Category Archives: video

Night Music: Toots and the Maytals, “Funky Kingston”

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It wasn’t an accident that I was holding Toots and the Maytal’s Funky Kingston in my modeling debut. It’s an amazing album and an amazing song, and totally in line with the Mono Brothers ethos to intimidate the winky Meeks into moving on from whatever weak stuff he liked to the good stuff. He would have thanked us, but it was only an ad, and we were only models.

In any case, maybe you haven’t heard Funky Kingston. Please do:

Link: Purple Rain is 30.

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I came across this story today, by Anil Dash, which celebrates the 30th anniversay of Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain by dissecting it. Full of excellent detail, it also illustrates our current linking problem. Many of his links are to Spotify tracks, which don’t play for me. I hope they do for you.

But what was weird and wonderful and included in Dash’s story was the video of James Brown, Michael Jackson and Prince on the same stage, maybe not at the same time but nearly so. You don’t want to miss this.

Night Music: The Rolling Stones, “I Am Waiting”

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When this clip started I saw the tow-headed kid playing the zither and thought it was cute, before realizing that it was Brian Jones playing a dulcimer. (So, it turns out that a zither is the large group of instruments that involve strings stretched across a resonator box. Specific types of zithers include pianos, guitars, autoharps and dulcimers, among many others.)

This song is the soundtrack to a big scene in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, which we watched tonight, but it is also one of those songs that is permanently fixed in my head, my own soundtrack. If I’m standing, waiting for something to happen, for the theater to let us in or my daughter to come downstairs so we can go out, it is this tune I will start singing quietly to myself, for obvious reasons.

It was originally released on the Stones’ Aftermath album, their first great album, musically ambitious and accomplished. These Stones, in 1966, were a little bit artsy, trying hard to expand their range, while at the same time burnishing their images as provocateurs. More than eight years later, when I landed in college, the debate continued to rage about whether Stupid Girl was misogynistic hate or closely-observed satire.

Not so with this one, which is more mysterious than a challenge.

Night Music: Epic Rap Battles of History, “Stephen King versus Edgar Allan Poe”

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Until about 20 minutes ago I didn’t know this was a thing. Two characters rap against each other, two characters from history tell their stories competitively, and then an expressive announcer asks us all to vote.

This video has more than 9,000,000 views. The John Lennon versus Bill O’Reilly battle has more than 30 million. Lady Gaga versus Sarah Palin? More than 34 million.

This is big business, and has obviously touched a chord. I’m not sure which one that is. There’s cursing, bad costumes, historical facts spouted too fast to absorb, and bad music.

But once I started I had a hard time stopping. We’re doomed.

Stay up all night, there are a lot of them. Here’s the Gaga Palin smackdown.

Breakfast Blend: The Hello People

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Jethro Tull are considered to be the only rock band that featured a flute, according to things I was reading last night. Now, we’ve already had Jeremy Steig on the Remnants, but I was put in mind of the Hello People, a band that never had a hit but caused a ruckus in 1970 with Anthem, a song about the lead singer’s time in jail for draft resistance.

Well, not about the time he spent in jail, but a call for others to stand up for what they believe.

Anthem is a sing songy pop song attempting to conscientious objectors, and showed some signs of breaking out when it was banned from the radio. I think their appearance on the Smothers Brothers show came about in defiance of that ban.

One other thing: They wore face paint and performed as mimes, though thankfully not the miming part in this or any of the clips.

Now sure, that’s not a rock song. But this one is.

Finally, the Hello people in the 70s hooked up with Todd Rundgren and served as his touring band. He produced an album for them in 1975, on which they covered this Rundgren tune.

Night Music: Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, “Anthony and Cleopatra”

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Live, at the Peppermint Lounge, in Manhattan, which was kind of next door to the original and awesome Barnes and Noble Store.

Not that Barnes and Noble had anything to do with it, except that rents were cheap in that belly of Manhattan, for reasons that are hard to imagine now, at that time.

As far as Jonathan Richman and his white reggae goes, this live cut explains a lot about what he’s thinking. And the band executes. Richman was a legendary originator of the punk sound, and later a performer who repudiated much of what came before, and still made a bunch of music that was passionate and individualist and passionate.

Lunch Break: More White Reggae

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Thinking about weird but wonderful white reggae, here is this one from Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Abdul and Cleopatra, that I really love (with a suitably odd homemade video–for instance, why use a map of the Tidewater rather than, say, Egypt?):

And this other one, the instrumental Egyptian Reggae, which has more than 2 million views, perhaps more for the video than the tune (which is catchy nonetheless).

New Night Music: The Menzingers, “I Don’t Want To Be An Asshole Anymore”

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I read a good review of this band’s “punky” new record last week and waded in. These guys are from Scranton PA, and the band’s name is the phonetic spelling of the German word for troubadour, which is kind of what gives here. You would hope that the sons of coal miners and refinery workers would be clawing (or digging) like mad to escape the brutal lives their parents lived as they struggled to get their little honeys into college and away from a life of Walmart and picking scabs off the inside of their various orifices. Kind of like Steve, who hails from around those parts, but no.

This kind of punk is really singer songwriter pop bleating catchy tunes above some well struck drums and jangly-hard guitars. I listened to a bunch of Menzinger’s songs and this one is the best I heard, but if you like it you might find something you like more in their catalog. If that’s the case, I’d suggest you try harder. There’s no reason to settle for competent fake punk.

By the way, I tried to be grumpy about the video but I couldn’t. Perfect.

Hmm, Menzingers, kind of like telling jokes about men. Kind of like that video. Brilliant.