Bongo with lingo
[note: this post is a bit of a digression. It might seem unfair to the post, amid this sea of digression, to single it out as such. You're welcome to decide for yourself. (It also could use some revision, I'll get right on that.)]
We were going to South by Southwest music festival in Austin Texas. Liz was going to see her boyfriend, and I was going to continue to reap minor dividends from my alma mater by way of a free pass, courtesy of the Duke publication board. I’d hesitated for exactly 2 minutes when Macy made the offer. A couple years ago, when I was barely writing for the Chronic any more, I’d wrangled a low-level pass out of them as a last huzzah. in return I drew up a slack centerspread that 12 Duke students probably read. A year after that Macy started her own magazine, and people seem to read that one, so she used my past coverage to snag a big time press badge, and tossed me one gratis. Terry graciously offered to house the Rock, for Macy and I and Paula Cook and half a band, and that pretty much sealed the deal. Every weekend, not to mention dollar, needs to count for me, but I couldn’t pass on a comped festival badge, brunches with M. Cook, and a bed to share with Terry.
Oh yeah and 5,000 bands playing at a hundred venues, so on and so on. It was good to have so many friends there, because normally there is so much pressure to see the coolest band possible every half hour, and this year I just wasn’t up for it. Macy and I spent three hours wandering ass-backwards in the wrong direction—trying to find a Mexican restaurant with a name that sounded just slightly different from every other restaurant in Austin—and when we finally found it in time for the Calexico’s last four (lovely) songs, we decided to quit with all the strategizing and just go for the obvious choice.
That being the M.I.A./LCD Soundsystem show. This was the show of the festival, containing not one but two of the most anticipated bands, so pre-jacked with hype that people were going to have to scramble to come up with a good reason to not try to get in. No use in denying it, M.I.A. and LCD are one-two next to each other on my iPod, and they have more plays combined than all the rest. Every subway ride is its own dance party.
(Oh and there were two other bands there, too: Ratatat, which is basically adult-contemporary electronica, or maybe ice cream truck-style hip hop, which were perfectly fine things for an opening band to be after we’d stood on line for an hour to get in; and Hot Chip, which came after M.I.A. and funked harder than all other three but nobody’d heard of them so all there is to say really is a straight line of 6 guys, 6 synths, and pocket-protector-equipped geek-nastiness. Incredible.)
For those of you who don’t keep up with thousands of music blogs each day, M.I.A. is it right now, an insta-princess the likes of which haven’t been seen in a long time, if ever. I don’t just mean the hype, there’s always hype like she’s got right now, but it’s never been behind a brown-skinned girl who belts out booty-bass anthems cribbed from dank gutters all over the world and littered with references to bombs, poverty, and terrorists. Imagine Yoko Ono busts onto the scene in ‘67, never having met John Lennon but singing like Nico and rocking like Lou Reed about Saigon hookers and jungles scorched with napalm. Yeah, I can’t imagine that either, but there are strange winds wafting over our shores these days and you can smell a big fire from awfully far away.
Macy and I went right to the very front, just behind a solid wall of cameras. Usually a hot band will have two or three photographers come out; for M.I.A. there was a horde, and few of them even looked like they were there on anything but a job. The rest of the crowd was way hyped, pretty diverse too for an event that should have been crawling with industry creeps. Behind us were two greasy punk kids with baggy pants who beat-boxed in between debates about which was better her full-length album Arular or her bootleg mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism (neither have been released in the states.)
When M.I.A.’s DJ-cum-BF Diplo came out and started spinning, the room filled up with bass, sharp thudded bursts that made the air fuzzy and thick. M.I.A. emerged to cheers, and she was, I am honored to report, totally fucking hot, in a sequined spandex tracksuit and over a baggy flea-market neon-spray-paint tee. She looked a little winded—did she say “Hello Houston!”?? But she seemed sweet enough to forgive anything (at the very least a voice that can’t quite hang with her songs’ high reaches). She looked around at this—her second or third show in the states, maybe one of a dozen live shows she’s ever done—and shook her head: “you ‘ave no i-deeuh wut I went through to get here!” Amid the cheers of welcome, the guy next to me shouted “Yes we do!” and as she started up her set I realized that he was speaking total truth: he’d probably been reading the blogs like three hours ago, with explanations of her visa troubles and up-to-the-minute posts about her flight’s status.
