Bad Brains Christmas Dance Party

Bad Brains and Charlie Brown Christmas dance party? Sure, why not. Now if somebody gets me some Bad Brains Hot Sauce this year, the holidays will be complete.

Bad Brains - Into the Future

Bad Brains are busting out out bughouse beats and metallic punk treats with their new song, Into the Future, and new album with the same title on Nov. 20 (Mega Force Records). With Eastern Alien guitar whoops added to the quickness, I am reminded that the band has no comparision,
especially if you delve into their history. Hah!

 




Feel free to leave a comment, I'm okay with that.

Scruffy's Grab Bag Pt. 2: Big Audio Dynamite, Radiohead, The Cars, Robotanists, Foster the People, The Darkness, and Bad Brains

No time for weighty, introspective posts these days, but we can spew out some gems that snagged our eye, with no theme, rhyme or reason.

Big Audio Dynamite and Mick Jones were never revered like Joe Strummer, but I see no reason he shouldn't get his due. I loved Strummer's records since he made his "comeback", but B.A.D. has probably got more play over the decades, especially while Strummer was moving through his wilderness years. In retrospect, Big Audio Dynamite's first album was ahead of its time, don't you think? Big Audio Dynamite are the latest to get back together, playing shows and recording a new album, according to slicing up eyeballs.



Big Audio Dynamite - Rush - Electric Picnic 2011 by ElectricPicnic

Big Audio Dynamite - Applecart by pcagx



Of course, Jones had been making music not too dissimilar from B.A.D. with Tony James in Carbon/Silicon, as well as giving lots of it away online.

The Best Man by Carbon/Silicon



Another reunion/reformation? The Darkness! Insert your own catsuit/falsetto joke here. I loved A thing Called Love, especially the way it sounds like Justin Hawkins sounds like he says "Fing Called Love".





Sat on this one for awhile, 'cause I'm pretty sure everyone was Radioheaded out. But Robotanists covered all of King of Limbs within 24 hours of its release (thanks to At Constant Speed). It's a free download, but you may want to check it out and grab it quick - I notice someone has removed all but one of the King of Limb tracks I posted from Soundcloud, so this might disappear soon as well.


Never heard of Foster the People, and I certainly don't like the name, but SXSW always brings out something interesting. Somebody wrote that they were a synth band and name-dropped Duran duran, but I think they sometimes sound like a cross between MGMT and World Party.

Foster The People - Pumped Up Kicks by ESS Blog

Foster The People - Houdini by thediscoverialist

Foster The People - Helena Beat by The Clink

The best hardcore band of all time, Bad Brains, are now working on a new album for a late summer 2011 release. "Stand by for the 'realist' we have ever written," says Darryl Jenifer. Duff McKagan (!) has written a brief article on the band's greatness for ESPN, I'm not sure why, but check it out here.

Bad Brains - 02 I Against I by christophermehl

19 We Will Not - Bad Brains by Moneybrother

The Cars have released an official video for Sad Song from their forthcoming album Move Like This (available May 10).



Cars - Sad Song by MMMusic

Headbangers and Punks, Living in Harmony!?!

This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Hevy Metal and Punk by Steve Waksman. Published by University of California Press, 2009

It's not often you can read scholarly works on metal or punk; here you get both, as author Steve Waksman traces the origins of punk and metal cross-pollination and carries it through to the Lollapalooza that was termed Metalpalooza. Waksman is an Associate Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College, and his take is often academic - sometimes too much so, such when explaining slamdancing:

"A seemingly chaotic act wherein dancers 'slammed' their bodies against each other, bouncing from one to the next, slam-dancing was in fact a highly ordered form of audience interaction. The crowd tended to move in a circle around a portion of the dance floor, known as the pit; as long as participants moved with the flow of the circle, they were likely to avoid significant harm."

That's all true, but it's kinda like singing about architecture, ain't it? Doesn't quite describe the frenzied energy, the heat, ripped clothes and bruises, and the andrenalin speeding through your veins and adding an extra pounding throughout your entire body as the music seems to be coming from everywhere.

Anyway, heavy metal seems to have become a genre it's cool or at least okay to like again these days. Bands like Mastodon make many critics' best-of lists, Stereogum debuts a serious metal column, and Sam Dunn's films Global Metal and Metal: A Headbanger's Journey both become popular and critically acclaimed. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that a serious scholastic analysis of crossover between metal and punk rates a 308-page book (well, 390 pages with index, bibliography, discography, and notes). But punk has always been more favoured by critics anyhow, as if punk was always more mature, or artier, more substantive, somehow more worthy, smelled better, looked better - even today, some people think Sid Vicious looks cool. Most of us don't think that spandex, athletic socks and a muscle shirt a la Steve Harris is cool. Do we?

