andrew w.k. at the gibson showroom

 

As originally published on larecord.com

The mass email from Andrew W.K. came into my best friend’s inbox and even though I only knew the simplistic, punch-along lyrics to “Party Hard,” we were one of the first 100 people to reply, earning us tickets to watch the man in dirty-white pound a few out on Liberace’s mirrored piano. How the famed, reflective Baldwin grand got to the Gibson Guitar showroom (two blocks off Rodeo Drive) from its permanent perch at Kitsch HQ in Vegas, I’ll never know, but there it was, missing its see-through Lucite top and some mirrored squares on the legs, but it was THERE with 100 lucky emailers surrounding it.

Andrew W.K. emerged from a black velvet box and stumbled over a nonsensical speech (about how we should make sure to bring extra quarters to the store when we’re buying water to tip the cashier. WTF?) before sitting at the mirrored beast and improvising simplistic songs about food, being a boy and dog ownership. Clearly hanging out in another dimension where he wasn’t expected to play the instrument in front of fans, Andrew (despite being classically trained since age 4) banged out staccato couplets until they bled into a garbled Nordstrom piano-player audition over which he sang, “You gotta eat food/You gotta eat to live.” His voice was not of Andrew W.K. but instead wandered lost between Bob Dylan’s hiccupping and Randy Newman’s laziness. And even though Andrew’s just-released album is comprised entirely of made-up-on-the-spot piano songs, this was just weird. Not party-‘til-you-puke, force-your-nose-to-bleed-because-it-looks-badass weird (which I was half-expecting), but more upside-own-sunglasses-at-night, I’m-mad-at-my-label-so-I’m-going-to-dick-around-on-Liberace’s-piano weird.

Eventually, he pulled it together enough to play keg-worthy anthems like “Party Hard” and “Get Wet,” which, surprisingly, translated well to the piano. And with his signature tunes coming out of Liberace’s piano, Andrew finally flourished. The pre-written lyrics allowed him to focus on unique re-harmonizations and the audience screamed the songs’ namesake choruses, stoked to be only arms-distance away from the headbanging man dressed like a Heartland mechanic.

I might have been puzzled when he got the crowd to alternately chant “Mrs. Washington” and “asshole Tuesdays” for a whole minute (and again when I realized that his improv songs are only as dry as his humor), but Andrew W.K.’s numerous erratic moments were overshadowed by the epic Beethoven-ness of his rare coherent ones. Oh, yeah. The glittery piano helped, too.

sangria night

I have an essay due in 10 hours and half of the DT staff is bumbling drunk on sangria made in a recycling bin trash bag singing Jimmy Buffett as they forget to take the elevator. I passed the time by turning tomorrow’s feature art (of our president christening a boat) into a “fakebadtaste composite rendering.”

if reviews were word vomit: wolfmother @ the wiltern

This experiment was conducted after writing half of my 15 page term paper for my Rhetoric of Los Angeles class in which I deconstructed the movie Clueless for both its ambivalence towards Hollywood-ized wealth and debunking mechanisms including Josh and Cher Horowitz, herself. I took a break to attend the Wolfmother show at the Wiltern and (stupidly) smoked a joint between sets with randoms in the patio. The resulting “review” was written on a laptop in my car after I had a panic attack thinking that I was in the crowd at a fictional Guitar Hero “concert” and had to leave. It’s a little more personal than how I normally like to write, but I thought I’d keep it unedited in the spirit of Richard Meltzer, et al. The last part about Slash was added today, after I realized that Slash showed up about 20 minutes after I left:

