day-glo degenerettes

dragonette first caught my attention over a year ago with their über-ohrwurm "i get around," which made its way onto both ladies love 3 and love is the answer. it's an irresistably hooky ode to shameless one-nite-stands (a far cry from "none of the guys go steady cuz it wouldn't be right" though, naw'mean?) which is actually a pretty perfect calling card for what dragonette are all about, but somehow i didn't really take the trouble to figure out who they were at the time; if i had, i might have realized that love's just about the last thing they have on their minds.

well, maybe. core duo martina sobrara and dan kurtz (pictured above) have been happily married for a buncha years now. the too-perfect backstory: they met at a music festival when sobrara was a singer-songwriter playing (retroactively self-described) "tampon music" and kurtz was... [oh no shhh he's was in the new deal!??! that makes so much sense thanks wikipedia!], he cheated on his girlfriend with her, and, yknow, the rest is history. how sweet. but this ain't no mates of state cutsiefest (who, btw, are even adorable when they're naked...)

dragonette are vile, reprehensible people. their debut record, galore, just came out here (it's been out in the uk and their native canada for a while), and from listening to it i get the sense that they're about the most despicable folks you could hope to meet. sure, they play delicious bubblegum electro powerpunk, just the way i like it, but all those spiky synths and sugar-guitars are just candy-coating as that slatternly minx sobrara coos her disgusting, debauched tales of promiscuity ("i get around"), adultery ("competition"), prostitution ("black limousine"), blasphemy ("jesus doesn't love me"), and just straight-up emotional abuse ("take it like a man.")

that one's a bit tricky actually - it's hard to tell exactly what's happening in the lyrics - "keep it up soldier" and the references to "the cause" suggest that there's some kind of military roleplay/metaphor going on - but it's pretty clear, even just from her disingenuous delivery, that sobrara's one cruel, manipulative drill-sergeant of a ladyfriend, constantly controlling and belittling the heck out of her poor fellow: "i've got to make you understand/you gotta take it like a man." that sounds like what we refer to as male oppression.

oh, did i mention this is one of my favorite songs in recent memory? oh man... it's really good. i got nothing more to say. as i mentioned, you really should watch the video. really well-done retro porn pastiche (i haven't decided if i think that's actually the band yet), and it suggests some novel readings for the lyrics:



[speaking of retro porn pastiche videos, you should really also watch this one, for "toejam" by bpa, which is a new project from norman cook/fatboy slim (yes! big beat return confirmed!), featuring various noteworthy people, in this case our good friend david byrne (!), and also dizzee rascal. how's that for a three-some. the video rates about even with mates of state cute nudity scale - but it's also quite clever to boot. (don't worry it's SFW.)




oh, and while we're on the subject, kinda, this is as good a time as any to mention that the so-so but entertaining-ish zack and miri make a porno, in addition to having some well-deployed '90s nostalgia music in the high school reunion scene (dj kool, marcy playground), has maybe the best-ever use of a pixies song for dramatic underscoring (sorry fight club), in the part where "hey" plays during the emotional crux of the "wrap party" scene (nevermind that having an emotional crux was probably the worst thing the movie decided to do.)]

ok, back to dragonette. so yeah, they get a lot of excellent mileage out of playing up their total shameless sleaziness. it works both as a contrast to the sweetness of their hooks and as a primordial rock'n'roll stylistic move that fits right in with their obvious mtv-era retro-rebelliousness. see also "the boys," their righteous cover of calvin harris' "the girls," available on theirspace, whose even-more-extreme libinous campiness actually makes it more palatable than harris' slightly discomfiting tho still great original (along with the gender-reversal, and better jokes - you feel like they're actually having the fun harris only wanted us to think he was having...)

none of this is especially weird. it is kinda weird, though, how the heinous hedonism of the album's dynamite first three tracks (which are almost definitely its three best songs) plays against the sappy love roles martina assumes in the next several. the verses of "true believer" find her confessing her sins:

"i've had such a wicked time
kissed the boys and made them cry
laughing while I wave goodbye
(they'd still like another try)"

but in the chorus she asserts that all that's changed now that she's met you, you her new magical spell-binding lover who makes her "better" and "sweeter" by giving her "pleasure" and "fever." the slightly worrisome middle 8 asks: "do you feel super?/I'm the new girl curled around your finger." it's basically the flipside to "take it like a man," a complete role-reversal where she is giving herself over to this guy's control - but considering how unreliable and manipulative she's proven to be in the past, it's pretty hard to swallow this newfound sentimentalism and goody-goodyness - there's gotta be a catch in there...

