I don't know whose house it was, and too many stories start like this, but so be it. It's Greenville. It's a party. In the tiny room in the front Irata was blasting, Hammer no More the Fingers waited in the wings. The Future Kings of Nowhere had finished their set, followed by some guy in a Soviet flag cape. The kegs bled steadily, empty by midnight when the bottles and cans took over. Everything flowed like mad, music and beer and things I can't mention in print and people wandering into the street with their Big Voices. Everything but beer pong... welcome to a show house.
Summer's coming, and I wanted to survive its fury, but that's just another aspect of life in the Underground. It's when the best bands come through. Case in point: Gifts From Enola's set last July 3rd. Maybe it was after midnight, but even if it wasn't I still consider it the ultimate Independence Day show. The indelible apocalypse crush of righteous post rock is all the fireworks I need... unless it's the literal fireworks that accompanied the last Wildildlife show. Didn't a guitar get smashed on July 4th? Do I have my facts straight? What's the capital of Bogota? Wait, that's the capital of Colombia... I digress.
Summer in Greenville is such a bizarre creature... you wouldn't understand it if you've never seen it. It gets so hot in the Spazz that reality becomes more distorted than usual, and bands that are eccentric enough in real life take on strange new dimensions. It's the castle scene from Willow all over again, when the troll gets blasted with the magic wand and turns into a two headed dragon that kicks everyone's ass and eventually explodes.
Summer brings shows like the New Thrill Parade, Ra Ra Riot, the Silent Years. It's the time to find the bands you could never even imagine, regular everyday people off stage who reinvent our concepts of music when they plug in. Did I mention how hot the Spazz gets in the summer? It's the time of year when the showspaces branch out, when show houses reassert themselves. It's the time of the year when the heat puts a Tim Burton twist on everything we see.
Going to a show house is like stepping into the Doors movie, minus Val Kilmer. Wasted like Jim Morrison, yes. Charismatic? Um.
Let's move on. I know I'm scattered as hell, but you have to bear with me. It's the show houses. They do this. They scramble the synapses. Myspace search every band I've mentioned. Also google Jon Crocker, the Protomen, Giants (the instrumental band, and not NC's Giant, they're different...), These Are Powers, Run on Sentence... that will do for now.
Summer in Greenville is not the time for floral dresses and tennis, it's a return to the cradle. We lose several steps of evolution. Canis Minor is occulted by the rogue planet Ellivneerg on its closest approach to the Earth between June and August and civilization drops away. The Great G-ville Halloween Debauch is croquet with grandma in comparison. Some people fear it, and are right to do so. It takes professional partying skills to go out and see these shows. The amateurs are gone. The pros, the dropouts, the employed, and the 8th year Juniors are all that's left. We don't have to soften our game. Otherwise peaceful bands catch the bacchanal fever and are swept into a frenzy of guitar smashing and crowd rushing. Blood, sweat, dirt, feedback... tidal forces.
The antimatter planet Ellivneerg swings closer to Earth than any other time of the year, in its perihelion it's barely outside the atmosphere, only a few hundred miles up from Greenville, intense gravity scrambling the populace and disrupting all but the most HD television signal. If the tidal forces of a full moon makes even the sanest puritan go wild, then imagine the result of a primal rogue planet hovering twenty times closer. Astronomy can't detect it, only wolves and the weird. We're sent howling down 10th street, chasing planetary phenomena that may not even exist.
The students head for the hills, evacuating until August, if August comes... Some apocalypse heads think the tidal forces may be too strong this summer and that Ellivneerg will tear Greenville from the face of the planet and hurtle it into the sun. Think of it as the ultimate hurricane party, taking jello shots with your closest friends, blasted on all sides by the most incredible soundwaves known to humanity, until the moment we plop into the sun like an ice cube falling into a river. The only survivors, the giant mosquitoes, left wandering through space towards any and all planets in their path ...or at least that's how it seemed to me while Irata was playing. God I love those guys.
I don't know whose house it was, and I couldn't print it if I did. The kegs bled steadily, empty by midnight when the bottles and cans took over, but so be it.
It's Greenville. It's a party.
4/19/08
The Ten Year Cycle and You: A Treatise on GVL History (Published May 18, '08, in G-Vegas Magazine)
Richard Faulkner runs 21 Eleven and probably knows origami.
In the late 1600s a tricked-out Honda pirate ship with 20 inch rims and blown speakers sailed up the Tar River, landing in what is now downtown Greenville. The crew that survived the treacherous sea voyage founded the Pirate Nation, which preceded the United States by over a hundred years according to historical graffiti.
The original colonists spent their time playing grog pong with the local Tuscarora Indians and racing their horses. No, literally, they had footraces against horses. The horses always won. This has always been the curse of Greenville, ever since the original pirates landed. We're always very good at what we do (the original pirates were very fast runners) but we so often apply ourselves to the wrong field (the horses were much faster).
