Happy New Year

Goodbye Aughts, and may the next decade be more peaceful and kind.

Happyhappy Joyjoy

I will be too crazy busy this weekend to post music, and you will be too crazy busy to listen. Have a wonderful last day of Hanukkah or Winter Solstice or Christmas!

Sunday Music: Dan Deacon

Dan Deacon's equipment setup
Photo by Milo Winningham

Apparently, I am the last person in America to see "Drinking out of Cups," Dan Deacon and Liam Lynch's hilarious CGI animation. In it, a sarcastic lizard with a Long Island accent spends most of the cartoon crudely dismissing random bizarre imagery.

I find Dan Deacon incredibly annoying, seeing how he was born a couple months after I graduated from college, yet has already accomplished enough for several lifetimes. After completing a Master's degree in "Electro-acoustic composition," he moved to Baltimore and founded Wham City, an art and music collective. Wham City helped to revitalize the arts scene in Baltimore, and created a much-needed creative gravitational pull away from Brooklyn.

Deacon's multimedia performances are big fun, with lots of audience participation and dancing, all driven by delirious/demented electro-pop played using vintage electronics and instruments. As a matter of fact, his music is so demented that I'm unsure as to whether it will stand the test of time. I doubt Deacon cares all that much; he's said one of his major influences were the Looney Tunes cartoons, and that he hoped his music would be like that produced by some "really cool six-year-olds." Here he is on local Georgia television, channeling a combination of Alvin & the Chipmunks, The Talking Heads and Mork from Ork.





Dan Deacon: Interview. From The Tape is not Sticky [Link]

Overheard: Generation Y

College students:
Boy: ...While we were there, we went to the Reagan Presidential Library.
Girl: Really?
Boy: Yeah! They have a big piece of the Berlin Wall with graffiti and stuff.
Girl: Cool!
Boy: We watched this clip of him saying "Tear down this wall," and there was a thing for little kids where they could build a wall out of blocks and knock it down. It was really cute.
Girl: Reagan was cool.
[Talk shifts to games]
Girl: I like playing dude games!
Boy: Ha ha...then you've played Frank's Adventure?
Girl: No...I don't think so.
Boy: Oh you'd love it! This guy has to get naked pics of girls but they're all cokeheads, so he has to score some coke first. It's really funny!

Editor's note: I found this game online, but could never figure out how to make money to buy the coke.

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