recommended if you like live shows

The RIYL show was fantastic. I give Chris Maher (of Morningsides fame) mad props for starting a record label - and one with such amazing bands. I'd heard two of the Morningsides' songs on the internet about two years ago - "Summer Song" and "A Molehill is a Mound" - but i hadn't seen Chris join Sam Grossman and John Dydo on stage since the dissolution of Shamus McNasty, so seeing them play together was sort of a revelation. Sam remains a fantastic songwriter, both in the pop-rock of the morningsides and the more recent collaboration with Simon Beins and John that is the Wowz. I'd heard a few of the Morningsides tracks online several years ago, but they played one unrecorded track which was terriffic. The Wowz' final song, "Groups With Guitars Are On The Way Out," was amazing. Folks should pick up the "Morningsides ''7 Single and the Wowz' upcoming CD Nicotine Bubblegum, the latter of which i will prbably be posting a review of in the near future. The other bands that played were all impressive - particulalrly Daggerhearts, whose innovative melodies were compelling and addictive, and The Fugue, although I wish they'd let Ben get off the drum kit (where he did a great job) and grab a guitar. Andrew (who i hadn't seen in like four years - not since Youngerman made us stop outside S-'s party none of us were invited to) and Alex said that Automato's in the process of writing new material. I'm excited to hear it.

The Wowz

Sam Grossman and John Dydo's new band, The Wowz, are playing a show at Galapagos Artspace on North Sixth in Williamsburg tonight at eight with a bunch of other artists, including Chris Maher, their former bandmate in Shamus McNasty and again in The Morningsides. If you can't make it, you should still check out their website.



Last night someone found my old website by googling my last name. It's always unsettling when someone else is googling you. Come forward if you're the culprit!

Post #201, Pataki Vetoes minimum wage increase, and a few more songs

The last post was number 200, so belated happy 200th post to The Problem Of Leisure blog. Hopefully the state legislature will, as phoebe suggests, override governor pataki's veto, and hopefully said veto will mean that come the next election, Dennis Rivera of District 1199 and the eladership of other progressive unions who recognize that the fate of the labor movement and that of unorganized low-wage workers are inexorably linked, won't be backing Pataki anymore, not even for the amazing health insurance and card check legislation they won last time around. With that taken care of (and by the way, if you haven't seen either Spider-Man 2 or Metallica:Some Kind Of Monster yet, i highly recommend both,) i guess it's time to continue with my Rosenberg-inspired protest soundtrack.



13.Song number thirteen is yet another song by the Clash. Combat Rock's "Rock The Casbah" offers a subtle but explicit critique of european colonialism and oil nationalism in the middle east, as well as enduring conflicts between a secular and westernized elite and popular religion and fundamentalist revolt, which can speak, more than two decades later, not simply to the chaos and insanity of the neoconservative project of remaking southwest asia, but also its scope and importance to the neocon imperial global imaginary. The song's video featured armadillos, oil derricks, rabbis with peyesses(sp?) and Arabs with Kaffiyehs (the latter two fratronizing in the front seat of a "brand new cadillac.") The terror the Bush administration has unleashed upon the world which overwhelmingly opposed its war may prove to be no less as frenetic, and, indeed, moreso.



14.and 15.For similar reasons, Outkast's "Bombs over Baghdad" deserves a spot on the compilation. One of SpeakerBoxxx's best tracks, Big Boi's polemic against Bush's "War" on iraqis and on african americans was probably heard by more people this year than any other song on this list thus far, with the possible exception of Rock The Casbah. But not only has it reached a wide audience, it's also a great antiwar song and a keen analysis of the world as managed by the bush doctrine, and the agency of black cultural producers in confronting the homeland security state.

W-A-Rrah, there'll be no tomorrow but sorrow

and horror will follow the hollow hearts battle for dollars

Politicians, modern day magicians

Physicians of death, more health care for poor health

Who makin us ill, they makin us kill

That's makin me spill my guts (chill Big, lay in the cut)

For what? I refuse to sit in the backseat and get handled

Like I do nuttin all day but sit around watch the Cartoon Channel

I rap about, the Presidential election and the scandal

that followed, and we all watched the nation, as it swallowed

and chalked it up, basically America you got FUCKED

The media shucked and jived now we stuck - damn!

16.Cheap Trick, "I Want You To Want Me." Unlike in "Surrender," Nielsen et al. do not here caution the song's object to not "give [her](?)self away" to the power of male desire, but instead simply articulate their need for adulation. This seems an apt metaphor of they ways in which both Bush and Kerry construct their respective electorates in ways which render them subject, delimited, their abilities to contest and reconfigure the terms of their relationship to the candidate curbed by desperation and fear. Disagreement is welcome.



17.Reflection Eternal featuring Mos Def: "This Means You." At the end of next month, the republicans will converge upon New York City. This is a post giuliani New York, a new york visibly altered by the neoliberal initiatives of the bllomberg administration. Perhaps no other song describes the vast changes to my hometown over the last decade or so than this track of 2000's Reflection Eternal/Train Of Thought. Mos Def's verse is unyielding.

Things changed in New York, type strange in New York

Forty-Deuce don't look the same in New York

Just politics, tricks and big games in New York

Switched trains a writer can't get fame in New York

Internet and Wall Street got paid in New York

Poor folks and workin class got slayed in New York

Even still, everyday they make weight in New York

Flashlights lookin for a brighter day in New York

In New York they say it's - red hot

Will the temperature ease up? Black I guess not

It's multi-lane traffic, no sign for rest stops

No corner breaks, put on your gloves and just box

No dance school to teach you to wop and bus stop

Better get up in the booth, hop up and just rock

If you think it's like that, it's not so just stop

All mankind time runnin down on one watch, just watch

or, as Big Boi puts it, "Tic Tic Boom."