All the ingredients are here for a world class music scene... so where is it? Historically, we've consistently given big love to the Next Big Thing. The Attic was the CBGB of the south (minus the passé t-shirts), high fiving the Cat's Cradle and trading bands like baseball cards. Anybody could play there, but Somebodies often did. Down the street, the penultimate record shop, CD Alley. Now, tomorrow’s legends come through town quietly, way under the radar. They’re here, but the venues aren’t the ones booking them. At least for today’s scene, the showspace will be its home.
The Attic is dead and CD Alley is gone. I moved back to town a few years ago, horrified to find a gym in its place.
What happened? What drove novelty underground?
“You go to Chapel Hill to see a band that's about to play Walnut Creek next time they come through. I think Greenville was like that in the 70s and 80s. I think it was like, right before bands got really popular we were the regional spot when people came through here,” says Richard Faulkner, contemplating the Sheetz parking lot from the couches of 21 Eleven. He sells a six pack of Ska Brewing's Brown to an ECU professor before continuing. “I know the Allman Brothers loved Greenville and used to call it their home away from home. The Charlie Daniels Band, too. Then In the 80s it kind of turned into Hootie and the Blowfish, near the end of the 80s, and Dave Matthews Band back when it was just Dave Matthews, or whatever his real name is, would come through a lot.
“Then in '94 Backdoor opened. That got underground. You could have a show in a space that's not designed to do a music show. I don't know if people remember. Like Peasant's? They started the whole Homegrown Network thing? I don't think that people know that that was started in North Carolina, like the whole String Cheese Incident and all those hippie jam bands. They had live music four nights a week, so you were guaranteed that one night would not be jam bands. They sold it to the guy that turned it into Aqua. That dude promised them when he bought it, it was a couple of old hippies, that dude promised them that he would continue to do live music and the first thing he did was put $250,000 in renovations to make it Club Aqua, to make it another booty club, then he sold it a year later because it was doing terrible.”
So much more could happen, so much momentum spent like water leaking through the frat house roof. We're like Wake Forest's basketball team. We always give the other NCAA teams a few surprises, and they remember how much fun it is to play us, but at the end of the day Carolina is still the star.
It goes like this (and it happens in every town): the best bands never leave their home base! The rule (exceptions are welcome!) is that a really spectacular band will arrive on the scene. People get the “WHOA!” factor, people come out. Touring bands on decent independent labels come through town and play with said band, they'll want the band to come play their town! Holy crap! Nothing could possibly suck, success is guaranteed! This is when the trap is sprung, and only the nimblest can avoid it.
Our local heroes will do one of two things. They either do a minor tour or two and retreat to Greenville to lick their wounds (to the tune of big money per gig, but no valuable exposure on the national market) or never tour and eventually stagnate as the audience moves on. After all, there's always another Big Thing. Bands exist on a ruthless ladder, chasing the flightiest of creatures: fans. It's evolution, it's Darwinism. The next Big Thing could always come crawling out of the swamp, baby, and move in on your ecological niche.
“What always disappoints me is that there's a school of music with, like, a thousand or two thousand kids that are studying music from people that are supposed to be the best in the world, it's been an accredited music school since the '60s, and there are no good bands around,” Richard said. “There should be a ton of good bands, you would think, there's all these people that know how to play music really well, and can play any instrument, and there's not more people that can put it together.”
If that isn't a call to arms, I don't know what is.
Audiences and bands are passing like ships in the night. Tours are coming through, thousands of hip college cats are on campus. Why don't they know about each other? Why do underground crowds diminish while cover band crowds thrive? To be specific, where is the Peasant's crowd that would be so into what happens at 21 Eleven?
“Maybe it's the way Peasant's marketed, or just because there were more hippies in town and hippies will do anything because they don't care because they're stoned and wandering around. Maybe that was it. Maybe they came and kind of countered the whole frat boy scene that was being established, obviously with Hootie and the Blowfish and Dave Matthews Band. The hippies came and were like, 'Nah, we don't like that,' so they kind of tried to stomp that out. Then, after that is where we are now and I don't really know what's after that,” Richard watched Charles Boulevard's evening crawl for a few minutes, squinting a little from the glare. This guy opened a small beer store and, in less than a year, has hosted as many touring acts per week as a proper venue. If not for the love of music, there would not be places like this.
Richard connected his thoughts, smiled for a second, and continued. “Greg Allman is supposed to be one of the greatest guitarists of all time, some people say. We've gone from that, and I don't like Dave Matthews either, but he always had a lot of talented musicians around him in the early 90s. We went from music to punk shows where anything goes to artsy type things with electronics, fashion. Fashion's part of it.”
The dystopic '80s gave way to the decade of hope, the '90s. The bridge to the twentieth century was almost built, almost complete, before it toppled. Now it's years past the y2k. January 1st, 2000 hit with a crushing defeat as none of our movies came true. We're past the future.
What do we do now?
4/15/08
The Overeducated Graduate's Guide to Incredible Beer
*guest column by Hikaru Pontiac*
Holy crap, it's graduation time! That sweet, sweet time of the year when thousands of twenty-somethings emerge from the egg cluster and migrate south through a mysterious process known to science as “ballooning.”
When you celebrate the metamorphosis, the emergence from your long larval state, be sure to do it with some higher class beer. Hint: don't buy any sixes with “light” or “ultra” in the name. Here are a few of my favorites.
