Monday, March 24, 2008

The Money Shot: Googling Vampire Weekend, No-Hit Wonders, & Rockin' The Chucks...

More headlines...

I'm with the band (The Guardian)
MS: "Converse have been my staple stage shoe from pretty much the beginning of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs," says Karen O of her unusual decision to put her face and feet to the campaign (YYYs have been known to turn down corporate sponsored tours in the past because it devalued their art). "They have become as much a part of my image as the bright red lips and torn fishnets. I'm happy to endorse a shoe that my feet have known so intimately throughout my rock'n'roll exploits."


The no-hit wonders that music refused to forget (Independent UK)
MS: The Raincoats

Despite punk's iconoclastic energy, and the short-term success of The Slits and X-Ray Spex, it is hard to dismiss the feeling that sexism remained rife. Many female-dominated acts, ignored at the time, have gone on to be praised as brave pioneers, from Manchester's Ludus to Swiss upstarts LiLiPUT, but it is The Raincoats who made the most impact by mixing sonic eccentricity with put-downs of consumerism and patriarchal society.

After the failure of 1984 album Moving, founder member Ana da Silva turned to dance as a means of expression, while the band's records awaited a more favourable time. That was the early Nineties, when the Riot Grrrl movement opened doors for female musicians and Kurt Cobain walked into Rough Trade to buy a copy of their first album. He was directed to Da Silva's house round the corner. A reformed line-up would have supported Nirvana if Cobain had not committed suicide, but The Raincoats still went on to play some other occasions, among them Robert Wyatt's Meltdown in London and Leeds Ladyfest.


Vampire Weekend doesn't vant to drink your buzz
MS: "You really start to realize that the Internet is a very bizarre place," he says. "You can't worry about every little thing, positive or negative, that's written about you. I'm definitely at the point where I'm not interested in Googling 'Vampire Weekend.' "

He also seems reluctant to accept the group's status as a "blog band" with a rep fueled primarily by online buzz.

"You'll hear about bands on blogs now," he observes, "because that's just a new form of media. Yeah, some bloggers really got behind us, which is awesome. But I think that before, like, 90% of any blogs wrote about us, we had a piece in the New York Times. So does that make us, like, 'a newspaper band'?"


Listen to Musical Justice

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I can imagine that Vampire Weekend has gotten their fill of buzz, both positive and negative, and of hearing that only musical sheep listen to them because of it. I avoided them for months because they hype was so extreme. Then I gave them a chance and ended up writing some buzz of my own!

Musical Justice said...

So, did you write about "Oxford Comma"? Looks like that might fit neatly into your blog!