Results tagged “music” from The Daily Nugget

Melissa called someone a freak-a-zoid this morning and it reminded of the song from Midnight Star.  And now, thanks to the Internets, I was able to find a video for the song that I had never seen before.  The video is freakier than the song itself:  it has a bunch of sadly dated computer graphics and the "whitest guy they could find" acting like a mime.  Wow, you gotta love the eighties.

In the video above, please check out the drummer in the background.  He is totally channeling Tommy Lee in a spinning drum cage circa 1987 like on the Girls, Girls, Girls tour.  This guy seems totally out of place from the rest of the band and it's funny as all hell.  He definitely stole the show in this performance.  Big ups to Meerenai for emailing me this gem.

The L.A. Times ran a front page apology to Diddy for the story they ran last week in which they implicated Diddy in shooting Tupac Shakur outside of a record studio in New York (see previous post).  Here's an excerpt of the public apology:

"The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not have been used...We apologize both to our readers and to those referenced in the documents...and in the story."

Diddy and his lawyers are nothing short of unimpressed and surely will pursue a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper.  This is not the end of this by a long shot.  I predict an out of court settlement in the L.A. Times' future.

MC Hammer is the newest Web 2.0 entrepreneur, or is he!? He is the co-founder of a dance video community site called dancejam.com that will is supposed to be launching today, although it hasn't actually launched as of this writing. I just went there and saw a video in the front page that said that the website is coming soon and a sign-up for a pre-launch invitation. The site is clearly suffering from a little performance anxiety.

MC Frontalot just made a sweet video of his new Nerdcore song, "It's Pitch Dark." That's right it's funky fresh Zork universe humor for all of those old enough to remember the Infocom games. What is a grue? Well, if you have to ask you probably won't understand this video.

Van Halen has reunited with David Lee Roth for a tour later this year that will include all original band members except bassist Michael Anthony who is being replaced by Eddie Van Halen's son, Wolfgang. Sweet.

Melissa and I saw The Killers at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium last night. The opening bands, Solar Cake and Howling Bells were, well, as crappy as other opening bands. Between the two openers, I have to give the prize to Solar Cake, since each and everyone of the Howling Bells songs sounded alike: slow tempo over processed shrieky vocals and over modulated guitars. Ugh!

The one thing that we noticed right away was the lousy audio mix for all of the bands. The vocalists were not mixed high enough and the bass was overpowering everything else in the auditorium. Not that the Bill Graham is known for its outstanding acoustics, but we have seen many other acts play there and sound great, including Green Day, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Cake, Smash Mouth, and Third Eye Blind. You can get good sound at the Bill Graham, but not so much last night.

Although the nerdcore subgenre (hip-hop hardcore + nerds = nerdcore) is a few years old, it may gain critical mass now that a new documentary about the movement is seeking distribution. Nerdcore for Life is a new documentary that sheds light on the most popular nerdcore artists and their lives. The trailer for the film has garnered over 600,000 views on YouTube.

MC Router, pictured here, has a famous beef with Wired Magazine for running a story about nerdcore (issue 14.09) and stating there's "even a few ladies" on the scene without giving her any props. Click on her picture to hear "Unwired" on her Myspace page, it's her rap rebuttal to the Wired story. Damn, even if you may not like her rap style you gotta admit that she has one of the sweetest tattoos ever!

I am completely fascinated by nerdcore and would love to see the film be entered and shown at the next San Francisco International Film Festival. Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing whether the film was even entered prior to the December 15th deadline for the festival. In any case, I sent the director and producer an email about the festival and can only hope that he follows up with the festival organizers. I wish him the best of luck in getting his film shown and distributed. For more on nerdcore go to nerdcorehiphop.org.

Two separate geniuses killed themselves earlier this month near Modesto while performing the "ghost ride da whip" stunt popularized by "hyphy" hip-hop artists like E-40. One 18-year-old kid hit his head on a parked car while sticking his head out of the passenger side of his driverless car. Another 36-year-old, yes that's not a typo, fell off the roof of his driverless car, hit his head, and earned a well-deserved "adios" for his stupidity. Natural selection.

Rapper Jay-Z announced that he will be ending his retirement from recording and releasing a new album titled Kingdom Come later this year. Jay-Z is now the President & CEO of Def Jam records and doesn't really need to record anything with a net worth estimated at $320MM. He guest starred in several rap songs during his "retirement," fueling speculation that another album would someday drop. According to Star Magazine, Beyonce is pissed that Jay-Z is recording again and feels that he should be paying more attention to his personal life, especially with their upcoming wedding slated for this November in the Caribbean.

