An unfortunate collision of world
events and visual theme can really
put a ding in your sales.

The other day I happened upon a tune I had forgotten existed, a song by Afro Celt Sound System called When You’re Falling, with Peter Gabriel on vocals (video below). It’s an uplifting tune with a persistent and catchy mandolin riff and Gabrielesque vocals and percussion, generally perceived around the world as a positive song about love and resilience. I actually own the CD it’s on, so I couldn’t for the life of me think of why it was that I had so completely forgotten about it. But as I did some quick poking around, I discovered one likely factor. The CD the song was on was released on June 19, 2001, so it would have been getting a little rotation just before September 11. Within just a couple of days of the attacks, Clear Channel circulated an internal memo with a recommendation of 165 songs that it might be inadvisable to play in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy. If you do a little research, you’ll find that even Snopes is willing to reinforce Clear Channel’s attempts to distance themselves from the absurd list, but if you examine the language of Clear Channel’s backtracking in the press, they don’t deny issuing the list, they just try to frame it as some casual “recommendation”. But as anyone who has worked in a corporate environment knows, defying a “recommendation” can put your position in just as much peril as blatantly violating a clearly stated company policy. So Clear Channel’s denials are patently absurd. But not nearly as absurd as the list of songs. While you can almost understand items like Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” – not so much because of the lyrics but because the song is kind of crap in the first place – the list in its entirety is utterly preposterous. Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World? Elton John’s Bennie and the Jets? Nena’s 99 Red Balloons? Mitch Ryder’s Devil with a Blue Dress On? And then there are oddities like Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal” being on the list, but not Michael Jackson’s original version. See the entire list here, and tell us if you can find the logic behind it all. Below are a few of our choices for “Weirdest Choices for a Post-Terrorist Attack Blacklist” list.

Louis Armstrong – What a Wonderful World

When you’re trying to instill widespread panic and fear in the populace, the last thing you want them thinking about is the fact that by and large, the world is pretty wonderful.

The Bangles – Walk Like an Egyptian

Just look at those clothes. Clearly, they are terrorists, and that’s obviously some secret attack command in the pharaoh dance.

Martha and The Vandellas – Dancing In the Street

What could be more terrifying after a national trauma than to send an invitation, across the nation, a chance for folks to meet? A song like this of course. Before you know it, they’d form a big strong line, and get in time and start laughin’ and singin’.

Nena – 99 Red Balloons

“Ninety-nine red balloons, floating in the summer sky. Panic lads, it’s a red alert!” Okay, the song is sort of about a war tragedy, but puh-lease. They could’ve at least let the German language version play, right?

Afro Celt Sound System – When You’re Falling (ft. Peter Gabriel)

This is the tune that made me aware of the list in the first place. The discomfort around the key imagery is understandable, but the tune otherwise is cuter than a roomful of puppies…

Shrimp Glockenspiel
Not bad, but needs more shark cowbell.

Cute Explosion
This is kind of like if the first Simple Minds album were made in the age of Nyan Cat

Babies
Ladies, ladies. I know all about makin’ babies.

Russian Dancing Men
Does what it says. Plus, a ballpoint pen.

Owls
The disturbing truth about Simon Cowell is finally revealed.

And you’re probably already familiar with Badgers, but I bet you didn’t know it’s now available in Dubstep:

And for the truly uninitiated when it comes to this peculiar art form, we’ve included SecretAgentBob’s Charlie the Unicorn, as well as Cyriak’s Welcome to Kitty City and cows & cows & cows.

This promotional poster by
Philip Chudy turned out to
be disturbingly prescient

The other day, I was transported to a surreal yet somehow comforting place I hadn’t been in years. No, I didn’t drop acid or hit the clubs on ecstasy, I borrowed a turntable from a friend so I could listen to their exceptionally rare vinyl copy of a brilliantly eccentic triple album released in 1977 called Consequences. Somewhere in the obscure soundscape between seventies art rock, the hallucinatory audio comedy and Joycean satire of Firesign Theatre, the silliness of Monty Python, the otherwise non-existent art form Jazz Opera, and Bubble Gum Pop lies the unique experience created on this album by Lol Creme and Kevin Godley. You’ll be forgiven for never having heard of it; although it is in a way a masterpiece of its era, in this case “its era” means the days of lush and meandering exploration of sound and story in the form of a rock opera. The term “rock opera” doesn’t really do it justice though; it is in fact often referred to by its die-hard fans as a “movie for the blind”. Aside from the relative obscurity of its creators (something I’ll get back to below) and its daring and experimental approach, the release was probably more doomed to obscurity by the timing of its release. One of the more popular sounds in 1977 was the dull thud of dinosaur rock finally stumbling to its death, a sound only subtly masked by the sound of aging white guys hitting the studios to churn out the year’s biggest hits like The Grand Illusion by Styx, Billy Joel’s The Stranger, Point Of Know Return by Kansas, and that death certificate of rock and roll, Foreigner. At the same time, groups like The Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Blondie, and The Ramones were signaling the wave to come. Even if it weren’t so peculiar, it stood little chance of getting listened to at the time.