The crowd appeared to be 75% dudes and 25% weird-ass chicks with their dudes. The opening band was fronted by a badass-looking Sheryl Crow-meets-Kim Gordon guitar player whose vocals were so deep it took me two songs to realize it wasn’t coming from the guy on the slide guitar. Maybe it was her muscles or the fact that she wasn’t on a bass, but I half expected her to be the one shredding. Realizing the riffage came from the meek-looking guy in the corner blew the whole “maybe I can be okay with arena rock for the next 10 minutes” moment I accidentally fell into. And then the guy behind me came back with his second beer and started breathing the first one on me, banging his Metal Mullisha baseball hat into my head and telling Lauren and I that our excitement was killing him. Stoked when the Heartless Bastards stopped (what a great unintentional pun), I took the opportunity to go to the bathroom, which was downstairs and to the right. For some reason there was a bar in the bathroom lobby and it reminded me of the carts right outside the bathrooms at Disneyland that sell fruits and pickles in a bag (you must know someone who bought those monstrous things). The line was horrendous and I wished I didn’t have to stare at drunk people emerge from the bathroom to realize they’d just made enough room to pack another one in and the dolled up housewives talking about their children’s shitting habits was making me sick, too, so I went back upstairs to the smoking area. For the remainder of halftime I smoked a cigarette with a guy dressed like a legitimate postmodern hippie and his friends from San Francisco who I blunty told that I wet the bed until I was 8 and a half. We talked about psychedelics and my term paper on Clueless (the only thing that’s actually truth here) then I returned to the cavernous old thee-aye-ter just in time to be moted by an effeminate dude who was 6 feet tall. He moved me behind him because his “bro” was in front of me and no way was I going to separate them tonight (!). Anyway, the view sucked because it didn’t exist and the guy next to me kept talking about how the asshole tall guy in front of me is such an asshole so I went back to the bathroom and sat with Lauren. The band thundered upstairs like the apocalypse was upon us, but, no, it was just Wolfmother, sounding like Led Zepplin on Guitar Hero. Back inside, I found another shitty view behind another tall guy (remember the ratio?) and halfheartedly headbanged with the rest of the crowd for a few songs before their actual Guitar Hero song came on and them my comparison all made sense. One of the white boy afros on stage soloed for about a 9000-note Shred-Streak(TM) and subsided only when the drunk girls to the right of me had their squeal-full. Another tall guy moved in on the left and not that he was blocking my view, but I was really beginning to reassess my fondness of altitudeinally advanced men. The pot kicked in from halftime and I thought about losing my necklace in this weird crowd of people and then about having a bag full of half-written term paper stored on a half-ex boyfriend’s laptop in my car that was parked on an unlit Koreatown street and my anxiety went through the roof. I felt like I was in the wrong place and the wrong time was about to happen, so I bid adieu and just left. When I got to my ride, the doors were unlocked. Creepy or a sign, I couldn’t tell. I really didn’t care if I saw Wolfmother—I’d rather listen to the CD than watch Myspace fans and UCR graduates mix together in a listless throb-pit only to be awakened by a Slash cameo during the encore. Way harsh, Tai? Whatever, I’m Audi.

 

 

exene vs. lil wayne: a critical review

Between a Lil Wayne documentary screening and an Excene Cervenka show at Alex’s Bar, I experienced the full spectrum of the art/artist-reality/celebrity conundrum in under 6 hours last Wednesday.

First, Quincy Jones III’s renegade documentary, The Carter, was screened in a subterranean auditorium on USC’s campus (with Ice Cube’s student son and Tupac’s first manager in attendance). Filmed with no scripts, plans or interviews (in accordance to Lil Wayne’s wishes), the film eschews traditional rock-doc babble for intimate reality show-worthy footage of the 27 year-old rapper (then at the tipping point of mainstream success) smoking joints, drinking cough syrup and recording impromptu songs out of a bag of studio equipment in his hotel room.

Although the hourly drug use and jetset lifestyle could easily get him lumped in with a hip hop hoodlum stereotype, Lil Wayne’s spontaneous creativity, unabated output and raw, uncensored lyrics (he once compared himself to Russel Crowe from A Beautiful Mind, but it’s probably more like Bob Dylan circa 1965) set him apart from the rest of a genre that is increasingly overrun with prefab “rappers.” While The Carter gives a more personal look at what it’s like to live in the unorthodox realm of “Wayne’s World,” it fails to give new insight to the rapper’s hinted-at deeper emotions and instead demonstrates the ease at which popular musicians avoids internal conflicts by slipping under the cover of celebrity bravado.