According to this news story, in hip hop culture kids are getting out of moving cars to dance on or around them, even on the freeway, and then try to get back in their vehicles to try and regain control before it crashes into something or runs them over, sometimes very unsuccessfully.

This ghost riding craze appears to have taken off as a result of popular rapper E-40, who has a song called "Tell Me When to Go" where he repeatedly chants, "Go Stupid! Dumb!" and "Ghost ride the whip!" That's exactly what the kids are doing. In fact, the song can be heard as background to many ghost riding videos found on the Internet. I guess that I am totally late to hear about this trend, since there were blog posts and news stories about this and the "hyphy" movement several months ago.

I am sorry but I was a teenager once and was never this dumb. Dancing on or around an out of control vehicle that weighs more than a ton is just plain stupid. Many would argue that this is just a form of natural selection. I predict that there are going to be a lot of wrecked cars (mostly belonging to mommy and daddy), broken bones, and deaths due this this craziness.

"Nuestro Himno," the Spanish-speaking version of "The Star Spangled Banner" which means "Our Anthem," is causing a stir and sparking a national debate about freedom of speech, national identity, and immigrant rights. There are mixed reactions from the song that vary from elation to utter indignation. The reactions stem from the fact that it is not a straight translation of the English version, because it has to rhyme, and because its release coincides with a planned May 1 national boycott in support of immigration reforms.

Surely, we should all be proud that we live in a country where we are free to make any version of the national anthem that we see fit. "The Star Spangled Banner" is in the public domain and the music can be played on an accordion, a bassoon, an electric guitar or anything else anyone wants. Additionally, words for the music can be written or rewritten at will by anyone in any language. It is called freedom and we should all embrace it. However, some see this Spanish-speaking anthem as a threat to our national identity.

The truth is that no matter how many versions of "The Star Spangled Banner" are made, there is only one national anthem in the United States. We should all be secure in knowing that there likely will never be a congressional action to change the national anthem. For example, even though Canada has two official languages and there are English and French versions of "O Canada" the English version is the official version of the song.

That being said, even if this Spanish-speaking version of "The Star Spangled Banner" is officially recognized by congress two hundred years from now when the official languages of the United States are English, Spanish, and Chinese, or a mixture of the three like in Blade Runner, the English version will likely still be the official version.

Here are the lyrics to a song that should be recorded to the tune of Aerosmith's Janie's Got a Gun. It would be awesome if Aerosmith recorded the song to parody Good ol' Dick, but I doubt that would ever happen.

Cheney's Got a Gun

Dum, dum, dum, Cheney what have you done
Dum, dum, dum, it's the sound of my gun
Dum, dum, dum, Cheney what have you done
Dum, dum, dum, it's the sound, it's the sound...
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah....

Cheney's Got A Gun
Cheney's Got A Gun
His whole world's come undone
From shootin' quail on the run
What did poor Harry do
What did he put you through

They say when Cheney lost investments
He swore to give Harry pain
That lawyer had it comin'
Now that Cheney's Got A Gun
He ain't never gonna be the same

The Legendary K.O. just put out a song called George Bush Don't Care About Black People over the beat of Kanye West's Goldigger track off the new Late Registration album. According to the FWMJ site, The song was supposedly produced by Kanye West and the words were written by Big Mon and Damien a/k/a Dem Knock-Out Boyz. Here's the link to the MP3 (Windows Audio, 8.69MB).

In related news, the University of San Francisco African American Studies Program is doing a forum on Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina this Monday night, September 12th, between 4:00PM and 6:00PM in the Atrium of Gleeson Library. The two contrasting quotes that will be analyzed during the event are Kanye West's quote, which is the song's namesake, and Condoleeza Rice's quote, "I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African-Americans. I just don't believe it for a minute." Belie'e dat, bitch!

April Winchell keeps a collection of multimedia that can be best described as a scary music museum. The categories she includes are TV Stars Who Insist on Singing, Abba Covers in Hindi, Roger's Track of the Week: Library of Excretia (a lot of Burt Ward songs here), German Covers, Beatles Covers, Stairway to Heaven Covers, Terrifying Christian Recordings, and a bunch of other bizarre music and sounds. Definitely worth checking out when you get a chance. My favorite is William Shatner's rendition of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.