Thursday, January 27, 2011

Oh dear God.

I cannae believe Lex posted that Daisy Dares You song on here.
K, I firmly believe that the song that 'Courtney' sings below is way better, hands down, no competition. Votes plz:


She dances a whole lot better, too. And looks better. I went too far didn't I.

Right, I totally think I came on here for a real reason other than to have a video-off with Lex...

YES! Our forum has been resurrected (thx Chris!) so please go on there>> http://johnnyforumer.freeforums.org/ and talk about us and say cool stuff like we're hot, and you really love our music. (Please note the words 'daisy' 'dares' and 'you' are all banned from the Other Bands section.)

AND AND AND

on our online merch store, we're now selling vinyls and ceedees of our EP (deep breath) You Thought You Saw A Shooting Star But Yr Eyes Were Blurred With Tears And That Lighthouse Can Be Pretty Deceiving With The Sky So Clear And The Sea So Calm.

Yeeeeeah. BIG CARTEL EVERYONE! http://johnnyforeigner.bigcartel.com/

Nothing else new I don't think. We start work on ALBUM NUMBER THREE in a few days. In other news, I have reached Chapter 10 on the fist of the north star game. When I grow up, I wanna be the saviour of the post-apocalyptic world.

kelly out.

xxxxxxx

Ps I was serious about the votes, I wanna know who wins between fake courtney and d**** d**** y**.

Friday, January 21, 2011

fsdhsghiodsgidhogv (kavs for lavs)

hi. thanks to everyone for being our online pr for th harriet video, tis awesome to see it spread but thats not why i'm here. ssssssssssssplurge::


there's this other common interview question, it came up today, what's yr musical guilty pleasure. and i always answer, i don't have any guilty pleasures. if i can get the same buzz from daisy dares you as from death cab, why is that something to be ashamed about? it's like slagging off gingers, its kinda pointless and playground, it's not like i'm forcing you to like the same noises as me. anyway, my theory is this:

if certain sequences of sounds stick in yr head, thats because some deep part of yr brain likes it. sometimes its the chorus from company calls and sometimes its the chorus from rosie, and yr reaction towards it is based purely on enforced tastes: one is an awesome treasured band, and one is a failed industry pop darling, but none of them words or opinions have anything to do with whatever it is that makes the song stick

ergo, no guilty pleasures. if you like something, then you like it. deal with it, let it be someone elses problem. this argument allows me to deflect any and all of kellys complaints when i play the ke$ha album, and also applies to any references to how much she used to like silverchair.

but then this thing happened to make me question my beliefs. it probably happened to everyone in the UK who thought this way, at about the same time:



if you havnt heard that before, we'll you'll probably remember from now on. I think the people that wrote this jingle are evil geniuseses. I don't drive, i barely watch tv, my brain has no reason to embed this aside from its pure horrible catchyness. i hate it. not only cos it's like graffiti carved MY OWN FUCKING MIND, but because of the awesome potential wasted. imagine, you have the power, some kind of massive perverse anti-musical skill, to create a jingle/melody/song/whatever this is that will stick in everyone's brain from now until they die, and the four word message you choose is about secondhand fucking cars. It's the sonic equivilant of sending a first contact probe to outerspace with, well, WE BUY ANY CAR sprayed on the side.

I'm clearly a less financially successful lyricist than webuyanycar ltd (srs) and i wish i had that magic to wield for more righteous reasons. there's a new advert running on telly now, a different phrase and different jingle, but possibly even more evil and sticky than the last. i can feel it crawling around inside my head looking for somewhere prominent to hang out forever. i totally don't want to search for it in case any more of the words (there are more words this time) rape my ears. anyway i read popjustice for the first time this year, i usually agree with pretty much everything they write and this was one of their worst songs of 2010

right, apart from the completely stupid middle8 which sounds like someone just accidently leant against pitchwheel and didn't tell her, i really like this song. i would genuinely rather hear this over deerhoof and i think i should be totally worried about that.

blehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

ranty mcrant



got asked by rock sound to do a little soapbox piece about the guardian article that informed its readers how rock, as a genre, was fading out. just a few sentences. got a bit high and went on a bit too long, i think in the end they used the last paragraph. preserved here for the small minority of people who like music-related ranty polemic;


-------------
in response to the gauridan claiming rock is dead, when what they meant to say was "DEATH RACE OFFICIALLY STARTED"

I think the article itself is an inherently flawed piece of sensationalist journalism, kind of typical of a newspaper where you wouldn't expect anyone to like rock music unless it was packaged by the florence machines or bon fucking jovi. The basis of the whole piece seems to be : the pop charts last year, they were full of pop acts! Even more so than last year! Therefore, rock, which is the other form music can take, is dead. O you silly adults, you have no idea...

