stryker and drummer John Deacon) to create the absolutely baffling Orgasm of Death in 1990 before evaporating into complete obscurity. Attempting to quantify exactly how much of this album is a joke and how much is quote unquote serious is a futile endeavor, as just about anyone could discern after 30 seconds of listening. There is simply no way to put adjectives to the Killer Fox experience, although one reviewer described it as "... nonsensical, never-ending songs, 'vocals' like a ranting old hag and weird and totally unmotivated sound effects. Like if THE RESIDENTS had made a Sci-fi concept Metal album." YES. The Residents meet... Old Lady Drivers? Fuck. I don't know. Orgasm of Death was released by the mysterious and obscure Metal Enterprises label out of Germany, who also boasted (?) a "White Power Oi-Metal" band fronted by a black dude (FUCKER), history's only "Grind-sploitation" band (EXREME NAPALM TERROR--see yesterday's non-mixtape), and the terrible Steely Dan+reggae+German thrash abomination GODZILLA. I promise to explore the Metal Enterprises back catalog in greater detail very soon. Meanwhile, let Killer Fox fuck you in your ear-pussy.
I'm not even sure where to start when discussing the underground cultural hip-hop/cock rock/punk/techno phenomenon known as I Hate You When You're Pregnant. Comprised of only one member (6'5" Flagstaff, AZ resident Phil Buckman), IHYWYP was part performance art, part abstract pop-culture-referencing postmodern poetry, part G.G. Allin, part motivational speaker, part Rock God, and part rap messiah. I've had a slim cross-section of Buckman's music in my iTunes library for years (courtesy of former Flagstaff resident Erik Del Tigre), but I recently unearthed his entire discography and felt the need to share it immediately. Many of you will recognize the genius herein and become instantly addicted. Many of you will dismiss it as hipster garbage and fail altogether. Such is the polarizing nature of I Hate You When You're Pregnant. Buckman began his journey in 2002, while roadie-ing for friends of the blog Stab City Slitwrists (above left). As the story goes, Stab City found themselves in need of an opening act one night in Portland, and coaxed Phil into going onstage and making an ass out of himself in a Speedo. The rest, as they say, is history.
Lyrically, I can't think of a single artist that could stand up to IHYWYP when it comes to pure abstract magic. According to Alex at Hotdogstorm.com (where I finally tracked down these 5 demos): "IHYWYP WAS A CULTURAL REVOLUTION. IN MY OPINION PHIL BUCKMAN IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SINGER/SONG WRITER OF OUR GENERATION. SUCK AN EGG IF YOU FEEL DIFFERENTLY." I tend to agree, but it isn't just the words that set IHYWYP apart from the outsider/underground/weirdo art pack. Phil's screaming delivery, his physical intensity, and even his weird minimalist techno beats (composed entirely on a Zoom RhythmTrak 234, which was also his only stage accompaniment) push the entire package from "mere curiosity" into the realm of "pure brilliance", and while I can't guarantee universal appreciation of his aethetic (Huge Man In Tiny Underwear has yet to catch on with the metal crowd), I defy you to ignore the raw emotion present in songs like "Desiree", "The Furr's Is Gone", "Peter Frampton Must Die", or "There Is Stuff In This World". But my words are superfluous. I recommend beginning with the second demo (my initial jumping off point with this "band") and moving outward from there, giving yourself time to absorb each release separately. Unfortunately, Phil "broke up with himself" and disbanded IHYWYP around 2005, but I've seen footage of him performaning from as recently as 2010, so not all hope is lost. This guy is an insane vortex of creativity, a gaping abyss brimming over with the exuberance of pure fucking ROCK. Cultural revolution indeed.
"... If 911 was 1-800/ and 1-800 was a one-armed man/ and if a one-armed man was Heinz 57/ THAT'S EMERGENCY KETCHUP!!!"
Sneak peek into the home life of Shelby Cobras: It's Sunday night, 7 pm. Our protagonist just ate some soup. Hm. What to do now? Cory said that 1980's Roadie, starring Meat Loaf and Alice Cooper, is free via Comcast OnDemand right now. Maybe he should check that out? Nothing else going on in this godforsaken city. But where is it? Free movies? FearNet? IFC? Hm. Maybe he should text Cory to find out...
The following are ACTUAL text messages from last Sunday:
Cobras: Where is Roadie ondemand? Cory: It's gone now but snakeeater starring Lorenzo llamas is p good Cobras: Duh Cory: He's a loose cannon wise cracking cop suspended for using excessive force Cobras: Story of my life Cory: And theres some movie called mind warp starring Bruce Campbell and the old man from phantasm Cobras: Angus scrimm? Fuck yeah
This thrilling exchange represents the exact time and place I first learned of the existence of 1992's Mindwarp (AKA Brainslasher), star vehicle for both Angus Scrimm and Bruce Campbell, two iconic figures in the horror pantheon who I indeed hold near and dear to my heart. How had I not heard of this film before? It was made by Fangoria Films, and with star power like that Mindwarp should be common currency in the realm of 90's sci-fi/horror, correct? Not so. Why? Because it's terrible. Terrible terrible terrible.
