This is summer beach music, pure and simple. Dig the upbeat Cali sounds of Grouplove’s debut full-length record, “Never Trust a Happy Song.” Their self-titled EP, out earlier this year, was stellar, and this record certainly lives up to the standard set by the EP. There are about 5 different sounds woven through their songs, all compelling and exciting. These guys (and girl) are versatile and they’re going to be hot really soon. They absolutely stole the show at Outside Lands in San Francisco this summer, not just because the music is great when performed live, but because they perform with so much energy and sincerity, that the crowd can’t help but feel enraptured by it all.
This article from the Poetry Foundation makes the case that L.A. Hip-Hop group Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA) resembles some poetry movements of the past (like Futurism) in the way it takes pleasure and finds ecstasy in violent, shocking imagery and themes. The author says that the members of the group are incredibly creative, and also incredibly self-aware, and even more than trying to shock us, they are actually showing off their desensitization to violence.
This is an interesting analysis of hip-hop as poetry, and of Odd Future’s aesthetic as a commentary on where our artistic culture is heading.
Happy Birthday Jack Kerouac
Kerouac lived the way he wrote — freely and spontaneously. He saw beauty in the journey, not just the destination, beauty in life itself. He wrote about the infinite possibilities of the open road.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time”
“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars”
“Happiness exists in realizing it is all a great, strange dream”
A few years ago I saw them perform on a boat up and down the Hudson River. Now Soulive is rockin Brooklyn Bowl for 10 days straight in what the NY Times is calling a “10 day intergalactic funk odyssey.” I was definitely digging their sound back then, and I can only imagine that these performances are transcendent experiences for all the people in the room each night.
Wavves / Best Coast at Webster Hall
From the moment the first beach balls were lofted into the crowd, it was summertime in New York City (if only until Best Coast and Wavves leave town). Each band played an upbeat, energetic set at Webster Hall on Wednesday night, opening their sets with the lead singers (both California natives) expressing their love for New York along with their distaste for the cold.
New Yorkers came here on this night to tap into the eternal summer that is this Wavves / Best Coast tour, to celebrate the romantic West Coast ideals of Surfing and The Beach in the depth of the dark East Coast winter night, to escape the cold on the chords of surfer rock.
They came to hear guitars and drums and harmonies that encapsulate the moment when the late-afternoon sun sparkles in the water, the feeling of hot sand under your feet, the thrill of driving to the beach, top down, surfboard stretched across the back seat. They came to hear “The Sun was High (and so was I),” “King of the Beach,” and “Post Acid,” music that almost makes you forget that the sidewalk on 11th street is submerged under a solid sheet of ice, that the City is perpetually grey; to hear music that reminds you that this is not how it has always been. We have seen warmer, simpler days.
We have floated in the current, body flat against our boards. We have stood up and fallen. We have had the waters rise and crash down on our backs. And somewhere in the closet a towel or tote bag sits with some sands that we neglected to shake out one August afternoon long ago.
