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.â€� 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.

Read More “White Trash Renegades: The Supervillains, Authority Zero, Pennywise, and Pepper at the 9:30 Club” »

Stupid Hurricane/Tropical Storm.

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.

Shockapella report, RNC edition: Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha made a ruckus on Minnesota’s capital lawn after the fuzz 86′d their planned appearance onstage. The shenanigans went down on Tuesday; videos thereof appeared yesterday on Above the Fold.

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.

I admire Britannica for doing more online, especially now that the entire world is literally conspiring together to put the encyclopedia publisher out of business. But if it keeps blogging nonsense like Robert McHenry’s post today, they get everything they deserve. McHenry is the former editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia—surely the job of a fearsomely intelligent man—and he’s careful to insulate his assertions with an admission that he doesn’t keep up. But still: “It seems as though sometime in the 1950s the golden age of songwriting came to a quiet close.”

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.

Harp magazine is back. Kinda. The Silver Spring-based music magazine, which ended its run in March, has relaunched as an online-only publication, Blurt, that includes a “digizine”—a digital magazine that includes all the contents of a typical music magazine. Accessing new content is easy! If you want to read EIC Scott Crawford’s editor’s note about the mag’s new direction, here’s all you have to do:

1. Go to www.blurt-online.com.

2. Click on the magazine cover at top right.

3. Click on the “next” button.

4. Again.

5. Again. Hurry, there’s an ad for an Amy Ray solo album!

6. Read pull quote: “The question on a lot of bloggers’ lips—laptop screens–right now is, is print really dead?”

7. Realize that you can’t copy and paste said pull quote. Or e-mail the article. Or provide a direct link to it.

8. Note that, while print may be having a death rattle, ungainly Web-print hybrids are dead from the start.

Before Barack Obama took the stage in front of a crowd of 75,000 in Portland yesterday, the Decemberists played a stacked set concluding with a mass singalong on “Sons & Daughters,” with its drawn-out chorus of “Here all the bombs fade away.” The song, a rallying cry for hope, peace, and…mouthfuls of cinnamon, seemed to strike an appropriate-if-predictable tone for Obama’s largest congregation to date.

But it’s worth remembering some other theme songs that have scored the candidates’ respective campaigns. In January, Obama took mild heat when his campaign included a prominent rendition of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” at his Iowa victory bash. As the New York Post notes, the song’s refrain, famous for its assertion that of Hova’s 99 problems, “a bitch ain’t one,” struck some as a Hillary dig.

The same Post piece gives a run-down on some other notable campaign jingles, including Hillary’s invocation of the Céline Dion turkey “You & I,” also featured in a strange and maudlin campaign video with viral intent:

…not to be confused, naturally, with the 2ge+her-worthy “hillary4u+me”:

Elsewhere, the ever-provocative RightWingNews.com offers suggestions for the DailyKos “Obama Theme Song” list, with snarky offerings from the Platters‘ “The Great Pretender” to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” to “Cocaine,” which they bafflingly attribute to ZZ Top. (Come on, guys, even Republicans should know their J.J. Cale from their ZZ Top.)

Meanwhile, Harold Meyerson’s most recent op-ed in the Washington Post puts forth a promising possibility for McCain’s theme song going into the general election:

If the McCain campaign is still trying out songs, there’s one by a couple of Brits, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, that it should consider. We have to change the words “an Englishman” to “American” to get it to work, but, that done, the song expresses succinctly and entirely the case for John McCain and, by implication, against Barack Obama:

For he himself has said it,
And it’s greatly to his credit,
That he is American!
That he is American!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sum total of the Republican message this year…. For some, “American” is a race — white — no less than a nationality, and it’s on this equation that Republican prospects depend.

Not exactly the scathingest thing Meyerson’s ever written, but an apt choice for the whitest party (no black national politicians; blacks compose 2 to 4 percent of the Republican electorate across the board) since Alexander Kerensky got drunk with a gang of polar bears.

In short, Jackie Wilson–whose”Higher” rates only seventh on the Daily Kos list–is most likely absent from the McCain campaign’s iPod Shuffle….

…the closest thing being “Johnny B. Goode,” which (for a while) was nearly as ubiquitous at McCain victory rallies as Joe Lieberman. For a while, I dug the choice (Chuck Berry, not Joe Lieberman), until I did the math and realized that when the single came out in ‘58, McCain was already too old to think it was cool.

Next stop on the Straight-Talk Express: Perry Como.

Think you’ve got a snappy choice for campaign theme song? Tell us about it in the comments.

Time spent at the concert: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

Time spent in the car getting to and from the concert: 6 hours, 50 minutes.

Cost:

• 2 tickets - $66.50 each.
• 1 parking ticket for the only available (metered) space in my neighborhood when I got home at 1:30 am - $30.
• 1 ruined pair of shoes.
• 1 even more ruined pair of socks.
• Seeing Liars’ set.
• Any chance that I’ll ever go to Nissan Pavilion again.
• The credibility of Radiohead’s self-righteous prattling about the benefits of getting to the show via carpooling and/or public transit.

And apparently, I was one of the lucky ones.

“The whole thing seems designed not to let Sonny talk,” said my companion last night at the event that Washington Performing Arts Society advertised as “A Conversation with Sonny Rollins.” Perhaps the more accurate “An Evening of Jazz Scholar/XM Radio Host Dick Golden Telling Irrelevant, Self-Serving Stories and Occasionally Asking Sonny Rollins to Respond to Them” was too long for the handbills.

During the 90-minute program at the Freer Gallery, Rollins spoke for perhaps 25. Five minutes was occupied by audience questioners; the remaining hour was a waste. Golden filled it by recounting his own encounters with Tony Bennett, Count Basie, Gary Giddins, and others; these were often connected to some tenuous end, Golden turning to Sonny and saying “How did YOU feel about him?” Mostly, though, they emphasized how well-traveled Golden was in jazz circles and how much he loved hearing himself speak.

Even more dubious, Golden frequently paused to play recordings–none of which were Rollins’, but were instead by Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra–assumedly because these had greater value in understanding Rollins’ musical development than, say, Rollins actually discussing his musical development.

Despite these concerted attempts to trivialize him, Rollins had some interesting things to say. He talked about the importance of growing up in a musical family, and in Harlem during its Renaissance. Asked about his creative process, he discussed it in terms of the burden he places on himself when he goes onstage: “It’s not about whether the audience is good or bad. It’s up to me to give them something good or bad.”

In this case, however, it was also up to the evening’s host to give us a good or bad experience with Sonny Rollins. By that standard, it was a train wreck.