But it's terrible in a way that is specifically pleasing to the Illogical Contraption mindset. As post-apocalyptic mutants (they're called "Crawlers") stumble around a barren landscape bedecked in barbarian furs and hubcaps, as insolent actors deliver foolish dialogue in front of horrific set designs, as poorly-lit scenes featuring Gwar-esque creatures in shoddy latex costumes dance across your periphery, you can't help but love Mindwarp for what it is: a train wreck. A gory, bloody, awful train wreck. Did I mention the guy with the bendy straws in his head who (inexplicably) shoots blue lazers from his crotch?
This movie has absolutely no shortage of fatal flaws, but "weak plot" ain't one of 'em. We begin with your standard "artificial existence in the void/virtual reality" sort of trip, quickly establishing that a company called Infinisynth (also the name of Cory's new band, uncoincidentally) has cornered the market on (gasp!) people's minds after the world is annihilated in a nuclear holocaust (quickly summed up Road Warroir-style in a cheap, stock footage montage at the beginning of the flick). We are introduced to female protagonist Judy while she is attached to her Infinisynth VR machine, and it is immediately obvious that this is going to be one of those "it was all a dream... OR WAS IT!??!?!?!" kind of movies. Judy is having all sorts of existential problems regarding her one-dimensional dream existence, which she mostly expresses through sighing loudly and delivering her lines in a nasal monotone. Luckily, things get really wacky really fast, and soon Judy is fleeing from radioactive mutants in some sort of Arctic desert, only to be saved by our boy Bruce, only to be captured again and trundled away to an underground dystopia that sort of resembles a way lazier version of Toxie's digs in The Toxic Avenger. And all this happens before the cannibalism, or the weird incestuous-breeding subplot, or the carnivorous slugs, or the people drinking blood out of a water fountain. Sounds awesome, right?
Reaction shot right after Bruce pukes a shitload of bloody slugs on her face. Seriously.
NOPE. Remember what I said back there about "fatal flaws"? Well, the MAIN one is Judy herself, as acted by forgotten, uh, star(?) Marta Martin (she went by "Marta Alicia" in this film). In short, this chick is just plain annoying as fuck. Not only does she seem to have trouble stringing sentences together or expressing even the most basic of human emotions in her facial area, but Judy just looks uncomfortable in front of a camera, as if maybe she's worried she might forget the rules, break the fourth wall, and start delivering her lines straight to the cameraman. Not only that, but Angus Scrimm, one of the main selling points of this movie, doesn't even make his first "official" appearance until a full hour into the film. And when he does, he appears to be pretty buzzed (not "acting" buzzed, either). It's all kind of depressing and sloppy and stupid, but I mean, that's what "normal" people look for in movies, right? Right!?!?!?
I'm not going to debase this fabulous catastrophe any further by trying to explain it, OK?. Just watch:
You guys are just DYING to see this, aren't you? Well, apparently you can't get it on Netflix, as I'm pretty sure it never even got to DVD. You can buy it on VHS here, but who has time for that shit? How about instead, you watch it in fuckin' HD, in its entirety, for free, RIGHT HERE?
I’m having a lot of trouble assembling sentences to properly discuss Chris Naab, something Chris Naab has never had a problem with. The dude is beyond fascinating and bizarre on levels so deep and contradictory that my loose grip on the English language is becomingly increasingly frail when charged with illustrating even a crude a portrait of this perplexing musical icon. Here is a guy who worships NWA, Celtic Frost, Malcolm X, Venom, James Brown, the Butthole Surfers and Elvis all equally and manages to puree them together in everything he says or does. A Hessian Black Panther with 10,000 LPs, lurking in his urban tower drinking several warm 2 litters of Pepsi a day, expounding on the virtues of two bass drums vs “cheater pedals” while wearing a t-shirt for Hitler’s European Tour and chain smoking Newports outside of a Compton swap meet.
With Sinnerjizm, we see just one example of his dementedly bizarre genre hybridism but there are literally dozens of different diverse musical projects combining many traditionally distant genres. Unless I loose interest, we’ll get into some more of those in the weeks to come.
Interesting Naab Factiod: Naab currently plays in an Alice Cooper tribute band with Don Bowles of the Germs (above). Rumor is they sound more like Hawkwind than Alice Cooper.
Also, these music videos were cut together by the bands organ player, an equally mysterious figure known only as The Lord. There is just so much weirdness stashed away in the Chris Naab Chronicles that I’m getting vertigo just peering over into the rabbit hole.
If you’re curious, you can check out Sinnerjizm’s Inject Them With Rabies, a soundtrack for a movie no one ever made.
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