She started up her set and the cameras started up their flashing, and for the first few songs all I could do was watch her expression freeze like in a strobe. None of M.I.A.’s sounds are hers—she pastiches expertly from the slums of Buenos Aires, Kingston, East London, Sri Lanka, Atlanta, Bollywood and places in South Asia that I couldn’t venture a guess—but the chutzpah with which she claims them and the coy things she does with her body make for something that make lines like “I got the bombs to make you blow/I got the beats to make you bang bang bang” sound like so much more truth than your typical MC shout.
So her father can be stamped on either side of the terrorist/freedom fighter coin, and she named her damn album after him, and she sings about bombs falling on her roof and how “every gun in a battle is a son and daughter too/why you wanna talk about who done who?” and that in the meantime "you can be a follower but who's your leader/break that cycle or it will kill ya,” and it’s all almost enough to overwhelm the fact that her beats do, in fact, make you go bang bang bang. It’s almost enough to get you thinking about a world out there simmering with poverty and violence and hatred and young horny fuxxors and blogs to make the bang bang bang heard even farther round the world.
oh wait. check that. in the last, unlisted song on her album, self-titled MIA,
"Cherokee Indians/Iraqi/Indians/Girls n' my girls when it comes to the fellas them/Japanese morrocan/carribean african/Life's your life uh/who the fuck's your president"
"You no get my life cause i got [???]/spread that boy i' my mouth wide enough/got brown skin i'm a west londoner/educated but a refugee still uh/ you wanna boy [??]/you old you go/you want to bite/ you suck, you blow"
That's the final line on the album. If your college's music department was anything like my college's English department, and if it knew how to blog, it'd have a helluva seminar on its hands.
It's not every day you see one of these bursts on the horizon. of course, remove the hype and the political correctness scrambling, take out the the awareness of her deft jjuggling of agitprop warrior chic and pop sprite, and what do you get: here's this crackling young brown thing dancin' shamanic about how hot it is out there, but when her face looks out on the audience with a thousand-yard-stare but just the slightest wide-eyed mouth agape hint of a scared little girl in a strange place, and a flash captures it for whichever mag to blurb on this music phenomenon from the internet, it’s enough to make you scared to hell for this poor girl, who’s balancing an awfully hot pot of stuff over a smoldering pile of sex that smells like nothing in Austin, or Houston or most anywhere in this country, even in those coastal nodes of blue.
Then the cameras left after two songs, and the crowd and performers alike seemed to sigh and shake it off. During the call-and-response chorus to “10 Dollar”—a pubescent-sex roller-rink jam that sounds like Britney-on-crank and quotes the hooker in Full Metal Jacket—she got the crowd to chant along, shouting “what can I get for ten dollah!?” “Anything I want,” she answered and laughed at us. When she played her album’s surprise lite-jam “Sunshowers,” which peaks with the holla line to end all holla lines—“Like the PLO, I don’t surrender!”—I almost expected to hear cheers. Nope, just dancing. Not quite there yet. But there’s time, and M.I.A. is probably gonna be around.
* * *
I danced like a maniac through almost every song of the worst set we saw at SXSW: LCD Soundsystem, which is the side project (or main event?) of half of the hottest thing in Hipsville. As part of the DFA dancester empire, LCD Soundsystem is a band that transcended Scene upon its very birth. They released like three songs in two years, self-mocking sneers packed into 8-minute dancefloor powderkegs, and through various other sly moves became the biggest thing ever, like MIA, before selling a full length record. now their full-length’s out and, if it doesn’t pack the punch of their singles, it does open up their sound to include ref’s not just to the New Order, the Fall, and Gang of Four, but also to the Beatles, Talking Heads, Can…an impressive hand.