Duck-Rabbit: This is the most appropriate choice for your ECU graduation celebration, since it's brewed 15 minutes away in Farmville! Respect their high gravity selections, especially the barleywine. Many an unsuspecting drinker has been knocked on their ass by this deceptively smooth concoction. My pick? Their Duck-Rabbit Porter, and its big brother the Baltic Porter, are two of the finest porters to come out of North Carolina. How Ham's beats these guys in the best local beer poll, I have no clue.
Great Divide: Only recently has this stuff come east to Greenville! A spectacularly original brewery from Denver, Great Divide specializes in beer's evolution. I recommend their Denver Pale Ale. Like anything they brew, the DPA is not just a standard pale ale, but their improved version of the style.
Flying Dog: A favorite of the late Hunter S. Thompson with label art by Ralph Steadman! I can only echo their tag line... “Good beer, no s***.” My recommendation? Old Scratch Amber. Very appropriate for the vicious hot summers in ENC, since the artwork features a huge mosquito.
Victory: This is seriously strong stuff. Don't go for it unless you have the constitution of a mako shark, or you'll spend five solid weeks with a champion of a hangover. Their Hop Wallop, literally named, is a sadistically fantastic brew on par with skydiving in a severe thunderstorm. Golden Monkey is the penultimate celebration drink, and is definitely my recommendation from these guys. It's a kind and gentle golden beer, a sweet tasting Belgian with enough alcohol in it to make Andre the Giant see double.
This is my graduation gift. ECU's Golden Ticket gets you a fighting chance at a sweet job. Good for you. My gift to you is the ticket to better beer. Good for you.
Party safely and, for Buddha's sake, don't drive! Nothing's dumber than a drunk at the wheel.
3/17/08
Lucky #520 (published in G-Vegas Magazine. March 15, 2008)
“The thing about music is that there's no rules, you can do anything.” A-sharp
I have no idea how to start this, so I'm just going to start it. I've been through half a dozen failed shots at this story and I'm starting to think I left my brain in the 21 Eleven parking lot. My last few attempts were uselessly clever and collapsed under their own weight in the first 500 words, so I'm just going to say what I'm thinking.
I know a really nice guy who happens to be a really good rapper, and his name is A-sharp. You should listen to him. He's one of the founding members of 520 Entertainment, and he's just recently come out of hiding with an arsenal of fresh songs. He shows up with a bemused half smile and a CD full of beats. You don't know what to think of the good natured dude with the smartass glint in his eyes, until he picks up the microphone and opens his mouth.
“The thing about music is there's no rules, you can do anything,” A-sharp told me one night at my house. We were drinking ghetto blasters, listening to Deltron 3030, discussing the advantages of the Nintendo 64 over the PS2. A-sharp is very conscious of language. He's very careful with labels and names, he knows how easily music can get pigeonholed to death. From his beginnings as a blues guitarist to his current lyrical somersaults, it's been a long road to what he does now. A-sharp is to a point where his music is entertaining enough to make the booties shake, relevant enough to make the fists pump, and smart enough to make the brains grow.
Why did he disappear, though? Why haven't we heard from him in several years?
“ When we first started we performed a lot more. Me, Chris and Carl, it was just us three then. We performed at ECU talent shows and Dynasty and s*** like that. Then Chris moved to Atlanta. I kept performing. I performed all summer, back when Scores was still called Scores...Then, when Chris came back, we started recording. We didn't want to do shows because we didn't have a complete album to give away or sell, so it just seemed kind of pointless to be doing shows even though it wouldn't have been pointless, but we thought it would be at the time. We just got stuck in a rut of recording and recording and recording.”
It's tough to survive this scene without selling out or burning out. Downtown clubs change hands fast and often, but variety stagnates. The same tired cover acts shuffle members, jaded ex-rappers host atonal karaoke Tuesdays, and there's always the snide refusal of any booking agent who “knows how this town works, buddy, and can't help you out.”
Maybe A-sharp's years in hiding were to save his sanity. Getting off the ground is always tough, but the Greenville scene can be openly hostile to original music. This gets me down, but I hear only hope and optimism from A-sharp. He's been making connections at a lightning rate since his reappearance, specifically in the sensational Roanoke, Virginia, hip-hop scene (if you haven't heard, there's some serious music being made up there). His growing list of connections, coupled with a “divide and conquer” tour mentality make him (and the rest of the 520 crew) a force to be reckoned with.
“It's me, Chris, J-Burner, LC, my little brother (his rap name is Bones), and Haze. But yeah, it's six of us. That's why I was saying we could actually book up to three shows in the same day, because we could separate into two people groups. Right now Dan (Bones) is in Iraq, so it would be a little different, but we could still do two different shows,” A-sharp told me. “I want to focus on the east coast. We're doing s*** in NC, we're starting to spread into VA, I just want to do it like that. My friend went to Tennessee and she's going to try to get us some shows there.”
And what does 520 mean?
