Sunday, September 30, 2007

A quick bit

The Golden Age opened today, a new Pilsen boutique that acts kind of like a mini-Quimby's. The store is full of weird and beautiful pieces of home-made art, from intricate silkscreens and lithographs, to zines, records, posters and DVDs. I hope that they're aiming for less class and more filled-to-the-hilt, but as it is, it's a little bit sparse.

A band by the name of Outpost played some folk music in the basement and it was really beautiful, heavy on the violin, to the extent that you actually could use the word heavy in conjunction with the very soft, floating ethereal sounds the instrument was making.

Friday, September 28, 2007

Tuxedomoon - I Heard it Through the Grapevine
Young Gods - Face a Face L'amour
M.I.A. - Bamboo Banga
Kavinsky - Wayfarer

Klaus Nomi - Total Eclipse
Violent Femmes - Black Girls
Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

World/Inferno Friendship Society - Addicted to Bad Ideas
Camper Van Beethoven - Eye of Fatima
Pinata Protest - La Cantina
GBH - Malice in Wonderland

Tras De Nada - Proletario
Morlocks - Project Blue
Frank Zappa - Dupree's Paradise/Satumaa
Cibo Matto - Sci-Fi Wasabi
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Graveyard
Tuxedomoon - In Heaven

Urgh!

Mumia/Mathew Shipp Education Vortex

Monday, September 24, 2007

Two Slaps Radio [WLUW]



ARVO:

Altyrone Deno Brown - Sweet Pea
Betty Wright - Good Lovin'
Johnny Davis/The Arrows - Boogedy Boogedy
Helene Smith - You Got To Do Your Share
Joe King - Speak On Up
Ronnie Whitehead - Cold Feet
Chip Willis & Double Exposure - I'm Gonna Gitcha
Majestic Arrows - One More Time Around
Marion Black - Come Come On and Gettit
Manhattens - Why Should I Cry
Mitch Mitchell/Gene King - Never Walk Out On You
Mae Young - Let's Give Our Love a Try
OFS Unlimited - Mister Kidneys
Grand Prix's - You Drive Me Crazy

Priscilla Paris - My Window
THe Paris Sisters - Dream Lover
Diane Renay - Navy Blue
Diane Ray - Snow Man
Little Peggy March - I Will Follow Him
Kari Lynn - Cleo Cleopatra
Sandi Shaw - Puppet On a String

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - Let Them Knock
Ananda Shankar - Jumpin Jack Flash
Curtis Mayfield - (Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Gonna Go

Bobby Byrd - Soul Man (live)
Bobby Byrd - I'm Lonely
Bobby Byrd - I'm Comin

James Brown - Just Won't Do Right
James Brown and his Famous Flames - Baby You're Right
Bobby Byrd - Keep On Doin What You're Doin
Bobby Byrd - I Know You Got Soul

Diana Ross - Keep On Down the Road
Gnarls Barkley - Gone Daddy Gone
Ebo Taylor - Heaven
Fania All Stars - There You Go

DJ Shadow & Keb Darge - Butter That Popcorn

Gene Chandler - Lovequake

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Brazilian Ukrainian Sweatlodge

Date: 9/21/07
Location: Empty Bottle
Bands: Juiceboxxx, Bonde Do Role
Cost: $12
Drinks: $2 Point
Things I missed to be there: MOTO and the Cola Freaks at the Lucky Gator Loft; Rollin Hunt, Pillars and Tongues, and John Bellows at Mister City; ESG, Yo Majesty, and Bahamadia at The Abbey Pub; Orphan Works with the Anatomy Collective at MoJoes Hothouse; Mucca Pazza with Obelisk and MC Cat Genius at the Hideout; Smash & Crunch featuring Passions, JoJo, Lance Milk, and Mr. Automatic at Liar's Club
Reason for Going: I like Bonde Do Role so much that not only did I pay the exorbitant (for me) cover charge, but I backed out of a low paying gig to do so.




While you could time your watch to houseparty DJs playing Justice's "D.A.N.C.E" at midnight like this year's "Sexyback", more and more you could hear Bonde Do Role tracks snuck in, as the new omnipresence. At this point, you could hear them anywhere, on college radio and cable TV bumpers, with the pitch cranked up to a million for maximum jukin' or going their own pace on my Mom's iPod. They are one of the dumbest bands of the year and one of the best. With Lazers is incredibly fun, and as baile funk goes, kinda lowest common denominator. It's incredibly, idiotically profane party music, but because Portuguese barely registers to me as anything more than rock'n'roll gibberish, the jokes don't wear thin, and I don't have to worry about Bonde Do Role turning into the next Fannypack (remember that band that did that song "Cameltoe"?).

