Life Just Bounces

...so don't you get worried at all. (A weblog of music and otrogenerica)

Monday 21 December 2009

LJB December mix: 40 Shades of Brown

Well, Life Just Bounces mixtapes were pretty sporadic this year. It started strongly enough, with an early hiccup in March and, then, er, May, and by July everything had basically gone to the dogs. Oh well: in a spirited last-minute effort, here's a mix for December, themed for no good reason around the colour brown.

Solid, reliable brown is the color of earth and is abundant in nature. Light brown implies genuineness while dark brown is similar to wood or leather. Brown can also be sad and wistful. Men are more apt to say brown is one of their favorite colors.


Click titles to download individual tracks
(YouSendIt, or Rapidshare in the case of the ultra-big Joe Zawinul track)


1. Roni Size & Reprazent – "Brown Paper Bag (full vocal mix)" ("Brown Paper Bag" 12", 1998)
2. Don Cherry – "Brown Rice" (Brown Rice, 1975)
3. The Coasters – "Charlie Brown" (7", 1959)
4. Butthole Surfers – "The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave" (Brown Reason to Live, 1983)
5. Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown – "May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose" (San Antonio Ballbuster, 1965)
6. Dianogah – "My Brother Wore Brown" (Battle Champions, 2000)
7. Foetus – "Free James Brown (So He Can Run Me Down)" (Butterfly Potion EP, 1990; more on the incident that inspired this track)
8. Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s – "Doing It to Death" (7", 1973)
9. Woodstock Brown Acid Warning
10. Pink & Brown
– "Puddles of Acid Part 1 And 2" (Shame Fantasy II, 2003)
11. Black Star – "Brown Sugar (raw)" (Brown Sugar OST, 2002)
12. Coleman Hawkins – "Sweet Georgia Brown" (At Newport, 1957)
13. Hella – "Brown Medal 2003" (The Devil Isn't Red, 2004)
14. Ken Nordine – "Brown" (Colors, 1967)
15. Joe Zawinul – "Brown Street" (Brown Street, 2006)
16. The Mountain Goats – "Song for Dennis Brown" (The Sunset Tree, 2005)
17. Dennis Brown – "Three Meals a Day" (The Promised Land 1977-79, 2002)
18. Mclusky – "Gareth Brown Says" (Mclusky Do Dallas, 2002)
19. Death By Stereo – "Fear of a Brown Planet" (Death Is My Only Friend, 2009)
20. DJ Shadow & The Automator – "Fear of a Brown Planet" (Bombay the Hard Way, 1999)
21. Roy Brown – "I've Got the Last Laugh Now" (Battle of the Blues, Vol. 1, 1959)
22. Sun City Girls – "Lord Brown of Due South" (Flute and Mask, 2002)
Others

Popbitch Commentary #2 (Thursday 17/12/09)

       >> Vodka tampons <<      
The only cool way to survive the Xmas season

"Slimming" is one weird way to get drunk. OK
you avoid the calories and therefore put on no
weight. But this is how you do it. Get a
large vodka, take it to the toilets, drop a
tampon in it so that it soaks up the alcohol.
Insert the tampon, and wait for the vodka to soak
in. We've seen people at it this party season.
There are so many reasons this story is full of shit. Not least because, outside a handful of isolated cases in Finland, the whole "vodka tampons" thing was pretty much a meme spread by Mogwai as a joke waaay back in the days when they used to make brilliant records.

Also, i'm no habitual tampon user, but how are you going to insert a used one of those things? Isn't the idea that they absorb liquid and swell up, not the other way around?

Also, how much calorific gain is generally associated with vodka consumption? Well, it's about 77 calories per 35ml shot. Worth the effort and mess of inserting vodka-soaked tampons and the stinging discomfort of alcohol applied to mucuous membranes (ever snorted spirits off a spoon? don't bother) and oh yeh, the risk of death? Hmmm, maybe if you're trying to avoid the devastating weight gain so often associated with vodka drinking. Or, i guess, if you've got space to fill in your weekly gossip email and have decided to address this by just reprinting a hoary old urban legend despite its complete lack of sense. Must try harder, Popbitch.

Oh and my arse have they "seen people at it this party season". Probably just disappearing into the bogs to do coke like everyone else in London.

mp3: Mogwai — "Christmas Song" (YSI)

Monday 14 December 2009

Raggedy update

Looking at Will's blog the other day, i noticed in his affiliate links section that i haven't actually written anything on here for four weeks. Eeurgh, terrible business. i have been dealing with various other affairs instead (of which, maybe, more later); but anyway, i thought i'd better check in and at least reassure any potential readers i'm actually still alive.

Main exciting news: i'm pleased to report sightings of two new 30KB tracks! The first one is from the new Certified Banger compilation, the fifth and final installment in the On the Radar series. It's called "My Vote" and in general terms it deals with cultural and political dissatisfaction and the power you wield by choosing wisely. The usual mopey shit, then. The beat was by our associate Article10 ("N.W.W.", "Toleracist 2008"). This tune's also going to be on our forthcoming EP In Spuriis speramus, which should be freely available within an indeterminate timeframe. Vague eh!

You can get hold of the whole On the Radar vol. 5 compilation here. Obviously this is very much advisable.

