Music Archives — Page 6 of 50 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

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You ought-sa know

December 16, 2009

FEBRUARY 2000

Christina Aguilera defeats Britney Spears in the Battle of the Midriff-Baring Blondes (i.e., wins the Best New Artist Grammy). The first words of her acceptance speech are "Oh my god, you guys!"

APRIL 2000

Pop goes the world: ‘N SYNC sells 2.4 million copies of No Strings Attached (Jive) in its first week of release, a sales record which still stands. To date it has sold over 15 million copies.

Metallica files suit against Napster, accusing internet pirates of stealing their booty — er, royalties.

Pop goes the world, part two: Britney Spears releases Oops! … I Did It Again (Jive). Album title will take on extra meaning in 2004, when Spears takes the vows twice in a single year (her first marriage is annulled after 55 hours; her second produces a pair of sons in quick succession).

MAY 2000

Eminem releases The Marshall Mathers LP (Aftermath). Two years later, he picks up a Best Song Oscar for "Lose Yourself," the theme from his critically-acclaimed 8 Mile. Eminem’s cinematic success was not to be repeated by his otherwise successful protégé, 50 Cent (see: 2005’s dismal Get Rich or Die Tryin’).

OCTOBER 2000

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (Interscope) drops; it’s an early contender for worst album title of the decade. Related: "Limp Bizkit" is probably the worst band name of all time.

FEBRUARY 2001

Jennifer Lopez has the number one album (Epic’s J.Lo) and movie (The Wedding Planner) in the country. Media frenzy peaked with Bennifer fever (2002) and national-punchline Gigli (2003).

JULY 2001

Mariah Carey’s downward spiral begins, including a bizarre appearance on MTV’s Total Request Live and the ill-timed release of Glitter, soon after the September 11 attacks. Carey later reclaimed her pop-diva throne with 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi (Island).

AUGUST 2001

Aaliyah dies in a Bahamas plane crash.

SEPTEMBER 2001

America: A Tribute to Heroes airs on all major networks. It’s the first in a series of concerts featuring big-name performers that would crop up after every major disaster throughout the decade, including the Indonesian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the death of Michael Jackson.

APRIL 2002

Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes dies in a car crash in Honduras.

JUNE 2002

R. Kelly is charged with having sex with a minor after a certain videotape goes viral. "Trapped in the Closet," his 22-part 2005 "hip-hopera," proves even more fascinating.

SEPTEMBER 2002

Kelly Clarkson wins the first season of the hugely popular talent contest American Idol. In Clarkson’s wake: pop stardom, fellow success stories like Carrie Underwood (and failures — anyone seen Taylor Hicks lately?), a zillion rip-off competition shows, a thousand moments of zen with Paula Abdul, and the baffling "Claymate" phenomenon.

NOVEMBER 2002

Michael Jackson. Blanket. Balcony.

DECEMBER 2002

Whitney Houston informs Diane Sawyer that "crack is wack."

FEBRUARY 2003

Famed producer and legendary oddball Phil Spector arrested after a woman he’d just met, actress Lana Clarkson, is shot to death in his mansion. In 2009, after two trials (the first ended in a mistrial), he’s found guilty of second-degree murder.

At a Rhode Island nightclub, 100 people are killed when a fire breaks out during a Great White concert.

MARCH 2003

On the eve of the Iraq War, Dixie Chick, Texan, and American hero Natalie Maines informs a British crowd: "We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas." Backlash, and a feud with uber-patriotic fellow country star Toby Keith — who had a 2002 hit with "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)" — ensues.

AUGUST 2003

Madonna smooches Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards. Oh my god, you guys!

SEPTEMBER 2003

Johnny Cash goes to meet the Ghost Riders in the Sky. Two years after his death, Walk the Line gives him Hollywood biopic treatment; Reese Witherspoon picks up an Oscar for portraying June Carter, who died just months before her husband.

NOVEMBER 2003

Michael Jackson is arrested for child molestation, not long after the broadcast of Martin Bashir’s fairly skeevy Living with Michael Jackson interviews.

Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica debuts. (Spoiler: they get divorced in 2006!)

FEBRUARY 2004

Janet Jackson. Superbowl. Boob.

JUNE 2004

Dave Chappelle’s Lil John imitation became the imitation you loved to imitate. Whuuut?

AUGUST 2004

Look out, brah! A bus belonging to the Dave Matthews Band dumps 800 pounds of shit off a Chicago bridge and onto a tour boat.

OCTOBER 2004

Ashlee Simpson pulls a Milli Vanilli on Saturday Night Live.

DECEMBER 2004

Heavy metal guitarist Dimebag Darrell shot to death while performing in Columbus, Ohio.

FEBRUARY 2005

YouTube is born.

JUNE 2005

Michael Jackson found not guilty. Dove Lady celebrates.

SEPTEMBER 2005

"George Bush doesn’t care about black people." — Kanye West, during NBC’s live "Concert for Hurricane Relief."

JANUARY 2006

High School Musical airs. Sequels, worldwide fame for even lesser cast members, and nude photo scandals await.

MARCH 2006

Three 6 Mafia win an Oscar for Hustle and Flow jam "It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp," which they perform live at the ceremony as fossilized Academy members gape in confusion.

JUNE 2006

Over a quarter of a million people download "Hips Don’t Lie" in its first week online, despite the fact that the Shakira track is so utterly inescapable it’s incredible anyone would choose to listen to it during any spare moments when it wasn’t playing already.

OCTOBER 2006

Amy Winehouse releases Back to Black (Island Records); the would-be retro pop queen’s career screeches to a halt after various addictions take hold. For the next few years, Winehouse’s downfall is gleefully chronicled and circulated by paparazzi worldwide.

FEBRUARY 2007

American Idol also-ran Jennifer Hudson wins an Oscar for her supporting performance in Dreamgirls. The gracious Hudson somehow keeps the phrase "In your face, Simon!" out of her acceptance speech.

Britney Spears. Clippers. Hair. (Chris. Crocker.)

JUNE 2007

The Sopranos airs its last episode. Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin" becomes a new-old sensation.

OCTOBER 2007

Radiohead self-release In Rainbows, allowing customers to determine their own price for the album’s download.

DECEMBER 2007

Jamie Lynn Spears, 16-year-old sister of Britney, announces she’s knocked up. Oh my god, you guys!

APRIL 2008

Miley Cyrus lets Annie Leibovitz take a vaguely smutty photo of her for Vanity Fair.

AUGUST 2008

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, a.k.a. Lady Gaga, releases The Fame (Interscope). Pop domination imminent.

SEPTEMBER 2008

Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and Adam "DJ AM" Goldstein are the sole survivors of a small plane crash in South Carolina. Goldstein is found dead in August 2009, leading to more than one tasteless Final Destination joke.

NOVEMBER 2008

Long-gestating, near-mythical Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy (Geffen) finally drops. World shrugs, admits they’ll always prefer Appetite for Destruction (Geffen) no matter what Axl does from here on out.

FEBRUARY 2009

Christian Bale’s angry rant at a crew member on the set of Terminator: Salvation becomes an Internet sensation. A dance remix follows almost instantaneously. "What don’t you fucking understand?"

Chris Brown beats up then-girlfriend Rihanna. He pleads guilty in August; as part of his sentence, he must stay 100 yards away from Rihanna (10 yards at public events) for five years.

JUNE 2009

Michael Jackson dies.

SEPTEMBER 2009

Berkeley Repertory Theater premieres American Idiot, a musical based on the 2004 Green Day album.

"Taylor, I’m really happy for you, and I’m gonna let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time." — Kanye West, MTV Video Music Awards. This is the only interesting thing that has ever happened to Taylor Swift.

Aughties Bay Area

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December 16, 2009
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Illustration of Kyp Malone, Joanna Newsom, and Devendra Banhart by Matt Furie and Aiyana Udesen

Picture ’06, the aughties about half over. Alissa Anderson, cellist of the sweet and elegant Bay Area country-folk ensemble Vetiver, was positively boiling.

"I think if you ask anyone who gets labeled as freak folk, they’ll basically tell you they think of it as f-cking garbage and insulting. It’s not accurate, and it’s just a cop-out."

Anderson — the DIY fashion impresario of Mittenmaker and the rock photog who went on to publish a tome via Chronicle Books — was no wilting violet, no shy refugee from a well-behaved string quartet. She only resembled a curly-maned Mucha poster girl crossed with Maria Schneider. In the halcyon days of ’06, she was royally pissed about the way her band — led by then-domestic partner Andy Cabic, musically and "spiritually" supported by Devendra Banhart — had been tagged as flaming freaks. This after Vetiver was plopped above the fold like overseeing avatars in a flashy New York Times photo collage illustrating a big, fat feature on the out-folk, "New Weird America," altogether-psychedelic movement. Booty-danced by Lindsay Lohan and wooed by Karl Lagerfeld? For Banhart and Vetiver’s crew it was just part of the hallucinatory passing parade of hairy fairies, gentle noise visionaries, and elegant acid explorers.

And it was just another Saturday night as the San Francisco Bay Area’s teeming subcultures, multitudinous lifestyles, and micro-tribes met in the evening shade. At SF’s last-call witching hour of 1:45 a.m., in the thick of the transformative and transfigurative ’00s, Anderson was in the car, looking for the night’s next after-hours warehouse party, and I was in search of a way to encapsulate the Bay scene, somehow, in print.

I followed Anderson from dusty gravel parking lot to her DJ friend Muffin’s soiree. The Dogpatch warehouse he shared with other musicians, artists, and the odd Web jockey was surrounded by heavy industry — trucking and transporting companies, old cement factories — and sat smack atop an auto repair garage known to emanate noxious fumes.

But what a great space for a raging party. Anderson grabbed and hugged pals as we climbed the skinny, swerving stairs to a large, rectangular space overlooking a street populated by hipster insomniacs. The difference between this and other clubs? Everyone was dancing to the rock-hard, grimy techno. I spied Anderson as she disappeared behind a massive piece of furniture into another room, while the evening’s live band, the Sixteens, prepped for a set of sharp, shattered art-punk that wouldn’t be out of line on a late-1970s Mudd Club bill.

Welcome to the Bay Area music scene, underground, overground, and increasingly known throughout the country during the ’00s for the hard-partying, house-rocking, artistically (and, at brief moments, commercially) ambitious ways that it swings. Chalk it up to the Summer of Love and its legacy of acid tests, its rotating doors of psychedelic perception, and taste for bold experimentation. Or to Sly Stone and his Owsley-fried knack for hybridizing funk and pop. Or to Too Short and 2pac and their street-level rap touched by heroic dealers and neighborhood Panthers. Or to an anthemic Green Day and its politicized Gilman Street punk, and a garage-days-to-arena-stages Metallica and its thrash nation. Or even to the massive creative infusion that came to the Bay with the dot-com Gold Rush, and then suddenly found itself with free time after the tech crash — young, imaginative minds that viewed the last psychedelic revolution as a starting point.

Witness the Friday night scenes at the Mission District’s Adobe Books, where artists and fans spilled out onto the street, socializing and sloshing red wine, to see microscopic, well-curated exhibits and hear a local band or two. Or the memorable one-offs that might find you stumbling down a rocky Caltrain track in the pitch black, after the trains stopped running at midnight, to hear DJs play in the tunnels. Or the Oakland parties of local music dynamo Vice Cooler.

Onetime SF Art Institute undergrad Banhart and Mills College compositional major Joanna Newsom might have drifted away by ’06, but the Bay Area rock, noise, and electronic scene still boasted binaries and beyond — Comets on Fire and High on Fire, Music Lovers and Lovemakers, Finches and Faun Fables, Deerhoof and Clipd Beaks, Rogue Wave and Thee More Shallows, Kid 606 and Six Organs of Admittance.

