MF Doom is at it again. The underground emcee managed to aggravate a whole room of fans on Saturday by billing a fake show at LA’s GrandStar Jazz Club. After standing around through opening acts and DJs, fans began to suspect that something wasn’t right when someone assumed to be Doom took the stage and then didn’t even take the mic. Boos erupted, and some of the commotion was even caught on tape by upset concert-goers.
Take a look at some fan footage from the venue and decide on the situation yourself:
Mischief has always been a large part of Doom’s persona. There were a few other live fake-outs in 2007, one of the most notable being the possible imposter at the Pitchfork Music Festival this year.
In March, Doom told Rolling Stone that the hijinks are a deliberate part of his persona:
“Everything that we do is villain style,” Doom says. “Everybody has the right to get it or not get it. Once I throw it out, it’s there for interpretation. It might’ve seemed like it didn’t go well, but how do we know that wasn’t just pre-orchestrated so that we’re talking about it now? I tell you one thing: People are asking more now for live shows and I’m charging more, so it must’ve worked somewhere.”
Is his music worth the hassle, or should Doom stop biting the hand that feeds him? Take a look at Current’s Embedded with Mos Def, where he talks about why the mask and villain concept are ingenious to him.
When I was a kid, I used to watch music video channels for hours at a time and record my favorite ones onto VHS so that I could have my very own video mixtape. Music videos are primarily viral now, so I turn online for all the newest and most interesting ways bands and other musicians pair their records with visuals.
Here are some fresh finds:
The Golden Filter, “Thunderbird”
Warren Wright directed the music video for The Golden Filter’s newest single. The electronic duo used to be known as Lismore, but then have since dumped that name and those poppier songs for harder beats and cultish imagery.
Jonathan Boulet, “A Community Service Announcement”
There are two things about this video that really get me: the way the digital deconstruction is noticeable but also isn’t completely overpowering and the fact that the song is sort of deceptively upbeat. I thought that the entire video was going to be about faceless guys running through the woods in some kind of youthful romp reminiscent of a scene out of “Where The Wild Things Are,” but then… it wasn’t.
Jonathan Boulet is a new artist, hailing from Sydney, whose album drops December 4th, and if this is him putting his best foot forward, then I can’t to see what he does next with both his music and his visual aesthetic.
Vampire Weekend, “Cousins”
I’m not one of those people who feels like Vampire Weekend saved modern music. They’re alright. Where they do tend to go above and beyond for me is in making music videos that are unique to them and entertaining even when they’re somewhat nonsensical. Vampire Weekend plus director Garth Jennings is such an appropriate match-up.
Noisettes, “Every Now And Then”
Unlike the others, this video came out at the beginning of the month and is actually the third single from Noisettes’ album “Wild Young Hearts.” It’s probably their most compelling video for me, though, containing an elegance that matches the vintage, pseudo-lo-fi sound of the single. Frontwoman Shingai Shoniwa is gorgeous, and I love everything she does here, the ending packing an emotional twist that still manages not to tip the scales so far that the whole video falls right into melodrama.
OK GO, “WTF?”
Once upon a time, OK GO had some brief MTV fame, but I’ve seen less of them on mainstream television ever since the novelty of their treadmill video (an early internet viral hit) wore off. Still, they’re always trying to come up with things that are new and wacky enough to fit them. The video for the lead single “WTF?” from their upcoming album, “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”, features the band’s members going a little crazy with color and a blur tool, celebrating the band’s penchant for bright backgrounds and also Photoshop.
Seeing shows in Los Angeles can sometimes be a bummer, for two reasons:
1) In big cities (especially entertainment-focused places like LA), there’s always some performance happening, so no one feels unique.
2) Trendy people never feel obligated to applaud anyway.
Even before their debut album, “Aim and Ignite,” officially released in August, fun. had begun to catch a lot of blog buzz, which doesn’t always bode well, because it could mean that a lot of fashionable and cool twenty-somethings will show up and be too dedicated to posing and wearing sunglasses indoors to figure out if it’s possible to clap with drinks in their hands. It does, however, also make it that much more rewarding when all the pieces seem to come together and both the band and the audience are actually feeding off of one another’s energy.
Somehow, fun. hit the jackpot.