I wouldn't have expected the Empty Bottle to get such a kick out of three kids and a laptop, but by the end of their set they had a whole sold-out crowd dancing, or at least jumping up and down. Their set was everything good about their album cranked up. There were even more iconic samples, ranging from the intro to Europe's "The Final Countdown" for a remix of "Gasolina" to the bass and "uh huhs" from Grease's "Summer Lovin" for "Jabuticaba" from one of their singles, to a shit ton of Slayer, and I'm not sure but it sounded like all those 80s metal guitars had been re-recorded and done louder. Then there was Marina Vello humping everyone on stage, moaning, screaming, rapping like a mongoloid, spitting blood, stripping, and grinding in the crowd like the Brazilian love child of Karen O and Peaches.

The whole time, it looked like the band was having fun. "We tried to make it nice for you," Marina announced, referring to the balloons and streamers they'd decorated the stage with and proceeded to rip apart. Pedro D'Eyrot and Rodrigo Gorky attemped (and failed) to come up with synchronized dance moves on the spot and looked on with glee as they miked themselves popping balloons with cigarettes.

The Empty Bottle can get so pretensious that changing the space just that little bit with the dollar store party decorations makes it approachable enough for people to stop fronting and get stupid in indie land.

Juiceboxxx ends up transforming the space with his entire set which, for the most part involves him climbing on every climbable thing in the room and then rapping on top of it. I had my doubts about whether his act could translate to a real venue but he kicked the Bottle's ass and was the perfect hype act for Bonde Do Role. He had people dancing on one side of the room, and then tensing up whenever he came over. They liked him and they were afraid of him, because they didn't know what he was going to do, he was shirtless and sweaty and looked like he could give two shits about someone's personal space. It was as if, because, as a skinny, whiteboy from Wisconsin, he was never going to be intimidating (and possibly doomed to be adorable), he would do the next best thing to scaring people by making them uncomfortable. It was an interesting thing to see, and if I'd thought it up on my own, I never would've thought it would have gotten people to dance.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Autumnal Gibbledy Gurge [WZRD]



Screamin Cyn Cyn & the Pons - Pedro's
Danny DJ & Morenna DJ - Villa De Penha
M.I.A. - Kala

Rachel's - Arterial/ Even-Odd
Tragic Mulatto - She's a Ho

[The following sets are an experiment to see if my last.fm page can be a better wzrd dj than I am]

Bonde Do Role - Rap Do Cb
The Ronettes - Baby I Love You
Dead Kennedys - Halloween
Shellac - Bonche's Dick
Japan - Don't Rain On my Parade
The Crystals - He Hit Me and it Felt Like a Kiss

The Magnetic Fields - I Don't Really Love You Anymore
Lydia Lunch - Four Cornered Room
The Meteors - Mutrant Rock

[Result: if buffering didn't take so long, it might have, but there was no accounting for profanity. that Lydia Lunch song should not have been played. strangely enough, it's the second time I've played it, the first being the result of me not screening the thing on youtube]

Dizee Rascal - Round We Go
Liars - They Don't Want Your Corn, They ant Your Kids
Justice - Waters of Nazareth (Menowah remix)

Strategy - Can't Roll Back
Chromatics - Nite 12
Nappy Roots - Roun the Globe
Alien Skull Paint - Unidentified
Murs - Walk Like a Man
Magic is Kuntmaster - Pestilence


[Steve Albini does not see the need in tasering hecklers when he can simply outsmart them, but he probably laughed watching the videotape]

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Who Thinks This Guy Here is a Bottom?

Date: 9/18/07
Location: Funky Buddha Lounge
Show: Outdanced featuring Dark Wave Disco, Michael T Motherfucker, Theo, Pier Novikov, Peppermint Gummybear and more
Cost: Free with RSVP to going.com
Drinks: $1 well vodka and whiskey
Things I missed to be there: Simian Mobile Disco and Telefon Tel Aviv at the Empty Bottle




Too many people are doing the same thing. It's getting annoying and, sadly, I'm one of them. Last night's show was swarmed with event photographers, trolling through the bar for people having a good time or looking to pose, without really stopping to get down themselves.

