Pitchnetforkflixmedia, Part One by William Bowers
The business section of this Sunday's New York Times will confirm the rumors currently circulating on most of the universe's message boards: Altria will be purchasing many of your favorite online brands and will also be changing its name to The Neighborhoodies Group. Pitchforkmedia as you know it will blend with the browse site of the popular DVD-by-mail service Netflix to become Pitchnetforkflixmedia.com, your source for music news, reviews, and DVD rental accounts with no late fees!
Pitchfork CEO Ryan Schreiber summoned me to his desk yesterday, where he was sporting a see-through jumpsuit given to him by R. Kelly at the Intonation VIP jacuzzi. Looking out over Logan Square, where a girl was loudly refusing to ride on the back of a friend or lover's motorcycle, Ryan pointed at me with his left hand. With his right, he clicked his mouse to unleash an acapella Mp3 of Pink's "Get The Party Started". And so I have: Please enjoy this introduction to Netflix offerings of potential interest to Pitchfork readers, according to our Visitor Acumen Surveys.
To hasten your not sending me e-mails about the criminality of certain titles' absence, please note that I considered the following so obvious and/or universal that my blurbs would be exceedingly redundant: 24 Hour Party People, Pixies, Meeting People Is Easy, Seven Television Commercials, Don't Look Back, Sid & Nancy, The Kids Are Alright, Gimme Shelter, Woodstock, Dig!, and the many films in which Tom Waits portrays a zen-burned wastrel. I assume that you already know more than I dare dream about Courtney Love's eerie cameo and Joan Baez's banana substitution.
The following are also not included, because they are either in my queue or because I dread them like a pedicure-addicted Verve apologist: Chuck D's Hip-Hop Hall Of Fame, the Classic Albums series, the Rockthology series, The Old Grey Whistle Test, Lou Reed: Rock & Roll Heart, Hated, Thelonius Monk, Space Is the Place, Paul Westerberg, Just An American Boy, War on Wax, Crowding Up Your Visual Field, End of the Century, Duran Duran, The King of Bluegrass, those collections of Bjorktastic videos by those three important directors, and the live DVDs by Dead Kennedys, Ween, Depeche Mode, New Order, the Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, Bob Dylan, Iron Maiden, Public Enemy, the Cramps, Led Zeppelin, Love, Morrissey, and Butthole Surfers.
Also: Netflix does not currently stock Belle & Sebastian For Fans Only, Dutch Harbor, This Machine Kills Fascists, Tropics of Love, Xiu Xiu (the soul-charring film from which the band takes its name), They Might Be Giants (the soul-charring film from which the band takes its name), or Speed Racer (the Vic Chesnutt doc). Very well:
Athens GA Inside Out, rating: 7.4
As the number of blogs specializing in resurrecting jangly 45s proves, R.E.M. cast a devastatingly long shadow over independent American music in the 1980s. Pylon's never "making it" is almost as puzzling as the performances by Dexter Romweber, a wild John the Baptist to Jack White's more measured Jesus. How great-- and hard to fathom now-- that a state-school-town in the South could breed such a flakey scene.
Ballad Of Ramblin Jack, rating: 9.0
Engrossing portrait of the other, less famous Jew who befriended and mimicked Woody Guthrie and tried to live a kind of pioneer yahoo ideal. Prepare to weep when the troubadour attempts to patch things up too late with the filmmaker (his chip-shouldered offspring) during a concert, and she heckles, "Shut up and sing!" Jack's version of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" will change the way you hear the song-- he's not dismissing an ex-lover, he's quashing beef with Dylan. Speaking of which...
Beef / Beef 2, rating: 8.0
These are insanely magnetic accounts of hip-hop feuds, from fun freestyle battles that became legendary to dumb tiffs that blossomed into homicides. From the "South Bronx" imbroglio to the "Roxanne" debacle to 50 Cent's war with most anyone who is not 50 Cent, you will be left wondering only why no one read these guys that interview in which Letterman refuses to diss Leno, or admit defeat by him, because they both get to go home millionaires.
Behind the Music That Sucks: Hip Hop, rating: 1.0
An easy-target, lazy-joke spoof on Eminem, Will Smith, etc. Aspires to South Parkiness, complete with crap animation, but falls dang short of their occasionally sublime bile-trough.
Benjamin Smoke, rating: 9.7
I've already published a lengthy piece on this film about the leader of Smoke, whose albums deserve a lavish reissue more than a music-distracted American citizen deserves a President like Bush. So let me just tout the sweet special features: performances of songs by Cat Power and Vic Chesnutt.
