BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Next week Philly will reprazent at the Jarvis Cocker-curated Meltdown Festival, to be held in London’s prestigious Southbank Centre. After a week featuring resurrected rock acts Roky Erickson, The Stooges and Devo plus Beth Orton singing Disney tunes with Pete Doherty & Shane McGowan (for sake of their health please keep those two apart) the week will climax with with the Philadelphia conglomeration known as The Valerie Project sharing the bill with the former Pulp frontman’s closing set. Originally formed for a screening at UPenn’s I-House last year, The Valerie Project will tune up for […]
“There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes/Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Funny how the more wars change, the more they stay the same. In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, John Prine, quintessential Americana songwriter, then fresh out of the Army and well-acquainted with the FUBAR Catch 22s of a soldier’s life, wrote “Sam Stone.” You may not recognize it from the title, but you have heard this song. Detailing the post-traumatic stress of a Vietnam vet all but abandoned by the country he nobly served, the lyric goes: “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes / Jesus Christ […]
EVA SAYS: LIVE & DIRECT FROM BONNAROO
EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend Phawker has not just one, but two, of its best correspondents on the ground at Bonnaroo. All weekend, assistant editor EVA LIAO and her trusty sidekick, book critic MAVIS LINNEMANN, will be blogging photos and scene reports straight from the primeval muck of Bonnaroo to your mind’s eye. Hope you appreciate that these chicks are living in a stifling tent and sweating their tits off so you don’t have to. I sure do. EVA SAYS: Here we are in Manchester, Tennessee, roasting in 95 degree weather under our makeshift tent (we didn’t exactly know how to […]
RECORD REVIEW: Slaves To The Grind
BY ED KING ROCK CONNOISSEUR I’ve spent a lot of time with two would-be badass albums over the last month: Grinderman, the boys’ night out Stooge-fest by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and the Heartless Bastards’ sophomore album, All This Time. Both come out of the gates looking for a rumble, which is fine by me in these days of 8-piece grad-school folkie orchestras and glossy-but-anemic 80s dance-punk replicants. “Gray” kicks off the Heartless Bastards album, throwing down a two-chord gauntlet and making full use of the throaty, 4 Non Blondes chick-like lead vocals of dynamo Erika Wennerstrom. The […]
THE ANTI-WAR SONG MTV WON’T PLAY…
Because The Donuts gave it to us first! Take that Martha Quinn! Eat our New Media dust Viacom! Anyway, it’s called “Justice In The Desert” and the ‘Nuts insist this is the catchiest song about Haditha you will ever hear. We sure hope so. Catch ’em tonight at the Underground.
THE EARLY WORD: Shock Of The Mew
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Jack White Explains Why Button Is So Hard To Button
A group of Chelsea Pensioners attending a concert by The White Stripes, left, at the Royal Chelsea Hospital in central London Tuesday June 12, 2007. The White Stripes won some new fans Tuesday during an intimate and unusual gig at a home for elderly British military veterans. (AP Photo/Andy Willsher) [via WASHINGTON POST] NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO: ICKY THUMP
HEAR YE: Now Playing On Phawker Radio
“Somehow the fake-brother-and-sister/ex-husband-and-wife duo of John Anthony Gillis and Megan Martha White, aka Jack and Meg White, has managed to transmute gimmick into mystique, to create a shimmering garage mirage out of little more than trashcan drums, greasy geetar and a natty tricolor fashion palette, and sell it to 4 million people. Having proven time and again that less is more, the White Stripes remain adamantly reductionist about everything, from their music to the truth about their lives. They are masters of illusion via subtraction. And the less they give us, the more we want.” — Jonathan Valania, A Long […]
BART WHITE: The Hardest Button To Button
In Jazzy and the Pussycats, Bart learns drums and in a parody of The White Stripes’ video of “The Hardest Button to Button”, every time Bart hits the bass drum, he “creates” a new identical drum kit next to the other drum kit, but leaves the old kit behind, therefore creating a trail of drumkits. Bart goes around Springfield, through the Springfield Elementary School with Principal Skinner chasing him in time with the music, and soon goes onto a footpath. MORE
BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT: Everybody Daylight
Yes, this is what you think it is.
King Britt, Need New Body Dude Score Pew Grants
Ki CUT CHEMIST: King Britt spins the crowd before Obama’s arrival at the Electric Factory, last month. Twelve fellows were awarded $50,000 each to spend any way they wish. The Pew program, in its 16th year, aims to identify Philadelphia-area artists at critical career junctures and give them the freedom to advance their artistic ambitions. “One of the things [recipients] say to us is that now when people ask them what they do, they say first and foremost, ‘I am an artist.’ There is something about the validation that these grants bring,” program director Melissa Franklin says. Validation, yes, and […]
LOCAL RAWK: NY Times Gives The Teeth Big Ups
“The Teeth’s first full-length album, ‘You’re My Lover Now’ (Park the Van), is a population explosion. Songs fling shards of narrative about dozens of characters: lovers, friends, schoolkids, parents, depressives, liars, strivers, even partygoers tootling kazoos. The bits of stories arrive in an even more manic outpouring of tunes: honky-tonk, garage-rock, music-hall Merseybeat, frantic new wave and a final tinkly philosophical ballad with an apt self-diagnosis: ‘You got too many ideas building up inside of you.’ It’s an overload, but an exhilarating one; these songs are worth decompressing.” — John Pareles NEW YORK TIMES: And That’s Just The First Song!
THE WINNER: “Now, let’s get that Brazilian started.”
Congratulations Mike Guggino You Are Going To See Lee Scratch Perry! Enjoy! The City of Philadelphia’s photo archive contains over 2 million images that date back as far as the late 1800s, i.e. the last time a Republican won in this town. In all seriousness, this is an INCREDIBLE visual record of the city’s evolution and a relatively new web site, PhillyHistory.org, is making it available for online consumption and purchase. To date, some 27,000 images have been digitally scanned, at a rate of roughly 2,000 images a month. So, if you’ve been wondering why the line at Kinko’s is […]