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Pop Rock Nation

Author: Paul Lorentz

  • Record Store Day 2010: The Dust Settles, The Vinyl Spins

    Last Saturday, just two days after groups of so-called Tea Partiers descended upon Washington D.C. and other centers of government to protest taxation-despite-representation, another group of avowed fanatics swooped down upon a few dusty corners of our nation’s hipper cities for a strange and probably misguided celebration of their own.  Saturday, April 17, was this year’s Record Store Day, a day when record store owners across this great land, with the aid of a few GGG (as Dan Savage would call them) record labels, defiantly flip the bird at their impending extinction, and thereby forestall it for at least another week.  Contrary to what will.i.am says at the end of “One Tribe”, there actually are still record stores – and feisty, independent, locally owned ones at that – to be found around.  Still, the likelihood that you’ll just accidentally stumble upon one in your daily travels is slightly lower than your likelihood of tripping over a Komodo dragon’s tail in the parking lot of Applebee’s.   You have to go looking for record stores.  But when – if – you do find one, you’ll find it holds a fascinating power upon those who enter its doors.

    Demographically speaking, Record Store Day shoppers – we’ll called them “Vinyl Partiers” – and Tea Partiers are surprisingly (and considering myself as one of the former, alarmlingly) similar – disproportionately white, disproportionately male, disproportionately middle-aged, middle-class, and socially inept.  I like to think that as a sub-sub-culture, we’re a little more good-natured than your average Tea Partier.  Our most militant slogan can be found at the bottom of a little white slip of paper tucked inside the sleeve of any current LP release from that illustrious Midwestern indie label Secretly Canadian:  “Long Live Physical Media!”   But the fact that that little white slip of paper also contains a code to download mp3s of the LP it came with suggests that we Vinyl Partiers are a little more appreciative of the pros and cons of various schools of thought and modes of playback.  My CD, vinyl, and mp3 collections are coexisting just fine.  (Then again, some things are beyond the pale of civilized discourse.  Cassingles, for instance.)

    And yes, I shop at Amazon.com – it’s a great source for digital downloads as well as CD imports.  But shopping on-line will never be as much fun to me as browsing an actual record rack in a real live store.  You can’t download mp3s of the strange conversations you overhear at the check-out counter of a record shop.  You can’t order the enthusiasm, the dedication, the sense of history, and the encyclopedic knowledge of music that not only sits behind the counter at your local record shop, but which is, as often as not, browsing the racks right beside you.  Start a conversation with a Tea Partier, and they’ll rattle off a predictable inventory of bullet-points on the evils of big government, but start a conversation with a Vinyl Partier and you have no – and I mean no – idea where its many tangents will take you.  Record stores are great for people watching.  And record stores are never more full of people these days than on Record Store Day.

    So, my ever-patient car-geek partner asked me last week, is this Record Store Day, like, a real thing? Uhh… yeah, it is.  Albeit, a relatively new real thing.  I believe (and I may be wrong) that this past weekend marked the fourth annual Record Store Day celebration.  Okay, so what do people do on Record Store Day? Well, they go to record stores and hopefully spend a lot of money – on records, on CDs, on turntables, on plastic sleeves to store your precious vinyl in so that the cover art doesn’t get smudged up.  Okay, but couldn’t people do that on any other day? True.  Which is where the GGG (that’s “good, giving, and game” for those who don’t read Savage Love) record labels come in, scheduling oodles of mostly limited edition releases for release exclusively to independent record stores (sorry FYE, sorry Best Buy) on Record Store Day, a relatively thorough list of which can be found on the official Record Store Day website.   In addition, most participating record stores also offer special sales, in-store performances, raffles and door prizes, beer and cookies, and, of course, swag bags.

    I’m fortunate enough to live in Madison, Wisconsin which boasts five participating independent record stores, and I made my rounds on Saturday picking up vinyl new and old at each one, and over the next couple of days on these pages, I’ll recount the highs and lows of my Record Store day acquisitions, but as a teaser, I’m emptying the swag bags and cataloguing their contents here:

