This doco by Todd Phillips focusses on a Murder Junkies tour in the late 80's and it includes much NSFW footage of Allin in action, along with evidence that he carries his posture of being anti-everything other than gutter-level perversion and random psychotic violence into everyday life. In addition, we get to meet some of the other "characters" in his band, like his doting Hitler-mustachioed brother, Merle, and a hippy drummer who performs naked because clothes irritate his skin. There are also great back story interviews with uncomprehending former teachers and bemused schoolmates; and a fan who shares John Wayne Gacy's assessment of GG's personal hygiene with us.

And, finally, let me repeat: this doco is very very NSFW...

Warren Jeffs attempted to do this in 2005 with a 14 year female cult member who had been promised to her 19 year old cousin. After being repeatedly raped by her assigned spouse, she went to the police and, on the basis of this and other charges, Jeffs was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in late 2007. After this, the authorities entered the FLDS compound in El Dorado, Texas, to look for more evidence of under-aged marriages - most of which would naturally have been arranged by Jeffs. (As part of these investigations, the FBI are now engaging in mass DNA testing of sect children to establish if any of them are the offspring of illegal unions.)

And what of Jeffs musical career?... Well, he initially found musical "fame" via samples of one of his racist/homophobic sermons that were incorporated in the song "Warren Jeffs Explain" by Chicago experimental rock band Kinkzoid. Recently though, it has come to light that Jeffs wrote and recorded songs of his own and the compound where the sect was based was even named after one of them - "Yearning For Zion". Kinkzoid's song can be heard on their MySpace page; Jeffs' own composition, which is a syrupy concoction of tremeloed synth, gentle piano and his drenched-in-saccahrin vocals, comes to us from the good folk at WFMU.

Warren Jeffs - Yearning For Zion

The Olympic torch relay is currently working its way nervously through its Australian leg and much as I sympathise with and support the current round of protests against it, I know that if similar actions had been taken in the lead up to the Olympics in my own country in 2000, then there would have been widespread domestic outrage and demands for the modern equivalent of a hanging, drawing and quartering of anyone involved. (Even if such protests were entirely justified, it wouldn't matter... that's the sort of country Australia is.)

So it comes as no surprise whatsoever to discover that a group of Chinese punters have responded to the recent torch relay protests by recording and distributing a cheesy piece of Mando-Pop that savages Western media coverage and has an accompanying video with images of Josef Goebbels.

The song is called "Don't Be Too CNN" and the YouTube version of it can be viewed above. The lyrics (which were translated by Wall Street journalist Sky Canaves) go something like this:

CNN
CNN's warped reporting on Tibet, and the Tibetan separatist attacks on
the Beijing Olympics torch relay, made me write this song
CNN
Don't be too CNN
That day on the internet I suddenly saw a photo
It showed the riots taking place in Tibet
CNN
CNN's simple promise, the whole truth is inside
But I gradually discovered, it's actually deception
No matter how much the world changes, the blue sea becomes a field of
mulberry trees
The fake South China tiger and this kind of photo [CNN Lhasa image], I
despise them equally
You can't turn lies into the truth by repeating them a thousand times,
The dark night makes my eyes black, but I will still use them to seek the light
CNN
How they rack their brains, to turn falsehoods into the truth, don't be too CNN
How can you possibly turn Jay Zhou into Li Yuchun?
CNN
How they rack their brains, to turn falsehoods into the truth, don't ever be CNN
I preferred that you all just be very stupid and very naïve
I preferred that you all just be very stupid and very naïve

Some musicologists have speculated that it might be a Dolceola, a commercially-produced early twentieth century cross between a toy piano and zither, but according to the engineer who recorded Phillips, the instrument was a homemade creation that "nobody on earth could use except him".

Over the years, Phillips' work has appeared on a variety of compilations and has been released in full by several labels (most recently Yazoo and Mississippi). For your listening pleasure, I'm passing on two tracks that have been covered by famous fans of Phillips. (The first one appeared on a 1971 album by Ry Cooder, and the second was covered by Will Oldham's band, Palace Brothers, in 1993.)