Do you remember when you first sold us the concept of rock? It was like, edgy, dangerous. The people that made it, they were genuinely a bit unhinged, and you exploited that to it's fullest so you could make some money for journalistic endeavours. Don't look at elvis's crotch! the who might make you explode. the new york dolls might rape you. the sex pistols, they'll make you explode and rape you. Later on, nirvana will make you self harm and marylin manson will confuse yr sexuality. are you so naive that you think that these kinds of people, and the hundreds like them who weren't pretty enough to sell yr papers for you, have just vanished? It used to be a symbiotic relationship, we knew you were vultures but we needed to please you because the internet hadn't been invented and we needed to communicate to the rest of the world. We needed to find all the other freaks that loved and understood what we were doing, so they could give us some money to keep on doing it. if the overspill meant we got tagged as "cool" and we picked up some cash from the mainstream, than, that's well and good too because this insane pressure and surreal lifestyle has led us to some pretty major drug habits. That's all over now.

Excuse the genre diversion, but, when was the last time amanda palmer was in the mainstream press? When was the last time she sold a record? She has a button on her website where people give her money. Then she does some amanda palmer stuff with that money, writes about it all on her website, people go, yeh, that's awesome, thanks, here's more money. That's the entire record industry in a couple of clicks and paragraphs. Some of her fans write about it on their websites so she's always attracting more traffic. There's a few more paragraphs that replaced the everything corrupt about the chart industry. This natural, organic and, above all, fair system of publicity and commerce is going to get better and better as the internet develops, and what we're seeing now is, forgive the analogy, the rats fleeing the sinking ship. I put it to you dinosaurs, vanguards of an industry that thrived for 80 years as loan sharks disguised as legend-makers, preying on the naive and the vulnerable, that rock music doesn't need the charts anymore.

Right, i've been blabbing on for years about how, now the internet's destroyed the music industry, bands and artists are going to have to split into two camps: those who want to be in the charts, and those who just want to rock. i think this is a clear sign that this schism is fully underway: since before we were born, a bands success was measured by radio play and chart sales. In these heady web 2.0 days, a band can make a living without having to utilise either of those channels. This isn't a new thing, (ask yr parents about crass or gbh, ask their parents about led zeppelin) but the decline of greedy cunts in suits has led to a whole bunch of alternatives opening up; indie distributors, bedroom labels, online shops, fucking myspace! essentially, rock isn't dead, it just looked at it's options and thought, them pop charts are kind of beneath me; I don't want to be contextualized in-between some pop idol kid and some goons whoring out my culture, and neither does the demographic that loves me, so, fuck em.

Have you noticed the rise of this awful celebrity - baiting industry? Robbie Williams is nobodies hero here i'm sure, but he makes a valid point - "these people, they hide outside my house waiting for something to go wrong so they can make money out of it. if i die when they're around, they'll be rich. I think that's evil." Those magazines, that culture, hangs around at the top of the charts, waiting for another heroin crisis poster boy or punk suicide. Sure, you can ride it out if you have say, queens of noise managing to convince the country yr 23 and a genuine unhinged star in waiting, but, as i think we all agree, florence and the machine = not rock. Chances are if yr reading this, most of the bands you love don't want this kind of attention; they want to sell enough shirts so they can afford to keep touring and put some food on the table, they don't really care about the size of their audience as long as the front rows are dancing, and they're clever enough to see the idea of popular rock stardom as a hangover from a bygone era. For all the whimsical eccentric spin journalists over 40 like to put on the pop charts, they're still an just an advertising mechanism for a pretty shitty industry.

I think the rock sound response does a good job of highlighting specific examples of living rock, but i'd like to chip in a few others. I'll go from the start of the year when everyone was like NO WAI RATM stole christmas! and then i'll point everyone latter half of the year where PABH, for my money one of the most exciting and scuzzy and fun ROCK bands of our generation, got played like, every fucking day on radio 1, their singer got plastered on 50ft high billboards over the capital for some ad campaign and even my girlfriends MUM went to watch them. thats a 50 year old woman enjoying the totally regular spectacle of a sold out room of kids mosh themselves crazy to a guy screaming "AWESOME RADICAL TOTALLY BODACIOUS" over giant grin-inducing dirtyass guitar riffs. exhibiting all the symptoms of a dead genre. like jazz, AHAHAHAHA. also this year, pretty much all my favourite bands; pavement, cap'n jazz, the d plan, reformed and toured to bigger crowds than they'd ever drawn in their youth. sure, there was a proportion of all their crowds who were just there for a nostalgia trip or curiosity, but those rooms were rocking out waaay harder than any pop idol show i ever saw, and none of them give a crap about chart sales. one last point, and i'm not really proud of this but it works to serve a point, i dj at a pretty standard indie night and nothing makes people rtfo like limp sodding bizkit.

so yeh, there's an expanding nugget of awesome amongst the smoking debris of the industry, and that's very much a part of this split: there's hardly any money in being in a rock band anymore. there's no big label deals, no coke and hooker parties, songs are physically worth a whole lot less money than they used to be and yr never going to get on top of the pops. so the only people left to start bands are those who just have an urge to make rock music are the ones driven to do it out of pure love for the music, the buzz of playing live and watching people move to their songs and take them home and soundtrack their lives. all the idiots who just want to chase fame, put on some makeup and generic emo clothes and go on chart shows and try and convince people they're genuine edgy artistes, no longer have the motivation; so the rest of us can carry on using this awesome punka internet, the magazines that haven't sold out for the sake of becoming household names, the guys running record labels out of their bedrooms and shitty rented office space, safer in the knowledge that the quality of the end product, that 12 months of hard graft turned into an album that you just got off rapidshare in 2 minutes, is going to be a lot higher.