Some folk have said already said nice things... the great-looking Style43 website, for instance, called us "one of my favourites at the moment... [w]e’re going to be keeping a close eye on them next year, as I reckon they’re another crew who are going to be making movements." Thank-you much! We're gonna have to try and actually make some movements now.

mp3: 30KB – "My Vote" (YSI)

The second tune is a studio version of a song we've occasionally been doing live with our boys Scams for a while now (indeed, we played it at this year's Kendal Calling festival at their invitation). It's called "Up All Night" and according to Scams' Andy, it's about the phenomenon of always seeing days "start from the wrong side", after midnight rather than in the morning. One for the night owls and insomniacs among you. And now, ironically, it's time for more coffee. Word.

mp3: Scams – "Up All Night" feat. 30KB (YSI)

Friday 13 November 2009

Letter to Radio 4's "Feedback"

Prompted by reams of humourless twats having a go at David Mitchell for a joke on Radio 4's Unbelievable Truth. i'm not a Mitchell fanboy or anything, but the people calling into this programme were a real excruciating band of humourless muppets (iPlayer).

From: Tom

Just want to put my voice forward to counter the storm of type-first/think-later auto-offendees submitting their knee-jerk faux-offence at the Anne Frank joke made by D Mitchell on The Unbelievable Truth. It was funny, sympathetic and not particularly offensive at all.

Your complainers seem to be prime members of the recently-developed "offencerati" class - those who sit around *waiting* for someone to 'offend' them so they can go crying to mummy - or audience feedback shows - as soon as they encounter something that doesn't square with their little eggshell worldview. More Mitchell, more Unbelievable Truth, more bold writing, and less capitulation to professional whiners, please.

Thanks.
tom.

Tuesday 27 October 2009

"Zombieland" capsule review (warning: spoilers)

Highlight the grey (potential SPOILER) text to view it.

Clichéd zombie movie tropes + clichéd pop cultural tropes + soppy Michael Cera clone + overexposed celebrity actor cameo + zeitgeisterrific nod to currently-hip "indie" subculture + square miles of mugging and self-congratulation = big dull box-ticking overrated dud.

And hey, main character: if you're supposedly neurotic enough to have as many as 32 different rules for not being killed by zombies (that's just me inferring the total from the highest-numbered one) why miss out half of them yet feel the need to repeat other ones three times or more? Welcome to Zombieland, population: half thought-out.

At one point in this film, Bill Murray is asked if he has any career regrets. The smug, predictable, shooting-fish-in-a-barrel, circle-jerk-y answer? Garfield: The Movie. Really? Garfield? Not, say, pastel-tinged Orientalist snoozefest Lost in Translation or execrable sports-meets-product-placement headache Space Jam?

Objectively, Garfield (or its sequel, which Murray was also in, so he can't have hated the experience all that much) may indeed be the worst film Murray's been in. But what sticks in the craw with that line is its fourth-wall-breaking self-satisfaction and achingly safe obviousness, which sum up Zombieland perfectly. The whole film comes off as if the audience has been issued a crib-sheet of received cultural opinions in advance, and when the filmmakers flash up the relevant neon applause sign, we laugh/cry/opinion-form (delete as appropriate) on cue. They might as well have had the whole cast do a synchronised mug-to-camera to emphasis that Witty Banter™ is, in fact, in effect.


Upsides? The gore. There's shitloads of gore, sometimes quite inventive (is "goreography" a word? It is now), sometimes relentlessly horrible, generally pretty entertaining. There's some pretty good comic lines in about 5% of the script, too. If you can ignore the other 95% of the script, the actors and the general smug atmosphere, it's a reasonable gore film.

Since seeing this movie i've found out that the ersatz-Cera (apparently his name is Jesse Eisenberg) is going to be playing Mark Zuckerberg in the upcoming Sorkin-written/Fincher-helmed The Social Network (aka "The Facebook Movie"), so it remains to be seen if he's any better when not working from a script that's basically the equivalent of "The Zombieland Writers became a fan of Bruce Campbell and obvious meta-humour".

Friday 23 October 2009

Very vague 30KB news

- We're working on a follow-up EP to 30,000 Leagues Under the Scene, to be released in the next couple of weeks;

- It's going to have either seven or eight tracks. One will be a Delusionists remix and another will feature Mr Benjamin Black from the said group;

- Production is divided between Crewdson, who did "Care Less" and "Crewd Sons (Ghost in the Machine)" off the first album, and also recorded the majority of said album, yer humble narrator, and, in the case of the said remix, the said Mr Black.


- In Bastards We Trust has been talked about as a name. Possibly in Latin, cuz we enjoy treading the line between pretentious and ludicrous for all we're worth.

- It will be freely downloadable from somewhere free on the internet, for free. Yes, FREE!

- Any or all of the above details are subject to change at the whim of our fickle personalities.

- Sports Night is one of the most criminally underrated TV series of all time. Total masterpiece. (Ignore the daft laugh track, it fades out by the middle of the first season anyway.)

Thursday 22 October 2009

[30,000 Leagues] Crewd Sons (Ghost in the Machine)

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://30kb.bandcamp.com/track/crewd-sons-ghost-in-the-machine"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Crewd Sons (Ghost in the Machine) by 30KB&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

"we interrupt this programme..."