    • The swag bag itself, a reusable  “Record Store Day 2010″ shopping bag, perfectly sized for carrying home the latest pile of LP records you just bought, but also with a special built-in pocket for 7” singles.
    • Another reusable shopping bag, sized for CDs, advertising the music documentaries It Might Get Loud and This Is It
    • A 7″ single by a group called Terrible Things, an earnest alt-rock trio from Alabama whose debut album on UniversalMotown is scheduled to come out later this year.  (A-Side “Hills of Birmingham” is pretty great).
    • A button for “The Runaways” movie
    • A button for the Dead Truth Recordings label.
    • The “Select-O-Hits Limited Edition Sampler” featuring songs by Jeff Bridges, Jimmy Buffett, and Christine Ohlman.
    • The Light in the Attic Zine Issue 2 Spring/Summer 2010.  Light in the Attic is the label behind the recent critically acclaimed reissues of funk provocateur Betty Davis, reclusive folkie Karen Dalton, and French pop maestro Serge Gainsbourg
    • A Coachella/Record Store Day mini-magazine with CD sampler.  Very cool.
    • A card for a free one year subscription to Death + Taxes.  Which, I guess, is a magazine of some sort.
    • A “The Nerve Agents” sticker
    • A Bright Eyes “Cassadaga” sticker
    • A “Support Your Local Record Store!” bumper sticker
    • A postcard advertising the new Black Keys album Brothers
    • A 429 Records label sampler.  New tracks from Tonic (really?), Joan Armatrading (yes!), BoDeans, Everclear, Clem Snide and Cracker.
    • A sampler from the Canadian alt-rock label Last Gang Records.  Very cool.
    • A Fanfarlo “Reservoir” sticker
    • A Rhymesayers Entertainment sticker
    • Another Fanfarlo “Reservoir” sticker.  (I do like Fanfarlo.  More on them in a future Record Store Day post.)
    • The Record Store Day – Urban Edition sampler, featuring Nneka, Wyclef Jean, Raphael Saadiq, an amazing new singer named Alice Smith, and (I’m happier about this than you will ever believe) Three 6 Mafia’s new collaboration with DJ Tiesto, Sean Kingston, and Flo Rida: “Feel It”.  Amazing song.  If you can ignore the Three 6 Mafia’s raps in it.
    • “Tha 4.20 Mixtape – Prequel to Streetlights” by Kurupt
    • Bridge Nine Records Summer 2009 Sampler
    • A Rhymesayers Entertainment badge.  Makes me wish I were still in Boy Scouts.
    • Priority Records 25th Anniversary sampler, including tracks from Snoop, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, N.W.A., Master P, EPMD, and Westside Connection.
    • “Record Store Day – Soulful Delights” – a Rhino sampler of classic 60s and 70s soul tracks featuring the Drifters, Otis, Wilson, Aretha, Bootsy, Ray Charles, Donny Hathaway, and Curtis Mayfield.  Sweetness.
    • A Jason Mraz “Beautiful Mess – Live on Earth” sticker
    • A coupon for one dollar off any pizza at Pizza Brutta
    • Semi Precious Weapons 3-song promo ep
    • Hail the Villain 5-song promo ep
    • A “graphic storybook” called “[Lost Highway record artist] Hayes Carll in ‘The Search for Ooga Kabooga Juice’ and Other Adventures”.  Illustrations by Jose Luis Gonzalez.
    • An Anjulie card
    • “The Infection”, a Strange Music Sampler – a collection of the most repulsive hip-hop I have ever set ear to.

    Jealous?  Wait til you hear about what I actually paid for.   More tomorrow.

  • We Are The… Canada. Young Artists for Haiti take on K’Naan’s “Wavin’ Flag”

    “And then it goes back. And then it goes back. And then it goes back…”  And here it comes again. “Wavin’ Flag”, Somali-Canadian rapper K’Naan‘s loving and mournful, hopeful anthem to his home city of Mogadishu has, in the year since its release, taken on a life of its own – or rather:  several lives of its own. A top 10 hit in his adopted home country of Canada (where he’s lived since his early teens), the song’s also been used on a video game soundtrack and later last year, was given a stadium ready bilingual remix (“The Celebration Mix”) when it was chosen as the official theme song for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Then, a couple of months ago, after the earthquake in Haiti, K’Naan performed a delicate acoustic version of the song on the Canada for Haiti telethon. In a timely reminder that Haiti still needs help, a group of Canadian recording artists calling themselves Young Artists for Haiti got together in the studio with producer Bob Ezrin (producer of both Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Berlin’s Count Three and Pray) to re-record the song all “We Are The World” style with a the obligatory in-the-studio, right-hands-to-headphones, documentary music video.

    The guest list for this gig includes a few international stars like Nelly Furtado and Avril Lavigne, some super-hip alterna-faves (Esthero, Emily Haines of Metric, rapper Kardinal Offishall, the bands Broken Social Scene and City and Colour), along with a few alterna-also-rans (Deryk Whibley, of Sum 41 – remember Sum 41?); there are a few wonderful “only-in-Canada” names (Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans?); there’s a token old guy (Tom “Life is a Highway” Cochrane doesn’t rate a solo, but you catch a few glimpses of him in the video), and a lot of pretty youngsters including Fefe Dobson, Drake,  Nikki Yanofsky (who wasn’t born when Tom Cochrane had that big hit), and Justin Bieber, who also wasn’t born when people knew who Tom Cochrane was, and has the strange distinction of having sung the first lines of “We Are the World 25” and getting to sing the final words here.   This assemblage of stars gets an added kick of wide-eyed optimism from a gaggle of singing, flag-waving children at the song’s climactic key-change.

