Your Grandma Hates You

Barbara Walters, the barometer of hip, hates the Moldy Peaches. You should care about this.

Walters interviewed indie spank-goddess Ellen Page, star of Juno, as part of her pre-Oscar primetime special and dropped a colossal bomb; she doesn’t “get” the Moldy Peaches.

And I thought she would. Like, really, I thought she’d shuffle between Wolfman Jack, the Andrew Sisters, and a pair of shoegazing acoustic stoners from New York City.

Adam Green, the half peach, shot back at Walters, claiming that because she sung part of “Anyone Else But You”, the duo’s smash hit, she clearly appreciates and even enjoys the tune.

He also managed to make this impossibly retarded foot-in-career comment: "If Michael Jordan turned out to be the biggest Moldy Peaches fan, I’d be, like, 'Join the fucking club.'

I tried very hard to find a deeper meaning to this quote but could only come up with this: Adam Green is a giant tampon.

This is, after all, a band whose album, The Moldy Peaches, was out of print because nobody gave two fruits about silly, mindless acoustic ditties recorded with low-fi equipment.

It’s only recently back in stores due to the popularity of the film, which prominently features MP’s Kimya Dawson.

This is like the worst rap battle ever; old, irrelevant lady versus young, irrelevant dude.

Not Even Mugged...

So, I didn’t die. And I owe Hoboken an apology. It was well lit, smelled good and was in no way scary or intimidating. My fault.

The same can’t be said for Be Your Own Pet.

They played Maxwell’s, a hole in a hole coffee shop/bar with an adjoining back room stage that reminded me of the cellar in Silence of the Lambs.

Dank. Dimly lit. Strings of lights tacked to the walls. A dump.

No One & The Somebodies and The King Left opened for BYOP. I thought it would be great if from now on, all of us at these shows could vote whether or not we wanted to hear the opening acts.

Like a show of hands. Majority rules, you play the crappy songs we don’t know, bark your garbled lyrics and numb us with your fuzzed out amps and keyed up drum mics.

Blah.

Anyway, BYOP ate our faces off. Jemina Pearl Abegg, donning a Disneyland kid’s tee and a black felt skirt, brought the pain early and often.

Backed by her band of male miscreants, Abegg thrashed, flailed, kicked and whipped through “Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle”, “Adventure” and “We Will Vacation, You Can Be My Parasol.”

She’s the star. She’s like 5’2”, lean, with striking platinum blond hair and a disarmingly cute speaking voice. And she will eat your first-born and punch you in the balls.

BYOP rarely announces the names of the songs they play. They don’t give a shit when people jump up on stage and freak out; no bodyguards, no security, they even let around twenty people pogo all over their instruments in the middle of a song.

They debuted a ton of new material from their forthcoming LP, Get Awkward, which drops March 18, sometimes to the chagrin of the frothy-mouthed faithful. Abegg let everyone know they’d be closing with a pair of new songs. A couple people booed. She told us to funk ourselves, seared back our skulls for about seven minutes, then exploded a pipebomb in our faces with “Bunk Trunk Skunk”, the nastiest of the nasty.

Yummy.

I Might Die Tonight!

I'm going to see Be Your Own Pet tonight in Hoboken!

And I'm terrified.

If I don't get stabbed and beaten to death in Hoboken, I'll write a review of the show in the comfort of my suburban home later in the week.

In the meanwhile, use your Ares and your LimeWire or actually go to a Best Buy and stop not knowing about Be Your Own Pet!

Give Me Your Money, I Own a Company!

If you’re one of the 28 people who still think MySpace is pretty keen and neat-o cool, you’re going to hate this.

CNN Money is reporting that MySpace is in talks with the music industry heads to launch a music-sharing site that will stream copyrighted music and sell MP3 downloads.

A quote taken from the article: “MySpace… has attempted to expand its position as a social networking site into an online media company.”

The Russian newspaper Pravda led the story with the headline “MySpace wants free music for its users”.

I know, they’re Russian, there’s probably a language barrier, they uphold the principles of Communism.

And yeah, there’s a slant here. “MySpace wants to genetically engineer unicorns for all the flightless children of the world.”

CNN Money isn’t stupid though, they know the last unicorns were killed off during the Mythical Horse Genocide of 1894.

They also know that MySpace has abandoned any semblance of peer to peer-ness and is rolling in corporate kickbacks.

It’s just one of the many steps in the process to make money via the mouse click and pillage our purses while we’re sleeping.

Yes, I have a purse. And yes, I’m opening a Walmart in my living room this summer. No shipping and handling, durh.

Well, Sure, You Could Say it Was Sublime

I was at Rowan University's Edelman Planetarium this weekend for the dual delight of a show about our solar system's prettiest planet, Saturn (I'm a wimpy nerd) and our solar system's trippiest ska-rap band from Long Beach, Sublime.

Brad and gang are the fourth band to get the laser lights treatment from Rowan (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles were all psychedelic freakouts in their own rights).

I can't think of a better way to spend five dollars. I wasn't even high or tripping and I still spazzed right along to an instrumental "Pawn Shop", the hard-charging "Saw Red" and the guitar/scratch blowout outro of "Garden Grove".

GO! It's a half hour, it's cheap, it's really, really cool. Here's a list of shows.

Three is a Lot More Than Two

Here are three songs I'm playing and liking a lot lately:

"19-20-20” by The Grates (pictured!) – I have no idea what this song is about, but Aussie lead singer Patience Hodgson grrs, growls and bounces around on this pop-punch rockalong that defies you not to dance. Hodgson rhymes ‘tigers’ with ‘liar’ and you don’t even care, you sort of nod your head and think yeah, that makes sense.

“Islands on the Coast” by Band of Horses – It might take you a few listens before you start to dig BOH, but that’s only because you’re retarded. These guys are a consistent, reliable source of heavy melodies and beautiful, grandiose progressions that will dip you deep in introspective thought and conjure the images of your ghostly ex-girlfriends. Creepy crawlie.

“Waiting for October” by Polaris – Polaris is the band that played a ton of the music for the Nickelodeon show “The Adventures of Pete & Pete.” Mark Mulchay surges and cracks on “Waiting for October”, waxing prophetic about the end of the world while riding the haunted riffs of a ‘90s indie gem, the proof that Polaris is a band that is as much a band as it is a feeling and a memory of things you used to be and things you used to do. If that sounds confusing it’s because it is.

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, on your face.

I'm pretty tired of you plugging in your iPod at a party and force-feeding us country playlists, Ludacris B-sides and club-rape, French ecstasy Eurotrash rave mash-ups. "Skat Man" better stop coming up on your Shuffle when we're in the car together, and I swear to god if you tell me you only like two Carrie Underwood songs I’m going to punch you right in your underwood.

Have you ever been around someone while they’re playing music, and you just sort of look at them and want to thrash them right in the face until their eardrums start to work again?

I feel like this all the time. Hopefully you do too.

That’s why I’m going to do everything in my power to get people back on track. I’ll review new bands and new albums, talk about my favorite places to discover music, and, most importantly, rip people for the stupid shit they put in their brains.