Not Wishful Thinking This Time: Pavement to Reunite in 370 Days
Nearly 10 years after the Brixton Academy show that ended the band’s career, Pavement announced yesterday via Brooklyn Vegan it will reunite to perform at least one show at Central Park Summerstage, and possibly as many as four, beginning on Sept. 21, 2010.
Now, with all due respect to Malkmus and his Jicks and the Preston School of Industry, I could not be happier to hear this. Don’t know if we’ll ever hear new original music from Pavement, but I’ll take whatever baby steps these guys choose to make. Pop the champagne — this news will make all food taste better and all comedy much funnier today.
Flaming Lips Appear on “The Colbert Report” Tonight
Just in case you have not doubled up on DVR programming for tonight, The Flaming Lips will appear on “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central at 10:30 tonight to promote the upcoming release of Embryonic, which will be released in all its physical beauty on Oct. 13 through Warners, and will be available for digital listening pleasure at ColbertNation.com through Monday.
In addition, the Lips will appear on “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” on the physical release date, Oct. 13. And there will be much rejoicing as Conan uncontrollably dances to “See the Leaves.”
Video of the Day: Sally Shapiro, “Miracle”
Pseudonymous Swede with a clear love of Italian disco and Pet Shop Boys lushness debuts the second single from My Guilty Pleasure.
Patrick Swayze Dies at Age 57
A nice guy, a good sport and a sound-effects genius.
Jim Carroll, singer of “People Who Died,” Died
Jim Carroll, the punk poet who wrote “The Basketball Diaries” and whose classic 1980 album, Catholic Boy, featured the death-roll anthem “People Who Died,” um… died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.
Plenty of bloggers will undoubtedly say things like “He looked like 65 when he died, he was a friend of mine,” but since StaticBlog didn’t know him, this blog shall refrain. Sort of.
Video of the Day: Kanye West Bum-Rushes Taylor Swift At the VMAs
In this media environment and particularly on MTV’s Video Music Awards, it’s hard to tell the spontaneous from the staged, and this event from last night’s award show veers perilously into self-parody on Kanye West’s part, but either way, this is pretty awful. If it wasn’t staged, Mr. West should be given balcony seating at all future awards shows. If it was all planned as some kind of skit, Swift clearly wasn’t in on the joke, and got a raw deal on a pretty unusual feat — a country star winning Best Female Video at the VMAs is highly irregular for the network.
West interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech after the singer scooped up Best Female Video for “You Belong With Me” to protest the win, which he believed should have gone to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).”
This video later went all the way to win Video of the Year, which I have to say it richly deserved for being unusually straightforward and kind of trippy without effects — Shakira’s “passing a kidney stone half-naked” routine in the “She Wolf” video would never have happened without “Single Ladies.”
So West’s protest was not just uncalled for, intemperate and unfair to Swift — and Beyonce classed up the place later and corrected the issue by inviting Swift to the stage — it makes West increasingly difficult to defend. I’ve never, ever given West a bad review (I even gave a semi-rave to 808s and Heartbreak), but this clowning has to stop. He’s becoming the John McEnroe of hip-hop.
If he must continue this behavior, I’d suggest that he put his energies toward more serious things to interrupt. There are all kinds of injustices going on in the world that are far more serious than Best Female Video.
I mean, this isn’t the kind of behavior that would be tolerated in our congressional chambers or anything like that.
UPDATE: Oh thank you, YouTubes!
Video of the Day: Mayer Hawthorne, “Maybe So, Maybe No.”
More superb summery soul from DJ Haircut. A Strange Arrangement is a must-have.
Music Review: Jay-Z, “The Blueprint 3″
Rating: 78
Few raise their own stakes quite like Jay-Z: by calling the third disc since his truncated retirement “The Blueprint 3,” hip-hop’s most powerful player sets the bar high and asks listeners to compare his latest work to his greatest work. While “Blueprint 3” is not nearly as great as 2001′s “The Blueprint,” it has several standouts that justify the title and serves as a nexus point for Jay-Z’s street-born ethos and his high-gloss rap-pop, both of which provide excellent settings for the master’s lyrical flow.