[adbuster keaton] wincing at the lack of principle. cut to a track of static snapping at commercial intervals. it's difficult, individuals lost well beneath the deck and i can't tell the fire for the CGI effect. freeze the eye instead, wire fed, sleeping in the lion's bed, i'm hopeful the doubting's less total than global, i'm vocal from mountain to molehill, the old news they told you just grew from a world of Chernobyls. next stop, watch dog, heard slow, sleep dream, and learn to get scared by the ghost in the machine. nothing seizes me, the blessing of the non-committed censorer pushing me higher with the cooling of the temperature. dementia breaks to figure these aches: is it wrong to dwell on that which has been built on mistakes? living this way, on hearsay how we stunted our fate to come triumphant on an ever-plundered bit rate. this day dismay strays from the movement of the rhythmless, drowns us all out with the proof of their grandiloquence, grimacing at costs of a flag they didn't hoist. seemingly incipience is lost without its voice. it's all so very off-the-levy breezy wayward heading. wear the brightest swooshes, still we can't see where we're treading; black spot lighting up my future, there's no way of telling if rebellion is instinctive or a lifestyle that they're selling.

[diss1] (...heeeey!) if i wake up again while i'm alive i want to organise a party like it's 2005. those were platinum days - i'm still paying off the interest of trying everything once but folk dance and incest. flavours i did ingest, distill and regurgitate, the have-a-go villain over rhythms that'll circulate, lyrics that'll perforate if need be. got y'screaming out "Dissonance!" like a detuned TV. and if i die before i wake, i wanna go back in time and be the first one to use that. but more likely back to square one in dark corners where miscreants gather to smoke reefer and chew fat. where's the truth at? not like anyone here will know. i last saw that shit like 6 years ago. really though, don't you make faces at this lyricist. i'll take you to the places where the eye meets the pyramid. rebellion into money, cheap at the price, blew the cash and the speakers on the thirty merchandise. now it's broken-down blown cones, holes in the ozone, extraterrestrials at the party better phone home.



Monday 19 October 2009

[30,000 Leagues] Welcome to Nothing

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://30kb.bandcamp.com/track/welcome-to-nothing-feat-ava-leigh"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Welcome to Nothing feat. Ava Leigh by 30KB&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

[diss1] The hornets' nest stirred when they cut down the saviour. Buy now: apocalypse later. Apocryphal labours, favours returned, no rest for the wicked and weary. Faulty logic hara-kiris conspiracy theories. And Dr. Dre said... *something his ghostwriter thought of* (Straight outta composition? sort of.) Hold your position. You're sub-poena'd by put-you-out-of commission. Sharpshoot lyricism with military precision and execution. Classified level 3 intel. D-day landing smashing your splinter cell. i'm like hot gas compression how my flow's turbo. you a non-union equiv. like Señor Spielbergo. Heard you wanna quibble? That's comical like Bananaman. Soft fucker, you can get box-cutter'd by Nevada-tan fan club presidential assistant orderly - the gory story of Hikikomori. Lock lips w/fibre optics and a free flash screamer of your choice. Speed trials exceed pace of whoever's really racing the tortoise. But small voices, too, can shatter glass at the right pitch: that's why he legged it through the night after hitting the lightswitch.

[AcheZen Pains] Slipped and tripped from the pinnacle to land on his hands. Comprehend, don't understand: i'll be the nation's reprimand. Assured through lawless lands, hear me, and my ideology's more mental than any theory you can find in Scientology. Just try stopping me: i'm like a hearty-sized typhoon. You're more ridiculous than a student at Cromartie High School. i'm more effectual than respectable Hollywood special effects. Dionysian powers protecting me. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets! Fool? hardly. Foolhardy words'll never take care of me. Passionately kiss yr ass goodbye cuz it says pull in case of emergency. No do-re-mi: i'm here to pierce the ears of peers. Go to sleep with bad thoughts and i wake up something fierce. Second guess i manifest the thoughts i'm writing as a cycle: force of an ouroboros meant you felt my reprisals. Sizeable slice, retire you twice, leachers 'n preachers of viable rights. Bleeping a future of fallen tonights. Welcome to nothing: walk into the light.

[welcome] to the way we on it
[to] contemporary supersonic
[nothing] not a hopeful sonnet,
scenes created just to bomb it


[welcome] to a true platonic
[to] toppin trivia delivered in song with
[nothing] style different shakin tectonics,
this be the imminent finish of the wrongest...

[Ava Leigh]
close to the woes, no right to belong

(facing a nation that's wasting)
heard you can't teach an old maestro a new song
stealing, thieving our freedoms, i'm seething venom
welcome to nothing, to nothing we're heading, yeah

Pripyat, Ukraine. PD photo by Wikipedia user Kadams1970


Saturday 17 October 2009

Vice magazine photoshoot: Chloë Sevigny, 1994

"You got it buddy: the large print giveth and the small print taketh away" — Tom Waits

So the day after i take a side-swipe at Vice magazine they go and publish the best thing i see all day (applicable to quite a few days, actually).

It seems they're pretending it's 1994, for some odd reason (opportunity for lots of dramatic irony seems to be the main reason).

Anyway, this gives them cause to reprint a '94 photoshoot of gorgeous Chloë Sevigny1 modelling stuff by X-Girl, Kim Gordon's fashion imprint, so even if i didn't love the nineties it'd have been worth it for that alone.

Chloë had made her first screen appearance two years earlier in Sonic Youth's "Sugar Kane" video, spraying champagne over a crowd in a X-Girl wedding dress, a manoeuvre which gets a nod in this very shoot.



Bonus Sonic Youth video

1 If you know me, you probably also know i'm a hopeless Chloë Sevigny fanboy.

30KB 50 Cent remix (re-up)

Just re-upped the 30KB remix of 50 Cent (featuring 'Big Pete' Gabriel) from last year.

