Every Saturday, I post a 15-20 minute podcast featuring some tracks I’ve been jamming the previous week, as well as some commentary and random musings from yours truly. Enjoy!
Tracklist:
Class Actress – Weekend
Born Gold – Decimate Everything
ceo – Ave Maria
Cass McCombs – The Same Thing
A friend of mine and I were discussing the awesome awesome lineup for Fun Fun Fun Fest this year, and recently, they announced their schedule for our viewing pleasure. My friend was excited, but admitted he knew only a few bands. Where, he wondered aloud, could he find a comprehensive rundown of each band, a sampling of their musical chops, so he could further educate himself before the finest weekend of his year? I assume the Fun Fun Fun website has such a playlist, and they do, and it’s cool, but I wanted to make my own. So every Friday, from now until the fest (that’s nine weeks), I will be posting a playlist for your educational purposes for each stage and day, excluding the Yellow stage, which is mostly comedy.
This week’s playlist covers the bands playing on the Blue (Hip-Hop/Dance) stage on Friday – Fat Tony, Auto Body, Pictureplane, Franki Chan, Black Milk, Omar Souleyman, Big Freedia, YACHT, Spank Rock, Four Tet, and Public Enemy.
Listen to the playlist on Spotify.
Missing From Playlist (not on Spotify yet): DJ Car (Stereo) Wars
My Stage Pick: Public Enemy
Friday’s headliner lineup is pretty great (Passion Pit, Reggie Watts, Danzig Legacy), but there’s no denying the headliner of the whole fest is Chuck D, Flava Flav, and the rest of the crew. Â Do yourself a favor and mosey on over to the Blue stage for a spell and it’s pretty much guaranteed you won’t be disappointed. Â These guys are hip-hop legends for a reason.
And so begins the weekend when a crapload of people litter the streets, destroy our prettiest park, clog up our traffic even worse, and make downtown unbearable. A weekend of sunscreen and insufferable tourists. A weekend of avoiding arguably the coolest parts of town. A weekend of middle of the road music and thousands of spectators not listening to it.
You know, ACL weekend. Thank God it’s only a weekend.
As you may have surmised, I’m not going, as usual. If C3 would make a lineup worth seeing (thank you FunFunFun…again), I would pony up the $180. Of course, by the time they even announce, scalpers have already grabbed all the tickets and are selling them on Craigslist for $200+. Too rich for my blood for an experience as unbearable as ACL. The crowds, the lines, the heat, the general d-baggery. No thank you, I go to festivals to see bands play, not to deal with screaming children, rolling college girls, and unattended lawn chairs to trip on. I’ve bitched about all this before, of course, but something about all the undeserved hype that surrounds this weekend every year just sends me on a bit of a tangent.
Why is SXSW any better, you may ask? SXSW is a completely different animal – a downtown-wide festival with many venues, many options, and so much diversity there’s something for everyone. ACL is 80,000 people cramped in a park too small for such an event, and, frankly, the lineup is typical fest fodder. Think of it as Lollapalooza with less left-field indie and more homespun “safe” bands.
That’s not to say there isn’t some stellar shit happening, just not enough to warrant a scorching-weather weekend of my life and $200 of my precious cash. There’s enough great shows coming to town I’d rather attend – ACL afterparties included – that are more intimate and a better concert-going experience. And cheaper. And indoors/in the evening when it’s cooler. With less people and shorter lines.
But, hey, enough of me on my soapbox. You kids have fun! Let me know how Foster the People is! (don’t) Let me know if Coldplay rocks the house and burns the stage down! Â (they won’t) Â Let me know how many old people (probably sleeping) you trip over and then apologetically crawl off of! (tons) And maybe I’ll see you in November or March.
If, for some reason, you missed out on Castlemania this year, you should get on that, because Dwyer and Co. are releasing another LP for 2011 on November 15, Carrion Crawler/The Dream. Just dropped today, here is the semi-title track for the album, and it rocks hard, as expected. I anticipate hearing this track, as well as many other new ones, at this year’s Fun Fun Fun Fest.
I was dressed like a woman on 9/11.