Of course, then we saw the guy, who turns out to be a hipster Baby Huey, this big chubbers with a pouty scrubbled baby face. At first, when he argued with the sound guy, it seemed like shtick, then like attitude; but after just a few minutes (and certainly after the first song) it became obvious that this guy was just totally fucking drunk as a bitch, and while this was occasionally amusing (“You think this is easy? Well come on up here, let’s do this!”) it was more like someone had brought a five year old to the party and let them run terribly free. He bitched at the sound guy mercilessly between songs, he bitched at the band, he bitched at the audience, sucking up any attention he could get. The funny thing was that this manchild’s band could play, so if you ignored his tuneless shouting (a particular shame in songs where, on headphones, his grunts and slurs are totally precise and deliberate and OTM) you could rock out pretty hard. And the crowd did! They did rock out, totally out, in a way that no SXSW crowds—much less ones at shows where industry types are 95% of the people in the audience—ever do, while he sounded like nothing so much as Jack Black in the opening scenes of School of Rock. this guy’s made a career out of both mocking the scene and then besting it, but here’s he embodies the OK so the guy played a mean cowbell, the booze sure didn’t hamper that, and it was almost good enough to make you wonder whether this rock-brat thing was just an act; but it was impossible not to think of Christopher Walken’s prescription in that bizarre SNL skit – “needs more cowbell,” indeed. In any case, when he tantrumed for five minutes straight, nobody heckled! Any self-respecting audience would have booed or at least told him to shut the hell up and play…but that’s just it, they wouldn’t and he knew it too, as he said to the one guy who shouted something: “Ahhh, shut the hell up. None of you paid for this show anyway.”
He was right on that one.
It was like watching the rebirth of post-something and the collapse of meta-something all in one night, although I’m not writing this for any publication so I just can’t be bothered to say what.
I’ll give him exactly this much slack: it was St Patrick’s day, and the guy’s last name is Murphy after all. On our long trip back to Terry’s place, we watched about a dozen fire trucks zooming around the city, and one guy who was dressed in green and standing (barely) in the middle of four lanes of traffic almost got hit by two of them.
We were going to South by Southwest music festival in Austin Texas. Liz was going to see her boyfriend, and I was going to continue to reap minor dividends from my alma mater by way of a free pass, courtesy of the Duke publication board. I’d hesitated for exactly 2 minutes when Macy made the offer. A couple years ago, when I was barely writing for the Chronic any more, I’d wrangled a low-level pass out of them as a last huzzah. in return I drew up a slack centerspread that 12 Duke students probably read. A year after that Macy started her own magazine, and people seem to read that one, so she used my past coverage to snag a big time press badge, and tossed me one gratis. Terry graciously offered to house the Rock, for Macy and I and Paula Cook and half a band, and that pretty much sealed the deal. Every weekend, not to mention dollar, needs to count for me, but I couldn’t pass on a comped festival badge, brunches with M. Cook, and a bed to share with Terry.
Oh yeah and 5,000 bands playing at a hundred venues, so on and so on. It was good to have so many friends there, because normally there is so much pressure to see the coolest band possible every half hour, and this year I just wasn’t up for it. Macy and I spent three hours wandering ass-backwards in the wrong direction—trying to find a Mexican restaurant with a name that sounded just slightly different from every other restaurant in Austin—and when we finally found it in time for the Calexico’s last four (lovely) songs, we decided to quit with all the strategizing and just go for the obvious choice.
That being the M.I.A./LCD Soundsystem show. This was the show of the festival, containing not one but two of the most anticipated bands, so pre-jacked with hype that people were going to have to scramble to come up with a good reason to not try to get in. No use in denying it, M.I.A. and LCD are one-two next to each other on my iPod, and they have more plays combined than all the rest. Every subway ride is its own dance party.
(Oh and there were two other bands there, too: Ratatat, which is basically adult-contemporary electronica, or maybe ice cream truck-style hip hop, which were perfectly fine things for an opening band to be after we’d stood on line for an hour to get in; and Hot Chip, which came after M.I.A. and funked harder than all other three but nobody’d heard of them so all there is to say really is a straight line of 6 guys, 6 synths, and pocket-protector-equipped geek-nastiness. Incredible.)