Because he would not sit down for direct questions from the producers (and gave vague responses to journalists featured in the film), lyrics splayed over artful live footage served as the closest thing to self-reflective commentary from Lil Wayne. But the rapper’s words are a jumble of pussy-eating semi-rhymes and crack-day reminisces that (like the late MJ) mask sadness with a public persona and prove Wayne is not ready to take off his diamond-crusted teeth and confront some damning truths.

Hours after the documentary’s credits rolled, Alien Lord (and veteran artistic onion) Exene Cervenka (in a move more Tupac than Weezy F. Baby) stripped away another emotional layer by roaring through a batch of subdued folk songs to a surprisingly thin crowd at Alex’s Bar. Flanked by musician-friends Wolfmaiden, Conquering Lion and Black Scorpion 35, the 53 year-old multi-medium artist set aside the last of her angry-punk bombast and presented a set of raw electric-acoustic tunes, many from her latest solo album, Somewhere Gone. Inspired by the last four years of living in Missouri, Cervenka’s new lyrics tackle subjects such as loneliness and isolation with such poetic honesty that there is no need for her signature snarling vocals.

Instead of keeping convention by writing songs in line with her other, louder music projects, Cervenka’s Midwest epiphany helped her do what Lil Wayne could not in The Carter, fearlessly emerge from behind the mask of public expectations and expose your soul to a bunch of drunk Long Beach fans. Somewhere in a pot-and-sizzurp stupor, Young Money is jealous.

sincerely, barack obama

This is the letter from the president that our office received on behalf of the school. It came in a self-adhesive script envelope with a return address of “THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON D.C.” Postage was pre-paid. Even though my grandmother’s contribution gratitude postcard was a mass-produced black and white mailer with an .eps signature layed over a pensive photo of the commander in chief, our letter was beyond legit, with a huge DO NOT BEND stamp on the packaging and a piece of cardboard to ensure frame-ability upon arrival. Notice how the authenticity-proving embossing of the president’s seal messed up the scan of the letter so that now you can’t tell—as I could when I was holding it—that Barack Obama’s signature bleeds through the silky-soft 24-lb. cotton bond paper, proving that a felt-tipped pen held by the president actually touched the paper. I bet Bush never would have personally signed such petty notices to institutions of the arts. Thank god we voted for change.

sunday bloody sunday

I met Ann Powers at a workshop at my school paper last spring and was so stoked that a living, breathing female music critic was actually talking to me (much less thinking I was the next Daphne Carr) that I held onto hope that our vague plans to get coffee and talk about summer writing prospects would eventually come true–even when summer ended. But then I found out that her husband got relocated and she moved to the deep South somewhere, inevitably getting lost in the thicket of backwards thought like the rich half of my family, which explained not only her lack of post-American Idol finale communication with me, but also her missing weekly musings printed in the Calendar section of the L.A. Times. Since her July disappearance, she has used her several returns to Los Angeles to write up expert assessments of big-time concerts (such as Pearl Jam at the Gibson and Thom Yorke’s recent dance party at The Orpheum), but today’s discussion of Sunday’s U2 concert at the Rose Bowl (which is so amazing, it’s not even posted on the Times’ website yet) is the most insightful yet.

Instead of writing about good-concert-bad-concert or “I love Bono” review fodder, Ann instead dissects what erecting $25 million dollar stages across the country means for the future of arena tours (creates a “welcome den”) and what the streaming of Sunday’s event on YouTube does for the concert experience (nothing compares to the real thing). I love Ann Powers because her dissections are infinitely more interesting than the concerts themselves and she never ceases to amaze me with her evaluations of the vast cultural web and finding important intersections that I see, but fail to find the words for.

Also worth playing around with: the Times’ interactive graphic of U2’s in-the-round stadium modeled off the LAX Theme Building. There are 12 guys that sit in its futuristic legs to control the spotlights and the LED screen expands to create a light show shower curtain that goes crazy during “Vertigo.”

