Datarock - Fa Fa Fa from nettwerkmusic on Vimeo.

Hat tip to my internet Luddite friend Kiki for burning this band’s disc for me. To quote him: “Like Devo meets disco!”

Nina Simone remixes, which never get old:

(Hat tip.)

Warning: Shittiness of picture may cause seizures.

This article is well-intentioned, but kind of gave me an uneasy vibe. It’s about a trend I was blissfully unaware of until very recently, when I went out bowling with some friends to a place that plays loud music and videos, and suddenly this song came on—I can’t tell you which one—and like half the people at the bowling alley started to do some kind of line dance. As I stood there appalled, my friends explained that this is some new thing that’s really popular, and later my friend Spinetta emailed out a video of a bunch of middle aged men doing the same dance in kilts….at a wedding of course.

In other words, you can blame the patriarchy for shitty dance crazes, at least in part. The craze for big weddings has created an engulfing need for songs that can get every rhythm-free and shame-laden guest at a wedding onto the floor after a couple of glasses of champagne, and line dancing really fits the bill. As long as weddings have been with us, so have line dances, because everyone can do them and get applause and recognition for it, and doubly so if they are usually considered terrible dancers. Everyone’s just pleased to see them capable of something. This guy spends a lot of time uncomfortably dwelling on how he, white boy from Iowa, looked to hip-hop from a young age to inject some cool and some masculinity into him, but what he fails to realize is that the widespread nature of that desire in this country made the hip-hop-to-gaudy-wedding-music road an inevitability. Who has these big weddings with a strong need for line dancing but the young men like our author here, who listened to NWA on the bus to the Iowa schoolhouse? And with the pressure to both have a picture perfect wedding and to express your “true self”, goofy employments of pop music on the wedding dance floor are de rigeur. I’m not denying that this can sometimes be fun, to watch the old folks shake it to Outkast, but it’s also the source of really goofy dances.

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Sorry it took so long to leave a random ten thread! I had to take the cats to the vet this morning and overslept. So, leave yours in comments and here’s some videos to put you in a musical state of mind. Choices picked because norbizness told me these bands are playing at La Zona Rosa in June.

Very exciting.

For those who care about the cats, they’re fine. Dusty has been sneezing some, and the vet confirmed that she has allergies, and that we now have permission to sedate her with a quarter of a baby Benadryl. Unfortunately, Molly crapped herself in fear on the way to the vet, which I think was caused as much by Dusty howling, hissing, and beating her as it was by the car ride itself. After the vet visit, Dusty was perfectly happy to get back in the carrier, but was simply not going to let Molly get in there with her, and the whole clinic heard her explain this. Which really, if you think about it, is reasonable. I wouldn’t want to be in close quarters with someone known to shit herself like that. The vet had to give me a cardboard box for Molly, which was just as well and made the ride back home relatively peaceful and shit-free.

So I’m standing there, enjoying the hell out of this Gogol Bordello concert last night,* and I dwell for a moment on how many influences they manage to wrap into their music. They bill themselves as “gypsy punk rock cabaret”, which basically is this mash-up of Eastern European music and punk rock, but what makes them especially fun is they’re perfectly happy to grab all sorts of influences, so you have Carribean influences, with reggae beats, dub effects, and even dancehall rapping, plus some rapping in Russian but with more of a U.S.-style feel to it. It’s a band that could seem like a novelty act, but they’re serious about just delving into using the energy of culture clash to drive this music, and it’s really pretty amazing. You really find yourself buying into this larger vision that’s expressed by the musical style, but also their lyrics that are almost cutely modernist and progressive, like “There were never any good days/There is today/There is tomorrow” and “My brothers are protons/My sisters are neurons”—this notion that culture is a shark that has to keep moving or it dies.

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Gnarls Barkley is putting out a new album.

I like to play Rock Band. They entered a B-52s song into the downloadables. It’s not the greatest B-52s song. Not even close. This is it.

My devotion to both Cindy and Ricky Wilson makes me a weirdo. I don’t care.

