What do Robert Johnson, Black Sabbath and Celine Dion all have in common? They have all been accused of devil-worship. This week, Dion has joined this category thanks to comments made by priest and exorcist Msgr. John Esseff. Dion hasn’t visited the crossroads or beheaded any doves. She’s launched a gender neutral children’s clothing line with Nununu, called CELINUNUNU. Essef is “convinced that the way this gender thing has spread is demonic” and believes “the devil is going after children by confusing gender.”
I always thought that pants were a basic gender neutral clothing item, but Essef doesn’t seem to have a vendetta against women wearing pants so much as he wants his followers to buy into the myth that both gender and sex are binary, rather than a spectrum. With a color palette that eschews typical blue and pink, Dion hopes to “inspire your children to be free and find their individuality through clothing.” Do uselessly small women’s pant pockets enforce gender norms? Personally, I’m just hoping the kids from her target audience will grow up to design a pair of adult gender-neutral pants with pockets that can actually hold stuff; til then, I’ll feel a little more rock n’ roll when “My Heart Will Go On” gets stuck in my head.
The New New
Grimes released a track called “We Appreciate Power,” inspired by North Korea and AI. PhoebeBridgers released a cover of McCarthy Trenching’s “Christmas Song” featuring Jackson Browne. NickiMinaj and Lil Wayne released a music video for “Good Form.” Neil Young released “Songs For Judy,“ a collection of live acoustic recordings from 1976.
End Notes
Idles are raising money for Samaritans by auctioning off 18 pieces of artwork from their album Joy As An Act of Resistance that’s been featured in galleries in New York, London and Paris.
This week, a viral video showed NYC commuters standing up to a drunk guy on the train when he started yelling racist insults at a group of teenagers. At the end of the video, as he’s pushed out of the train car, someone launches a container of soup at them, covering them in yellow goo. It gets better: the hero in this story is rapper Princess Nokia, who tweeted, “Although painful and humiliating we stood together and kicked this disgusting racist off the train so we could ride in peace away from him… [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][I’ll be] damned if I let some drunk bigot call a group of young teenage boys racist names and allow him to get away with it.”
Women Speak out About Sexual Assault in the Music Industry
No doubt encouraged by the bravery of the many women who have come forward to share their harrowing experiences with powerful film executive Harvey Weinstein, women are coming forward to call out men in other industries who they say have engaged in inappropriate behavior up to and including harassment and assault. Allegations have surfaced in the last week involving Matt Mondanile (a.k.a. Ducktails) who parted ways with former outfit Real Estate over the allegations last year; The Gaslamp Killer, and Alex Calder. A few of the labels and publicists who have worked with these artists have spoken out as well in a show of solidarity.
Other Highlights
Watch Beyonce’s video for “Freedom,” listen to an unreleased Bob Dylan song, an early listen of Bully’s Losing, Radiohead songs translated through Spongebob, it’s the release day for St. Vincent’s MASSEDUCTION as well as Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile’s Lotta Sea Lice and Beck’s Colors, watch the new Neil Young video for “Hitchhiker,” Japanese Breakfast directed Jay Som’s “The Bus Song” video, Marilyn Manson discusses his onstage accident, Taylor Swift is starting her own social network, Joan Baez is retiring from touring, Sharon Jones’ posthumous album to be released next month, and read this: The Story of Jud Jud.
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”]The sculpture garden in Secret Project Robot’s former space on Melrose. The new location’s “smaller but more intimate” sculpture garden is under development with the help of Kathleen Dycaico and Monica Mirabile.
Bushwick’s Secret Project Robot Is Reopening
The DIY venue will reopen on Broadway in Bushwick, near the Kosciuszko St J stop. Its eight partners have stated that the venue is “entirely self funded” by them, and will only hire artists, helping to “keep artists thriving in a New York City landscape that is less than financially friendly to the creative.” The reopening date is set for May 4th- details here!
The Latest Rockstar Species Is Named After Radiohead
Revealed soon after the Pink Floyd-inspired shrimp, there’s a new species of ant named after Radiohead. Sericomyrmex radioheadi is a type of silky ant which have figured out how to grow their own food. These creatures live in the Amazon and farm fungus gardens for nourishment. Why Radiohead? Ana Ješovnik, one of the authors of a Zookeys study on the insects, stated they wanted to honor their music, and “acknowledge the conservation efforts of the band members, especially in raising climate-change awareness.” Read more here.
RIP Jonathan Demme
Demme was a revered film director who directed, among other classics, the Talking Heads live concert doc Stop Making Sense. David Byrne posted an essay in tribute to the filmmaker on his website, noting that Demme helped him when he was developing True Stories and highlighting his good taste in and love for music: “Jonathan was also a huge music fan—that’s obvious in his films too…He’d find ways to slip a reggae artist’s song or a Haitian recording into a narrative film in ways that were often joyous and unexpected.” Read the whole thing here.
Last year, Neil Young performed a feat many famous musicians seem to be doing these days – he worked hard on a memoir that was published recently and gave it a few twists.