In the last half of the aughties, Thee Oh Sees, the Dodos, Ty Segall, Nodzzz, Wooden Shjips, Jonas Reinhardt, Mi Ami, Sleepy Sun, Sholi, Howlin’ Rain, Colossal Yes and more joined the locals crew, while onetime NorCal-ers like !!!, the Rapture, and Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio made a splash on the other side of the continent. Arthur magazine caught the Bay Area tailwind, swathing its covers with the images of Bay-bred performers, which fed a sister scene down south. How did one get a handle on such a sprawling sonic landscape populated by the children of Blue Cheer and Moby Grape, Brian Wilson and Neil Young?

By going out every night and then some — and why not? There was always something going on — and though so many of these talents didn’t bust out into the mainstream like Lady Gaga or Weezer, the Bay made its presence known, big time, as a site of audio and music technology revolution amid the chat and twitter of the overall tech boom.

The Bay — once home to Universal Audio innovator Bill Putnam (who developed stereo recording and studio essentials like the 1176 and LA-2A compressors) and Redwood City magnetic tape giant Ampex (supported by Hillsborough retiree Bing Crosby) — has, in the aughties, changed the ways music is made and listened to. Daly City’s Digidesign produces Pro Tools, the widely adopted digital recording platform that transformed the sound of studio-produced music in the ’00s. Cupertino’s Apple and its iPod, iTunes, and Garageband sped the spread of digital music, the demise of physical product, and gave everyone with a MacBook a tool to make their own beats, podcasts, and songs.

Napster brought file-sharing to new highs, or lows, depending on whether you think "information wants to be free" or "home-taping is killing music," until Bay neighbor Metallica brought it down. East Bay-bred DJ Shadow made it into Guinness World Records in 2001 for supposedly creating the "first completely sampled album" with … Endtroducing (Mo’ Wax, 1996). UC Berkeley grad and MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson brought DIY oomph and social networking savvy to bands eager to promote themselves, and Brisbane’s YouTube revived the video as a viable pop-art form. Now Pandora is breaking pop hits down to their quantifiable components — slightly easier than reducing the multitudinous Bay Area music scene into Google-able, bite-sized bits.

You had to be there. And on the cusp of this adolescent century’s teens, amid the flux and flow of music-makers and pop creatives moving in and town, it’s time to ask some new questions: what are we doing and listening to next?

The decade in music

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December 16, 2009
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IN THIS ISSUE:

>>The breakdown: A hyped-up digital decade stung by its own long tail
By Mosi Reeves
>>You ought-sa know: A tawdry, tuneful timeline of the last decade
By Cheryl Eddy
>>Aughties Bay Area: Meet me at MySpace with your iPod and we’ll indie dance
By Kimberly Chun
>>Flashing lights: 10 years on the Bay Area dance floor — and still looking fantastic!
By Marke B.
>>2009 = 1989: The end of this decade sings a love song to the end of a decade past
By Johnny Ray Huston
>>False Idols: Pop went meta, exposing its gaga machinery
By Louis Peitzman
>>Some kind of mastodon: Out of the rap-rock toilet and into the fire — the decade in metal
By Ben Richardson
>>Nothing like it: From mob to hyphy to crack — the decade in Bay Area rap
By Garrett Caples

DECADE IN MUSIC "If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it" This became the comment-capping mantra of a musical decade that started with excess — record stores and Napster, industry fat cats and self-released upstarts, CDs and MP3s all coexisting in ignorant bliss — and ended with the sound of one thumb Twittering. The promise in that catchphrase, that music selection has become so democratic that we can ignore what we’re not into, also proved a trap. With all the fractionalized niche overload and microbranding, who hasn’t felt the sting of that uniquely contemporary psychological malady, feeling-out-of-the-loop-itis? How do you know you don’t like it if you don’t hear it?