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I just have to post this video that I saw at PZ’s.

It’s a song about a Jack Chick tract. It’s worth watching, seriously.

But it does raise some serious questions about the religious right and their relationship to law and government. Bear with me, I have a point. One of the favorite things that we pro-choicers like to do to anti-choicers is asking the point-blank how much time a woman should do if she has an illegal abortion. It’s fun to see the rusty gears try to turn, and the stammering come out. Try it at home!

The issue is that they get a lot of enthusiasm by putting things into two simple categories: Bad and Good, and never the twain should meet. And the law should ban Bad things because they’re Bad, and the actual pragmatic issues there (like whether or not everyone thinks they’re Bad) don’t seem to come into the question. But then you have the added issue of this whole Christian salvation doctrine, which says that your sins, no matter how bad, are wiped away if you say you’re really, really sorry to Jesus. And believe in him. And I do believe some crying is involved.

Since they don’t distinguish between sin and things that are a matter of the law, then it’s probably hard for your average wingnut Christian to distinguish between god’s authority to grant forgiveness and the secular need for the law to be enforced fairly. Like in this video. You have a man who raped his daughter, let the neighbor rape his daughter, and gave his 5-year-old herpes. But because he was saved, it’s all okay. No discussion about the immediate need for him to go to jail for a long ass time. God forgives, and so should the government. You say this same thinking with the evangelical outpouring of support for Karla Faye Tucker. It wasn’t that they were anti-execution, per se, but it was clear that they thought it should be reserved for non-fundies, especially those with darker skin. And also with the insane abortion thing. They argue that women who have abortions are murderers, and murderers are only fit for jail, and yet they welcome these “murderers” with open arms if they say they’re sorry and they love Jesus. They put them at the front of the line for propaganda purposes. Don’t they think these women should be in jail?

Just like the whole thing with making “In God We Trust” bigger on the coins, this whole religious right thing is about joining a super special club with special privileges. I heard someone recently describe it as “country club religion”, and I’m stealing that for the title of this post.

I had an opportunity to play Michael Jackson’s version of “Ain’t No Sunshine”. It’s quite possibly one of my all-time favorite vocal tracks. If you want to hear the whole thing, here’s the video:

The Verve remix album version of “See Line Woman” by Nina Simone. I dare you not to dance.

I’m in Boulder, CO for a meeting with the great folks of RH Reality Check, so not much in the way of time to pull out my iPod and generate 10 songs at random for your reading/bragging rights pleasure. But feel free to do the Friday Random Ten in comments, of course!

But I won’t leave you hanging in terms of celebrating Friday with a bit of tuneage. Any time is a good time to celebrate 80s post-punk with clips from “Urgh! A Music War“.

For Lauren, some Pere Ubu:

Because explicitly feminist punk rock predates the Pacific Northwest music explosion, the Au Pairs:

Wall of Voodoo:

I realized that I’ve been posting a lot of videos throughout the year, but I’ve neglected to put up anything from The Go! Team’s new album, Proof of Youth, which is one of the best of 2007 in my occasionally-but-rarely humble opinion. I shall remedy that now.

They’re really a genuine 21st century band. I defy you to come up with an easy categorization for their music. I say “hip hop”, because nothing else comes quite close enough to describe the way they combine an entire catalog of sounds.

*Pam gets the best hate mail.

For your thoroughly secularized holiday, a song by Gogol Bordello:

And thank you to the reader who sent me this picture of her disco ball-bedecked Christmas tree!

If you have money this year for charity, I recommend Katha Pollitt’s charity list for ideas.

Ugh, Ike Turner has died. Compare and contrast the ratios of lauding talent to bemoaning violent misogyny in his obituaries to the recent ones of Norman Mailer. It’s an interesting twist of history that Ike Turner—who is, to be honest, just one of many, many, many men of genius in history who was also a violent, wife-beating nightmare of a person—will be one of the few remembered more for the evil in him than the beauty. A combination of racism, a disdain for the greatness of rock music, and the power of cinema has made this much certain. (Read BFP’s powerfully moving post on the image of Tina Turner that she coincidentally wrote just a few days ago.)