"another day" is a telephone love ballad, pretty enough but slight. and then comes "get lucky," which can be read, pretty straightforwardly, as either lovey-dovey sweetness or a hardly-veiled burlesque come-on (depending on whether you interpret "go all the way" as referring to marriage or sex), an ambiguity that's certainly intentional. musically though, it's a total curveball, a swingin' tin-pan-alley/broadway-styled number, complete with tinny barbershop harmonies, which hearkens back to the '30s instead of the '80s, and sounds like none of their contemporaries so much as the hammy swedeyboppers miss li (whom i kind of detest - does it show?) and amy diamond (q.v. bedbugs' intriguing discussion of the renewed relevance and skewed escapist subtext of amy's depression-era pop revivalism.)

more musical weirdness: "jesus doesn't love" is a kind of anti-gospel song, electro-blues that reminds me a lot of the eurythmics "missionary man." things tame down for a bit after that musically; no 1840s-era antiquarianisms on "gold rush," unfortunately. lyrically, "you please me" returns to familiarly wanton territory, with the post-breakup lament: "i don’t miss your company/i just want those hands on me/t o touch the places underneath."

and for their final act, saving the weirdest for last, they construct their own bollywood mini-opera (complete with boy/girl duet vocals) and/or their own in the zone-era britney eastern-music camp pastiche (no, it's definitely both), entitled "marvelous." a total wtf moment. typically, as far as the lyrics are concerned, no good will come of anyone's actions here. but its melodramatic excesses (and musical adventurousness) have a lot to say about this band's commitment to pop music theatricality - something that very much puts them in the vein of amy diamond, as well as (just off the top of my head) my chemical romance, r. kelly, and alice cooper. which, of course, means that fretting about their dubious personal morality is beside the point (as it always was)... but dissecting it is not. let's just keep an eye on where they go from here.

fascination!

as another one of my other fave '07-'08 pop-bands-qua-bands put it:

"it's just the way we feel"

or, to go back to the original source (c. 1983):

"passion burning/love so strong...
...looking learning, moving on"

borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered '80s

robyn hitchcock at the world cafe live.

i've already seen three robyn concerts this year (so many that i didn't even write about one of them, apparently.) tonight, muchas gracias a sñr uvawitz (hm, grape-brain?), made it four, if you squint: much like the other one, this robyn has shockingly silvery hair that frequently drapes over his face. (if i were at all photoshop-savvy, i'd probably just go ahead and paste ms. carlson's signature tresses over alfred hitchcock's bald pate - in fact i'd be surprised if nobody's done it before.)

similarities mostly end there though; a more fruity comparison would be to the concert i reported on two weeks ago. both rh and db could rightly be called foundational figures of alternative (rock) music; both are not infrequently labeled eccentrics, though rh is decidedly one of the peculiar english variety whilst db, though apparently still not a u.s. citizen after fifty-some years of living here, ain't. jonathan demme filmed both of them (storefront hitchcock, added to netflix queue - check.) and like mr. byrne, mr. hitchcock is touring with some legacy material: here and elsewhere, he performed the music of his excellent album i often dream of trains, originally released in 1984, the same year, if you want to get technical, as stop making sense.

though that's mostly a technicality from perspective, seeing as how i grew up on stop making sense before i even started to in the first place, while i hadn't heard i often dream until about three years ago, and hadn't really digested it much until i bought yep roc's reish of it last year. not so my companion this evening, who, as she told robyn after the show, listened to his music throughout her childhood (this prompted a nearby fan to relate that her kids had "seen him in utero," which took him somewhat aback.)