For those of you who don’t keep up with thousands of music blogs each day, M.I.A. is it right now, an insta-princess the likes of which haven’t been seen in a long time, if ever. I don’t just mean the hype, there’s always hype like she’s got right now, but it’s never been behind a brown-skinned girl who belts out booty-bass anthems cribbed from dank gutters all over the world and littered with references to bombs, poverty, and terrorists. Imagine Yoko Ono busts onto the scene in ‘67, never having met John Lennon but singing like Nico and rocking like Lou Reed about Saigon hookers and jungles scorched with napalm. Yeah, I can’t imagine that either, but there are strange winds wafting over our shores these days and you can smell a big fire from awfully far away.
Macy and I went right to the very front, just behind a solid wall of cameras. Usually a hot band will have two or three photographers come out; for M.I.A. there was a horde, and few of them even looked like they were there on anything but a job. The rest of the crowd was way hyped, pretty diverse too for an event that should have been crawling with industry creeps. Behind us were two greasy punk kids with baggy pants who beat-boxed in between debates about which was better her full-length album Arular or her bootleg mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism (neither have been released in the states.)
When M.I.A.’s DJ-cum-BF Diplo came out and started spinning, the room filled up with bass, sharp thudded bursts that made the air fuzzy and thick. M.I.A. emerged to cheers, and she was, I am honored to report, totally fucking hot, in a sequined spandex tracksuit and over a baggy flea-market neon-spray-paint tee. She looked a little winded—did she say “Hello Houston!”?? But she seemed sweet enough to forgive anything (at the very least a voice that can’t quite hang with her songs’ high reaches). She looked around at this—her second or third show in the states, maybe one of a dozen live shows she’s ever done—and shook her head: “you ‘ave no i-deeuh wut I went through to get here!” Amid the cheers of welcome, the guy next to me shouted “Yes we do!” and as she started up her set I realized that he was speaking total truth: he’d probably been reading the blogs like three hours ago, with explanations of her visa troubles and up-to-the-minute posts about her flight’s status.
She started up her set and the cameras started up their flashing, and for the first few songs all I could do was watch her expression freeze like in a strobe. None of M.I.A.’s sounds are hers—she pastiches expertly from the slums of Buenos Aires, Kingston, East London, Sri Lanka, Atlanta, Bollywood and places in South Asia that I couldn’t venture a guess—but the chutzpah with which she claims them and the coy things she does with her body make for something that make lines like “I got the bombs to make you blow/I got the beats to make you bang bang bang” sound like so much more truth than your typical MC shout.
So her father can be stamped on either side of the terrorist/freedom fighter coin, and she named her damn album after him, and she sings about bombs falling on her roof and how “every gun in a battle is a son and daughter too/why you wanna talk about who done who?” and that in the meantime "you can be a follower but who's your leader/break that cycle or it will kill ya,” and it’s all almost enough to overwhelm the fact that her beats do, in fact, make you go bang bang bang. It’s almost enough to get you thinking about a world out there simmering with poverty and violence and hatred and young horny fuxxors and blogs to make the bang bang bang heard even farther round the world.
oh wait. check that. in the last, unlisted song on her album, self-titled MIA,
"Cherokee Indians/Iraqi/Indians/Girls n' my girls when it comes to the fellas them/Japanese morrocan/carribean african/Life's your life uh/who the fuck's your president"
"You no get my life cause i got [???]/spread that boy i' my mouth wide enough/got brown skin i'm a west londoner/educated but a refugee still uh/ you wanna boy [??]/you old you go/you want to bite/ you suck, you blow"
That's the final line on the album. If your college's music department was anything like my college's English department, and if it knew how to blog, it'd have a helluva seminar on its hands.
