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Weekly Mailbag! Vol. 5: Remedial Letter Writing
It's been at least a year since my last Weekly Mailbag, so the name isn't even REMOTELY accurate. I kind of like calling it Weekly Mailbag in spite of that. It's kinda what makes blogging fun.
Let's start with an e-mail:
To: the Public Readers of The Hartford Advocate & the Editor and Dan Barry
Dan Barry has it all wrong.
For anyone that was standing in the club on Saturday night in down town Hartford- Up Or On the Rocks was featuring Connecticut's TIP THE VAN from Marlborough & the crowd loved them!
The place was packed. The crowd was cheering,dancing,singing
lease another cd because I'll be in line amongst the many fans who voted TIP THE VAN the # 1 band in the Hartford Advocate Grand Band Slam - to get another cd to skank to.Check out TTV'S web site and listen for yourself.
www.tipthevan.com or www.myspace.com/tipthevan
Yup, Dan Barry has it all wrong.
Signed- TIP THE VAN FAN FOR LIFE!
So what you're saying is, um, you're a fan of TIP THE V... excuse me, Tip The Van. And you advertised their CD, which I already knew about. Was there anything else?
No? Great. Moving on, then.
* * *
As you might imagine, the vast majority of responses to my column -- when they're not from the musicians themselves -- are from someone claiming to to be the General Public (though they are often, I shit you not, girlfriends/parents/roadies of the band who received my less-than-sparkling review. You know that MySpace page you made where it says "MY BOYFREINDS BAND IS SOSOOOOO FREAKIN AWESOME"? Yeah. It's not hard to find). And they're fuckin' angry. They want to kill me. They want to bleed me to death slowly by hundreds of tiny papercuts made with Hartford Advocate pages.
Unfortunately, these people then sit down behind their keyboards and compose letters like the above. "I've got it all wrong," our anonymous writer claims -- and then goes on to summon up a bunch of random information that has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. Yup, the crowd was definitely into it -- but I never claimed they weren't. I caught those powerful horn lines; I remember specifically complimenting Steph, the trombonist, as a good player. And yeah, I was aware of their CD -- I first listened to it when I penned the cover article about TTV winning our Band Slam this past summer. (Our correspondent must have missed my byline.) In my recent review of Tip The Van, my central point had nothing to do with any of these things. I argued that they are not a ska band, despite their claim to be. I argued that due to certain things they did in their songs and on their instruments -- and certain things they did not do -- they were more like plain old alternative rock.
"TIP THE VAN is a rock/reggae/power ska band," writes our correspondent. Well, ska historically preceded reggae, so if they don't have the elements of ska style, they probably don't have much reggae in 'em, either. And I had never heard of "power ska" as a subgenre before, but a quick Google search seems to turn up other bands who are rock/ska hybrids -- which, as far as I can tell, is exactly the same kind of watered-down, 3rd-wave skate-punk ska I was bagging on in the first place.
So... what you're saying is, I was right? Because a second ago you said I was wrong. You're losin' me, baby!
It saddens me that the vast majority of our readership, it seems, is so lacking in anything resembling argumentative or rhetorical skills that they can't even latch onto the main idea of my column -- let alone disprove it. It saddens me more when a zealous reader, trying to come to the defense of their beloved band, accidentally lends support to my arguments. That shit is so sixth grade. Like, if it came to me written on a piece of paper folded up into one of those little square packets, I would take it seriously. But somebody let you on the internet, and that means you're old, and should know better, and that shit scares me.
A lot of people put the burden on members of the press to write responsibly. And we should and must, I agree; but the buck doesn't stop there. I think the public also has an obligation to read responsibly. If you can't read an article or watch a newscast and isolate the main idea, then you're not going to notice when media organizations start replacing Good Press with ridiculous biases, factually incorrect statements, and self-imposed censorship.
Wait. Wait a second. OH, FUCK!
Unfortunately, these people then sit down behind their keyboards and compose letters like the above. "I've got it all wrong," our anonymous writer claims -- and then goes on to summon up a bunch of random information that has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. Yup, the crowd was definitely into it -- but I never claimed they weren't. I caught those powerful horn lines; I remember specifically complimenting Steph, the trombonist, as a good player. And yeah, I was aware of their CD -- I first listened to it when I penned the cover article about TTV winning our Band Slam this past summer. (Our correspondent must have missed my byline.) In my recent review of Tip The Van, my central point had nothing to do with any of these things. I argued that they are not a ska band, despite their claim to be. I argued that due to certain things they did in their songs and on their instruments -- and certain things they did not do -- they were more like plain old alternative rock.