RIP brendan mullen

Brendan Mullen died on Monday and with it, a piece of LA punk history. Not only did he skip out on the UK to co-own Hollywood hardcore-hole the Masque which was in 1978 what dingy-homegrown-music haven The Smell is today, but he also used that to catapult himself into a lifelong career as the only booking agent in town who actually gave a shit about the music. We interviewed him back in 2007 for our Masque 30th Anniversary Issue and discovered that New York sucked even back then and he still owns 95% of his old records. Flea wrote “an appreciation” of Mullen for the LA Times and it made me cry openly on the blue line as it rolled through South Central. I obviously didn’t know him personally, but his is a name that comes up again and again when talking of the underground’s don’t-give-a-fuck early days and because of him bands like X, The Germs, The Dogs and The Zeroes are still (in one incarnation or another) playing shows.

RIP Brendan Mullen

lbc’s lbt is omg

Dear Long Beach Transit,

You’ve really been on a roll lately. And yes, that pun was intended. I haven’t been on your cheap, urban bus system since that summer I was homeless and even then, it was only the 4th Street crawler to get me from downtown to Taqueria #4 at Redondo. But yesterday, you became the highlight of a trek that took me from the bus stop outside my apartment all the way (sorry to bare my soul here) through the Orange County of my past and into the arms of my simultaneous future–Long Island Iced Teas and bypassing hospital visitor hours included.

Anyway, what I realized on my mandatory ride on route 91 to PCH is that where Metro went wrong in its most recent bus upgrades, you went right and your board of directors is reveling in what I see as more model-proof that effective public transportation is possible in Southern California. But you’ve always been licking at new technologies, like the water taxi that blasts through near-stagnant ocean from the Alamitos Bay to Belmont Shore and your 2006 implementation of real-time satellite bus tracking available online or from bus stops.

Your newest fleet-vestment, however, tops it all!

In April, a new batch of hybrid-electric buses–Passport shuttles on Prius technology slathered in USC-pride steroids–were added to the fleet. In addition to windows tinted on the outside and acceleration that sounds like a fucking Tomorrowland ride, the new buses have extra butt-friendly seats (like the best motel bed you’ve ever slept on) and a route-specific recording of hypnotizing upcoming-stop announcements (in a Bond-lab-of-the-future sort of way).

My bus driver was barely out of high school and smiled even though I was unprepared for the 20 cent fee hike to ride on the eastbound clean-air machine. A balding ginger wearing a Lakers-jersey and green patent leather Dunks sat across from me. He had so many bags (one on a stick) that I was convinced he was The Hip-Hop Hobo Leprechaun I’d been dreaming of writing screenplays about. More people got on. There was no graffiti etched into the windows, no shitty tag names scrawled into the seat backs. The crackheads sang to themselves, the high school girls texted their 20 year-old boyfriends. Everyone said “Thanks” to the bus driver as they got off, even the ones that didn’t speak English.

It was a pleasant experience and I hate that word and never thought I would ever use it, especially in reference to something in Long Beach and especially not about a fucking bus ride, but it was. Everyone on that thing is a typical Long Beach freak–even me–and the experience of us freaks engaging in some form of civilized urbanity provided an uplifting feeling that betrayed the surrounding decay like a night at the Queen Mary Hotel.

So, I’m throwing up words here because I’m glad someone acknowledges what Metro never will: that even weirdos who ride the bus deserve privacy from the  gawking public, comfortable seating and a lulling directional voice reminding us of where the hell we are because sometimes, who knows?

Oh yeah, Long Beach.

–Mandy

an unsent letter to the editors of newsweek

Dear Newsweek,

I should have guessed by the wording of your cover story this week, but your “exclusive” ranking of The Greenest Big Companies in America is more structurally unsound than the US fucking economy. Anyone mindlessly flipping through your beautifully-colored rankings wouldn’t think twice about the recognizable names that made the top 50—Intel, McDonalds, Microsoft–but when Wal-Mart comes in at 59 (under companies founded on eco-friendly principles like Whole Foods Market) it becomes apparent that something else is at work here. How is it that you scored these corporate giants to come up with a grossly misdirected, arbitrary ranking and how is it that corporate image has somewhow been mistaken for actual results?

Although you attempted to “design a ranking system that makes sense,” you failed to make sense on many levels, firstly with your failure to even define what “green” means in the context of these rankings. Furthermore, with the Green Score being based off three arbitrary factors (Environmental Impact, Green Policies and Reputation Survey),  you also failed to prove to me that any of these companies have done more than sign theoretical letters of intent to “go green” (and convince their peers of the same good intentions).