I want to be happy that Ike Turner was exposed as the monster he was. And I am, but it comes with caveats. One is that the simplistic view that far too many people take of the world will make it hard to reconcile “abuser” and “genius”, and face up to the fact that the monster we fear is us. He beat his wife, severely for years. He also played what’s well-acknowledged as the first rock song.

The other caveat is that the demonization of this particular wife-beater and not of others, we’ve managed to minimize the problem of domestic violence while exposing it, a neat hat trick of the patriarchy. He wore the foul reputation that belongs to many, many more who didn’t. And that’s a real shame.

The ‘fros were large and the clothes were stylin’ back in 1974. This was required Saturday viewing back in the day.

Watch the moves on this Soul Train line; but also take a head count of the number of “family” members working those moves. There are quite a few rocking queens on that line, honey.

Hat tip, Anthony Wilson.

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy had a minor, um incident/rant a few weeks ago, where he way overreacted to an article about his team. Considering that he mocked the writer for not having children, one suspects that the strength of his reaction might have had something to do with the sex of the critic that caused him so much pain.

Punkass Marc retorts by remixing the speech with “Eye of the Tiger”. Enjoy!

"I think if you legalize that, you've got to legalize some other things that are pretty unsavory. You can call me a radical, but how can you tell an aunt that she can't marry her nephew if they are really in love and sharing the bills? How can you tell them they can't get married, but something else that's unnatural can happen?"
– John Rich of the country group "Big & Rich", with deep thoughts on marriage equality

Gay employees and straight non-bigots at Warner Bros, and that pretty much accounts for almost everyone who works there, are pretty disappointed, to put it mildly… and I'm not the only one getting complaints. One person who has worked on the Big & Rich projects wrote, "I tend to support all of our artists unconditionally even when some of their politics don't necessarily coincide with mine. I have been made aware of comments made by Big and Rich and I must say this is a real blatant slap in the face and it's somewhat scary to think that I'm helping to make artists' voices such as theirs heard out in the world. I feel deeply torn by comments that they've made recently and can't help but feel really uncomfortable having to see or hear them played in this amazingly diverse environment of Warner Brothers Records that to me has always spoken on behalf of the eccentric and artistic."

Another WB employee, an out front gay men, is torn between his disapproval of censorship and his disapproval of bigotry. He feels it's the company's duty– their moral responsibility– to take a public stand against this denigration of a class of people. "Rich's comments are not a political position, they are words of hatred that denounce an entire community and are taken as a personal attack on many of our families. CBS did not tolerate Imus's racist remarks against Blacks nor should we with Rich's remarks about gay families."

I spoke with one of Tennessee's most influential and respected radio programmers. He was still dismayed today and he said most everyone he knows in the music business is as well. This is what he told me:

    "Much of the Nashville music scene is ashamed of John. We have felt betrayed because many of us had embraced him and his mantra of love everybody. John has made a career on the backs of many people, and a lot of them are gay. More than anything, his hateful comments have hurt them and they feel especially betrayed. John is entitled to his opinion. However, comparing gay marriage to incest was unforgivable. I have urged those who feel as I do to stop buying his records and songs that he writes."

UPDATE: Via Perez Hilton, it looks like Rich must have felt his career was going south fast if he didn’t issue a “clarification” of sorts (that’s kind of surprising; figured he’d have some good old boys come to his defense):

“My earlier comments on same-sex marriage don’t reflect my full views on the broader issues regarding tolerance and the treatment of gays and lesbians in our society. I apologize for that and wish to state clearly my views. I oppose same-sex marriage because my father and minister brought me up to believe that marriage is an institution for the union of a man and a woman. However, I also believe that intolerance, bigotry and hatred are wrong. People should be judged based on their merits, not on their sexual orientation. We are all children of God and should be valued and respected.”
- John Rich, of country music duo Big & Rich