Washington Phillips - Denomination Blues
Washington Phillips - I Had A Good Father And Mother

Back in 1999, Freezepop had just started out as an electro-pop outfit in Boston when one of their members, Kasson Crooker, signed on as a sound designer and composer at Harmonix, a games house devoted to vocal/instrumental “karaoke” games. In the years that followed, Harmonix released a series of well-received games of this sort and all the while, Crooker was there, inserting Freezepop songs into many of the projects he worked on. Then, in 2005, Harmonix (and Freezepop) hit serious paydirt with the outrageously successful Guitar Hero. As the franchise grew into a phenomenon, Freezepop became a band with a million fans who not only heard their music but played along with it.

(Ironically, this band - who became the catalyst for a million masturbatory guitar-god fantasies - contains no guitars and even revels in that most “unrock” bastard child of the guitar – the keytar…)

Here’s an 8-bit remix of Freezepop’s first video game outing – Science Genius Girl

If you were an aspiring Jewish songwriter in New York in the first decade of the 20th Century, then your first port of call was vaudeville and this would invariably mean writing Jewish minstrel songs. Just like their “black” counterparts, these songs were parodic riffs on contemporary stereotypes of Jews. Unlike them though, they were written by Jewish songwriters for a Jewish audience. And they weren’t just a fringe activity – one of the greatest American songwriters of the early 20th century, Irving Berlin, started out penning songs like “Cohen Owes Me $97”, a minstrel ditty about a Jewish businessman on his deathbed who is obsessed about the money owed to him by one of his debtors.

In addition to providing amusement to a Jewish audience, these songs were popular with the gentiles who perceived them as pandering to their anti-Semitic tendencies. Probably for this reason, they remained largely concealed for much of the latter part of the 20th century and have only really come to light with the release of the Jewface compilation in 2006 (which jokingly refers to itself on its cover as “Perhaps The Most Offensive Album Ever Made”.) And here, from that album, is a 1908 tale of inter-racial love in the Wild West.

Edward Meeker – I’m A Yiddish Cowboy

Good Lord... I'm gobsmacked. Not so much by the limber-limbed MC Hammer wannabe in this clip, but by the mother who continues impassively knitting while her hyperactive son gets jiggy all over their living room. (via Metafilter)

Ngo Mebou Melane - Paul Pendja Ensemble
Smyrneiko Minore - Marika Papagika

The album is released on the Dust To Digital label and can be purchased from their website.

It was originally recorded back in 1860 by Frenchman Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville using a device called the phonautograph that traced the soundwaves out on a piece of blackened paper. At the time, however, there was no way of playing back the recording. The fact that we can hear it now is thanks to the work of the First Sounds project who created a "virtual stylus" to translate Scott de Martinville's 148 year old etchings into sound.

The song that the woman is singing is Au Clair De La Lune. (via SMH & Metafilter)

Right now, it’s a dangerous time to be an emo in Mexico. Venture outside with your overgrown angular fringe and eyeliner and you’re likely to be beaten senseless by local punks (or rockabillys or metalheads). The reason for such violence is the automatic association of effete dress codes with homosexuality; something which is a complete anathema to other supposed “alternative” types in Mexico.

Although ignorant thuggery by any subculture is deplorable, it's particularly sad to see such outbursts of homophobia from people who identify as punks; especially when you consider who originally inspired the name and style of that movement...

Well, that’s what you get with Chinoiseries, an album by French DJ Onra which came out of a visit to the land of his grandparents, Vietnam. While he was there, a local taxi driver helped him acquire 30 platters of 50’s & 60’s Viet-pop, and an orphanage worker named M. Hoa inspired him to produce something that might raise money for local street kids.

The 32 tracks on this album are all short, loop based affairs that revel in the melodies and crackly textures of their battered vinyl source materials. Here are two sample tracks:

The Anthem - Onra
I Wanna Go Back - Onra

The album can be purchased from Piccadilly Records and proceeds go to La Goutte d’Eau.

For the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, it’s a chance to advertise their desire to join the European mainstream, but in a region embroiled in long-standing dormant conflicts, it can also be a lightning rod for local enmities. This year, for instance, when Armenia announced its entry, which was to be performed by local starlet Andre Sirusho (pictured), Azerbaijan was enraged by the fact that Sirusho hails from the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh and was singing a “stolen” Azerbaijani folk song that they had planned to enter themselves. Since then, it seems that the Armenians have opted for a different song, but it’s unlikely that this will be the end of the issue…

Whatever the outcome, you can look to Global Voices Online for any developments that might emerge. They also have links to all three Caucasian entrants for 2008.

