“He’s just a big schlub from Detroit. He’s fat and he’s got a mustache. I wouldn’t shit in Lester’s nose.”
Lou Reed, in a jab at Lester Bangs after the rock critic referred to his transvestite (but possibly transsexual) lover Rachel as “the bearded lady” in a column — in an interview with “Zig Zag” magazine, circa 1973.
“Purely strange, a mother lode of unholy awe. If the album ‘Berlin’ was melted down in a vat and reshaped into human form, it would be this creature.”
Lester Bangs, from Jim DeRogatis’ biography of Bangs, “Let It Blurt,” describing Bangs’ impression of Rachel, a transvestite (but possibly transsexual) Lou Reed was dating and who was in tow when Bangs interviewed Reed at the Detroit Hilton in 1973. More info and photos of Rachel and Lou here.
“It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire and ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”
Frank Zappa, in his 1989 autobiography, “The Real Frank Zappa Book”
“Cutting ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ out of the market just as it was reaching its audience, EMI, the Sex Pistols’ first label, dropped them after the televised ‘fuck’ that made Declan McManus’ day, recalled the records, and melted them down. … The press contrived a moral panic to sell papers, but the panic seemed real soon enough: the Sex Pistols were denounced in Parliament as a threat to the British way of life, by socialists as fascist, by fascists as communist. … The group itself had become contraband. In late 1975, when the Sex Pistols first appeared, crashing another band’s concert and impersonating the opening act, the plug was pulled after ten minutes; now to play in public they were forced to turn up in secret, under a false name. The very emptiness of the terrain they had cleared — the multiplication of new voices from below, the intensification of abuse from above, both sides fighting for possession of that suddenly cleared ground — had pushed them toward self-destruction, into the silence of all nihilist noise.”
Greil Marcus, discussing the Sex Pistols in his 1989 book, “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century”
I’m not really a fan of remixes and/or extended mixes, just as I’m not generally a fan of sequels (unless you tell me Al Pacino is the villain in an upcoming Stan Lee joint). Remixes by nature are just filler to keep you on the dance floor longer, even if we’re talking about a goth remix — which should be an oxymoron — and said club-goer is just going to be holding up the walls all night in some dark corner.
I’m, of course, referring to the “goth” culture before it had a name and was then promptly sold to Disney, before people tweeted misery to other antisocial “nonconformists” who also dress up like Tim Burton characters. Does anybody remember The Cure’s abomination, “Mixed Up,” a collection of its hits in New and Improved 30 Percent Larger Fun Pack versions? On “Lullaby” alone, listeners are left stuck — like a spider’s meal — in a hepped-up groove somewhere near the beginning of the song for nearly eight torturous minutes. It’s embarrassing to say it now, but there was a time when Robert Smith could do no wrong, and I listened to “Mixed Up” as faithfully as all the rest of his output, even side project The Glove.
But I digress. My point here is that the Liars’ remix of The Twilight Sad’s “Nil,” (off the latter’s third full-length, “No One Can Ever Know”) is one of the best remixes I’ve heard. I’ll admit that I am perhaps just flogging a dead horse, as in the evolving climate, the line between remixes, sampling and covers is quite blurry. In any case, the only peers to this remix that spring to mind are a few entries off 2012’s “Dross Glop,” reinterpreting The Battles’ “Gloss Drop,” such as The Alchemist’s remix of “Futura.”
Ultimately, I think a good remix is able to give the original new appeal, which is what happened in the case of “Nil.” I’d sort of passed by The Twilight Sad’s catalog with barely a glance before hearing the gussied-up Liars mix. Now, I know better.
SEE ALSO: EARGGH! reviews Liars, “Loose Nuts on the Veladrome”
“I once proposed the construction of an apparatus which would have been a cross between a gallows and an old-fashioned shower stall. The shower curtain was to have been an American flag, and behind it, hanging from the gallows, was to be a side of beef (at room temperature). I proposed to roll this out at the end of each show, play a fanfare and open the curtain, releasing flies into the audience.”
Frank Zappa, detailing his early exploits, circa the summer of 1967, which he referred to as “the early Mothers of Invention ‘entertainment statement,'” and also included ACTUAL rotting vegetables and whipped cream covering a stage in a stuffy, AC-less, run-down Greenwich Village theater the band was regularly gigging at that summer, detailed in his autobiography, “The Real Frank Zappa Book”
“People say, ‘Nirvana killed heavy metal,’ and they didn’t. If you had any type of music scene that is so weak that another band can come on playing a different type of music and kill your scene, then your scene wasn’t good enough in the first place.”
Riki Rachtman, host of “Headbangers Ball” when Nirvana members Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic showed up for an interview in November 1991, in a 2011 interview. It’s notorious in that Cobain wore a bright yellow gown and was obviously under the influence, and the appearance for many symbolizes the death of “hair metal,” i.e. pop metal — of which Def Leppard is a perfect representative. Read the interview here. Watch the “Headbangers Ball” segment here.
“I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if i did this by accident and i’m gonna flounder without them. … I’m sad that my desire to be treated as an equal and as a human being is interpreted as hatred of men, rather than a request to be included and respected.”
Excerpts from a blog post/rant by Grimes (the stage name of Claire Boucher), viewable in full on her Tumblr
“Where are you? Children, are you walking through the air that is 50 degrees wrong? Are you walking under the tampered sky in the 10th year of no rain? We are millions trying to get dressed and go to work as screams travel back and forth inside our bodies, as our own shock and disbelief pulls on our faces. We push in the earbuds, Adele sings ‘Rolling in the Deep.'”
Bill Tale — better known as Reverend Billy, leader of the Church of Stop Shopping — in his 2012 book, “The End of the World”
“It is for anyone who has ever had any interest in combining the joie de vivre that is the vigorous bouncing of one’s anatomical/spiritual/energetic molecules with the existential absurdity that is living in a world/country/economic system of injustice, war-mongering, and cultural ineptitude. Oh wait, that’s you. If you feel like it: come in your own crazy aerobics costume, whatever that means to you. Taste the sweat.”
Excerpt from The Knife’s announcement of its upcoming “Shaking the Habitual” tour, viewable in full here
EARGGH! 