My semi-AWOL status is likely to continue; Marc and I have had so much fun playing Guitar Hero II that we got the midnight release of Guitar Hero III last night. On the way home, Marc remarked that the game has really crossed the gender line in popularity, and I noted that it couldn’t hurt that the female characters in the game are remarkably objectification-free. The designers took the daring step of creating the female characters in the exact same way they created male characters, which is to model them off real people/types you see in the rock world. The singer seems modeled on Ani Di Franco. There’s Pandora, who’s the Bauhaus-style Goth chick, Judy Nails, the punk chick that looks like a cross between Kathleen Hanna and Jane Wiedlin, and Casey Lynch, who is clearly modeled on Ruyter Suys of Nashville Pussy:

Suys plays in her bra a lot, but she’s no passive sex object. In fact, she’s scary aggressive and the animators really captured her fuck-you attitude in Guitar Hero II. And all three women have normal-looking bodies, even. The game is really welcoming to women in that it doesn’t make you feel that you have to compromise Teh Rawk with Teh Twittery Sex Object to be a female guitar hero. And I knew that the new game was being designed by a new team (since the old one is busy doing Rock Band), and there was some fear that they wouldn’t carry on this casually non-sexist sensibility to the new one.

The verdict: So far, a mixed bag. The new designers wisely decided to slavishly follow the old game’s aesthetic, so most of the changes are minor, which is a good thing. However, they gave into this strange urge to tweak Judy Nails (made her more goth, as if that made her cooler, which is something that makes exactly no sense) and worse, the threateningly fuck-you, aggressive, half-naked hellbeast Casey Lynch has been cleaned up, with straight blonde hair and her character descriptions says something about her realizing she needed to be a bit more polished and feminine to really win them over. Now she looks less Ruyter Suys and more some groupie hanging out at a Poison concert. *SIGH*

I was pleased, however, to see that they did decide to inject some racial diversity into the character options. From the initial offerings of characters you can play, you have a chance to play a character modeled on Jimi Hendrix and a Japanese woman who apes the aesthetic of Shonen Knife. That tickled me, so I made her the guitarist for my band Pussy Oversoul.* My delight was softened, however, by the unnecessary racist joke in her character description that says something about how she put down her violin at age 3 to pick up the ax. Seriously, it’s like one step forward, two steps back sometimes.

All that said, if you want real analysis of these issues and video games, Mighty Ponygirl has a great blog. And reviving a question she asked on her blog: What song would you like to be able to play in Guitar Hero? I’m dying for Purple Rain.

*Zuzu: I told you I’d name a band that one day.

Wow, this might be a first—Rolling Stone has put together another of their many, many lists, but for once, it doesn’t make me roll my eyes so hard I have to lay down in a dark room with a warm washcloth and soothing music. It’s the 25 most underrated guitarists, and I would put a number of these on a list. Right away, I agree with from the list: Prince, Lindsay Buckingham, Mick Ronson (Guitar Hero probably had something to do with his making the list), Tom Verlaine, Carrie Brownstein, Robert Fripp (is he underrated?), and Johnny Marr. If I wanted to put thought into it, I’d probably agree with even more. For my out-of-left-field pick that’s most definitely on this list, I’d put Ricky Wilson, but I don’t expect anyone else to feel the love.

Who’d you put on this list?

I was saddened to see that on my post about the sexist bent of Insufferable Music Snobbery, a lot of people decided to write off the entire practice of music snobbery. It’s too bad, too, because I only complain about sexism in this hobby because I want to see more women in it. It’s just part of the larger cultural desire to hipster-bash, I suppose, which I can safely say puzzles me. The only thing that the overtly hip music snobberia does to hurt anyone is to make other people kind of jealous. I come not to bury music snobbery, but to praise it. For without it, we would not have this wonderful and eye-opening video.