Perfect for anyone who likes awkward unwieldy mash-ups.


MP3: 50 Cent — "I Get Money (30KB Hammer Party edit)"

Friday 16 October 2009

Weird BBC headlines #3: wtf does this even mean?


To be fair, it can't be easy to convey in only five words the idea of being able to 'implant' false negative experience in the brains of fruit flies by binding a chemical receptor to their individual neurons. As this headline aptly demonstrates.

Thursday 15 October 2009

Hip Hop Hypedog compilation Vol. 1 out now

Repost from HHHD.


DOWNLOAD:
SENDSPACE // RAPIDSHARE

HIP HOP HYPE DOG COMPILATION - Volume 1
Release: 15th October 2009
Graphics: Sam Wightwick

After four successful months here at Hip Hop Hype Dog we wanted to celebrate the music surrounding the art form, so getting in touch with a few rappers/producers, we've created a compilation you can download for free.

This exists to showcase the artists and to give the public a musical taster of what we've been publishing on the blog, and what's happening now. The Compilation features 28 tracks, mostly British and a small seasoning of American, that we feel represent the positive direction that Hip Hop music is heading at the moment.

Send this round to your friends and spread the vibe, bump it in your car, drop it at your house party, pass around the word of Hype Dog. Come check the site for daily updates on all spheres in Hip Hop, and keep informed on the ever growing world of www.hiphophypedog.blogspot.com

Feel free to click its sibling site www.ukhiphopmixtapes.blogspot.com, a huge up and coming resource for sharing UK mix tapes.

Bad name for a doctor's surgery.



report: "BNP to consider non-white members"

i find most "let's-all-mock-the-BNP" activities to be either sneering, nasty everybody-laugh-at-the-thicko-proles snobbery (hi, Vice magazine, you bunch of coked-up Shoreditch fauxhawks!)1 or self-congratulatory empty bandwagonnery (you're not a racist? Wow, like, radical, man. Srsly, have a medal.)

But the news today that the party might have to reform their constitution to allow non-white members to join in line with anti-discrimination laws is sort of irresistible. If this does in fact go ahead, how great would it be for the BNP to be confronted with a sudden and massive groundswell of membership applications from blacks, Asians, and indeed any other ethnic minority they hate?

For one thing, a racist group that represented a full rainbow spectrum of the UK's various races would be completely meaningless, like those "I Hate Hip Hop!" groups on last.fm that get joined by loads of rap fans and consequently have their charts filled up with Kanye and Weezy every week. For another, you'd probably get rid of a lot of current BNP members through rage-induced spontaneous combustion.

It's probably no more effectual than ordering them pizzas they don't want, or 658 identikit punk bands all singing "fuck the BNP!" as if trying to defeat them through sheer tedium alone.

But i reckon it'd be a damn sight funnier.

1 NB: aspiring writers! Please have more dignity than the people in this comments section.

Monday 5 October 2009

Are these two paragraphs more hilarious or heart-breaking?

Discuss.
X Factor winner [Alexandra Burke] is keen to prove she's not one of the "puppets paid for by Simon Cowell" that Lily Allen referenced in her recent blog about illegal file-sharing.


...The new hairdo is part of a record company reimaging of the singer, described in their own PR material as "Alexandra Burke, version 2.0, 2009 remix".

Thursday 24 September 2009

Weird BBC headlines #2: Facebook is Satan

Screencaps of odd, amusing or plain WTFworthy headlines from the BBC News website or BBC Ticker.


@Lucifer RT @Satan they're on to us http://bit.ly/BYxg3 #hellisotherpeople

Tuesday 22 September 2009

New Sugababes: now with 100% less Sugababes!

So Keisha, the last remaining original Sugababe, has been sacked, leaving only Disproportionately Large Head Girl, Anonymous Session Singer #1 and Anonymous Session Singer #2 and effectively rendering them the Frankenstein of girl bands, a reanimated corpse stitched together from leftover body parts.

("They're like Sugababes FC", comments my 30KB co-conspirator J, correctly.)


Maybe, like someone on The Social Network for Short Attention Spans said (sorry, can't remember who), this is as good an opportunity as any for Keisha, Mutya and Siobhan to reform and tour as The Original Sugababes.

(edit > ah, actually, it was Simon Price.)


i can't stomach the thought of putting up Sugababes music on here no matter how relevant, so here's some vaguely thematically-connected material from the Juno soundtrack, Boris with Merzbow and DOOM instead.

mp3: Michael Cera/Ellen Page — "Anyone Else But You"
mp3: Boris with Merzbow — "Farewell"
mp3: DOOM — "That's That"

Monday 21 September 2009

another new layout

One day, one day, i swear i will design an original look for this place.

Until that day, however, we are rolling with Tekka by Blorgspot users Evhead and Glish. cheers guys!

Weird BBC headlines #1: Gaza

Screencaps of odd, amusing or plain WTFworthy headlines from the BBC News website or BBC Ticker.

The Gaza strip: NOT, apparently, a picnic hotspot

Thursday 17 September 2009

And the prize for fastest-aging meme EVER goes to...