The calculations of your index (above) is flawed in the following ways:

• Environmental Impact Score: Above everything else, the information that you received in order to conduct these rankings were not even your own, but instead were obtained through a third-party surveyor, Trucost, whose only achievement in the world of providing environmental impact data is for this very ranking. They work off of questionably reliable financial and emissions data provided by the companies themselves, churning it through some algorithm they concocted so that the information becomes readable in “the one currency that business managers are comfortable with: dollars and cents.” For the purposes of your Environmental Impact Score–which is a company’s supposed worldwide footprint “based on more than 700 metrics” provided by Trucost–what does dollars and cents have to do with it? Moreover, who the fuck is Trucost lobbying for?
• Green Policies Score: Your “comprehensive assessment of environmental initiatives” is as useless as a love letter from an ex boyfriend. Analyzing green policies is just tallying up the number of rules that the companies have in place, announcements of good intentions that give no indication of actual enforcement mus less results. If everyone got fucking gold stars for promising to be good, we’d have a lot of assholes out on parole.
• Reputation Survey: This logistic was the most infuriating to see on your list of calculating factors. Since when are the opinions of CEOs “and other green experts” in any way shape or form relevant to a company’s actual “greenness”? The opinions of CEOs are not based on actual performance, but on inside opinions and the drama of capitalism that only the rich white men on top could ever understand. Who knows if Wells Fargo’s 38.96 rating is truly because they have a reputation as a non-green company or if they jilted those asked in a past business deal? But moreso, why does that matter anyway?
• Green Score: In addition to the faulty scores given in the three previously mentioned categories (that are twice-removed the actual impact of the companies), the Green Score is the most misguided yet. As the main number by which all the companies on the list are ordered, the Green Score is “a statistically weighted average” of the three meaningless numbers before it. What the fuck does that mean?! When you statistically weight stuff, that means that you have, again, arbitarily created a formula by which one of the previous faulty scores means more than the other, but I can’t decide which is less important to a green ranking: public image, internal image or an unconfirmed “environmental impact.” Despite your scrambled wording to justify these green rankings, I tried to find a pattern in the incongruous number jumble and figure out which of these factors was weighted more, but I could find no method in your madness. How is it that Owens Corning’s impact of 15, policy of 66 and reputation of 47 comes out to a green score of 80, a number much greater than any of the previous?
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The most frustrating thing about your “statistically weighted average” is that the one thing that should be statistically weighted above any of the other bullshit was not even included in the rankings evaluation. A company’s greenhouse gas emissions is an actual representation of its impact on the environment and yet, these numbers remained in a column to the right of the green score as an anecdote to the already-decided company grade. By not factoring in the physical impact of these companies, you are judging them based on their corporate image more than the actual realization of that image.

This leaves companies like Wal-Mart (above, with 21.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the most of any company on the list) with high rankings despite their unreasonably high contribution to atmospheric decay and their public reputation as professional policy bullshitters. Did you miss the whole New Age of Wal-Mart documentary on CNBC where they dedicated 2 hours to exposing the company’s lack of reliability with manufacturer sustainability audits and spent another hour talking about how their new marketing campaign demonstrating a more environmentally-friendly approach is a great cover-up for a company that would still sell out its own planet for the bottom line. Let’s not even start on Wal-Mart’s rapid expansion in emerging markets (like China’s 300-and-counting stores) which negates installing energy-saving LED lights in American stores by exponentially expanding their horrific global impact. Can we really give the world’s largest corporate producer of greenhouse gas emissions a thumbs up for intentions to make each store a little more green when they’re building 50 new ones every year?

The main point of my rant against your inaugural green rankings is not to say that corporations are bad and we’re all going to hell (we are, though), but more to enlighten whoever created this defective ranking to the scary truth behind bullshit numbers. Intentions to not equal results and I would be hardpressed to believe that your pages of concocted numbers show anything more than whose PR people can paint the prettiest picture. Wake up, Newsweek. Dig deeper (I know you’re good for it). There is a way to do this properly, but you might actually (GASP) have to work for it. The answers are there, my dear favorite slightly-liberal news source, just don’t go to Trucost looking for them.