That was my big problem with Outdanced, a show I've been looking forward to for some time now. Not enough people were having a good time, and the DJs weren't helping. When I got there, Margaret Cho had just come through and done her thing and Theo and Michael T Motherfucker were spinning, and it was just a flairless set of all that postpunk, new wave, and NY dance shit me, my Mom, and everybody else plays. I had hoped we would be seeing Theo (formerly of the Lunachicks) with her new band, Theo and the Skyskrapers, who do their own version of that synthy NY shit I just mentioned, but she was just spinning. One room over, Dark Wave Disco was playing some hard hitting dance shit but no one was getting down because it was the room people were going into because it was less crowded than the main room. It probably would have stayed that way if Peppermint Gummybear didn't change the mood with a hot body crowd, pulling all the photographers up to the front of the room, and whipping the rest of the crowd into a spring break-at-Senor Frog's-in-Cabo type of frenzy.

The results were a couple of titties, a couple of butts, one wang, a bunch of screaming motherfuckers who wanted to get laid, and untold number of pictures that look exactly like this...



Which is kind of interesting, I guess, but also pointless. I kept my guy sheathed because the party was covered and there wasn't much I could add but a bunch of self-serving pictures of other photographers.

Professional quality digital cameras are pretty cheap these days. For just a couple hundred bucks more than something that fits in your pocket and takes mediocre pictures, you can get a Rebel, an N60 or a D40 and the people who really like to see pictures of themselves are starting to realize. In a Newcity article about the main stealer of hipster souls in town, Liz Armstrong (who writes about Outdanced in this week's Reader) describes it thusly: "Anyone with a really nice camera can do that shit. There is nothing else but an image, and in the end I guess it feels a little cheap."

When the Hot Body contest was over people were actually starting to dance in the main room. I shook my shit for a little while and got bored, wondering if Simian Mobile Disco were ever going to show up, looked at my friends falling asleep on the couches in the VIP room, shrugged and left, drunker than I should have been and ready to sleep.


[Theo & the Skyscrapers doing their thing]

Monday, September 17, 2007

Two Slaps Radio [WLUW]

Arvo set:

Ike and Tina Turner - It;s gonna work out fine
Syl Johnson - Back for a taste of your love
Eddie Ray - Wait a Minute
Al Green - Let's Stay Together
Wilson Pickett - 634-5789

Carla Thomas/Rufus Thomas - The Birds and the bees
Eddie Floyd - Raise Your Hand
The Astors - In the Twilight Zone
Jeanne & The Darlings - Hang Me Now
Barbara Stephens - Wait A Minute
Sam & Dave - I Take What I Want

Mar-Keys - Foxy
Booker T and The MGs - Green Onions
The Bar-Kays - Give Everybody Some
Otis Redding - Security
Sir Mack Rice - Mini-Skirt Minnie
Memphis Nomads - Don't Pass Your Judgement

Quantic Soul Orchestra w/ Spanky Wilson - Don't Joke With a Hungry Man

Lab Rat set:

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - 100 Days 100 Nights
Jay Mitchell - Mustang Sally
Amy Winehouse feat. Ghostface Killah - You Know You're No Good

Billy Paul - Am I Black Enough For You
Baby Huey - One Dragon, Two Dragon
Lyn Collins - Do Your Thing

Angelique & Third World - Love Cycle
BT Express - Express
Master Chivero - Black September
The Rhine Oaks - Tampin

Clarence Carter - Snatching It Back


[Nina Simone doin her thing]

Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Renegades of Spunk

Date: 9/16/07
Show: Do+Division Street Fest/Renegade Craft Fair with Camper Van Beethoven and more
Cost: Street festivals are technically free but theytry to enforce their $5 donation
Reason for going: I really like Camper Van Beethoven




"We've been together like three years."
"Long time."
"Maybe we should get married."
"I think I saw some handmade wedding invitations over at the Etsy tent."
"Oh, cool. Do you think they could cross stitch some with pictures of birds or maybe giant squid?"
"Probly. Where are you gonna have the ceremony?"
"We were thinking about the Hideout, or if they're booked, that loft above Diana's shoes. Half off admission if you RSVP to Going."
"Of course... you could have Flosstradamus do the reception."
"With special guests Million Dollar Mano and the Cool Kids."
"Yell some vows at this bitch!"
"Throw a ring on this bitch!"
"You could have a 21 moped salute."
"Naw, too gaudy. I was thinking maybe just a pair of Just Married mopeds. We were gonna register at Warbux anyway."
"Fuck that, I'm registering at Tiffany's."
"Fuck that, you're registering at Gramaphone."
"We'll talk."
"No. We won't."