All the same, I’ve never understood the obscurity of the duo that created Consequences; you would probably know them best from their time with the British pop group 10cc when they produced the band’s biggest hit I’m Not In Love , or long after they left the band, from their club hit of the late eighties Cry (both videos below). But especially in the years between 1977 and 1980, they produced a series of utterly brilliant recordings (like L and Freeze Frame) which fused the musically sophisticated jazzy quirkiness of Frank Zappa with hook-laden excursions into almost Beatles-esque psychedelia, all framed with lush production and vocal harmonies that were later more or less cloned by Queen with much greater commercial success.

One of the most compelling things about Consequences is that it creates an eerie feeling of pre-existing backstory. As weird as its vocal characterizations (delivered by British actor Peter Cook) are, there’s a familiarity to it all. If you’ve ever seen the equally obscure film Buckaroo Banzai, you may have some sense of what I mean. And there’s a similar reason for this sense of stepping into a story that was going on before you got there; much like the writer of Buckaroo Banzai had gone through dozens of iterations of the script before it finally got picked up, Creme & Godley spent thousands of hours in the studio reworking the material. In fact, the release wasn’t originally intended to be a three disc, two hour epic; it started out as a promotional single for the guitar gizmo they had invented, aptly named the, uh, Gizmo. The rather fascinating expanded story of how this all happened can be found in Mr Blint’s Attic.

And if I’ve piqued your interest, now I have to apologize. Although the album was remastered and re-released on CD in 2000, the versions available on Amazon right now are over $200.00. If you’re prone to do so, you can probably find a torrent though, and although the medium hardly suits the “ambient radio theater” format of the material, all six of the full-length segments can be found on YouTube starting here.

You may know Godley & Creme from their eighties club hit Cry …

…or their influence on 10cc’s I’m Not In Love. Try to ignore the mullets and cheesy video montaging.

Here’s a clip where Lol Creme talks about their device the “Gizmo”

So ponder this. Are you even sure they’re an actual band? I’d argue they’re not, based on output and substance. I did my best to track down a way to buy a CD, and gave up. I eventually tried their MySpace page, and after getting annoyed with MySpace for trying to force me to update Flash and link my Facebook account, I suddenly realized that it was the WRONG PUSSY RIOT. It’s an Italian band from six years ago. Eventually I found and downloaded the collection called “Pussy Riot – Kill The Sexiest” [sic], and gave it a listen. Well, that didn’t take long. The longest of the songs clocks in at 2:11, and the total running time was 10:15. Probably the most interesting thing about it remains the rebellion behind it, not the music. As this review points out, some of content in these one-minute wonders is actually sampled from eighties punk, sort of completing a weird circle of irony.

Personally, I remain adamant in my support of Pussy Riot, merely on the basis of the absurd harshness of their sentence. But I’m perhaps much more impressed with the media savvy behind the “band” than even their ideology. One thing that never gets mentioned in major media pieces is that Pussy Riot is an offshoot of the Voina group, which was established in 2007. The band itself was really formed just last year, as a direct response to a decision by former President and current Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev not to run for re-election as president. As the husband of Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova points out in this Spiegel interview, it wouldn’t be especially prudent to go into detail about their long term planning and the details of their “marketing strategy”, but rest assured, one exists. From the brightly colored balaclavas to the harmless looking threesome that took the fall (with amazing resilience under oppressive prison conditions, by the way), there was a plan behind Pussy Riot. But not much of a “band”. Sheer genius in activism, and a worthy cause. I hope my fellow citizens here in the states don’t wait until things are as bad here as they are in Russia before they get this savvy and productive when it comes to standing up for freedom. And fuck twats like Vadim Nikitin of the NYT who offer up liberal elite analysis questioning westerners’ support for the group, comparing Pussy Riot to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The issue here is resisting authoritarianism, not the kind of dumbass debates Americans are having right now, like whether or not Romney is testing well with black voters, or whether Obama plays too much golf.

