The Sneaker Heads amongst you will already know about it, but for the rest of you, well, we just had to introduce you to the final word in sneaker documentaries, Just For Kicks.
Written and Directed by Thibaut de Longeville and Lisa Leone, this 2005 doc traces the journey of the humble sneaker as it jumped from a staple of the playground to the most essential streetwear item for a whole generation of people fired on the Hip-Hop explosion.
Hear how Run DMC turned NYC, then the World on to Addidas, and where they got the inspiration for the laceless look. Listen to Damon Dash, Missy Elliott, Grandmaster Caz, Raekwon and Ad Rock wax on how Kicks Culture laced itself through their backstories and go gooey over the accent of the Air Jordan!
We’re not gonna ruin it for you, watch it for yourself!
So they’ve announced the tracklisting to the hotly anticipated Runaways biopic, with only 8 of the band (and associated members) tracks featured in a run of 14. Original Runaways recordings like ‘Hollywood’ and ‘You Drive Me Wild’ cosy up against covers of ‘Cherry Bomb’ and ‘Dead End Justice’ by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, presumably included to drag in the TwiHard Dollar.
More interesting is the inclusion of Suzi Quatro, MC5, David Bowie and The Stooges on the album, fleshing out what would have been a sub-greatest hits. There’s also a Joan Jett track, but sadly no Lita Ford. You can Preorder it over at the Runawayssoundtrack.com, with the US Digital dropping on 16th of March and the Wax (we wish) on the 23rd.
Here’s the Tracklisting
1. Nick Gilder – ‘Roxy Roller’ 2. Suzi Quatro – ‘The Wild One’ 3. MC5 – ‘It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ 4. David Bowie – ‘Rebel Rebel’ 5. Dakota Fanning – ‘Cherry Bomb’ 6. The Runaways – ‘Hollywood’ 7. Dakota Fanning – ‘California Paradise’ 8. The Runaways – ‘You Drive Me Wild’ 9. Dakota Fanning & Kristen Stewart – ‘Queens Of Noise’ 10. Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning – ‘Dead End Justice’ 11. The Stooges – ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ 12. The Runaways – ‘I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are (Live)’ 13. Sex Pistols – ‘Pretty Vacant’ 14. Joan Jett – ‘Don’t Abuse Me’
It’s pretty hard to accept that some of your favourite movies are going to be remade by a Hollywood shitout of ideas and lacking a set of balls. Sometimes it’s even harder to accept that the “rebooters” may have done a decent job.
Hot on the tail of Rob Zombie’s not to awful stab at the first 2 Halloween remakes, comes Samuel Bayer’s stab, or slash, at the ultimate kiddie killer flick, A Nightmare on Elm Street.
There’ll be no Robert Englund, which means that there’s likely to be none of the famous Freddy humour on show. They’ve cast Watchmen’s Jackie Earle Haley as Kruger for what is supposed to be a “reimagining”, but from the trailer looks pretty close to a reshoot. Haley, (who actually auditioned for Johnny Depp’s role as Glen in the original) looks the part, possibly even creepier than Englund’s turn as Freddy, but there’s something missing. Freddy may have been a child slayer, but at least he had character!
Other than that, it doesn’t look too bad. What do you think?
The fights sequences throughout the Rocky franchise have always been deeply engaging but outrageously ridiculous in their mechanics, and sternly serious affairs throughout. So it was refreshing that old Sly decided to break the formula for Rocky 3, by inserting some humour with the Charity Fight between Rocky and Hulk Hogan’s‘Thunderlips’, bringing together valiant art of pugilism with the dubious entertainment of wrestling. Of course, pretty much everybody has seen wrestling doc’s like ‘Beyond the Mat’ or heard Mickey Rourke talk about his training for ‘The Wrestler’, with the general conclusion being that yes, these battle are highly choreographed, but the physical side is brutal stuff.
The Charity Fight in Rocky 3 is a great example of this. You get the feeling that it was Sly’s intention to script a statement on the argument regarding wrestling’s dubious qualities into the film. It’s certainly relevant considering that Rocky 3’s subplot revolves around the ‘Stallion’s’ ascendancy to an entertainment superstar, merchandised to the hilt for the icon greedy public, something the likes of Hulk Hogan knows all about.
Of course, everybody remembers how the fight runs. Rocky thinks it’s all horseplay, laughing off Thunderlipps’ pre-match insults and expecting the Hulkster to ham it up. A succession of bodyslam’s and suplex’s later, Rocko’s shell-shocked in the crowd, getting his gloves cut off so that he can grapple with the bigman on even terms, eventually tossing Thunderlips into the baying audience with the ref calling a draw just to end the madness.