not sure what to think about this thing of re-creating old albums/eras on stage, which seems to be happening increasingly often these years (i saw liz phair do it, for instance, and she's barely even a "veteran.") it's obviously a great gimmick to draw a crowd, even for still-active performers like david and robyn, and it is legitimately exciting as a fan. but it's somewhat worrisome as a trend, though perhaps i shouldn't worry so much.

in any event, moreso than byrne, (and certainly more than phair,) the performance hitch gave tonight felt no less refreshingly loose and natural for being under this semi-formal constraint. he disregarded the track sequence, for one thing, which is smart - knowing the setlist in advance always kills a bit of the excitement. and he didn't even play all the songs from the album, although i don't really know it well enough to be sure at the time. (it's trick too since various versions and reissues have had unusually variable tracklists for such a "classic," with substituted bonus cuts and whatnot.)

the memorable "i wish i was a pretty girl," for instance, only turned up briefly, playing over the loudspeakers before the show started, from, as it turned out, a cassette player which robyn carried on stage and then proceded to manually mangle to enjoyable audible effect. (one gets the sense that he doesn't care much for the song these days - although at one point it sounded like he was about to start playing it on guitar, before realizing it was a misstart.) he also skipped "furry green atom bowl" and maybe a couple others, but he played all of the truly essential and wonderful numbers from the album, of which there are many many greats, and also a bunch of related b-sides.

"it sounds great when you're dead" was the one i'd had in my head of late (so great to be able to hear something live the same day you'd been singing it to yourself) - he introduced that as "the good news" after the painstaking psychiatric self-inspection of the "very slow" "cathedral." but the wry-yet-touching post-break-up ballad "i used to say i love you" was the one that stuck with me afterwards. "trams of old london" was gorgeous; ditto the solo title track, which is also just a tad creepy. the hilarious atheist piss-take/group-singalong "ye sleeping nights of jesus" and jaunty fan-fave "my favorite buildings" (complete with shaker-egg and pocket trumpet!) were super-swell, and of course "uncorrected personality traits," in a cappella three-part harmony around a single mic, brought the house down.

gah, gotta get out of record-reviewing mode! what was really great about this show was how simple and low-key it was (just robyn and two dapper confederates, one of them apparently the guy from the band departure lounge; three guitars traded amongst them, a piano, and a few necessary toys) while still feeling impeccably crisp and clearly well-rehearsed (robyn writes some deceptively complicated guitar parts, and he's a killer at executing them.) his strangeness is very tidy and approachable, neatly contained in nonchalantly-delivered poetic tirades of absurdist quasi-nonsense in convolutedly perfect syntax and sometimes uncanny philosophical depth (prepared or spontaneous? it's hard to tell) and in snazzily screwy sartorial (the name of his buddy's label) choices: top hat (removed to reveal aforementioned silver shock), purple skinny jeans, jacket removed to reveal black and white polka-dot shirt, to match his black and white polka-dot stratocaster (larger dots on the shirt though, creating dizzying op effect.)

approachable guy too, a kindly old cynic, but a romantic too (he's pretty happy about the new president, one "who doesn't have voices inside his head.") t and i stuck around after to have him sign, uh, a silly flyer we found advertising the gig, and he was quite friendly about it. all told, just a lovely presence, and a truly good songwriter on quite a few levels.

the whole thing made me want to go and dig further into his catalog. and those nifty, completist-baiting reissue box sets are making it just too easy and tempting too... ah, pre-packaged nostalgia. if you don't have your own, you can always borrow it. and if not, you can probably buy it on amazon.

mixtube: girlpop earworms '08

i was gonna do a post with embedded youtube video clips (as a low-hassle alternative to mp3-sharing) but then this came along: mixtube, an excellently-named successor to muxtape (r.i.p.), admirably resourceful and utilitarian-minded, which lets you create and share mux-styled playlists using the audio from any video on youtube. brilliant! (and seemingly relatively riaa-proof, though, we'll see...) (it's especially clever how there are no accounts associated with the playlists; if you want to revise a mix you've made, you don't log in to edit it, you simply make a new one "based on it.")