"TIP THE VAN is a rock/reggae/power ska band," writes our correspondent. Well, ska historically preceded reggae, so if they don't have the elements of ska style, they probably don't have much reggae in 'em, either. And I had never heard of "power ska" as a subgenre before, but a quick Google search seems to turn up other bands who are rock/ska hybrids -- which, as far as I can tell, is exactly the same kind of watered-down, 3rd-wave skate-punk ska I was bagging on in the first place.
So... what you're saying is, I was right? Because a second ago you said I was wrong. You're losin' me, baby!
* * *
It saddens me that the vast majority of our readership, it seems, is so lacking in anything resembling argumentative or rhetorical skills that they can't even latch onto the main idea of my column -- let alone disprove it. It saddens me more when a zealous reader, trying to come to the defense of their beloved band, accidentally lends support to my arguments. That shit is so sixth grade. Like, if it came to me written on a piece of paper folded up into one of those little square packets, I would take it seriously. But somebody let you on the internet, and that means you're old, and should know better, and that shit scares me.
A lot of people put the burden on members of the press to write responsibly. And we should and must, I agree; but the buck doesn't stop there. I think the public also has an obligation to read responsibly. If you can't read an article or watch a newscast and isolate the main idea, then you're not going to notice when media organizations start replacing Good Press with ridiculous biases, factually incorrect statements, and self-imposed censorship.
Wait. Wait a second. OH, FUCK!
OMG Disturbingly Awesome Pairing
The answer is: a ghettotech white boy hip-hop electronica duo bearing the AMAZING name House of Blow.
The question, Alex, for $1000, is:
What do you get when the hulking, hard-drinking, neck-tattooed guitarist for Hatebreed teams up with the scrawny, scrotally-tattooed, straight-edge singer for Glassjaw and Head Automatica?
House of Blow.
Say it out loud with me now.
House of Blow. House of Blow.
House of Blow plays this Saturday, April 7th at the El 'n Gee.
APRIL 12. Redscroll Records Opens. Mark it on Your Calendars.
Redscroll will be to Wallyworld what Metropolis is to the Northwaste Corner -- which is to say, the hub. The center. The everything.
CD CONTEST!
That's right -- it's going down!
The wonderful folks at The Space have recently put out an AMAZING CD compilation featuring 20 (!!!) local bands who have crushed their stage. Among the many bands features are Local Motion favorites Call it Arson, Welcome, Shadowgraphs (ex-Eschellon), and Mile Marker Zero. The great thing about the comp is that it has so many different genres of music, you're bound to discover a band you like (even if you haven't heard of them before).
HERE'S THE DEAL. I have THREE copies of this disc to giveaway. To enter, all you have to do is post a comment on this blog entry (see link below) telling us about the best concert you ever saw at The Space. Haven't seen a show at The Space? That's fine -- tell us who you'd like to see play there and why. (And yes, I'll know if you're promoting your own band, so don't bother.) The best entries get the goods!
A quick note: you don't have to sign up to Blogger to post comments (there's an "Anonymous" option), but if you go that route, please sign with your e-mail address so I have a way to contact you if you're a winner.
Hehe, "if you're a winner."
GOOD LUCK!
Hurtling Back Into Orbit
Long time no see, huh?
I'm really excited -- I'm almost ready to get back into the action here. And you know what the best part is gonna be?
CONTESTS.
Oh yes. I'm gonna give you shit. Free. For no reason whatsoever.
What's taking so long? Well, other than moving to a new apartment, another car breakdown (ahem), and a gigantic cold that wrecked my holidays, Blogger has also upgraded to their new version. Among other improvements, they now offer LABELS! So now you can sort through all the entries I've written by topic -- I've even got tags for different genres of music. (I personally recommend the "Shitty Music" label.) It's taking a while to go back through all my old posts and tag them, but I'm almost done.
You can anticipate all of this -- tags, giveaways/contests, and a completely overhauled links section -- sometime in February. With any luck, I'll even be linked on the Hartford Advocate's main page.
Hang tight -- just a little while longer...
Going on Hiatus
Because of some crazy circumstances and big changes in my life (moving, etc.), Local Commotion is going on hiatus until late December '06/early '07. I'll be back soon to continue writing silly, ridiculous crap. Until then, have some wonderful holidays, make sure you get enough sunlight to keep those crappy New England moods at bay (these lightboxes work wonders), and drop me a line if you hear somethin' good.
Until then,
Dan
CBGB Closes. In Other News, Punk Has Sucked For Years.
Sigh.
If not for Kitty Kitty Bang Bang, I might never have seen the crusty, poster-slathered inside of CBGB. And now it's gone. Check out Yahoo News' article on its final show:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061016/ap_en_mu/music_cbgb_finale
I like that Patti Smith and members of Blondie were there to close it out.
But I gotta tell ya: Hilly Kristal? I'm not a fan.