Best Of MusikLaden: Roxy Music/T Rex, rating: 9.6
Yeah, Marc Bolan, bongos, trippy backdrops, whatever. Oh, but Roxy Music is awesome, dressed (except for Bryan Ferry) for a rock opera based on Lair of the White Worm. Bowie may have based Ziggy's name on the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, but the I'm-not-from-this-planet pose had to be copped from the flat-out zany-acting Eno, fingering knobs on curious consoles. The German fans are total lookers, too.
CBGB: Punk From the Bowery, rating: 0.5
Gosh, the camera doesn't move. Gosh, those grown men seem awfully pissed at or about something or other. Gosh, many of them are overweight.
Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog, rating: 8.0
Classy era-spanning film! His wives seem to compete with each other-- or maybe I'm projecting. You get his somewhat polite rise and then his descent into shit-talking genius, ending with a posthumous performance (not by him, obviously) of "Epitaph". Racism, mumbling, eviction, moodswings and allergy to compromise...sounds like your garden-variety male 20th century American savant.
The Circuit series, rating: 6.1
This ambitious digital video magazine reminds one of that wistful Super Bowl for which all of the commercials were for dotcoms. They're patchy, but interesting; for example, Circuit 1.2 features a humble Jeff Tweedy hoping that Summerteeth finds an audience, a boring Lou Barlow moping around his home studio, and a riveting Silver Apples performance.
Dark Days, rating: 8.9
If you arrived at Style Wars too late, and thus can't separate its fame-seeking vandals and prancers from Turk 182! or the "Beat It" video, this film is for you, because it goes under those subways, where people once struggled to exist, not knowing that their quest would end up on some disposable Pitchfork list because it's soundtracked, doomily and then cathartically, by DJ Shadow.
Dee Dee Ramone: Hey Is Dee Dee Home?, rating: 2.0
Some footage of Johnny Thunders, some footage of Dee Dee talking. About "the scene," you know, back in the day, and drugs, and tattoos. For a feature-length amount of time. Ending with notice of his overdose. Might serve some function as rock anthropology, but to watch it requires fending off fantasies of other levels of entertainment: for example, if Flea were playing Dee Dee in a biopic, there'd at least be the inorganic suspense generated by an ego's rubbery sublimation.
Devo: Complete Truth About De-Evolution, rating: 9.4
Packed with extras (such as an account Bowie of trying to overcharge them to enter his stable), packed with ideas (such as, you know, asexuality), and the damn disc also works as a cautionary tale. Contains the demented early work that seemed to spawn from some Ohio malaise, and then spirals into their peak as a "non-band," bursting with videos too preachily sincere or brimming with critique to dream of being shown today. At some point, though, the uniformity and Reagan hair-helmets stared back into them. That said, no quick-cut infomercial on MTV4 can rival the detournement provoked by the juxtapositions in Devo's montages of murderous Barbies and fascist stock footage.
Devo Live, rating: 5.5
They play, early, at a Lollapalooza '96 date in California. The camera swings out over a largely unmoved crowd. They seem bitter during the interview. By their own logic of de-evolution, perhaps it's fitting for them to get less than they've earned?
Dirty Old Town, rating: 6.1
You already knew how nice Ted Leo is, and I'm not talking about the old-school hip-hop "nice" or the styrofoamy baby-shower "nice"-- Ted Leo is of course a transcendent and sexy kind of stand-up-human nice. But he's flummoxing to his fans, because just as he stranded the titanic "The Sword in the Stone" on a throwaway EP, this DVD zeniths on a bonus feature of the Pharmacists rocking New York during the blackout.
Downtown 81, rating: 7.9
Jean-Michel Basquiat seems all too mortal, and sometimes downright airheaded, in this subcultural travelogue made tolerable by the fascinating performances of DNA, the Plastics, Tuxedomoon, James Chance and the Dragon People. If a tree falls in the woods, and no one in New York heard it...
Friends Forever, rating: 8.2
Two guys become nomadic punk performance artists, playing noise (and hurting themselves) in suburban parking lots. Their absurdist tour is the opposite of the capitalism-missionary-work to which many bands aspire on the road; they even give away (or destroy) their merch. Think a crustier version of the guys from Hella cast in Waiting For Godot, with a minivan for a stage.
Galaxie 500: Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste, rating: 2.3
Well, the videos were on the Ryko reissues, and the band's infuriatingly sassy during the interviews, and famously stationary during the performances. This one's probably just for Dean or Naomi fetishists, because, jeepers, I yield, those two are unique-looking. (Is there a pro-Damon camp out there? Text-message me.)
