Fidel Castro Announces Plans To Form Run DMC Tribute Group

My Adidas … a “straight-up gangsta” Fidel Castro poses with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

How Our Parents Perceive Hip-Hop

“A Rap Song”
By Mum and Dad

1, 2, 3, 4!

(While enacting embarrassing “gang sign” hand movements)

A-Wiggedy wiggedy
A-Wiggedy wiggedy
A-Jiggedy wig wig
A-Wiggedy wig!

Well my name is James’s mum
And I’m here to say
I like the rap music
Every single day!

A-Wiggedy wiggedy
A-Wiggedy wiggedy
A-Jiggedy wig wig
A-Wiggedy wig!

My name is James’s dad
And I wish he’d move out
I like to rap
All the time!

A-Jiggedy-wig-wig

I’m the best rapster since Will Smith
I’m on the double-u dot com!
But how do I turn this thing off?

A-Wiggedy wiggedy
A-Wiggedy wiggedy
A-Jiggedy wig wig
A-Wiggedy woo

Definitive Indie Quiz

I posted this as a Myspace bulletin, back before Myspace was mainstream, not to mention before indie was mainstream… sell-outs.

How Indie are you?

If you answer yes to any of these questions give yourself 5 points…

( ) Were you the first person you know to hear “Last Nite” by The Strokes?

( ) Were you the first person you know to hear “Evil” by Interpol?

( ) Were you the first person you know to hear “Lazy Eye” by the Silver Sun Pickups?

( ) Were you the first person you know to hear “Naïve” by the Kooks?

( ) Were you the first person to hear any Kooks song ever?

( ) Did you know about the Kooks before they formed?

( ) Did you invent skinny jeans?

( ) Were you the first person you know to see Garden State?

( ) Zach Braff’s myspace is your homepage.

( ) Were you the first person you know to wear a scarf at a club even when it’s not cold outside?

( ) Streetparty!…. Did you just have an orgasm when you read that word?

( ) Do you believe a cardigan is a way of life?

( ) Are you so indie you’re actually massively corporate?

( ) Did you know the dinosaurs would become extinct before it happened?

( ) Did you start the trend of dinosaurs wearing Chuck Taylor All-Stars?

( ) Fuck the dinosaurs they sold out when they made a comeback 365 million years after they were supposedly dead. Fucking suits. Agree?

( ) Did you invent music?

( ) Are you the only truely Indie person in the world?

If you didn’t answer ‘yes’ to every single one of those questions you are not truely indie, so go suck on one you corporate sell-out super-suit fucking poseur.

If you did answer ‘yes’ to all of them… you’re not indie, because I already answered yes to them all first. Sell-out.

Experimental Jazz and Death Metal… More Alike Than Once Thought?

I’ve come to the conclusion that Experimental Jazz and Death Metal music are pretty much the same thing. Well, obviously one is louder, faster, more aggressive, and contains more references to slashing and maiming than the other, but the general idea behind both forms of music are generally pretty similar.

For example…

• Both types of music are dismissed as irritating background noise from an uninitiated listener, until, on further examination, they realise it’s actually just irritating music.
• Experimental Jazz and Death Metal are both completely devoid of vocal harmonies. In the case that vocals are needed, they are achieved a few ways. From the making of random low-pitched noises (sultry “Yeh’s” or brooding growls), to horrifyingly loud, completely annoying noises (shouty “YEH’s” or over-the-top RRRRAAWWWHGHGHHHHH!!!!’s)
• When someone doesn’t “get” their favoured music, an Experimental Jazz/Death Metal fan will always defend it by saying “you just don’t know how to listen to it”, or “it’s above your head”.
• Both forms of music are played, and listened to, purely for the self-satisfaction devotees receive when they mention a band or artist they like, and the person they’re conversing with doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about.
• Both genres are awful.

Look at the picture on the bottom…
I mean, shave the blonde dude’s head, give the asian guy a spiky leather jumpsuit and make the chick an evil-looking, bearded Nordic man, and you practically have a death metal band here!

What would they be called?

Jazz Faeces perhaps?

People I Wish Were Popular Today

Kate Bush

Imagine any seventeen year old pop star writing and performing lyrics like this these days…

They open doorways that I thought were shut for good
They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu
They build up my body
Break me emotionally, it’s nearly killing me
But what a lovely feeling.

-Kate Bush,
Them Heavy People

My mum grew up a big Kate Bush fan.
Of the cassettes, and later, CDs that were played in the car during long interstate trips around Christmas, Kate’s releases featured heavily.

A 16 hour hour trip to Ballina on the north-coast of NSW would be punctuated by little ditties such as Wuthering Heights, and Oh, To Be In Love.
As a result I have a surprisingly vast knowledge of Kate’s back-catalogue.
I’m still not sure if I like Kate because of the sense of nostalgia her music brings me, or if it’s an indication of the quality of her music, and how talented a songwriter she was…

Wait a minute… those long, cramped car trips with my parents and three sibs were fucking shithouse!

Of course it’s because she’s awesome! That and she’s bat-shit crazy… how can you not dig the Bush???

With so many mass manufactured, fresh off of the assembly-line popsters aimed at the lucrative tween market these days, an artist of Kate Bush’s caliber would be decidedly refreshing.
A talented singer song-writer, (Kate wrote all of her own songs, some of her best-known before she was 18 years old) who’s songs are actually… well… good, is just what we need.
A shining light in the dark, dismal abyss of mediocrity that is the modern music industry.

And, yes, I know, apparently we can expect big things from Gabriella Cilmi and the like, but so many people say that about every new artist, until they burnout and are never heard from again.
They wimper away into irrelevence simply because they are boring! And if there is one thing Kate Bush wasn’t, it is boring.

But even quality artists have to lose favour with the public eventually, and even though Kate’s still selling albums, they are squarely aimed at her old-school fans (Mum) and are all very mellow and refelective (about her children and stuff).

Anyway, this is the film clip for Kate Bush’s single Babooshka… it’s so completely insane I want to hoon into the filmclip in a Dodge Viper dressed as Aragorn and say “Jump in Kate, we’re gonna go to Middle Earth and make sweet love in the middle of the Hobbits’ little cul-de-sac! We’ll show Bilbo Baggins how it’s done, baby!”