“Chris used to live at 520 Rustic Lane, in Belvoir, way out in the boondocks. That's where we used to write and record s***, and he didn't have any equipment like he does now. He just had a little $300 dollar Casio and the mixer was a grand, but that was about it. He made all the beats on a Casio. After a while he left, he moved to Atlanta...I had wanted to start an independent label while he was gone and I never thought of a name for it. When he came back he was like 'Why don't we just call it 520?'”
Behind A-sharp's, and all of 520's songs, are Chris's beats. Chris Knight and A-sharp started making music together in high school, right here in Greenville. 520 has come a long way. The Casio is long gone, replaced with proper beats that nod politely to modern influences while honoring their predecessors in the 90s. Chris raps too, taking the mic as often as any of the 520 crew.
Most impressive was the 520 set at the infamous/famous Turducken House's New Year's show. They went on early, not long after 10:00, to a packed house that knew all the words! I mean all the words, not just the choruses... Definitely check out the new stuff on his myspace (link at the end). I listened to it to keep my head straight while I wrote this, and it's pretty crucial. Especially “Flip It.” I can't get enough!
I'm going to totally switch gears now.
Rap is the new jazz. It's a purely American music style, and it evolves the same as jazz. The academics hijacked jazz, decrying any progress as sacrilege. Real music evolves on the streets and in dirty little house parties, in venues small enough to take risks. What do you think a speakeasy was?
Don't let the academics fool you, music is about evolution. Constant, relentless, often reckless evolution. Jazz was music by, and for, people with nothing to lose. Jazz was the cutting edge, but the academics got to it. Now it's wedding band music, true jazz was driven far underground. It's too edgy, it had to go semi-tonal to survive. Rock music speaks well, but it misses by miles on the improv front. When rockers go free form it's nightmarish... you end up with thirty minute Phish songs or worse. Jam bands are a blight on our fair planet.
Thus is jazz reborn in disguise. A real rapper, not just some Empty Vee loser flashing their pinkie ring, can freestyle like Dizzie Gillespie.
I've put it together, and I like it.
Myspace.com/adamsanturo is where A-sharp hangs his hat.
HawkSeason.Blogspot.com is a place you should never, never go.
I have no idea how to start this, so I'm just going to start it. I've been through half a dozen failed shots at this story and I'm starting to think I left my brain in the 21 Eleven parking lot. My last few attempts were uselessly clever and collapsed under their own weight in the first 500 words, so I'm just going to say what I'm thinking.
I know a really nice guy who happens to be a really good rapper, and his name is A-sharp. You should listen to him. He's one of the founding members of 520 Entertainment, and he's just recently come out of hiding with an arsenal of fresh songs. He shows up with a bemused half smile and a CD full of beats. You don't know what to think of the good natured dude with the smartass glint in his eyes, until he picks up the microphone and opens his mouth.
“The thing about music is there's no rules, you can do anything,” A-sharp told me one night at my house. We were drinking ghetto blasters, listening to Deltron 3030, discussing the advantages of the Nintendo 64 over the PS2. A-sharp is very conscious of language. He's very careful with labels and names, he knows how easily music can get pigeonholed to death. From his beginnings as a blues guitarist to his current lyrical somersaults, it's been a long road to what he does now. A-sharp is to a point where his music is entertaining enough to make the booties shake, relevant enough to make the fists pump, and smart enough to make the brains grow.
Why did he disappear, though? Why haven't we heard from him in several years?
“ When we first started we performed a lot more. Me, Chris and Carl, it was just us three then. We performed at ECU talent shows and Dynasty and s*** like that. Then Chris moved to Atlanta. I kept performing. I performed all summer, back when Scores was still called Scores...Then, when Chris came back, we started recording. We didn't want to do shows because we didn't have a complete album to give away or sell, so it just seemed kind of pointless to be doing shows even though it wouldn't have been pointless, but we thought it would be at the time. We just got stuck in a rut of recording and recording and recording.”
It's tough to survive this scene without selling out or burning out. Downtown clubs change hands fast and often, but variety stagnates. The same tired cover acts shuffle members, jaded ex-rappers host atonal karaoke Tuesdays, and there's always the snide refusal of any booking agent who “knows how this town works, buddy, and can't help you out.”
Maybe A-sharp's years in hiding were to save his sanity. Getting off the ground is always tough, but the Greenville scene can be openly hostile to original music. This gets me down, but I hear only hope and optimism from A-sharp. He's been making connections at a lightning rate since his reappearance, specifically in the sensational Roanoke, Virginia, hip-hop scene (if you haven't heard, there's some serious music being made up there). His growing list of connections, coupled with a “divide and conquer” tour mentality make him (and the rest of the 520 crew) a force to be reckoned with.
“It's me, Chris, J-Burner, LC, my little brother (his rap name is Bones), and Haze. But yeah, it's six of us. That's why I was saying we could actually book up to three shows in the same day, because we could separate into two people groups. Right now Dan (Bones) is in Iraq, so it would be a little different, but we could still do two different shows,” A-sharp told me. “I want to focus on the east coast. We're doing s*** in NC, we're starting to spread into VA, I just want to do it like that. My friend went to Tennessee and she's going to try to get us some shows there.”