Sincerely yours,

Normandie Rawlins

in your headphones

I wrote a few reviews for CDs coming out today. Blahhhh.

Thrice
Beggars
Vagrant Records

Irvine post-punk band Thrice has been at it for almost a decade, but its stalwart status makes no apologies for its seventh studio album, Beggars, which takes a step back from the band’s increasingly conceptual work to revisit the upbeat sounds of its past. After its first two albums — Identity Crisis and Illusion of Safety — introduced the fast, spastic guitar-driven songs that defined its initial popularity, Thrice slid into its softer side. Vheissu turned Thrice’s mosh-inducing hardcore into ambient, almost spiritual sounds by incorporating electronics, strings and a Rhodes piano. And with four separate CDs — each with an earth, wind, fire or water theme — released in two bouts of double discs, The Alchemy Index served as the climax for the band’s lofty conceptual goals.  But after four discs filled with various experimental techniques and ambiguously religious lyrics, Beggars comes in to showcase that Thrice is capable of meeting the two personalities in the middle. Singer Dustin Kensrue fluctuates between scratchy screams and soaring high notes, drummer Riley Breckenridge keeps 4-4 as often as he goes off conventional time signatures and the band as a whole presents on Beggars a more mature version of the sound that won its first fans nine years ago. After going to the extreme with an ambitious concept album, the members of Thrice have been able to hold back enough to make an album that isn’t too hot or too cold, but just right.

Pete Yorn and Scarlet Johansson
Break Up
Rhino Records

Three years ago, actress Scarlett Johansson and singer/songwriter Pete Yorn recorded a string of catchy duets in 48 hours without much thought of the outcome. Inspired by the 1968 actress-musician duets of Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg, Yorn asked Johansson if she’d like to record some songs with him and, unfazed by outside influences or expectations, the two laid down the tracks that were to become their album, Break Up. Although Johansson released a solo album of awkward Tom Waits covers last year, Break Up was recorded almost two years prior. The dreamy banjos and throaty soul vocals take listeners on a sonic journey though a mutually self-destructive relationship. Even though the story arc is depressing, the songs are upbeat. Even in moments when the lyrics threaten imminent relationship disintegration, one can’t help but bob along with the catchy guitar work. But while closer in concept to the Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward collaboration band She & Him, the Johansson-Yorn album varies in one major respect — Yorn wrote everything. Johansson lends unexpectedly sultry harmonies — like a more baritone Amy Winehouse — to Yorn’s crisp pop-rock songs, but she fails to demonstrate that she understands any of the musical technicalities gone into the album’s creation.  Great for the celebrity novelty — they even cover Big Star — but unfortunately, Break Up pushes little boundaries for either party involved.

Big Star
Keep an Eye on the Sky (Box Set)
Rhino Records

Big Star is the one band that everyone knows, but no one has heard of. Although the Memphis foursome self-released two albums during their three years as a band, they played only a handful of shows, received little radio play and were virtually unknown when they disbanded in 1974. But after a 1978 release of the previously recorded — and musically darker — album Third/Sister Lovers,  Big Star’s ragged-guitar, country-tinged power-pop slowly gained a cult following and the short-lived band has since inspired an eclectic list of subsequent generations’ alternative rock musicians from The Replacements to R.E.M.  Recognizing its influence on indie bands around the world, Big Star reunited in the early ’90s, and has been actively touring, releasing live records and keeping a presence greater than in its heyday (think That 70’s Show’s theme song and Adventureland soundtrack). And to demonstrate its evolution from refined British Invasion wannabe rock-n-roll to the meticulously textured pop finesse that fuels modern alternative music, Rhino Records has compiled a four-disc box set titled Keep an Eye on the Sky. With nearly 100 tracks of rarities, remixes, live recordings and unreleased tracks packaged together with liner notes, unseen photos and essays about the band’s history, Big Star is celebrating its belated popularity by giving its now-massive fan base the definitive resource for its cultural legacy.