so here's my first stab, a guided tour through some of my favorite girlpop tracks these days. expect to see most of these show up on a forthcoming installment of ladies love (although one was already on the last one.)

cue it up and listen along!

i must say i haven't been bowled over by too many girl-pop songs this year; unlike '06 the year of synths and sirens (and heiress-pop) or '07 with its uk-chart and disco-soul retro-diva glut, the female artist i've been most excited about in '08 slings a ukelele and lives in my neighborhood (bertine zetlitz comes in a close second, but that was all back-catalog catch-up.) as the year draws toward a close (it's already half-past november - shocker! - and i'm feeling the itch to switch into critical-review mode), the big guns have started coming out of the woodwork (britney, xtina, beyonce, pink), and they've all been more or less misfiring, not so much spectacularly as perfunctorily.

meanwhile, perhaps the clearest contender for my favorite song of the year - if it counts - is cassie's "is it you?," which i first heard late last year. i liked it enough then to slot it first in my 07 year-end mix (which probably disqualifies it.) i still like it now, a hundred or so listens later, and it still hasn't even been released as a single (in this country - it went top ten u.k. r&b, which may not be very impressive), let alone on cassie's still-AWOL second album (the wiki article for which has apparently been deleted seven times in the last year.) it was on the step up 2 the streets soundtrack, which just so happened to launch the year's longest-running #1, a song ("low") which i enjoy a lot less than i enjoy the name of its artist (flo-rida).

"is it you?" was featured in the movie itself (which cassie starred in) over a montage sequence, although the shots of her character performing didn't make the final cut (you can see it as one of the dvd bonus features - which i highly recommend - and, of course, on youtube.) that version was just piano and vocals, featuring producer/rising star ryan leslie on the ivories, but i haven't been able to find an mp3 (or decent-quality youtube audio) of it. instead, this is the "piano version," which is only different for the first thirty seconds before the beat of the "normal version" butts in and it turns out more or less the same. beats me why this hasn't been a smash. maybe next year.

meanwhile, cassie's been doing other stuff - my favorite "new" song of hers is "official girl", which has a great slinky, fresh-sounding beat-displacement beat (can't wait to hear it in higher quality) produced by "danja.... and the.... clutch," as they inform us in probably my favorite producer-id bit ever (it's so cute!) i really like how the weirdly herky-jerky, rushed and overlapping vocal phrasing of the verses (it sounds like she's trying to squeeze in more words than quite fit) contrasts with the relatively languid, drawn-out delivery of the chorus ("i'm tired, i'm tired, i'm tired...") also, ultimatum/verbatim is a pretty sick/silly rhyme. lil wayne does nothing for this one...

another candidate for my fave song of the year is solange knowles' "sandcastle disco", which has, similarly, mysteriously failed to become a massive hit (while her big sister b is ruling the charts with so-so re-hashes of her past glories.) well, not so mysteriously in that it hasn't actually been released as a single yet, which is the only reason i can forgive the u.s. listening public (though i thought they weren't supposed to care about technicalities like that anymore.) literally every time i've played it for somebody they have been remarkably enthusiastic, so i know that it's not just me (it is possibly about a DJ, which might have swayed me a bit.) damn, just listen to it. how can you not swoon? [eta: according to wkpd it's not going to get a u.s. single release. d'oh! also, btw: evidently produced by danes soulshock and karlin, of "leave (get out)" fame, among other things.]

otherwise, the only new girl to really catch my ear lately has been jazmine sullivan, whose album i'm still digesting. it's not quite what you expect from '08 r&b, which in this case is a good thing. shades of jill scott c. 1999 - especially on the willie-hutch-sampling "my foolish heart" - which almost makes me feel old. "dream big" samples daft punk, which is getting obvious but it's in a quite different (and much less obnoxious) way than "stronger," if equally shameless. and the results are pretty irresistible. apparently the missy "suckas!" call-out is really part of the track?

