Yeah I guess if you consider This Is Your Bloody Valentine to be their first album, then MBV doesn't qualify for my list of "random bands who broke big on the 2nd album." But for the sake of clarity: TIYBV was basically just a demo on which only two members of the "real" MBV actually played (Shields and Colm) featuring Dave Conway on vocals. It was recorded in 1984, four years before Isn't Anything, and its entire AllMusic review reads:
My Bloody Valentine's debut album, This Is Your Bloody Valentine, is an unfocused and derivative collection of post-punk goth rock that offers no indication of the revolutionary guitar sound the group would later create.
That said, feel free to exclude MBV from my incomplete list of bands who broke out on LP2, with my apologies for the error!
FWIW my own consternation is not related to the "other lives" of the person/people behind Myrkur but the fact that Myrkur's label has put anyone covering the music in such an odd position: Regurgitating the bio is perpetuating a lie (or, more generously, an encouragement to spread misinformation based on absence of facts), but on the other hand, no one involved is being upfront about the truth, which leaves us with nothing really to write about at all. I assume that's at least partly why this second single got covered in so many fewer places than the first one.
It only matters if it matters to you! I guess it matters to me, so I wrote it this way -- I don't feel like it's my place to simply repeat the info in the bio, nor is it my place to identify the person/people behind the project. I will admit, though, that covering it in my neither-here-nor-there fashion is decidedly suboptimal!
I probably should have shared this earlier but some time ago, when I searched for background on this very lyric, I came upon an explanation from Okoi from last year (which he shared in a YouTube comments thread):
'I am most certainly not promoting nazi symbolism. The relevance of the "wolf's hook" or "crooked cross" is that of the wayward spirit. One manipulated and seduced into treading one path, which in the context of this song leads to self destruction, through the enthronement of war.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu-ehYhkM0s
You're free to make of those lyrics what you will, but compared to "Angel Of Death" -- maybe the most famous and popular metal song of all time -- they seem fairly benign to me:
"Auschwitz, the meaning of pain/ The way that I want you to die/ Slow death, immense decay/ Showers that cleanse you of your life..."
Brandon, I appreciate this thoughtful response, and will offer only one rebuttal: I think that some conversation similar to this one would have emerged on ANY music site -- metal-specific or otherwise -- that published this interview. I'm happy to have it on Stereogum because we've been enthusiastically covering Bölzer since first hearing them (click on any of the links in the story above for evidence of that).
I got a chance to spend some time with both members of Bölzer at Maryland Deathfest, and in that brief meeting, I was sincerely impressed by their humility, their kindness, and their seriousness, all of which were displayed in both word and deed. I'm not sure they knew what Stereogum was, but they seemed flattered to learn of our coverage of their music.
Beyond being a fan of Bölzer, I'm a pretty avid and active tattoo enthusiast (the 2010 feature I wrote about great American tattoo artist Mike Rubendall remains one of my proudest achievements). Tattoos are such an unusually specific and personal form of self-expression that even the simplest ones totally defy easy interpretation. Okoi is from New Zealand, a place where tattoos have especially unique and potent cultural and spiritual significance. I'm personally viscerally repulsed by sunwheels and swastikas -- even the word "swastika" makes me queasy. When I first saw Okoi's tattoos, I doubled back, scouring both his lyrics and his old interviews, and found absolutely zero evidence of bigotry in either. If that weren't the case, I would have stopped covering Bölzer altogether.
When Kim offered to me this interview, I accepted it knowing that particular exchange would lead to unease and revulsion, but eager to have Okoi's explanations on the record. I can't fault anyone for being unsatisfied with those explanations, but I'm reluctant to assume the worst about an artist, especially one who so openly addressed his choices.
There are some artists in metal who have espoused fascist and separatist ideologies -- Burzum is the most prominent example I can think of. There are others who blatantly embrace and flaunt Nazi imagery -- Slayer have made a mint selling that repugnant shit to teenagers. Okoi Jones has tattoos that I would consider ill-advised at best, but which are meaningful to him, and which he is open to discussing without reservation. I'm not surprised that those tattoos raise suspicions, but in this case, to me, those suspicions are defused by the substance of that discussion.
Is that right? I remember reading about him doing a song called "1974" with Alanis back in the Gold days, and I guess I just assumed the track that appeared on Rock N Roll was that song. Thanks for the heads up! Good eye!
It's funny you say that! There was absolutely zero condescension intended, although I worried maybe I came off a little too pithy. To be clear, I both was and am a fan of the albums you mentioned, and I actually like this song a lot, but I couldn't find much to say about it that was more insightful than, "It sounds like Interpol." I mean that as a compliment! This is a good song, and if the rest of the album is this good, El Pintor will probably be the third best Interpol album. But that's basically definitely its ceiling, right? Honestly, this song doesn't suggest to me that the band's best days are ahead of them. Also, FWIW, I loved "The Heinrich Maneuver" when that song came out, and I couldn't wait for Our Love To Admire, and that album was a total letdown, so I'm inclined to approach this one with cautious optimism. But I am optimistic, and I'd be much happier if Interpol were to release a great album that makes my pithiness here look shortsighted than a mediocre (or bad) album that makes my pithiness look prescient.
