[link]

Paul Stanley needs no introduction. Every fucking song at a Kiss live show, however, seems to need one, a completely inane overly-rehearsed one at that, and some mad genius out there has finally made a CD-length compilation of some of the gems in the Paul Stanley Crowd Interaction canon. My good friend Dave Viola, who’s been obsessed with Stanley’s on-stage patter for countless years, tipped me off to this one — he’s the one who pointed out to me that Stanley, in-between songs on-stage, sounds less like the frontman for an internationally known rock megaband than a shrill Christopher Street queen stuck outside a club at three in the morning, frantically searching on the wet pavement for the last few poppers that accidentally flew out of his hand onto the ground. The ZIP file below of 70 tracks’ worth of Stanley shenanigans has already been posted elsewhere on the web, but it’s good to get this kind of stuff as much exposure as possible.

The blog from whence comes the text above has since taken the files down, but you can still get them here: [link]

sounds less like the frontman for an internationally known rock megaband than a shrill Christopher Street queen stuck outside a club at three in the morning

Ahahahahahahaha AWESOME.

I've been reading Simon Reynolds Rip It Up And Start Again - Postpunk 1978-1984 and it's pretty fucking great.

Highly recommended for anybody interested in that era ( SA!) or just grew up on that music. It's really well written and beautifully researched, covering everything from Manchester when the Fall and Joy Division were recording, to the NY No Wave scene with James Chance and Lydia Lunch to The Residents, Pere Ubu & Devo, Throbbing Gristle, PiL, Gang of Four and the Mekons, the origins of the goth scene. Just tons of fascinating stories and insights.

It's making me imagine a tribute to JG Ballard from that era. He was so influential and so many groups reference him directly or obliquely. "Always Crashing in the Same Car," "Warm Leatherette," "At Home He's A Tourist," "The Passenger," "Hallogallo," Gary Numans "Cars," "Autobahn," so much of the early Fall, "Transmission" etc.

Relatedly, a song review in AMG for The Associates "White Car in Germany."

Like just about every other song recorded by Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine as Associates, “White Car in Germany” sounds little like anything else you’ve ever heard. Their songs might bring up fuzzy recollections or thoughts – the score from an obscure foreign film you can’t quite recall, Berlin-era Bowie at a war-ravaged cabaret, Scott Walker at his most fractured, a disturbing dream you once had. Their ambitious, experimental pop tapped into a type of genius that few other groups can lay claim to. “White Car in Germany” closed out a fantastic run of 1981 singles and wound up as the lead song on Fourth Drawer Down, the LP that collected those singles released for Situation 2. It’s a plodding march of a song, led by an overdriven machine beat, that features peculiarly cracked lines from Mackenzie. They seem to vacillate between a children’s playground chant (“If some brat annoys you/Do what’s felt impromptu/Kick them in their own”) and something scrawled by a hallucinating lunatic (“Slide your way through Zurich/Walk on eggs in Munich”). The cold, concrete-and-mortar atmosphere is offset by Mackenzie’s detached diva vocals, which add a darker color of gray. Like every other song recorded by Mackenzie and Rankine, “White Car in Germany” is likely to be seen as either a steaming pile of pretentious slop or a glorious slice of oddball pop. (It’s truly the latter, of course.)

Attention, s'il vous plait! I have a Teaching Emergency here!

I am in need of Mos Def's "Respiration" for my Yo!Hip-Hop IS Poetry unit for tomorrow.

I don't suppose anyone can BuffistaRawk me all night long?

Ok, leaving before y'all throw tuneful rotten tomatoes at me.

Last night, I decided to replace three very cherished albums that I once owned on vinyl, but lost long ago. All three albums were by the same band -- a band that only ever put out a grand total of five studio albums.

As a body of work, those five albums are quite possibly the tightest, most solid body of work ever put out by a rock band. The volatile personalities that produced such great music also meant they couldn't last. They straddled genres and in many ways redefined what music could be, all while helping propel the overall sound of rock music into it's next phase.

The albums I picked up are (IMO) the best three of the five, though the other two still kick much ass. One was the best of their two early albums. One was the middle album -- an album very representative of a slight shift in the sound of the band, but still solid in its own right. The third album I bought was, in my opinion, lip to label one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded.

Anyone want to take a stab as to who the band is, and what three albums I picked up?

I'm guessing the Police. Album: Zenyatta Mondatta, Synchronicity, & Regatta de Blanc

Tool

I'm pretty sure Sean has Tool on CD.

I'm guessing The Pixies.

HA! Good guess bon, but no. Sue guessed correctly with surprising alacrity. Except for the part where she thinks that Synchronicity is a better album than Ghost in the Machine, which is just wrong, wrong wrong.