No Age's Randy Randall asked to take off Obama T-shirt for 'The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson'

Early Wednesday morning, Randy Randall of local fuzz-punkers No Age sent out an e-mail to a wide group of journalists, friends and fans stating that on Oct. 2 he had been asked to take off his pro-Obama T-shirt for a taped performance for “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson,” slated to run Oct. 27.

With only a few minutes before the scheduled taping, “the talent booker told me I couldn’t wear my Obama T-shirt,” Randall said, speaking from No Age’s practice space. “She took one look at it and called the suits in New York, who said it was against the equal time rule. I asked her, what if I didn’t take it off? She said then that they couldn't tape us.”

Randall and fellow No Ager Dean Spunt quickly hashed out the tough situation. “We’re an underground band without a lot of publicity -- there was still an opportunity to take advantage of. We'd be able to say something versus nothing.”

First, the band asked if they could write the names of John McCain, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader somewhere on the stage or on their clothes, but CBS reps said no -- there would still be other candidates who wouldn’t get included.

So, at the last minute, Randall took off his Obama shirt, turned it inside out and wrote “Free Health Care” with a Sharpie marker. He put it on underneath his open flannel and performed.

Hey, did you hear? A long-absent, wildly influential act out of Britain is playing a handful of highly anticipated and absurdly well received gigs. No? Well, the first of My Bloody Valentine's two nights at the cavernous steel echo chamber that is the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium took place last night, and while we'll have a complete wrap-up on Friday after Margaret checks out tonight's show, I just had to weigh in on one of the more talked-about aspects of their shows. Namely, the 10-odd-minute white-noise excursion MBV launches into midway through the pounding "You Made Me Realise" at the close of an admittedly jaw-dropping set.

First thing: bring your earplugs. No really. BRING THEM. If you happen to have your pair whisked away by the overzealous door security because their carrying case resembles contraband (thanks, guys!), grab a pair from the box by the entrance, and then grab another pair as a backup. Seriously. There's a reason why they're free and available. There's loud, there's Kiss circa 1978-loud, and then there's "You Made Me Realise."

Last night I caught the first of six consecutive Rancid shows at the Fonda, on which you can peruse a windy opinion here. But one of my favorite moments from the set was when they slyly covered Operation Ivy's "Knowledge" and sent the crowd into paroxysms of glee.The endurance of Op Ivy in the punk consciousness is pretty astounding -- I'd wager a sizable portion of Rancid's fan base was born after Op Ivy broke up in '89, yet every Warped Tour and trek down Hollywood Boulevard yields more and more T-shirts and jacket patches of the leaping ragged hat guy.It got me thinking how completely awesome and relevant it would be if Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman found Jesse Michaels and Dave Mello and made one goodwill victory lap. It won't happen, especially because of Rancid's long-awaited new record, but here are some reasons why they should. 

Pitchfork Media posted a review Wednesday of the debut album from the Airborne Toxic Event, the next big Silver Lake band, according to gathering local legend, that will revive the sputtering indie rock scene. But not everyone's so convinced: Pitchfork's Ian Cohen gave it an abysmal 1.6 rating -- hey, at least it wasn't a monkey peeing into its own mouth, or is that better? -- and the first paragraph launched with a withering critique of the Los Feliz/Silver Lake scene at large.

On Thursday, TATE responded with an open letter on its website, stating, among other defensive moves, that "we know full well that Pitchfork doesn’t so much critique bands as critique a band’s ability to match a certain indie rock aesthetic. We don’t match it."

Soundboard loves a good brouhaha so we started an e-mail discussion. Here are some excerpts. Weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments, if so inclined, but no pictures of animals doing anything but looking cute will be allowed.

-- Margaret Wappler

Margaret Wappler: OK, so here's the first paragraph of the Pitchfork review: "I probably couldn't get anyone here in Los Angeles to admit it, but the city lacks a flagship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way -- one both a little fresher than Spin cover stars Beck and Rilo Kiley and with more mainstream potential than the bands from the Smell. The onus would likely fall on the folkier, cuddlier Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene, but over the past three years it feels as if the area's bands have failed to rise to the occasion."