Still, the giddiness of sonic freedom has touched us all, and diversified playlists have provided plenty of kicks. No longer is the world of sound divided into mainstream and alternative — Kylie was shoehorned into the Fox Theatre while the Pixies headlined Coachella. And no longer does the same tune deliberately get stuck in everyone’s head. We readily admit we’ve yet to hear "Party in the USA" or have the slightest clue what a Daughtry is. We’ve been far too busy digging nueva cumbia and Scandinavian death metal to click out of curiosity, though we’re sure we’ll get around to it. With everything instantly available and a warped sense of retro shrouding all ears in historical doubt — believe it or not, "Don’t Stop Believing" sounded horrible in 1981 — the past decade already seems a bit of a blur. (And all this audio information hasn’t necessarily made us smarter or more noble. What did we do after we invaded the wrong country? Gleefully watch a young pop starlet implode.) The current musical moment seems to be reveling in a sigh of relief. "Chill" is the watchword, stillness is the move: a welcome respite from the beaver-flashing spills of yesteryear.

Looking back, though, a lot has happened since Y2K, when the late Biggie and yet-to-be-Vegas Celine Dion were belly-jousting for the top spot on Billboard Hot 100, and Santana’s Supernatural was imminent. (For starters, everyone knew what the Billboard Hot 100 was.) We’ve seen Britney outdo Sinead, Eminem get Nelly, Destiny’s Child survive until it didn’t, Creeds and Outkasts, Norah Jones and Usher, MJB’s breakthrough and Whitney’s breakdowns, and the glittering cuckoo moments and emancipation of Mariah Carey. We’ve seen Ashlee Simpson wiggle her acid reflux-addled uvula. We’ve heard Kanye. And heard him. The spawn of Billy Ray Cyrus has raided our thin wallets, Katie Couric has quizzed Lil Wayne about weed. We’ve encountered more neo-microgenres than you can shake a Nano at, seen vinyl rise like a zombie from the dead, and YouTubed another hole in the ozone.

Locally, the Bay Area kept a low profile — were Keyshia Cole and Train really our only contributions to thenational pop landscape? Yet we still made an enormous amount of exhilarating music. Mashups, space disco, metal onslaughts, freak folks, hyphy, arty indie, psychedelic drones: all found a teeming nest of originators here. The Guardian asked our music critics to plug in and go nuts on the past decade of local and universal pet sounds. Behold our multi-tentacular monster mash. (Johnny Ray Huston and Marke B.)

1, 2, 3 — do you copy?

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December 9, 2009
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a&eletters@sfbg.com

MUSIC "Is it nature or nurture?" asks David West, pondering whether garage rock is the most natural sound of San Francisco. Playing in "rough ‘n’ ready" fashion makes sense today, he thinks, given the city’s pricey rents and dense environment, whereas the psych bands of the 1960s, and ’70s art-punk bands like Chrome, Flipper, and Tuxedomoon, could better afford to have "a conceptual mind and lots of practice." An interesting hypothesis.

Rank/Xerox, a trio featuring West on guitar and vocals; Kevin McCarthy on bass, vocals, and keyboard; and drummer Jon Shade, are no "garage" band, but their music is some of the most exhilarating in San Francisco. I met with McCarthy and West at McCarthy’s house, where the pair took turns putting LPs by Thin Lizzy and the Ramones on the turntable as they discussed their group, which came together earlier this year.

Shade and McCarthy run a Web-based videozine, Mondo Vision. They had been playing music together for about a year, never finding a third player they were happy with until they met West — who recently moved to SF from Perth, Australia — in February. Their first shows came in April, and they released a split cassette with Grass Widow on Wizard Mountain Tapes shortly thereafter. Brynn Michelle, who’s played saxophone at a few Rank/Xerox gigs, overdubbed some improvised, inspired parts on these urgent, punchy cassette recordings.

"It’s still pretty up in the air as to what we’re going for — we take it song for song," McCarthy says. "We kind of have a law that we can’t say what we want." This desire to avoiding any hard-and-fast description or formula is understandable; even as Rank/Xerox’s music (thus far) resonates with the very best of the grim, mesmeric post-punk seeping out of England in the early ’80s, their bracing sound feels wholly unforced. Born of this troubled moment, it hits an anxious nerve. West reluctantly hints that the group is drawn to "more difficult punk music," and that Rank/Xerox lyrics address "power relationships, gender equality, sexual dynamics, socioeconomic issues, and love," before concluding with a laugh that "the songs are mostly about feelings."