camper web


This is how it starts. The hippest goddamn street fair I've ever seen. On one side, it's all silkscreened shirts and handmade buttons. On the other side it's all funnel cakes and Polaroid pictures in front of a surfer backdrop. Hipsters and yuppies pass freely between the two worlds like before and after pictures of one another. When we're done cracking up about our ultimate West Town wedding, we feel a little embarassed and a little empty, because we're not above it at all. We crumple up our plastic cups, each one stained with a different flavor of Carlo Rossi, and seperate.

We need to kill time before Camper Van Beethoven. I don't know where K____ and B______ go. They're skinny fuckers, and functional alcoholics. They could be anywhere. Sarah and I our chubby fuckers with poor impulse control, so we go to Small Bar for hummus, beer, and fried cheese curds.

When we get back to the fest, we're already late. Camper Van is playing a waltz. This is the kind of stuff I really like from them. The songs that sounded almost Eastern European in their perfect mix of joyous and mournful. This was the only one I was going to here before they launched into a rockish nostalgia set. I've always liked Camper Van Beethoven, from the goofy pop and country of "Joe Stalin's Cadillac" and "Lassie Went to the Moon" to songs like "Eye of Fatima" which may or may not be as deep and as beautiful as I thought they were when I first heard them, but the last time I saw the band, at the Old Town School's annual Folk and Roots fest a few years back, they were amazing. Their music was experimental and otherworldly, sometimes inhuman and sometimes excessively so. They played just a few recognizable songs and a handful of instruments I'd never seen before. This was at least a year before their reunion album and they didn't play it like it was a reunion, they played it like a band who wanted to blow the hell out of anyone who took the time to see them.

I don't know if the organizers of the Do+Division Street Fest tell their headliners to play the hits or if it's unspoken. Maybe it's just what the band wanted to do. I have my doubts because I don't want it to be what the band watnted, and this is the same festival that the Violent Femmes sucked ass at the last time I saw them. Whoever decided to play the show as a testament to 80s college radio, it made a lot of people happy. Left and right I saw cats singing along and getting all intense. I was bored, but I had come in with different expectations, so I left the band with the people who were going to enjoy them.

I was ready to wash the icky feelings off of me anyway. I saw a vision of a future that I really don't want for me today, and I was an active participant.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Off the Hook, Now Get Out of the House

Date: 9/14/07
Location: People Project
Show: OffGrid Radio Benefit with Environmental Encroachment, Rand Sevilla, Livewire, Protman, and DJ Demchuk vs. Eric lab Rat
Cost: $5 suggested
Drinks: $1 beer, $1 vegan jello
Things I missed to be there: Rooftop Party with DJs Hilary Rawk, Joel Brown, Menowah, and Emily Tragic; CHIRP benefit with 3 AM Fever, Ultratumbados, and The Slim Pickins at the Mutiny




The night started on a surreal note. DJ Demchuk and I frantically trying to fix my equipment, which all decided to go to shit at the same time. We look up and realize that the only people in the room are the members of Environmental Encroachment, all dressed as bunnies, and the goons, a large group of leather jacketed hardcore guys from the Southside. We shrug it off and get slug through a mediocre set as people filter in. The people who run the gallery have already dismissed us.



I now know a few common sense things I never would have thought to ask before, mainly, once someone accepts your request to use their place to host a party, offering no conditions of their own, ask again. I figure that when someone says I can have a party at their place, I have permission to use their place until the cops come or it peters out on it's own, at the very least until the same time as the bars close.

This was not the case.

Two days before the party, we were told that we would have to clear the place out at nine. I should've argued but I didn't. I figured that if the party was still going strong, they would let it keep going for another hour and, if not, we could probably bribe them. Unfortunately these guys had some integrity, they were steadfast, and between midnight and one, over 100 people got turned away at the door.