    The result may be a bit “over-inspirational” (as is wont for this type of project), but on the whole, it’s significantly less artistically misguided than “We Are The World 25”.  For one thing, it’s shorter.  Which is nice.  But I think the major thing it’s got going for it is that, while it’s still a remake (K’Naan does get the first few lines),  it’s a current song; it’s not attempting to re-conjure quarter-century-old charity-single magic.  The original “Wavin’ Flag” is still charting in the Canadian Top 10.  (How it continues to elude a significant American audience is absolutely beyond me.)   The rap section in “We Are The World 25” felt like a freakish appendage to a song written for a pop landscape that had no idea rap was coming, but when Drake drops a Haiti-specific verse leading up to that final chorus (you know, the part where the flag-waving kids come in), it makes absolute musical sense – it feels organic and right, and places that final flag-waving moment in an appropriately empathetic context.   On “We Are The World 25” it seemed like a bunch of rappers trying to out-machismo each other on a rhyme that seemed ghoulishly self-involved and self-aggrandizing.    (I’d quote it here, but I honestly can’t bring myself to watch it again… so:  sorry.)  Also, aside from the rap, there’s a general (and refreshing) lack of Auto-tuniness here.  These singers mostly just sing, and some of them sing pretty amazingly – amazingly enough for me to want to spend my evening Googling my brains out trying to figure out who they are and where I can get my hands on some of their other music.

    All in all, the song gets more right than wrong, and this actually feels like the proper heir to the original “We Are the World” and all the other idealistic charity singles of the 80s.  Even if the faces and names aren’t as recognizable as will.i.am and Barbra Streisand.

  • 80s Hair Takes Over Reality TV: Lauper and Michaels and Nunn, Oh My!

    Fans of 80s music and reality TV had much reason to celebrate over the last two days. First, the new season of Celebrity Apprentice opened with a fundraising showdown between Cyndi “I Want My MTV!” Lauper and Brett “F*ck Me, I’m Diabetic” Michaels. Both were chosen as their teams’ respective project managers for a challenge that involved opening a Burger Heaven on a busy New York intersection for three hours and raising as much money from food sales and tips as they could. Michaels and his crew (Team Rock Solid!) had a distinct advantage in having chef Curtis Stone on their team. The guys also had the audacity to charge a minimum $100 per burger, while Lauper and the ladies (Team Tenacity), Sharon Osborne among them, went the populist route charging $20 a burger.

    While the ladies’ place was packed from the moment they opened the doors, and Cyndi even led her team and customers in a sweet, but only occasionally tuneful, accordion-accompanied version of “True Colors”, aside from Brett’s predictable, seemingly on-cue blood sugar crash, the most the men could offer for entertainment was Rod Blagojevich long-windedly regaling businessmen with his tales of political derring-do while a burger en route to Ms. Joan Rivers (in secret shopper mode for His Trumpness) sat in the window for nearly ten minutes getting cold. However, despite poor service and high prices, audacity trumped (har har) Tenacity, and Brett Michaels emerged triumphant. As project manager for her team, Lauper was definitely a candidate for the first firing of the season; but after an interminable, touchy-feely board room discussion, Lauper was spared the ax. 80s hair lives!

    Terri Nunn of Berlin

     

    Speaking of 80s hair: Terri Nunn, lead singer of the California based new wave/synth rock band Berlin (whose original line-up reunion on VH-1’s Band Reunited a few years ago was one of the most touching things I’ve ever seen) was featured as a guest judge, along with Henry Rollins (yes, that Henry Rollins), on this week’s episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Nunn is currently promoting a new album (credited to Terri Nunn & Berlin) called All the Way In, a collection of covers, mostly of Berlin songs, but also including a very a propo, porn-starrish take on Marilyn Manson’s “The Dope Show”. In addition to a spot on the judging panel alongside regular judges Santino Rice (Project Runway, Season 2) and Paris Hilton-biographer Merle Ginsberg, Nunn got a lot of screen time acting as vocal coach for the queen-testants, who, for this week’s elimination challenge, were charged with actually singing (not lip-syncing, as drag queens usually do) a “heavy metal version” of RuPaul’s double-entendre-laden manifesto “Ladyboy”.

    Nunn proved to be an ebullient teacher, whooping, shouting, throwing her arms all over the place, and clearly having a blast with the whole thing.  And even if most of the dolls had no idea who she was – Beyonce-wannabe Ms. Tyra Sanchez could barely mask her disdain, and reinforced his ignorance when he blithely confessed to Ru that he’d never seen Tina Turner perform except for that one time with the B.– the queens who did know her (all two or three of them) made up (and then some) for The Other Tyra’s youthful indifference. When contestant Raven found out that Terri Nunn was in the building, his well-cultivated severity evaporated into a nearly tearful fit of fan-boy ecstacies. (I have to admit, I identified.) But the pleasure, apparently, was all Terri’s, who, by the time her ten-minute tutorial with Raven was over, had developed a very visible crush on the man. At one point, she complimented Raven for his nice ass; he, in turn, promised he’d have it all hanging out for her during his performance – a promise he kept, by the way, while wearing a wig replicating the Terri Nunn look, circa 1984.   Two words:  Balls.  You can watch the whole episode here.