The success might have something to do with a pretty fortuitous combination of good timing and real stage skills. They had a Friday night show and a sold out crowd who had all had a couple months to learn the lyrics and were ready to chant them right back at the band as they played. It helped—it really helped—that everyone in this band played well. While fun. have only three official band members, they’re touring with six people to help recreate the songs live. Each song had the fullness it needs to really affect listeners, the instruments played with enough precision that each song sounded like the record but with a certain live, open flare. Nate Ruess also had impressive vocal control, not shying away from any notes that were higher or more difficult and therefore not cheating listeners out of all the musical money-shots.
(fun. playing “Be Calm” live at The Troubadour, November 13, 2009)
The band jumped right into performance without hesitation, uncaring about whether or not the crowd was prepared. With an album that’s largely successful because of how much excitement the band has managed to inject into a handful of songs, playing an equally exciting show seemed like it would could either be easy or fall so flat that it was impossible to recover.
Because each of its core members comes from other bands (Nate Ruess used to be the frontman for The Format; Jake Antonof and Andrew Dost are from Steel Train and Anathallo respectively) “Aim and Ignite” is made up of music veterans. Starting their set with “At Least I’m Not As Sad (As I Used To Be)” caught the audience off guard, but then the energy didn’t die. They made the transition to a live show seem effortless, keeping energy at the highest levels, supporting each song with familiar and charming banter, and avoiding pretension despite being a talked-about band who decided to include random punctuation in their name. This band earns its moniker just as much live as with the album, and if they can get big city, Friday night cool kids to dance and sing, then they’ve got to be on to something special.
When The Decemberists debuted material from their newest album “The Hazards Of Love” at South by Southwest (SXSW), they played all the songs from start to finish in the same order as the record to preserve the story told through the album. “The Hazards of Love” is a concept record. It isn’t quite the The Decemberists’ first crack at making one—”The Crane Wife” also had a narrative thread, if more vague—but the new effort has them throwing their lot in with a number of other artists in recent years attempting the same thing. From My Chemical Romance to Mastadon and even Kid Cudi, concept records seem to be everywhere.
Getting an answer for who created and when the first concept album seems impossible at best. They were definitely popular during the 60s and 70s, with albums like The Who’s “Tommy” or Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon.” The trend was also supported by the fact that musicals like “Hair” included songs that were reminiscent of popular music at the time, which stopped being the case for Broadway soundtracks in decades that followed. In fact, it seems that as the two mediums became more disconnected sonically, the viability of the concept album died as well, until recently.
Many music critics and journalists say there’s been a significant rise in the number of concept albums in the last few years, with an especially high number released in 2008 and 2009. Thanks to director Michael Mayer (who was behind the 2002 Broadway production of “Spring Awakening”), the link between what’s popular on radio and musicals is even being re-established. His adaptation of Green Day’s “American Idiot,” with some additional tracks from “21st Century Breakdown” for the stage debuted at The Berkeley Repertory Theatre in September.
Of course, another idea is that history has to repeat itself eventually, and in a few years, concept albums will be on the way out again. Both theories seem likely, and if whatever eco-political endeavor Neil Young was rumored to be working on at the beginning of the year turns out to be as crazy as it sounds, that unfortunate decline might be setting in sooner rather than later.
Passion Pit are one of the most talked about bands of 2009, particularly on the internet. They’ve gotten a lot of buzz since they formed in 2007, a result of lead singer and songwriter Michael Angelakos first writing songs for his then-girlfriend and starting a band “because [he] had nothing else to do” that took over the Boston music scene. After being upstreamed to Columbia via Frenchkiss Records, however, the band began to garner national attention as well, and their major label debut, Manners, was released with the kind of overenthusiastic fanfare that Vampire Weekend received during 2008 and MGMT got the year before that.
They’re a band in the middle of what seems to be a well-oiled machine at this point: indie hype. Last year Current aired “Hyping Indie Hype,” a segment about creating buzz for underground artists in both rock and rap, suggesting that even with the marketability of “indie” as a genre since television shows like “The OC” made indie cool to the masses, it’s still hard for independent artists to really break the mainstream. For those that do, however, the praise is overwhelming, pushing emerging bands at consumers so much so early that a backlash can happen before the band even fully establishes their sound. These days, some consider Clap Your Hands Say Yeah a cautionary tale.
Lime Wire contributor Matt LeMay says that indie music has fallen prey to a tendency towards online “groupthink,” mirroring the same mainstream trends that independent music is supposed to be getting away from.