It's not every day you see one of these bursts on the horizon. of course, remove the hype and the political correctness scrambling, take out the the awareness of her deft jjuggling of agitprop warrior chic and pop sprite, and what do you get: here's this crackling young brown thing dancin' shamanic about how hot it is out there, but when her face looks out on the audience with a thousand-yard-stare but just the slightest wide-eyed mouth agape hint of a scared little girl in a strange place, and a flash captures it for whichever mag to blurb on this music phenomenon from the internet, it’s enough to make you scared to hell for this poor girl, who’s balancing an awfully hot pot of stuff over a smoldering pile of sex that smells like nothing in Austin, or Houston or most anywhere in this country, even in those coastal nodes of blue.
Then the cameras left after two songs, and the crowd and performers alike seemed to sigh and shake it off. During the call-and-response chorus to “10 Dollar”—a pubescent-sex roller-rink jam that sounds like Britney-on-crank and quotes the hooker in Full Metal Jacket—she got the crowd to chant along, shouting “what can I get for ten dollah!?” “Anything I want,” she answered and laughed at us. When she played her album’s surprise lite-jam “Sunshowers,” which peaks with the holla line to end all holla lines—“Like the PLO, I don’t surrender!”—I almost expected to hear cheers. Nope, just dancing. Not quite there yet. But there’s time, and M.I.A. is probably gonna be around.
* * *
I danced like a maniac through almost every song of the worst set we saw at SXSW: LCD Soundsystem, which is the side project (or main event?) of half of the hottest thing in Hipsville. As part of the DFA dancester empire, LCD Soundsystem is a band that transcended Scene upon its very birth. They released like three songs in two years, self-mocking sneers packed into 8-minute dancefloor powderkegs, and through various other sly moves became the biggest thing ever, like MIA, before selling a full length record. now their full-length’s out and, if it doesn’t pack the punch of their singles, it does open up their sound to include ref’s not just to the New Order, the Fall, and Gang of Four, but also to the Beatles, Talking Heads, Can…an impressive hand.
Of course, then we saw the guy, who turns out to be a hipster Baby Huey, this big chubbers with a pouty scrubbled baby face. At first, when he argued with the sound guy, it seemed like shtick, then like attitude; but after just a few minutes (and certainly after the first song) it became obvious that this guy was just totally fucking drunk as a bitch, and while this was occasionally amusing (“You think this is easy? Well come on up here, let’s do this!”) it was more like someone had brought a five year old to the party and let them run terribly free. He bitched at the sound guy mercilessly between songs, he bitched at the band, he bitched at the audience, sucking up any attention he could get. The funny thing was that this manchild’s band could play, so if you ignored his tuneless shouting (a particular shame in songs where, on headphones, his grunts and slurs are totally precise and deliberate and OTM) you could rock out pretty hard. And the crowd did! They did rock out, totally out, in a way that no SXSW crowds—much less ones at shows where industry types are 95% of the people in the audience—ever do, while he sounded like nothing so much as Jack Black in the opening scenes of School of Rock. this guy’s made a career out of both mocking the scene and then besting it, but here’s he embodies the OK so the guy played a mean cowbell, the booze sure didn’t hamper that, and it was almost good enough to make you wonder whether this rock-brat thing was just an act; but it was impossible not to think of Christopher Walken’s prescription in that bizarre SNL skit – “needs more cowbell,” indeed. In any case, when he tantrumed for five minutes straight, nobody heckled! Any self-respecting audience would have booed or at least told him to shut the hell up and play…but that’s just it, they wouldn’t and he knew it too, as he said to the one guy who shouted something: “Ahhh, shut the hell up. None of you paid for this show anyway.”
He was right on that one.
It was like watching the rebirth of post-something and the collapse of meta-something all in one night, although I’m not writing this for any publication so I just can’t be bothered to say what.
I’ll give him exactly this much slack: it was St Patrick’s day, and the guy’s last name is Murphy after all. On our long trip back to Terry’s place, we watched about a dozen fire trucks zooming around the city, and one guy who was dressed in green and standing (barely) in the middle of four lanes of traffic almost got hit by two of them.
posted by Greg Bloom at 3/27/2005 05:25:00 PM
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