And what does 520 mean?
“Chris used to live at 520 Rustic Lane, in Belvoir, way out in the boondocks. That's where we used to write and record s***, and he didn't have any equipment like he does now. He just had a little $300 dollar Casio and the mixer was a grand, but that was about it. He made all the beats on a Casio. After a while he left, he moved to Atlanta...I had wanted to start an independent label while he was gone and I never thought of a name for it. When he came back he was like 'Why don't we just call it 520?'”
Behind A-sharp's, and all of 520's songs, are Chris's beats. Chris Knight and A-sharp started making music together in high school, right here in Greenville. 520 has come a long way. The Casio is long gone, replaced with proper beats that nod politely to modern influences while honoring their predecessors in the 90s. Chris raps too, taking the mic as often as any of the 520 crew.
Most impressive was the 520 set at the infamous/famous Turducken House's New Year's show. They went on early, not long after 10:00, to a packed house that knew all the words! I mean all the words, not just the choruses... Definitely check out the new stuff on his myspace (link at the end). I listened to it to keep my head straight while I wrote this, and it's pretty crucial. Especially “Flip It.” I can't get enough!
I'm going to totally switch gears now.
Rap is the new jazz. It's a purely American music style, and it evolves the same as jazz. The academics hijacked jazz, decrying any progress as sacrilege. Real music evolves on the streets and in dirty little house parties, in venues small enough to take risks. What do you think a speakeasy was?
Don't let the academics fool you, music is about evolution. Constant, relentless, often reckless evolution. Jazz was music by, and for, people with nothing to lose. Jazz was the cutting edge, but the academics got to it. Now it's wedding band music, true jazz was driven far underground. It's too edgy, it had to go semi-tonal to survive. Rock music speaks well, but it misses by miles on the improv front. When rockers go free form it's nightmarish... you end up with thirty minute Phish songs or worse. Jam bands are a blight on our fair planet.
Thus is jazz reborn in disguise. A real rapper, not just some Empty Vee loser flashing their pinkie ring, can freestyle like Dizzie Gillespie.
I've put it together, and I like it.
Myspace.com/adamsanturo is where A-sharp hangs his hat.
HawkSeason.Blogspot.com is a place you should never, never go.
2/15/08
MC Homeless and the Temple of Doom (Published Feb. 15, 2008, in G-Vegas Magazine)
It's been the weirdest January on record... so warm, and it's gone by so fast. I think it's doing something to my poor brain chemistry, and I doubt I'm alone. An owl almost landed on me the other night during my walk... not kidding. I'm not down with all these omens. Next thing, someone's going to tell me the Spazz was built on an Algonquin burial ground.
I think MC Homeless is with me on this. He's more of a Mayan doomsayer, but that's fine. He's just as optimistic as the other apocalypse-heads I know. I mean, he does tend to sound a little victorious when he says “2012 is not a random number.”
I don't know what possessed me, maybe it was the sleep deprivation, maybe it was the brainfuzz that follows my favorite high gravity beer around, but I wanted to hear the Big Hate. Specifically: what grinds his gears? Mainly I got unprintable rants on foreign policy and addled recollections of questionable legality.
“Anywhere that doesn't give me free beer for gracing their stage gets the Big Hate. Let's see... shady promoters get the Big Hate. As far as towns, though, I don't know. Every place I played on the last tour was cool,” said Homeless, whose birth name is unpronounceable by human tongue. He's been on the move for so many years now, living all over the place and touring relentlessly. He has to have played with some losers in that time... dig deeper.
“Who stands out as bad? God, I've played with so many bad rappers it's not even funny. Tali Demon. She went on tour with the Insane Clown Posse, and she had a little juggalo following, that was definitely the worst show.”
“What the hell's a juggalo?” I asked. I was convinced it was either something he'd made up or an obscure Australian marsupial.
“It was a great show, they just sucked. A juggalo is, like, ICP's fans,” he clarified. I need to Wikipedia that word... I'm still convinced it's some kind of miniature kangaroo. “Their CD kept skipping and it was the show where we were opening up for the Coup, it was that one, where I almost fought. It was Tali Demon and her Two Loyal Servents, or something like that, and it was these two hillbilly rapper guys... but, to make a long story short, they tried to rush the stage and fight me.”
“Her people?”
“Yeah, and they got kicked out. Then they fought each other outside and got arrested.”
“They got kicked out of their own show?”
“They were one of the opening acts for the Coup. I don't know why they put them on, they were just horrible redneck rappers. ICP just attracts the scum of the earth. Anybody who still wears JNCO Jeans.”
Homeless paused, smiling at something invisible for a second. “It's like the hip hop version of trailer metal. They're trailer hop. Really bad, bad news.”
It was a really nice night, one of those nights where you can solve any problem with a minimum of effort. 27 degrees, feels like 19. Overnight low projected to be 9 degrees… sunny and 9 degrees. Cold enough to think. I felt like Batman, back in Gotham City after years of vacation.
There are heroes of the national underground, too. I won’t call MC Homeless a hero, but he knows what he’s doing. Pretty much anyone can hop on Myspace, put up their band page, and book a national tour. There are benefits and detriments. I was talking to a friend the other night, and he was saying that MTV ruined the regional nature of music.