madonna's album this year fell pretty flat (though i actually liked the single ok), but her long-since-eclipsed contemporary cyndi lauper put out a dance-pop album that was, in striking contrast, remarkably tasteful (not surprising) and remarkably decent (not sure), though also not as great as i'd hoped. i haven't decided yet whether i prefer her "lay me down," produced by kleerup, or his mostly-instrumental version of same, "thank you for nothing," allegedly so-titled in churlish response to cyndi not allowing her vocals to appear on his album. anyway, i think "echo" is my favorite track - sleek minimal glide, not too much going on, but lush and lovely nonetheless, and kinda funky.

my hands-down favorite girl/pop full-length of the year, though, was the almost entirely overlooked debut by cloetta paris, which continues to impress and delight me. she deserves a full post later on, but check out "broken heart tango" if you haven't heard her yet.

i've still got some more 2008 to sift through (including the new taylor swift), but apart from a few outliers like ashlee simpson's "boys" and rihanna's "disturbia" - and let's not forget "no air" and "shorty get loose" - that's about the best of it so far. pretty slim pickings indeed. man, what happened this year?

i'll finish up with a few songs from 2007 have been worming their way back around to my brain lately. i never really gave much of an ear to "bottoms up" when i was first listening to keke palmer's album last year, but it is pretty great. big stupid electro crunk'n'b dance jam, with finger-snaps and tweety tweets, an awesome/unfortunate semi-entendre of a title, a rotating parade of quasi-referential hooks, and an utterly charismatic vocal performance from miss keke p. i love her little kelis impression. (completely with MIMS-esque arrangement-quote.) i heard it at a basketball game last week, strangely enough, as part of the half-time cheerleader-dance medley, which also included a mash-up of pink's "so what" (already?) with rihanna's "s.o.s." (i hope it's called "s.o. what." oh, yes, it is.)

i've probably talked about the veronica's "this love" before, but it's been in my head and i thought i'd air it again. apparently their album actually came out here a little while ago, not that anyone noticed (but good because it means i will find a used copy eventually.) this one is pretty near perfect. it pops, it rocks, it dances. and it's way sentimental - and sure, completely melodramatic - but it's damn effective. still tears me up a little, particularly when the v's actually show a bit of vocal restraint on the a capella bits. and the "take on me" snatch at the end is just inspired.

dragonette made an album last year that just came out here, and which i've been listening to a bunch. i'll have more to say later, like that you should probably watch the "take it like a man"
video, which requires some forewarning but is actually much tamer than the song itself.

in the mean time, enjoy the title track from marit larsen's new album, the chase, which i'll get around to reviewing one of these days...

david byrne at the tower theater.

hooray. after several weeks of impulsively refreshing http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=david%20byrne and a handful of fruitless e-mail negotiations, we scored a pair of face-value pit tickets, row CCC (i.e. third row, 4 and 5 seats from the center aisle) from a guy who posted this afternoon, that put us about ten feet from the stage, in (as nava promptly noted) the first row of stadium seating.

david david david. not to recount our long history, as i've done a bunch of times, at least once on this site; though it is striking that it's now been over ten years since i first saw him, with my parents, at a rochester venue (water street r.i.p.?) about 1/20th the size and grandeur of this one. since then i can't remember if it was one or two shows in 2001 at the tla (but i think two), one at the lovely count basie theater in red bank n.j. in 2004, one at carnegie hall last winter. a bunch of great and varied shows, and quite a progression of venues (the tower admittedly a step down from carnegie, but not all that far down.)

was thinking about how much db's stature has changed over those years, as an established musical luminary and general cultural luminary (and also a-list gotham arts-world celeb?) it's not that his (solo) music has gotten all that much more popular since feelings (1997) initiated my interest in (love for) his contemporary career output. (certainly one reason why this tour is so large-scaled is that he's specifically reviving a lot of talking heads material, even though he's also done that every other time i've seen him.) and i doubt anyone expects everything that happens will happen today (2008) to sell especially many more copies than his last bunch of albums, even though it seems, much more than his others, to arrive with a ready-made sense of historicity attached.

