Weezer: The 8 Bit Album

If you’re a regular reader, you may remember that we previously published a piece on Chiptune music HERE, or more correctly ‘Chip Music’ as some Needle Nose decided to let us know. If not, here’s the dillio. Chip Music is a genre where super-geeks bang out very sweet music on a succession of obsolete 8-Bit games consoles. Think Gameboy’s and Nes’, that kinda old school boxy stuff. It’s really cool, very heartwarming and predominantly without pretention.

Anyway, chip music net label Pterodactyl Squad (a bunch of super swell guys who specialise in releasing free video game inspired music) have produced a compilation where Chiptuners like Bit Shifter, Seal of Quality, Unicorn Dream Attack and Arcadecoma have covered an albums worth of tunes by ultimate geek garage rockers Weezer.

If you’re fan of the band, like me, you’ll absolutely shit bricks. It’s awesome! Awesome and Free! You can download it now as a whole or by individual tracks. If you’re going for a taster before committing, I recommend ‘The World Has Turned and Left Me Here’ or ‘Holiday’. Perhaps, if this is aurally pleasing to you, you may explore the rest of the Pterodactyl Squad free back catalogue?
DO IT HERE!

Gimme Danger Little Stranger

As I drown in a sea of auto-tune, coiffed teen idols and singing Scottish grannies, I long for the decapitation of dolls and bats, the splatter of fake blood and bloated greasy snakes writhing around the torso of a bedevilled, painted malcontent. I wanna see the tabloids scream “who will save our children”; I want oppressive parents with whiskey breath tearing posters from children’s walls, state condemnation, religious opposition, moral indignation. Book burning, record smashing, placard waving fervour; the News cries murder and the mothers cry for the unborn. I want the leather to shine, the eyes to dart, the ribs, the hips, hair as black as sorrow. The guitars in flames, glass under the skin and the hot blood on the cold truth.

Crash through the barriers, choke on the gas and stare in to the bonfires. March in the streets, swarm for the exits, pray to your Gods.

Shock me alive once more!

Sreamin’ Jay Hawkins

"You hear me? I put a spell on you, Because you’re mine."

Screaming Lord Sutch

"When he walks down the streets, To every girl he meets, he says, is your name Mary Blood?
Uaaaaaaah!"

The Crazy World of Arthur Brown

“Fire, I'll take you to burn,
Fire, I'll take you to learn,
Fire, I'll take you to bed!”

Alice Cooper

“School's out for summer, school's out forever, schools been blown to pieces”

The Stooges

“Honey gotta strike me blind, Somebody gotta save my soul. Baby penetrates my mind!”

KISS

“She wears her satins like a lady, she gets her way just like a child.
You take her home and she says: ‘maybe, baby’.
She takes you down, and drives you wild!”

Ozzy Osbourne

“In the fields the bodies burning, as the war machine keeps turning.
Death and hatred to mankind, poisoning their brainwashed minds. Oh Lord Yeah!”

Marilyn Manson

“I'm not a slave to a god that doesn't exist and I'm not a slave to a world that doesn't give a shit”

Slipknot

“You can't see California without Marlon Brando's eyes!”

Lady GaGa

“I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as it’s free. I want your love.”

Werner Herzog and The Rogue Film School

Over the last few days, something exciting has been taking place in an unnamed LA Hotel, something that won’t be captured on video, through audio or by the lens. Those that have been lucky enough to make the cut will filter in to Los Angeles from around the world, with $1450.00 clutched in a sweaty grasp and traumatised but open minds alert to the opportunity their good luck and hard cash has delivered them in to.

When Werner Herzog, the notorious German film director with a savage reputation for pushing the boundaries of safety (his own and his crew) to heart-stopping limits of borderline insanity, announced the launch of his Rouge Film School last September, he threw open the doors of his legend.

Now 67 years of age, Herzog is at a point where he’s ready to let a younger generation of filmmakers in to his twisted psyche, to run them ragged through the boot camp of his inspirations and to reveal the thundering motor that has driven him to the depths of despair and the ends of the earth, in pursuit of his unique cinematic visions.

"The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted, it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock-picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favouring their projects. In short: it is for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four-year-old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream.”

Herzog has planned a course in guerrilla filmmaking, the tricks of the trade for the outlaw auteur, eschewing the technical in favour of the practical, with subjects like “...the art of lockpicking. Travelling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.”

