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Episode 329: The 2011 Holiday Spectacular!

Christopher — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:50:42 +0000

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This week: Put on your footie pajamas, get a cup of hot coco, and eavesdrop on Max’s bedtime story. There is enough hamming it up here to make a vegetarian squirm.

This episode is squeaky clean and safe for the kiddies.

Yip-Yip in Mark Mothersbaugh’s Top Ten

Bryce Dwyer — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:15:51 +0000

Top ten lists are a staple around this time of year. What they lack in shades of grey they make up for with enthusiasm. I could read them all day. My favorite top tens come from trusted sources, so when I cracked this month’s Artforum I went straight to Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh’s list of his 2011 top ten moments in music. Mothersbaugh avoids listing albums only. On his list, he includes a weird message on an answering machine cassette found in a Palm Springs thrift store as well as a cover band he saw play in a Tijuana restaurant. What really surprised me was his number five: the self-released album Bone Up from the Orlando-based electronic duo Yip-Yip. As Mothersbaugh says, “I’m a million years old, and I’ve heard a lot of music, but I’m always happy to be pleasantly surprised. Yip-Yip did that for me.”

Yip-Yip had already been performing live for a year when I moved to Orlando from my hometown in 2003. In the absence of a local artist-run gallery circuit like Chicago’s, live music filled the city’s niche for experimental culture. Playing in mutant black-and-white costumes behind pyramids of synthesizers, Yip-Yip was the closest thing to contemporary art I laid my eyes on in Orlando. They introduced me to the possibility that experimentation derived from the character of and in constant conversation with a specific place might breed something fantastic.

Yip-Yip, Live in Orlando, September 2011.

As media decentralizes, kingmakers like Artforum are no longer primary fountains of validation. That the magazine’s globalized gaze had turned to a commited local group like Yip-Yip was not what surprised and impressed me about Mothersbaugh’s top ten. Here’s what really knocked my socks off: Yip-Yip are always have been massive Devo fans. In a place like Central Florida, without widespread institutional support for things like experimental music, a pop group like Devo might be the only model to work from. Seeing one of Yip-Yip’s idols list them among his favorite things about music this year renews my faith in the stalwarts of local culture. Like Mothersbaugh, I’m pleasantly surprised.

Paul McCartney Between Art and Pop

Bryce Dwyer — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:42:16 +0000

As Paul McCartney played “Paperback Writer” during his concerts at Wrigley Field this past July, details from Richard Prince’s nurse paintings flashed behind him on stage four stories high. I was confused.

For a concert with tens of thousands in attendance, the connection is subtle. The images in Prince’s nurse paintings come from pulpy dime-store paperback novels and the song is, of course, about a writer of paperbacks. If—after years studying contemporary art and much longer as a Beatles fan—the connection was lost on me, I’d guess it was lost on much of the audience as well. If it was lost, it didn’t seem to matter much. The Baby Boomers around me still bopped along. We can only assume that Paul, or maybe the tour’s art director, got a little kick out of the embellishment.

Either way, juxtapositions like this are nothing new in McCartney’s career. He’s been nuzzling up to contemporary art since at least the mid sixties. He has both collaborated with visual artists and produced artwork himself. Many of these associations are chronicled in Ian Peel’s 2002 book The Unknown Paul McCartney: McCartney and the Avant-Garde. He’s made albums of concrete music and masqueraded under pseudonyms. In 1977, a conductor named Percy “Thrills” Thrillington released the album Thrillington, an orchestral version of McCartney’s 1971 solo album Ram.

Prior to its release, Thrillington took out announcements in the society pages of English newspapers that seem as much like Fluxus provocations as buzz marketing. These snippets mention the album, but also describe Thrillington’s whimsical adventures in high society, including highlights from a ski trip in Switzerland. The album’s provenance remained mysterious even though the back cover shows McCartney reflected in the studio glass. No one could say for sure that Paul was behind it. It wasn’t until 1989 that McCartney revealed it had been him all along. He’d produced the album a month after Ram’s release. With wife Linda McCartney, he wrote the ads for the society pages as a lark. Old copies of Thrillington immediately tripled in value.

McCartney’s art gestures will attract attention from people whether the work merits it or not. He is, after all, a millionaire, one of the most recongnizable human beings alive, and a knight of the British Empire. But there are also instances where McCartney has collaborated with artists directly, and the interest the work generates does not derive primarily from his celebrity. For example, he enlisted his friend, the artist Richard Hamilton, to design the sleeve for The Beatles’ 1968 self-titled album, better known today as The White Album.

Think about that for a moment—because of an artist’s design, we refer to an album by the biggest band in the history of the world by the way it looks rather than what the band named it. What’s more, the design itself apes the aesthetics of conceptual and minimalist art emerging at the time. “The Beatles,” the only words on the album’s front, are not printed but are simply embossed into the object itself. Sleeves were manufactured with seemingly unique serial numbers. By some estimates, there are over three million copies. Especially now that seriality has been recognized by art historians as a primary concern of late sixties artworks, Hamilton’s serial edition of three million spread in homes, record stores, and radio stations across the world comes off as a prescient joke on a massive scale.

