Sometimes there are certain clubs you just can’t join. Even if you consider yourself to be the fun exception or an amusing anomaly, there is a bit of decorum one must respect in established circles of humans. It can be very frustrating at times, and you might feel a bit left out and lame, but love it, set it free, gaze from the standpoint of a besotted admirer, and gather some inspiration. This is how I feel about the Bear scene.
What sort of twisted hall of fame is North Carolina cloaking from the rest of the world? Bad Brains, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Confessor, Corrosion Of Conformity, D.O.A., Fear, Fugazi, GG Allin, Husker Du, Lunachicks, Minor Threat, Mission Of Burma, Motorhead, Neurosis, Nirvana, Screeching Weasel, Sleep, Texas Is The Reason, The Dead Boys, The Exploited, The Go-Go's, The Professionals, The Replacements...Also Bo Diddley and Melissa Etheridge not to mention Prong, REM, and Sunny Day Real Estate. It's just an excerpt from the long list of bands who have charmed crusty drunkards at the Milestone.
Hideki Kaji, a Japanese pop nerd with a Nordic fetish, has spent lots of time recording at and giving tour guides to his foreign brethren at Malmö's Hellmouth, aka Tambourine Studios, where the Cardigans, Junior Senior, and many, many other artists who could use a serious kick in the kneecaps have queefed out their oeuvres. And ha ha, he was just robbed and beat up there so hard he lost a filling. While dressed as a pineapple. A fucking pineapple. The ruffians who did this have yet to be caught, and we applaud them for their good taste in targets. Finally the Swedes are taking a stand against all this namby-pamby nursery garbage that's been plaguing their land since Varg Vikernes went to jail. Hopefully this means they'll start burning down churches again.
It’s been a while since Ian Svenonius sat anyone down in the ol’ interrogation seat for a thoughtful yet shrewd bequestioning. He’s doing it again tomorrow at Logan Square Auditorium in Chicago with the city’s most loveable curmudgeon Steve Albini and Dirtbombs' Mick Collins. They will not talk about hot dogs. It’s free, but if you want to go you have to RSVP here. And when you're done sitting still and being quiet and thinking, go to our afterparty for the exact opposite of that.
Before Myspace and nerds, punk bands had to go on cable access shows and get asked stupid questions to get any exposure. Nowaday when you see these old clips it may seem like a primitive, chintzy platform for high school bands trying to get laid but it really was all they had. This was "good" in 80s Midwest America. At least for punks like Die Kreuzen. Please take notice.
OK, office punks, it's monday and I'm bored. I'm sure you are, too. Here we have some manic footage of classic first record era Husker Du. Bob Mould ain't so fat or bald, Grant Hart is still a blur of a blob behind the set and Greg Norton hasn't even grown his signature handlebar mustache yet.Funny thing about these videos is that they sound ten times better than the actual record. Enjoy these on your lunch break. If you really dig these, look up the video of The Du on the Joan Rivers Show.
I was in a bad mood when we arrived in Chicago because my friend Rita wouldn't answer her phone. I was coming down from the night before and feeling really bloated. I was about to sever our friendship for good when she finally answered her phone and promised to take me out to Ruby Tuesday's for dinner.
Everyday I walk into the Vice Melbourne office and sit down at my respective desk I am faced with two challenges: 1. Writing a letter (with a pen that writes in AIDS instead of ink) to the Australian Government to bar any Australian from being permitted to pick up an instrument or be let within a thousand meters of a recording studio and 2. Not tarring and feathering my editor for her latest installment of video forwards that ruin my life more with each passing day. Here's a few of my favorite office forward emails I've seen in the last few months.
Usually in blog posts we try and give you loads of handy links to "media-fy" your online experience into an all encompassing 360-degree brolly of moving, sounding stuff [note: we have no clue what that word means either--US ed]. Mob Rules don't actually have a MySpace, website, Facebook thing, or a blog so in this case we can only offer you an interview, YouTube video, and an MP3. Actually, that's a whole bunch of stuff so quit your whining. They are also, for our pounds, the best punk/hardcore/whatever-you're-calling-it-this-week band in the UK as of right now so click on to read about how bad Leeds is, tales of childhood urine explosions and why they are actually called Mob Rules.
You know when you did something just a little too crazy—you brought a live chicken from a slaughterhouse to a party, say, and bummed everyone out, or maybe while getting drunk with a bunch of friends you drank someone’s piss on a dare and it was too freaky to keep the good times a-runnin’—and suddenly your mind was whoa-ed out, blank, free? Mark McCoy, proprietor of Youth Attack! Records, taps right into that inner psycho instinct with a book of creepy black-and-white collage art of humans and animals and who knows what else called Wound. Blown up to dot-matrix view, it's so zeroed in it’s almost out of focus, like that 90's disturbo Answer Me! stuff, only abstracted. With an underlying vibe of a malcontent’s pain and hatred of anything using oxygen, it has the feel of something bad even if you can’t quite tell what it is. A foreword by Thalia Mavros puts it all in perspective though: when your secret source of inner violence has just barfed up its dinner, she says, your minds is suddenly clear.
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