It’s a history of the breakbeat called “The Amen”, and while the video is 18 minutes long, it’s well worth watching the whole thing. It’s not really a video but an audio recording anyway—you don’t need to watch it, just listen to it. The artist who made it, Nate Harrison, has a really important point to make and he has to use the entire 18 minutes to build his case. I will warn you, the story he tells is so enthralling that it could be a gateway drug into music snobbery. Because once you start to see the value in delving into the obscure and digging around in the history of the obscure and the well-known pop culture, it becomes rather intoxicating to keep going. I’m just a dabbler in music snobbery, I’d say, but I watched the video straight through without fidgeting because I’ve got the bug and just knew as soon as he started delving into the history of this breakbeat that the payoff would be so worth it.

Music snobbery has, like a lot of subcultures, a jingo-laden, elitist downside, but for some reason music snobbery tends to piss people off more than, say comic book collecting or film snobbery. And I don’t think it’s just that music snobs are bigger show-offs, because I don’t think you can really say they are more than any film snob. Pitchfork can be nauseatingly pretentious, but no more than any similiar publication writing about movies. I think people are doubly hostile to pop music snobbery because there’s something elemental to our lives about music that makes it easier to be defensive if someone knows more about it than you do, particularly if it’s something you like. I’ve definitely felt the anguish over looking like a rube next to someone more knowledgeable about something I like, and the initial reaction can be anger and rejection, but learning new information about pop music is generally worth sucking a little humble pie.
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David Bowie donates $10,000 to the defense of the Jena 6. (Via.)

Barry Manilow refuses to go on “The View” unless they guarantee him they won’t get wingnut Elisabeth Hasselback. He cites her dangerous, mean-spirited right wing views as the reason. I don’t blame him; if I had to sit across from her, it would be pretty hard not to start up a nasty political argument with her. I do have to disagree with people who think that she’s been the source of the downfall for the show. Maybe; I don’t watch it. But, from what I’ve seen, it seems to me that Hasselback could potentially be reflecting back to all the conservative housewives in the country that parroting your husband’s bigoted, hateful opinions doesn’t make you look nearly as smart as you’ve been led to believe. A thought.

Anyway, question time. Death Is Not An Option: Barry Manilow or Paul Anka? Except this time it isn’t sex with them, but being stranded on a desert island with only their entire catalog as music.

Ha, this is the most awesome unscientific-but-damning study I’ve read in awhile: Gawker kept track of Pitchfork’s record reviews and found that they have more men named Mark writing reviews that women of any name. (Via.) And I had just sent off this article about how girls get subtly and not-subtly dissuaded from pursuing science at a young age to a blogger I thought could take that article very well. I can’t speak as well on that, but I can talk about the structural sexism of Insufferable Music Snobbery quite well. Because I’ll bet, if you ask them, the editors at Pitchfork would make all sorts of noises about how they want women to write more record reviews, but there’s not enough women out there to do it. Which I suspect is true to a degree, though it’s probably also true to a degree that sexist assumptions about women’s lack of taste also factor in. As a wee IMS, though, I encountered many difficulties that have run me off of any pretensions to being a professional IMS, and I imagine my experiences are pretty common in this regard, which does in fact whittle down the pool.

Myths That Run Women Out Of Insufferable Music Snobbery

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I saw not one, but two fires at ACL Festival this weekend, and luckily the motherfucker didn’t burn. One fire was apparently started when an RV hit a propane tank, and it was looking touch-and-go for awhile, like they might have to evacuate the place. Luckily, the got it under control, though 4 people were injured. The other fire was during my favorite show of the festival. Here’s my 3 favorites in order:

1) Bjork

We ended up skipping the Kaiser Chiefs to get closer for Bjork, and boy was it worth it. Bjork is just a world class talent. What amazed me was that she’s popular at all, since she’s such an odd duck and as much an avante garde artist as a pop star. For the first half of the show, she mostly stuck to her ballads, which are strange and beautiful and somehow rock the house even though by any measure, they should scare people off. Then of course she came around to playing more danceable stuff, which is when the speakers on stage left caught fire. They evacuated the stage and it was touch and go if the show would continue for a minute, but they got the fire out, and Bjork came on stage and shouted, “The speaker catches fire and we don’t care!”