Let's hash this out. Do we think this critique of L.A. is fair? Are we desperate to run any indie band up the flagpole? Is it true that the Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene has failed to rise to the occasion? And finally, is Pitchfork instantly knocking down Airborne for being from L.A.?

Jessica Gelt: OK, I’m from this city and a card-carrying member of its incestuous so-called Silver Lake indie-rock scene and I’ll admit it: L.A. lacks a flagship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way. 

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.

Between constant plays of the great new Laura Marling album and finding this interesting bit of worthy  navel-gazing by Salon's Judy Berman on loving and leaving Conor Oberst fandom, I've been thinking about the music of 18-year-olds lately. That's the beginning of that sweet spot of post-high school wanderlust where you're old enough to understand your taste and listen widely, but still malleable and sensitive enough to get your mind blown. I've often wondered if the music you fall for between 18 and 22 is hard-wired to be the only music you really love in that insane, possessive, identity-crafting way for the rest of your life. Do we lose our capacity to be devastated by art as adults? What does it mean when you stop listening to the songs that sent ice up your spine at that age -- does that make your youthful music lust irrelevant today, or is all art meant to have a time and place you're supposed to grow out of?   

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Let's explore a hypothetical. Say you're an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they'll call you "The New Music That's Best" or something.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

The My Bloody Valentine endurance challenge

Hey, did you hear? A long-absent, wildly influential act out of Britain is playing a handful of highly anticipated and absurdly well received gigs. No? Well, the first of My Bloody Valentine's two nights at the cavernous steel echo chamber that is the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium took place last night, and while we'll have a complete wrap-up on Friday after Margaret checks out tonight's show, I just had to weigh in on one of the more talked-about aspects of their shows. Namely, the 10-odd-minute white-noise excursion MBV launches into midway through the pounding "You Made Me Realise" at the close of an admittedly jaw-dropping set.

First thing: bring your earplugs. No really. BRING THEM. If you happen to have your pair whisked away by the overzealous door security because their carrying case resembles contraband (thanks, guys!), grab a pair from the box by the entrance, and then grab another pair as a backup. Seriously. There's a reason why they're free and available. There's loud, there's Kiss circa 1978-loud, and then there's "You Made Me Realise."

Last night I caught the first of six consecutive Rancid shows at the Fonda, on which you can peruse a windy opinion here. But one of my favorite moments from the set was when they slyly covered Operation Ivy's "Knowledge" and sent the crowd into paroxysms of glee.The endurance of Op Ivy in the punk consciousness is pretty astounding -- I'd wager a sizable portion of Rancid's fan base was born after Op Ivy broke up in '89, yet every Warped Tour and trek down Hollywood Boulevard yields more and more T-shirts and jacket patches of the leaping ragged hat guy.It got me thinking how completely awesome and relevant it would be if Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman found Jesse Michaels and Dave Mello and made one goodwill victory lap. It won't happen, especially because of Rancid's long-awaited new record, but here are some reasons why they should. 

Pitchfork Media posted a review Wednesday of the debut album from the Airborne Toxic Event, the next big Silver Lake band, according to gathering local legend, that will revive the sputtering indie rock scene. But not everyone's so convinced: Pitchfork's Ian Cohen gave it an abysmal 1.6 rating -- hey, at least it wasn't a monkey peeing into its own mouth, or is that better? -- and the first paragraph launched with a withering critique of the Los Feliz/Silver Lake scene at large.

On Thursday, TATE responded with an open letter on its website, stating, among other defensive moves, that "we know full well that Pitchfork doesn’t so much critique bands as critique a band’s ability to match a certain indie rock aesthetic. We don’t match it."

Soundboard loves a good brouhaha so we started an e-mail discussion. Here are some excerpts. Weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments, if so inclined, but no pictures of animals doing anything but looking cute will be allowed.

-- Margaret Wappler

Margaret Wappler: OK, so here's the first paragraph of the Pitchfork review: "I probably couldn't get anyone here in Los Angeles to admit it, but the city lacks a flagship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way -- one both a little fresher than Spin cover stars Beck and Rilo Kiley and with more mainstream potential than the bands from the Smell. The onus would likely fall on the folkier, cuddlier Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene, but over the past three years it feels as if the area's bands have failed to rise to the occasion."