Of course, only some of those people missed out on a worthwhile party. The night started out strong with Environmental Encroachment pulling out all the stops, pushing the bass to eleven, drumming on a ventilation ducts, even sneaking a Radiohead song into their drum-and-brass madness; the night ended even stronger, with Rand Sevilla getting people naked on the dance floor for a big, sweaty jukefest, but the middle of the night kind of dragged with not too many people dancing. That was probably my fault for not thinking enough about the lineup order. Livewire set a good mood, taking people out of the marching band music with a freeform set of disco and electro but Protman was a bit too clunky to keep what Livewire started going, so the Livewire people retreated to talk and drink in the back of the room while the Protman people got back on. It wasn't until Rand got going that the whole room erupted, and once he did, he only got to do it for a half hour.



At least I've learned my lessons, and I can say without a doubt, that when the party was going well, it was the best thing in the city.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Lets Get Drumtarded in Here

Date: 9/12/07
Location: The Heartland Cafe
Show: The In One Ear Open Mic with The Spoony Bards and The Lie of a Pipe Dream,
Cost: $3
Things I missed to be there: Marat 14k at People Lounge; Flosstradamus and Dude'N'Em at Subterranean; Dark Wave Disco vs. I Love House at the Note; Bomb Banks, Russian Tzarlag, Kites and Oakeater at Mister City; Stressape, Red Rocket, and Mass Shivers at Ronny's
Reason for going: My pet rat Bukowski lives in Rogers Park, and when Bukowski wants to go for a walk, Bukowski goes to where the poetry and drunk girls are***




This is a guitar, an American institution. From the twenties through the eighties it was an emblem for rebellion (until hip hop hit the suburbs and became the thing that scared our parents). It is a totem for sex, for the animal within the artist and the artist withn the animal. For over a hundred years it has turned goons and schlubs into sensitive souls and sexual gods. The nude woman poses next to it because it has a power over her, and she is not strong enough to wield it herself. It goes without saying that the ones who are, are forces to be reckoned with.



This is a keytar, emblematic of the the excess, the overzealous futurism, and the entirely frivolous, disposable plastic nature of the 1980s. It was never dangerous. The woman holding it is just as sexy as the woman next to the guitar, but she's too ashamed to show her face. For some reason, you're almost guaranteed to see a keytar player if you go to see a funk band but nearly nowhere else.



This is a drumtar. It's so dorky, that the hot girl wielding it is really just a drawing of a guy, and not a particularly sexy guy at that. I don't think I've ever seen a drumtar, until today. More on that in a bit.


It's been a while since I was an open mic regular, or even an open mic irregular. I feel kinda like I graduated. I became comfortable on stage, I made a solid group of friends, and I figured out how to make more. I didn't need to hear any more bad poetry. That's the only reason I ever went: poetry, spoken word, monologues... the occasional piece of puppetry or performance art. As bad as most of that turned out to be, the rest was insufferable. So many years. So much comedy. So much music. So many hateful men trying to be edgy, so many terrible faximile Leonard Cohens, Ani DiFrancos, Mos Defs and Nina Simones.

Thing is, I miss some of it. It's been ages since I've heard good folk music, which I can really get off on live but doesn't really do much for me on album. My old friend Blake Thomas's albums sounded wonderful, but if I wasn't taking the time to listen to Nick Drake and Arlo Guthrie, what kind of a chance did he ever have?

It was nice to see The Lie of a Pipe Dream. I didn't know it, but I really was in the mood to hear someone plucking a banjo today. They were three men gathered around one microphone, harmonizing with a guitar and banjo. They sang sci-fi folk songs and their name was a Eugene O'Neill quote (I had to google to find out that "The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober" came from O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh). Their songs were pretty and they were nice, but the real treat was The Spoony Bards.

I'd seen The Spoony Bards play the Heartland before. I guess in the couple of months since the last time I came out to the Heartland and actually paid attention, they've become something of a house band. I always figured that they were a high school band. Their membership was always fluctuating by two or three people, they played videogame covers, they were newly dedicated to an open mic, and they looked like they could have been extras in Superbad.

I figured that when I saw them today, I was looking at a more cemented version of the band, because, well, they were perfect. Like I said, they could have played the self assured nerds of Superbad but they could have been the triumphant nerds of Dazed and Confused, too. The music was straight out of the seventies, in a weird way. It was the type of shit that wasn't even cool back then. It was ballads, the stuff that Kris Kristofferson was doing when he wasn't being all the way country, the stuff Steely Dan did that no one ever talks about, the stuff Neil Diamond was born to do. It didn't matter if they were only fifteen, they did it with a swagger and they did it with a DRUMTAR! They also did it well.