New it may be, but Rank/Xerox already has serious connections to the Old World, sharing its name with an Italian comic book superhero created in 1978 and a song off of German punk band Hans-A-Plast’s 1979 debut, a vinyl copy of which McCarthy readily furnishes. Additionally, its only "tour" so far was through Eastern Europe in early October — a fluke occurrence stemming from the fact that all three group members happened to be there at the same time.

Rank/Xeroz’s terrific split cassette is sold out, sadly, but a new single is now available directly from the band, featuring "In a Hole," "Basement Furniture," and "Masking/Confessions." It’s the inaugural release on Shade’s own label, Mondo Bongo Top Ten Hits, and a thoroughly DIY affair: West recorded it; McCarthy made the artwork; and Shade is releasing it.

I once spotted a local Rank/Xerox fan sporting a homemade T-shirt that stated, in permanent marker, "Listen to Rank/Xerox." Earnest, homespun advice worth heeding before they’re on some future Messthetics comp devoted to SF in the good ol’ aughts. *

www.mondovision.tv/mongobongo; www.myspace.com/rankxeroxx

RANK/XEROX

part of "ATA 25"

Sun/13, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. (10 p.m. performance), $10

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.atasite.org

Nice apse

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December 9, 2009
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superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Ever since Jack handed down the Key to the Wiggly Worm in 1987, dance music has flaunted its spiritual side. Sure, disco was about transcending the physical bonds of quotidian slavery, Parliamentary funk probed the cosmogenic recesses of inner space, and early electro froze out any organic interference with its ethereal pings and pongs. But house was “a feeling,” a “spiritual thing,” a “soul thing.” And techno explicitly mobilized the restless ghosts in Detroit’s rapidly antiquating machines. Merely read the titles of techno originator Derrick May’s late 1980s output — “Beyond the Dance,” “The Beginning,” “Strings of Life” — for the gist of that genre’s ectochromosomal blueprint.

Upping the metaphysical has led to some notable clubby excesses — think sage-smoked rave prayer circles, jungle and tribal house’s witch doctor shenanigans, the gamma states of trance, or whatever the hell Burning Man thinks it’s doing. For the better part of this decade, “ultra lounges” had to feature a giant golden Buddha somewhere on the property or risk excommunication from the Eternal Congregation of Bachelorettes. And how many times did some of us (me) find ourselves, after a crazed and filthy weekend, on the EndUp dance floor on a Sunday afternoon in the 1990s, twitching to a gospel house choir shrieking about the power of salvation through The Lord. (Answer: 42.)

Still, everyone calls their favorite club “church” because that’s where they go on the regular to feel a part of something bigger than themselves. So you’d think a club night in an actual church — let alone one in Grace Cathedral called EpiscoDisco — would be the ultimate theological expression of this nightlife strain. Not so, says Bertie Pearson, the young Episcopal priest, longtime club fixture, and on-point DJ who launched the electro-centric monthly last February. “We’re not out to convert anyone, or try to ‘bring youth into the fold,’ or anything like that,” he tells me. “The Episcopal church isn’t really about proselytizing, anyway — all paths to God are equally effective, and we’re more concerned with keeping our community fed and sheltered. We just wanted to open up this amazing space on a night when there wasn’t much happening here and have a great party.”

EpiscoDisco, with its heady mix of spiffed-up nightlife glitterati, up-to-the minute live acts and DJs, and edgy art installations curated by Paradise Now, offers a perfectly relevant and reverent early evening club experience — even without the cavernous gothic grandeur of Grace echoing every furtive stiletto-clack of the otherwise irreligious. (Pearson says he always wanted to be an Episcopal priest because the faith “appealed to all sides of me: social, spiritual, philosophical, artistic, intellectual … and now the nightlife side, apparently.”) Yet you are, indeed, in a spectacular candle-lit cathedral, navigating the vaulted apse with your plastic-cupped Chablis, gazing at luminous gold-flecked icons of MLK Jr. and John Donne, tracing the gorgeous meditative labyrinth etched in the nave’s marble flooring.

