The new mashup/decalage/pastiche by Girl Talk is out. It’s free!! I downloaded the one giant mp3 and it’s pretty good. I found myself listening to one half of each song and trying to figure out where everything is from. It’s almost like, if you’re an artist and you appear on this mix, then you are given a certain chosen status. I’m so glad Nicki Minaj made it, and Gaga. And a few others. A whole lotta fun. Go here to download it!
So I bought Deerhunter’s new CD “Halcyon Digest” a few weeks ago at Berkeley’s Amoeba, the same place that I bought their last double CD. So it was an attempt at nostalgia, hoping to recreate the last experience, so naturally, it failed. Last time I was in Berkeley, the town was so foreign to me, that music was a strange comfort. This time, the magic is gone. After listening to this new one, I must say that I liked their older one better. It’s pretty good, though, and I’ve usually liked what they have had to offer in the past, especially the do-it-yourself aesthetic of Bradford Cox.
Halcyon Digest sounds more professionally produced, with a lot more instruments like saxophone, less moody or maudlin (a new word I learned!), and more mature… like, less adult and sexy, but more confident. The song “Helicopter” is one of their singles, but once you read the story behind it, written by Dennis Cooper and included in the cover booklet, it takes on a different meaning. It’s about a boy caught up in human-sex trafficking. SO the lyrics: “now they are through with me” totally broke my heart, because, that could be anybody!! It could be me!! My worst fear is that I will be murdered after having sex. Like, I’ll be the victim of someone’s necrophiliac tendencies. Anyhoo, yeah, it hit home because of this weird phobia of mine.
Dima (real name Dimitry Marakov) was born in 1986 in the town of Nalchik, Russia. From a young age, he dreamed of working in the fashion industry as a designer. Lacking the moral or financial support of his parents, he actively sought out contacts within the industry through the internet. At the age of 14, he became acquainted with a successful fashion photographer in St. Petersburg who invited the boy to come live with him and work as his assistant. Dima accepted the offer and moved in with the photographer. According to friends of Dima, he became the older man’s lover for approximately the next year. He eventually grew dissatisfied with the lack of benefits he had been promised would result from the arrangement. He left the photographer to become live-in lovers with a wealthy man who provided the financial backing for a conglomerate of pornographic gay websites. It was at this point that Dimitry adopted the stage name Dima and, with the help of false documents that corrected his age to the legal 18, began a successful career modeling naked and starring in hardcore sex videos on the gay websites financed by his lover.
Between the age of 15 and 18, Dima was a highly sought after pornographic model and performer. He saved the money he made from modeling to pay for the tuition at a leading college of fashion that he hoped to attend when he reached 18. At a certain point, Dima began supplementing his income by renting himself out as an escort within his lover’s circle of associates and acquaintances. According to friends of Dima, they included several leading figures in the entertainment industry as well as one of the most powerful men in Russia’s world of organized crime. Dima began to express concern to his friends that the organized crime figure had become obsessed with him, but he refused to accept their advice to stop seeing the man because of the large amount of money these dates were earning him. Sometime in 2005, Dima abruptly left his lover, gave up his modeling career, cut off all communication with his friends, and moved in with the organized crime figure. The last public Dima sighting was late that year when his friend Ignat Lebedev, who was also working as a male escort at the time, accompanied a client to a private sex club where he claims to have witnessed a very thin and confused looking Dima being forcibly sodomized by a group of perhaps ten to fifteen men. Lebedev claims his client identified one of the men as the organized crime figure and dissuaded him from speaking to Dima for his own protection.
Lebedev claims he described what he’d seen to Dima’s former lover and was told Dima had been killed the previous week and that he shouldn’t speak of this again. Lebedev reported both incidents to the police, but after interviewing the lover and being told Lebedev had made the story up, they declined to investigate the matter. In 2006, Lebedev persuaded a prominent Russian gay journalist to write an article on Dima’s disappearance, but during the course of investigating the story, the writer was abducted by unknown assailants, beaten, and told he would be murdered if he wrote the story. Dima has not been seen or reliably heard from in three years, although in early 2007 another organized crime figure, Evgeny Ershova, who was awaiting trial on an unrelated murder charge, claimed that in late 2005 he witnessed a young male prostitute matching Dima’s description be pushed out of a helicopter over a remote forest in the north of Russia. Before Dima’s ex-lover died of lung cancer in late 2007, he reportedly confessed to friends that Dima was sold as a sex slave to a man in the Ukraine in late 2005 and had lived until late 2006 when he’d committed suicide.
Anyway, the last couplet of songs are the strongest of the album. “Coronado” sounds like the end of a movie, like it should be played during some montage in an ’80s film where the protagonist gets to escape and move to another city and start over. Imagine: walking down the typical streets of New York where it’s all crowded. I think it’s the saxophone, man! Very cool. The growly-ness of Cox’s voice is so pleasing and contagious, it makes me want to be on his side. Like, yeah! he’s overcome!
“He Would Have Laughed”, written in memory of Jay Reatard,who collaborated and toured with the band in the past, is a twinkly, maudlin (!!), mournful, growly, pretty, and bouncy lament. It’s actually two songs in one. It’s also really self-confessional-like, the kind of emotion that makes me love Deerhunter so much. The one-two punch of triumph with acknowledging grief is so stunning, I think.
So I have recently taken to wearing my earphones and listening to music ALL the time while walking around the campus. It scares me a little because it’s actually really common, a LOT of people are wearing their headphones and stuff. It’s like, not natural or something. I wonder if people do what I do: imagine that I’m in a movie and I’m listening to my own soundtrack, creating a narrative to my life.