Unfortunately, after looking online, it looks like most of my assumptions were wrong. The Spoony Bards is a fairly huge band with rotating members, all of whom are college-aged or older, and they don't do this kind of music, this kind of slightly soul-ly rock'n'roll that doesn't rock, at least not as their bread and butter. What the Spoony Bards is, is an anime and videogame music tribute band. They play AnimeCons and GameCons all over the country playing "The Theme from The Legend of Zelda" or "a song by Yoko Kanno, that was originally done for Cowboy Bebop."

They are even COOLER and DORKIER than I could have ever imagined. They warrant unnecessary CAPS LOCKs! The only downside is that I'm not going to hear a lot more of this type of music. C'est la vie. Chances are good that I probably wouldn't like it outside of an open mic anyway.



***Oops: Apparently there was a clown burlesque show. The people who told me about it usually tell me about boring burlesque shows but this one had Lil Princess, Heather Vernon, Maiden Sacrifice and Happy the Human Pin Cushion weirding out at the Smartbar. I can miss all sorts of dance parties but I try to fill up on this kind of weirdness when it avails itself. Oh well, if I had gone, my rat would've been neglected and I probably wouldn't have gotten laid.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Two Slaps Radio [WLUW]



Arvo Set:

Fela Kuti - Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense
Ohmega Watts - Slippin Away
Afrika Bambaataa and the soulsonic force - Renegades of Funk
Grace Jones - NightClubbing/Pull Up to the bumper
Marvin Tate - Town of 500

Lab Rat set:

Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog
Little Richard - Rip It Up
Donny Hathaway - I believe to my Soul

Funkadelic - One Nation Under a Groove
Snoop Dogg feat. George Clinton - Doggystyle
Axiom Funk - If 6 Was 9

Derby Sisters - Go Back To Your Pontiac
The Dolls - And that Reminds Me
The Shangri-Las - Remember Walkin In the Sand


Jiraphand Ong-Ard - Thai Boxing
The Isley Bros feat. R. Kelly - Contagious
Eddie Ray - Wait a Minute
Myrna Hague - Touch Me Baby

OFS Unlimites - Mystic
Mitchell Mitchell - Never Walk Out On You


[Axiom Funk doing "If 6 Was 9" off their album Funkronomicon]

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Poke the Bear! Poke the bear!

Date: 8/5/07
Location: The Mutiny
Bands: Disrobe, S.S.Ex, and Demonslaught
Cost: FREE!


dddddiiiissss8768f35

So in three weeks, I'm going to be 25, and I'm starting to take stock. By most people's accounts, 25 isn't that old, but it's around the time a lot of people stop going to shows, at least at the level that my friends and I have been doing it, but I can see it in them and I can feel it in me. I just don't have the energy I used to. This really is a young man's game, and if you're not part of it, you're some just some sort of spectator; you're Dan the Fan, Max Hippie, Thax Douglas, or that guy Jerry who's always at naked people parties, who probably doesn't mind being referred to as Old Naked Guy because he's got a really big dick. Either way, you're either somebody's mascot, or somebody's sad sack, maybe some permutation of the two, and if I can't find away to participate, that's going to be me, if I'm lucky. If I'm not lucky, I'll just be some old, normal guy, who's happy to have a job and a girlfriend which wil eventually lead to a carreer and a wife, and I'll forget about fun things and fade away. That's how I feel about a lot of the people in my family. I get it, but I don't like it.

Most writers don't even know anything else that Dylan Thomas wrote, but everyone kinda knows him because he wrote the words, "I will not go gently into that good night," which is itself one very notable quotable...well that's me, and if I can't fight nature and be the man I think I should be, I could leasr approximate it for a few fols or a little while. I almost choked on my drink a couple months ago when an old acquaintance of mine said, "Lab Rat, I wish I could be more like you, just quit my job and focus on making art but I've just gotta work.

I was shocked. I mean, I make art, or, at least, I make things but I never thought of it as what I was doing, because I make art (or things) even when I am working and as far as I could tell, I was just serially underemployed. Now that I've got a job, I feel kinda like a sellout, but I'm working and I have a place to go when I wake up, and I'll just have to work around that.

