Freedom's like a rash

Viral phenomenon Queen of Vagina is reaching pandemic levels, globally. Symptoms include painting your house whore scarlet and asking strangers if you can have sex with their penis.



I've already got a red kitchen, and well, lets just say I moved straight on to Level 3 Queen of Vagina which manifests as an obsession with Nigerian disco. A vast amount of incredible disco music poured out of the country in the late 70's/early 80's, the years of Nigerian's Second Republic. A democratic government was in power for the first time in decades, the oil driven economy was booming and the growing Nigerian music industry was developing a down-tempo afrobeat influenced take on the commerical disco sound. This song by Oby Onyioha is amazing, combining a strange metaphor of freedom as a rash that keeps on spreading with references to Humpty Dumpty. Have a ball if you want it - it's your life!

Oby Onyioha - Enjoy Your Life

My funny valentine

Dee D. Jackson - Automatic Lover

Remember the future?

The Telstar satelite was launched in July 1962 and relayed the first telephone calls and television signals through space. Six weeks later the Tornados released their single Telstar, produced by Joe  Meek, one of the early pioneers of experimental electronica. It's weird distorted retro-futuristic sound was created in Meek's flat, on Holloway Road above a shoe shop, where he lived, worked, and died. He was one of the first people to treat the studio like an instrument, instead of trying to record sounds faithfully he would compress them, or layer them with echo or reverb until he got the effect he wanted.

I hadn't heard of Joe Meek or this song until last week when a friend played it for me. There's something strangely sad about it, perhaps just in retrospect. It was Meek's biggest hit, afterwards his success diminished and his paranoid grew - aggravated by his obsession with the occult, a fondness for amphetamines, and the pressure of keeping his homosexuality a secret. In February 1967 he killed his landlady with a shotgun, before turning it on himself. 

According to Wikipedia(and I'm not sure whether to believe this because it sounds too good to be true) a Scottish group called the Knits recorded a song called Passivism in the 80's which overlays passages from Marx' 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte onto samples from Telstar. It sounds mental and I desperately want to hear it!

The Tornados - Telstar

Sideways Ponytail (you better straighten up baby)

I spent the afternoon listening to italo disco and making ponytails out of cheap synthetic hair. 

Like this for example. What a performance! The flamer in the middle is such a hypocrite though.

B.B. & Band - That Special Magic(12' Version)