Because the '90s aren't going to bring back themselves: Death Valley Girls

My introduction to Death Valley Girls was their 'What's in My Bag' episode:

Totally the sort of band I dug the hell out of in the '90s. Checking them out further, DVGs are just fun fun fun as far as I can see:

Awesome vibe. Great fun.

The Way That Madness Lies

U2's career highlight, Achtung Baby (1991) was a single CD with 12 tracks.

The 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition comprises 2 CDs with 26 tracks total.

The Super Deluxe Edition comprises 6 CDs (with 72 tracks), 4 DVDs, a 92 page hardback book and 16 art prints in a wallet.

The limited, numbered Uber Deluxe Edition is a magnetic puzzle tiled box containing 6 CDs, 4 DVDs, an Achtung Baby double vinyl album plus 5 clear 7" vinyl singles in their original sleeves, an 84-page hardback book (8 pages missing!), 16 art prints in a wallet, a copy of Propaganda magazine, 4 badges, a sticker sheet, and a pair of Bono’s trademark 'The Fly' sunglasses.


Update: James Cameron Edition (April 14, 2016)
Cameron announces that now there will be four Avatar sequels.

Versions of 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World'

Tears for Fears' original was, of course, one of the best #1s of the 1980s.

Its 10 minute, extended version is worth listening to at least once just to hear all the synth layers separately.

The Bad Plus's jazz trio arrangement is lovely (I'm not sure why these guys get sneered at).

Clare & The Reasons' chamber pop/torch reworking (live on The Culture Show) is pure seduction.

Lorde's grim reimagining (which sounds like it's a good fit for The Hunger Games Part 2) initially struck me as too mannered, but has grown on me these past few days.

Glee, as is its wont, used the song as an anthem of perseverance and (gay) self-affirmation. Anything I've missed?

Two Thoughts on (the rise and fall of) Female Pop Stars

Two years ago, at the height of Born This Way furore, I identified the problem with Lady Gaga's pop trajectory: after Bad Romance Gaga took as her model the more conceptual, overexposing 1989-1992 Madonna, the Madonna whose music feels secondary to exhibitionism, cultural provocation and domination for its own sake. That was a problem for Gaga because Madonna had all the cultural political capital gained from her first three albums to spend down during that period, while Gaga's obnoxious and exhausting phase had to be 'funded' out of only the handful of broadly appealing singles up to Bad Romance.
Fast-forward two years and Gaga's OK-ish (and certainly better than BTW) next album, Artpop, arrives together with all sorts of extra-musical, antic and excessive promotional stunts, but only the hard core of fans are paying any sort of positive attention: Gaga's selling a few hundred thousand records not millions. The sort of good will you need to have to get the casual fan to buy your stuff no longer exists for Gaga - it's all been spent. Maybe Gaga will enjoy being a more cult figure, albeit one's that's possibly about as big as Bowie was for much of the 1970s:

"As of June 1983, Bowie’s total global album sales were as follows (according to Zanetta/Edwards’ Stardust, figures rounded up/down):
Three top sellers: Ziggy Stardust (1.38 million units moved), ChangesOneBowie (1.33 million), Young Americans (923,000). A few gold records: Diamond Dogs (745,000), David Live (598,000), Station to Station (552,800), Aladdin Sane (533,000); a few mid-list sellers: Space Oddity (455,600), Hunky Dory (445,600), Pin Ups (421,250), Scary Monsters (347,400). With the “Berlin” records, a complete cratering: “Heroes” (279,000), Low (265,900), Lodger (153,360), Stage (127,350). Between 1977 and 1983, one of every two new Bowie LPs was returned unsold by retailers. By contrast, Michael Jackson sold over a million copies of Off the Wall between August and December 1979 alone." (Pushing After The Dame)

Here's hoping she can come up with some 'Berlin'-worthy music once she realizes her new status.
2013 has seen the rise of the exciting, brilliantly precocious Lorde. This was a genuinely unexpected development; 2013 was supposed to be the year of the 'Baby Robyns': Frida Sundemo, Faye, MØ, and the like:



I'm not sure that it quite makes sense for all these Scandi-gals to sell nothing while Lorde sells millions! Indeed Robyn herself has never had quite the global success (esp. in North America) that Lorde is having. Thus, while Lorde is a fantastic development for the charts, the flukiness and winner-take-all-ness of pop chart success remains troubling. Incredible luck is involved in becoming a 'chosen one'. Lorde shows signs of understanding this, and of appreciating her good fortune more generally. Let's hope she never forgets the point (it's probably one of the keys, along with staying a little bit 'alternative' to the mainstream, to Lorde's preserving good will and having a long career).

Winners' History and Whiners' Whining

Steven Hyden's thoughtful and provocative seven-part series of articles, "The Winners' History of Rock And Roll", posits that:

In the late '60s, Led Zeppelin represented a new choice between.. "a clearly defined mass taste and a clearly defined elitist taste." This dichotomy would define the rock discourse for the next several decades, until elitist taste finally eclipsed mass taste due to audience attrition. Today, the best rock bands, almost without exception, make records with no chance of reaching the "mass taste" audience. You can blame that on changes in mass tastes — as much as "mass tastes" still exist, anyway — as well as revolutions in media and the record industry. You can also blame the bands, many of whom (intentionally or not) have sequestered themselves from the very people who used to be rock's core constituency.

