Blog Archives
DJ Nu-Mark (and His Toys)
Lots of artists use toys as musical instruments—but the way DJ Nu-Mark does it is pretty special. I’ve been a fan of Nu-Mark ever since his days with the indie hip-hop group Jurassic 5, but I had kind of lost track of what he was up to, until someone hipped me to this video of him playing with his growing array of children’s toys. The way he samples and cross-cuts between them like they’re records and turntables has to be seen to be believed. Watch the whole thing, trust me—the best part comes at about the 4:00 minute mark. Anyone know what that toy is with the different colored cubes on it is called? Next baby shower I get invited to, I’m totally buying one.
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Imperial Stars
First off: our sincerest apologies for not posting any new content in so long. We’ve been slacking, clearly. Also, we’ve been stuck in traffic. And that part is totally the fault of these guys.
See, earlier this week, a bunch of douchebags from Orange County calling themselves Imperial Stars thought it would be cool if they promoted their new single, “Traffic Jam 101,” by…get this…causing a traffic jam! On the fucking 101 freeway! Genius, no?
To achieve this totally awesome end, the group drove a big-ass van down the 101 freeway in Hollywood during Tuesday rush hour (okay, it was 10:30 am, but this is LA, people…it’s always rush hour), then parked it sideways across three lanes of traffic, climbed on top, and started performing a little impromptu concert for all the poor suckers running late to their auditions and yoga classes. Concert ended when the cops showed up and arrested all three guys for disturbing the peace and unlawful assembley, but a really lame-ass hip-hop band from the O.C. that no one had ever heard of was all over the evening news, so hey…mission accomplished, I guess. No such thing as bad publicity and all that.
Now, obviously, one crass but effective publicity stunt does not a weird band make, so you’re probably wondering why we’re wasting precious bandwidth on these clowns. Well, there’s a few reasons. First off, there’s the band’s publicity materials, which seriously read like they were run through one of those programs that translates text into, I dunno, Slovenian or some shit, then back into English. Here’s a brief sample, from the band’s Facebook page:
“Dynamic synthesizers, authoritative drum patterns and mainstay power vocals that remind even the average ear of greatness, The Imperial Stars pierced themselves into the heart of music history…Vocalist Paul Arabella exhales igneous verse that bridge chorus potential into hit records…Imbedded into the culture of hip hop from the ages of adolescence, big Paul reinvented himself in content and persona that parallels elevated status.”
Second, there’s the band’s actual music, which almost makes the press materials seem coherent by comparison. At some point in “Traffic Jam 101,” the aforementioned Paul Arabella (who kinda looks like Andy Samberg in O.C. hip-hop drag) drops igneous verses like, “In the traffic jam, bumper to bumper/Heat for your winter, cool for your summer.” And head Imperial Christopher Wright says he “play my music for the children of the stars.” Dude, did the “children of the stars” tell you to ruin the morning of thousands of strangers?
Last but not least, there’s the alleged reason Imperial Stars decided to risk arrest so they could subject Hollywood commuters to their crappy song. They did it for the children.
“We were thinking we needed to do something big to grab the attention of the American people to this cause of the 1.5 million homeless children,” guitarist Keith Yackey told a local radio station the day after the stunt. The group claims it will donate 50% of all proceeds from sale of the “Traffic Jam 101″ single to help homeless youth.
If this is whole thing is some kind of weird Die Antwoord style meta-joke, it’s kinda brilliant. But if Imperial Stars–who, by the way, used to make incredibly derivative faux-gangsta rap under the name Imperial Assassins–are trying to be serious…and I think they are…well, then, wow. Just wow.
Links:
- Imperial Stars official site (it says you need to give them your email address to enter, but fuck that–just follow this link and you can peruse the site in all its glory)
- Imperial Stars (aka Imperial Assassins) on MySpace
- Imperial Stars Facebook fan page
Insane Clown Posse
Let’s be straight up on this one. We would’ve blogged about ICP a long time ago, but we never got around to it because, frankly, we thought they sucked. Some third-rate Beastie Boys wannabes wearing KISS makeup and rapping about serial killers? No thanks. Oh, wait, they spray their audiences with shitty midwestern soda pop? Nope, still not buying it.