As a fight scene, the wrestling scenes specifically, it’s pretty physical stuff. Yeah, of course it’s all choreographed, the ring in sprung and blah blah blah, but the whole scene took 10 days to film ($$$$ for the extras), with the Hulkster giving Stallone a bit of a hammering, as relayed by the guys themselves in an excerpt from an interview that Hogan conducted with Sly for the WWE website in 2006.
Hogan: Okay. WWE Superstars like me are always getting injured in the ring. As an action star – the greatest action star of all time – what is the worst injury you’ve ever suffered in front of the camera?
Sly: Truthfully, the hardest I was ever hit was actually by you, Hulk Hogan. We didn’t put it in the movie (Rocky III) because I was so traumatized. It was where you threw me into a corner and you leapt up, and you were really, really light on your feet that day, for 310 pounds. You went up and caught me with your shin, believe it or not, on my collarbone. I collapsed to the ground. I’ll never forget, I was laying there and I was thinking, “I don’t want to look. I don’t want to look because that bone is sticking through my flesh and it’s over. Here’s the end of the movie.” So that was the worst actual impact I ever had that was instantaneous, spontaneous, eruptive, absolutely mind-boggling pain at that time. When people tell me, “Oh, wrestling isn’t traumatic,” I say, “Trust me. He was going easy on me and I couldn’t see straight for three days.”
The Rocky 3 match is good fun, though the WWF tried it for real at the inaugural Wrestlemania, in one of the most ridiculous match-up’s in sporting history: Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorfff versus Hulk Hogan and Mr T, with Muhammad Ali as guest referee and FUCKING LIBERACE ringing the bell!!
Revolution needs art, art needs revolution. The fire in the soul of the oppressed will push them to create slogans and guerrilla art that will threaten the state, challenge the status quo and call the people to arms. Its message and the sheer vitriol of which that message is daubed is what makes it potent beyond the guided propaganda of the state.
When the Polish socialist Solidarity movement, led by the Papal backed Lech Wałęsa and born of a trade union at the Gdańsk Shipyard in 1980, broke the iron grip of communist Soviet rule over the country, it did so with a striking and defiant emblem. The graffiti like, thick blood red scrawl of the party’s name was as dangerous to the state as the message behind it. If you want to topple the state, then you’d better have a flag the people can get behind.
The Polish people got behind Solidarity, and the quake that the movement caused shook the communist eastern bloc from its foundations. Here’s some of the fantastic posters produced by the brass hands of the SolidarityParty.
The Logo: Jezy Janiszewski’s Solidarity Poland
Budecki: Count on Me: 1981
Karol Sliwka’s Independent Labour Union of Individual Farmers, Solidarity: 1981
M Wieckowski’s 1918-1981 Independence: 1981
M Wieckowski’s Solidarity: 10 Million Members: 1981
Marek Lewandowski’s May 1st Holiday of Workers: Solidarity 1981
Solidarity: Food Rationing System Collapses
Unidentified Solidarity Poster
Tomasz Sarnecki: High Noon, July 4th Elections: 1989
Solidarity: Vote With Us: 1989
Vote for Solidarity & Lech Walesa: Election Campaign of Solidarity Citizenship Committee
Liars? They’re BATSHIT crazy, and they’re back with a new album, Sisterworld, out on the 9th of March on Mute. While you sit, whittling a 15th century witch from a bar of medical soap, waiting for the album to drop, why not ease yourself in to the right state of mind by eyeing over the video to the new single ‘Scissor’?
“The hard core, the outlaw elite, were the Hell's Angels... wearing the winged death's-head on the back of their sleeveless jackets and packing their "mamas" behind them on big "chopped hogs." They rode with a fine unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom.”
Thank you God....... or should that be Thank You Jack White? For the Good Lord put them all on earth, but Mr White brought them together, stuck vintage instruments in their claws, wrote them a killer garage rock tune, cut it to wax, got it on the shelves and directed the awesome video below.
Back in 2007, a hideous dickhead by the name of Guy Hands, set the sights of his private equity firm Terra Firma on one of the most famous record labels in history. Sure, EMI was up the creek, but what major label isn’t? £2.4 Billion later, Guy Hands, a man with no experience of running a record label, was at the wheel of a label that Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Pink Floyd once called home. Additionally, Hands also acquired the legendary Abbey Road Studios, which EMI had built and launched in 1931.
With an intention to reduce the labels overheads by £200 Million per year, it’s no wonder that EMI’s key artists started to desert the ship. How key? How about Radiohead, Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones for a start!
Well 3 years later and Hands is in the shitbooks of his backers, Citigroup. They want their cash back, after fronting over £3.3 billion in loans to Terra Firma. So as well as asking investors to cough up £120 Million by June, Guy Hands is scratching around for stuff to pawn.