As an artist, Hamilton brought more than simple imagery to the album jacket. Visual artists’ work had appeared on album jackets before The White Album and continues to do so today. Hamilton’s design focuses attention on both the album’s construction process and the circulation of the album itself. It makes us acknowledge the album’s birthplace in a factory, printed plainly and efficiently and stamped finished with a serial number. The serial number also makes tacit the existence of all the other Beatlemaniacs out there. We’re both the owner of a unique artifact (“No. 0382937 is all mine!”) and an object that’s come off the assembly line. What you make of this contradiction built into the album’s design depends on your point-of-view. It could just as easily be a perverse illustration of commodity fetishism as a light-hearted prank meant to give fans a laugh. It’s easy to think of the legions of Beatles fans as simpletons who could swallow the inscrutability of The White Album because their devotion to the group was forged during the mop-top years. But to know the real truth of that assumption, you’d have to interview a lot of Beatles fans. Meanwhile, it’s safe to say that the group never let any presumptions about their fanbase’s intelligence or sophistication get in the way of unconventional aesthetic maneuvers. The cover is a white canvas to project on anyway, the possible interpretations as numerous as the copies in circulation: it’s an aesthetic retreat from the Pop art cover of Sgt. Pepper’s released the previous year, an absurdist quantitative measurement of the world’s Beatles fans, and a comic skewering of the concept of originality in art.

I am a fan of the austere gestures of conceptual art as well as the sophisticated humor of popular music. Historically both sides, although not without exceptions, have tended to avoid the contamination of the other. Side A thinks Side B is poisoned by the market. Side B thinks Side A is willfully pretentious. With this stand-off the status-quo, the occasions of overlap are jarring. When Richard Prince’s paintings appeared fifty feet high on screen at Wrigley Field, I was jolted. I thought I’d come to the concert as a McCartney fan, not as someone trained to recognize an artist’s work from memory. But my knowledge of Prince’s work and my reserve of Beatles trivia reside in the same brain, maybe they even share neurons. The same goes for my understanding of early conceptual art and the story behind The White Album. Both emerged at the same time in like places involving similar people. It would be silly to pretend that they didn’t share some common stock. At least in this case, the less boundaries I have between professional interest and private enthusiasm, the more I might see where the two fields overlap and, consequently, enrich my understanding of the instances where open-minded cross-pollinatation has produced curious hybrids that exist in the world without much concern for what club they belong to.

Episode 288: The Residents

Christopher — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 23:52:53 +0000

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This week: Richard and guest host Charles King speak with Hardy Fox, from the Cryptic Corporation who acts as the agent of The Residents. The Residents is an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. The first official release under the name of “The Residents” was in 1972, and the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects, ten DVDs.

They have undertaken seven major world tours and scored multiple films. Pioneers in exploring the potential of CD-ROM and similar technologies, The Residents have won several awards for their multimedia projects. Ralph Records, a record label focusing on avant garde music, was started by The Residents. Throughout the group’s existence, the individual members have ostensibly attempted to operate under anonymity, preferring instead to have attention focused on their art output.

Much outside speculation and rumor has focused on this aspect of the group. In public, the group appears silent and costumed, often wearing eyeball helmets, top hats and tuxedos – a long-lasting costume now recognized as their signature iconography. Their albums generally fall into two categories: deconstructions of Western popular music, or complex conceptual pieces, composed around a theme, theory or plot. They are noted for surrealistic lyrics and sound, and disregard for conventional music composition.

Black Visual Archive: A Daily Briefing on Contemporary Black/Post-Black Art

Claudine Isé — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:28:51 +0000

Written and overseen by Meg Onli, our beloved BAS teammate, Black Visual Archive is a terrific new blog/website dedicated to contemporary black and post-black visual culture that launches this week. What’s more, the website is designed by another invaluable BAS colleague, Martine Syms, who as you all know also runs Golden Age. I love the crisp look of this site, and the range of subject matter, which promises to be pop-y, eclectic, smart yet fun, too. Right now, Black Visual Archive has a beautifully written review of Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition catalog Mementos from his 1998 exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which looks at the thematic and conceptual implications of the book’s design and content. They’ve also posted on a performance of Nina Simone’s “Feelings” at the Montreau Jazz Festival and the Berry Brother’s Fascination’ Rythym. A brief excerpt from “Kerry James Marshall | Mementos” follows:

Historically, a souvenir painting is a literal interpretation of an event, however, instead of painting the march from Selma to Montgomery or a portrait of the Little Rock Nine, Marshall’s “Souvenir” paintings all depict the interior of a middle-class household. In Souvenir I, (1997) the home becomes sanctified with the souls of black folk who hover above a couch. Their visages, reproduced with screen-prints, which are a sharp contrast to Marshall’s hand, are of deceased men, women and children with angel wings. In gold glitter the phrase “in memory of” is scrawled just below them. Is this our souvenir? The ability to ascend to a higher social status? Are these men and women our post-Movement saints? Powell notes, “one gets the sense that the ‘Souvenir’ paintings have just as much to do with process of memorializing as they do with the ‘idea’ or ‘theme’ of the memorial: painting likeness and building effigies to the one-time mortals-but-now-gods; creating a functioning, commemorative alter in one’s home; and constructing a hierarchy of African-American sainthood.”