Against a blaze of disco beats and synth washes courtesy of producer Kanye West, Jay-Z directs inward with a litany of his starring roles in media moments in “What We Talkin’ About” and a stunning and hard-as-nails glorification of himself and condemnation of competitors in “Thank You.” And like most legends, Jay-Z is a bundle of contradictions, taking aim at T-Pain collaborators in “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” but indulging in it immediately afterward with “Run This Town,” featuring West and Rihanna.
Such dichotomies recur constantly: Jay-Z delivers raw and awesome couplets on the hard-edged “On to the Next One,” recalling the rapper in his hungry, incendiary 20s, but “Empire State of Mind” is Shawn Carter as “the new Sinatra,” the king of New York. It’s a soaring travelogue of the five boroughs featuring Alicia Keys on the instant-classic chorus. That pop majesty has an unsatisfying flip side: the finale “Young Forever” is built on the Alphaville synth-pop weeper “Forever Young.” Comparatively speaking, Jay-Z is an elder statesman in a young man’s game, closing in on 40 but sounding thoroughly vital … until this track. A sure sign of insecurity about aging for this rapper is insisting that time doesn’t pass for him. But for the balance of “The Blueprint 3,” this mogul sounds practically ageless.
Video of the Day: Ryan Adams, “New York, New York”
I’m a problem sleeper anyway, but for the first two weeks following Sept. 11, 2001, I slept little. My wife would go upstairs, and I’d lie there on the couch, freaking out. When I did fall asleep, I would have horrible dreams, the nightmarish stuff of which I don’t really like to talk about.
So I would lie there, mostly watching MTV, which had reverted entirely to music videos in the days following the attacks. The network was regularly (probably hourly) showing this Ryan Adams video, filmed only four days before 9/11, making it one of the last pieces of popular culture to prominently feature the World Trade Center.
The other prominent video being played at the time was slightly more surreal, as was its effect on me. Earlier that year I had read Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” and its near-future visions of the “Metaverse” and avatars, allowing people to operate in sunny, near-perfect simulations of life that sharply contrasted the scuzzy real world outside their headsets, had a strong impact on my imagination.
At any rate, that other video that MTV kept showing was Janet Jackson’s “All For You.” Miss Jackson and her dancers all seemed to be operating in a Stephenson-esque CG “Metaverse,” and they were all smiling and way too happy in their plastic perfection. And in my disordered, paranoid mindset, the message seemed simple: we need the “Metaverse,” because we are headed down a dark road.
Needless to say, my outlook improved greatly over time — I eventually started sleeping again, and MTV eventually started programming crap again. But when the day rolls around every year I feel the need to post the Ryan Adams clip in remembrance of what took place. Some of us simply view our histories through the popular culture of the moment. It doesn’t comfort or ameliorate things, but it provides a reference point that brings it all into focus.
Random 10 for Sept. 10, 2009
Death Cab For Cutie - I will possess your heart from microcosmikka on Vimeo. La Roux - Bullet Proof from serkan söğüt on Vimeo.
1. Death Cab For Cutie, “I Will Possess Your Heart.” So this is how you propose to Zooey Deschanel — by writing the creepiest stalker ballad since “Every Breath You Take.”
2. Nellie McKay, “Gladd.”
3. Glasvegas, “S.A.D. Light.”
4. Jason Segel and Sarah Hagan, “Jesus is Just Alright.” “Which one’s your sister? She’s not that chick who’s singing, is she?”
5. The Arcade Fire, “Wake Up.”
6. The Flaming Lips, “One More Robot.”
7. The Knife, “We Share Out Mother’s Health.”
8. Jay-Z, “Roc Boys (And the Winner Is…).”
9. Husker Du, “Turn It Around.”
10. La Roux, “Bullet Proof.” Elly Jackson has become something of a tastemaker in London in the past few months, which roughly means that walking through Charing Cross must be like falling into Visage’s “Fade to Grey” video.