I found myself arguing in defense of Myspace. It has, in the positive, brought a new relevance to the independent scene. Music needs to be approachable. Music needs to be made by real people, not celebrities. Maybe the fever has broken, maybe the curse of MTV has been lifted. Regional success exists! In the independent touring scene is a more complex and complete six degrees of separation than Kevin Bacon ever dreamed of. The giants of the scene come through every few months, but they lift us all to the rare heights. We're in the presence of greatness, but not in its shadow.
Amen.
Then, there’s the downside. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes the most innovative band, beyond what you could imagine, shows up out of the random and blows your mind. More often, though, you’ll dig through endless strata of imitators of the latest sonic fad… and they’ll catch on faster because they sound so familiar. Still, the control is being wrenched from the hands of the mega-conglomerate record labels. Why else would iTunes, which is quickly eclipsing CD shops in music purchases, sell self-released music? There's a demographic that loves the realness, the sounds that no producer has had a chance to ruin.
Homeless and I were placing bets on the outcome to a fight to the death between Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus. His money was on Paris Hilton, but I was hoping for mutual annihilation. It's so punk rock, really, to make your own name in the music industry. When so many people buy their way in, or are born into it (through the strange crosseyed dynasty that gave us this Cyrus creature), it's so pure to make records and tours happen through hard work and intuition. Anyone can tour once... Homeless has done it three times a year for the past four years, and he doesn't even own a car. How does he do it?
I'm not sure. He was babbling about something that really confused him in the brain. I didn't catch all of it.
“...Sublime cover bands that travel the country and put out DVDs,” he was saying. “I was at Best Buy the other day and I saw that this band, I won't mention their name or anything, but they're this big Sublime cover band. They had a DVD out of a set they did, just covering Sublime songs.”
We're through the looking glass, people. Scary stuff. Danger stuff. Strange stuff.
But strange is good... and it's not hard to get to this conclusion. It's good to not fit in. Sometimes it's good to be the nerdy little metal-obsessed rapper who's drunk at his own show. Sometimes it's good to go broke and live on the road, year after year, building an underground power base and grabbing for a tiny little corner of immortality. It's good to be at least a little strange in a town where party hats serve as aggression amplifiers and most bartenders can read your thoughts.
Save us from people who can't tell beatnik from gonzo. Save us from creativity cannibals. Send us an 120lb nerd rapper, wandering in among the roaring chainsaw drunks, speaking his own incoherence but doing it so well.
He's at myspace.com/mchomeless
I'm at hawkseason.blogspot.com and hawkseason@gmail.com
Peace.
I think MC Homeless is with me on this. He's more of a Mayan doomsayer, but that's fine. He's just as optimistic as the other apocalypse-heads I know. I mean, he does tend to sound a little victorious when he says “2012 is not a random number.”
I don't know what possessed me, maybe it was the sleep deprivation, maybe it was the brainfuzz that follows my favorite high gravity beer around, but I wanted to hear the Big Hate. Specifically: what grinds his gears? Mainly I got unprintable rants on foreign policy and addled recollections of questionable legality.
“Anywhere that doesn't give me free beer for gracing their stage gets the Big Hate. Let's see... shady promoters get the Big Hate. As far as towns, though, I don't know. Every place I played on the last tour was cool,” said Homeless, whose birth name is unpronounceable by human tongue. He's been on the move for so many years now, living all over the place and touring relentlessly. He has to have played with some losers in that time... dig deeper.
“Who stands out as bad? God, I've played with so many bad rappers it's not even funny. Tali Demon. She went on tour with the Insane Clown Posse, and she had a little juggalo following, that was definitely the worst show.”
“What the hell's a juggalo?” I asked. I was convinced it was either something he'd made up or an obscure Australian marsupial.
“It was a great show, they just sucked. A juggalo is, like, ICP's fans,” he clarified. I need to Wikipedia that word... I'm still convinced it's some kind of miniature kangaroo. “Their CD kept skipping and it was the show where we were opening up for the Coup, it was that one, where I almost fought. It was Tali Demon and her Two Loyal Servents, or something like that, and it was these two hillbilly rapper guys... but, to make a long story short, they tried to rush the stage and fight me.”
“Her people?”
“Yeah, and they got kicked out. Then they fought each other outside and got arrested.”
“They got kicked out of their own show?”
“They were one of the opening acts for the Coup. I don't know why they put them on, they were just horrible redneck rappers. ICP just attracts the scum of the earth. Anybody who still wears JNCO Jeans.”
Homeless paused, smiling at something invisible for a second. “It's like the hip hop version of trailer metal. They're trailer hop. Really bad, bad news.”
It was a really nice night, one of those nights where you can solve any problem with a minimum of effort. 27 degrees, feels like 19. Overnight low projected to be 9 degrees… sunny and 9 degrees. Cold enough to think. I felt like Batman, back in Gotham City after years of vacation.