Abbey Road may possibly be the most famous recording studio in history (sorry Sun & Hitsville USA), but in the age of Macbook Pro Tools, a Georgian townhouse full of expensive kit would seem a little excessive to any label taking a punt on a new band of skinny-jeaned, gobshite teenagers.
So Terra Firma will be putting the legendary studios up for sale. Yeah, there are a few interested parties, groups of musicians putting a kitty together and even the National Trust preparing a bid, but it’ll most likely see 2010 out as some sort of museum or hotel. By this time next year, you’ll probably be able to get married on the spot where the Fab Four sang “one thing I can tell you is you gotta be free...”
It’s been 2 very long years since French electro duo Justice released their eponymous album ‘†’, 2 years since they dropped the hammer and blew the EDM scene wide open, check that...blew music wide open.
Word spread last year that their sophomore album would be one of the marquee releases on the recently revived (and formerly legendary) Elektra imprint, which has been given a dustdown by Warner’s/Atlantic, in 2010. Fans jibbed out at the thought of them vacating the Ed Banger label family, but it seems that Elektra will be onboard for the distribution side more than anything.
News on the release has been slow since, with no date forthcoming. But 2010 will be the year that Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay return to blow our tiny minds once again. Alongside Daft Punk, who’ll also be releasing new work this year in the form of the Tron Legacy soundtrack, Justice are the most inspirational entity to emerge from electro since Kraftwerk. Here are 3 examples of how their crunching beats have transcended the aural in to the visual.
Genesis House, “Palais de Justice”
Inspired by the ‘†’ album and Justice’s motif, New York and Paris based architects PLANDA have created the Cross House, a hypothetical two story lair featuring a cinema, studio, bar and roof top pool which would perch upon the cliff edge at California's Santa Catalina Island. It’s just blueprints and dreams at the moment, but sometimes that’s all you need.
‘Stress’ Uncut
The boys describe this unbelievably violent video to their mind-bending track ‘Stress’ better than anybody could as a "clip unairable on television" for a "track unairable on the radio". This video ignited a shitstorm of protest in France and beyond, where it fingered a wound still raw from the 2005 Parisian banlieue riots. Watch it for yourself below, but be warned, it’s seriously strong stuff.
Across The Universe
This documentary, helmed by Romain Gavras and designer So-Me, follows the band on their 2008 North American Tour, through bottle attacks, mass hysteria and mucho debauchery. Check out the trailer below and have a little cry over your life not being anywhere near as cool as this shit.
It’s fantastic to see the name of a kick-ass old film being blogged about without the words “remake” or the infuriating “reboot” tailing its ass. Even better when the flick in question is Clive Barker’s 1990 super-failure Nightbreed!
You know the one? It was Barker’s follow-up to Hellraiser, starring Brat Pack wannabe Craig Sheffer in the lead and David Croneberg as the terrifying Dekker. It revolved around a huge community of freakoid monsters living in an underground city called Midian, under a cemetery in Nowheresville U.S.A.
The studio kicked Barker’s ass over the production, cutting 55 minutes and over 2/3 of the monsters out of the final cut. Well, now the original 145 minute print has surfaced and will be playing at the Minneapolis' Horror Hound Weekend in March. Fanboy’s are pissin’ their pants and screaming for a DVD release ASAP! I’m with them.
I loved this film so much as a kid that I even bought the Commodore 64 ‘Nightbreed Version’ just to get my fix of the Midian freaks. Here’s the trailer.
Remember those glorious days back in the 80’s when skateboards were the shape of bodyboards and not the size of lollipop sticks? Wide enough to kneel or lie on, big enough to house all kinds of killer extras like rails and tail plates? They were also sufficiently big enough to provide a decent sized canvas for the spazzed out graphic doodling of artists like Jim Phillips.
Jim was at the helm of the movement defining Santa Cruz Skateboards art department, and was pretty much responsible for all the kick-ass board and wheel graphics that you remember as a kid. The ‘Slime Balls’ splat? Check! ‘Rip Grip’ alien? Check! Bullet & Slimeballs Wheels, the Slasher monster, Independent Truck Company cross? Check! Not to mention the actual Santa Cruz logo and his signature piece, the classic ‘Screaming Hand’. He’s also been producing a fine line in Surf and Rock art for over 40 years.
Bottom line, the guy is a legend! Andreas over at the excellent fecalface.com paid a visit to Jim Phillips’ studio with a few friends in tow, to check out Jim’s work, and ended up on what amounted to a guided tour through skate history.
You can also check out Jim’s site at www.jimphillips.com to see a run through of his genre defining work. Here are some of our favourites to get you loose!
