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Lightning Bolt's Demented, Sonic Torture
You'd be amazed how good it sounds after a month of Rebecca Black.
Lightning Bolt! Making the world a better place, one innocent toddler at a time.
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Good Music and Kitsilano. Compatible?
Sun Wizard makes a pretty strong case with 'Positively 4th Avenue.'
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They Don't Make Music Like This Anymore!
Except when rising remix stars The Knocks take on Motown and Stax.
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America's Dirty Little Fame Secret
It explains why nine-year-old Willow Smith is the next pop 'queen' while other fame-seeking children are 'whores.'
Let's get this out of the way -- Rebecca Black's "Friday," that ubiquitous, poorly shot, amazingly auto-tuned Wikipedia description of the days of the week, is not a good song. This is obvious. The people who've watched it 85 million times on YouTube don't think so; the thousands of people who've spent real money buying it don't think so. I'm willing to bet that her parents, who paid for the video, and even young Rebecca herself don't think it's a particularly noteworthy tune. (And really, ABC? You had to clown a teenager on national television? This is news?)
So getting the acerbic wit that is Stephen Colbert, and backing him with a band as tight and accomplished as The Roots, just to do a straightforward rendition in mockery of "Friday" is overkill on par with having Noam Chomsky edit YouTube comments. It's not as if "Friday" is even the worst song out there -- there are 60 million views of "Like a G6," and a huge chunk of that song is about a guy wearing Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. (Another Far East Movement song features the stunning revelation, "You ain't a doll. You's a silver dollar.")
LISTEN TO THIS:
Still, I don't think we should have spent the equivalent of over 246,000 days (that’s 85 million views x four minutes) listening to this song on YouTube. And I offer this alternative -- instead of listening even one more day to it, put on Lightning Bolt instead, in particular the duo's stellar 2003 offering, Wonderful Rainbow. Turn to the fifth track, "On Fire," and remember that this is only two people; that one man on a bass guitar and another on the drums is making all this amazing, brain-altering noise. Nothing rhymes, nothing has a consistent rhythm. It's just 4:42 of sheer, pulsating aural assault. Ignore that occasionally drummer Brian Chippendale will do a bad Zack de la Rocha impersonation through a tin can megaphone -- you can't understand a word he's singing anyway -- and eventually the vocals become simply another part of the glorious, auto-tune free soundscape.
And cut Rebecca Black some slack. When you were her age, I doubt 85 million people knew who you were. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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warbler
1 year ago
say what?
I read this article before my morning coffee, and then again after, and I haven't the foggiest clue what Wong is saying, who he's talking about, or what the subject matter is. It reads like a private journal entry, typed after smoking several spliffs with the Colbert Report playing in the background whilst conducting random YouTube searches.
Anyone else wanna take a crack?
Mathieu Y
1 year ago
So Rebecca Black suck and
So Rebecca Black suck and Lightning Bolt are cool? If you didnt know, they're playing tomorrow in Seattle at the Healthy Times Fun Club. I was going to go but that venue is pretty "for seattle by seattle" despite Lightning Bolt coming from Rhode Island...
And I agree with the other reviewer. How do you justify comparing Lightning Bolt and Rebecca Black? They're nearly entirely opposite ends of the musical spectrum and you wrote nothing that makes the two comparable. Editors must have been asleep when this got pushed through.
Alcyon
1 year ago
Band great, story awful
Why don't you tell us about the band? Lightning Bolt is really awesome and creative, definitely one of the better noise bands I've ever heard. I wish they'd visit Vancouver sometime. I read this piece looking for some media appreciation of the pair and instead wasted five minutes on Rebecca Black. She's not even that bad. Why do music reviewers feel like they have to denigrate bad pop music to give themselves enough street cred to review legitimate underground acts?