Don't let the fluff in this piece fool you. Kristal let this happen. To some degree, he even wanted it to happen. CBGB's last gasp as a culturally active institution was sometime back in the '80s, if not earlier. Since then, it's pretty much just been a t-shirt. Kristal never really grasped the cultural significance of his own venue or its meaning in the birth of punk -- he merely wanted to make a buck. So when it began to look like CBGB was going to bite the dust a few years ago, he immediately started talking about moving to New Jersey or Las Vegas. He didn't understand that it wasn't the name CBGB, or the awning, or the logo that made CBs important -- it was the space.
It was the disgusting, awkwardly-shaped, piss-infested, sounds-like-shit space. It's a space only a punk could love. It's a place you can only enjoy if you don't give a fuck about anything, drink hard, and prefer physically intimidating your crowd over performing for them. Kristal, ever clueless, recently said, “For some reason, they want us here. I don’t know why it matters to them, but it does.”
[Read more of that interview here. It's excellent.]
As the interview makes painfully clear, Kristal does not care about the space. It was filled with numerous code violations (a big no-no after the Great White show fire in RI); he didn't pay his rent; he's long viewed the place as an instution to museumify, rather than a living place that can transform music and culture.
CBGB is dead. Long live CBGB.
Musical Instruments Are People, Too. Sorta.
This helpful announcement just in from Lys Guillorn:
Cold weather PSA for my fellow musicians: humidify!
Howdy. Just a reminder to put your instrument humidifiers in your guitar or other wood-based instrument cases as we get into cold weather. If you don't have "real" humidifiers, you can use a film canister with holes poked in the lid and a damp, but not sopping piece of sponge inside. If you need film canisters, I can give you some... (Film? Yes, people still shoot film...) A little prevention will spare you having to have cracks repaired later.
Be very well,
Lys
Album Cover Deathmatch!
From what I hear, this video has taken off pretty quickly, and well it should -- it's hilarious. Watch classic album covers battle to the death!
Mildly unsafe for work.
Local Commotion October Updates
... and no, I'm not going to call it fucking "Rocktober."
Just got back from the Tool concert last night... Wow. Interesting experience. On the upside, I enjoyed watching some brilliant musicians play some wicked tunes. On the downside, the Hartford Civic Center sounds like a subwoofer trapped in a dumpster. Not to mention it's kind of weird seeing thousands of drone-like Tool fans mouthing the lyrics to a band who advocates thinking for yourself.
Anyway, I'm thrilled -- THRILLED -- that my interview made the cover this week. It's only the second time that's happened (not counting the Band Slam/Snow Slam previews I do), and I get all giddy about that shit. It's definitely a high point of my writing career so far.
Enough blabbing. I'm here to tell you about some updates I made this morning! I've got new shit for the fans and new shit for the bands. Something for the holes and something for the poles. You know how it go.
- For the Fall season, I've put some new tunes up on the Local Commotion MySpace, which is basically a jukebox/soundtrack to this blog and the Advocate column. I focused on a "creepy" theme for the autumn! You may have never heard of these groups or genres, but believe me, the sounds and textures are a perfect fit.
- I've separated the categories in my links section on the right-hand side. I also shrank the font to make it a little more readable. Let me know if you don't like it and I'll change it back.
- I've created a new links section for blogs! There are so damn many CT-related music and arts blogs out there -- it's about time I started spreading the love. Like cream cheese. I had jalapeno cream cheese on a cheddar bagel from Lox Stock and Bagel in West Hartford this morning. Mmmm. I'm hungry again just thinking about it.
- I've finally begun linking (and expanding) the link sections for Record Stores and Labels, and I created a new section for Promo Agencies. If you're a musician, or in a related field, please send me links to help fill out these sections -- and pass the word along to other CT people looking for local music resources.
Thanks for reading.
(Image courtesy of Scary Bunnies.)
Holy Shit, Sugarfist!
HUGE and bittersweet news from the Sugarfist camp. Jenn Jacobs has parted ways with the 'Fist! She's been around since the beginning, and to many of us her awesome voice has come to represent the band just as much as the goofy stage antics and the jambalaya clusterfuck songwriting. Meanwhile, they've already found a replacement!
Here's the announcement from the band:
"We would like to take this opportunity to extend a gracious and sad farewell to one of Sugarfist's own- Jenn Jacobs. Beginning in 1999 and one of our founding and core members, Jenn has decided to depart from the band. She has been a part of the Sugarfist family for many many years and we all wish her the very best in her future creative endeavors to come. Her last performance with us can be seen at a free show this Saturday September 9th at The Haddam River Days Festival in Haddam, CT.
We would like to give a new toasty welcome to the always entertaining and extravagant...Krizta Moon!!!! Joining the band now on vocals!!! Krizta will perform our last song of the evening on Saturday night and can be seen with us thereafter at the following locations of mass media cronyism..