But this past weekend, something kind of awesome happened: Insane Clown Posse’s fans, the Juggalos (seriously, that’s what they call themselves…we’re not clever enough to make this shit up) drove Tila fucking Tequila off the stage under a hail of beer bottles, rocks, fire crackers and supposedly even a little human feces. And while we’re glad they didn’t, like, kill her or anything, we applaud the sentiment behind the attack, which seems to boil down to something like: If you are a talentless fame whore whose best move is to show the crowd your tits, we will take you down.
This incident, which has already been described ad naseum here, here, and also here, took place at the Gathering of the Juggalos, an annual ICP-led festival that’s been happening every year since 2000 and now pulls in some scary large number of fans—over 20,000, claims the festival’s Wikipedia page, which is a lot of beer bottles. Apparently, the Juggalos also threw shit at Method Man, which somewhat undermines our theory that the attack on Tila was actually a scathing critique of reality TV culture—unless they’re confused and thought that piece-of-shit sitcom Meth did with Redman a few years back was supposed to be real. Or maybe they’re just lashing out at all purveyors of crap television. Anyone know if Tom Green got his ass kicked at the Gathering, too?
Anyway, regardless of what we think of ICP’s music—or what ICP fans think of bisexual midgets named after alcoholic beverages—we have to give Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope props for doing whatever the hell it is they do for so long…20 years and counting, which is a helluva lot of Faygo (that’s the shitty midwestern soda pop they spray on their audiences—and believe us, they spray it like they own stock in it).
It’s tough to decide what the weirdest thing is about Insane Clown Posse. Is it their music, which we guess is called horrorcore, and sounds kinda like a cross between Korn, Kid Rock, Cypress Hill and Weird Al Yankovic (and you would think that would sound awesome, except it doesn’t)? Is it their fans, the Juggalos, who proudly flaunt their Faygo and clown makeup in all sorts of goofy homemade videos and endlessly debate what it means to be part of the “Juggalo family“? Is it the fact that they run their own wrestling league? Or their crazy, over the top Halloween shows, which almost put GWAR to shame? Maybe it’s just the fact that their ringleader is a fat white dude who wears clown makeup and calls himself Violent J. God knows we’ve stuck other bands on The Weird List for less.
Eddie and I debated this one long and hard and finally came to this conclusion: Of all the crazy weird shit ICP is responsible for, nothing is weirder than the video they just released earlier this year for a song called “Miracles.” This really falls into the so-stupid-it’s-pure-genius category. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Be warned: It’ll shock your eyelids.
Links:
- Insane Clown Posse official site
- Insane Clown Posse on MySpace
- Psychopathic Records (ICP’s label)
- Gathering of the Juggalos official site
- JCW (Juggalo Championship Wrestling) official site
- JuggaloNews (fan site)
- Look At This Fucking Juggalo (not really sure what this site is, but it’s awesome)
- Violent J Is John Goodman (interesting theory/Photoshop exercise)
Sxip Shirey
(Photo by Carl Saytor)
Today’s TWBITW entry was suggested to us by one of our readers, Marc Blazel*, who turned us on to the fabulously bizarre gypsy/punk/folk/beatbox stylings of one Sxip Shirey. Sxip (we still have no idea how to pronounce that) is one of those guys who uses everyday objects as instruments and instruments as, well, objects—not necessarily a weird or original idea in and of itself, but the music he conjures up with that approach definitely exists in its own little universe.
His bio page, which also features a nifty little short film about the man and his madcap music, mentions such contraptions as “Industrial Flutes, Bullhorn Harmonicas, Regurgitated Music Box, Triple Extended Pennywhistls [sic], Miniature Hand Bell Choir, Obnoxiophone.” All of which might sound totally random and made up, but we’re pretty sure those are all actual Shirey “instruments.” We can vouch for the existence of the Industrial Flute and the Bullhorn Harmonica, at least. (We’ll get back to the Bullhorn Harmonica in a sec.)
Beyond that, we haven’t been able to suss out much about Shirey, except that he’s based in New York, has worked some with folks like author Neil Gaiman and singer-songwriter Jason Webley (one-half of another TWBITW favorite, Evelyn Evelyn), and he’s also part of a band called Luminescent Orchestrii, which as near as we can tell is sort of a Gogol Bordello for the Fringe Festival crowd. He also has a new album out called Sonic New York, which is great. Among other things, it includes a spooky Portishead-meets-Regina Spektor cover of that old disco song “Ring My Bell.” We know that sounds terrible, but trust us, it actually kinda works.
Oh, about that Bullhorn Harmonica. It’s featured, along with beatboxing and some very funky tuba, on this song called “I Live in New York City,” which as far as we’re concerned should replace that fucking played-to-death “Empire State of Mind” monstrosity as the official Big Apple anthem immediately.
*Yes, we actually have readers—and what’s even more amazing, we do sometimes take suggestions from them. Email us at weirdestbandintheworld(at)gmail.com is you have a favorite weird band you’d like to see on The Weird List. But be prepared to be mocked ruthlessly if your idea of weird is, we dunno, Bowling for Soup or some shit.
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MC Frontalot
We don’t mention hip-hop very often on TWBITW, but it’s not because Jake and I aren’t fans. We thought that last Jay-Z album was pretty dope, as the kids like to say. But there seems to be a severe shortage of truly weird hip-hop acts out there. Most stick to the formula: Drop danceable, repetitive beat; spit rhymes about how awesome you are and how much your rivals suck; attempt to sing simple pop chorus yourself or hire moderately successful R&B star to sing it for you; repeat. Hey, don’t get us wrong—when it’s good, it totally works, but there’s precious little room left for weirdness.
Enter MC Frontalot, a rapper so uniquely weird that he’s inspired the creation of his own little hip-hop sub-genre, nerdcore. See, instead of rapping about bitches and bling, Front (real name: Damian Hess) and his fellow nerdcoreans rap about Star Wars, Commodore 64′s, tech blogs, role-playing games, and other subjects near and dear to geeks’ hearts. It’s sort of like if you took Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” and built an entire genre of music around it.
Front just released his fourth album, Zero Day, earlier this year; it features tracks about actor/blogger Wil Wheaton, multiplayer online game Kingdom of Loathing, and a cameo by that geekiest of geek icons, John Hodgman (who plays the PC in those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials). If you’re wondering how anyone could possibly fill four albums with songs about such specific subject matter, you clearly have never been to Comic-Con. The nerd culture well runs deep. (It should also be noted that not every single Frontalot song is a nerd anthem; he also defends homosexuality on “I Heart Fags” and makes fun of hipster culture on “Indier Than Thou.” Mostly he writes nerd anthems, though.)
Since coining the term “nerdcore,” Frontalot has inspired a host of misfit rappers to get in on the geekiness. Other nerdcore rappers include MC Lars (sample song titles: “O.G. Original Gamer,” “White Kids Aren’t Hyphy”), MC Chris (who does some of the voices on Aqua Teen Hunger Force), and our favorite (name-wise, at least), Optimus Rhyme. There’s even not one, but two nerdcore documentaries in circulation: Nerdcore Rising and Nerdcore for Life. Because if there’s one thing nerds like almost as much as videogames and computers, it’s making documentaries about themselves (see also: The King of Kong, Wordplay, etc.)
Anyway, here’s the official video for “It Is Pitch Dark,” a track from MC Frontalot’s second album, Secrets From the Future. And if you don’t know what a grue is, all we can say is, you are clearly not an O.G. Original Gamer. Go find yourself a copy of “Zork” and recognize.
(P.S. This live version of “It Is Pitch Dark” is pretty killer, too. Watch those nerds bounce!)
Links:
- MC Frontalot official site
- MC Frontalot on MySpace (which he “despises the living shit out of”)
- Nerdcore Rising: The Movie official site
Max Normal (or, Die Antwoord v.1.0)
Of all the weird bands we’ve blogged about here on TWBITW, the one that’s gotten by far the biggest response so far is Die Antwoord, the South African “zef rap-rave crew” fronted by a scrawny, prison-tatted MC named Ninja and an even scrawnier singer/rapper/fly-girl named Yo-landi Vi$$er. Like a lot of baffled yet undeniably delighted observers, we suspected the whole thing might be a put-on, but there was something so awesome about the group’s outlandish attitude that we decided they were probably for real.
