On Dylan

As everyone by now knows, Bob Dylan got the Nobel prize for literature earlier today. Now, I've never really understood why people like him and his music so much. To me his music always been a bit boring and at times obnoxious, and it's not just about his singing voice. I have a strong taste for more rhythm and more vigorous beats, and you have to admit there's not much of those in Dylan's music. I have found his orchestrations noisy and incoherent, and it's something I don't like in Bruce Springsteen either. The Big Sound just escapes me. I like it when The Byrds made "Mr. Tambourine Man" into a jingly-jangly pop song.

My ex-girlfriend and the mother of my first child is a great Dylan fan. She had to have everything Dylan ever did. You can easily see this caused some difficulties between her and me - our tastes in music were too different. This wasn't the cause for us breaking up apart, but it had something to do with it. It has also cast a shadow over me and my relationship with Dylan's music. Still, whatever I do, I just can't get the taste of it.

Of course, Dylan got his Nobel prize for his lyrics, not his music. In rock music, though, they are inseparable, but as for me, I've never really cared for listening to the lyrics. I don't really know why this is - maybe it's because it reminds me of my work, reading and writing, and I want music to be something else entirely.

There are some exceptions to my views of Dylan. I like Dylan without a noisy band, like for example here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park

I just saw this TV-made movie on 35 mm print last Monday. It's supposed to be a horror movie, but it's almost a kiddie picture. The film's not very good, to put it mildly (though it was directed by veteran Gordon Hessler), but its cheerful jerkiness is entertaining throughout. Wouldn't you laugh at Gene Simmons acting badly and throwing flames out of his mouth to the sound of a lion roaring? The Kiss guys have also raybeams coming out of their eyes! And they can fly!

As for the music, I don't really care for Kiss, but some of the song are actually pretty good power-pop items.

Here's a sample from the film with "Hotter than Hell" to other lyrics.

More Overlooked Movies at Todd Mason's blog.

Italian disco at its very best

I dare you to watch this. Just how can that.. that.. that thing stay on her, even when she's shaking that.. that.. that thing of hers?

Finally it's Yuri time!

Some of you may remember that I was having a birthday party on May. As a commemmoration, I played live some songs I recorded on a C-cassette player in the late eighties. During those years I pretended to be an artist called Yuri, but I never performed live and I never distributed any of these (except to some friends and my then-girlfriend). My kid brother Matias shot some of the performances with his digital camera in May, and now I finally got to upload them in YouTube (or is it "on YouTube"). (Too bad no one captured me and Matias playing live at the same party. We were a band called National Panasonic Boys. Maybe one of these days...)

I called my music "acoustic speed metal", but it's more akin to hardcore punk in that the songs were very short, from two seconds up to 20 seconds. There are two videos now, the shorter one being "Kill Me" and the longer one being "I Am a Dead Milkman" (which, as I write in YouTube, is a tribute to The Dead Milkmen, a band which many may not remember). I introduce the songs in Finnish. I play a plastic toy guitar, in the eighties Yuri had a real guitar - but it had gone bonkers and you couldn't really tune it (not that I would've known how to do it).

Okay, here you go...


"I Am a Dead Milkman". (I talk about the psychobilly fashion a bit. I was never a billy man, but I've been somewhat fascinated by the style. The song is in Finnish. It goes something like this:

I'm a dead milkman
I'm a dead milkman
I'm a dead milkman

I used to deliver milk to people's doors
now I don't do that anymore
'cause I'm a dead milkman

etc.)

"Kill Me". (I compare this to Kurt Cobain's ("that loser", I say) "Rape Me".)

PS. There's actually a third song by me on YouTube, but you'll have to find it that yourself.

They give rock cred a new meaning

Elina was cleaning up and found a clip from the Finnish rock magazine, Rumba, that I'd saved in order to scan a piece from it and post here. It's from an interview with the Japanese rock band, Electric Eel Shock.

It says roughly like this:

"The members of the band are known to have backgrounds with lots of rock credibility. The drummer or the band was working in a factory that manifactured false teeth. The bass player played for years in a Japanese funk band, while Aki still writes about fishing for the most important Japanese fishing magazine."