“People don’t trust you until you’ve been around for two or three years. When you become a name that sticks, then they’ll start giving you a decent look,” Angelakos told the Boston Globe in May. “I feel like now we’re just a flash in the pan to them. But I think this record distinguishes us – we’re not MGMT, we’re not Vampire Weekend, we’re not Hot Chip.”
Watch Angelakos talk about working with the PS22 children’s choir below — it’s an outtake from tonight’s Embedded Tour Stop, which airs at 11p/10c:
Just two weeks after a September 11th Freedom Walk in 2005 headed by the Department of Defense—which ended in a huge Clint Black concert in support of the military—Thievery Corporation produced Operation Ceasefire, an all-day music festival with a huge anti-war sentiment, urging the government to bring troops home. The 10-hour concert was presented by Thievery’s ESL Music, in conjunction with The Mintwood Media Collective, the now defunct DC Anti-War Network, and United For Peace and Justice to send a message to congress right from the Washington Monument grounds.
The concert lasted until 1 a.m. and featured a wide range of artists, from underground heavy-hitters like socialist hip-hop group The Coup to more well-known artists like Le Tigre, the Bouncing Souls, and Ted Leo and The Pharmacists.
Check out Ted Leo playing “My Vien Ilin,” introduced by Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra:
The bold concert event also featured speakers between acts, including the co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, Cindy Sheehan. The show was free, and the message was simple. It followed its own morning rally and march, aiming to make as much as possible, right where political officials could see.
Watch more with Thievery Corporation and Operation Ceasefire from Embedded:
On “Universal Mind Control,” Common tried out more “futuristic” and otherworldly ideas, beats, and imagery to push himself and take his music to places he hadn’t previously explored. Working with Pharrell Williams of producing duo The Neptunes played a huge part, since Pharrell is no stranger to enthusiasm for outer space themes and ideas. From his music label Star Trak, to his clothing lines, Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream featuring an astronaut as its mascot, and even citing scientist Carl Sagan as someone he really admires, Pharrell is often pushing creativity toward an interplanetary future. (Watch Pharrell talk to Current about his creative community ARTST here.) The first single and title track from Common’s “Universal Mind Control” is a perfect example of that.
But Pharrell and Common aren’t the only artists in hip-hop to focus attentions on off-world conquest. It’s been a source of inspiration and a big topic for a lot of emcees and producers in recent years especially. Since the beginning of his mainstream career, Kanye West has talked about escaping in a “Spaceship”, and his entire 2008 Glow In The Dark tour hinged on a plot line where he’d been traveling the unknown to find the meaning and inspiration that Earth had failed to provide.
A 2008 Slate magazine article suggested that the black “Afronaut” has roots all the way in the earlier 1900s. But young music fans and bloggers have suggested that what it makes appealing in most recent history—though even that extends back to Afrika Bambaataaa’s “Planet Rock” in the 1980s—is being able to identify with “the alien Superman.” There’s something relatable in the isolation of outer space existence, and then using that same “otherness” to present ordinary Earth with material that’s both unique and heroic, thanks to the grandness that comes along with huge spacecrafts delivering lifesaving resources that people need.
New artist Kid Cudi fits right into that idea with his debut, “Man on the Moon: End of the Day” (narrated by none other than…Common). The isolation of the space agent is crux of the album, and Cudi says that space as a concept appealed to him even as a child—going from traveling to his own world in his imagination to placing himself there more definitely as an artist.
Hailing from Sweden, Lykke is becoming a big contender in the indie and electropop sets. Stereogum named her an artist to watch in 2007, and she’s since gained even more momentum, playing shows worldwide and making a few television appearances, including Last Call With Carson Daly. Her cover of “Knocked Up” by Kings Of Leon has gained a lot of notoriety on blogs this year. She’s also had the opportunity to work with other recent indie favorites like Kleerup, N.A.S.A, and Bon Iver.
Her debut album, “Youth Novels,” was released January 2008, featuring the song “I’m Good, I’m Gone,” which is heard on tonight’s episode. While a second effort is in the works, Lykke has said that it may be a little while before fans get some official new music. In the meantime, you can check out her new song “Possibilty” from The Twilight Saga: New Moon soundtrack and even still grab her first record, available on iTunes.
Here’s an exclusive outtake from tonight’s episode, in which she talks about her love for A Tribe Called Quest:
Tune into Current TV tonight at 11/10c to watch our full segment with Lykke.
UPDATE: Learn a little more about Lykke Li’s philosophy on clothes and music in this Tour Stop, on Embedded.