Well, it turns out we were had—sort of. Die Antwoord is actually the latest incarnation of another group called Max Normal, an earlier hip-hop crew which also featured the inimitable Ms. Visser (minus the dollar signs) and a fellow by the name of Waddy Jones, an actor/musician/artist/troublemaker who, before he created the Ninja character, fronted his Max Normal crew in a three-piece suit and (according to a band site that’s been taken down but is still viewable in archive form) performed “motivational speaking style raps” to deliver “high energy hip-hop power point presentation[s].” Quite a far cry from Die Antwoord’s ghetto fabulous approach, although judging from the above publicity photo, both groups do share the same Keith Haring-esque design aesthetic.
Waddy and co. have clearly attempted to cover their tracks: the old MaxNormal.tv website has been taken down and replaced with a deliberately primitive-looking WordPress “advertising blog” [Update: It's now been taken down altogether] ; www.waddyjones.com similarly features a very plain-envelope article directory link farm, which we’re guessing (although we can’t find an archived version) has not always been the case. Even the Max Normal Wikipedia page was just taken down yesterday—ostensibly for copyright infringement. [Update: It's since been restored and gives a very good and seemingly accurate history of the band.]
Not that we’re complaining about any of this. As the rest of the blogosphere has already widely proclaimed, what Jones and his crew are doing is so clever that an added layer of Borat-like chicanery is all just part of the fun. So enjoy this Max Normal video—which, as near as we can tell, is about two years old—and appreciate a.) how fucking versatile these guys are, and b.) how much better they’ve gotten in just a few years. If Waddy Jones doesn’t have his own HBO special by this time next year, we’ll guzzle the juice in this fish paste jar.
[Bonus factoid: the dude in Die Antwoord with progeria has been widely identified as an artist named Leon Bartha. Another zef rap-rave mystery solved!]
Links:
Die Antwoord
We gotta say, 2010 has gotten off to a pretty slow start here at TWBITW. There just isn’t much genuinely weird shit out there these days. Note to bands: There were over 100,000 new albums released last year. You might wanna try to, y’know, stand out a little.
So thank Christ on a crutch that someone finally hipped us to this “zef rap-rave crew” from South Africa called Die Antwoord. Frontman Ninja is fond of mentioning in every one of the group’s songs, videos and interviews that his crew is onto some “next level futuristic shit” and we gotta say—dude ain’t lying.
Die Antwoord—whose name apparently means “The Answer” in Afrikaans—also consists of singer/dancer/future American Apparel model Yo-landi Vi$$er, producer/DJ Hi-Tek (who will no doubt be getting a cease-and-desist letter shortly from this dude), and a little guy with progeria syndrome whose main job seems to be to stand around looking weird. Based on the intro to this video, you’d think the whole thing was a joke, but then Ninja starts rapping like a white South African Busta Rhymes over Hi-Tek’s squiggly beats and Yo-landi’s helium-voiced croons and something undeniably awesome starts to happen. What that something is exactly, we’re not sure, but we like it.
It’s hard to pick just one of Die Antwoord’s videos because they each showcase a different aspect of the group’s goofy, slightly malnourished charm. But the one that probably blew our minds the hardest was “Enter the Ninja”…especially the little inspirational monologue at the 4:05 mark. If you’re hungry for more, we’d also recommend the video for “Wat Pomp,” which appears to use the same set. Recycling—it’s da bomb, baby!
P.S. For a long time, the above video wouldn’t play as an embed, but since Die Antwoord ended their contract with Interscope Records, it’s back. Sweet!
P.P.S. See also our post about Max Normal, the “motivational speaker-style” rap group that Ninja and Yo-landi were in prior to Die Antwoord.
Links:
Birdy Nam Nam
These days, it’s not unusual for bands to feature a DJ. But a band featuring four DJs? Okay, now you’re got our attention. Say hello to Birdy Nam Nam, a group of four French DJs who use turntables to create music that’s pretty much impossible to classify. They’ve won the DMC World Championships, hip-hop’s highest honor, but this ain’t your mama’s hip-hop.
What Crazy-B, DJ Pone, DJ Need and Little Mike do is take the sound collage approach to hip-hop pioneered by guys like DJ Shadow and turn it up a notch, making tracks that are dense, funky and downright bizarre, filled with samples that American producers would probably never think to try. And the coolest thing about them is, they can recreate most of their stuff live, on four mixers and turntables, as this semi-legendary video from the DMC championships attests.
Links:
- Birdy Nam Nam on MySpace
- Video for “The Parachute Ending (Justice Remix)” (new Birdy Nam Nam single)