One thing I found endearing was how Bjork and her all-female horn section pretty much defied any ability of the camera to objectify them—she wore an oversized gold tunic and her band wore shapeless tunics, and the only skin showing was basically her bare feet. Which was funny, because the cameraman focused on her feet like 4 times. It was like they don’t quite know what to do with a female presence on stage without body parts to focus on.

Bjork simply blew us away. She has this immense voice and somehow she manages to actually run around the stage, dancing like a fool, and still belt out these tunes. Her body must be half lungs.

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I’ll be in and out this weekend starting today. Because I’m going to the Austin City Limits Festival. The tickets were my birthday present from my punkass consort, and today’s going to probably be the biggest day for us. Here’s some You Tube videos of bands we plan to see:

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I was fully prepared to be annoyed at this article by Justin D. Ross about the naughty, naughty rap music and the misogyny therein, because I’m sick to the teeth with a discourse that implies that rap is somehow special in its peddling of hateful attitudes towards women, when hateful attitudes towards women are part and parcel of 75% of pretty much every kind of entertainment, particularly that which is hoping to cash in the anxious masculinity of the frat boys and wannabe thugs of the world. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to read someone who finally, finally got past the unsubtle racism of most critiques of hip-hop that tries to hold black men especially accountable for sexism in the world and addressed the real reason that so much modern rap music is unlistenable crap, and it has everything to do with who has the money—middle and upper class white people—and what they want to spend it on—apparently, entertainment products that both peddle in ugly stereotypes about black people while simultaneously providing an escapist fantasy. Why is rap music so dreadful these days? Well, white consumers are to blame.

Across the country, white kids in comfortable suburban neighborhoods (mine was Greenbelt) sit in their cars or bedrooms or studio apartments, listening to the latest rap music that glorifies violence, peddles racist stereotypes and portrays women as little more than animals. We look through the keyhole into a violent, sexy world of “money, ho’s and clothes.” We’re excited to be transported to a place where people brag about gunplay, use racial epithets continually and talk freely about dealing drugs. And then we turn off whatever we’re listening to and return to our comfy world in time for dinner.

White fans buy over 70% of rap music in this country. The frat boys throwing racist Halloween parties are the same people who made a hack like 50 Cent a multi-millionaire. Not that there aren’t non-white consumers of the most ridiculous rap music out there, but the market is increasingly driven by pandering to the young white male consumer from the suburbs, and more often than not, he wants to hear about bitches, guns, drugs, and how black people are born criminals. Look at the history of hip-hop—when it wasn’t quite “mainstream” (read: majority white audience), there was really no such thing as “gangsta rap”. Then there was a time when gangsta rap was a subgenre of hip-hop. Then sometime in the mid-to-late-90s, “gangsta rap became so overwhelmingly popular that a lot of people (particularly those who don’t know much about the music at all) began to assume that gangsta rap was rap. You know, even though the Fugees were platinum-selling.

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You know when I have time to write two posts in one night, there’s probably something better I need to be doing with my time, but fuck it. I realized that the post below could be read as a little aesthetic Stalinism, and I want to assure everyone (myself mostly) that’s not the case. If the Ben Folds Five wasn’t self-indulgent crap, I’d probably be more generous to the lyrics of the song, but the fact that the music itself is self-indulgent crap narrows the interpretations of the lyrics to the singular “self-centered prick” interpretation. Since this is the blogosphere, I imagine I’ll have indignant fans beg to differ with me, but thems the shakes. Soft-pedaling one’s opinions on these matters is insulting your readers’ intelligence.

Point of the post: The intersection of feminist politics and art. I was listening to my iPod and some Ike and Tina came on, and I love Ike and Tina Turner. A compilation disc of theirs was the first disc I put into my giant CD changer. In my book, they’re gold, the dictionary definition of rock and roll. They are also mostly a private pleasure, because put their music on around company and invariably the discussion turns to their famously bad marriage.