Let's hash this out. Do we think this critique of L.A. is fair? Are we desperate to run any indie band up the flagpole? Is it true that the Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene has failed to rise to the occasion? And finally, is Pitchfork instantly knocking down Airborne for being from L.A.?

Jessica Gelt: OK, I’m from this city and a card-carrying member of its incestuous so-called Silver Lake indie-rock scene and I’ll admit it: L.A. lacks a flagship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way. 

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.

Between constant plays of the great new Laura Marling album and finding this interesting bit of worthy  navel-gazing by Salon's Judy Berman on loving and leaving Conor Oberst fandom, I've been thinking about the music of 18-year-olds lately. That's the beginning of that sweet spot of post-high school wanderlust where you're old enough to understand your taste and listen widely, but still malleable and sensitive enough to get your mind blown. I've often wondered if the music you fall for between 18 and 22 is hard-wired to be the only music you really love in that insane, possessive, identity-crafting way for the rest of your life. Do we lose our capacity to be devastated by art as adults? What does it mean when you stop listening to the songs that sent ice up your spine at that age -- does that make your youthful music lust irrelevant today, or is all art meant to have a time and place you're supposed to grow out of?   

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Let's explore a hypothetical. Say you're an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they'll call you "The New Music That's Best" or something.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

Five reasons Operation Ivy should reunite right now (and one reason why not)

Last night I caught the first of six consecutive Rancid shows at the Fonda, on which you can peruse a windy opinion here. But one of my favorite moments from the set was when they slyly covered Operation Ivy's "Knowledge" and sent the crowd into paroxysms of glee.The endurance of Op Ivy in the punk consciousness is pretty astounding -- I'd wager a sizable portion of Rancid's fan base was born after Op Ivy broke up in '89, yet every Warped Tour and trek down Hollywood Boulevard yields more and more T-shirts and jacket patches of the leaping ragged hat guy.It got me thinking how completely awesome and relevant it would be if Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman found Jesse Michaels and Dave Mello and made one goodwill victory lap. It won't happen, especially because of Rancid's long-awaited new record, but here are some reasons why they should. 

Pitchfork Media posted a review Wednesday of the debut album from the Airborne Toxic Event, the next big Silver Lake band, according to gathering local legend, that will revive the sputtering indie rock scene. But not everyone's so convinced: Pitchfork's Ian Cohen gave it an abysmal 1.6 rating -- hey, at least it wasn't a monkey peeing into its own mouth, or is that better? -- and the first paragraph launched with a withering critique of the Los Feliz/Silver Lake scene at large.

On Thursday, TATE responded with an open letter on its website, stating, among other defensive moves, that "we know full well that Pitchfork doesn’t so much critique bands as critique a band’s ability to match a certain indie rock aesthetic. We don’t match it."

Soundboard loves a good brouhaha so we started an e-mail discussion. Here are some excerpts. Weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments, if so inclined, but no pictures of animals doing anything but looking cute will be allowed.

-- Margaret Wappler

Margaret Wappler: OK, so here's the first paragraph of the Pitchfork review: "I probably couldn't get anyone here in Los Angeles to admit it, but the city lacks a flagship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way -- one both a little fresher than Spin cover stars Beck and Rilo Kiley and with more mainstream potential than the bands from the Smell. The onus would likely fall on the folkier, cuddlier Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene, but over the past three years it feels as if the area's bands have failed to rise to the occasion."

Let's hash this out. Do we think this critique of L.A. is fair? Are we desperate to run any indie band up the flagpole? Is it true that the Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene has failed to rise to the occasion? And finally, is Pitchfork instantly knocking down Airborne for being from L.A.?

Jessica Gelt: OK, I’m from this city and a card-carrying member of its incestuous so-called Silver Lake indie-rock scene and I’ll admit it: L.A. lacks a flagship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way. 

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.

