Song of the day: #37 Isaiah Toothtaker – "Intruder"

i alluded to Song(s) of the Year in my Jacques Greene post the other day, and this is another of my definite contenders. i keep returning to "Intruder" over and over.


Apart from just being a great record, part of what's so fun about "Intruder" is just how many layers of détournement have gone into making it what it is. In case anyone doesn't know the provenance of the music in this song, here's a brief memeology.

First there was Antoine Dodson, who went viral in July last year after a shit-talking interview with his local TV station in which he warned his sister Kelly's attempted rapist what was coming to him.


Then The Gregory Brothers, apparently a country/soul group but pretty much known for their novelty "Auto-Tune the News" series of YouTube videos, caught wind of the musical cadences of Antoine's voice (and what Wikipedia calls his "flamboyant delivery") and autotuned parts of his and his Kelly's interview and exposition from the news anchor, into an R&B song, "Bed Intruder Song".


This went even more viral, getting to number 89 in the Billboard charts on iTunes downloads alone and racking up, so far, 86 million YouTube hits. Détourne 1: from bad news story to pop smash.¹ Then other performers started to do their own versions, 2,500 of them by this time last year, ranging from rubbish (the singer out of Paramore and someone from kiddy-punks New Found Glory; the human sigh that is Dane Cook) to ace (Afua's bass-based snippet; the shamisen arrangement). Then there's this brilliant version by the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Marching Band. Détourne 2: from pop smash to parade-ground anthem.


It was probably inevitable that there'd end up being a rap interpolation of the theme, but we're lucky that it was done by someone with the skills of Isaiah Toothtaker and Wavves drummer Jacob Safari, who produced "Intruder", and that they recognised that the marching band's huge, powerful version was the best (to sample, or otherwise), and furthermore that all the song lacked was a tonne of skittering drum machines and an MC as charismatic as he is casually menacing.

Toothtaker's repurposing of the song as a snitches-get-stitches warning is détourne 3, from light-hearted YouTube meme (albeit excellently done) back to urgent street-level threat. This is only emphasised by an excellent split-screen video, in which Toothtaker's performance to camera is mixed with a creepy animation of a clenching and unclenching hand, and scenes of shootouts, car accidents, fist fights and bits of Mark Hejnar's 1996 film Affliction² (particularly Turbo Tom's eye-gouging, and hilariously unhinged gun nut Full Force Frank) edited together by experimental filmmaker Walter Gross. And the cycle is complete, with the salvaging of something concretely decent from a shifting sea of memetics. It'd be interesting to know if Antoine Dodson, who was able to move his family out of the projects from his share of the "Bed Intruder Song" proceeds, has heard this, and if so what he made of it.

¹ Although the questionable power relations of affluent white New York hipsters bolstering their rep off the back of the sincere anger of a wronged black housing project resident didn't go unnoticed. NYU music professor Jason King told NPR, "It has a really good hook, but it's problematic, too. There's a way in which the aesthetics of black poverty—the way they talk and they speak and they look — sort of becomes this fodder for humor without any interest in the context of the conditions in which people actually live", while comedian/Onion web editor Baratunde Thurston elaborated that "As the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its separation from the underlying situation. A woman was sexually assaulted and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to be laughing at him and not with him (because he wasn't laughing), as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short news segment. Watching the wider Web jump on this meme, all but forgetting why Dodson was upset, seemed like a form of ‘class tourism.’ Folks with no exposure to the projects could dip their toes into YouTube and get a taste."
² Worth a watch if you're into mental underground/transgressive culture, but probably only once.

"What are you listening to, tomasz?"

...why, this stuff of course! (Just a brief glance at some current rotationals.)

Germlin
Because the only excuse i need to rinse a new Germlin album is possessing a copy.
mp3: "Graves II (feat. Kania Tieffer)"

Ornette Coleman

He's curating this year's Meltdown festival and the line-up looks worth selling a kidney for. There's a show where Ornette, his current quartet and special guests Bill Frisell and the Master Musicians of Jajouka will play "material from his groundbreaking album The Shape of Jazz to Come and music inspired by it". Holy fucking shit. If i could secure tickets to see that, i'd probably literally jizz in my pants. But because realistically i probably won't be able t', i've been going through the whole of the stunning 6-disc Beauty Is A Rare Thing box set on Spodify instead (link). Also, anyone else reckon he looks a bit Stringer Bell-esque in that picture?
mp3: "We Now Interrupt for a Commercial"

Prince

Everyone's favourite Top 40 industrial has-been Trent Reznor recently tried calling bullshit on Prince Rogers Nelson, saying "if you have a hundred great songs or a thousand, how about picking a few and putting them on your record that you've put out because your last several have sucked".