There are heroes of the national underground, too. I won’t call MC Homeless a hero, but he knows what he’s doing. Pretty much anyone can hop on Myspace, put up their band page, and book a national tour. There are benefits and detriments. I was talking to a friend the other night, and he was saying that MTV ruined the regional nature of music.
I found myself arguing in defense of Myspace. It has, in the positive, brought a new relevance to the independent scene. Music needs to be approachable. Music needs to be made by real people, not celebrities. Maybe the fever has broken, maybe the curse of MTV has been lifted. Regional success exists! In the independent touring scene is a more complex and complete six degrees of separation than Kevin Bacon ever dreamed of. The giants of the scene come through every few months, but they lift us all to the rare heights. We're in the presence of greatness, but not in its shadow.
Amen.
Then, there’s the downside. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes the most innovative band, beyond what you could imagine, shows up out of the random and blows your mind. More often, though, you’ll dig through endless strata of imitators of the latest sonic fad… and they’ll catch on faster because they sound so familiar. Still, the control is being wrenched from the hands of the mega-conglomerate record labels. Why else would iTunes, which is quickly eclipsing CD shops in music purchases, sell self-released music? There's a demographic that loves the realness, the sounds that no producer has had a chance to ruin.
Homeless and I were placing bets on the outcome to a fight to the death between Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus. His money was on Paris Hilton, but I was hoping for mutual annihilation. It's so punk rock, really, to make your own name in the music industry. When so many people buy their way in, or are born into it (through the strange crosseyed dynasty that gave us this Cyrus creature), it's so pure to make records and tours happen through hard work and intuition. Anyone can tour once... Homeless has done it three times a year for the past four years, and he doesn't even own a car. How does he do it?
I'm not sure. He was babbling about something that really confused him in the brain. I didn't catch all of it.
“...Sublime cover bands that travel the country and put out DVDs,” he was saying. “I was at Best Buy the other day and I saw that this band, I won't mention their name or anything, but they're this big Sublime cover band. They had a DVD out of a set they did, just covering Sublime songs.”
We're through the looking glass, people. Scary stuff. Danger stuff. Strange stuff.
But strange is good... and it's not hard to get to this conclusion. It's good to not fit in. Sometimes it's good to be the nerdy little metal-obsessed rapper who's drunk at his own show. Sometimes it's good to go broke and live on the road, year after year, building an underground power base and grabbing for a tiny little corner of immortality. It's good to be at least a little strange in a town where party hats serve as aggression amplifiers and most bartenders can read your thoughts.
Save us from people who can't tell beatnik from gonzo. Save us from creativity cannibals. Send us an 120lb nerd rapper, wandering in among the roaring chainsaw drunks, speaking his own incoherence but doing it so well.
He's at myspace.com/mchomeless
I'm at hawkseason.blogspot.com and hawkseason@gmail.com
Peace.
MC Homeless and the Temple of Doom
It's been the weirdest January on record... so warm, and it's gone by so fast. I think it's doing something to my poor brain chemistry, and I doubt I'm alone. An owl almost landed on me the other night during my walk... not kidding. I'm not down with all these omens. Next thing, someone's going to tell me the Spazz was built on an Algonquin burial ground.
I think MC Homeless is with me on this. He's more of a Mayan doomsayer, but that's fine. He's just as optimistic as the other apocalypse-heads I know. I mean, he does tend to sound a little victorious when he says “2012 is not a random number.”
I don't know what possessed me, maybe it was the sleep deprivation, maybe it was the brainfuzz that follows my favorite high gravity beer around, but I wanted to hear the Big Hate. Specifically: what grinds his gears? Mainly I got unprintable rants on foreign policy and addled recollections of questionable legality.
“Anywhere that doesn't give me free beer for gracing their stage gets the Big Hate. Let's see... shady promoters get the Big Hate. As far as towns, though, I don't know. Every place I played on the last tour was cool,” said Homeless, whose birth name is unpronounceable by human tongue. He's been on the move for so many years now, living all over the place and touring relentlessly. He has to have played with some losers in that time... dig deeper.
“Who stands out as bad? God, I've played with so many bad rappers it's not even funny. Tali Demon. She went on tour with the Insane Clown Posse, and she had a little juggalo following, that was definitely the worst show.”
“What the hell's a juggalo?” I asked. I was convinced it was either something he'd made up or an obscure Australian marsupial.
“It was a great show, they just sucked. A juggalo is, like, ICP's fans,” he clarified. I need to Wikipedia that word... I'm still convinced it's some kind of miniature kangaroo. “Their CD kept skipping and it was the show where we were opening up for the Coup, it was that one, where I almost fought. It was Tali Demon and her Two Loyal Servents, or something like that, and it was these two hillbilly rapper guys... but, to make a long story short, they tried to rush the stage and fight me.”
“Her people?”
“Yeah, and they got kicked out. Then they fought each other outside and got arrested.”
“They got kicked out of their own show?”
“They were one of the opening acts for the Coup. I don't know why they put them on, they were just horrible redneck rappers. ICP just attracts the scum of the earth. Anybody who still wears JNCO Jeans.”
Homeless paused, smiling at something invisible for a second. “It's like the hip hop version of trailer metal. They're trailer hop. Really bad, bad news.”
