Summer jam artiste Mpho’s debut album Pop Art won’t be out for months yet, but that doesn’t mean she’s not keeping busy. To sate our thirst after listening to Box N Locks approximately three kajillion times in the past two months, the British/South African singer’s taken to the Youtube to present us with a moderately acoustic cover of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill. With the aid of just a keyboard, a drummer, and a drummer’s backpack, Mpho transforms Kate’s original* from a dated-sounding dance tune for gay wiccans into something a little more soulful and less otherworldly, despite making only very minimal changes to the vocal delivery. Sorry Placebo, but this is now the only cover of this song that I want to hear (besides Kiki and Herb’s, of course.)
Since Kate Bush revivalism is the #2 trend of the year (after disco revivalism), it’s not actually that very surprising that the woman touted as the newer, more ethnic Santogold would choose to cover this song. But I don’t care how shrewd a commercial move it is, I’m still wicked excited right now.
[via ArjanWrites]
It’s on. And it’s possibly not getting archived, so listen now! Because my Bastille Day Eve tribute to French pop is unmissable! And, you know, mumbly and shoddily executed, in my fashion.
[My year-long recap of my favorite songs of the decade continues, very very slowly.]
4. The Strokes, Last Nite
When The Strokes’ debut album was released in the fall of 2001, it was as if music critics collectively decided to play a game wherein they would each talk about how amazing the album was, both on the grounds that it was revolutionary and also because it sounded a lot like some other completely unrelated band from history.
Rolling Stone said the album sounded like British mods covering James Brown and Buddy Holly; the late Nude As The News heard the Stones and a feisty Lou Reed as influences. Entertainment Weekly also mentioned Reed’s band The Velvet Underground, particularly Moe Tucker’s drumming. Television was also thrown around as an influence by critics, as were Oasis and the Dave Clark Five and pretty much every other band ever beloved by rockists. And I haven’t even gotten to the reeeeeally enthusiastic British press. (NME’s review, though comparison-free, is pretty comically overwrought today.) But at the time nobody–absolutely nobody–picked up on the group’s biggest influence of all.
Filed under: gay, heterosexuals, movies, music, porn | Tags: automats, billboard, bruno, buying music in a store, casey kasem, comics, condoms, levi johnston, porn, sex, shakira, shaving, solange, south africa, swimmers, the dalai lama
[ed. note: Today is the end of SoundSession, Providence's biggest music festival. There's music all day and into the night, and a parade, and basically I'm pre-booking tomorrow as a hangover day. So you're getting your news delivered early, you lucky so-and-sos!]
Levi Johnston gave his thoughts about Sarah Palin’s resignation, which, whatever, but whoever decided to place him in an enormous swivel chair in front of a million books deserves three raises.
Americans aren’t so sure what sex is.
Casey Kasem, who I’d probably call my hero if anybody ever asked me who my hero was, is stepping down from the mic (again).
Choire Sicha’s thoughts about Bruno almost make me kind of want to see it. Even though Dreamy David Rakoff thinks it’s bad for the gays.
Carnal Nation reports on condoms and porn.
There’s only one thing I read more than blog posts about why sex work isn’t necessarily a sign of desperation. And that’s blog posts about the relative merits of people buying v. sharing their music.
Male swimmers shaving each other is fine, I guess, for practical reasons, but the massive push for men to shave everything is really bringing me down. (See also.)
Louisiana’s Southern University is feeling the Solange.
There’s more to South African music than you might know.
The Dalai Lama made a surprise appearance in Apartment 3-G yesterday. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the strip (we don’t have it in Providence) but it’s the only strip I’ve enjoyed for the past, oh, decade or so. (Occasional individual Get Fuzzy and Rex Morgan strips aside.)
A big trend this week is people who know nothing about the Billboard album chart complaining about the Billboard album chart.
Finally, National Geographic offers tips on how to make homemade food that tastes like it was the opposite of homemade.
Because I spent most of today figuring out my stupid rent situation, here’s a song for the destitute. It’s Elizabeth Cotten’s version of Shake Sugaree, a Cotten wrote with her grandchildren. Notable covers include one by the sadly neglected Fred Neil on his Everybody’s Talkin’ album, and one by Mary Lou Lord on her major-label outing Got No Shadow.
Cotten’s version appears in the depressing but lovable 1991 Vietnam-era film Dogfight, for those of you recognize the song and spent some part of your life obsessed with River Phoenix and/or Lili Taylor.
Sixty-two years ago today something happened in Roswell. What, nobody knows for sure, but when you’ve got conspiracy theorists on one side and the military on the other it’s not so easy to believe anybody.
For some reason, Roswell keeps coming up lately. Just the other day I posted about John Doe, the X frontman who played a dad on the WB teen drama about pretty teenaged aliens. (I watched that show, pretty much religiously, for all three of its poorly-written seasons, mainly because I had a big crush on Jason Behr’s ears.) Also, on Sunday I found myself telling someone–again–about the criminally underrated beauty of Sheryl Crow’s second album. That CD kicks off with the Roswell-mentioning Maybe Angels, and was one of a handful of alien-themed modern rock songs to come out in the wake of the incident’s 50th anniversary and the success of The X-Files.