yeah, i get that it's about brian eno too, or at least about their collaboration... okay, that's fine. but frankly, if you ask me, this is a david byrne record. eno's a record producer, albeit an extremely big-deal one - to me and many people, he's never been anywhere near as popular or fascinating or exciting as david, but that's another matter - but these are clearly byrne's songs (he wrote the "words and melodies," or something like that), even if eno is responsible for their (less than luminous) compositional underpinnings.

basically, db's cachet seems pretty much unimpeachable in the mid-to-late 2000s, as a combo result of his assorted slate of recent artistic activities and (more significantly) the increasing canonization of talking heads, from various angles, as influential and innovative and otherwise essential. q.v. the whole 1980s new york punk-funk underground hoo-hah, also just the fact that in the '90s the heads had been together less than ten years ago. plus his signing to nonesuch (who reissued the first byrneno alb last year, etc etc.) y'know.

all of which makes this tour (the songs of david byrne and brian eno tour) feel a good bit more of an event than others, or than is usually conducive to transcendent concert-going experiences. which isn't to say it wasn't totally awesome, for sure. also complicating is that i'd heard a fair amount of advance press - this was almost the last date out of two months (though that's just the first leg of a six month world tour), at least the fourth or so in easy driving distance, and the pesky interweb had pre-warned me that this would probably be the closest i'd ever come to experiencing my fabled pop mecca, the whole 1984 stop making sense shebang/panithiopliconica. which of course meant it couldn't possibly live up to it (not that i'd have expected that anyway.)

anyway, it was clearly cut from similar rock-show-as-performance-art/scripted-spectacle cloth, but this ain't no nostalgia trip, at least it's much better not to take it that way (like i said, he's been performing plenty of these songs all along, which makes it kinda cloying that we're seemingly supposed to treasure them so especially dearly this time around.) there's more thn plenty rock show and spectacle on its own here without needing to lean on any reflected glory. the gang on stage (db+11 - among them marc d.g.a. from soul coughing and g+m muldaur's daughter - including 3 dancers and 3 singers, who also occasionally sang and danced) were a relatively young and energetic bunch, with a median age probably at least twenty less than the 56-yo byrne (he's my mom's age), who still has as much youthful energy as any of 'em, and looks like a silver-haired angel-demigod to boot.

so yeah. the new songs are good - mellow, but not overly so (the set-closing "i feel my stuff" got downright fierce); gospelly as promised (via soul and/or country), big simple swoony group-harmony vocal hooks. haven't digested the lyrics all yet, but they nod pleasingly to his younger, angrier, output, and his style hasn't changed all that much (from "world moves on a woman's hips" to the world as "my big nurse" and "the milk of human kindness/from the breast we all partake"; "everything that happens will happen today" vs. "heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.")

similarly, the choreography of the sleek modern dancers (they were on stage about half the time, it seemed, doing everything from contact lifts to twirling on office chairs) occasionally winked at db's heads-era movement vocab - most notably some subtle quotations from the "once in a lifetime" video, and running during the break of "life during wartime." can't speak to whether the "new ography" for the twyla tharp excerpt "big hands" had anything to do with the original, probably not, but it's a good reminder of how fitting it was for there to be modern dancers (db's been working with them for a long time) - a worthy replacement for the string section he had on the last couple tours.

remain in light, never my favorite album, though it may still be growing on me (is that allowed?) got four of its eight songs aired; the obvious ones (since "born under punches" always seems to get short shrift these days) including a totally awesome "great curve" and, my favorite, "houses in motion," which had some of the best choreography (and lighting work) and i wish had come later in the set so i'd have appreciated it more. fear of music actually had four selections too, though i always forget to associate "heaven" and "wartime" with that album (since they're on sms i guess), and the always-punchy i zimbra was slotted second before the new-mellow-one/old-dancy-one rhythm got smoothly established (there was a bit too much up-and-down in our seats over the course of it.) best - and most surprising thing in the show - though was "air," in the second encore. what a crazy, ridiculous, paranoia-perfect song. ("some people say not to worry 'bout the air/some people don't know shit about air!") (and a better representative of what i think of as the utterly weird core of the album.)