When MTV beamed itself into our television sets for the first time on the 1st of August 1981, it blew the music world wide open, adding an extra dimension to music and changing how we chose to accept and absorb our rockstars. It changed the game, changed the kids, changed the planet. The MTV logo has become as much as a globally recognised symbol for American capitalism through consumption as Coca-Cola and McDonalds.
Of course, MTV has changed with the game over the years. Now you’ll be lucky to see a music video on the channel unless it’s being reported on by their showbiz news report. Today Music TV is a slick and saccharine home for semi fictionalised reality tv shows, featuring the air headed children of the first MTV generation and their idols.
So the corporation has decided to stop pretending it’s even remotely interested in music anymore, and drop the words ‘Music Television’ from under the iconic logo. Considering there’s probably not a person under 40 on the planet that doesn’t recognise that MTV stepped out of that game years ago, it’s still a sad day. Yes, they still broadcast their spinoff genre specific stations like MTV Base etc.., but as a home to new popular music of all genres, one that raised a generation of music fans on a diet of popular youth explosions like Hip Hop and Grunge, that had the power to shape the youth consciousness through their playlists (for good or bad), we’ll never see it’s like again.
The MTV logo itself, whatever it represents in these hollow days, is still cause for celebration. It was the first major logo to eschew a corporate colour, so that it could change with the times, with its subject matter, daily if (and was often) necessary. You can read the story of the MTV logo by the guy who helped design it, Frank Olinsky, at his site RIGHT HERE.
So to salute what was the most significant development in modern music since the electrification of the guitar, here’s a little video produced to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of MTV to transport you back to better times.
Raw Power, Iggy and the Stooges legendary but initially unsuccessful 3rd album has been pencilled in for a reissue this 13th of April. It’s not the first time it’s been reissued. Back in ’97, Columbia Records goaded Iggy in to digitally remixing the album, giving him the chance to redeem himself for the hash he made of the initial original mix, and to outdo David Bowie’s subsequent rescue mix, which both he and the rest of the Stooges have publicly lambasted over the years. The 97 reissue turned out to be a bit of a pointless exercise, as fans poured scorn on Iggy’s digitally distorted remix, with the Stooges themselves eating humble pie by admitting that Bowie’s mix still came out on top.
This time around they’ve stuck with Bowie’s mix, but have thrown in a bin-load of extra’s over 3 CD’s. For your dollar, you’ll get the original album, a slew of out-takes and a bootleg recording of a ’73 Atlanta club show. Not so great, but if you opt for the Deluxe Box-Set which drops 2 weeks later on the 27th, you’ll get some nice shiny bits and pieces like reproduction 7” artwork, photo prints, the Making of Raw Power DVD and a nice book of Raw Power testimonials from Lou Reed, Joan Jett, Tom Morello and perpetual gobshite Henry Rollins.
Get over to Stooges HQ to sign up to the mailing list for any advance on the down-low.
From a ruined mask, perched on the heavy hunch of a lumbering vessel, spewed forth seventy and more years of filthy woe and slanderous bellows. Beaten hard and hard to beat, life in the gutter bars, five dollar rooms, relentless heat.
A face as hard as the words it spat, hate wrapped in beauty, beauty cloaked in wrath. But though the black air and sour malt stench which kept guilty hours and only grew thicker, against the grain, a light would flicker, for which the Bluebird would wait and imagine a path. Its cage was strong, had its rules to obey, live by the lights of the night, and bear the shallow day. But the Bluebird would plead ‘til his voice drew thin, and once in solitude its cage would begin... “There’s a Bluebird in my heart that wants’ to get out, but I’m too tough for him.....”
Some dude called Tory L has gone and dropped THE BOMB over at PopCandy. He’s blogged on his Top 5 Kenny Loggins Soundtrack Hits. That’s right, cuts from ‘Over the Top, ‘Footloose’, ‘Caddyshack’ and ‘Top Gun’!
Bow down, lowly dogs, to the King of the feelgood fistpumper. All Hail KENNY LOGGINS!!!!
‘Crash’ by JG Ballard is a perverse and thoroughly engaging hellride through the dead-ended lives of a few’s obsession with the sexual unification of the human body and the cold, protruding, projectile shards of automobiles during harrowing collisions, on the highways and overpasses of the protagonists minds and bleak environs. Ballard’s words can be as cold as mirror glass entering the cornea and as removed as the approaching ambulance sirens in the distant greyness.
Some elements will need to be mentally abandoned just as soon as they are absorbed, such troubles can the sexual mechano-violence cause in an unprepared mind. As addictive as it is repulsive with a fine line in characterless characters, it can inspire the unimaginable in even the most glacial of readers. So what can it inspire in the most absorbed of artists? Here are some of the better ones.
“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).”
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