— BANG! ...first joke off the starting line (within about 20 minutes... RIP Pat);
Kanye West interrupts your website;
Punctuation FAIL;
Apology generator;
— Entirely formulaic and lame "Hitler disses Kanye" modified Downfall clip (for the 400th time this year)1;
Image macro compendium;
— Piss-weak "topical" cartoon strips each including a semi-relevant and tangential reference to the cartoonist's area of interest (perfect example).
— Post-match meme analysis in The Grauniad (tardy).


How i actually feel about the Kanye incident:

(via Joe King @ Tw*tter)





(came up with this one all on my own.)




And finally: Terry Moran and his ABC compadres should have been fired from a cannon for violating an off-record agreement with an interviewee within minutes of it being made. All the little Che Guevara wannabes on the net going "there's no such thing as off-the-record! If the President said something, he said it! Da Troof™ is all that matters!" miss the point comprehensively and utterly (as usual). There is such a thing if you've just agreed to it as a professional, actually. Google that word, "professionalism". You'll be surprised.

The following is the only piece of music by Kanye i've ever felt the need to listen to (hint: somebody else produced it).

mp3: Kanye West — "Love Lockdown (Bean Butler rubdown)"

1 Seriously. You don't have to be Alejandro Jodorowsky or anything, but why not at least try subtitle-modding a scene from a different movie even, you lazy, unfunny, desperately unoriginal rehashing tedious internet pricks?

File under "religious vomit".

The Telegraph printed a story the other day that atheists are more successful at online dating than our religious counterparts. Unable to concede absolutely anything that might paint a non-believer in a slightly favourable light,1 they've subsequently got their Religion Editor, the blessed and benighted George Pitcher (right), to redress the balance by suicide-bombing logic on behalf of insecure deities everywhere.

When i first saw the title ("Atheists are no good in bed") i jokingly thought "perhaps his argument will be based solely on the fact that atheists don't shout out "Oh God!" at the moment of climax". After reading the piece, i am forced to conclude that this would actually have been among his stronger arguments. Instead, he delivers maybe the most specious, disingenuous, flimsy, illogical, non-sequitous blend of ineffectual insults and bollocks i've ever seen condensed into a mere two paragraphs.

i suppose i shouldn't really be surprised that a Christian preacher would have some trouble with logic, but is the Telegraph really that desperate for writers these days? Or is it easier just to troll for clicks than it is to bother getting any proper content?2

religious vomit

They just takes care
Of Number One
An' Number One ain't you
You ain't even Number Two...

mp3: The Persuasions — "The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing"
mp3: Dead Kennedys — "Religious Vomit"

1 Even though the original piece was hardly serious anyway.
2 Judging by that sexy byline photo, i bet George gets his pick of the Christian ladies, latex-faced hottie that he is.

Monday 14 September 2009

A tribute to Tupac

Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of the passing of Tupac Shakur, musician, actor, one of the most widely-acclaimed rap lyricists and performers of the 1990s.


Ever ones for the obvious here at LJB, today we celebrate 'pac's life and work with a tribute song written by lunatic hyper-caffeinated octogenarian former NYC postal worker Bingo Gazingo (from his self-titled album, and accompanied by a song that sounds a little like the Beavis & Butthead theme tune, as played by R. Stevie Moore and various other WFMU DJs.)

It's ridiculous, of course, but it doesn't seem like a pisstake — more like an actually pretty heartfelt tribute. There's probably an argument to be made somewhere that this very unlikeliness says a lot about the universality of Tupac's appeal.

Rock'n'roll, the American soul
to the American dream

Hard blast to your chest

Blood all over your breast

Why didn't you wear your bulletproof vest?

You lost your left testicle

And your right lung

Why did they have to shoot yer?

And take away your future

when you were so young?

Tupac Shakur: it's a heartbreaker

It's a ballbreaker

Your mother was a Black Panther

And your father was a political criminal1
But you had a voice as sweet as a Jewish cantor

Singing from the hymnal

On a high holy day...

I remember the words you sang which
changed the English language

Friday the 13th... you lost your dream...
And then he starts rapping. Dear lord, you have to hear this.

mp3: Bingo Gazingo — "Two Pack Shaker"

1 Yeh, stepfather in actuality. Whatever. You better hope you're this cool when you're 70-odd.

Saturday 12 September 2009

#9: The TV Theme Players — "Then and Now" (Big Eye, 2009)

Or: "things i have learned from listening to The TV Theme Players".

— My god but there are a lot of TV shows. This double CD has 110 tracks. And they're pretty much all American shows, the only UK representative being the really crap Skins.

The Blind Boys of Alabama version of "Way Down in the Hole" is apparently the definitive Wire theme. Which is balls, of course, as everyone knows it's the Tom Waits original.

— Hardly any TV themes are in irregular time signatures. There's Mission:Impossible (5/4), of course, and stalwart Britcop drama The Bill (7/8). And that's literally about the lot. Wasted opportunity, this.

— No kind of treatment could make the theme from Nip/Tuck sound like a decent piece of music. That isn't on this album, i'm just sayin'.

— A lot of shows nowadays don't have proper themes so much as an inoffensive little ambient sound-squiggles (see: Lost, Heroes etc.) This, too, is a waste of potential.

Ben Butler & Mouse Pad absolutely must cover the theme from Tequila & Bonetti. possibly also Jump Street. It's ok, i've told them already.

— The 80s were truly halcyon TV theme days.

— i've really gotta watch Twin Peaks soon.

— i do not find the theme from ER to convey the requisite sense of urgency, being far too relaxed for this purpose. In hospital terms, i think it would be a much more convincing soundtrack for somewhere like the Ear, Nose and Throat department.