would have been cool to hear more more songs songs (i guess eno was less involved? i almost said they're less poppy, but that's...not true.) they did "take me to the river" though, and that is a good good good good-ass song. they backup singers were especially having fun on that one. and he "snuck in" "burning down the house" (as if somebody would complain?) (web tells me they've also done "don't worry about the gvmt" - now that would've gotten me in the gut.) furthermore, there was the catherine wheel bit and, awesomely, "help me somebody" from my life in the bush with db singing/speaking the part of the sampled evangelical preacher.

a fair amount of material, though it was not, as it turned out, a particularly lengthy show. the set proper was over in a bit more than an hour, and there were three encores (five songs? six?) that didn't make it all that much longer, and (from perspective) mostly failed at creating the illusion of an indulgently long show such as the kind that usually has three encores. maybe it's because i sort of knew to expect them, but the encores felt annoyingly obvious/scripted - as is always true with encores these days (you just keep clapping until they one when turn on the lights, and then you leave right away) - but it seemed like with a show as conceptual as this (not heavy-handedly so, but still) they could have come up with a more interesting way to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. it reminded me most of the ritual leavings and enterings and multiple bowings at an orchestra concert.

ah well. i hope it doesn't sound like i'm complaining. some perspective may be in order - suffice to say, of all the various accolades i could lay on him, david byrne remains one of the most soulful, and inspiring performers - or artists, period - that i have ever seen or encountered.

citizen up!

Elx Day Special!

title: Get Out The Fuck!
format: CD
date: October 29th, 2004
packaging: jewel case with canvassing map, masking tape dispenser inserts, and a little propoganda card that makes the spine say THE BUSH-CHENEY RECORD

tracklist (courtesy reminced):
1. the laws have changed • the new pornographers
2. rapture rapes the muses • of montreal
3. lies • the knickerbockers
4. burning with optimism's flames • xtc
5. this will be our year • the zombies
6. rebellion (lies) • the arcade fire
7. this is our emergency • pretty girls make graves
8. 1976 • rjd2
9. simon says • pharoah monche
10. get up • the coup f/ dead prez
11. the end starts today [tommie sunshine mix] • bis
12. making flippy floppy [live] • talking heads
13. nothing can stop us now • st. etienne
14. nothingsevergonnastandinmyway(again) • wilco
15. mr. president • clinton
16. electioneering • radiohead
17. bedlam • elvis costello and the eating pastas
18. i am a tree • guided by voices
19. parade • garbage
20. wake up everybody • harold melvin and the blue notes

wow, four years ago! so long ago! back when i had just moved to philly, back when we wanted john kerry to be president. back when i liked the arcade fire! back when new elvis costello albums were still exciting! back when i was just discovering of montreal, and nobody else had yet! back when i listened to hip-hop (?) back when i was burning with optimism's flames, (unlike now, where optimism just seems realistic and reasonable, and "realism" seems pessimistic.) back when i was a tree for halloween (hence track 18.)

so this was my election day mix, obv. for listening to on election during GET OUT THE VOTE funtimes, titled in reference to our canvassing director's campaign to get us all to hook up (which worked in my case), and also to "simon says" (aka get the fuck up), the semi-title track.

still a very exciting and inspiring listen, even though i was too sick-feeling today to do much more than get out and vote myself... lots of great tunes that i don't think of much anymore. canniest inclusion is probably "making flippy floppy," even though i just put it on for the kerry flip-flop reference and didn't even realize until after the fact how apropos it is:

"the president's crazy - did you hear what he said?"

incidentally, i got an email from david byrne urging me to vote because he (as a green card-holding immigrant) can't.

also, the "laws have changed" brilliance: "all hail what will be revealed today"...

"form a line to the throne!!"

this will be our year!