Wasilla, Alaska, isn't exactly an indie-rock mecca, but one band of note does hail from the area -- the loud and dreamy rock combo with the odd name Portugal. the Man. Singer-guitarist John Baldwin Gourley and bassist Zachary Scott Carothers grew up and started playing music together near the isolated town and still spend considerable time there. (The band's MySpace page lists its home as "Wasilla/Willow/Portland/Seattle/World, Alaska.")
As a native, Gourley's been observing the rise of the town's former mayor, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, with increasing consternation. This morning he decided to act on it, posting a moving argument against her candidacy on the band's blog. Gourley's words of protest led me to investigate the matter, and I discovered that some of the group's anti-Palin sentiments stem from her allegedly standing in the way of a skate park's construction in Wasilla when the band members were teens.
Gourley's blog post is mostly philosophical. Under the heading "Sarah Palin, Because We Don't Need It," he writes of the first time his father took him hunting for moose, when he was about 6. The pair quickly spotted their quarry, but his father pulled back. They didn't kill the moose "because we don't need it," he explained to his son.
" 'Because we don't need it' was something that has been taught to me every day of my life through these amazing people," Gourley writes of his parents, who were Iditarod dog-sled mushers and continue to live an Alaskan life. "And to watch Sarah Palin get so much attention based on what? Two years as governor of the state of Alaska? Or is it based on her time as the mayor of Wasilla? The town of 5,000 at the time."
Two truths could be gleaned from last night's eight BMI Urban Awards ceremony at the Wilshire Theatre. One, it's T-Pain's world, at least for now. And two, Michael Jackson is still an inescapable presence in pop, even when he's a physical no-show. But his brothers made their contributions too.
This annual event honors the most performed songs on urban radio -- the R&B and hip-hop hits with the most juice. T-Pain wasn't the only songwriter pulled up onstage to receive a prize numerous times: Producer Polow da Don could barely get off the podium, and Patrick "j. Que" Smith and Ezekiel Lewis from hit-making Atlanta crew the Clutch warmed it up some too.
But the man who's turned Auto-Tune into a virtuoso instrument ruled the night, not only taking away the songwriter of the year prize, but also adding some infectious verve to an otherwise less-than-thrilling parade of industry types holding up placards and getting their photos snapped.
With the word “change” pouring forth frequently from the stages at both the Democratic and Republican National conventions, John Mellencamp has decided the time is right for an update of Bob Dylan’s 1963 bellwether of social and political transformation, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
Mellencamp has recorded a homemade video capturing his stripped-down, acoustic guitar rendition of the song, singing while wearing his horn-rimmed glasses as he appears to read the lyrics as he goes. The video has been posted as a Web-only performance on his website, www.mellencamp.com.
Is it just me, or does he bring a little change of his own to Dylan’s original lyric “As the present now/Will later be past” toward the song's end, modifying it to “As the president now/Will soon be the past”? His sendoff, perhaps, to the outgoing chief executive? Decide for yourself.
Public radio station KCRW-FM (89.9) is calling off its annual "Sounds Eclectic Evening" multi-artist concert fundraiser this year after shifting the time frame of the event earlier this year from spring to fall.
The show had been slated this year for Oct. 12 at the 6,200-seat Gibson Amphitheatre with headliner k.d. lang and support acts including Bajofondo, the Duke Spirit and “more artists to be announced and special surprise guests.”
But the rest of the bill didn’t materialize because the summer concert festival circuit “which was particularly robust this year, created a challenging environment for filling out a seven-band bill,” according to a statement the station issued today [FRI5].
“We’ve always had a high standard for the bands we’ve invited to play this concert and changing the date to fall -– at the end of the summer festival season -– proved to be a bigger hurdle than we were expecting,” said Nic Harcourt, KCRW music director and host of its “Morning Becomes Eclectic” show.
Lang’s performance will be shifted to the 500-seat Malibu Performing Arts Center on the same night and it will be presented as part of the station’s recently inaugurated KCRW Sessions series. Refunds will be made to those who bought tickets for the "Sounds Eclectic Evening" show, and they will be given priority to buy seats for the downscaled lang concert, KCRW’s statement said. Tickets will be $150 and $250, and proceeds will benefit the station.
It was 1:30 in the afternoon Thursday, and a mermaid's tail was bobbing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast at Pt. Mugu. The shimmery, blue sea creature was playing siren to Jack's Mannequin singer-keyboardist, Andrew McMahon, in an upcoming video conceptualized by bestselling "Twilight" saga author Stephenie Meyer.
Meyer is being billed as the co-director of "The Resolution" video, even though "I've never directed anything," the 34-year-old author said on set, where dozens of fully clothed music and movie folk were milling around the Ventura County beach. "Clearly I have no experience. They're just running things by me."
Her impression midway through the shoot, which, in reality, was being shot by director Noble Jones: "It looks good. It looks the way I imagined it, so that's really cool."
What Meyer had imagined for the video was a mermaid who's also a stalker. Everywhere McMahon goes, the mermaid follows, flooding the landscape as the 26-year-old singer moves from ocean to desert to mountaintop, hauling his upright piano in the bed of an ancient Ford pickup. (Any similarities to the vintage red Chevy that heroine Bella drives in the “Twilight” books are purely coincidental, said director Jones; Meyer had written the video with a U-Haul in mind.)
