“Chuck Brown’s Long Dance,” last Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine cover story about the godfather of D.C. go-go music, was an illustration of the importance of editing. Brown’s audience? “30- to 40-something African Americans.” Later we learn that his audience “is made up of mostly 30- and 40-something African Americans.” Brown’s prison stint? “Back then, Lorton was like a school,” he tells author Robin Rose Parker. Later he tells her “Lorton was a schoolhouse,” adding for good measure, “It was like a college.” And what of Parker’s assertion that Brown’s 1979 hit “Bustin’ Loose” was released “decades before his high school audience was born”? Considering today’s seniors were mostly born in 1992, those must have been some short decades! But the problems with this piece don’t end with line-editing—you have to wonder why a feature on Brown got assigned in the first place, when there is nothing new left to say about the legendary musician, who rates over 11,000 results in a Google search for “Washington Post” plus his name. However! There are still some scenarios under which a Chuck Brown feature might be worthwhile reading, as long as the Godfather is still winding up the living. For instance:

Chuck Brown’s Global War on Terrorism

It is one thing to bemoan the United States’ purported use of torture on suspected terrorists. It is another to note that 24 is a really good show, and sometimes rules have to be broken to ensure peace. While Charles Graner and Lynndie England earned prison stints for their boneheaded prisoner abuse, an elite squad of undercover psyops specialists has turned CIA “black sites” into confession factories—and there has not been an attack on U.S. soil in eight years. Thank you, Chuck Brown.

Chuck Brown Saves the Redskins

Greg Blache didn’t fire up the Skins during halftime with an emotional speech that led to last week’s win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It was actually Brown, who is secretly Sean Taylor’s uncle and has sworn to return the team’s D to what it could have been had his nephew lived. Blache is retired and living in Boca; Brown wears a full-sized suit to impersonate him on the sidelines. Also, Brown, working with Andy Garcia (uncle to Taylor’s partner, Jackie Garcia) is close to finding Taylor’s real murderer: a forensic scientist–cum–serial killer in the Miami Police Department who blamed Taylor for Rod Gardner’s lackluster career. First, however, Brown and Garcia must befriend the forensic scientist for several episodes.

Chuck Brown Invades Nashville

Bored with decades of love and adulation, Brown, a fan of Marcel Duchamp, decides to become the sort of artist who invites scorn and ridicule. Because it’s impossible for him to become a white reggae musician (and unlikely that he’ll consent to another Thievery Corporation cameo), he opts for the second best thing: black country singer. With Cleve Francis, Darius Rucker, and Cowboy Troy, Brown forms the first all-African-American country & western tribute band, the Charley Prides.

Chuck Brown, Consumer Advocate

Although his D.C. Lotto commercial is one of the catchiest spots of all time, Brown has never been able to work that marketing magic in an Eastern Motors ad. Brown’s talks with the second-chance auto store fell through when the the Godfather learned of Eastern’s tagline “Your Job’s Your Credit,” because as a successful working musician who has managed to raise children and keep himself in luxury cars and silk shirts for the last 40 years, he is savvy enough to know that nobody’s job is their fucking credit.

Photo illustrations by Brooke Hatfield

That was certainly the case last Thursday night, when the area duo and about four dozen recruits performed the 36-minute work-for-30-odd-boomboxes while walking around the Dupont area. The music itself shuffled through a few movements and themes: At times it was ambient and aquatic-sounding, while other moments were minimalistic and percussive. My favorite passage was a chaotic assemblage of found sounds—exactly the “weird, electronic jungle” that Bluebrain member Hays Holladay told me to expect last week.

After the jump, check out a 3-minute video Bluebrain made containing some highlights of the event. The group performs this Friday at The Writers Center in Bethesda as part of the ongoing “Story/Stereo” series.

Also, YouTube user haetta posted this video of the first 10 minutes of “Cakeblood”:

One of my higher-ups alerted me to your valedictory XX Files column in yesterday’s Washington Post Magazine. Imagine my surprise to discover that it was all about me!

Surprise and chagrin, to be honest. Because your column paints a horrifying picture of post-college male decadence, including but not limited to 1.) gluttony 2.) a dependency on beer and 3.) suggestively redacted Tenacious D lyrics.

The backstory, for the eavesdroppers: last summer, I was out on the town with a number of visiting friends (also recovering college a cappella types). On our way to the Russia House, a female companion begged us to sing a thing or two; we obliged with a swingin’ Jimmy Reed medley. Drawn to our unusual music, unknown women appeared on a balcony, offering beer and pie in exchange for ascent and song.

Free pie? We accepted.

