Just picked up one of these from my friends Sean’s clothing line, check them out!
Search:
Blogs I follow:
November.
16.
2011.
02:44 am
I haven’t laughed this hard since I first heard Beatallica.
Smells Like Teen Spirit came out 20 years ago this week. As someone already digging Metallica, Anthrax, Suicidal, but craving shit more stripped down and raw, it absolutely hit the spot. The 14 year old me went over my mates house, knocked his front door and said “man have you fucking heard THAT SONG?”. He had, and scribbled down the band name cos he’d heard it on the radio. We immediately went and knocked the door of an older kid who had drip-fed us many thrash metal albums to ask if he had it. “Ahhh. I’ve been expecting you”, he said. He gave us a tape with ‘Bleach’ on side A and ‘Nevermind’ on side B. It was most confusing to see that this band was not brand new and that there was some secret earlier album we missed the memo on. Anyway that tape got absolutely played to death, and I had kids in school asking me to hook me up since I was the first one in our year group to have it.
I will spare you the rose tinted essay about the memories associated with those songs. But I discovered Nirvana at the exact same time I discovered girls, was getting sick of corporate rock, blah blah blah. So Nirvana may as well have been a projection of a band my own subconsciousness needed to exist.
But the reason for this blog post is because my favourite thing about the Smells Like Teen Spirit video is Ron Guardipee from Seattle Straight Edge band Brotherhood moshing in the video, armed with construction gloves and standard issue youth crew attire. He throws the best moves of all the reprobates in the video by a million miles. Blink and you’ll miss him, but once you’ve identified him he’s easier to spot with repeated viewings. I’ve tried to capture him in the above screengrab but it’s not the clearest shot.
Even now, aged 34 and completely jaded and indifferent to music, it still blows me away to know that when me and the kid over the road first discovered Nirvana in 1991, there was a whole even deeper level of subgenre, captured fleetingly in the Teen Spirit video, that I was still months away from discovering.
“I’m leavin’ naysayers stumped like rainforests”.
I’m not the biggest Sage Francis fan out there, but there’s something very more-ish about this video. Perhaps its the change of pace at the 55 seconds mark. Perhaps it’s that the video was shot at CBs and around the LES and I think I must’ve paced every single street used in it. Maybe its just the endlessly great lines such as: ”…a loose cannon standing on a rooftop with a new respect and understanding of bartenders and locksmiths”.
But quite probably it’s because of the sartorial win involved in executing the Tony Sylvester look so effortlessly that you can show up for your own video shoot with a beard, a shirt and tie, and a jacket borrowed from Del Boy Trotter and still look completely in control of your shit.
The cull pt 2.
Sorry if I unfollow you, it’s nothing personal. I barely use Tumblr, and when I do come on here looking for certain posts I can’t see the wood for the trees because of all the photos of cups of coffee, bare feet, androgynous looking girls, animated Manga gifs, and other bandwidth sapping clutter.
I guess the whole point of Tumblr is that you can just press one button and “reblog” anything but I’m too old and set in my ways to be able to adjust to such high levels of churn and unoriginal content.
As you were.
August.
28.
2011.
06:48 pm
The cull.
What you’re looking at there is 8 black bin bags full of old hardcore tapes, zines, shirts, CDs, flyers, and other gubbins. But mainly tapes. This is stuff that I had not touched for the best part of 10 years that was languishing in my old bedroom at my parents house in Barry. After many years of nagging to sort it out I finally threw myself into the task. 8 hours it took. Very very little was spared. Slavearc tape demo? In a bin bag. Humanity Is The Devil on CD? In a bin bag.
It was cathartic. I obviously didn’t need this stuff anymore if it could sit untouched for 10 years. And anything of true sentimental value was sidelined and came back to Surrey with me.
Less clutter in hardcore.
Along with a couple of associates, I run a clothing company called Dead Heroes. We usually hook up rock bands but threw the net a little wider this time round. Kitty puts in serious hard graft to get her name out there and her music heard, and we think more artists that are sitting on their arse waiting for things to land in their lap would do well to take a leaf out of her book. Here’s Kitty sporting our Death From Above shirt and looking stylin’. Go check her out.
Info: www.kittycowell.com & www.deadheroesclothing.com
Sheeeeeit. I forgot I had a Tumblr and then I had to stare at the wall for 10 minutes trying to remember what it was called and shit.
Anyway I know that when people mention ‘87 in reference to music they’re often talking about youth crew bands that couldn’t even shave yet but the view from my window circa ‘87 looked somewhat different. Thankfully nothing escapes Youtube’s cultural radar and so here we are in all its glory one of my favourite tracks which made it to number 3 in the UK charts in Jan ‘88. Krush carried on for a few more years and vocalist Ruth Joy released some solo stuff too.
I don’t like Tumblr because it seems to just re-re-re-regurgitate the same old same old, so here’s something great that nobody is talking about.
