The other night at the Dirty Projectors show at the Independent [1], Angel & Dave walked out to play the first song, "Two Doves", and I noticed that Angel was wearing a Spacemen 3 t-shirt, and even though I'd been already looking forward to this concert as the best concert ever, I knew, then, that it really would be.
Here's Spacemen 3's nonsensically awesome "Revolution".
[1] Everything begins and ends with the Dirty Projectors.
Dirty Projectors, originally uploaded by Wexner Center
Last night, Dirty Projectors at The Independent; this was my first time seeing them live, and they absolutely killed.
In case you were wondering why Bitte Orca is the best album of 2009, the video for "Stillness Is The Move"--complete with llamas, Siberian Huskies, and the mountains of Vermont--is proof.
St. Vincent performed "Marrow" on Letterman this past week:
Actor
Kelefa Sanneh on Michael Jackson:
Thursday night in New York was hot--after weeks of rain, it was one of the first real summer nights of the year. Car windows were open all over the city, and just about every station on the radio dial had switched to an all-Michael Jackson format; for the first (and, for all we know, the last) time, it felt as if absolutely everyone was listening to the same songs.
Yes, so: I had high expectations, and Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca
My favorite track keeps changing--pretty much every track has a lot to recommend it--but I'm currently stuck on "Useful Chamber", which goes from mournful synths to spoken-word breakdown to guitar chaos, and all the way round again.
I've had this in my head over the past couple of days. So, so great.
I can't wait to hear the album
A great quote from Kim Gordon about the "Radiohead model" of selling records (via Idolator, who has more to say about it):
"I don't really think they did it by themselves," Gordon counters. "They did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out. It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn't catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don't sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever. It was a good marketing ploy and I wish I'd thought of it! But we're not in that position either. We might not have been able to put out a record for another couple of years if we'd done it ourselves: it's a lot of work. And it takes away from the actual making music."
Sasha Frere-Jones writes about "Butter 4.0", a mixtape of nineties hip-hop by the Australian DJ Broke. I've been listening to this exclusively for the last couple of days. It's brilliant.
Some m.c.s were simply goofballs, a category that's almost defunct. DJ Broke drops in "Studda Step," a brief nineties comeback by eighties comic hero Biz Markie, who handed the crown to Ol' Dirty Bastard in the nineties. (The late ODB appears here with a personal favorite, "Hip-Hop Drunkies," an homage to drunkenness Ol' Dirty recorded with Tha Alkaholiks.) And "Butter 4.0" features Redman, who might be the poster boy for nineties rap. Redman was a skilled punch-line rapper, a type entirely absent from the 2009 charts, unless you count Eminem, who has turned into the Dane Cook of punchline rappers, delivering the goods about four per cent of the time.