Never mind that "The Resolution" has absolutely nothing to do with old trucks or with mermaids. When the band's frontman wrote the song last year, "it was sort of about my experience dealing with the cancer thing," said McMahon, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2005 and later received a bone-marrow transplant from his sister. "It was me coming to some place of acceptance with the past and deciding maybe I haven't figured out what I'm trying to accomplish, but I know I'm looking for some kind of resolve."
Meyer wasn't aware of that story when she wrote the video's treatment. Mermaids, she said, are "a subject I've always been fascinated with. When I was letting my imagination run wild for this [video], there were several different story lines I came up with and this one I thought had the most visual impact."
As for the longstanding rumor that Meyer will pen an upcoming book involving such a creature, "I don't know if I will or not," she said.
L.A.'s indie scene has long been fertile territory for teen-soap-opera music supervisors, but who else caught the lengthy Division Day aside on Tuesday's premiere of the new "90210"? In it, protagonist/perpetual grinner Annie Wilson (Shenae Grimes) is enduring a rough day at West Beverly High when new frenemy Silver (Jessica Stroup) spots a certain sticker on her school folder advertising a gauzy local post-punk quartet. "Don't they have, like, eight fans total?" she asks Annie, which means that whatever twentysomething Highland Park-residing scriptwriter assistant working on the show truly knows the scene of which he or she speaks.
Hopefully, it'll earn some traction for the band, who have been pushing various editions of their proper and worth-revisiting debut, "Beartrap Island," for what seems like forever. This pretty hackish revision of "90210," if it lasts, might eventually do for the local rock scene what "Gossip Girl" has done for the swirling vortex of Gawker microcelebrity. Cory Kennedy even showed up at one of the girl's birthday parties about two years too late to matter!
-- August Brown
P.S. Full disclosure: Division Day drummer Kevin Lenhart once played drums at a studio session of a mercifully short-lived country band I was in a few years ago.
I've spent a lot of extra-curricular time with Pete Wentz lately, so it's always a good day when my favorite arena-emo fameballs get it together to actually make new music. "I Don't Care," the debut single off Fall Out Boy's "Folie a Deux" (due out on election day, Nov. 4, but please don't be distracted, kids), falls somewhere in between their best moments like "Sugar, We're Going Down" and flatter notes such as their "Beat It" cover with, erm, John Mayer. "I Don't Care" strays from the hyper-glossy R&B kick of "Infinity on High" and into something approximating scuzzy classic rock, or as scuzzy as you can get with Island/Def Jam's quarterly outlook dependent on your radio spins.
Nike's Human Race event drew well over 12,000 red-shirt clad runners to the L.A. Coliseum last Saturday, even a running Elvis. It was the last leg of Nike's ambitious fund-raising event, which made the most of new technologies in running (participants were given a computer chip that logged their miles, contributing to a global mileage meter for the event) and music (certain Nike running shoes, for instance, can sync to an iPod or other devices).
The 6.2-mile race had already hit several countries around the globe, including Germany and Japan, with proceeds going to environmental organizations and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave some opening comments, as did Councilman Bernard Parks, as runners stretched and warmed up.
The runners were there to compete, but there was no doubt that the closing performance by Kanye West, Mr. Nike Air Yeezy himself, was on everyone's mind. It was one of the benefits of finishing the race, which went up Figueroa Street with turns at Adams Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard, as fast as possible, though many participants played their own personal soundtracks on earbuds or enjoyed the entertainment provided en route -- dance and music, including Chinese lion dances, Brazilian capoeira dancers, Japanese taiko drummers and Mexican mariachis.
If you think homophobia is exclusively the domain of less progressive places than Hollywood, think again.
Former MySpace sensations and recent A&M/Octone records signees Hollywood Undead have been hyping their just-released debut album, “Swan Songs,” with a phone number on their website and MySpace page. When fans call the number, they are treated to a pre-recorded message introducing band members (with names like “Charlie Scene” and “J-Dog”). The message then quickly devolves into the all-too-familiar language of young Alpha males who feel the need to assert their masculinity via putting down homosexuals. (You can guess which homophobic epithet they use.)
To be fair, the sextet, who describe themselves as “modern day Beastie Boys with screaming” in a Jonas Åkerlund-directed electronic press kit, are hardly the first band to explore misogyny (see the Beastie Boys’ 1986 track “Girls”) or espouse homophobic viewpoints as something their young male fans should emulate.
So, I'm in the elevator at Southern California's food porn capitol -- the two-story Whole Foods on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena -- when my eye strays to one of those earth-toned signs advertising a cooking class/singles event. Imagine my surprise when the name Maynard James Keenan jumps out at me! Along with the phrase "wine tasting"!
Actually, the surprise was minimal. The multi-tasking prog rock master from Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer has been doing the grocery-store circuit for a while, offering autographs and sips from the bins of his Arizona vineyards. He hit his first Whole Foods back in April. (Idolator blogger Dan Gibson spotted that event while shopping for overpriced lettuce in Arizona; Keenan can keep his PR budget down for these events, since music scribes apparently love to shop Earthbound Farm-fancy.)
The current wine tour has Keenan and his partner, Eric Glomski, sampling from the first vintages of Arizona Stronghold Vineyards, a new business uniting the two winemakers on the refreshed ground of an old vineyard near Willcox, Ariz.
Public radio station 
Nike's Human Race event drew well over 12,000 
So, I'm in the elevator at Southern California's food porn capitol -- the two-story Whole Foods on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena -- when my eye strays to one of those earth-toned signs advertising a cooking class/singles event. Imagine my surprise when the name Maynard James Keenan jumps out at me! Along with the phrase "wine tasting"!