I was opening at 7:30 in the morning, which is a time I've been used to falling asleep recently, so I had to play it out carefully. There was no way I was gonna fall asleep, though and it is around that time of year where second-year juniors and third-year sophomores announce that Wednesday is the new Friday, so I might as well go to a show. If I was sleeping at my folks' house, I would go to the open mic at the Heartland Cafe but that's too far from work; if I was sleeping at Sarah's house, I would've gone to the show to see Sir Vixx, Sounds Happy, Xrin Arms, Insect Deli, Saskrotch, Pommel, Ersatz Modem and Common Denominator play breakcore and noise, but Sarah found roaches in her cupboard so she'll probably never sleep there again. In the odd event that I was sleeping at my house with my parents' car, I would've gone to Danny's because it's soul night and a pretty girl invited me, but I was sleeping at my house, and the Mutiny was the closest place I could go to.

The Muriny was the Mutiny, and anything I could say about the show, I could say about a million others. For some reason, I missed S.S.Ex just like the half dozen other times I've been to shows they've played at, and you could tell that Demonslaught had played without even going in from the number of punks milling around outside with light-up plastic swords holstered to their belts, and just like the last year's worth of Disrobe shows I've seen, I couldn't believe how good they've gotten, how much better than the last show they played, and how guitarrier the band seemed to be.

There was even a game to it. As Disrobe's singer Josh barreled into the crowd for the umpteenth time, like Matt Foley on a speedball binge, knocking motherfuckers over, spilling half-pitchers of Pabst, and instigating numerous circle pits, the goal became clear: knock this motherfucker over.

And people tried, none more adamantly than my friend Ryan, an eager little bikepunk who's maybe a biscuit over 21, if that. Every few secinds he would take a flying leap at Josh who would flick him off like a bug or else keep singing on the floor, or in a pile of equipment or from within a leglock. Eventually people got sick of Ryan, and the game morphed into how many times can I sneak a punch or a kick into this kid before he gets up off the ground. A lot of people had fun with it, roo much fun if you ask me, especially for Ryan, who, undeterred, started performing fake blowjobs, one by ome, ro every member of the band like some attention starved Andy Dick/GG Allin hybrid. Eventually, my friend Catherine stood on his chest and ordered him to the back of the bar "because nobody wants you here" and he complied. When I talked to him there, his face was ten kinds of bruised, and through a proud shit-eating grin announced that he'd just dislocated his knee, and even though there was a time when Catherine was pulling a drunk me out of the room for my own good, I knew that I would never be that young again.

Monday, September 03, 2007

TwoSlaps Radio [WLUW]


ARVO:

The Clovers - Lovey Dovey
Chris Kenner - I like It Like That
The Spiders - I didn't want to do it
Chantels - Maybe
Track 1 from Dangerous Doo Wop 3
Wilbert Harrison - Kansas City

Ravens - Count Every star
The Flamingos - I Only Have Eyes For YOu
Cadillacs - GLoria

Little Anthony & Imperials - Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Pop
Silouettes - Get A Job
Boss-Tones - Mope-Itty Mope
Hollywood flames - Buzz-buzz-buzz
Norman Fox & Rob Roys/Sid Bass & His Orchestra - Pizza Pie
Edsels - Rama Lama Ding Ding

Ouiwey (the Son Of Bootsy Collins) - Girl I
Goerge Clinton - Do Fries Go With That Shake (Know What I'm Sayin' Remix) featuring Vanessa Williams and Shistee
Bar-Kays - RAID

LAB RAT:

Betty Davis - DEdicated To The Press
Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators - Feeling Free
Abraham and the Casanovas - Hook and Boogit (part one)
Laura Leee - Mama's Got a Good Thing

Bull & the Matadors - Funky Judge
Bobby Byrd - I Know You Got Soul
Co-Real Artists - What Was Her Name?

Geraldo Pino - Heavy Heavy Heavy
Al Escobar - Tighten Up
Papa Mali & the Instagators - Fire Water

Egyptians - Party Stomp!
Rare Grooves - Soulful Street
The Stovall Sisters - Hang On In there

Lord Rhaburn - Disco Connection
The Staple Sisters - Soul to Soul


[The Band with The Staple Sisters doing "The Weight"]

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Up the Taqx

Date: 8/31/07
Band I saw: Expendable Youth
Bands I missed: Tzeboble, Secret Trial Five, The Kominas, Vote Hezbollah, Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate, Al-Thawra, La Armada, Sangre De Abajo
How could such a thing happen?: Motherfucker wanna eat, motherfucker gotta work
Location: La Casa Maldita
Cost: $5 suggested
Drinks: BYO
Things I missed to be there: Miss Pussycat Puppet Show at Reversible Eye; Fake Rich
Party at Das Butt with Koku-Ban, H1N1, Local Hero, and Grifty; Varietease Burlesque Show at Kitty Moon
Reason for going, as briefly as I did: As far as I know, nothing like this has ever happened in Chicago