I think it's really long-tailed these days -- lotsa American listeners still love guitar-based stuff but there's no singular identity for guitar-based music. You've got punk and indie-rock and metal and blues rock and grunge-y stuff and jammy stuff and Britpoppy stuff and a bunch of others, and they all have tiny little factions within their own worlds, whereas country and rap are pretty monolithic, which more easily allows for media ubiquity.
And it really is cultural! Behemoth is a Polish band, and in Poland, they're household names: For years, their frontman, Nergal, dated a singer named Doda (the "Polish Britney Spears") and was a judge on the Polish version of The Voice!
Steven and I went back and forth on this on Twitter a little bit, but I contend part of this is due to the fact that rap and country (the two dominant commercial pop-music "genres") are intrinsic parts of Black and Southern identities/cultures, respectively, and both have massive media and political machines dedicated to them, whereas hard rock and pop metal are simply genres within pop music. Taylor Swift made $40M last year. Dr. Dre made $620M after the sale of Beats. That stuff doesn't just happen because those particular artists are more willing to embrace the mainstream than Behemoth. That said, Bon Jovi made nearly $30M last year so there's an appetite for "hard rock," no?
It was a great year! But again there wasn't really a consensus -- Decibel had it at #5 on their list, behind (among other things) two OTHER doom records (Evoken and Witchcraft). Last year there was a greater consensus frankly (and deservedly, probably) with the Deafheaven/Gorguts/Carcass trifecta. But we're talking in circles -- it's a great album, I like it more than you do, etc. (FWIW the new one is probably more Wowee Zowee than Crooked Rain.)
Well it's a question you really have to pose to individual critics -- for what it's worth I like S&E more than all the albums you mentioned, and looking now at our list of 2012's best metal albums, I can't find anything there that I like MORE than S&E (although there are a few albums there that I more or less like AS MUCH as S&E). Why is it worth of superlatives? In brief: Great songs, great performances, great sound, and Brett Campbell's vocals are out of this world in a way that John Baizely's are not (no disrespect to Baizely).
There might be some confirmation bias at work there -- I definitely remember the Baroness record being more widely covered in mainstream outlets than S&E. The Converge record probably, too. The rest of those are pretty marginal -- Kreator is one of my favorite bands ever and I stanned pretty hard for the last record but no way was, like, Rolling Stone (or however we're defining "mainstream critics") gonna devote a ton of time to the 13th career album from a German thrash band in their late 40s. Something similar might be said of all the other albums you mentioned -- those are pretty niche-y bands, man!
I like it more, no doubt, which doesn't necessarily means it's better, per se -- but it's definitely a bigger, more ambitious record, and I personally find it to be a more beautiful record, too (among other things). I dunno, I have a lot of thoughts but I'll save them for when the album is nearer. What did you think of the song, Shuffles?
Not a criminal in the eyes of the law but an unethical, power-playing, manipulative creep with the influence to affect a very young woman's career in a very competitive industry. This line, to me, says it all:
"There’s plenty of other girls waiting in line, so he’s not forcing you to do shit."
The implication is basically: "If you want to work as a model, you'll suck off Terry Richardson when he asks you to suck him off. If you refuse, there's another girl right behind you who won't refuse."
(And that's a quote from a model who's defending Terry Richardson!)
Stop it. I wasn't "explaining R. Kelly’s situation as, surrounded by 'controversy'" (your words). I said that the Page 6 piece claimed "the clip was scrapped due to [among other things] the ever-present controversy surrounding R. Kelly." To quote Page 6 directly, around the time the video was supposed to premiere, Kelly "faced backlash [emphasis mine] over an in-depth Village Voice interview with veteran Chicago writer Jim DeRogatis, in which he chronicled 'stomach-churning' sexual assault suits against Kelly in the 1990s, saying there were 'dozens of girls -- not one, not two, dozens -- with harrowing lawsuits.'"
Gaga and/or her team weren't distancing themselves from Kelly due to the charges made against him in those suits in the '90s; they were distancing themselves due to the "backlash" kicked up by the Voice piece. The song was recorded with R. Kelly at some point between 2012 - 2013; the video was filmed in September 2013. The first promotional photo from the video was released by Gaga and/or her team on December 13, 2013 ... and the Village Voice piece ran on December 16. The video was reportedly supposed to be released in December 2013; instead it was shelved. I'd personally feel pretty comfortable betting that this renewed focus on Kelly's alleged crimes at least partially led to the video being shelved, but I'm not betting on (or assuming) anything; I'm merely summarizing what the Post wrote.
Beyond that, I'd go so far as to bet/assume that Gaga and/or her team initially employed Kelly in this capacity precisely BECAUSE of the notoriety that has followed Kelly since those charges were made. The song tacitly plays with a rape double-entendre, and the video openly (and joyously) depicts a rape scenario in which Gaga is drugged, unconscious, and Kelly is essentially molesting her. It is my belief that Gaga and/or her team wanted to "shock" people with the video, and when the Voice piece ran, they realized that cultural awareness of and pubic opinion on Kelly had shifted, and the video would now result in outrage, disappointment, heartbreak, boycotts, etc. But, I believe, they didn't so much care about the charges made against Kelly so much as they did Kelly's place in the public eye. And again, that's beside the point, because when I wrote the word "controversy," I wasn't illustrating my beliefs IN ANY WAY, but summarizing the story as reported by the Post.
Comments