— The TV Theme Players are likely a group of highly competent session musicians capable of convincingly switching between myriad styles and instruments with ease. However, the reason i say "likely" is because there's no clue anywhere on the internet who's responsible or why. Their last.fm page has no comments and no bio. In the absence of any sort of personality or obvious motive to the group whatsoever, what we're left with is the '00s equivalent of those weird Top of the Pops albums they had in the '60s where groups of session musos would perform ten Top 40 covers — mostly quite passable, sometimes incomprehensibly awful — to skirt licensing regulations.

Considering the potential audience for this creeps me out a little. Who is it aimed at? Prankster radio stations with archive space to fill? People who think TV shows are just a waste of 40 minutes between the cool music bits? The sort of people that listen to anime soundtracks, or consider Jonathan Larson their favourite composer?

At times the atmosphere is uncomfortably close to being stuck in an office Christmas party in Purgatory. The instrumental themes tend to fare better than, for instance, the Tesco No Frills version of Happy Days, which is like being badgered by a hyperactive Butlin's redcoat while trying to eat a cooked breakfast in peace. The most wretched of the lot are the themes which are actual songs: Jane's Addiction's horrible Entourage theme was bad enough to start with, and an anonymous cover of a bastardised excerpt, as here, only adds a sheen of gloss-eyed vacancy to the usual cock-rock bluster. Gruesome. Likewise, South Park illustrates the folly of trying to sound like Primus,1 and Massive Attack's "Teardrop" gains nothing by being oversimplified and renamed "House". And let us never speak of "Jackass" (a.k.a. a horrible bowdlerising of the Minutemen's "Corona", but with all the "Corona" removed). If anything, the themes-that-are-bona-fide-songs mainly serve to reinforce the earlier point that good TV theme composition is a rarefied art, to be increasingly valued over the lamer and more prevalent options of licensing some generically hip alt.rock or setting a synth to AutoBloop.

Jack White of The White Stripes shows up to do backing vocals on the Friends theme.2

— By the 85th consecutive theme i have started to feel as if someone has injected my entire face with Lidocaine. Only another 25 to go...

— The L.A. Law theme sounds like Christopher Cross playing "The Little Drummer Boy".

Highlights: Six Feet Under (wonderful theme in general; includes inventive rendering of the discordant modern classical mid-section vamp); Quantum Leap (which i've always felt to be quite a mediocre theme); Justice League Unlimited (too much metal for one hand); Dragonball Z (session-muso metal is just too hilarious); The Cosby Show and any of its jazzy cod-new-Jack-swingin' 80s contemporaries, against all odds (just unashamedly joyous and daft); Twin Peaks (atmospheric); Prison Break (rare class for a modern theme); Quincy M.E. (parping, clownish); New York Undercover (sounds like an MJ Dangerous outtake); Magnum PI (even, say, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain would have trouble fucking up a tune that good); Young Indiana Jones (a class rendition of Laurence Rosenthal's Boingo-esque theme); Boston Legal (just because i'm pretty sure the original did not feature someone imitating a guitar solo by going "wow waow waaooowww....").

Lowlights: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (no version of this will ever escape lame-o student-disco ironyland); "Woke Up This Morning" from The Sopranos (it was a terrible song to start with, this is just a straight cover. How have Alabama 3 managed to wangle the role of "the Gomez it's ok to like" anyway?); One Tree Hill (shockingly bland college rock crap); Walker, Texas Ranger (widdle widdle widdle); Murder, She Wrote (generally pretty good, but reorchestrating out the flatulent quacking trombone sections is total desecration); Baywatch (always was fucking awful, with its sand-in-the-joints phallic sax breaks farting all over everything, but this version is egregiously bad. it actually sounds like MIDI programming); the aforementioned Heroes (good effort, though); Chappelle's Show (funny for the first thirty seconds, excruciating for the next five lots of thirty seconds); Flintstones (wailing lead/synth revisionism).

mp3: TV Theme Players – "Prison Break"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Justice League Unlimited"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Six Feet Under"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Young Indiana Jones"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Tequila & Bonetti"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Twin Peaks"

1 Even if you are Primus. No, especially if you are Primus.
2 Not really.

Thursday 10 September 2009

If you're looking for miserly pricks, it's like Christmas come early!

Some genuine radicals in Yorkshire1 have decided they're going to make everyone's life better by supergluing the locks of charity shops they deem to be 'selling Christmas stuff too early'.

The writer claims to speak for the "Movement for the Containment of Xmas".

Clive Barker, manager of the Oxfam shop in Otley Road, said the letter was posted through his letterbox on Monday evening.

He said: "It is very odd. Every morning I wonder if I am going to be able to open up or will the lock be glued up.

"We are not going to take our cards down as we are a charity and we raise money for all the Oxfam projects.

"The cards are important for our fundraising. Like the rest of the High Street there are Christmas cards on display as early tasters.

"Four shops have been targeted and I just hope that nothing comes of it. The police say they are treating it very seriously and have taken the letter for fingerprints."

The letter states: "This is a very polite but very serious reminder not to display Xmas cards until 1st Nov. We will put super glue into your locks if you do. Peace and goodwill."


Truly revolutionary, guy(s). You are doing a sterling job of reclaiming Christmas from the forces of capitalistic greed and back towards the true Christian message of charity to others by, erm, vandalising a charity shop for attention.

i'm starting a counter-movement called "Movement for the Proliferation of Xmas" just to spite these pricks. And i'm going to find out their identities and send them Christmas cards and serenade them with carols ALL SUMMER.