Anyone familiar with the legacy of the German director would have expected that once he was ready to open up to the aspirational new breed, his unconventional journey would make for unconventional teachings. Born in Munich in 1942, at the age of 14 young Werner found an entry on filmmaking in his family encyclopaedia, inspiring him to steal a 35mm camera from the Munich Film School and set off on a journey to project his visions on to the world.

Some would say that Herzog’s penchant for quixotic lead characters was a reflection of his own struggle to jump the boundaries of conventional film making. No better example of this was his work on 1982’s ‘Fitzcarraldo’, which saw a deluded European enlist the natives of the Peruvian rain forest to pull his paddle steamer over a mountain in order to harvest an untouched expanse of rubber trees on the other side, before navigating the giant vessel through a savage gauntlet of rapids and back to the city of Iquitos, where he planned to cash in his bounty and build an opera house from the profits.

Herzog decided that the only way to truly capture the mania of the plot was to mirror it, by actually enlisting the local natives to haul the 3 story, 320-ton steamer over the 40° hillside. The problems of achieving this terrible feat were compounded by Herzog losing his lead and main supporting actors, Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, after 40% of the film had already been shot. In a move that would throw fuel on the inferno, the director scrapped the footage and started again, recasting the lead with the notorious German actor Klaus Kinski, who caused so much tension on the set that the leader of the Peruvian tribe enlisted to pull the steamer kindly offered to murder Kinski for Herzog. The director himself would later personally threaten shoot his lead dead if he tried to walk off set.

A strong subplot in the story of Herzog’s journey was his complicated relationship with the maniacal Kinski. Their families had shared a house in Munich when they were teenagers, and Herzog tells how in a fit of rage, Kinski smashed every piece of furniture in the home to smithereens over and explosive 24 hour freakout. Kinski brought this madness to everything he ever did, building a fearsome reputation for insolence, depravity and unconventional behaviour which seemed to produce an almost universal loathing for the actor. Herzog would star Kinski in 5 of his features, as well as a documentary ‘My Best Friend’, which was based on their personal and professional relationship.

It would seem that Werner Herzog was not quite content with just putting his movies on the screen, but the story behind them also. There exist several documentaries chronicling the making of his films, including Les Blank’s ‘Burden of Dreams’, which followed the troubled production of ‘Fitzcarraldo’. Blank would also direct the bizarre documentary ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’, in which our hero valiantly delivers on a bet he lost with filmmaker Errol Morris, where Herzog offered to eat his own shoe if Morris ever completed the film ‘Gates of Heaven’.

Although Herzog had large elements of control over such documentaries, there exists a bizarre piece of footage from an LA based BBC interview with Mark Kermode, where during the interview, Herzog is shot in the stomach with an air rifle by an unknown gunman. To Kermode’s surprise, Herzog waves off the whole thing by declaring "It is not a significant bullet." Check it out.

A few days earlier, the actor Joaquin Phoenix laid stuck in his overturned car on a mountain road overlooking Hollywood following an accident. Phoenix tells how Herzog appeared from nowhere to pull him from the wreckage before disappearing in to the night before the emergency services arrived.

You get the sense that in a twisted polar reversal, the stories actually follow this director, with his movies, at times, becoming the by-products of a bigger picture. Now, as the first class enters into Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, the true mechanisms of one of the great cult directors are revealed for the first time by the man himself. They will already know his story; Herzog will show them his truth.

Honesty & The American Dream: When Mr California was merely Mr Universe

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Reformat The Planet

It’s amazing how music can, out of nowhere, take you down like a Bengali Tiger, wrestle with your consciousness, absorb you, engulf you with obsession and then flee you in the night. How a friend can say “Hey Douchebag, check out this old Italian 70’s synth-psych horror soundtrack that I found down the back of a couch at my local bric-a-brac shop”, and then for the next 2 weeks all you can think about is Italo-synth-horror-psych, spending all your time online, diggin’ amongst the pixels for every last scrap that you can get your filthy meat hooks on. Then another friend shatters your frenzy with “wait ‘til you hear this industrial dancehall record that the guy from Napalm Death is making under the name ‘The Bug’, your shells are gonna Bllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed!” Goodbye Italo-psych and hello to doing the boggle in a disused Berlin warehouse at 4am on a school night!