If you haven’t actually listened to Pussy Riot, some clips are below, and you should have no trouble finding more tracks by Googling “Pussy Riot – Kill The Sexiest” [sic]. And since downloading the songs for free won’t do them OR your ears much good, visit FreePussyRiot.org to donate to the defense fund and generally keep up to date. Oh, and remember, there are eleven OTHER members now in detention. Let’s not forget THEM.

Vladimir Akimenkov, 25
Andrei Barabanov, 22
Fedor Bakhov, 31
Yaroslav Belousov, 21
Stepan Zimin, 20
Nikolai Kavkazski, 26
Mikhail Kosenko, 37
Maksim Luzyanin, 36
Denis Lutskevich, 20
Aleksei Polikhovich, 22
Artyom Savyolov, 33

You’ve probably seen the clip where Pussy Riot protests at the church. Before you get all indignant about the fact that they were protesting in a church, you may want to know what kind of bastard they’re referring to when they say “The Patriarch of the Church”. We’re talking about a church whose leader wears $30,000 Breguet watches which the church Photoshops out of images  to make it look like he’s not the rich vain suckup to Putin that he is.

Pussy Riot has been at this for a while. Here they are last December performing on the roof of “Detention Center No1″, which holds protestors arrested after the elections immediately prior.

And here’s the “exclusive release” presented by The Guardian:

The “fan video” that introduced me to Rebecca & Fiona

If nothing else, they seem to enjoy their job as much as their fans:

Death From Above 1979′s Sexy Results is NSFW, if breasts with mouths aren’t safe where you work:

MSTRKRFT’s Easy Love video is in the same vein of non-erotic erotica:

This is probably the best fan video ever made. By Jaque Fisher, for DFA’s “Turn It Out”

Death From Above 1979′s “Black History Month” almost sounds like old Wire

Death from above’s mouths as nipples pre-date Yolandi Vi$$er and Lady Gaga by about a couple of years:

Now available on iTunes

Well lucky you, average music consumer. You can now purchase Thomas Dolby’s recent EP “Oceana” – previously only available to drooling sycophants like myself – on iTunes. And Mr. Dolby has announced another small change in marketing strategy. While he originally stated a plan to release three EP’s (exclusively to Flat Earth Society subscribers) leading up to the full release of the album “A Map Of The Floating City” this summer, he’s now added an online social networking adventure to the mix. While the FES forums and regular promotional materials that are being released don’t go into much detail, this fellow is apparently one of the developers. And Dolby himself described it in this interview with Amy Steele: “You can access the game for free through your web browser. It’s set in a kind of 1930s that might have come to be, had the strange experimental weapons of that time come to fruition. There were sonic cannons and Tesla death rays. In the game, tribes of players collaborate to explore what’s left of the planet following an event of mass destruction. Survivors take to the oceans in the hulls of abandoned vessels, and eventually they raft up, like the merchants’ barges in Tokyo harbor in the 17th century. A strange kind of barter culture emerges, a form of ‘maker’ society where players cobble together inventions using relics from the past. Most of this is done in text form, you understand, it’s a kind of collaborative fiction, not a 3d shoot em up. And as you explore the game, you will discover new songs from the 3rd and final EP from my album, ‘Urbanoia’.”  As a non-gamer, this doesn’t thrill me much, but it’s a clever marketing angle. I’ll personally probably just wait for random leaks and buy the complete album when it arrives. We’ve been following Dolby’s recent releases with interest since last May, and will share any updates as they become available. So Oceanea remains the only material you can purchase without becoming a Flat Earth Society member, or playing the upcoming game. But if you love the tune Toadlickers as much as I do, well, there’s an app for that. Vids below.

I’m not sure if this video does the Toad Lickers iPhone app justice. I’m not an iPhone user:

Here’s Rebecca Black’s Friday

Watching this Ark Music Factory promotional video gives me the same sick feeling inside that I got in third grade when I watched my nerdy friend get bullied during recess and acted like I didn’t know him:

And this video is probably even more disturbing. Here’s this girl, CathyMay15. Cute as Rebecca, and probably just as talented. No autotune, no expensive LA video gloss. Or wait. Is it satire? I can’t tell…

But in this world where pop music is indistinguishable from satire of itself, there’s a review of CathyMay15 available:

On The Eve by ambientitems

Unrelated: it’s been driving me nuts that I now have Soul Coughing’s Screenwriters Blues blues stuck in my head, thanks to the refrain

“…it is 5 am
and you are listening
to Los Angeles…”