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.