Make no mistake, it's death race time here in the music business. it's going to take a while before all our bands and their fans can get our amanda palmer shit together, and the dinosaurs are getting desperate to preserve the old order. We'll come out of it in a generation or so, and be stronger for it, more exciting, more personal, but now, more than ever before, the way YOU choose to find and fund the music you love makes more of a difference than ever before. Pick your bands, pick yr writers, all that stuff that goosebumps you thru otherwise colourless and drab times, and know that if they stop, have to get "real" jobs, it'll be your fault and your loss. and i hope we're both still here on the other side.

harriet, by j matthew

or, lets play at being the music industry part 4628247

if you've just switched over, when we were in america, we had a few days to kill, and, for no good reason other than he's awesome, j matthew nix sent us a treatment for a video he wanted to shoot for harriet, by proxy. it was totally rad and fun and (for us) easy, we shot on our penultimate day, in chicago, which is kind of our spiritual motherland, and after a month spent using cgi to make my hair less grey, we have the finished package ready to show you guys.

it's fucking special.

last week saw us debating amongst ourselves, our label, our manager and our press dude on the best way to release it. as i think yr all sick of whining about by now, we r skintd, so th most obvious route seemed to be, find a way to monetize it; but that seemed kinda wrong considering the whole crew worked purely for the joy of it and never even mentioned anything as disgusting as money. and and and then we asked you guys, who pretty much gave us a list of every music website ever, and we were still undecided, till jack pop hit on the rad idea we're executing in the next few paragraphs. apologies to the 405, who, if one facebook post is anything to go by, are at least, 300% better than the nme and the dis, but th most punk thing to do seems to be this:

(actually the most punk thing to do would be to get you to make the video, but j matthew beat you to it, so consider this the second best option crossed with a bit of healthy experimentation)

You get the exclusive. yeh, YOU. welcome to the fun fun world of music journalism. here are two links to our manager's dropbox.



the first is our awesome video for harriet, by proxy, the second is the same thing only ready for iStuff. The Music Press won't see this till the end of this week/start of next, and we'll put it on our youporn account and that soon if you just don't want to play our stupid game anyway.

If you do, then, here's the Product. remember, RIGHTCLICKCOPY!LOL. I've done at least 1000 interviews in the last few weeks where i've tried to articulate, in as least a pretentious manner as possible, how our band is way better for everyone if we replace as much of the industry as we practically can, with awesome human beings who just do stuff for the sheer love of being involved in something they believe in, and how that's pretty much our definition of punk and how we try to conduct ourselves. and it works; we meet a super skilled video guy on the other side of the planet and now we have a super skill video. So, in keeping with our lets-see-how-far-we-can-push-our-luck-with-no-money ethos, please feel free to post it all over the interwebs in ur utubes yadda yadda meme out.

here are some words of accrediting that need to be seen first, cos we know you internet people like to play fast and loose with copyrights. mention j matthew nix tho, cos this is all his fault. and us. and yourself, yr our internet dude, remember.

The big city is no place for a lost little ghost.

Directed by J Matthew Nix


-- CREW --
5D Operator: Mark R. Smith
7D Operator: T.J. Bachorz
Producers: Bruce Bohr and J Matthew Nix
B Camera Team: Nick Nylen
Transportation: Lance and his Dodge Caravan
Editing and Post Production: J Matthew Nix
Gear and Facilities provided by Absolute Vision: http://www.absolutevisionproductions.com

-- CAST --
Johnny Foreigner - Alexei Berrow, Kelly Southern, Junior Elvis Washington Laidley
Harassed Parkgoers - Dan Gardner, Ryan Allen
Terrified Passerby - Justinn McDaniel
Human Corkboard - Richard Scott
Disillusioned Twentysomething - Nick Nylen
True Patriot On Bicycle - We never got his name, did we?
Harriet - Herself

-- SPECIAL THX --
Freesound.org users Rhumphries, fonogeno, and stijn for recording their awesome city ambiance, Jack from Alcopop, Tim Kinsella, Emi Nakamura, Cat Briggs, Owen Cluer, Nyssa Preinitz, Christina Mulé, Pat O'Hara, Ashley Lusk, Jane Nix, Ken Nix, Lauren Nix, the kind man at Officemax who let me make 100 photocopies of a lost ghost poster at 6 AM, every goober who whined about The Big Show doc taking longer, every person who stared blankly at the camera in the background, Bank of America, Navy Pier, Subway, that tasty Italian place, coffee, wrist braces, Blood Red Shoes, Sky Larkin, Copy Haho, Los Campesinos!, the entire Jofo road crew for trusting a bunch of crazed Americans with their precious cargo, Final Cut, After Effects, Lady Luck, Father Fortune, and you for watching!



i feel everything vaguely polemic i've written on the internet in the last few months has had the spectre of matt from king adora hanging over me. specifically the myspace bulletin that read "come on guys, lets do an arctic monkeys". fuck those old ghosts.