The fact that they've given themselves a fancy yet slightly wacky name screams "clever-clogs students" to me. (NB: Sarah, who knows about these things, says "I guessed those student sorts too. Then I read the article and it says that some of the beef happened in Headingley which makes it a 99.9% cert.")

He/they probably meant it sincerely, too, but pound-to-a-pinch-of-shit that if the po-po pick do them up from the fingerprint evidence, they won't even have the balls to cop to it, and will instead say "Oh, it was meant as an art statement, on the nature of capitalist society and how it erodes our basic humanity. We were SATIRISING the sort of people that put glue in locks."

Weak as plankton piss. A plague on all their houses.

See also this Facebook group, where they're actually compiling lists of shops that they think are selling Christmas stuff "too early", putting in complaint letters and boycotting the shops in question. Good job that such a list could also be used as a guide to where to shop if you want to spite the kind of bores that find it necessary to join such a group!

Debenhams, the target of their ineffectual bleating, wrote back very patiently with a stock letter explaining their position. (Incidentally, some geniuses in the group seemed to think they were the next Sherlock Holmes for spotting this fact. "
I received an almost identical, and obviously canned response", smugs one complainant. Well, yes. The reply is very similar to the reply received by others who complained, perhaps because you all put in the same fucking complaint.) If i owned a shop, my fantasy reply letter wouldn't have been quite so cordial. It would have more likely been along the lines of:

Dear Complainant,

It's our store, and therefore our prerogative to sell what we want whenever we see fit. We are not bothered in the slightest that your ignorant arse will not be crossing our threshold this year.

Fuck off,
tom dissonance.

Ho, ho, and indeed, ho.

mp3:___dREàgänN|||||| — "This Is My Christmas"
mp3: Cutting Pink with Knives — "Merry Fucking Christmas, You Spineless Fuck"

1 Well, one guy at least. Probably two at most. They will be plural for the time being.

Wednesday 9 September 2009

Spodify advert reviews pt. 1

Who/what: Amy McDonald
The gist of it? "Hi, youu can broowshe throoough maaa baack cataloogue on Shhpodifyyy..."
Net result? Sounds like it was recorded onto a tape Walkman pissed after falling out of a Yates' Wine Lodge.

Who/what: Frankmusik
Gist? "Boom, ka-BAPhi, i'm-boomboom bap Frankchkkachkkamusik. I'm boom-ba-KA!doing that boof chk-chkreally annoyingticktick ba-ba-ba beatboxing-and-speaking-widdly-BOOM-chk-chkBOOM-bababa-duggadugga...AT-THE-SAME-TIME thing that boomBOOMboom Rahzel's been doing since der-der-derrrr before we were all spunk. Chkka-chkka-chkka."
Result? Like someone dug up Les Rhythmes Digitales and gave him an even stupider name and worse music and made him spew his Urban Tourette's™ all over my fucking playlist every half an hour. Wank.

Who/what: Little Boots
The gist of it? "Hi, ...Spodify." Followed by her music.
Result? You hear Little Boots' music and wish you hadn't.

Who/what: Mika
The gist of it? Promoting his new single
Result? Twofold. Initially there's dismay that Mika is still out there making music. This is then tempered by a kind of nauseated amusement at the way his new song simultaneously rips off Jason Donovan's "Too Many Broken Hearts", "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Belinda Carlisle, Kiss, Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer", The Darkness and about eight other really bad songs.

Who/what: "The Spotify answerphone"
The gist of it? Britain's Got Opinions (whether it deserves them or not)
Result? "Hi there... errrr.... Spotify's like amazing like, but the only fing that'd make it better is, ummm, y'know, if you could like, save the music, like, onto your EmPeeFree playa like, yeah?"

i can't even write suitably sarcastic commentary about how dumb that sentence is.1

1 Yes, it's obviously a paraphrase. But the meaning is consistent with that of the original.

Wednesday 2 September 2009

30KB Delusionists remix

ahwhatthefuck... might as well post this since it's ready & i'm bored & in work...

i remixed the Delusionists' "Parallel Worldz" (featuring Invizible Frenz) from the recent Certified Banger On the Radar Vol. 4 compilation for their remix contest.


BEETS LAYING ABOUT

Hopefully it is good enough for the first guy from Invizible Frenz not to "literally shit on" me.

mp3: Delusionists — "Parallel Worldz" feat. Invisible Frenz (30KB mix)

Tuesday 25 August 2009

One woman's horrific story

Definitely the best thing i've seen on the front of a women's magazine for a while.


mp3: 14 Year Old Girls —"Grand Theft Auto 3"
mp3: Don Caballero — "Slice Where You Live Like Pie"

Monday 24 August 2009

In defence of Milli Vanilli (or: towards an authentic fakeness)

Reading a BBC piece the other day about the legendary "miming vocalist" fallout surrounding Black Box's 1989 hit "Ride on Time", i got to thinking that Milli Vanilli got a pretty raw deal out of their whole experience with same. The point's been made before that their biggest crime was essentially being twenty years ahead of their time (see this DKPresents piece for a concise and interesting precis). But was it? Or was it more serious for MV that they failed to pay lip service to pop culture's bizarre and uneven obsession with "authenticity"?