The Taqwacores is a book by Michael Muhammad Knight, detailing the lives of the residents of a flophouse that doubles as a DIY mosque for punk rock Muslims in Buffalo, New York. The narrator is of the story is the new kid, Yusuf Ali, an American Pakastani who doesn't know where he fits in, but finds love, solace, and adventure in punk rock, and a hero and personal savior in Jehangir Tabari. Kind of ironically, Jehangir is a martyr straight out of the Jesus mold, a man too perfect to live. In punk rock pop culture he is Heroin Bob, or that girl from Suburbia In literature, he is Randle P. McMurphy, pushing the psyche ward inmates to free themselves.

Jehangir lived and died by taqwacore. The word is a portmanteau of the words hardcore and taqwa an Islamic term for a kind of simultaneous love and fear of Allah*. The book ends with Jehangir gathering all the taqwacore bands in America, all the ones he could find, for one show, a punk rock spectacle that ends in his death. On the pretensious tip, it is an end of innocense for the various people in the book, an end of the utopian views of taqwa, punk rock, and Islam.

Before the book was published, originally as a zine in 2002, there was no such thing as taqwacore, but since then it has become a real movement, not just for arab and Muslim punks, but for disaffected white kids who're looking to further piss off their folks and disassociate themselves from a fairly racist USA that's currently at odds with much of the Muslim world. It's cynical, but it's true. In the book, Taqwacore was as much an umbrella as punk rock, there were skinhead taqwa, straightedge taqwa, and ska taqwa (skaqwa?). Middle East Punk night wasn't that much different. Tzebeoble is a one-man riot folk band whose music sounds more like Tom Frampton, Kinky Friedman, and The Moldy Peaches than This Bike is a Pipe Bomb or Yusef Islam. From the one song on their myspace page, San Antonio's Vote Hezbollah (who take their name from a band in the The Taqwacores), I could say that they sound like the gritty/glitzy postglam of D Generation, in a way that almost borders on new wave the way the Brits did it, and a little bit like old Social Distortion, but that might just be the one song (which has pretty shitty lyrics). The Kominas are a punk group that seem to take their influences from all avenues of punk, with a little bit of regae and hip hop thrown in. Their song "9000 miles" could've been done by the Transplants, but it probably would have been done by someone a lot better. The Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate and Chicago's Al-Thawra are the most interesting to me though, because they both do more experimental music, from a punk background and aesthetic.

Al-Thawra's sound a lot like early industrial, from a time when groups like Laibach, Muslimgauze, Nurse with Wound, and Throbbing Gristle were all sharing bills. It's very low, and very crunchy. Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate come from a slightly dancier place, and sound a lot like the electrometallic dub that seems to come out of kinda weird bands who've had hits do when they want to try new things, but want to go further than their fans would allow. Think of the Deftones side-project Team Sleep, or the At the Drive-In/Mars Volta side project Defacto. Unfortunately, even though they were on the bill, they had to drop out of the show before yesterday.

Yesterday marked the first time that a lot of these bands got together to play a Taqwa show in Chicago. The scale wasn't as big as it was in the end of the book, but it didn't end up with any scene fatalities, so I'm pretty sure everybody was happy. Unfortunately, even moreso than TSS dropping out, was that I had to.

I only got to see one of the bands, before I left for work, and that was Expendable Youth. If you drew a straight line on a graph from Rancid to Aus Rotten, Expendable Youth would be a dot in the middle in a Witch Hunt t-shirt. They're political, but kinda indiscriminately political, like, "It doesn't matter that you're all a bunch of anarchists and punks at a political punk show in a basement, we're gonna still say things like 'this one is about political prisoners, because Mumia isn't the only one.'"

When I hear that kinda preachy bullshit, it puts me in that cynical place where I place them in a world where music only exists on a straight line between Rancid and Aus Rotten. Otherwise, they were good, melodic hardcore, you know like they exist in a world where Aus-Rotten is a goal to strive for, and Rancid is the poppiest, sell-outiest anti-punk band you can think of. I've seen them before and I'm sure I will again, but I was kinda disappointed that they're all I got outta my time at Casa Maldita last night.


["Lord of Dawn" by Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate]