Of He Men

Best of Craigslist recently selected this piece about masculinity, and the legacy of wounded pride in American boyhood. It's provocative, and I recommend it to you all.

Cracked Pepper

New album from Ill Chemist and CCC came out over the weekend called Cracked Pepper. It's a celebration of the 40th anniversary of The Beatles "Lonely Hearts Club Band" through a mash-up of everyone under the sun.

I'll happily lay my cards on the table and say that I hate the Beatles (as well as U2, Oasis, and that Jared guy from Subway). The reason for this is 1) because the music is outdated now and 2) if the song comes on a jukebox in a bar take a look around at the assholes singing along with "Hey Jude" and you'll know why.

That being said, I think this is a wonderful and masterful creation. It captures the magic that people must have felt in 1967 when the original album came out, while still pushing music in a creative and interesting way. It's not your typical mash-up and is incredibly complex and intelligent. It references the inspirations for the album, the music that the album later inspired, and makes leaps between obscure genres deftly. Like I said, it's a masterful album.

I strongly recommend checking it out.

CCC and Ill Chemist Present: Cracked Pepper

The 1990's - You're Supposed to Be My Friend

It's been a slow day at work today, so I'm overwhelming the Heman Blog. Sorry.

Here's a track for you by a band called The 1990's. With a name like The 1990's how bad can any of their tracks really be? Well this one is pretty nice. They sound like the kind of music that The Replacements should have been making if they'd formed their band when they were super happy 14-years-olds.

The 1990's - You're Supposed To Be My Friend

Update: Found the video for it. I think it just makes me like it more.

Oh yeah!

Check out this great animation that a student put together for his graduation project. Pretty freaking sweet! The song is Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan's "Starving in the Belly of a Whale" which is a fantastic track. It's a real double whammy.


Starving in the Belly of a Whale - Animated by Gal Shkedi

Podcasting Question

Hey I've got a question: is anyone interested in having a HMWH's podcast? It would be super easy for us to all pick an MP3 each week, send it to a central location and mix it into a podcast that we can send out. It'd be even easier for us to just pick an mp3 that we like and add it to the podcast feed whenever we have a track that we are loving.

I guess the question behind my earlier question is: does anyone really care about podcasting or is it too foreign to get on board with? I know Heman Zero and I are into it, but I'm not sure about anyone else.

Anyway, I'd be happy to create the weekly compilation and the podcast feed to send out, but it'll be based off of the interest of the Hemen (hymen?)

The National - Fake Empire (live on Letterman)

You're welcome.

Zissou Be Damned - I'm There

Architecture In Helsinki video - "Hold Music"

So it's a Monday and the band Architecture In Helsinki is sitting around their in their apartment hanging out. One of them, the drummer, goes over to his computer and - oh look! He's gotten an email from his mom. Isn't that interesting, she's forwarded him a video from YouTube. It's the music video for Ok Go, and they're dancing on treadmills.

He calls over the rest of the band to see.

"Wow." Says the lead singer. "What a fucking shitty video. I can't wait until ours comes out and makes them look like fucking idiots."

And then 6 months later Architecture In Helsinki's video comes out and Ok Go gets sent an email from their mom about a new video on YouTube. And they feel like fucking idiots.

Podcast Party: Laid Back Show

(Podcast Party is meant to be a weekly nod to the world of music podcasting. Since the world of podcasting is difficult to break into and daunting to find new and interesting podcasts these posts will help to direct those with an interest to good stuff)
Laid Back Show is a weekly show out of Brussels that plays roughly an hour long mixtape each week. The music tends to revolve around hip-hop and funk along with a light dabbling of jazz. Recently they were given an extra hour long throw back show on another radio station as well.

Since Brussels isn't exactly the music capital of the world, the Laid Back team has taken to podcasting to help spread their music. What this means is that early on Saturday morning your podcatcher program will start downloading between two and four of their mixtapes for you.

For hour-long mixtapes they're generally pretty good. The DJs do a good job of keeping the music moving along. That being said, just don't expect the music to change your life. Nothing they're doing is revolutionary but that's fine for me. I've found they're perfect for work because they tend to be light on vocals but have a lot of good and recognizable music in it. For the most part they revolve around themes: particular producers, under appreciated genres, and of course the old-school throw backs.

Laid Back Show Information Page
Laid Back Show RSS Feed

Kanye West - "Can't Tell Me Nuthin" Video (alt. version)

Holy! Living! Fuck!

Kanye West - "Can't Tell Me Nuthin" video (alt. version feat. Zach Galifianakis and Will Oldham)

Best. Prison. Activities. Hour. Ever.

Shout out to Graham for the tip.

Jeff Tweedy's Playlist from the NYT

Worth a gander.

Podcast Party: MPR's Current Song of the Day

(Podcast Party is meant to be a weekly nod to the world of music podcasting. Since the world of podcasting is difficult to break into and daunting to find new and interesting podcasts these posts will help to direct those with an interest to good stuff)

Anyone who has been to Minnesota can understand why a podcast like this exists. Minnesotans are a quiet and polite people with an intense interest in the world. This comes about because of the natural conditions that they live in: 7-8 months of weather that keeps the general population indoors.

MPR's Current Song of the Day Podcast is a great little appetizer to the world of music podcasting. Every weekday the music team from 89.3 The Current chooses a single song that stands out to them from within the piles of music that they're exposed to. If you were stuck indoors for half the year, wouldn't you want to be up on what's been going on musically in the world?

The music tastes of The Current are fairly diverse. It's mostly melodic rock and singer-songwriters but you get a good mix of faster punk, bluesy ballads, and a smattering of hip-hop. It's mostly independent artists, with very few artists that you recognize so it's pretty fresh. The best part about the song choices is their trend forecasting. They have an uncanny knowledge of what's going to be good a good month or two before it's talked about or shared widely on the bit-torrent sites (er . . . I mean in record stores).

That's about it to it. There's no intro, or outro, or ads or anything. You're just given straight up, good quality MP3s of pretty good bands. There's nothing that could go wrong. My one complaint though is that the back log only goes back to the last 7 days so if you want to redownload a track, it's probably gone. That's not really a complaint though, I just wanted to put at least one negative thing about this podcast before I ended.

Current Song of the Day information Page
Current Song of the Day RSS Feed
Add Podcast to your Podcatcher Program

Risky or Genius?

Via GvB, apparently M.I.A. will be covering this song on the forthcoming Kala.
They are the Aborigine version of Another Bad Creation.
Wow.

The Fucking Eagles

Good god I love the Fucking Eagles. Simple throwback rock that rock that makes me want to dance all crazy. Thank you Greg for tipping me off to the first respectable joke band name since the The (that is a joke). Wait, I don't even know what the joke is any more. Just listen.

Hype Machine Hacking

I'm trying to not overwhelm everyone today with a thousand posts, but this one is important. I just realized that everyone's favorite MP3 aggregator, The Hype Machine, has added RSS capabilities for their search terms. What that means is that you can do a search for an artist or a song with the Hype Machine, copy the RSS feed into iTunes and subscribe to it as a podcast. That way whenever the Hype Machine finds new things that match your search terms it'll get downloaded automatically in iTunes for you. OH MY FUCKING GOD!

Of course it's not perfect and you'll get a handful of duplicate tracks. And the search tends to take a while to return results. Oh well, I'm will to accept these faults.

If you're a noob to podcasts here's a quick walk through

1. Go to The Hype Machine
2. Search for something (ie. "the national live")
3. Scroll down the page to where it says "Get RSS Feed" with a little orange box next to it that says "XML"
4. Right click on the orange box and copy the link that it gives you
5. Go to iTunes, go to the "Advanced Menu" and select "Subscribe to podcast"
6. Paste the link into the dialog box that pops up and hit enter
7. You're all done. iTunes will automatically download any new MP3's that match your search term. In other words whenever someone posts a new live MP3 of the National, KABOOM! It's now downloaded into iTunes for you! Fuck yeah!

Here are some pre-made RSS feeds for you that you just have to copy and paste the link for.

"The National Live"
"Ghostface Killah"
"Justice Remix"
Stereogum blog
The Music Slut's Blog
Brooklyn Vegan Blog

Siren Music Festival

Though I usually avoid Coney Island, the line-up for the Siren Music Festival this weekend may persuade me otherwise. Oh, and did I mention that it is free?

I'm Not There

I guess that this is the sort of thing for Heman Woman Haters, but it's a clip from I'm Not Here, the Bob Dylan bio-pic. It's the movie where they're using lots of different actors to play Dylan (in this case it's Cate Blanchett) at different stages of his life. Plus you've got David Cross playing Allen Ginsberg which is such a mindfuck for me because you've got one of my favorite comedians of all time playing one of my favorite poets of all time. It's like if you cast Jessica Biel to play a huge BLT sandwich for my lunch.

Provocative thought of the day

Popular music certainly affects culture - it's hard to look at Elvis, The Beatles and indulgent hair metal and think otherwise. But it seems to me that music's influence on culture tends to be a one-way ratchet - toward anti-authoritarianism and anti-status quo. Lots of music movements have at their base a negative philosophy - punk and hip-hop cut their teeth on negativity, with the overtly positive artists ending up in Gap ads.
Not that I think skepticism and speaking truth to power are in any way undesirable, and I have always been drawn to music that features just this sort of critique of society, but I just wonder if it's possible to harness music to something culturally (not simply artistically) constructive? When you look at optimistic political campaigns, the songs they choose are invariably feeble. I expect to get slammed by HMZ expressing this bourgeois perspective, and I welcome it, as long as it's hitched to some comment on the role of music.
Maybe popular music is supposed to be Shiva, destroyer of the old and staid. But is that necessarily its only role?

The More You Know...

Damn. Lately, you people've been getting your post on like you was Grape Nuts. Anyway, check out the video. The Assimilated Negro found it on BET, where it was running as a PSA. It's totally rad.

Shirley Bassey - Get the Party Started

Wait . . . what the fuck? Is that Shirley "Goldfinger" Bassey covering Pink? Don't get me wrong, I love Shirley Bassey. But why this song? I feel like if she had done a little bit darker of a tune (I'm thinking "Float On" by Modest Mouse) she would have sounded a million times more natural. And what director did she hire that pitched her this bizarre fucking video. It looks like a Calvin Klein Obsession ad from 1994. Come on girl! You're better than this. If your eyes hurt, I'll direct you to this remix of her fantastic song "Where Do I Begin (Love Story)" by awayTeam.

GBH.tv - MySpace Roundup

I think that this is a fun little thing.

New Built To Spill tracks

More goodness from Stereogum yesterday. Two new Built To Spill tracks for public release. They're not connected to any album, just Built To Spill saying "hey did you think for a second that we're not awesome? Well here you go..." and then you listen to them and you're ashamed that you thought for even a split second that they're not awesome. How stupid of you.

Stereogum - New Built To Spill Tracks

The Kleptones

I assume (haughtily) that everyone has heard of the Kleptones. One of our members turned me on to this album (A Night at the Hiphopera) a few years ago, and it is goddam phenomenal. Anyway, they have a blog that is rarely updated, but I dare say that they have good taste and lots of fun little downloads. I am going to copy this to the links section as well, but take a look. Hectic City

Stereogum Presents: OK X: A Tribute to OK Computer

Uh . . . did anyone else see this earlier this morning? Am I the only one who got super excited about it?The idea is pretty sweet; to celebrate the 10th anniversary of OK Computer, Stereogum arranged some of their favorite musicians like The Cold War Kids, Vampire Weekend, and My Brightest Diamond to do a song for song remake of OK Computer. Plus all the artist give a description of their thoughts on the songs and album and the effect it had on them musically.

I'm still at work so I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but I'm kinda excited about it. Definitely in my top five albums list so it'll be fun to take a fresh listen to it.

Stereogum Presents: OK X: A Tribute to OK Computer
Download Album as Zip File

Oh... THAT'S why he's hot.

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0711,harvilla,76021,22.html

Flight of the Conchords

Mind is a Razorblade

Just so it's recorded for posterity: The Knife's "Heartbeats" is one of the best songs of this, or for that matter, any year. Let us gorge on all aspects of this epochal song.

I love the way this video captures in imagery the ecstasy of simple pleasures, like being a kid on an endless summer afternoon. The song is revelatory on such an intimate level and the video hits that note perfectly.

Also, please note how well the song translates from its synthy original:
Jose Gonzales' cover
Scala & Kalacny Brothers' Cover
A Mash-Up with Grizzly Bear's "Knife" - Highly Recommended

Because one time at HMZ's house you thought the adjacent conversation about Don Herzog was really about Werner Herzog, this one's for you, 9G.

He Boy

To My Boy

Why am I so into them? Skipping my ADD meds again might have something to do with it.