That’s usually the first thing that comes to mind when people start talking about where they were and what they were doing when it happened. It was homecoming week; I was a high school Freshmen trying to win a costume contest. I had a padded bra, a wig, ear rings, makeup, the whole nine. I remember being in a great mood that day up until 4th period – history class.
I had been hearing about it all day – the first plane, the second, the Pentagon, and, living in a small Texas town, never having visited the East Coast in my life, all I was really thinking was, “Wow, that’s crazy.” Until 4th period. Mr. TeBeest had us watch CNN all period; I hadn’t watched any news coverage until then. “Aren’t we going to learn history?” one of the students asked. “This IS history,” Mr. TeBeest responded quietly. He looked shaken. I guess that was when it hit me, watching him, watching the news coverage. The room got really quiet, and I think I was the first one to break the silence after awhile. All I could say, with the overwhelming sense of fear, of shock, of anger, was “Oh my God.” Everything at that point felt so trivial, homecoming week, winning some dumb contest, everything.
Today, 9/11 is one of those events – our JFK, our Pearl Harbor. We’ve heard so much about it, we’ve seen the stock footage so much, we’re desensitized to it. We’ve forgotten how we felt that day. Usually when you talk about 9/11 now, you don’t really talk about the day, but what it led us to, economic crisis, two wars, etc. We talk about the lives lost, the heroism of police officers and firefighters and ordinary people. These are all great stories, but I feel like we’ve forgotten what we felt that day, that chill that went up your spine when you realized what exactly was going on, that undeniable fear. I think we lose a bit of perspective about why exactly 9/11 is still such an important day, even ten years later.
The most frightening movie I’ve ever seen isn’t a fictional horror movie, but a real-time documentary of the events of 9/11. It’s called 102 Minutes that Changed America. It’s showing this weekend on the History Channel and the Biography Channel, and you can stream it below. I encourage you to watch it, to remember, to put yourself in the shoes of the people that lived in New York that day. Sometimes, when we’re just watching a sky-shot of a building thousands of miles away on TV, we don’t get the true sense of what was arguably the most important day of our country’s life.
Every Saturday, I post a 15-20 minute podcast featuring some tracks I’ve been jamming the previous week, as well as some commentary and random musings from yours truly. Enjoy!
Tracklist:
Aaliyah – (Are You That) Somebody (Hudson Mohawke Remix)
Purity Ring – Belispeak
All Pigs Must Die – The Blessed Void
Junior Boys – Banana Ripple (2 Bears Remix)
A friend of mine and I were discussing the awesome awesome lineup for Fun Fun Fun Fest this year, and recently, they announced their schedule for our viewing pleasure.  My friend was excited, but admitted he knew only a few bands.  Where, he wondered aloud, could he find a comprehensive rundown of each band, a sampling of their musical chops, so he could further educate himself before the finest weekend of his year?  I assume the Fun Fun Fun website has such a playlist, and they do, and it’s cool, but I wanted to make my own.  So every Friday, from now until the fest (that’s nine weeks), I will be posting a playlist for your educational purposes for each stage and day, excluding the Yellow stage, which is mostly comedy.
This week’s playlist covers the bands playing on the Black (Metal/Punk) stage on Friday – Defeater, Mind Spiders, Bane, Doomriders, Ty Segall, From Ashes Rise, D Generation, Thee Oh Sees, Russian Circles, Murder City Devils, and Danzig Legacy (Danzig playing Misfits tunes.)
Listen to the playlist on Spotify.
Missing From Playlist (not on Spotify yet): Total Control
My Stage Pick: Thee Oh Sees
John Dwyer’s experimental left-field home recording project has taken on a life of its own, with a fan base possibly more devoted than his previous outings, including the Coachwhips. Â If you’ve never seen Thee Oh Sees, prepare to have your mind blown. Â There’s no other way to describe it; Dwyer never fails to amaze.
Japandroids – Tonight @ Mohawk
Ty Segall – 9/17 @ Mohawk
Toro y Moi/Unknown Mortal Orchestra – 10/8 @ Mohawk
Star Slinger – 10/12 @ Beauty Bar
Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band – 9/30 @ Emo’s
