Prairie Pop
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Prairie Pop

Grrrls gone mild

by Kembrew McLeod

Paradigm shifts typically happen in the abstract–at the level of the Big Picture–not right in front of your eyes, real time. Nearly 20 years ago, I watched and heard the musical-cultural ground move under my feet in the dank basement of my next-door neighbor’s house (typically not the type of place where a shifting paradigm takes place).

“We want revolution, GIRL STYLE NOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWW,” Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna howled during the kick-start of the band’s set. I was standing just four or five feet away, eyes bugged out with jaw on ground. At 21, I had seen a few memorable things in my brief semi-adult lifetime, but never anything like that.

Posted inArts & Entertainment, Prairie Pop

Fueling the Fire

by Kembrew McLeod

Prairie Pop: May 2010 – British collage artist Vicki Bennett balances her avant-garde sensibilities with a dose of goofiness–perhaps more so than some of her other peers in the sound collage underground. The British experimental music magazine The Wire describes her music as “a freeform, unfolding imaginary landscape that is liberally peppered with slapstick.” Bennett–who performs under the name People Like Us–demolishes the demarcations between high and low culture, and she has brought her unique aesthetic to highbrow arbiters such as Tate Modern, the Walker Art Center, and the BBC.

Posted inArts & Entertainment, Prairie Pop

Pitch Imperfect

by Kembrew McLeod

Prairie Pop: April 2010 – Apparently, the naked human voice isn’t good enough. Whether we’re talking about studio gimmickery or vocal tricks not aided by technology–Appalachian yodeling and Tuvan throat singing come to mind–we’re often suckers for interesting oral freak-outs. Voice alteration gizmos soon began popping up in hit singles of the 1970s and 1980s–applying […]

Posted inArts & Entertainment, Prairie Pop

Prairie Pop: Pop Summit

by Kembrew McLeod

Springtime is here, and I’m ready to rock: in this case, at the Experience Music Project’s Pop Conference, held last month in Seattle. It’s one of my favorite places to be, for a variety of reasons. The event attracts a diverse mix of music-obsessed scholars, journalists, critics, musicians, and other misfits—a strange brew that injects […]

Posted inArts & Entertainment, Prairie Pop

Prairie Pop: 12 Days…To Drown Out Holiday Muzak with Twisted X-mas Rock.

by Kembrew McLeod

Organized religion is responsible for more bloodshed than any institution in human history, but Christmas music is its biggest sin. I hate those songs—and the hegemony they hold over the airwaves, public spaces and every nook and cranny of our subconscious in the weeks leading up to Jesus’s birthday. Nevertheless, I make an exception for […]

Posted inArts & Entertainment, Prairie Pop

Prairie Pop: Turn Off Your Radio

by Kembrew McLeod

Copyright infringement, billboard “alteration,” an evil secret society known as the Illuminati, country music legend Tammy Wynette, the incineration of £1,000,000 in cash, and—most recently—No Music Day. These odd, interconnected events were engineered by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, an anarchic British pop duo who used several pseudonyms, including their most well known moniker, the […]

Posted inArts & Entertainment, Prairie Pop

Mix It Up

by Kembrew McLeod

[audio:Double_Dee_Steinski_-_Lesson_1_The_Payoff_Mix.mp3] Double Dee & Steinski – The Lesson 1 – The Payoff.mp3 [audio:Double_Dee_Steinski_-_Lesson_2_The_James_Brown_Mix.mp3] Double Dee & Steinski – The Lesson 2 – The James Brown Mix.mp3 [audio:Double_Dee_Steinski_-_Lesson_3_History_of_Hip_Hop_Mix.mp3] Double Dee & Steinski – The Lesson 3 – History of Hip Hop.mp3 The most unlikely outsiders to make a distinct, lasting impact on hip-hop were two ad […]

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