What ensued was no more—I thought at the time—than a few nice songs and some light banter. Little did I know that we’d left an indelible impression on the lady of the house. Who, over a year later, would use the evening to bolster a coming-of-age narrative in the paper of record!

Now, I understand the nature of a column—you have to take your audience from point A to point B, creating symmetry and closure that may not have inhered in the events in question. So I thank you for calling us “college Romeos in shaggy haircuts” even as I forgive you for bemoaning the “salacious, operatic note[s]” of “Fuck Her Gently,” which we sang with no shortage of grace or obscenity for you and your charming guests. So you employ a sly, extended Shakespearean analogy in which—over the course of two songs!—a rapt, girlish Juliet becomes a stiff, scolding Lady Capulet. Which, you know, good for you—but it does makes us sound like scallawags.

What you must understand, Sandra—may I call you Sandra?—is that I was a different man back then. Hell, the scene in question went down last June (2008—the year of the rat, remember?), which is why I was initially puzzled at its inclusion in a September, 2009 column. I’m 24 now, Sandra*, and I’m trying to think ahead. No more beer pong parties. Time to buy two sets of guest towels. Maybe vacate that air mattress on my buddy’s floor.

So, apologies for the gross indecency. But thanks for the pie.

Yours immaculately,

Ted Scheinman

*As of two days ago, but who’s counting?

Which is how highly regarded papers end up with concert reviews like this one, published last Thursday in the Montreal Gazette. The ignorance and complete disregard for the actual music is exceeded only by the blatant misogyny.

Still wonder why journos are worried?

From tonight’s pick by Caroline Jones: “One part kitsch, one part political satire, and one part glitter, the Kinsey Sicks, describe themselves as “America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet.” The group returns to D.C. on Saturday night with a new set of parodies, skewering everyone from Condoleezza Rice to Vanna White. What began 15 years ago with four guys attending a Bette Midler show dressed as the Andrews Sisters is now an off-Broadway revue that’s traveled around the country and the world.”

Read the entire Kinsey Sicks pick for details.

Skate rock (Think Sublime’s genetic material crossed with that of Minor Threat) is a lot like milt. Some people get a mouthful of the creamy white stuff and think, “So this is fish sperm. Not bad!” Other people take a bite, move it around with their tongues, and then say to themselves, “Oh god, I just put fish balls in my mouth.” They panic. They look for a trash can, a napkin, maybe some condiments to amend the taste. They crunch up crackers and squirt cocktail sauce directly into their gaping, fishy maws.  When that doesn’t work, they spit what’s left into their hands and shove it in their pockets.

Likewise, when it comes to seeing West coast skate music live, you either like getting involuntarily spanked by drunk white chicks with neck tattoos, pierced tongues, and exposed muffin tops, and jostled by aggressive white dudes with melanoma, trap muscles that touch their ears, and tattoos denoting their area codes/favorite Stephen King villains–both sets drugged and boozed to the hilt–or you don’t. God help you if you ended up–perhaps by invite–at the 9:30 Club last night for the Jagermeister Tour without prior knowledge that you were entering White Trash Central.

My accomplice and I missed openers the Supervillains, who’ve come a long way since playing house parties in St. Cloud, Fla., and jettisoning their trombonist. Smally is still on sax and Dom is still on drums and vocals, though they brought in some guy named Skart who has dirty dreads and loves weed to sing about, well, his dreads and weed.  (Full disclaimer: I was five years behind the Supervillains at St. Cloud High School, and after catching them live my freshman year, joined the Shoehorns–a short-lived Christian ska band–on trumpet. The ska stuff wasn’t for me–I just couldn’t tongue my horn fast enough!–but I did have the privilege of dating the Shoehorns’ bassist and a diehard Supervillains groupie for an entire month, at the end of which she asked me to choose between her and my penny loafers. I chose the shoes. She dumped my ass.)

Though we missed my hometown act, we made it just in time to catch Las Vegas rapper Big B perform “White Trash Life.” When he asked the crowd, “Where my white trash hoes at?”, nearly every guy in the club raised his hand in the air and then pointed down at the nearest female. I didn’t hear the part about the hoes, so I just waved my hands for the hell of it, which earned me a wary stink-eye or two from a group of dudes in fitted black ball caps and Tapout muscle tees.

Next up was Authority Zero, a Latin- and ska-tinged punk band from Mesa, Arizona, that’s been doing this whole music thing for, like, 15 years, with almost no one noticing (which explains why it’s constantly losing members to the Air Force and other Fuck-It-Time-To-Grow-Up jobs). After running through a catalogue of maniacal punk numbers, the band played “One More Minute,” the Sublime-ish alt-rock radio hit from 2002’s A Passage in Time, but declined to launch into their anti-Iraq War cover of Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio.” The highlight of the set was Jason DeVore’s rapid-fire vocals and stage monkery on nearly every song, which earned him mad props from Pennywise’s Jim Lindberg, who is too old to jump around and likes to sing really, really slowly.

