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.
Deep down in this Los Angeles Times story about the Recording Academy (aka the Grammys) NOT changing its eligibility to allow Lady Gaga a possible nomination as Best New Artist is some clarification on that category—and a surprising-slash-intriguing nugget.
There is a chance that veteran artists, as well as those who released records in 2008, will be nominated. Rock acts MGMT, the Ting Tings and the Silversun Pickups are all on the ballots for the 2010 ceremony. Los Angeles’ Silversun Pickups have their sophomore effort in “Swoon,” released this year on Dangerbird Records, and MGMT and the Ting Tings are still promoting albums that were released in 2008.
The best new artist field is generally one of the most debated of the Grammy categories. Recording Academy rules define the parameters this way: “A new artist is defined as any performing artist who releases, during the eligibility year, the recording that first establishes the public identity of that artist as a performer.”
There’s no question this was Silversun’s breakout year, or (to our ears) that “Swoon” is Grammy-worthy. And it’s clear the Academy has been aiming for a cooler, hipper audience (and that can’t mean only the Jonas Brothers, right?).
Nominations will be announced December 2 as part of a live concert special. Get more news, music and videos with Silversun Pickups at Current.com.
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:
Check out this remix made by combining our a capella clip with Mos Def and an instrumental track. The original version shot as part of Embedded with Mos Def is below.
It wouldn’t be entirely wrong to call The Decemberists indie darlings. The band is smart, serious about their music and devoted to pushing the boundaries of what you’d expect from a rock-folk-art-inspired group from a city in the Pacific Northwest.
When senior producer Alex Simmons showed up to film them for Embedded, they had finished their album, “The Hazards Of Love,” and were smack in the middle of rehearsals:
“The band was extremely busy and a little stressed when we went to interview them in Portland. They were about to go on tour for almost the entire summer and they had to learn how to play the entire album “The Hazards Of Love” straight through. That said they were really gracious and made sure every member sat down with us. Jenny inviting everyone over to her house to try Nate’s beer was icing.
“I love Portland, best coffee and beer in the world I say. So does the New York Times, which everybody was talking about when we were up there.”
“I came in having heard one or two of their songs and left standing up clapping hands overhead and yelling for more. I think it was the epic-operatic nature of that particular show… strong themes and sophisticated song and instrument arrangements. Colin’s voice is so characteristic that it is all easy to write off if you don’t like it—but I do like it, and so everything felt really theatrical and great.
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:
The odds are, whatever you think you know about Thievery Corporation, it’s only part of the story. They’re far more than just genre-crossing DJs that spotlight some of the world’s most talented musicians, and they’re not just those guys that got audited by the IRS because they played an Iraqi war protest. Thievery Corporation is the epicenter of a community, an art scene and an empire that exists in what may seem like the least likely of places: Washington, DC.
However, once senior producer Douglas Caballero spent some time with Thievery in their version of our nation’s capitol, he learned why it couldn’t happen anywhere else:
“Rob Garza and Eric Hilton showed me that Washington, DC is more than the typical 8th grade field trip—you know, monuments, blue suits, politicians and traffic circles. At least, that’s the impression of the city that many visitors get during the day. But once the sun goes down, the city’s nightlife and its eclectic community of music and artists, becomes much more visible and I’d say makes it competitive with other East Coast cities better known for fun after dark. The most interesting facet to this was listening to Thievery discuss how the DC’s world of artists and musicians co-mingled with the politicians and pundits. A lot of names and specifics were left out of those stories.
In addition to being world-famous musicians, I was struck by how entrepreneurial the two band members have become, both co-owning hot spot night clubs. Rob co-owns a club in Mexico and Eric is actually part owner of some of DC’s best restaurants, clubs and even a music venue, which we visited and we partook in the food, music and drinks (lots of drinks). Hangovers and happy palates aside, I left DC with a new appreciation for the city’s arts and entertainment offerings.”
AMANDA PALMER
Our VP of music programming, Davis Powers, had booked Amanda’s band The Dresden Dolls on their first US TV appearance back when he worked on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. When her first solo album, “Who Killed Amanda Palmer?” (produced by Ben Folds) began making big waves online—Amanda famously wrote and performed a song begging her label, Roadrunner, to drop her if they weren’t going to promote her more—the once-underground performance artist began drawing more and more attention as an innovator of internet self-marketing.
Still, executive producer Mark Rinehart wasn’t sure whether the Embedded game plan—Amanda would organize a secret Tweet-up show, and Current would document the result—was actually going to work:
“I’d been hearing about the Secret Show/Twitter phenomena and before the shoot, I thought the whole thing was kind of played out. But my opinion changed when I saw the whole thing unfold. Seeing tons of people materialize out of know where from a simple post online was pretty amazing.”
Shana, our online producer who had heavily lobbied to get Amanda into the show, was most impressed by Amanda’s genuine willingness to turn over the day to her biggest fans:
“A lot of bands talk a good game when it comes to doing what their fans want, but in the end they either bend to pressure from the labels or aren’t willing to give up that much control. Amanda not only asked the fans in line to help dress her but came with no prepared set list. What people wanted to hear, she played. When the crowd asked her to play more on the ukelele, she brought everyone over to another area of the venue and sat down, story time style. Amanda values her fans not just as passive consumers but as an active part of her experience as an artist.”
Since we began shooting Common for Embedded, we have built a great relationship with him and his team. They came to us for Make Common’s Day because they knew Current had experience in doing these sort of viewer-created video call outs, and they wanted to take a unique approach to making a video for the song.
It was an opportunity with a big name artist that we couldn’t really pass up. It sort of plays off the VCAM initiatives as well as the Writer in Residence project, but seemed like a perfect way to bring Current’s filmmaker community together with Common to create something special.
From what Common’s team told me, he chose this one because it was overall a different vibe than your typical clichéd rap music video. It had a fun feel to it, and the use of clip art was simple yet effective, as was the way the producers integrated the green screen footage, and gave it a grainy clip art feel.
Watch Common’s pick for his favorite “Make My Day” video here, and tune in tonight just after our Embedded with Common special—so, about 11:30/10:30c—to see it make its TV premiere:
And check out these photos from when we shot the green screen footage:
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.
