Does it make you gay if your band covers the Ronettes during a free acoustic set at a shoe store in San Francisco on the eve of Pride Weekend? No? What if you’re wearing a pink button-down shirt? With matching pink Ray-Bans? Attire and circumstances aside, your West Coast Correspondent is starting to develop a slight musical chubby for dreamy Chris Chu and his Morning Benders.
Tom Waits journeys to Middle America; your SAK correspondent chronicles it all for The New York Press.
Emperor X is weird in the best way possible. See him for free this Saturday afternoon, June 28th (and get free MP3s of “Spieltier” and “Raytrancer”):
Your SAK correspondent’s disparate musings on Girl Talk’s Feed The Animals are now up at The New York Press site.
An Animated Look At The Sample-Soaked Population of Gillis’ Island
Pittsburgh’s Attention-Discotheque-Disordered and hipster-beloved DJ Girl Talk’s new album Feed The Animals, given a nothin’-but-’net release yesterday by record label Illegal Art, bookends its 14 tracks with sister cuts titled “Play Your Part (Pt. 1)” and “Play Your Part (Pt. 2).” And that, for as many reasons as Animals has samples, is quite a loaded twin christening.
Released with an In Rainbows-style pay-whatever-you-want deal (even $0.00 gets you a 320kb copy), the notion of “playing your part” here could shallowly be interpreted as: 1. paying something for the record; or 2. simply downloading it. But one-man show Gregg Gillis, the audio collage artist behind Girl Talk’s four sample-based LPs and sole captain of GT’s manic, user-generated live shows, is actually asking you for—and giving—much, much more.
But they don’t have forever / To blog for you, yeah / But when they say they want / This column to be clever / It’s cause they need a word / They can rhyme with “Forever”
Your SAK correspondent wants you to go Bowery Ballroom on Friday.
One more reason being famous sucks.
When your SAK West Coast Correspondent was but a wee boy in heavily starched Catholic school uniform, he spent his numerous detentions clapping erasers and wishing to someone else’s god that his teachers were just a little bit cooler. Does chewing gum in class really hurt anyone? And what exactly was wrong with engraving “AC/DC” on one’s desktop with the pointed edge of a compass? Had that graffito not righteously usurped the erroneous “Styx Rulz!” that some other student had so stridently etched on the same polished fiberboard?
It took a few years, but those after hours wishes have been answered in the form of Boat. D. Crane, who sings and plays guitar in the Seattle four-piece, makes his living as a junior high school English teacher, is happily married, and had to hire a substitute to watch his class while he and the band roadtripped down to Portland, San Francisco and Davis last week. Mild mannered teacher by day, mild mannered indie rocker by night, Crane’s creative outlets are the quirky, living room-recorded songs that he keeps secret from his students–and their potentially uncool parents.
Your SAK correspondent suspects you think he shouldn’t even have been at last Sunday’s Beirut show in the first place, and consequently have no right to complain (not about the show, but about the fans and the wide reach of the blog[s] that brought them there). To each indie snob his own, then.