Anyway, this happened to me around a year ago when a colleague sent me a link to a music doc that was screening on Pitchfork TV for one week only. ‘Blip Festival: Reformat The Planet’ was the first time I’d ever heard Chiptune. Sure, I remember Malcolm McLaren declaring that computer game music was the new punk back in the early 90’s, but who was going to let that manchild of privilege swindle them again?

Chiptune turned out to be a scene packed with computer geeks who revel in making banging choon’s from within the 8 Bit boundaries of old consoles like the Nes, Atari and Gameboy (their Stratocaster). Sound’s gimmicky right? Well initially it is, but as this enthrallingly charming documentary unfolds the history and international reach of the genre, you start to get wrapped up in the good clean fun and nerdy exuberance of the Chiptune faithful.

The film is mainly based in New York City, where players like Bitshifter and Glomag have found a venue called The Tank, to hold regular Chipmusic nights, with some excellent background visuals adding to the club feel of the place. We then get to see what the Chiptune kids in Scandanavia and (of course) Japan are doing with the genre, developing its style out of the glitch technobeat towards more progressive leanings. These International musicians along with Chiptune enthusiasts descend on The Tank for the first annual Blip Festival, a pixelated love-in of geektastic proportions. Check out the trailer and yes, that is the Neverending Story theme!

As the doc progresses you get feeling that having started as a gimmick, Chiptune has developed a true DIY spirit, encompassing punk’s inter-community values alongside artrock’s experimentation, but with a childlike beauty that banishes the snobbish demons that haunt the houses of the aforementioned genres. Plus, you can’t help but get behind these loveable poindexters, their world is one of beauty and innocence.

After watching ‘Reformat The Planet’, I instantly hit the information superhighway to find out where I could catch my first Chiptune show. Within 2 weeks I was 200 miles away from my homestead, standing in the dingy downstairs room of The Fly on Oxford St, watching the likes of British Chiptuner’s Sabrepulse, Henry Homesweet and Syphus tear it up on the Chiptune Alliance Tour. Sure, I looked like Methuselah amongst all the fresh faces and New Era Caps, but it was worth the trip to see a real underground genre spreading it’s wings across the land to the welcoming ears and hearts of kids unaffected by the tainted commercial legacies of former youth explosions like punk and rave, even though Chiptune owes a heavy debt to both.

For the blasting of the cobwebs that my dalliance into the world of Chipmusic provided, I’m still unable to put my finger on how, 9 months on, I’m only just remembering about it now. Could it be the old adage that the best pop music should be both vital and immediately disposable? Or did someone mention Industrial Dancehall to me?

Until The Light Takes Us

Like so many genres before it, Black Metal was first delivered to the mainstream consciousness by the sensationalist tabloid headlines of the quick-buck yellow-press. But unlike punk rock and its artschool nihilism, there really was something nasty hiding behind the movement’s smudged corpsepaint and subhuman facade.

Black Metal may have been bastard born of a clutch of early 80’s thrash bands like Venom and Celtic Frost, but it wasn’t until the more defined second wave of the early 90’s broke over Scandinavia, and Norway in particular, that a scene, that was as visually challenging as it was aurally, spiralled out of control when it’s satanic pantomime stepped off the stage and in to the headlines.

With key members of the Norwegian Black Metal scene killing themselves, killing eachother, and taking the torch to the houses of the Lord, the media freakshow blasted the little regarded sub-genre from the underground in to orbit over night, unintentionally glorifying the music’s misanthropic ideals and the villainy of its wayward figureheads to a generation of bored kids.

Satan! Fire! Blood! Distortion! Sounds interesting right? Well it’s just interesting enough to warrant a kick-ass new documentary chronicling the church torching and murder of Norwegian Black Metal’s Glory Years! Check out the excellent trailer to Until The Light Takes Us below.

Crimes Against The Sleeve

I might have been getting a little carried away posting about movies on Standard Love Affair of late. You see I’ve been contributing music pieces to a kick ass site WWW.ELECTRICROULETTE.COM (check it out!!), so I’ve been getting my music fill there. But all that’s gonna change, I swear, take me back. TAKE ME BACK!!

Anyhooo, this post is gonna concern Album Artwork, or rather, Crimes Against Album Artwork by German metallers the Scorpions. Yeah, you know ‘Wind of Change’ or ‘Rock You Like A Hurricane’ (an obsession with air displacement?). Well, they’re also known for their hideous and inappropriate artwork. Lots got banned, lots got censored, all should have been burned. Still, these cheese-balls have sold over 75 Million albums, worldwide! Go figure.