Genghis Blues, rating: 9.9
Terrific and heartful tale of a blind bluesman Paul Pena's trip to Tuva, where he wins a horse for throatsinging and makes us all believe again in the panacea/placebo of pre-boxcutter cross-cultural tolerance. The show is stolen by Kongar-ol Ondar, who is my favorite screen presence ever: a gentleman Mongol, a pliant nationalist, a street-fighting repository for an exiled art.
Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns, rating: 6.9
With all due respect to the oft-told story of They Might Be Giants (experimental songaholics become tamer Randy Newmen for TV themes, but still deliver in concert), you will marvel at the visages of folks who usually hidden behind radios and dust-jackets: Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, Ira Glass, etc.
Gunner Palace, rating: 8.5
American troops in Iraq perform not only their combat and police work; they also recreate the poses of their favorite rappers and Metallica-style guitarists. Pop culture serves as a kind of utility belt to these folks, who speak for more than the enlisted when they rap about actually living in movies.
Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King, rating: 9.8
David Fair's role in this story of what has essentially become his brother Jad's band is a tad misproportioned, but he is so charismatic (in the attraction/repulsion vibrato way) that you won't care. The film contains performances of many of the gems from their Moe Tucker-assisted classic, Fire in the Sky, and among the special features is the entire "Live In Hell" show, during which David is a pogo-ing man-child who occasionally shoves the skeleton cheerleaders.
High Lonesome, rating: 7.6
This respectful history of bluegrass never stoops to the genrist sanctimony of several hip-hop docs, but it's also a mite generic. Fans won't glean much fresh scoop, and newbies'll just get the canonical timeline, ending when rock wiped out bluegrass as viciously as Christianity dethroned the Greek gods. A Netflix customer reviewer from Pennsylvania confessed to being made nostalgic for a life in Kentucky during the Depression!
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: Disc 2, rating: 9.5
Forget the first disc, which is not aging well. You don't want to be sold the bill of rockist goods that somehow, watching Wilco manager Tony Margherita wear Campers and complain into a headset-phone is an authentic portal into the dark heart of artsy Americana. (I can't believe that Greg Kot's book about this band was named Learning How To Die, as if Jeff Tweedy was G.G. Allin.) But the shows captured on the bonus disc are great, especially the Kleenex-riffic version of the song he gave to Golden Smog, "Please Tell My Brother". I propose a toast: To facial hair!
Inspirations, rating: 7.0
David Bowie comes off as much more charming-- if also eerily mortal-- in this doc about artistic fuel cells than he did surrounded by muppets and testing a codpiece in Labyrinth. He plugs his "Verbasizer" (a digital simulation of Magnetic Poetry), he yanks song ideas from assassination headlines, and he reveals his envy of the stylish dad in the Dennis the Menace comics.
Jandek on Corwood, rating: 8.7
This film deepens the mystery of Jandek, which is to say that this film doesn't succeed in selling Jandek's music on its own merits. His absence is enthralling, though, like the tiptoed-around Hitler and Jesus of The Tin Drum and Ben-Hur. One can't help but wonder what the filmmakers think of this mailorder performance-artist's scheduled live appearances-- did someone read him that Emily Dickinson poem about existential peekaboo, the one that initially honors the godlike shut-in ("He has hid his rare life from our gross eyes") but ends up calculating the opportunity costs of a prolonged disappearing act ("Would not the jest have crawled too far")? I recently named a cat Corwood-- seemed like a veteran Pitchfork typist thing to do-- and it turned out to be reclusive, right down to denying me eye contact. Oooooooh.
Jump Tomorrow, rating: 6.9
If you are obsessed with TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe, meaning that you wish that Touch & Go would release a DVD of him running his errands, wearing his blazer over his hoody, then this art-lite film is for thee. He plays a constipated, virginy, Urkel-versus-Rain-Man-with-a-pinch-of-Malcolm-Shabazz schlub conscripted to marry something or other, but he falls for a nineties Latino on his way to Niagara Falls, the most obvious symbol of albino menstruation since the Milky Way. Only the Crocodile Dundee trilogy generated as much goodwill by showcasing the curious propensity of cultures to vary.
Kurt & Courtney, rating: 6.5
Please, fate, let me never date someone who goes on to do the whole generational-surrogate-prophet thing and end up in an exploitative (and okay, titillating) documentary. Please fate, let Bill O'Reilly never surmise the swiftness with which the ACLU gets violent on Nick Broomfield, for daring to speak into their unsecured mic at one of their events celebrating freedom's inexecrable etc. My friend in Seattle thinks that a certain climate-centric Rob Milli & Fab Vanilli hit contains the key to Kurt's genius's junkiedom's end: Blame it on the rain...
TO BE CONTINUED! SO DON'T DIE!
