There are several new benefit comps with exclusive recordings raising money for wildfire relief — including Los Angeles Rising, Good Music To Lift Up Los Angeles, Love Los Angeles, and Super Bloom: A Benefit For Fire Relief In Los Angeles — and today Bandcamp is donating its fees to MusiCares. Meanwhile Give A Frock LA is auctioning music video outfits and gear to support Altadena Girls, Friends In Deed, One Voice, and Pasadena Humane Society. And tomorrow in LA Stereogum will co-present Rocket at Zebulon benefitting the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Recovery Fund and the Pasadena Job Center.
Weyes Blood's Natalie Mering also just revealed she was displaced by the Eaton fire, and she's partnered with the American Red Cross for a limited edition t-shirt with profits going to food, shelter, and support to those impacted by the wildfires.
THIS WEEK'S 10 HIGHEST RATED COMMENTS
THIS WEEK'S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF'S CHOICE
 | marko |
| Feb 6th | |
Ugh.Another popular artist resorting to using Al for their music video. | |
| Posted in: Watch "Weird Al" Yankovic Play Clairo In Clairo's "Terrapin" Video | |
And Flying Up The Modern Rock Charts On Its Way To Peaking at No.2… it’s “Numb” by U2.
I used to “sing” along to this by making coughing-up-phlegm noises in the back of my throat. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
So U2 had finished the North American leg of their ZooTV tour, and had six months to kill until the European leg. Still buzzing with energy from touring, and not yet feeling burnt out, they decided – instead of going home to their families, not really an option in the case of The Edge since he’d just gotten divorced – to take all of that energy and see how far they could push the weirdness they had started with “Achtung Baby.”
They pushed it pretty far. With “Numb” they possibly pushed it a little bit too far.
They also allowed The Edge to rap. Or even worse, write lyrics: “don't gape, don't ape, don't change your shape… have another grape.” They must’ve really been feeling sorry for him.
Supposed to reflect the sensory overload of the ZooTV tour – if so, mission accomplished – “Numb” builds and builds and builds, seemingly playing all the video clips that they used on the tour, all at once, and over the top of one another… they’d never sounded anything like it before… and they never would again. Pity.
“Numb” is an 8
https://youtube.com/watch?v=N4jR1RNypG0
I had to evacuate due to the Eaton Fire.
My place didn't burn but it's uninhabitable due to all the smoke and ash inside.
We have to get rid of almost everything and move.
I hope I can salvage my vinyl, not sure -- have to look into how porous the sleeves are for those toxins
I feel for all these folks and how tough it is to lose your music. The article is--not wrongly--peppered through with acknowledgments that there are worse things from the fire than losing your record collection, but it's still so crushing. I lost a few hundred CDs in an accident almost a decade ago and I still mourn that loss--just yesterday I was looking for an album I couldn't find and realized it was among those! My heart goes all the music lovers in this piece.
Jesus fucking Christ, our country is spiraling fast. I wonder how much of us realize it. In the past 2 weeks, there has been a relentless assault of lawless actions, brazen power grabs, and destabilizing acts of administrative aggression.
Just now I learned that the Office of Personnel and Management was instructed to reduce their agency by 70%. Seventy percent federal staff reductions across the country. Plans need to be ready by Monday. And that's just one agency. The rest of us will be in their cross hairs soon enough.
Still, no federal worker should take whatever lure they dangle in front of you. Don't fall for the "deferred resignation" stuff--it's BS that will leave you stiffed. If they want to oust you, make them do it the hard way, and then take legal recourse. Or, wait til you get another job and leave on your own terms.
We all need to pay attention to what's happening. But it's important that we not despair. Do not cede any power to these fucking wannabe-Nazi neckbeards that was not legitimately bestowed upon them. Stay vigilant, stay loud. And don't let them kill the fun either.
Anyway, I need to cheer myself up a bit, so it's pizza tonight. Wife and I are watching Six Feet Under for the first time and loving it. Have a great weekend everyone!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mNtqtJkB2q0
So the secret to an early Comment of the Year yardstick is to make an obvious joke at an easy target on a viral story.Good to know, good to know.
Just want to offer my sympathies, solidarity, and energy to my fellow trans and non-binary folks over in the US right now.As of right now - cos the UK is very much copying America's trajectory on tape-delay - I am fortunate to not know exactly how terrifying and soul-crushing this brazen attack on your very existences is, but I can grasp enough to just find it utterly despair-inducing.Know that your continued survival, you don't even need to be living just surviving (though you deserve the opportunity to live rather than survive), is itself an act of resistance.My DMs on BlueSky are always open to trans/nb members of the Gummetariat if you just need somebody to listen whilst you vent; I mean it.
Weather Station album good.
friendly reminder that if you love music and want to help artists, quit spotify and switch to a less evil alternative like tidal or qobuz. it's easier than you might think, and worth it. not only do other services have better sound quality, but they pay artists more. here are some additional bad things about spotify:
donated $150,000 to trump inauguration ceremony
invested millions on the spread of misinformation via joe rogan podcast
has been pushing their own fake, AI-generated artists over real artists
invests heavily in military companies
is run by yet another one of those idiotic tech billionaires
recently started paying smaller artists EVEN LESS
This is why I read the site. Never stop being you, Tom.
fuck off, i killed that shit
And Flying Up The Modern Rock Charts On Its Way To Peaking at No.2… it’s Bjork and “Human Behaviour”
She was an alien. A pixie. An elf. Something at least that wasn’t human.
That’s how the music press treated her anyway.
And she came from Iceland, a land that no music journalist had ever been. A land where they believed in pixies. A land so little known for anything except maybe Vikings and volcanos that it may as well have been an alien planet.
But honestly, after hearing “Human Behaviour”, can you really blame them? This is a song, that begins with Bjork giving some advice to some being, who, we can infer, has never been close to a human, and who, consequently, had better be ready to be confused. This is not the work of someone who identifies with, or as, a human herself.
“Human Behaviour” is not however supposed to be heard from the perspective of a pixie-alien-hybrid, but from the perspective of an animal. It’s Bjork bringing out her inner-David Attenborough – if David was an animal telling us all about humans, instead of visa versa.
And just to prove that there’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic, she goes off and sings a lot of “sometimes Icelandic words but mostly gibberish.”
All of which Bjork sings in a sense of childlike wonder; a sense of childlike wonder would also – rather patronizingly – be a key component of the Bjork persona. And she did, to be fair, write the song – or at least the melody – when she was a child.
Maybe that’s why it’s the perfect song for a video featuring a giant stuffed teddy-bear!
“Human Behaviour” is ever so, ever so, sat-is-fy-ing and it’s a 10!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=p0mRIhK9seg
I am a federal employee. I got all of those deranged emails you might have read about in the news, and I’m not fucking leaving. But I did make sure to slack on my telework days this week (while I still have them) and finished tracking my tweemo record. I am usually anal about having something to show for my time when I am not in the office. Look where that got me.Not anymore. Now, teleworking is for shredding and screaming.
My wife had it worse. She’s a research scientist and was interviewed by our local NPR station about the grant freeze, while simultaneously preparing to submit a grant. Who knows what happens next.
Hang in there everyone. This fucking sucks. Find an outlet, stay safe.