This has led me to think about exactly how far I've internalized the elite-taste/indie/NYC-centered vision of rock's possibilities over the last decade or so. Here, I guess, are some of the artsists I've definitely dug over the period that may fit Hyden's model of "sells out midsize theaters in large cities and elicits blank stares every place else... a group that appears to have little or no concept of what a beer-chugging, Middle American audience might want out of a rock record":

• Dirty Projectors
• LCD Soundsystem
• Bon Iver
• The National
• Sleigh Bells
• Beach House
• Passion Pit
• Arcade Fire
• The Rapture
• The Strokes
• The Shins
• The Decemberists
• Bat For Lashes
• St Vincent
• Broken Social Scene
• Joanna Newsom
• Panda Bear
• Metronomy
• M83
• Anna Calvi
• Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
• Jens Lekman
• Fleet Foxes
• Life Without Buildings
• Interpol
• Swans

My off-the-top-of-my-head/itunes list feels, on average, more open to broader success than Hyden's totems of indie isolation and impotence: Grizzly Bear. I suppose that Hyden would say that a lot of the stuff on my list isn't Rock and/or macho enough to count for his purposes. It's fair to say, for example, that Dirty Projectors never thought they'd be or wished they'd be as big or as slamming as Led Zep. But what of LCD and M83 and Arcade Fire and The Rapture and The Strokes? I think they met the great unwashed, Middle American audience at least half way, and all attracted or attract a solid female audience not just "the same pasty, 35-to-44ish, predominantly dude-y bunch" that Hyden fears Rock has dwindled down to.

Foals' Holy Fire to take over world?

Filter meets Mansun meets Dave Gahan's 'Kingdom' meets TV On The Radio meets Passion Pit meets Talking Heads meets Vampire Weekend. What's not to love?

Girls Season 1: Some Questions

1. What about the lies Adam told Hannah about HPV testing?
2. What about the 'Hannah's Dad is gay' idea?
3. How is Hannah planning to keep the apartment that Marnie's been paying for? Hannah needs a flat-mate who'll cover her share of the rent. Good luck with that! Did the show not stress this point because then having Adam move in would have made too much sense just on a practical level (i.e., Hannah's offering the room to someone else would then look certifiable)?
4. Hannah's old writing prof. says that Tally (Hannah's nemesis) is a terrible writer, but Marnie liked Tally's book. Are we supposed to conclude that Marnie is lacking in judgement and taste? 
5. And how is an Oberlin prof. on the scene so conveniently in NYC?
6. Jessa's marriage can't be serious. Neither can Marnie's throwing herself at tubby, bombastic wedding guy. Was a shark jumped? 
7. And why in the original 'threesome' ep. didn't the unimpressed Jessa just leave and wish Marnie well in her effort to get laid by Thomas John? (And is that guy's ridiculous name a clue that none of this whole side of the narrative is to be taken seriously?) That Jessa would insist on, as it were, vag.-blocking her friend seemed quite out of character for her. 
8. Does this show and its characters make even basic sense?

Update August 1, 2012. And a Non-question:

• Why are Hannah's friends and broader peer-group so white? Good god. Lena Dunham should be allowed to write about what and whom she knows. Her world's a little narrow and bordering-on privileged. So was Jane Austen's. So is Richard Curtis's. Comedy thrives under these kind of self-imposed constraints. Don't like it? Don't watch it. Make your own show. Stop whining.

Ice Choir's I Want You Now And Always

Sounds like a hit from an undiscovered John Hughes movie. Pretty great in other words (although I'd like the Sundays-style guitar in the middle eight to continue, and I suspect that the harmony vocal in the final chorus could have been explored further, e.g., used earlier in the song, possibly completely on the beat, and then more extensively elaborated at the end). I'd like to think IWYNAA could be a hit in 2012, but what do I know? I was staggered at how little chart traction and action all of Robyn's Body Talk hit-candidates such as Hang With Me and Indestructible got back in 2010.

Update 1: Having tracked down and listened to a couple of other Ice Choir tracks, I can report that they're less compelling and endearing than IWYNAA. Still, even if IC's currently only got one big hit in 'em, here's hoping a killer song can still find an audience (but maybe luck will be required: being used in an ad., appearing on Gossip Girl, and the like).

Update 2: Thinking on IWYNAA a little more, it's not a million miles removed from a Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin track I liked enough to make a Bringing Up Baby-themed vid. for a while back:

Update 3: My own vid for IWYNAA:

Talk Less, Say More's Sky Over Everything

A nifty track from a new-to-me band that overall sounds a bit like Fad Gadget and Chris Knox (vocals may require some acclimatization in other words!), a bit like Talking Heads, and a bit like The Beta Band. Their (net-only) label has made their whole album England Without Rain downloadable here. Take up their offer; you won't be disappointed.

From The Foundations' You Don't Know Everything

Good tune from a new band with a tricky name. I find myself spiralling off into infinite regresses:

• Have you heard From The Foundations yet? No? Well, here's the latest track from From the Foundations.
• Have you heard From From The Foundations yet? No? Well, here's the latest track from From From the Foundations.
• Have you heard From From From The Foundations yet? No? Well, here's the latest track from From From From the Foundations."

And so on.

I think I may have caught my limit of weird

Iamamiwhoami seem fascinating in something like the way Bjork has always been, but if I'm honest, I'm feeling burned out on ultra-conceptual, visually intense, musically magpie-ish busy-ness:


Much of the center of pop from Gaga to Minaj to Florence is already quite exhausting, hectoring, brow-beating,... The avant garde is doing the same thing only more obliquely. In sum, too much weird - a weird bubble - leaves one overstimulated, deadened, and demand for it seems likely to undergo a sudden collapse. We'll see.

Clara Bow would like Metronomy (if she time-travelled forwards from 1927)

Yes she would. Must set some of It or Dangerous Curves to some of English Riviera.