The overall premise of Waging Heavy Peaceis that of Young peering into his brain matter over a period of a few months in 2011 and recording it (in writing, and only in writing – sort of). He talks about everything he’s currently doing and working on, complete with whatever thoughts pass through. It goes on for 497 pages. At times it was easy to forget that the book is that long. At other times it suddenly occurred to this reader to look ahead to check how much longer it was going to be before a next chapter, or to the end of the book, but it definitely had its moments.
Those looking for seriously deep insights and a more solid chronology from Young’s memoir are better off hunting down Shakey, Jimmy McDonough’s biography of the man. Peace finds Young holding to his chest the cards that proclaim how he feels about his closest family members and about many other matters that require intense introspection, but he’s quite willing to expound on many musicians and artists he’s played with, especially the ones who have passed away – original Crazy Horse guitarist and vocalistDanny Whitten; Larry Johnson, the filmmaker with Young’s Shakey Pictures who was best known for working on Young’s Human Highway; David Briggs, the producer with whom Young feels he made his best albums. There is a profound respect for what these people have meant to him and to the lives they led that is revealing in its own way. In a world he’s created that consists of music, family, close friends, and technology, Young can be an astute observer of surface.
Much has been made of the focus of Peace. It’s too easy to get caught up in that, and part of me wonders if that’s one of Young’s feints, a series of obstacles placed in the way of the readers that keep the man himself comfortable inside his own castles. They are edifices largely built of old cars and a need to present sound and music as he feels it should be heard. Young sings praises of the Lincvolt – his project transforming the innards of a ‘59 Lincoln Continental into a 21st century machine with a clean-burning engine – and a type of sound quality player and distribution system that would supposedly blow MP3s out of the water. He finances these enterprises, does some work on them, but mostly revels in a sort of nostalgia over these things. They are symbols of his American dreams, in a sense, of days when big cars helped bring him to his earliest gigs and larger vehicles like tour buses seemed to have lives of their own. Days when, even though the sound of his own albums may not have been perfect at the time, they sounded better than the CDs and iTunes digital files of the present. Repeated references to all of this stuff borders on annoying, making me wonder if Peace isn’t much more than a sales pitch.
If it is, it isn’t a very good one.
The Voodoo Music Experience is one of New Orleans’ attempts at being all things musically relevant to all people from all over the world – and to somehow, some way, make a profit while doing it. Its name makes it stereotypically New Orleans while differentiating it from the more well-known Jazz and Heritage Festival, somehow hinting at providing more “dangerous,” off-the-mainstream musical offerings than JazzFest would have.
The reality is that the Voodoo and Jazz Festivals are coming closer together with every passing year, both of them booking performers that wouldn’t be out of place in either festival context. One of those performers happened to be on the Le Ritual stage at Voodoo Fest earlier this year, rocking the audience with mostly new music that sounded a lot like his older music. Not that there’s a thing wrong with that, as Neil Young and Crazy Horse can still bring it. Put it in the context of Young’s recent memoir, though, and brace yourself for questioning why one would even attempt to categorize what he does at all.
Young’s interests and doings have gone well beyond wielding a pencil and paper to write songs, then wielding his trusty guitar, Old Black (among many other instruments over the years) to record them and perform them live. Watch him onstage with Crazy Horse, however, and you wonder why he would want to do anything else. Despite Young’s sobering hearkening back to past music on occasion with a bit of “Needle and the Damage Done” and the more recent, unblinking portrait of a couple’s travails over nearly twenty years of marriage in “Ramada Inn” from the newly released Psychedelic Pill, what he and the members of the Horse were best at was a sheer joy in playing rock. The massive expanse of the festival stage was shrunk not only by Young and the band members clustering together as they played, but also by the attitude they brought. An attitude that screamed This is fuckin’ FUN.
An occasional, recurring afterthought of sorts in Waging Heavy Peace is what playing with Crazy Horse means to Neil Young. It’s something that isn’t new to the memoir; Young has spoken of the Horse as an entity unto itself that kicks him into a higher gear both musically and spiritually many times before. He anticipates getting the group back together at the White House on his Broken Arrow Ranch and schemes to get each one of the musicians in on sessions that created Psychedelic Pill, another rock set destined to burnish their massive legacy (it’s of no little surprise to me that there’s a song called “Walk Like A Giant” on it). But watching them all performing live drives home one thing that Young’s memoir only hinted at…
…These days, the road is Neil Young’s drug. His music is still, largely, his greatest gift to us all in life. And the mirth he and Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro took in 1990’s “F*!#kin’ Up” on that stage at Voodoo Fest was not to be missed – nor was the shredding that Old Black took, its strings a tangled mess on the rug after the encore of “Like A Hurricane.” These small, intense windows into Young’s innards are, truly, the best we as an audience will ever get.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Ticket Giveaways
Each week Audiofemme gives away a set of tickets to our featured shows in NYC! Scroll down to enter for the following shindigs.