Universal Pictures currently has a Milli Vanilli biopic in development. Screenwriter Jeff Nathanson told Variety that “I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of fakes and frauds, and in this case, you had guys who pulled off the ultimate con, selling 30 million singles and 11 million albums and then becoming the biggest laughing-stocks of pop entertainment.”


"The biggest laughing stocks of pop entertainment"? Really? After all, everyone from Britney Spears to the Antares hip-hop movement1 to Yo-Yo Ma is Milli Vanilli nowadays, and no-one's suggesting narcotically-assisted slow suicide as a suitable penance.2 No-one's ever excoriated Jack Nicholson for not actually being a tormented wife-terrorising failed writer living in a decrepit hotel in the middle of nowhere. And anyone whose dreams were shattered upon finding out that Johnny Depp is not in real life a flouncy dreadlocked buccaneer has only himself to blame; Walt Disney Studios is not accountable for "misleading" him.

Much of the discourse around Milli Vanilli has the "disgraced" group being "stripped of their Grammy" for "trying to fool" the listening audience. But surely this only holds true if you're the kind of person that believes Mike Batt should be done for fraud because an actual Womble is not vocalising on "Remember You're A Womble". Is it really that hard to comprehend that artistic spectacles aren't meant as literal truth? In the press, Milli Vanilli are now framed exclusively as a hoax, or even an elaborate practical joke (witness their entry on the Museum of Hoaxes website and J. Nathanson's "ultimate con" quip above). But the NYT article quoted above that broke the "stripped of Grammy" story even includes these paragraphs:

Virtually all recorded music is the product of studio manipulation. Classical albums are typically pieced together from the best of multiple takes of a work; even live albums, classical and popular, are often patched up to correct wrong notes. Most popular music is created on multi-track tape that allows dozens of separate elements to be perfected and combined.

Dance-pop like Milli Vanilli's album can be recorded with the efforts of a small group of people. A single songwriter-producer can generate all of the instrumental sounds, from computerized drums to synthetic horns. All that needs to be added is human voices, so it is possible that only the producer, the recording engineer and the performers would know who appeared on the album.


So it's not like this was some great shady record company conspiracy; it was all out in the open even then. The pained howls of dimwit Proper Music™ enthusiasts about how the sonic reality of Girl, You Know It's True does not exactly correspond with the physical movements made in the studio during its creation should thus be ignored as epic point-missing at best. To consider the very nature of performing on electrified instruments artificially amplified over a public address system for an audience larger than could possibly ever assemble to hear such an ensemble play "naturally"3 just emphasises that the stadium cock-rock of, say, Pearl Jam or Stereophonics, is exactly as (in)authentic as Milli Vanilli were. But, for whatever reason, only one of these inauthenticities must be censured as "artificial" or "dishonest".

No, Milli Vanilli's real mistake was to trick an establishment whose authenticity game they weren't playing into rewarding them with its highest totem, The Mighty Grammy Award. When the Grammies' inadvertent endorsement of MV was discovered, someone was going to have to fall on a sword just to restore and reperpetuate the authenticity illusion. After all, if they hadn't, someone might have pointed out that Girl You Know It's True was, qualitatively and content-wise, exactly the same record the day after the miming revelation that it was the day before. The group were stripped of the Grammy not because of a reconsideration of the work's merit, but because of an arbitrary political decision regarding the process of its fabrication.

Maybe they should just have been blatantly up-front about it. i used to be in a group called Saigon High Chair Pirates, and like all good groups, we had a theme song. In the middle of "Theme from Saigon High Chair Pirates" (maybe the "middle eight", who the fuck even knows what that actually means tho) we included a repeating vocal vamp with harmonies saying "Saigon, ooh yeah baby!" — a classic pop hook, i think you'll agree. At the point in the song, the three of us (the other two now have a different band) would step up to the mics, let our instruments hang by the straps, and perform handclaps along with the vocal harmony. This would carry on for a couple of bars, after which time we'd slowly start to back off from the mics — still singing, still doing the hand claps — while the vocals, pre-recorded and mimed all along, carried on without us. This always got a laugh, but i was always secretly hoping we'd have baited a more guillible audience member into protesting that we'd been miming our whole set.

Maybe Milli Vanilli should have had women mime the male vocals. Or been accompanied onstage by a ludicrous backing band armed with instruments obviously incapable of producing the sounds coming out of the speakers: say, one guy with a set of cardboard boxes of various sizes arranged and mimed as if a real drum kit, one guy struggling to carry an eight-foot wooden railway sleeper ("bass guitar") above his head, one guy with a toilet bowl strapped around his body like a sousaphone with a fifteen-foot length of hose coming out the back attached to a baritone sax mouthpiece at the other end. (For example). That would more clearly have said, "These guys clearly aren't playing this shit. We're not singing it either. Enjoy it for what it is or grow the fuck up and go listen to something you do like."

Or maybe it's time they got their own tribute band? All-female, probably. A tribute both to them and to their concept, the perfect isolation of song from performer. The pioneers who got scalped.

Twenty years. And we are where now?

mp3: Binary Star — "Reality Check"
mp3: Pumpkinhead — "Fake vs. Real"
mp3: Saigon High Chair Pirates — "Theme from Saigon High Chair Pirates"

1 Tangential note: calling for the "death of autotune" is like calling for the death of reverb, or the death of flutes. It's a completely inane, nonsensical generalisation.
2 Though in poor Britney's case, it's kind of a moot point.
3 i.e. free from such accoutrements.