Well, leaving aside the obvious pot/kettle/racial-epithet action of Trent Reznor saying anyone's last several albums have sucked, the fact remains that Prince, as a Jehovah's Witness, is required to spend as much free time as possible going door-to-door trying to save people's souls, which has to be better than spending all your spare time dicking about on Twitter and sucking off tech bloggers till they do a feature crowning you King of Revolutionary New Distribution MethodzzzZzZz™. And even if you don't buy that for an argument, Prince's back catalogue still pisses on Rez's from a great height.

mp3: "7"

Shock G

The received wisdom is that Shock G's solo set Fear of a Mixed Planet was a stunning album that got slept on harder than a showroom of Sealy Posturepedics®. For once, the received wisdom is absolutely on-point. This record should have outsold the majority of rap released in 2004.

mp3: "Your Sun iz a Pimp" feat Humpty Hump & K-Lien

Jon Poole

Speaking of masterpieces no-one knows about:¹ 16 Zappa covers, one Cardiacs/Wildhearts alumnus,² one rubbish drum machine, a couple of guitars, a bass, a synth, voices, and — since it was all done on a four-track recorder — probably one of history's biggest bouncedown tallies.

mp3: "Dog Breath"

Frank Zappa

Cuz you've gotta go back to the source; cuz we're going to see Zappa Plays Zappa in a week and it's going to be outrageously ace; and cuz there are 79 albums and counting to get through and i only own about six. Current selections: Sheik Yerbouti, Uncle Meat, the Cheap Thrills and Son of Cheep Thrills comps, Freak Out!

mp3: "Peaches en Regalia"

Dylan

And not even his own stuff either! Mainly just interstitial material, announcements and informative chat as i progress through the archives of his ace Theme Time show.

Pulp
Found the special edition of This Is Hardcore on Spodify. The extra material on the second disc is nothing amazing, but the album holds up well despite the unfair critical panning it got at the time.

mp3: "The Day After the Revolution"

Marilyn Roxie

("if aphex twin was american and a CHICK")
Distressingly productive American lass who puts out lush electronica/soundtrack/VGM-informed synthscapes as well as teaching Japanese and the history of rock, blogging prolifically and, for all i know, probably composing the odd symphony and constructing a beautiful palace of pebbles in her lunch hour. And her most-played group on last.fm is The Fall. i'm mildly in love.
These plays are for both some old records, and her new one, Non Limerent Object.¹
mp3: "Drift Along/Distortion"

Wavves
Primarily while researching this gig preview for Amsterdam Event Guide, which ended up getting taken down anyway due to Nathan Williams' inability to handle his drugs. Nice one, Nathan!
mp3: "California Goth"

Tom Waits
Bootleg live on Coffee Break Radio Show, WMMS, Cleveland, Ohio, December 3rd 1975.
mp3: "Nighthawk Postcards (on Easy Street)"

Super Furries

A favourite of Joe Germlin, appositely enough. i've always thought that, while their albums have a tendency towards slight slumps in the middle, SFA were one of the very best singles bands to have ever existed. Proof can be found in Songbook: The Singles, Vol. 1, where at least every other track is a classic. Although, having just said that, i've also been listening all the way through to Mwng, which i find their most consistent and cohesive record and which also closes with the simply beautiful "Gwreiddiau Dwfn/Mawrth Oer Ar y Blaned Neifion" ("Deep Roots/A Cold March on Neptune").
mp3: "Gwreiddiau Dwfn/Mawrth Oer Ar y Blaned Neifion"

Cornershop
So my rap group 30KB are playing at Kendal Calling festival (second time lucky! last year we were meant to be playing one of the tent stages at the same festival, but got fucked over by intra-promoter-ial P'n'B (politics'n'bullshit, that is)). Anyway, i'm probably missing the point of the exciting modern-day festival line-up, but the thing i'm most looking foward to seeing at said fest is the 1997 revival on day three with Ash, Idlewild and Cornershop. Wow, it's like being fourteen again! i dug out When I Was Born for the Seventh Time to celebrate and am even currently sporting my fetching beige WIWBft7T t-shirt.