Between constant plays of the great new Laura Marling album and finding this interesting bit of worthy  navel-gazing by Salon's Judy Berman on loving and leaving Conor Oberst fandom, I've been thinking about the music of 18-year-olds lately. That's the beginning of that sweet spot of post-high school wanderlust where you're old enough to understand your taste and listen widely, but still malleable and sensitive enough to get your mind blown. I've often wondered if the music you fall for between 18 and 22 is hard-wired to be the only music you really love in that insane, possessive, identity-crafting way for the rest of your life. Do we lose our capacity to be devastated by art as adults? What does it mean when you stop listening to the songs that sent ice up your spine at that age -- does that make your youthful music lust irrelevant today, or is all art meant to have a time and place you're supposed to grow out of?   

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Let's explore a hypothetical. Say you're an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they'll call you "The New Music That's Best" or something.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

Soundtable on Pitchfork's negative review of the Airborne Toxic Event

Pitchfork Media posted a review Wednesday of the debut album from the Airborne Toxic Event, the next big Silver Lake band, according to gathering local legend, that will revive the sputtering indie rock scene. But not everyone's so convinced: Pitchfork's Ian Cohen gave it an abysmal 1.6 rating -- hey, at least it wasn't a monkey peeing into its own mouth, or is that better? -- and the first paragraph launched with a withering critique of the Los Feliz/Silver Lake scene at large.

On Thursday, TATE responded with an open letter on its website, stating, among other defensive moves, that "we know full well that Pitchfork doesn’t so much critique bands as critique a band’s ability to match a certain indie rock aesthetic. We don’t match it."

Soundboard loves a good brouhaha so we started an e-mail discussion. Here are some excerpts. Weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments, if so inclined, but no pictures of animals doing anything but looking cute will be allowed.

-- Margaret Wappler

Margaret Wappler: OK, so here's the first paragraph of the Pitchfork review: "I probably couldn't get anyone here in Los Angeles to admit it, but the city lacks a flagship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way -- one both a little fresher than Spin cover stars Beck and Rilo Kiley and with more mainstream potential than the bands from the Smell. The onus would likely fall on the folkier, cuddlier Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene, but over the past three years it feels as if the area's bands have failed to rise to the occasion."

Let's hash this out. Do we think this critique of L.A. is fair? Are we desperate to run any indie band up the flagpole? Is it true that the Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene has failed to rise to the occasion? And finally, is Pitchfork instantly knocking down Airborne for being from L.A.?

Jessica Gelt: OK, I’m from this city and a card-carrying member of its incestuous so-called Silver Lake indie-rock scene and I’ll admit it: L.A. lacks a flagship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way. 

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.

Between constant plays of the great new Laura Marling album and finding this interesting bit of worthy  navel-gazing by Salon's Judy Berman on loving and leaving Conor Oberst fandom, I've been thinking about the music of 18-year-olds lately. That's the beginning of that sweet spot of post-high school wanderlust where you're old enough to understand your taste and listen widely, but still malleable and sensitive enough to get your mind blown. I've often wondered if the music you fall for between 18 and 22 is hard-wired to be the only music you really love in that insane, possessive, identity-crafting way for the rest of your life. Do we lose our capacity to be devastated by art as adults? What does it mean when you stop listening to the songs that sent ice up your spine at that age -- does that make your youthful music lust irrelevant today, or is all art meant to have a time and place you're supposed to grow out of?   

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Let's explore a hypothetical. Say you're an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they'll call you "The New Music That's Best" or something.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

The homegrown homophobia of Hollywood Undead

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.

Between constant plays of the great new Laura Marling album and finding this interesting bit of worthy  navel-gazing by Salon's Judy Berman on loving and leaving Conor Oberst fandom, I've been thinking about the music of 18-year-olds lately. That's the beginning of that sweet spot of post-high school wanderlust where you're old enough to understand your taste and listen widely, but still malleable and sensitive enough to get your mind blown. I've often wondered if the music you fall for between 18 and 22 is hard-wired to be the only music you really love in that insane, possessive, identity-crafting way for the rest of your life. Do we lose our capacity to be devastated by art as adults? What does it mean when you stop listening to the songs that sent ice up your spine at that age -- does that make your youthful music lust irrelevant today, or is all art meant to have a time and place you're supposed to grow out of?   