Fly To The Rainbow: 1974


Good God! An early show of support for Gay Pride maybe? Perhaps not, but that is some sort of futuristic welder plane surfing through the brown night sky, proudly flying the Rainbow Flag. What does it mean? Let’s ask Uli Jon Roth, Scorpions guitarist:

"Don’t ask me what that cover means… I disliked it from the beginning. It looked ludicrous to me back then and looks just as bad today. It was done by a firm of designers in Hamburg, who had actually done a good job on the Lonesome Crow album before, but I think that time they failed miserably. As for the meaning, I can only guess, but I’d rather not…”

That’s right, looks like Scorpions didn’t exactly have much of a say in their art direction, with label and management pulling the strings. But if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem, so let’s not exonerate the band members completely.

In Trance: 1975


3 Things that go hand in hand: Fish and Chips, Scumbags and Public Transport and Metal and Sexism. The cover of ‘In Trance’ is a beautiful (but tame in contrast to later artwork) example of the latter. This was the first of many Scorpions album covers to be censored. The record finally made it to the shelves of most regions with the lovely lady’s booby blacked out.

Virgin Killer: 1976


This is as bad as they come! I’ve posted a censored version up here so that the authorities don’t think I’m some sort of pederast. That girl on the cover (Jaqueline) is 10 years old in that picture. As if that isn’t bad enough, the Douche-bag Product Manager from RCA, Steffan Böhle, who pushed hard for this cover to happen, is a relative of the kid. It’s been debated whether or not the girl was his Niece or Daughter. Who cares? Let’s just find out where he lives and toss a firebomb through his window.

As you can imagine, an album with a naked, pre-pubescent girl on the cover called ‘Virgin Killer’ rubbed more than a few people up the wrong way. It was sold in sealed black plastic or was swapped for a different image in most countries. Jesus, even Wikipedia got in to legal wrangling because it featured on their site. Do you know what Scorpions rhythm guitarist Rudolf Schenker thought of it? He thought it was a "great thing". I think he’s a “Cunt”.

Taken By Force: 1977


It’s ’77 and the Scorpions decide to give sexist and misogynistic imagery a year off and instead decide upon a photo of 2 children with guns, shooting at each other in a military cemetery in France. Nice touch, Germans!

Tokyo Tapes: 1978


If anybody was ever unclear about the homo-erotic sub context of rock n rollers, thrashing around in leather and aiming their big, electrified phalluses at each other, please allow the Scorpions to clue you in.

Love Drive: 1979


This one is probably best summed up by the guy who created it, Storm Thorgerson: "Not exactly the most politically correct scene you've ever seen. I thought it was funny but women read a different inflection into it now." Playboy Magazine voted it ‘Best Album Sleeve of 1979’. Score!

Animal Magnetism: 1980


Again, super-intellectual Storm Thorgerson, ladies and gentlemen: "That one was funny. I don't think we figured it out. We just knew there was something rude somewhere."

Love At First Sting: 1984


It was major US retailer Wal-Mart that took exception to the cover of ‘84’s ‘Love At First Sting’, depicting a dude simultaneously making out with/tattooing the thigh of this hottie. Polygram, as with many previous Scorpions albums, were forced to issue a “Clean Cover”. You see, when the company that sells the majority of your albums in the USA decides that your record is offensive, you bend over and let them be the daddy. Funnily enough, the Scorpions artwork lost its overly sexual tones following this little incident. They just got crapper.

Moment of Glory: 2000


Following in the footsteps of Metallica’s celebrated collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony on ‘S&M’, the Scorpions decided to take up an offer from the impressive Berlin Philharmonic (first extended in ’95), to perform together. The results were released as the 10 track ‘Moment of Glory’. How did Scorpions decide to celebrate their collaboration with this distinguished orchestra? By releasing the fruits on an album with a T-Rex wearing women’s jewellery on the cover. ‘Moment of Glory’ indeed.

Like I said earlier, after Wal-Mart objected to the sexual nature of Scorpions artwork, their covers went from being Badly Misogynistic to just plain old Bad. Here’s a selection from the rest of their catalogue, enjoy (if you can).