Joe G.³ says they've also got a new album out that sounds "Moog-y, Bolan-y, glam rock, with sitars and trombones", which sounds intriguing, to say the least. The only slightly jarring thing about this festival appearance is their spot on the bill, below Emmy the Great (cute, but musically nothing to write home about) and The Rumble Strips (who?). But hey, at least they're on there.
mp3: "Candyman"

Shitloads of songs about coffee
And versions of "Love Will Tear Us Apart".¹

¹ Of which more later.
² Though both were in the future at this point.
³ Jesus, Joe, how many times do you wanna be in this post?

#6: Wavves – "Wavves" (Fuck It Tapes/Woodsist, 2008)

Wavves is a Californian noise-pop group consisting mainly of San Diegan Nathan Williams and completed by Ryan Ulsh when playing live (i'm not sure whether you pronounce that "waves", or to rhyme with "Chavez"). Apart from having a fucking dope taste in hip-hop (a topic which he seems to blog about more than i do these days, rather embarrassingly), Williams is most commonly to be found on the internet, getting compared to a cross between punk rock and The Beach Boys by legions of moist-undergarmented indie hacks.

You can kinda see where that description comes from, though it isn't going to survive the first 20-odd lazy journalistic iterations and, more to the point, it leaves a lot out. Personally i can't even find that much Brian Wilson (or really any surf) on Wavves, save for the surf-y titles and Williams' fondness for high-pitched woo-ooh harmonies.¹ (Apparently they do like to sing about the beach, but i cannot verify this suggestion because of what seems like the sixteen different distortion pedals smothering my chance of hearing any of the words.)

The self-titled track and "Lover" best illustrate the Beach Boys/punk element, their coruscating guitars and frantic garage-rock drumming carrying swooning rushes of scuzzy melody. But on their (i'll call them "they" for the sake of argument) self-titled debut — first self-released on cassette, then reissued on vinyl by BK psyche-heads Woodsist — Wavves also mine a seam of classic noise-pop that includes the likes of Sebadoh, the Mary Chain and early-90s Sonic Yoof.

Photo by Robbie Butler; excerpted from Nathan Williams' blog @ here

Thus, "Space Raider" sounds like someone sweeping up at the end of the day in a factory that makes broken fluorescent strip lights and penny whistles. "Spaced Raider",² meanwhile, could even be a fuzzed-up lo-fi rock descendant of The KLF's seminal Chill Out album, if all the synths had been replaced by tiers of keening, distant guitars. "Vermin" sees the band follow a calmer, more stripped-back garage-rock path a little like the respite offered by "Maps" on the first Yeah Yeah Yeahs record, and allowing Williams's tendency for space-soaked psyche tunes in the vein of Woodsist contemporaries Magic Lantern to shine through. "California Goth" even pleasingly recalls underrated Scouse perennials Clinic.

As mentioned, this lot/this guy/whatever is/are/whatever really tearing up the "blogosphere"³ at the present time (you know you've made it when you've generated your own backlash by Album #2); and while any hype gets more and more disconnected from reality the more people get involved in it, it's still gratifying that Wavves seem to have made it thus far solely by sounding like a pop band playing extremely loudly at the end of a wind tunnel during an air-raid.

You can catch Wavves @ the Paradiso on June 19, 2009, London's Luminere on June 22, or various other European spots on the surrounding days. Judging by how the tour is apparently going so far, it might be a spectacle worth witnessing for more than just their music.

— Originally writ for Amsterdam Event Guide.

¹ The love of a good melody does not count as a similarity with the Beach Boys. A large amount of the world's great musical groups have used good melodies, not because the Beach Boys did it first, but because good melodies are just sort of innately... good.
² Watch those titles, there is tricksy humour afoot. How else to explain "Intro Goth", "California Goth" and "Beach Goth"?
³ God i hate that fucking term.