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Let's explore a hypothetical. Say you're an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they'll call you "The New Music That's Best" or something.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

On Conor Oberst, teen angst and growing older

Between constant plays of the great new Laura Marling album and finding this interesting bit of worthy  navel-gazing by Salon's Judy Berman on loving and leaving Conor Oberst fandom, I've been thinking about the music of 18-year-olds lately. That's the beginning of that sweet spot of post-high school wanderlust where you're old enough to understand your taste and listen widely, but still malleable and sensitive enough to get your mind blown. I've often wondered if the music you fall for between 18 and 22 is hard-wired to be the only music you really love in that insane, possessive, identity-crafting way for the rest of your life. Do we lose our capacity to be devastated by art as adults? What does it mean when you stop listening to the songs that sent ice up your spine at that age -- does that make your youthful music lust irrelevant today, or is all art meant to have a time and place you're supposed to grow out of?   

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Let's explore a hypothetical. Say you're an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they'll call you "The New Music That's Best" or something.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

Bidoun becomes an unlikely home for great contemporary music writing

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Let's explore a hypothetical. Say you're an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they'll call you "The New Music That's Best" or something.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

Pitchfork’s epic fail of a Black Kids review

Let's explore a hypothetical. Say you're an influential music website known (accurately or not these days) as the tipping point for new and undiscovered bands to instantly become hot commodities if given an especially favorable review. Maybe they'll call you "The New Music That's Best" or something.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

Reporter’s Notebook: Why doesn’t Josh Homme’s homophobic rant mean the end of Queens of the Stone Age?

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme had some disappointingly ironic timing in unleashing one of the most spectacularly offensive dressing-downs of a fan I've ever seen. At Oslo's Norwegian Wood festival Friday, a feverish and justifiably peeved Homme called out a young audience member for chucking a bottle at him during a performance of Queens' song "3's and 7's." But what followed was a diatribe that demolished all boundaries of taste (the kid didn't seem to mind, though, as he tossed devil horns and grinned  the whole time he was being escorted out).

The rant is deeply un-postable on a family music blog (though it's easy to find on YouTube if you search for "Josh Homme" and "Norwegian Wood"), but highlights include repeated use of the word "faggot" coupled with an odd threat from Homme to have forcible sex with the male fan in front of his friends. Whether he was right or wrong to stop the show and yell at the kid is one thing, but does this disgusting meltdown mean one should re-think their QOTSA fandom?

Pop music is certainly not immune from blatant homophobia, and Homme was admittedly in a volatile spot after the bottle altercation. But still, when an artist says something this ugly, even in a heated onstage fight, should fans still support them afterward? If Homme had used other minority epithets, like ones used to slur African Americans or Latinos, he'd likely never be able to make another major label record. Homophobia seems to be the last bastion of socially acceptable (or at least less socially punishable) discrimination and hate speech, and whatever Homme's personal thoughts on homosexuality are, this kind of casual ugliness and gross machismo only reinforces the double-standard in using particular epithets. Are some slurs just more career-ending than others?

-- August Brown

Photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown

Reporter’s Notebook: So, about that Justice “Stress” video…

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice's video for "Stress": when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice's hit "D.A.N.C.E." on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It's a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West's blog. The clip's merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice's is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video's violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the '05 riots in many of Paris' far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media's vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the "Stress" video can't be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn't need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video's willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?" smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that's all it does. The questions of "Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?" have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn't probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid's question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it'd be a shame if Justice's only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  "OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we'll give you a freakish caricature that you'll probably eat up," is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that "we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues." If that's truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes "Stress" a powerful but truly failed piece of art. "Opening up debate" is a good start for a piece of art's goals -- it's the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it's primarily entertainment and there is no "meaning," or even an admission that Justice can't help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. "We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other," the statement concludes, "in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment."

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It's not the violence itself that's the most upsetting quality in the "Stress" video -- it's the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

-- August Brown