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.
Check out this clip from December 2007 (cleverly retitled by someone—not me—post-Idol), in which he talks about getting glammed up for a high-fashion soiree at an LA nightclub. (While you’re spotting random reality show stars, don’t miss Project Runway winner Christian Siriano in a couple of shots.)
2. Lambert auditioned for Idol because he was tripping his face off on ’shrooms at Burning Man.
”I realized that we all have our own power, and that whatever I wanted to do, I had to make happen,” he tells Rolling Stone.
All things considered, I’d say his drug-inspired gamble has paid off pretty well. Can you say the same for your Playa epiphanies?
Instead of just talking about how Bowie is the be-all end-all of glam-rock and inspiration to hipster bands everywhere, Lambert has pushed the idea of androgynous queer dance rock to a new (and far less ambiguous) level.
See, for example, his extremely cheeky, campy album cover:
Now, I hate medleys with a fiery passion—pick a goddamned song and sing it all the way through, people!—but I appreciate a man who sings not one but three Bowie songs on a nationwide tour targeting mainstream American TV audiences and their kids.
4. He liked the American Music Awards just about as much as you did.
(Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Lambert’s debut album, “For Your Entertainment,” comes out today.
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.
Owners of the new pocket video camcorder will be able to record video footage and then upload it straight from the camcorder over Wi-Fi networks both private and public, a feature currently being offered in some DSLRs.
Flips — especially those with HD — shoot a pretty strong quality video (see our episode of Embedded with Common for some Flip footage shot by his assistant and then passed back to Current), and are way more affordable than a DSLR camera.
I’ve shot a little bit of concert footage using the iPhone/YouTube app, and as a fan scouring the internet for clips from shows I couldn’t make it to, I’ve definitely noticed a decrease in lag time between actual concert and online viewing.
Would you buy a wi-fi Flip if it was, say, less than $150? What have you been shooting your best fan footage with?
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.