So is Waksman a fan of both of those genres, or is he going to tell readers how great Iggy Pop was and make fun of metallic clothes and lyrics? Okay, he does tell us how great Iggy was, but he also recounts going to see artists such as Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Van Halen, The Scorpions, Helix, Whitesnake, Kiss, Bon Jovi, and Y & T, among others, in the mid-eighties, and he doesn't apologize for any of them. Well, boys and girls, I too went to see all of those bands in that approximate time period. Not all on purpose, I should admit - Bon Jovi and Y & T just happened to open for other bands, for example. But the idea that you should grow up and grow out of metal (an issue covered beautifully by Dunn's Headbanger's Journey) is something that I think a lot of people have encountered. I'm not going to say that I want to hear Whitesnake again, and when it comes down to it, classic rock radio has killed most popular metal for me. I'm also not going to get into what's "real heavy metal" and what isn't either, and neither does Waksman in his book. That's for another day.

But just because I began to broaden my horizons doesn't mean I started believing that all metal was for kids. The metal vs. punk argument may have been going on when I was a teenager, but I don't think I ever joined into that fray. Waksman recounts the amusing back-and-forth between Creem magazine readers as music junkies lined up on one side or the other. I don't know, I think I missed it. In the mid-eighties a kid gave me some D.O.A., Minor Threat, Youth Brigade, and Stretch Marks, so I thought that was punk. When older brother brought home The Dickies, I argued that it wasn't punk, it was just rock played at faster speeds.

When an acquaintance quit his metal cover band, shaved his head, and professed a love for punk, I talked him into going to see D.O.A. A lot of people seem to think that grunge killed off hair metal, but bands like D.O.A. shoved it out of the way as fas as I was concerned. Let's face it, Joey Shithead was more entertaining than anyone out there. Still is.

Without giving away too much, Waksman posits that there are way more links between metal and punk than most people have ever realized. It's a bit of a strange narrative, going from Grand Funk Railroad to Jane's Addiction, but there are certainly some original ideas put forth. The author offers Iggy and Alice Cooper as forerunners, hands up The Dictators and The Runaways as Exhibits A and B for a punk-metal crossover, trumpets Motorhead as furthering the cause, and throws down the New Wave of British Heavy Metal as another signpost. Here's a spot where Waksman allows a bit of humour to creep in. Waksman quotes Def Leppard's Rick Savage as respnding to why the band wasn't playing punk.

"Basically, it's just down to the fact that we're all fucking posers. We all want to go out onstage, pose, wear dinky white boots, tight trousers and have all the girls looking at our bollocks."

Waksman further delves into SST, Metal Blade and Sub Pop as growing a metal-punk cross-pollination. It's good read, if sometimes a little dry and technical for a non-musician such as myself, but certainly an interesting an original look at genr4es that were seemingly antithetical. Here's some videos of artists featured, I'll let you guess or get the book if you want to figure out how they fit in to Waksman's thesis.

The Dictators - (I Live For) Cars and Girls



The Dictators cover Search and Destroy circa 1977.



The Dictators - California Sun



A movie about The Runaways seemed unthinkable even in recent years, but maybe some have already read this book and agree that the band was a forerunner.



Runaways - School Days (after Cherie Currie left)



The book's cover was taken from this vid or a still, one of my favourite archival pieces of footage; the straight announcer kill me - "That's peanut butter!"



The Stooges - TV Eye/1970


Alice Cooper - I'm Eighteen


Motorhead - Iron Fist



Early Maiden always had some punk energy to me, with Paul Dianno's tough vocals and the speedy musicianship. My fave is Women in Uniform.




Def Leppard - look at those costumes! Amazing!
Rock Brigade


Hello America


Mudhoney - Touch Me I'm Sick


Mudhoney - Here comes Sickness


These last few don't figure into Waksman's book, but D.O.A. will always represent punk to me, and Bad Brains really melded metal and punk as well as reggae into an amazing stew. Suicidal Tendencies made some pretty metallic punk records, but went off on the wrong track after that.

DOA - World War 3


Bad Brains - Soul Craft


Suicidal Tendencies - Possesed to Skate



Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized