Sound Taste

Coming out of my Moz coma

My Halloween treat came early this year. Thanks to friends in low places, I got to see Girl in a Coma for the first time at Hammerstein Ballroom last Friday. And, oh yeah, some Irish dude.

The San Anto gals got the primo opening slot for Morrissey thanks to the less-than-politic comments Kristeen Young made from the stage. Our bud Kiko Jones picked up the story from morrissey-solo.com and Kristeen's MySpace page.

It takes some real ovarios to come before rabid Moz'ers as an almost total unknown (I think me and my plus-one and the Blackheart people were the only ones who could actually sing along). But the girls gave it their all, even with a muted sound that I'm sure made them hard to hear over by the bar.

From our perch in the balconies, we saw that by the second song, some of the folks by the stage were bopping and clapping along. But I'm sure the response from most of the audience was more along the lines of Ear Farm, which slavishly documented all Moz Hammerstein shows: "A minor change really - Morrissey has never been known for his impeccable taste in openers." But by Sunday's final show, even though he starts out saying, "I hadn't even heard them play a song yet, but I already hated them. I was grumpy, distrustful of Morrissey's taste for openers, and ready to get on with seeing the headliner," he too fell to the charms of Nina, Phanie and Jenn:

they still blasted through their set (the song "Clumsy Sky" was a particular favorite) with equal parts energy, pop hooks, and guitar power. At times I felt some Siouxsie in the vocals, some Doug Martsch in the guitar work, and an overall Joan Jett/Yeah Yeah Yeahs kind of vibe from the band.

In Friday's show, they came off as super-confident, even though they hadn't played such a big room in a while, if ever. They ran through all the songs in their debut CD, "Both Before I'm Gone." Surprisingly, "Clumsy Sky" and "Say," the two more popular songs, came well before the climax of the set. And Jenn has a lovely way with understated, yet sweet banter. She is the anchor to Nina's bouncy energy (how does she manage to play the guitar down by her knees?).

The gals were ecstatic after the set, hunting for bathrooms and snacks and rushing to secure good viewing spots for the headliner. Confession time: I am not one of those Latinas-for-Moz (I think it's mostly a Chicano/Mexican phenomenon), and had never actually seen him live. I was won over, but don't expect to see my middle-aged body crowd-surfing to bum-rush the stage anytime soon.

Morrissey is comfortable in his barrel-chested body, his voice and his well-cultivated pose of never-fulfilled desire (which reminds me so much of the simmering of Ian McKellen's James Whale in Gods and Monsters). There is no substitute for the suavity that comes with more than two decades of performing experience, and his backing band, visually very much within Moz's aesthetic of well-scrubbed, sharp-jawed masculinity, are as solid a rock machine as I've seen out there. The gong in "How Soon is Now," with Morrissey legs up against the elevated drum kit, was bombast at its best.

So here's YOUR little treat, the video for "Irish Blood, English Heart"

[blurry, no-flash photos by moi]

Casting call for Oscar Wao

Don't start lining up, people. The movie version of Junot Diaz's novel "Oscar Wao" was recently optioned, but has a while to go before it's greenlighted. In the meantime, though, girls can dream. At least that's what Damarys Ocaña over at Latina magazine did recently in a post on the mag's new and improved blog pages where she lines up her Oscar Wao dream cast.

Her choice of Oscar de la Renta (R.) for Trujillo (L.) is brilliant. The man is as smooth as Trujillo wish he had been. But Gina Torres as Belicia? She's barely 30, and even if in real life she's just old enough to have two teenage kids, that's not her Hollywood age. Maybe she'd work for the flashback sequences of feisty Belicia in the DR. Belicia, as Junot describes her, should look as worn as late-period Luba. I'm telling you, Raquel Welch.

Damarys sees Victor Rasuk as Oscar (adding 150 pounds on the method acting yaniqueque diet). But he'd make a much better Yunior. Or maybe Manny Perez (a good friend of Junot's since "Washington Heights" days) could play Yunior (if he's not too old already. Sorry, Manny). Oscar is the tough one. If only Rick Gonzalez weren't as skinny as a twizzler. Where is the Dominican-looking sweet chunky we need?

I keep imagining Guillermo del Toro as director (as Pan's Labyrinth demonstrates, he's got the chops for Latin American politics, fantasy and horror), credit sequences animated by Los Bros. Hernandez, maybe a little rotoscoping a la Waking Life.

Other ideas?

Say it ain't so, Joe

I guess it's compay Friday. "5" blogger and frequent Sound Taste commenter Kiko Jones has a  barbed, thought-provoking response to my little Joe Strummer gush last week.

He points to how "The Clash’s music [has been] knowingly and wilfully defanged by their use in shilling jeans and luxury cars (!) in recent years." The latest of the offenses is the use of "Pressure Drop" in a Nissan ad (itself a Toots & Maytal cover). At first I didn't quite place the piece, since they only loop the guitar part and a bit of the hummed chorus. When I finally figured it out, a part of me died just a little. The worst hit of course, was the first one, hearing the dangerous guitar of "London Calling" on a Jaguar ad.

Not that I'm categorically against the use of cool songs in ads. I too have gone off to find tunes after hearing them in an ad (or, egads, a TV show). But it's when the song so obviously, um, clashes, with the product that I feel a little nauseous.

Rob Walker had a real interesting piece a few years back on how subversive music gets in ads. In short, the ad companies cherry-pick song parts, most people don't pay attention to lyrics beyond the chorus, and the bands signed off on it anyway. Sigh. I just change the channel.

Kiko also mentions Fender's $900 Joe Strummer Telecaster, a replica of Joe's trusty ’66 model. I'm not a guitar geek, but I always wonder -- what is it people think they're buying when they drop $2,600 on a replica Van Halen "Frankenstrat"? I think this is the textbook definition of fetishism, whether you're talking anthropology, sexual psychology or Marxism. But what do I know? I'm just a girl.

Friday Girl in a Coma

Pause for shameless nepotism. The Tejana group Girl in a Coma is in town this weekend (their first NYC shows, I think).

I found out about them through West Coast compadre Jimmy Mendiola, who's done two of their videos -- the one below for "Clumsy Sky" and an upcoming one for "Say" -- and really love these hard-rockin' Chicanas, who remind me of the Pretenders or Sleater Kinney. NIna Diaz's husky growl keeps up handily with her comadres' pounding backbeat. I'm not the only one who likes 'em -- Joan Jett signed them to her label Blackheart Records.

So go check 'em out, tonight at Crash Palace (they're going on early, at 7:30 pm), and Sunday (my favorite going-out night of the week) at Knitting Factory.

UPDATE: Unless you have a ticket for tonight's Morrissey concert at the Hammerstein, your introduction to the girls will have to wait. It seems Moz fired his opening act and is taking the San Anto chicks on for the rest of his East Coast tour. Hurray for them! Boo for me.

Future paperweight

Some companies are smart and see Latinos as a huge consumer base that tends to be loyal and spends, for example, $21.3B on telecommunications. And then there's Microsoft, which has decided that its Zune isn't lame enough, and is now coming out with a limited-edition Wisin y Yandel player, pre-loaded with the duo's new album, "Los Extraterrestres," video and a couple of other mild goodies. Leila Cobo at Billboard reports that the mp3 player will be sold at Wal-Mart starting Oct. 29, a week before the new album hits stores.

This is almost as bad as the White Stripes Holga camera. Reggaeton haytahs will quip that nothing on earth can be improved by adding a dem bow beat to it, but seriously, what is the point of this? Anyone fool enough to drop $199.94 on this device deserves the annoyance that awaits 'em.

I agree with Adam Krebs at Zune Thoughts. It's a "glorified reggaeton CD."

[image via ZuneOnline]

Mission accomplished

Well, New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones did warn that his Get Whitey article was meant to stimulate discussion.

The story has, as they say in old journalism lingo, legs. The responses to the article continue to pile up, mostly to say how he's oh so fuckin' WRONG. Part of it is that S/FJ hit a nerve -- the white guilt of indie rockers/hipsters -- and part comes from the "High Fidelity" boyish obsessiveness that has spawned a million and one music blogs.

Many bloggers repeat criticisms I mentioned before, but the latest rock tossed at S/FJ that caught my eye comes from Slate, where Carl Wilson makes several good points, including: how the segregation of musical forms is also related to the rise of Black Power and disillusionment in integrationist ideals; how minstrelry became a "capital cultural crime," not just a matter of political correctness; that the post-Reagan widening class gap has as much to do with the isolation of indie rockers as the shift in racial dynamics; that indie rock is coping (badly) with a crisis in white masculinity; and, in a point similar to the one made here and here, that

When "miscegenation" does happen in music now, it's likely to be more multicultural than in Frere-Jones' formula, as in rainbow-coalition bands such as Antibalas and Ozomatli.

Amen, brother! Preach! (Oops, is that too "black" of me?)

Friday Strummer

So excited that finally (a year after showing at Sundance) the Julien Temple doc about Joe Strummer, The Future is Unwritten, will be screening in NYC, at the IFC Center starting Nov. 2.

While we wait for the doc, check the video of "Redemption Song" I ran across via Heavy Sounds and the Abstract Truth. The Bob Marley cover appeared in 2003's posthumously released Streetcore. The video is bittersweet, basically the making of the spraypainted memorial mural to Strummer on E. 7th St. outside Niagara bar. You see neighborhood folks, Clash t-shirt toting fans, round the way girls and a few indie celebs (Rancid in rudeboy drag, Jim Jarmusch, Cinque Lee and Steve Buscemi).

Just when I think that my Joe Strummer fascination is all about nostalgia for my youth, I hear his voice at the intro of the song, saying things that should sound maudlin and naive, but instead make me want to run out and fight fight fight to make the world better:

People. People can change anything they want to.  And that means everything in the world. Show me any country, and there'll be people in it. It's time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. You know, think on that. Without people, you're nothing.

I will always kick myself for not seeing the Mescaleros' last NY show April 2002 at St. Ann's Warehouse. I had all intentions of going, and something which now seems altogether unimportant got in the way.

Ebony and Ivory (no room for Mahogany)

This week's New Yorker article by Sasha Frere-Jones on the unbearable whiteness of indie rock has riled a lot of people. Responses have pointed out that some indie rockers are black, that there's lots of bands that disprove his theory, etc.

Lots of territory covered in the provocative dialogue between Tom Breihan and Rob Havilla on Status Ain't Hood, in which Harvilla asks whether S/FJ isn't basically saying "Why don’t you like what I like? Why don’t you sound like I’d like you to sound? Could it be... racism?" Idolator even came up with a funny "SFJ score" for CMJ bands and battles complainers by saying,

Forget indie rock, there's not a single aspect of white--and especially white male--culture that doesn't need to be mercilessly picked apart for both the covert and overt, conscious and unconscious racism that it perpetuates every day!

Unfortunately, most of the conversation has remained firmly within the black-white terms S/FJ sets up. It's the tired old tale of rock being ONLY about the white man stealing the black man's cool, Led Zep and the Stones trying to be bluesmen and getting it gloriously wrong. Even the word miscegenation, which S/FJ uses as his measuring stick of righteous rockness, basically frames rock within the history of U.S. slavery.

My first thought was: What about Lebanese Dick Dale inventing surf guitar by playing tarabaki drum beats? What about the famous farsifa organ hook line in "96 Tears" being a transfer from conjunto accordion? Richie Valens? Phil Manzanera? Boogaloo? Or for chrissakes, all the insertions of Brazilian or South Asian sounds that reinvigorated the rock gene pool? Do only black and white people in the U.S. have a stake in rock?

Let me take a step back: the basic argument of the New Yorker piece is that we are in a period where music has re-segregated, and that the more popular indie rock acts right now do not partake of the beauty of miscegenation. Well, yes, at the formal level indie rock is as white as it's ever been, and I do agree with Frere-Jones' point that the obsessions of the "whitest" of the groups are speaking to an ever-more-specific and subdividing community of listeners. As is happening in much of hip-hop.

But the fact is, other people have deliberately opted out of rock minstrelry. That's the argument Simon Reynolds makes about post-punk bands like Pere Ubu, Devo and Mission of Burma in his excellent book, Rip It Up and Start Again.

I think the larger problem is not one of how boring the music is because indie rockers are less interested in rhythm (which lots of other folks have pointed out is just not true, especially with the return of "dance rock"). I think more to the point is how in the rockist quest for authenticity/"realness," there's a lot of musicians who are no longer actively listening to music of all kinds, and just as importantly, fewer CRITICS who can listen to music without always translating it back into Anglorock. Just read any random review in US papers of Cafe Tacuba, Jaguares or Aterciopelados. Not that every music critic should be a trained ethnomusicologist (I'm not), but a lot of the pop/rock critics these days aren't even familiar with enough music genres to be able to HEAR what's going on in music outside their ever-narrowing fields of interest.

P.S. Great minds think alike. Check my tag-team partner Jimmy Mendiola's take on the article at Ken Burns Hates Mexicans and his reference to the promises-to-be-excellent American Sabor exhibit at the Experience Music Project in Seattle.

Digging in the archives: Los Super Elegantes

Writers are packrats. Or at least I am. Moving a bunch of files from boxes to a new filing cabinet (the small thrills of those who work at home), I found all kinds of clip files and old articles, published and inéditos. Among these was an unpublished piece I wrote in 1995 for a Latin alternative magazine about a Bay Area cult group called Los Super Elegantes.

The magazine is nominally still in publication (but, judging from the barrage of event-related emails I get from them, seems to be more in the promotion business). Los Supers, which seemed like one of those brilliant mirages that could not last, are amazingly still around. The interview was fun and provocative. Why did it never run? I never got a straight answer. I suspect it was because, without a label, there was no opportunity for promotion. Whatever.

I've always had a soft spot for bands made by art students. Martiniano and Milena met at CCAC and made the band as a project in pretending to be rock stars. In SF at least, they succeeded.

In 1995, Los Super Elegantes were like the unholy children of Pedro Almodóvar and Johnny Lydon, led by a fey skinny Argentine guy, and a gorgeous Tijuana gal willing to roar, crawl and otherwise let it all hang out. They totally anticipated all the silly electroclash and nacotheque stuff, and the more interesting turn of late on performance, on taking surface seriously.

As the opener of the interview, which you can read at right under the "My clips" section, describes, they "cross musical genres shamelessly -- quebradita with punk, boleros with porno soundtracks -- and put on a visual spectacle with outlandish costumes and acrobatic somersaults." There were violins, trombones, screaming. Oh what a time it was.

And In the last few years, since their move to LA, Los Supers have maintained that ambivalence between band and art project. I saw them do a roller disco number at the 2004 Whitney biennial, as part of a project with frequent contributor Vivid Assume Astro Focus. One of their songs, "Sixteen," actually did well in Mexico, and they had some buzz when their record, Channelizing Paradise, came out.

See an interview on MTV Tr3s with them here (sorry, no direct link, but it's the video current under "Indie 101"), and MySpace page here. Supposedly, they have a new record, Nothing Really Matters, coming out shortly. Here's the video for the title single, a goofy pop ditty with mid-80s vintage r&b choruses:

[Milena y Martiniano pix via Phonocromatico]

Porfirio Rubirosa: the Ultimate Sanky Panky

And who better to portray a slimy man-whore than Antonio Banderas? That's the latest word on the long-rumored Porfirio Rubirosa movie project, which I first saw mentioned in a Dec. 2002 Vanity Fair piece on Rubirosa as a style icon. John Malkovich supposedly optioned the movie version of this Rubi bio, but the company that signed Bandy is the Venezuelan Sierralta. The stories on the deal say filming will begin next year in DR, Paris, Spain and Prague.

I have mixed feelings about this project. It would be a chance to see a glamorous Dominican on screen, but why the one who single-handedly created the "Latin Playboy" label? Why not Maria Montez, por ejemplo? I imagine this becoming a Dominican Scarface, minus the coke (but with accents just as ridiculous).

A quick primer for those not in the know. A scion of the Dominican elite, Rubirosa had jobs, as a diplomat (and rumored spy) but he was better known for car racing, polo playing and cutting a wide sex swath through Hollywood (Barbara Hutton, Ava Gardner and Zsa Zsa Gabor) Fifth Ave. (Doris Duke) and the world over (Eva Perón, the Irani princess Soraya Esfandiari). So suave was the guy that he was able to get away with divorcing Trujillo's daughter Flor de Oro without having his (legendarily prodigious) genitals handed to him on a silver tray.  He's inspired two bios in English (this one and this one) and a few in Spanish (like this one and this one).

As for the nickname in the headline, I have to admit, I ripped it off the brand-new Dominican Book Club blog. For the non-Dominicans in the house, the term "sanky panky" comes from the homologous hanky panky, and refers to guys who trade their looks and sexual favors for money, comfort, or a way out of poverty on the island. The movie Sanky Panky made this into farce, and the excellent Heading South (based on a Dany Laferrière novel and set in Haiti) takes on the issue more seriously.

And btw, there's a goofy Italian pop band named Porfirio Rubirosa. Here's the silly video they made for a  catchy bubblegum song.

[Rubi & Zsa Zsa at Claridge's 1954 via newyorksocialdiary.com; Maria Montez image via skylighters.org]