There are still tons of shows left this weekend as part of CMJ, so go check out some new bands and dance with somebody! Here’s some inspiration.
Shout out to my boy Burke for getting this song in my head this morning.
Whitney Houston – I Wanna Dance with Somebody:
If you want to hang out with us tonight, come check out Beast and Red Wire Black Wire for the AM Only Showcase at The Studio at Webster Hall! RWBW just got back from being on tour and are celebrating the release of their great new record Robots & Roses, out now on Tough Customer Records, so it should be a fun time.
The CMJ 2009 Music Marathon & Film Festival starts today in NYC. Since we are going to be all over the city covering the best of CMJ this week, the JOTD feature will be on a brief pause, resuming next week. In lieu of the full JOTD, here is a song from one of the bands I am most excited to see this week, who we wrote about back in early September, The xx.
Saturday night Justin Vernon of Bon Iver sat down and talked with New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones at Stage 37. The event, part of this year’s New Yorker Festival, basically consisted of Sasha interviewing Justin about the singer’s home state of Wisconsin where he recorded For Emma, Forever Ago in 2007, followed by a brief four song acoustic set. It was a really tender, intimate performance, and given that Vernon confirmed at the show multiple times that Bon Iver was taking a hiatus for an undetermined amount of time, a certain cathartic overtone prevailed throughout the evening.
I can’t be sure, but at the show he said this song was called “Michican’t,” although I can’t seem to find any reference to that title online. Oh well. He boldly pronounced that he “will never play this song again,” so luckily someone in the audience was taping and has put it up on YouTube.
Apparently (according to the Times article posted today), if you give the Rev. Henry Willenborg (or many other Roman Catholic priests) one more drink… then he might make sexual advances at a spirituality retreat that lead you to break off your marriage, have his baby, and then get into a decades-long struggle with the Franciscan higher ups over child support and confidentiality agreements! What ever happened to priestly celibacy? As if the Catholic Church hasn’t had enough sex scandals. This is getting into R. Kelly-level territory. But seriously, I went to a middle school run by Franciscan nuns, and don’t find this funny one bit. Keep it in your pants, dogg.
But it’s Friday night (“and I [am] feeling alright”). So you know what is funny and also sort of relevant? This video of “One More Drink” from Ludacris and T-Pain (with an appearance by Katt Williams). If this is a “Luda Service Announcement,” I look forward to more of those and less of these.
If you were watching/reading basically any major news outlet today, then you’ll already be familiar with this “balloon boy” fiasco that has captured the nation’s attention. After local authorities and others spent hours searching for Falcon Heene and tracking the flight path of the giant helium balloon that was “accidentally” released while his brothers “thought” Falcon was inside one of its compartments, it turns out that the kid was just hiding in his garage the whole time. How do the police possibly think that this was a genuine mix-up and not a media stunt? Here are some facts that seem to give it away as a hoax to me:
1) Brian Stelter, who covers the television industry for the New York Times, reports that immediately after the Heene family’s experimental balloon lifted into the air, possibly carrying a six-year-old child, his father Richard Heene called Channel 9, KUSA, the NBC affiliate in Denver, to enlist its help in finding his son;
2) Falcon’s parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, were featured on the 100th episode of ABC’s prime-time program “Wife Swap” in March 2009 because of the popularity of their three boys from their FIRST appearance on “Wife Swap;” and
3) In an interview with CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Falcon said he heard his parents call for him from the garage. When asked by his father on-air why he didn’t respond, the boy replied, “You guys said we did this for the show.”
Come on cops. Get it together over there!
There seems to be an inverse relationship between how much this family sucks and how much this song, from Neutral Milk Hotel’s triumphant second album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998), rules (sorry, Falcon, you’re a cute kid but your dad seems “appall[ingly]” douche-y). So listen up and just remember that there are some people in this world who are famous for reasons other than being attention whores, like for making great records.
Neutral Milk Hotel – In The Aeroplane Over The Sea:
Last night at Pianos, we caught a set from Boy Crisis, who were joined onstage near the end of their performance by the other half of Das Racist, Himanshu Suri (along with Boy Crisis frontman Victor Vazquez), for a “live remix” of DR’s “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” and BC’s “Dressed to Digress.” Check out a live video of the combination.
Boy Crisis ft. Das Racist – Dressed to Digress (Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell Remix live):
Not sure what happened to the video during filming, but at least the audio gives you an idea of what went down. “Combination Best of Times and Worst of Times.” Word.
East Village to Brooklyn 