It was a really nice night, one of those nights where you can solve any problem with a minimum of effort. 27 degrees, feels like 19. Overnight low projected to be 9 degrees… sunny and 9 degrees. Cold enough to think. I felt like Batman, back in Gotham City after years of vacation.
There are heroes of the national underground, too. I won’t call MC Homeless a hero, but he knows what he’s doing. Pretty much anyone can hop on Myspace, put up their band page, and book a national tour. There are benefits and detriments. I was talking to a friend the other night, and he was saying that MTV ruined the regional nature of music.
I found myself arguing in defense of Myspace. It has, in the positive, brought a new relevance to the independent scene. Music needs to be approachable. Music needs to be made by real people, not celebrities. Maybe the fever has broken, maybe the curse of MTV has been lifted. Regional success exists! In the independent touring scene is a more complex and complete six degrees of separation than Kevin Bacon ever dreamed of. The giants of the scene come through every few months, but they lift us all to the rare heights. We're in the presence of greatness, but not in its shadow.
Amen.
Then, there’s the downside. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes the most innovative band, beyond what you could imagine, shows up out of the random and blows your mind. More often, though, you’ll dig through endless strata of imitators of the latest sonic fad… and they’ll catch on faster because they sound so familiar. Still, the control is being wrenched from the hands of the mega-conglomerate record labels. Why else would iTunes, which is quickly eclipsing CD shops in music purchases, sell self-released music? There's a demographic that loves the realness, the sounds that no producer has had a chance to ruin.
Homeless and I were placing bets on the outcome to a fight to the death between Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus. His money was on Paris Hilton, but I was hoping for mutual annihilation. It's so punk rock, really, to make your own name in the music industry. When so many people buy their way in, or are born into it (through the strange crosseyed dynasty that gave us this Cyrus creature), it's so pure to make records and tours happen through hard work and intuition. Anyone can tour once... Homeless has done it three times a year for the past four years, and he doesn't even own a car. How does he do it?
I'm not sure. He was babbling about something that really confused him in the brain. I didn't catch all of it.
“...Sublime cover bands that travel the country and put out DVDs,” he was saying. “I was at Best Buy the other day and I saw that this band, I won't mention their name or anything, but they're this big Sublime cover band. They had a DVD out of a set they did, just covering Sublime songs.”
We're through the looking glass, people. Scary stuff. Danger stuff. Strange stuff.
But strange is good... and it's not hard to get to this conclusion. It's good to not fit in. Sometimes it's good to be the nerdy little metal-obsessed rapper who's drunk at his own show. Sometimes it's good to go broke and live on the road, year after year, building an underground power base and grabbing for a tiny little corner of immortality. It's good to be at least a little strange in a town where party hats serve as aggression amplifiers and most bartenders can read your thoughts.
Save us from people who can't tell beatnik from gonzo. Save us from creativity cannibals. Send us an 120lb nerd rapper, wandering in among the roaring chainsaw drunks, speaking his own incoherence but doing it so well.
He's at myspace.com/mchomeless
I'm at hawkseason.blogspot.com and hawkseason@gmail.com
Peace.
1/31/08
How to Not Get a Job (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cave Bear)
I come to you now, hat in hands, offering a repeat entreaty. Do you seek employees? I seek employment. Maybe my people can talk to your people...
If you can use someone who knows music, then I can be of service to you. I know movies pretty well, but music is definitely my strength. I'm the worst kind of addict. I not only love and devour music, but I also make it. There's this never ending quest to surround myself with music in my life and work. Something about working in a place that sells CDs appeals to me, but I can't put my finger on exactly what.
My flexible is schedule (?). As things stand, I have a full time job and am looking to scale back and rearrange it in favor of doing something new. Specifically, pushing pertinent music on an unsuspecting town (seditious!). See, I'm the last survivor of a strange breed: the compassionate music snob. I can turn people onto The Good Stuff without making them feel inferior. We were nearly hunted to extinction in the '80s, and if you're nice I'll tell you my secret identity.
I've been told, when I've applied before, that you'll want to know my top five movies and albums. This is hard. I had the toughest time limiting to five (and couldn't always trim my list down), but here's what I came up with.
Sights:
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
City of God
City of God (again)
Godzilla vs. Gigan
the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
2001: A Space Odyssey/Dr Strangelove (tie)
Sounds:
Red Sparowes: Every Red Heart.../At the Soundless Dawn (tie)
Tom Waits: Frank's Wild Years
Pearl Jam: Yield
Liars: Drum's Not Dead
Gifts From Enola: Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind
I left out some choice music. Maserati, Explosions in the Sky, Sleater-Kinney, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Mogwai, Lake Trout, the Black Angels...
***
Anyway...
I'm reliable, honest, and hard working. I learn fast and can defy gravity at will. I invented the telephone, the fax machine, and the helicopter. These facts-or any others-can be confirmed or denied by _________, who knows me pretty well.
So I can tell I need to close this bizarre diatribe before it collapses under its own weight. Please let me know if you can use me!
With clarity of intention of cleanliness of shirt...
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