There’s much more to come, so check out the site on a regular basis, or subscribe to the RSS feed for more.

We Are Hunted: Music Discovery Site

Christopher — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 07:00:58 +0000

It’s nothing dramatic to say that radio is largely dead and discovering new music you like is both simultaneously easier and much much harder then ever before.

Myspace was a solution at one time, as was marketplace solutions like iTunes, Amazon & Zune.

Thesixtyone.com was a solution for a specific genre that was and still is quite good and in that vein “We Are Hunted” was created. It attempts to crawl the web for the top 99 relatively new songs that a majority of people are talking about then displays them on the site for your listening pleasure.

It’s not a one stop shop but definitely a nice tool in your music safari arsenal. Enjoy and find that new song for your summer fun or maybe just this weekend.

New Years Eve Music Suggestions Video

Christopher — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:21:50 +0000

Right now your doing one of two things probably

1. Shoping for beverages for a party
2. Looking for music for a party playlist

Well BaS is here to help and even though our tastes run a bit indie-rock and instrumental we can promote the biggest hits of 2009. Luckily someone has done the work for me and remixed the top 25 songs of this year in one song. Yes one song and one music video. Hopefully this will help in your search, if not you can always go with “Blitzkreig Bop” but that’s like black it goes with anything.

I still think “Take Your Shirt Off” by T-Pain is a underrated masterpiece that will be remembered years from now

UPDATE: We want to thank DJ Earworm for the remix and here is the download for the hi-bitrate mp3 file. Happy New Year!

Episode 226: Lou Barlow

Christopher — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 04:30:43 +0000

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This week: recent addition to the BAS family Anna Kunz talks to indie rock legend Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr., Folk Implosion, Sebadoh, Sentridoh, and his own solo work) about the creative process, his music, and other exciting stuff. Lou recently released a spectacular new album out Goodnight Unknown. Richard will kick himself for a long time that he wasn’t there for this interview. Bad at Sports congratulates the Barlow family on the addition of a recent bundle of joy! The baby thing is catching kids, watch out. Before you realize it everyone you know will have a couple ankle biters running around.

Clipped from Wikipedia, and redundant:

Lou Barlow is an American alternative rock singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

A founding member of the groups Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion, Barlow is credited with helping to pioneer the lo-fi style of rock music in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Barlow was born in Dayton, Ohio and was raised in Jackson, Michigan and Westfield, Massachusetts.
Dinosaur Jr.
Folk Implosion
Sebadoh
Sentridoh
Lou Barlow
Anna Kunz
Rashid Johnson
Moniquemeloche
Janis Joplin
the Ramones
the Stooges
MC5
Kiss
Dee Dee Ramone
Devo
B52s
Nirvana
Dave Grohl
John Cage
Robert Rauschenberg
John Denver
Hannelore Baron
Goodnight, Unknown
Boxing Day

The Beatles Never Broke Up, Listen To Secret Recordings [hoax but still great]

Christopher — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:00:11 +0000

I could present this in the form it should be experenced in which is one of:

On Sept. 9, 2009 I experienced something that I still am having trouble believing happened to me. I came into the possession of a cassette tape containing a Beatles album that was never released. I dont expect you to believe what happened to me, I sure wouldn’t, but thats why I grabbed the tape as proof that my experience was real.

But I know someone will complain so in the end just listen to the best mix album since the Grey Album by Danger Mouse. Check it out, share it while you can cause like the Grey Album this will be on the ghost net in short order al a Grey Tuesday.

The Beatles Never Broke Up

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In 1 More Day Everything Changes

Christopher — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:00:58 +0000

Only 1 more day before the switch and at this point we all are done working really. It’s almost Halloween (spelled it right Anna Maria Cerniglia thanks : ) and lets get real many of us are already out downing our second Pabst in anticipation for Saturday. So have a great weekend, see everyone Sunday with a fresh new show among other things. Here is a great music video of David Byrne & BPA’s “Toe Jam” directed by Keith Schofield that is definitely not safe for work [NSFW] but hopefully will get you amped up for a great weekend.

Have fun!

Bad at Sports » Music

Episode 329: The 2011 Holiday Spectacular!

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Yip-Yip in Mark Mothersbaugh’s Top Ten

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Paul McCartney Between Art and Pop

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Black Visual Archive: A Daily Briefing on Contemporary Black/Post-Black Art

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New Years Eve Music Suggestions Video

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Episode 226: Lou Barlow

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The Beatles Never Broke Up, Listen To Secret Recordings [hoax but still great]

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