Which brings us to Pennywise, the wizened grandfathers wise godfathers of California skate punk. Aside from a guest appearance by Minor Threat bassist/guitarist Brian Baker and a ballsy rendition of “Bro Hymn” (Next to Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” it is THE rev-em-up sports song), I was more interested in Lindberg’s between-song banter than guitarist Fletcher Dragge’s oversized and overamped three-chord chest-breakers. Unlike DeVore, who’s consistently espoused an anti-authoritarian political philosophy since 1994, Lindberg is all over the place. At the beginning of Pennywise’s set, he said he approved of Obama “so far,” and that he was definitely preferable to the “last eight years of bullshit.” Later in the set, however, he gave a shout-out to the military’s work in Iraq and Afghanistan, and encouraged the crowd to give a big hand to the men and women of the armed services who are “over there, kicking ass to keep us safe and free,” despite the fact the Iraq War is the bulk of George W. Bush’s political legacy, and  hands-down the stinkiest bullshit from the last eight years.

In between those pronouncements, Dragge and Lindberg riffed on white collar drones and “emo boys who wear their sisters’ pants.” Perhaps the sloppy mix of anarchism and hypermasculine nationalism is a West coast thing, but it just seemed so…not punk. A drone’s a drone, whether it’s sporting Brooks Brothers and a Blackberry or camouflage and an M-16. Then again, the no-neck crowd might have gone apeshit–and not in a good way–if Lindberg had openly criticized the military. The band’s one attempt at inspiring political activism came when Dragge announced–not two songs before “Fuck Authority” from 2001’s Land of the Free?–”This song is for one of you fuckers, hopefully you’ll make it into the White House.” Isn’t saying “Fuck the government, unless we’re the government,” kind of like, I don’t know, Ronald Reagan famously arguing “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”?

Hawaii dub-rockers Pepper went on last, wandering onto the stage covered in sweat and wearing nothing but board shorts, and did their best to disperse the angry white-dude vibes by shouting “Poonani,” and “If you fight now, you can’t fuck later,” and flashing the triangle/vagina sign. The feel-good members of the crowd quickly caught on, bobbing their heads like a flock of pigeons and shouting “I love pussy!” while the dudes in Tapout shirts left for the curb outside to suck down some nicotine and compare choke holds. The set’s only downfall was that it was loud enough to harsh my buzz.

Arlington Arts, the good people behind the annual Rosslyn Jazz Festival, have just announced that the “predicted severity of Tropical Storm Hanna” has resulted in the festival’s cancellation. No rain date or anything…just flat canceled.

If you were planning to head out to Gateway Park on North Lynn Street to see and hear pianist Lafayette Gilchrist, harmonicist Frederic Yonnet, singer Holly Cole, or the Spanish Harlem Orchestra–for that matter, if you were planning to stay in and listen to it on WPFW’s simulcast–well, make new plans.

Watch below to see what happens when a couple of scalawags get their hands on a megaphone. Oh, the impertinence!

A few weeks back I was traveling through Cleveland and decided to make a more focused visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I wanted to avail myself of the exhibits and memorabilia that had a District angle. Wandering from floor to floor in the massive and often impressive space, however, I realized that mentions of D.C.’s impact on rock history were spare.

Sure, there were the obligatory references to Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole playing the Howard Theater, and to the Beatles’ first American concert played in D.C. But what became apparent was that according to the Rock HoF, D.C.’s singular role in rock and roll history–what it should be known for–is that of morality police.

For example, a large wall panels just inside the entrance to the main exhibit tell the story of rock and roll’s early fights against the Man.

“Rock and roll is repulsive to right thinking people and can have adverse affects on our young people.”

J Edgar Hoover, Washington DC

It doesn’t end there. Other panels reported on Tipper Gore’s decency crusade and Frank Zappa’s (pictured) appearance before Congress. And in the hip-hop exhibit is the prominently displayed letter sent by the FBI (from DC) to N.W.A’s label expressing their concern at Straight Outta Compton’s content.

Though in the interest of balance, Jim Morrison’s High School Diploma and report cards from George Washington High School in Alexandria, Va. get some wall space.

And worse: “Surely one of the primary reasons that the Beatles hold such an eminent place among contemporary popular musicians is that they, meaning chiefly John Lennon and Paul McCartney, had a strong sense of melody and wrote songs that could be played, sung, and listened to with pleasure by others.”

It’s been a rough go, lo this many decades after Let It Be, finding music that can be “listened to with pleasure,” but somehow we’ve muddled through.