It’s tough, because the fact that Ike beat Tina Turner has been to the detriment of the enjoyment of their music. It particularly adds an eerie edge to how sexy so much of it is. On the other hand, it’s good that there’s a very public outing of the facts of domestic violence, which could probably help some women name their problem. On the other hand, the fact that their marriage is so famous tends to shadow the common nature of domestic violence. I’m sure an alarmingly high number of musicians in your own collection have beat someone or been beaten in an intimate relationship, but only Ike and Tina Turner have that fact overshadowing their music.

It’s not really aesthetic Stalinism or anything like that. I’m sure there’s someone out there who thinks one should boycott Ike and Tina Turner’s music because of the violent history. But mostly no. It just sucks when something horrible colors something good. Luckily, with the damn Ben Folds song, something horrible is casting a shadow over something horrible, making it a horrifying wash.

I didn’t know Lee Hazlewood died.

So the other night, Janet and I sit down to watch The Departed. But no sooner do we settle in on the movie couch and hit “play” than we hear the opening riff of “Gimme Shelter” on the soundtrack. (In the past, some have described this soundtrack as “killer.”)

“Wait just a second,” I say. “This is Scorsese, isn’t it?”

“You know damn well it is,” Janet says.

“Well, what the fuck is up with this shit, then?” I say. “Does he have to use the intro to ‘Gimme Shelter’ in every single goddamn movie he makes?”

“He doesn’t use the intro to ‘Gimme Shelter’ in every single goddamn movie he makes,” Janet says.

“Oh yes he does,” I say. “He used it to suggest a kind of deadly intensity in Casino and he used it to suggest a kind of scary intensity in Goodfellas and he used it to suggest a kind of otherworldly intensity in The Last Temptation of Christ.”

“All right, I call bullshit,” Janet says. “Martin Scorsese did not use ‘Gimme Fucking Shelter’ in The Last Fucking Temptation of Christ.”

“Oh yes he did,” I say. “When Willem Dafoe is getting it on, fantasy-sequence-wise, with Barbara Hershey, it’s all like ‘love, sister, it’s just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away.’ I swear you can’t fucking miss it.”

“You are so fucking making this shit up,” Janet says.

Readers, I parried her. But she had a point: Martin Scorsese has not, in fact, used “Gimme Shelter” in the soundtrack to every movie he has ever made. He refrained from using it in The Color of Money, which featured important Adult Contemporary talents like Eric Clapton and Phil Collins instead; he refrained from using it in The King of Comedy and Raging Bull (but check out the young Joe Pesci as Joey La Motta!), and, most amazingly, he refrained from using it in Mean Streets — though he did use “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which amounts to the same thing, because. . . .

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The baby on the cover of “Nevermind” will be able to vote in the next election.

I challenge you to look at Iggy Pop’s moves

and NOT say that this guy used Iggy as his inspiration.

(FWIW, I love Iggy and the Stooges.)

Back in the day when women sang about, well, it had to be babies and casseroles, right?

From Scott, I see that David Brooks has managed to create a kerfluffle from one of his standard issue editorials about how much better it would be if women had no rights or self-respect. Of course, Brooks imagines women are happier without rights or respect, because women aren’t really human so much as a breed of particularly self-effacing canine. What’s causing Brooks’ testicles to shrivel into his body this week is teeny-bopper songs where women are allowed to sing about love and loss, when they’d presumably they’d be more pleasant singing about kitchen appliances. Dana Goldstein mocked him. Matt defends Brooks, meekly pointing out that Brooks is right that women’s right to choose who they marry the later ages people get married is a big change. Dana jabs back with some ugly facts, namely that the blip in the 50s-70s of young marriage was just that, a blip caused by a strange sort of capitalist-patriarchal backlash and that people get married later in life for good reason.

But Brooks is saying more than the increasing equality of women later age at marriage is different and crazy, he’s arguing that women are deeply unhappy with their newfound rights not to be marched to the altar and pushed off on the first guy they have sex with, whether they’re comfortable with that or not. No, women hate being free.

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