A fun freelance gig I’ve had for the past couple of years has been writing the Sound Check column for Concrete Skateboarding magazine. Sadly, Concrete has decided to stop covering music, and so Sound Check is no more.
I have decided to post a few of the article I wrote for Concrete, starting with this one on Vancouver’s own rock ‘n’ roll power duo Japandroids.
For this week’s Georgia Straight, I interviewed English postpunk act Eagulls about convincing their reluctant singer to join them, and their resemblance (or lack thereof) to a certain American band. Read it here, and check out some of the group’s video’s below.
Earlier this week, the European Court of Justice held that Spanish lawyer’s “right to be forgotten” was violated when Google refused to eliminate links to embarrassing articles about him in its search results. In this interesting take on the case and its implications, Slate’s Eric Posner says the ruling is “perfectly sensible”, noting that it shows that “America is rigidly ideological about free speech, while Europe is pragmatic and flexible.”
It’s hard to imagine a “right to be forgotten” in the United States. The First Amendment will protect Google, or any other company, that resurfaces or publishes information that’s already public. This is especially true of official records, like a property auction, but also applies to pretty much anything that has not been found by a court to be defamatory. By contrast, the right to be forgotten allows courts to balance the public’s interest in knowing this information against the ordinary person’s right to be left alone.
About a year ago I started a blog called Get Evolved! Rather ambitiously, I thought that blogging about issues such as the environment and veganism was a great idea. Well, I still think that’s a great idea, but I have come to realize that keeping a blog up to date actually takes more time than I had available. Nonetheless, that blog is still there, and I will update it periodically. (And more often than “periodically” if there is a sudden spike in interest.)
I took that photo of the trees myself, incidentally. Kinda reminds me of Endor.
One of my favourite articles to write in recent years was this Georgia Straight cover feature on South African rap act Die Antwoord. It’s not that the group was a great interview—it was actually tricky getting decent answers out of Ninja and Yo-Landi—but writing the story gave me the opportunity to research an area of global pop culture that was quite literally foreign to me.
You can read the full article here, but here’s an excerpt:
As a condition of interviewing Die Antwoord, all reporters are instructed to visit the group’s website and watch a video titled “Straight From the Horse’s Piel”. In addition to offering a flash of Ninja’s tattooed penis, the eight-minute mini documentary purports to answer the above questions, and then some. Like everything else Die Antwoord does, though, it really seems designed to make you wonder what the hell you have just witnessed, with Ninja’s obfuscations taking viewers further down the rabbit hole. Addressing the band’s much-discussed authenticity, for example, the lanky rapper offers the following: “It’s actually a deep question, that question, you know. ’Cause the only real things in life is the unexpected things. Everything else is just an illusion.”
By that yardstick, Die Antwoord is as real as they come. No one outside of South Africa—and few outside of Cape Town, for that matter—knew of the group before February 1 of this year. That was the day Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin posted the videos for “Zef Side” (aka “Beat Boy”) and “Enter the Ninja” to the popular U.S.–based blog. Both clips instantly went viral, with the latter racking up more than 7.6 million YouTube views to date, thanks in large part to its off-the-chart WTF quotient. It’s a safe bet that no one watching the “Enter the Ninja” video had ever seen anything like it before. While Ninja spits head-spinning rhymes about decapitating haters, Vi$$er does a Lolita routine in a bedroom plastered with pictures of her bandmate and crawling with rats. While she lip-synchs the song’s helium-voiced hook, she changes out of what looks like a school uniform and into an oversized T-shirt that hangs off of one shoulder.
“Enter the Ninja” is striking enough on a musical level, its melodramatic, synth-swept beat topped by Ninja’s rapid-fire flow of English peppered with Afrikaans slang. But it was probably the physical appearance of Die Antwoord’s frontpersons that seemed so foreign to a North American audience accustomed to picture-perfect pop stars. Impossibly long and lean, and covered with what look like homemade tattoos, Ninja is menacing in a comic-book-villain sort of way, while Vi$$er’s petite frame and postlobotomy mullet give her the look of a Skipper doll whose platinum locks have been attacked by a toddler armed with a pair of scissors and a malevolent streak.…If Die Antwoord shocked North America, the feeling was mutual.
I recently reviewed Vancouver music-scene mainstay Phil Western’s latest release, Longform, for the Straight. In the review, which you can read here, I described the double LP as “an exercise in what he is arguably best at: namely, hypnotic electro built from lush layers of synthesizer tones over a variety of creatively deployed but generally unobtrusive rhythms. The focus here isn’t so much on the beats as on the often psychedelic interaction of samples and live instrumentation.”
Preview the album below, via Bandcamp:
For the current issue of the Georgia Straight, I wrote reviews of three of the documentaries screening at the DOXA 2014 festival. Read my reviews of A Brony Tale, Death Metal Angola, and InRealLife here.
Of the three, my favourite was Death Metal Angola, the story of two people and their struggle to mount a rock festival in the war-scarred African country. Check out the trailer below.
John Lucas 