18. Jadakiss featuring Anthony Hamilton, "Why." A powerful track which asks a series of questions essential to the conflicts the political contest hinges upon and those it seeks to erase.

Sountrack Part II

Alyssa's inclusion of "Let's Talk About Sex" and "Die Trying" are strokes of genius, but i'm not done yet



9.The Wailers: "Small Axe." Because corporate power and the state are indeed a big tree, and we are a small axe, ready to cut them down, willing to chop them down.



10.Bob Marley and The Wailers: "Crazy Baldhead" - Because we need to chase the RNC out of town and the Neocons and Neoliberals out of power.



11.Peter Tosh, "Equal Rights." "Anyone but Bush" isn't sufficient. "Everyone is crying out for peace, nobody's crying out for justice. I don't want no peace. I want equal rights and justice."



12.Wu-Tang Clan - Protect Ya Neck. Anticipating the security-state and its permutations, Inspectah Deck informs us that the Wu-Tang Clan will "terrorize the jam like troops in Pakistan."



More later.

I ain't no joke

Eric B. and Rakim's lead track off the classic Paid In Full seems a proper response to this disgusting suggestion by the Bush administration. But what might my answer to Alyssa's political soundtrack look like? Here, in no particular order, is one attempt.



1.No list of "political music" (and i'd argue that all cultural production is "political") woudl be complete without Operation Ivy's "Freeze Up," in which lyricist/vocalist Jesse Michaels offers a powerful critique of the ravages of deindustrialization, the informatization of production, and the Reaganite ordering of global difference

One nation stands the tallest radiating blinding light.

Plastic and fluorescent energy robbing us of sight

Set in our way content with our decay

We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade

Ever ask yourself wheres my place in this hell?

But no one's there to tell you cause they dont know that themselves

The well-rehearsed lines from our elated politicians

No longer offer solace we can see the self destruction.

2.Talib Kweli: "The Proud." This one seems to obvious, dealing with the failures of the Civil Rights Movement and the racialized brutality of bi-partisan "zero tolerance" policing initiatives.

It's just the beginning, the first inning

Battle for America's soul, thedevil's winning

The President is Bush, the Vice President's a Dick

So a whole lot of fuckin is what we gon' get

They don't wanna raise the babies so the election is fixed

That's why we don't be fuckin with politics

They bet on that, parents fought and got wet for that

Hosed down, bit by dogs, and got blacks into house arrest for that

It's all good except for that - we still poor

3.The (International) Noise Conspiracy - "Bigger Cages, Longer Chains" and "New Empire Blues" (I'm still waiting for Armed Love to be released in the US. When it does, this list may expand.) The former is a searing indictment of reformist politics with a killer saxophone intro. "Let's get together, get organized, and baby, let's set ourselves free." The latter is a rocking and insurrectionary Negri/Amin/Spivak-inspired interrogation of imperial power.

4.Sleater-Kinney, "Call The Doctor." The republican attempt to define personhood and citizenship through the institution of heterosexual marriage, and the democrats' refusal to demand that love, (and ballots, and unions) be recognized regardless of gender have been troubling elements of this electoral contest. Luckily, we have Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein (Janet Weiss had not yet joined the band when this, the lead track for their second album, was released.) Tucker and Brownstein's rage against the scientific categorization of bodies and attempts to control women's sexuality is a call to resist legislative attempts to excise queer relationships from the constitutional definition of citizenship.

5.Sleater-Kinney, "One Beat." Perhaps the best Sleater-Kinney song ever, 2002's lead-off track for what may be America's best rock band's sixth CD links concerns over imperial scientific discourse, the construction of gender, and imperialist war machinery in a single verse which asks:

If you think like Thomas Edison, can you invent

a world for me?

Now all that's on the surface

are bloody arms and oil

fields

could i turn this place all upside down

and shake you and your

fossils out

6.The Clash, "Washington Bullets." Alternatively, "Police On my Back" provides a welcome analysis of America in the age of "Infinite Detention," and "Career Opportunities" gives the lie to Bush's claims of job creation. But Sandinista's "Washington Bullets" takes a systematic look at how certain imperial efforts to instantiate global stability have resulted in bloodshed and terror.

and if you can find a Afghan rebel

That the Moscow bullets missed

Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist

Ask the Dalai Lama in the hills of

Tibet,

How many monks did the Chinese get?

In a war-torn swamp stop any

mercenary,

and check the British bullets in his armoury

Que? Sandinista!

7. Dead Kennedys, "terminal preppie." Bush's Theme Song. Probably Kerry's, too, for that matter.

8.The Coup, "Underdogs," and "Lazy Muthafucka" because tens of millions in this country live in poverty without health insurance, while the Joe Zaccagninos, David Swensens, Roland Bettses, Theresa Heinz Kerrys, Kenny Boy Lays, and Rupert Murdochs hold untold billions which they never toiled to earn.

to be continued

I just woke up from a dream in which Judith Butler and Antonio Banderas were in love.  Antonio Banderas asked Judith Butler to marry him, but Judith Butler was all like "i don't think so, buddy."

Fuck the yankees.  Fuck A-rod especially, though.