[kj] New KJ festival date: Sideways in Helsinki on June 12: FYI
Rheinhold Squeegee
kjlist at live.com
Mon Apr 13 10:06:49 EDT 2015
Steve Albini's cranky old man-take on Odd Future, which begat both Mr. Sweatshirt and Tyler the Creator, is worth revisiting here:
MESSAGE BOARD POST FROM STEVE ALBINI:My band shared an airport shuttle with [Odd Future]
in Barcelona. They piled onto the shuttle late, after finally getting
corralled by their minder, who was nursing a head wound with an ice bag
wrapped in a towel. They piled in, niggering everything in sight,
motherfucking the driver, boasting into the air unbidden about getting
their dicks sucked and calling everyone in the area a faggot. Then one
of them lit a joint (or a pipe, I didn't look) and told the driver to
shut the fuck up nigger and smoked it anyway. A female passenger tried
to engage one of them in conversation, but he just stared at her with a
dead-to-me stare while his seatmate flipped double birds in her face.
The whole trip they complained about not being at a McDonalds and
repeatedly shouted for the motherfucker to pull over so they could get
some fucking McDonalds nigger. Interspersed with the McDonalds requests
were shouted boasts about how often they masturbated and fucked bitches
nigger and got paid like a motherfucker fifty grand like a motherfucker.
They continued complaining that the trip was taking too long and
insisted they be fed immediately all the way to the airport, where their
minder presumably fed them.
I am quite happy none of them engaged me directly, because at least one of us would have regretted it.
I am well aware, thanks, that good people can make ugly art and that
ugly people can make good art. Ultimately the function of art is to
express something and move an idea from one person to another, and the
tools of that can include revulsion and discomfort. Having been in a few
bands myself, thanks, I know that the uninitiated can mistake these
devices as windows into the soul of the creator. Ultimately they are, of
course, but not necessarily in the crude autobiographical way they are
often interpreted.
I know all that, so I am never quick to judge a person based on a
superficial reading of creative output. Peter Sotos is a lovely fellow
whom I trust implicitly, despite his writing evoking a truly primal
disgust in me, to use another rapey example. Michael Gerald from
Killdozer said it best in an interview, when the journalist remarked
that he seemed like a nice fellow, which was unexpected given that the
characters in his songs are often repellent. "Oh, that's not us," he
said, "that's the crazy people we sing about." In that light, I am one
hundred percent behind Odd Future's right to rap about what they wanna
rap about, and if she don't like it fuck her.
And also fuck me. It's none of my business what they wanna. I'm not
part of the audience for hip hop, and as a non-dilettante I don't
generally respond to it when I hear it, so I can't make any critical
assessment of Odd Future's music on its own terms, but they go out of
their way to make it clear that this is not a case of regular people
making music about assholes, but assholes making music about being
assholes. I have no time for that. I don't respond kindly to it when Ted
Nugent does it either.
If the whole thing is a put-on, a bit of Vincent Gallo
life-as-theater for the benefit of whoever happens to be sitting next to
them, that's no excuse. It's being an asshole about being an asshole.
From: vassifer at earthlink.net
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 09:51:06 -0400
To: gathering at misera.net
Subject: Re: [kj] New KJ festival date: Sideways in Helsinki on June 12: FYI
I hate to sound like the old man I so inarguably am but …. Earl Sweatshirt? Who on god’s green earth would pay money for bullshit like that? I haven’t even heard him, and I hate everything about him.
Alex in NYC
On Apr 13, 2015, at 9:20 AM, Rheinhold Squeegee <kjlist at live.com> wrote:A curious booking, but a gig is a gig. While it includes Jesus & Mary Chain, it also features Azalea Banks, Earl Sweatshirt, Ariel Pink and a lot of other hipster business.
At least it's not all the usual gargle-metal bands.
http://www.sidewayshelsinki.fi/
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