FRIDAY October 6th The Beanery Old Dam Road Fairfield, CT ALL AGES
SATURDAY October 21st The Colony Woodstock, NY"
Tupac: Robbing Men of Their Boners and Women of Their Conjugal Bliss, Even From the Grave
Now I've seen it all.
The Associated Press (killing local reporting since 1846) offers up this report about a lawsuit between civil rights activist C. DeLores Tucker and two Philly newspapers. At issue? "Her dispute with the estate of slain rapper Tupac Shakur," according to the article.
What did that naughty Tupac do? He rhymed "Tucker" with "motherfucker." Oh SHIT!
But wait -- the shit has only begun to fly. According to the AP article,
"Tucker had sued Shakur, alleging, among other things, that her husband, William Tucker, had suffered loss of 'consortium' because of the emotional distress brought on by Shakur."
Oh yes. Consortium. If you think that sounds like some kind of awful Freudian metaphor for something, award yourself one point. Baby, Dictionary.com gives us this legal definition:
"The legal right of husband and wife to companionship and conjugal intercourse with each other."
So let me get this straight: a so-called activist is suing a newspaper for mischaracterizing a Tupac lyric which was so scathing that it prevented her husband from getting a hard-on?
I've got one word for ya:
By the way, have any of you seen the movie Tupac: Resurrection? (Thanks, Olympia, for sending it my way.) It's interesting in the way Born Into Brothels is interesting, which is to say that if you peel back the cutesy, crowd-pleasing surface, there are some very ugly monsters lurking underneath. The selling point is that it's told in "Tupac's own words," and indeed it's compiled from a number of interviews and monologues. But a careful listener will hear that many times, Tupac's speech is spliced together from several different interviews, often in mid-sentence! His speech, his life -- they're so heavily edited to put a positive spin on a man who was one of the most internally embattled characters of his day. By the end of the film, Pac is basically being cast as a black Jesus figure, a patron of the arts, and a sensitive gentleman who only occasionally ran into trouble with the press and the law. It's no coincidence that the film was made by Tupac's mom, Afeni Shakur. You can just see her pulling the strings the whole time.
Guess she had to get him back for "Dear Mama" some way or another.
Meszenjah Spreads the Irie Vibe to Middletown
DJ Meszenjah puts on one of the sickest live sets I've seen a local kid spin. I was especially impressed with how deep he got during an all-reggae set I saw at Zen Bar. It's so rare that a DJ around here will dig into the reggae stacks, let alone navigate them with a degree of eloquence. Meszenjah has all the beats you could ever want and eloquence to boot. Check him out at Vibrations, a club night at Tommy's in Middletown. He'll be there October 6th and 20th.
Will Haven Signed
Bieler Bros Records, home to UK math-metallers Sikth, have recently signed one of the bands that got me into hardcore: Will Haven.
When I first discovered them in the late '90s, Will Haven's thick-chained guitars and relentless 3/4 time signature were quite possibly the heaviest thing I had ever heard. It was simplistic, reductive, and palpable. I grew up listening to alternative; in 1996 a high school friend turned me on to the Deftones, and from there it was only a short jump to heavier sounds. Snapcase came first -- they had just released Progression Through Unlearning, which I think to this day is their best album ever. But shortly thereafter, I found Will Haven's "Ego's Game" on a comp CD, and was thrilled to hear another band using the same kind of guitar style and rhythm. After investigating both bands' back catalogs, I have to say unequivocally that Will Haven's is the better of the two: it's more consistent, and while that certainly leads to a degree of predictability (Will Haven outside of the 3/4 time signature is almost impossible), it's definitely preferable to Snapcase's many failed experiements.
The official announcement:
"Bieler Bros Records is proud to announce the signing and return of metal-core pioneers WILL HAVEN. Will Haven will release their as of yet untitled Bieler Bros. debut in early 2007. The release will be the bands first since 2001's critically-acclaimed Carpe Diem."
Apathy Tears Collabos a New One
Check out Apathy's post on MySpace where he shreds one of hip hop's most abused institutions: the collaboration track.
The Conspicuous Willingness of Secondary Metal Markets to Commercialize/Market Themselves as Though They Were Primary
... or: You're All Fucking MySpace Sellouts.
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF OVERHYPED DEATHGRIND ARTISTS
Summer 2003: Daughters
Fall/Winter 2003: Between the Buried and Me
Summer 2004: Invocation of Nehek
Summer 2005: Through the Eyes of the Dead
Fall/Winter 2005: Job for a Cowboy
Summer 2006: Suicide Silence
Oh yes, motherfuckers: I see you. I see exactly what you’re doing.
You know what you are?
Coldplay.
Keane.
The Killers.
Editors.
of metal.
The "it" band until the next "it" band comes along.
Fuckin’ shame on you.
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