The Harding Test is a set of algorithms that measure the level of rapid cuts, flicker patterns, and strobe effects in a piece footage, and their subsequent ability to induce epileptic fits in susceptible viewers.

It’s a test whose need became readily apparent after a 1997 “epidemic” of seizures that accompanied the screening an episode of the Pokemon series in Japan. (In that particular episode, the seizures were triggered by strobing red lights emanating from the eyes of the signature character, Pikachu.)

Recently, its most notable application was the temporary ban of the video of Gnarls Barkley’s new single “Run” (see the above piece of YouTubery) by British MTV. The supposedly seizure inducing part of the clip appears towards the end when moiré patterns swamp the background and flickering images of the word “RUN” worm their wary into the video.

What we’ve seen less of, though, are bottom-up models that help individual artists farm an income on their own terms from internet distribution of their work.

Enter the 1000 True Fan Plan… Quite simply, it’s the idea that all you need as an artist is 1000 “true fans” (ie people who will religiously purchase anything you produce.) If you can provide this fan base with a steady supply of new product that they will happily spend up to $100 a year to acquire, then you have created a revenue stream that you can comfortably live on.

Featured on this LP only release are an assortment of preachers and pious lay folk who know how to attack a tune and could quite easily have become "rock stars" in their day if they hadn't had such a disdain for the "devil's music". (One of the artists on the album, Reverend Lonnie Francis, even claimed to have been "offered a lot of money to play rock & roll". He consistently turned such offers down, however, and reveled in his ability to blow rock bands off the stage with his untouchable brand of sacred lap steel.)

On the show today, we featured three tracks from the LP. The first was "Seat in The Kingdom", a fairly straight ahead gospel number by The Crumb Brothers, an underage quartet who are notable for the astonishing vocal chops of their ten year old lead singer, "Sugar". This was followed by a 1956 anti-rock sermon by Elder Charles Beck which probably would have out-rocked almost anything else recorded at that time. The third track is something of an enigma; an abstract slide-guitar reworking of Amazing Grace by an unknown Oakland musician. It only came to light when it was saved from a fire by a local record collector who perished rescuing his kittens and the rest of that collection.

The Crumb Brothers - Seat In The Kingdom
Elder Charles Beck - Rock N Roll Sermon (Radio Edit)
Oakland's Famous One Man Band - Amazing Grace

The album that all of these tracks come from came out last year on Mississippi Records. The release though was small and most of it was snapped up fairly quickly, so you might have to dig to find a copy. Mine, which I picked up about a month ago, came from German distributor, Music Berlin, who might hopefully still have a few tucked away.

FOOTNOTE: If you haven't checked in on the radio version of Rummage, you're running out of time to do so. In the next month or so, a restructure of the drive time band on 2SER will lead to the canning of the segment. I don't have a definitive date for its demise as yet, but I will keep you posted on any developments. (If you don't already know, it's currently broadcast and streamed online between 4pm & 5pm on Monday afternoons, Aussie Eastern Standard Time.)

Musically, El Touchy sounds like a slightly brain-fried Herb Alpert outtake; but the thing that makes it truly memorable is the fact that Luie bookends the music with some seriously effusive commentary in which he elaborates upon the structure and purpose of the Touchy. (In short, it begins with a wild trumpet intro that will prompt you to engage in uninhibited physical contact, then ends with a series of rhythmic stabs that signal the cessation of “touching”.)

The rest of the album that this track comes from follows a similar pattern – an impassioned preamble in which Luie intones nuggets of wide-eyed philosophy (mostly related to physical contact) followed by some increasingly demented take on lounge jazz.

For a long time, the album was a hard-to-find, much-sought-after artifact of musical weirdness but now, thanks to Companion Records, Touchy has been released on CD; complete with “Touchy Buttons” that listeners can attach to body parts that they want their partners to “touch”... Here are two tracks from the CD for you to enjoy:

Luie Luie – Touch Of Light
Luie Luie – Lord What A Wonderful World