Pulp, “Bad Cover Version.”
Occasionally I’ve casually entertained the possibility of writing a dopey McSweeney’s-ish list of lines to add to this song (“like Joe Buck’s call of Freese’s homer/the newer Katamari Damacys/like Mad Magazine with adverts/like Smokey & the Bandit 3”), but that’d just add another level of meta-commentary that would extend way too far into the ridiculous.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
GQ: How were you feeling physically?
James Murphy: My voice is actually still not the same. I’ve permanently damaged my voice. “Jump Into the Fire” was the one. At Terminal Five, I felt it go. I was just like, “I have to do this.” It felt great. The “Jump Into the Fire” at Madison Square Garden was like the death of my voice forever. I could feel it.you can hear it by the first “swim the sea”
How music-nerd apropos would it be for Murphy to blow out his voice on a Harry Nilsson song?
(Source: GQ)
Via BuzzFeed. #truth
Dudes, Ithaca and Ann Arbor have all of those things and actually affordable rent.
Yeah, but Portland and Brooklyn also have “near cooler places”, like the entire east coast and Seattle. Ithaca is sadly lacking on that front.
ann arbor is cheaper than brooklyn but it’s still pretty expensive, at least from my point of view
GPOY (“bearded men with pretentious music taste”—I’m also pretentious enough to note that it should be “with pretentious taste in music”)
UMMMMM ANN ARBOR IS A VERY SHORT DRIVE FROM DETROIT WHICH IS THE COOLEST PLACE IN AMERICA.
MIDWEST MIDWEST MIDWEST MIDWEST
The Twin Cities: it’s fucking cold up here and none of our pro sports teams have won a damn thing in 20 years, but at least we don’t have panic attacks about whether every other trendy person in town is a bigger asshole than we are.
![thediscography:
Young People Today Wouldn’t Recognize New York Of The 1980s [Business Insider]
Hey, wait a minute…](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyd8pzEBeP1qb0720o1_500.jpg)
I sold Jimmy Page a Graphic Novel
I used to work in a bookstore in Central London whilst I was at university studying.
One day I looked up from my computer to see a small, very tanned, white haired man wearing a long black coat holding out a graphic novel to buy. It was none other than Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.
by Benjamin Law Smith
And now the only thing I’ll be able to do with my brain all day is speculate what graphic novel it was. A Hellboy TPB? Heavy Liquid? The Airtight Garage? Acme Novelty Library #20?
(The Suicide Commandos being these fuckin’ guys)
The Ramones Play the State Theater, Minneapolis, January 21, 1978
In the words of the video’s narrator: “They seemed like four wholesome American kids from Forest Hills, New York…”
The audience feedback vox pop bit around the 6:30 mark is fantastic, especially the woman who says she’d rather be seeing the Suicide Commandos.
Juxtaposition!
ARF ARF
I finally heard “Friday” for the first time, by the way.
What’d’ya think?
Pretty good! Like Jonathan Richman, only bearable.
I’ll be damned. Thanks to my sworn hostility against all things memetic, the first time I actually heard “Friday” in full was at an event called Salon Saloon in Minneapolis (hosted by the inimitable Andy Sturdevant), where it was performed with a sort of flabbergasted giddiness by a small group of locals. I was there with Matos, who was in town visiting, and after the show ended I admitted that after hearing the song in full for the first time it reminded me a bit of Jonathan Richman.
(Matos resoundingly disagreed.)
PAZZ/JOP
Here’s my batshit whackadoo ballot, in which my dorkdom for fuck-a-genre EDM (Modeselektor, Katy B, Egyptrixx), nu-indie druganaut rap (Kendrick Lamar, Big K.R.I.T., Danny Brown) and oil-stained dirtbag rock (Kurt Vile, Black Lips, DJ Shadow kinda sorta I guess, Justice effing definitely) is hopefully made less contradictory and inexplicable by the inclusion of motherfucking “Sharevari”. And I voted for the #1 album while I was at it, so hey.
Kano, “It’s a War” (from Kano, 1980)
This is my favorite music video clip in forever. And I don’t even mean that in a “ha ha old things are kitschy and weird” way, though this is admittedly kitschy and weird enough that justifying an appreciation of it on a musical basis takes greater rhetorical abilities than I am capable of at this time. Kano was the Italo-disco act that gave us the “Whoomp! There It Is” break, and since I like “I’m Ready” I dug up their self-titled 1980 LP to find out what else they were doing back then. So I heard “It’s a War” and the first thing I thought was “hey, the singer sounds weirdly reminiscent of circa-Plastic Beach Damon Albarn in this. I should find a clip of this song and post it and point out how strange that is.”
Then I found a TV performance of it and the strangeness aspect had to be completely reprioritized.
Here are my four favorite things about this clip:
1) the combination of gold lame suit & certain dance moves make the frontman look like a Bruce Lee Game of Death Robot
2) there are at least three moments where it looks like the dancers are all just going to smack each other upside the head by accident but don’t
3) the audience sits there stock still like kindergarten students at storytime, only to break into applause at what seem like the most non-sequitir times possible
4) the fact that the TV show is called “POPCORN”, therefore alluding simultaneously (though not necessarily by design) to both James Brown and Hot Butter
I do sincerely love this song though. Fuck Steve Dahl in hell for eternity for his attempts to deprive America of things like this.
ley-lines
Listening to various versions of Jorge Ben’s “Taj Mahal” for years now has made hearing “…Sexy?” strange. At first I couldn’t hear the Ben without hearing Stewart’s lifting of it (annoyingly so), but now that process is happily reversed. I’m pretty sure Reynolds mentioned “Taj Mahal” in Retromania, so I’m slightly surprised he didn’t make the connection more explicit here, since it’s a very literal instance of Stewart borrowing from “contemporary black music.”
(Source: andrewtsks)
