Shit Sandwich
Why do ‘Stonehenge’ or ‘Big Bottom’ need reworking? Why meddle with brilliance? On this occasion, the musicians on the album now include a member of the House of Lords – rock royalty indeed – but suffers from being performed and recorded by men now in their 60s. Guest, McKean and Shearer have contaminated the Tap brand before, 1992’s Break Like The Wind acting as self-parody of a parody (a ‘serody’, as one of the band might put it). The Return of Spinal Tap (1994) was barely an adequate sequel to the film, suffering from the lack of a good script, a barely worked out concept and no Rob Reiner directing. And yet, there’s something brilliant about two of the reworkings on this album.
Andrew Stevens groans as the amps go back up to 11 with Spinal Tap‘s Back From The Dead.
Music for fiction
Noise as a musical genre has long since been passe because it got so huge. Suddenly thousands of indie musicians hung up their basses and ran toward drum kits and picked up music theory textbooks and everybody was a noise artist. Shows were overflooded with drone, people looked at it as a fad instead of a movement. Some artists were working before it all blew up and some never stopped, Oneohtrix Point Never has been working at creating a higher plane of musical thinking officially since 2004, though equally before then throughout his career and life, and there is nothing passe about him.
By Nicolle Elizabeth.
The Novel’s Nervous Breakdown
Richard Marshall’s interview today with Rape New York author Jana Leo is the latest in his series of talks with Semina authors for 3:AM. You can also read his interviews with Bridget Penney, Maxi Kim and Mark Waugh.
When Love & Hate Collide
As noted in this week’s Time Out: Beat the Dust and 3:AM Magazine present an evening of Love & Hate featuring writers from the literary underground including Steve Finbow, Melissa Mann, Joseph Ridgwell, Heidi James, Mark Walton, Mark SaFranko, Paul Ewen and Will Ashon plus live music from Yardghost and Mush & Bile DJ sets.
Rape New York: Jana Leo
Active torture is an inverted form of torture, in which the figure of the tormentor is passed onto the victim. It releases the tormentor from guilt and imposes feelings of self—betrayal and humiliation onto the victim. Active torture is perverse because it creates the illusion that nothing is actually happening against the victim’s will. There is a gap between the coercion and the fulfillment of the request. Humiliation is created in the gap between being asked to perform sex and being directly forced into having sex. The victim must force herself to be raped, to dominate her own body for the rapist.
Richard Marshall‘s latest Semina interview.