Tag Archives | Music

The Music Of L. Ron Hubbard

By on September 21, 2012 in News 12

It’s little known that L. Ron Hubbard left behind a body of musical compositions, lyrics, and sound experiments intended as a soundtrack for the Battlefield Earth series and to promote the ethos of Scientology. John Travolta, teenybopper heartthrob Leif Garrett, and Frank Stallone, all heard singing below, were part of a Scientology super-group who recorded an album of Hubbard-penned songs in 1986. An odder, alternate version of “Road to Freedom” features L. Ron himself crooning in a low, booming voice, with the track retitled “L’Envoi, Thank You for Listening.”

Two stanzas include: You are not mind or chemicals / You don’t even have a form / You’re in a trap of senseless lies / It’s time to be reborn. / To you there is no limit / Knowledge is your key / Take the route of auditing / And once again be free.

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The Growing Silence Of The Natural World

By on September 4, 2012 in News 14

The rich, complex musical symphonies produced by nature are now being irrevocably destroyed. The Guardian writes:

When musician and naturalist Bernie Krause drops his microphones into the pristine coral reef waters of Fiji, he picks up a raucous mix of sighs, beats, glissandos, cries, groans, tones, grunts, beats and clicks. The water pulsates with the sound of creatures vying for acoustic bandwidth. He hears crustaceans, parrot fish, anemones, wrasses, sharks, shrimps, puffers and surgeonfish.

But half a mile away, where the same reef is badly damaged, he can only pick up the sound of waves and a few snapping shrimp. It is, he says, the desolate sound of extinction.

Krause, whose electronic music with Paul Beaver was used on classic films like Rosemary’s Baby and Apocalypse Now, has spent 40 years recording over 15,000 species, collecting 4,500 hours of sound from many of the world’s pristine habitats.

But such is the rate of species extinction and the deterioration of pristine habitat that he estimates half these recordings are now archives, impossible to repeat because the habitats no longer exist or because they have been so compromised by human noise.

… Read the rest

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An Oral History Of Gay Punk

By on August 24, 2012 in News 7

It’s exciting when something happens in the news that reminds you how subversive punk rock can be. Via OUT, a conversation featuring remembrances from Bruce LaBruce, Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould, and numerous notable others about a movement which changed the world, whether people know it or not:

The Queercore scene grew out of a generation that bristled against what it saw as the bourgeois trappings of a mainstream gay lifestyle and the macho, hetero hardcore scene that punk — a movement founded by women, people of color, and gays — had become. It started out as a loose collective, trading fanzines and letters, and evolved to include dozens of bands.

There was a gay element to early punk, such as the Los Angeles group The Germs — whose singer was the closeted Darby Crash—as well as Seattle transplants The Screamers, The Apostles in the U.K., and, in Texas, The Dicks.

… Read the rest

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Dee Snider To Paul Ryan: Stop Playing ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’

By on August 23, 2012 in News 28

It’s sort of a tradition that unhip Republicans use iconic American music without permission and then very publicly are humilated by the artists who created the music. Randall Roberts reports on Paul Ryan’s humiliation at the hands of Dee Snider for the LA Times:

Pretty soon, the only songs Mitt Romney and Paul Ryanmight be able to play will be the collected works of Hank Williams Jr. and Ted Nugent, at least judging by a statement Dee Snider made Wednesday morning.

After learning that Republican vice presidential hopeful Ryan had been warming up crowds with “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” the lead singer of Twisted Sister requested that the song be pulled from Ryan’s playlist.

This comes after Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello wrote an editorial denouncing Ryan after learning that the candidate was a Rage fan; and after L.A. band Silversun Pickups decried Ryan’s campaign for using their “Panic Switch.”

Twisted Sister’s 1984 hair metal song, which has sold more than 8 million copies, is one of the heartiest workout anthems of that decade.

… Read the rest

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Deceased Beastie Boy MCA’s Will Prevents His Being Used In Advertising, For Eternity

By on August 13, 2012 in News 5

A brilliant final touch from Adam Yauch, who inserted an integrity clause into his will to prevent his music from ever being co-opted — if only other cultural icons past had thought to do this. Via DNAinfo:

Late Beastie Boys member MCA made sure he would never be a corporate sellout — even in the afterlife. The pioneering rapper, whose real name is Adam Yauch, instructed in his will that his image, music and any art he created could not be used for advertising, saving himself from the fate of other deceased musicians whose faces and songs have become corporate shills.

It’s unclear whether Yauch’s will would prevent his bandmates from ever selling the music they wrote together to advertisers. Yauch’s lawyer and a spokesman for the Beastie Boys did not respond to requests for comment. Yauch died May 4 at the age of 47 from salivary cancer.

Corporations have regulalry enlisted deceased musicians, celebrities and historical figures in ads.

… Read the rest

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Lost Classics Of Right Wing Folk Music

By on July 19, 2012 in News 17

CONELRAD keeps alive the memory of one of the strangest of pop music subgenres–conservatism-themed folk music artists of the 1960s who were promoted in an unsuccessful attempt to counter the Bob Dylans and Peter Paul & Marys of the scene. Perhaps most fascinating is Janet Greene, a former children’s television personality in Ohio who was discovered by the right wing organization Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, which had Greene record a series of propagandistic songs and marketed her as the “anti-Joan Baez”.  The most entertaining work in her catalogue is “Poor Left Winger”, a tale of woe concerning a naive girl seduced by a communist beatnik “bearded singer” mocked for his “espresso”, “demonstrations”, and dirty shirt:

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Damnation’s Eternal Soundtrack

By on July 15, 2012 in News 3

Sean Beaudoin lists the ten bands he’ll be forced to listen to in hell, at Salon (thanks to Richard Luckett for the link):

I’m going to hell. You know it and I know it. But I’m fairly sure it’s not going to be of the William Blake-etching variety. There will be no eternal fire, three-headed dogs, or seas of percolating sinners. There will be no cloven hooves or torture racks or rounds of cribbage with Pol Pot and Hitler. No, my hell will almost certainly take place in a windowless basement room buried deep in the purgatorial nethers. The ceilings and walls will be slathered an institutional shit-brown. I will be in the center of a wet cement floor, Duct-taped to a broken lawn chair, with old Victrola megaphones stuffed in each ear.

And I will sit there. Forever.

Listening to scratchy mp3s at top volume.

For untold millennia.

Not only do I know this treatment is coming, I know I deserve it.

… Read the rest

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Jailed Russian Punk-Rockers ‘Pussy Riot’ Begin Hunger Strike

By on July 10, 2012 in News 15

Игорь Мухин (CC)

Via Common Dreams:

Three members of Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist punk-rock band, began a hunger strike Wednesday after a Moscow court suddenly told them they must prepare their defense for trial by Monday.

Maria Alyokhina, Yakaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were taken into custody in March, after the group’s February performance of “Virgin Mary Put Putin Away,” an anti-Putin song, inside the Russian Orthodox Church’s main cathedral, asking the Virgin Mary to chase President Vladimir Putin out of power.

The three women were arrested over four months ago and have been held without bail on charges of criminal hooliganism  — which carry a possible seven-year prison sentence. Two other female members of the band have avoided arrest thus far.

“I announce a hunger strike because it is unlawful,” said Tolokonnikova, wearing a T-shirt with the famous slogan of the Spanish Civil War, “No pasaran!” (“They shall not pass”), emblazoned across it.

… Read the rest

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