Filed under: copouts, gay, heterosexuals, hookers, magazines, music, not hot, personal, porn, shameless self-promotion | Tags: hookers, pride, sarah palin, books, porn, drake, rubber soul, punk, marketing, records, paris hilton, dubai, bikinis, tender morsels, y?n-vee, terrible band names, kerry washington, transsexuals, crack, chairs, self-promotion
I didn’t have enough links on Sunday for a wrap-up. But boy is there a lot to talk about now! Sorry about that!
Romance novels can be written by smart women! This article made me want to try my hand at it, too, even though, you know, I’m a man and don’t really read romance novels.
AAG responds to a letter by a guy concerned about the ethics of watching porn. Nothing new to people that read about this all the time, but pretty interesting anyway. I like the idea that some people think of it as performance art. [via Debauched Domestic Diva]
Drake, the Degrassi star/rapper/general annoyance, is (thankfully) doing his part to revive the jimmy-wrapping era of hip-hop. [via Idolator]
Punk. It’s a lot like social media, you know?
A Russian woman can lift 14kg with her vagina muscles. That’s one of those articles that make me wonder about how, exactly, the newspapers got wind of the story.
FiveThirtyEight mentions Sarah Palin’s resignation, commenters start hurling insults.
Bitch Magazine continues to be really juvenile and irritating. Now they’re offended because Paris Hilton hired Middle Eastern cultural experts before she started filming her new TV show in Dubai, as though that’s a bad thing. Also they don’t like that she wore a bikini to go swimming. Which, since Dubai is 82% foreigners, is actually both legal and fairly ordinary common (and probably got the OK from her cultural advisors.) [via Natalia Antonova]
Australian writer Margo Lanagan’s new Tender Morsels is causing a big to-do in Britain . The updated version of Snow White and Rose Red, which is actually intended for children, includes a gang-rape scene, a detailed description of a miscarriage, and in its very first paragraph has a sex scene between a witch and a dwarf. [via Bookslut]
UPDATE: The second I hit send The Book Bench also posted about this. Apparently the book’s been out in the US since October and nobody here paid it any mind at all.
At some point in my complaining about stupid 3oh!3 and their stupid name, I remembered early nineties r&b girl group Y?N-Vee, who weren’t really any good either but who at least didn’t make Helen Keller jokes in their songs. Though the chorus to their song Satisfaction did have a really awkward line about how “it melts in your mouth and not in your hands.”
Kerry Washington will be playing a cracked-out transsexual hooker in Life Is Hot In Cracktown, and it may or may not be the first time a black biological female actress plays a trans character on film. (On TV it’s happened a bunch of times before, oddly, at least according to the comments on that post.) [via Clay Cane]
Studio 360 came up with some ideas for a new Gay Pride flag. My favorite was the squares one, because it re-instituted the turquoise and pink–symbolizing art and sex–that were taken out of the real Pride flag in the past. Also, it reminds me of the new Pet Shop Boys album.
Charles and Ray Eames debuting a new chair on NBC in 1956. [via Joe Gebbia's Posterous]
And, finally, my 1000th Tumblr post went up about fifteen minutes ago. Trying to do something memorable/milestone-y, I went with a photo I shot myself, though it’s not a self-portrait so don’t get your hopes up.
Amazingly, I’m about to queue my 1000th post on Naked Pictures Of Your Dad. Which means that I’ve looked at I don’t even know how many pictures of naked dudes since I started the blog back in February, but it’s definitely in the five-digit range.
Anyway, earlier today I was thinking about finding a picture of Sexy Damon Albarn to be post #1000, and then coincidentally Buzzfeed just went and led me to this video.
I can’t say I blame these people for their little moment of hippie frottage; To The End is like the sexiest song ever. (Although I think I might change my mind and just put a self-portrait up as post #1000.)
(*I know I just used that lyric for a title less than a month ago, but really, what else could I call this?)
Because it’s the first nice day in what feels like months.
If somebody had to ask me what my favorite American band is, I’m pretty sure I’d have to go with X. Because even though John Doe ended up on Roswell and Exene left him to marry Viggo Mortensen, they put out six amazing, amazing albums. Not all of them are perfect; 1987’s See How We Are, which 4th of July is on, suffers from the fact that it sounds like it came out in 1987. But it’s kind of a brilliantly flawed album, made even more interesting because it lacks the all-around perfection of Los Angeles and Wild Gift and Under The Big Black Sun.
[nb: This video just got uploaded to Youtube yesterday. I'm assuming the record company folks will take it down any minute now, but I thought it would be better than listening to somebody's cameraphone version of them doing it at South By Southwest this year.]
It’s been five months since the Franz Ferdinand album came out and I could still sing its praises joyously. In a year when everyone from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to the Noisettes to Shakira to Bat For Lashes have been partying like it’s 1977, Franz Ferdinand have added an intriguingly (and, in my opinion, necessary) masculine counterpoint.
Can’t Stop Feeling, though a great song, isn’t one of the standouts of the album, but it’s being released in the UK anyway as a single on Monday. Unfortunately, the video takes all the sultry, sexy, suit-wearing aura of the album’s artwork and previous singles and replaces it with, uh, something that can best be described as “most reminiscent of recent Weezer.” There’s awful face-making, pointlessly low-budget effects, and Alex Kapranos is wearing a sweater that kind of looks like it has water stains. Why, I ask you. Why? When the song is about, oh, thirty times as much fun as it looks like they’re pretending to be having…
