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I should have made three different concept albums to go with these covers. This one should have been a Kurt Russell themed concept album.
You should just look at these covers, imagine what they might’ve sounded like and… that’s the music I’ve created and put it in your head.
Dzima : Libertarianism
I really like this one. Actually I really like them all.
From now on, I’m going to start appropriating Pete’s work, tweaking it a bit and exhibiting in galleries - a bit like Richard Prince does.
Dzima’s ESCAPE FROM EARTH
For all the people who have been eagerly waiting for the next Dzima album (all three of you), the project has been shelved, stored in The Vault and will remain unreleased for the time being. I had some internal issues within my one man band so I broke up with myself - the spark just wasn’t there. Pop music has reached its terminal decline.
I feel that whenever I try to write music as if I am channeling the spirit of Steve Jobs to write the music He wants me to write; as if we’re just another colour in his multi-billion colour palette.
Anyhow, I had commissioned Pete Toms to design a cover for the album - a John Carpenter themed concept album. I’m going to post his designs and their tentative titles. This one is JOHN CARPENTER’S ESSENTIAL FILM MUSIC COLLECTION by Dzima
Lana Del Rey is brilliant. Though it’s not because of her looks or her music - if you like her songs then good luck to you. Musically they are the most obvious schmaltzy ballads, pushing all your emotional buttons, things that you’ve been conditioned to respond to by the last 50 years of Western pop music/400 years of Western tonal music. And if you still get excited or riled up about pop music in general and care about whether it’s manufactured or not, then good luck to you too.
She (or her team of producers) is brilliant because she is the ultimate internet-attention-seeking-generically-attractive-webcam-girl; she represents the logic conclusion of indie and pop music as a manufactured industry of eternal youth; the end of America as the be-all and end all dream destination for the world’s populace.
Remember when the music industry invented Alanis Morissette, how she didn’t wear make-up, dressed like a tomboy and sang from the heart? Lana is also singing these emotional lyrics, with all the right words added for spice (heaven/honey/kiss/stars/sun/etc), but at the same time she looks like this glossy magazine pinup. I mean, what is going on with the world? So even tarted up indie singers, hedge fund managers and war criminals have feelings too?
And why are you Western people so obsessed with authentic pop idols who can sing and play an instrument and with high production values in your mass media products? Wouldn’t it be great to have a world run by Jpop style entertainment “offices”. Marxy would have a ball trying to make sense of it all.
Johnny’s Jimusho takes over Corporate American Indie/Celebration of American Hegemony’s heyday
Lana is great because she’s the ultimate (and probably the last) Internet Popstar (Toms, 2006). Her work is like Christian Marclay’s The Clock, the magnum opus of Youtube collage videos - the statement to end all Youtube parodies.
Ratings: 5 out of 10 for her music; 12 out of 10 for her cultural standing/social meaning package.
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PS: I used the word “end” a lot in this text. Well, it is the end of America, the end of Europe, the end of the West and the whole of civilisation will be over soon.
And I can’t wait to start living in a tent in the outback, nearby Thunderdome, where I’ll be listening to an Anton von Webern record on a gramophone while fantasising about Lana - but only in my head, as there will be no internet in our global village.
Seeing all this commotion on the internet about LULU made me wonder whether the average Metallica or Lou Reed fan would enjoy Alban Berg’s LULU opera.
The answer is probably not. I wished they had had John Zorn producing and released an atonal noise metal album. This is ‘Berlin’ and ‘Metal Machine Music’ vs ‘Kill ‘Em All’ and ‘St. Anger’ and it should have been called ‘Loaded Vienna’.
Are people attacking Lou Reed because he’s breaking the boundaries of ‘good taste’ by going heavy metal? Are people attacking Metallica because they released an album with some old guy impersonating William Shatner yelling poetry over their riffs?
The thing is that indie people and metal heads are conservative and dogmatic in their own ways. And even though I think it’s time for baby boomers to hang up their boots and give more room to the younger generations, I’m glad Lou Reed is still alive and trolling the internet kidz (unlike David Bowie). And Lars Ulrich is always a good laugh to listen to.
This is why I like it: exactly because it’s “bad” and “failed” experiment. So guess what Pitchfork, this is the best album of the year, the decade, the MILLENIUM. 11.23/10
