Annual Stream of Consciousness
apropos of nothing
I see where Garrison Keillor and the Prairie Home Companion came to do their show in my hometown of Missoula, MT. But then it occurred to me: does the NPR affiliate there (KUFM) even carry that show? I don't recall having ever heard it there, although I was by no means the NPR enthusiast then like I am now. What I remember most about KUFM is that they played more fucking classical music than any person could be expected to endure. That and a lot of kids' shows in the daytime, Pea Green Soup or whatever. So KUFM was pretty much unlistenable for me. Finally in about '97 or so, the students at UMont somehow managed to get another radio station going (KBGA). Like any good cynical punk rocker, I made sure to find reasons to hate KBGA, and indeed, when it first started it was mostly just shit like Pearl Jam and so forth. In fact, when they started, they held a contest to come up with a tagline for the station, you know, like "KBGA: the one that ROCKS!". My submission was: "KBGA- We Put the 'Dio' Back in 'Radio'", which really had nothing to do with anything, because they didn't play any Dio, but I thought it was clever as hell at the time. But it didn't take long for KBGA to become a really decent station, very well rounded and not afraid to play anything, and best of all, they were real supportive of local bands.
Did anyone see the movie version of the Prairie Home Companion? Egad, the radio show is agonizing enough; I can't imagine what the movie was like.
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Long-Standing Mondegreen Resolution
The song "Ray-O-Vac" by Royal Trux, from their 1995 album Thank You. You know it?
Great song and all, but I've spent the last ten years thinking that the lyrics in the refrain were:
"Got ol' Billy Joe Rock on the Ray-O-Vac"
Imagine my dismay when perusing the lyrics to the song on the Internets yesterday, I found out the lyrics are in fact:
"Gotta build your rock on the Ray-O-Vac"
Certainly I can be excused for this particular mondegreen; it's not like one lyric makes any more sense than the other. Goddamn junkies.
They kinda redeem themselves on the next song, "Map of the City," which features, right around the 2:50 mark, The Goosebumps-Inducing Guitar Solo That Neil Young Wishes He Had Come Up With.
While we's on the topic of lyrics: when did searching for lyrics on the web become such a fucking nightmare? It's kind of embarrassing when I'm at work and decide I need to find out the lyrics to some song and pretty soon my whole screen is covered with bright flashing ads telling me that I have a small prick (wrong!) and that if I can just pick Brad Pitt out of a group of four photos, I'll have won 3 million dollars.
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I Was A Teenage Hall of Shame
Everybody else in the world probably knows this already, but I just learned that Kathleen Hanna, late of Le Tigre and Bikini Kill note, is now married to Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, aka King Ad-Rock. Ordinarily I wouldn't give a fiddler's fart about such a thing, but it reminds me of how in the punk rock/underground sphere, so often it's the most strident and shrill people that are the first to make the big leap to the Other Side. Another case in point: Chumbawamba was probably one of the most doctrinaire anarchy-spouting, communal-squat-dwelling gutter-punk bands in the 80s and 90s. Then in, what was it, '99 or so, The Man must've dropped by the squat waving fistfuls of Euros, and pretty soon you're hearing Chumbawamba on your local adult-oriented rock station. Shit, that didn't take much prodding!
Now I happen to dig the Beastie Boys and Le Tigre, but I'm compelled to look back fondly to February of 1994 when my band VTO opened up for Bikini Kill in Missoula, and of course, being cursed with a penis, I was forced to stand at the back of the room, farthest from the stage, with all my becocked brethren. I remember thinking at the time how gimmicky that was, to make all the dudes stand in back, and I resented the fact that we in VTO had temporarily renamed our song "Man Hater" to "Pro Skater" in some pre-emptive attempt to curry favor with them. Fat lot of good that did us.
And of course, I'm also compelled to recall Kathleen Hanna's cringe-inducing contribution to Mike Watt's 1994 "Ballhog or Tugboat?" album, which consisted of a message she'd left on Watt's answering machine telling him, in her incredibly grating Valley Girl affect, that she was "too cool" to be included in that "white rock boy hall of shame." I hasten to note that this is the selfsame white rock boy hall of shame that included Mr. Adam Horovitz!
All the same, I wish them connubial bliss.
you knew anout this.... right?
Hanna: He didn't ask me to do a song. He didn't even ask me to do
anything. I forced my way onto that record. OK, I'm going to tell you
the truth. You caught me in an honest mood, 'cause usually I lie.
That's really bad. I'm probably going to hang up the phone and have a
total seizure, a panic attack. I'll be going, "Oh my God, I told the
truth to someone."
I met Mike Watt, I don't even remember where. And he was telling me
about his album. And I said, "It sounds like there's only one woman
on this whole record, and there's, like, 300 guys." I was
like, "What's the problem?" And he was like, "Do you wanna do it?" He
didn't even know me. I don't even know if he knew I was in a band.
And I said, "Yeah." Then I walked away, and I was visiting New York
City and staying in a friend's apartment. I just spent an hour
thinking about what I would want to do. The whole idea was that I
didn't want to be on the record, and I kind-of said I wanted to be on
the record to be annoying. And then I was like, "Uh-oh, I kind-of
said I would do this." I don't think he gave a shit whether I did it
or not. He just was like, "Whatever, you can do it." He's a pretty
nice guy, a pretty funny guy, a pretty smart guy
Then I was like, what do I wanna do? And I was like, Oh my God, do I
really want to be on a record with fuckin' Henry Rollins at this
stage of the game? I mean, I love Black Flag, but c'mon. And I was
like, this is really weird company to be keeping. I was like, "I
don't want be on it, but I do want to be on it," so I decided to
record that ambivalence. The way I figured I could do that was to
record me rejecting being on the record. So it's this whole thing of
recording my absence. Or recording the absence of resistance. That
was my idea, to have a record of absence on the record.
It also made it an interesting thing because of the idea of
- Bruce February 06, 2007 04:37authorship and ownership. People didn't know if I really had left
that message on the machine, and then he just put it on without my
permission. Or if I left the message on his machine hoping it would
go on. The thing is, there was no machine, it was just a recording.
He never really had my Annie record [a reference to Hanna's
admonition to Watt at the end of the message to return a copy of the
soundtrack album]. I made that whole thing up, I barely even know
him. It's just art.
What a self-absorbed twit. Didn't take much patriarchal pressure to get her to marry a millionaire wigger, I bet.
- rusty mcgiggles February 06, 2007 06:33Kathleen Hanna's husband once sang:
Girls - to do the dishes
Girls - to clean up my room
Girls - to do the laundry
Girls - and in the bathroom
Girls - that's all I really want is girls
Two at a time - I want girls
With new wave hairdos - I want girls
I ought to whip out my - girls, girls, girls, girls, girls!
- NightVision February 06, 2007 18:46I was thinking of that same song! I wonder if they played that at their wedding?
I also seem to recall that when I saw Beastie Boys in Missoula in 1987 (with Fishbone and Murphy's Law), their stage accoutrements included a giant inflatable penis onstage and a girl in a cage.
Grrl Power!
- Dikki O'Malomar February 07, 2007 05:43Bruce- that insight into the K. Hanna spiel was indeed news to me. I gotta say, it's got me pretty confused, having spent the last 13 years operating under the assumption that it was the real deal.
- Dikki Rokket February 07, 2007 05:45