Case in point: I have a crush on every boy. So when I play this song, and walk around the school, I’m all “I wish he was my boooyfrieeeennd!” to every boy I see. There’s a lot of unrequited love, I can sense, here at Berkeley. Ugh. I especially love the lines: “The other girl is nooot me, she’s prettier and skinnier, she has a coooollege degree, I dropped out when I was seventeeeeen”. It’s a mix of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and Camera Obscura’s “Hey Lloyd”. I also love the way she emphasizes and drags the most unusual words. It’s so very.
Just posting some cool music I downloaded on a whim. I love it when that happens: When I throw 10 bucks down on itunes and I come out with a cool album of songs. Thanks, Pitchfork! Almost seems like happenstance/I actually have good taste in music.
It’s like, some kind of avant garde house music that will throb your brain sometimes. I first listened to this while I was slowly developing a hangover, falling asleep after a night of Vegas drinking. I find myself constantly going back to listen to it over the weeks, though. Bowls especially, needs to be bumped with some loud bass as it counters with some harpy harps and clangy clanging bells. Somewhere in there, there’s a house party. And Found Out is a deconstructed, softly mutated disco diva’s ballad sung by a croony white dude with remorseful pains about being found out about some affair or another. Or at least that’s the story I imagine, I didn’t really listen to the lyrics. It’s soooo Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way”. And I mean that in the best way.
You know, I haven’t been impressed by Christina Aguilera for a long time. Probably not since I was a teenie-bopper in the 5th grade who was blasted with TRL and Pepsi and Doritos and Carson Daly and Christina Aguilera. I was in love with Christina Aguilera. And I remember that I ALWAYS said her entire name. Christina Aguilera. I always took her side over Britney, too. Oh GOD, poor 5th grade me! I’m a survivor though. So yeah, Christina Aguilera. Aside from her great voice, I guess, I was never convinced by her… appeal? I don’t know. She wasn’t trashy enough, and when she finally got trashy, it was… unconvincing. I’m having a hard time saying that I’m realizing that I never really liked her!
Ok, so she’s readying her new CD. Called Bionic, because she is like, a mom or something. I heard a radio-interview with her and Ryan Seacrest. She was all, I’m a new mom, so I’m bionic. It’s like, she’s not even convinced by her own product that she’s supposed to sell.
But I like this song. Maybe because it’s mostly M.I.A, and just a little bit of Christina. It’s witty and I love the buzzy synths and it’s playful and meta–”You could even say it’s a metaphor”. It almost reminds me of Robyn’s new song “Fembot”. Maybe we should compare them.
I first listened to Portishead’s “Third” on a drive home from Berkeley, CA after a friend picked it up at the Amoeba record store up there. This was about a year and a half ago. I was of course familiar with Portishead, since my sister had turned me on to them in middle school during a particularly dreary summer. It was a stoned summer. Funny thing about my lazy summers in Souther California: they often amount to just nothing. It’s stagnant. I’m always making tons of plans but the overbearing heat inspires sweaty retreat. My main jam was the cool and longing “It Could Be Sweet”.
Anyway… my first listen to “Third” was surprising, because for me, it was a completely different Portishead. Yet, this new sound seemed like a natural progression. They still had that chilling and ambient mood, still moody as hell, and still really sexual–or rather sensual. I was surprised by the new sounds and original arrangements. It seemed very crafted and yet really experimental.
So I was REALLY excited when I heard that Portishead was working on a new album. If anything, their last one “Third” assured me that they are still capable of performing not only solid work, but in also reinventing themselves, creating and experimenting and finding imaginative ways of looking at old sounds and creating new music. “Chase The Tear” is one of their newest songs. It borrows, from what I’ve read, a sort of Krautrock-inspired sound. It’s droning and pushing, what I fantasize driving on the Autobahn would be like. Beth Gibbons’ voice is slightly distorted and strained, but it’s a kicking song. If anything, it makes me really excited for their new CD.
Spring is coming faster than I expected–Just when I got used to the mild California winter weather and wearing light jackets, Daylight Savings Time hits me in the face like a sort-of hangover. I was awoken by the sound of tiny meows coming from inside my closet…My pregnant cat has finally popped and she did it on a pile of my dirty laundry.
From here on out, the days are going to get longer, the sun is going to get hotter, and I’m going to get less sleep. Ahh Spring. I need to get on top of school, because I just found out I’m going to be staying for a year longer than I expected. Things are just happening slower and faster than I expected them to. And it’s my own fault because I have kind of been sleepwalking through life lately. I’m kind of on auto-pilot. I need to wake up.
Is it because I was getting so much sleep before, and now I’m getting so little, that my brain can’t distinguish memories from dreams? I’ve been having deja vu more often lately… “if I can have just one pure thought”. Maybe I should quit the al-kee-awl.
On the cover of her new CD “Have One On Me”, Joanna Newsom is seated quite fashionably amidst a real life collage of antiques, what looks like a tapestry, and other knick knacks and paddy whacks . It’s appropriate because her music to me always feels like listening to some kind of artsy collage of collected antiques and borrowed stories. But it’s always been a single voice, albeit a bold and stunning single voice.
So this new song is like her other songs, in that it is another collage sprawling with details and “flights of fancy”, BUT it also contains something different. The only word I can come up with to describe it is the word community. “Good Intentions Paving Company” is like Joanna Newsom made a bunch of miniature copies of herself and she’s testifying to the Lord! It’s certainly more gospel-y and, like somewhere I read, channeling Joni Mitchell in a way. The Good Intentions Paving Company is like a torch song for an honest old business or way of life that is long gone. Maybe it’s a hearkening for home or for a place to belong or for someone to “just pull over and hold you until you can’t remember your own name”. Anyway, it’s a fun little down-home song and I haven’t been able to stop listening to it.