Rock cred? Sure. But then I have more rock cred than these guys. I mean, I've been offered marijuana once.

(Source: Rumba 4/2008.)

African psychedelia, pt. 2

I still get a few hits on my old posts that I wrote about African music. A collection that I'd been listening to contained some pieces that I thought were more psychedelic rock or even heavy metal. Here's a link to a South-African garage/r&b band that Sarah posted and here's a link to Vum Vum's "Muzangola" that another commentator posted. On Sarah's seemingly very new blog you get a link to her radio show's podcast: check it out, it contains really interesting garage punk stuff from the sixties, from countries like Poland and Japanese! Here's a shortcut to the podcast.

Run Isaac Run

Isaac Hayes is dead. He's best remembered for Shaft, but if for nothing else, I'd remember him for this piece. (Wondering why no one has put up the scene from Kill Bill with Run Fay Run playing.)



This is also the first time me trying to embed stuff from YouTube.

Huoratron: Finnish electro at its most fierce

Check out the latest video $$ Troopers by Huoratron, the Finnish hard bleep act. May not work best on a computer screen, but the video is great and the track.. um.. rollicking?

A Kompleksi interview (and also some review!)

Here's a longish interview with my friend pHinn AKA Erkki Rautio who does very nice anti-glam electro with his band Kompleksi.

NMKY = YMCA

Just in case, you haven't seen this, here goes: YMCA by Village People, rendered into NMKY by Gregorius. I don't know who the hell this guy is and I sure don't remember this from the Hepskukkuu show, but it's hilarious anyway. (And it was intended as a parody in the beginning - so don't get any wrong ideas about Finns being totally without any wit.)

TVOD by The Normal

I've been listening to England Dreaming, a collection of pre-punk, punk and post-punk compiled by Jon Savage. One of my favourites in there is "TVOD" by The Normal, a very funny and catchy cheap synth piece. Check it out here - someone's made a nice rock video of his/her own.

Pistol Valve

From Todd Mason comes this suggestion to check out Pistol Valve, a Japanese hard-rocking band with full brass section.

They remind me of Dino Lee who was a special favourite in the late eighties. I still have two of his LP's on vinyl. Here's he on YouTube. (Bill and James may remember him, too, him being a Texan.)

MonoJunk: Finnish electro act

I've really liked the tracks the Finnish electro band MonoJunk has put up on their MySpace site. Check them out - if you're into electronica. My favourite track is "Fantasy".

Finnish electronica

If you're interested at all in either electronic music or Finnish rock scene, check out these post by my friend pHinn:

Regina has fastly become one of my favourite Finnish bands: very nice, beautiful, catchy, haunting, brittle electronic pop (with some acoustic elements). Here's their new video of their single "Paras aika vuodesta/The Best Time of the Year". They should be huge, but apparently the Finnish audience wants their stuff heavy and full of angst.

Minimal dub or whatever by Vladislav Delay here. More traditional electronic dance music by Mesak here. And some other stuff by him here. (Mesak, or Tatu Metsätähti, is actually related to pulp fiction, since his granduncle was Harry Etelä about whom I've been writing about and whose old stories I'm putting together for a collection!)

African psychedelia and heavy metal

I wrote here once that as a teenager (an eccentric one, let me tell you that) I dreamed of a new music genre: African garage rock and rock'n'roll. I wrote my own hypothetical reviews of garage punk bands coming out of Nigeria and Senegal. A year ago, I found a song that fits my scheme: Vum Vum's "Muzangola". I wrote about it here.

Now I've been listening to a collection of Nigerian funk from the seventies. It's great stuff throughout, but the most interesting thing is that there are two pieces that also fit my dream about the new genre: Tunji Oleyana and the Blenders's "Ifa" is a moody piece of weird psychedelia and Ofo The Black Company's "Allah Wakbarr" (sounds like a religious piece) is quite heavy and rollicking rock'n'roll tune, almost without any African elements. The guy - whoever he is - plays his electric guitar like Jimi Hendrix on speed.

Here's a review of the album. It says pretty much the same thing about Ofo The Black Company.

It would be interesting, though, to hear real garage punk bands from Africa. There must've been at least some in countries like South Africa and Rhodesia. But I don't think they had any African influence.