And despite the party-priest’s protestations about keeping his intentions earthbound, you can’t help but get lifted in a club-spiritual way. Upon entering Grace’s AIDS Interfaith Chapel, EpiscoDiscopalians are greeted by ultimate club kid Keith Haring’s wondrous “Life of Christ” triptych altarpiece. A panel of the AIDS Quilt memorializes Grace preachers who passed away from the disease and the “Book of Names” lists Bay Area victims. Given that some of the most exciting recent nightlife trends have been about exhuming the music and fashion buried by AIDS, the chapel offers a celebratory connection to the other side.

But there’s a connection to the living at EpiscoDisco, too. “San Francisco nightlife can be a bit clique-y,” says Pearson, a master of tart understatement. “Sometimes if you walk up to a group of people and just start talking to them, they look at you like you’re insane. That doesn’t happen here. Isn’t that great?”

EPISCODISCO with DJ John Friend and Pale Hoarse live. Saturday, Dec. 19 and every third Saturday of the month, 7 p.m.-10 p.m., free. Grace Cathedral, 1100 California, SF. www.episcodisco.com

DERRICK MAY Yes, the Godfather is coming, throwing down one of his gleaming Hi-Tek-Soul soul sets to call the spirits down. Thu/10, 10 p.m., $10 advance. Vessel, 84 Campton Place, SF. www.vesselsf.com

AC SLATER Electro — saved by the bell? The latest banger boy wonder takes to the tables at Reverend Pearson’s other club playground, Blow Up. Fri/11, 10 p.m., $10/$15, 18+. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.blowupsf.com

LE PERLE DEGLI SQUALLOR DJ Bus Station John’s latest bathhouse disco and vinyl rarities monthly breaks cruise-y new queer ground at the Hotspot. Sat/12, 10 p.m., $5. Hotspot, 1414 Market, SF.

Monster mash note

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December 9, 2009
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a&eletters@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "I’m from the underground. And I’m making pop music and I’m not a bit ashamed about it."

So sayeth Lady Gaga on the cellie last year on the way to a radio show at a Raging Waters in San Demos where she was dying to get wet. Alas, she forgot her Jellies at home and didn’t want to get her towering D Square pumps splashed ("I’ll find a private part of the park and just go in my birthday suit"). Yet I’m sure Christian Siriano could relate to this pop fashionista dilemma — regardless of whether he’d sniff at her taste-defying getups or not. After all Lady Gaga is the pantless, prep-school-bred amalgam of Carole King and Madonna reimagined as a hot tranny mess, a Gossip Girl turned Fame Monster.

OK, Gaga is no tranny, strictly speaking, though at the time she told me she was thrilled about appearing at SF’s Pride Fest ("I grew up in the dance and theater community — I’ve been surrounded by gay men and women and transgendered my whole life!"). Still, this bio queen’s obviously snatched more than a scrap of inspiration from clubland’s OTT drama kids, and she’s rough enough around the edges to make any sex bomb efforts an exercise in wise-ass deconstruction. From the gag of her "Radio Ga Ga" handle to her go-there way with the attraction-repulsion factor, Gaga is enough of a fabulous freak to embrace a gag-able frisson — I’ll be looking for that vomiting video vixen on the megascreen at her upcoming show at the newly reopened Bill Graham Dec. 14.

There’s more than a smudge of Her Dancefloor Madge-sty in the diva’s diamond-hard pop persona, wardrobe switch-ups, and workaholic drive. Lady Gaga impressed me at the time with a disarming sincerity and brusque sweetness: she was eager to be understood by serious music fans who might dismiss her as a throwaway popster. "The level of commitment and dedication it takes to put on a perfect pop show is very difficult," she exclaimed. "And I think some of the underground snobbery is fear and not understanding that discipline.

"Listen, I come from a party background and I used to party like crazy! That was a lot of my source of creativity," she continued. "But my life has changed a lot now, and I can’t do that shit. I got to go to bed, and I gotta wake up, I gotta work out, I gotta go to rehearsal. I got to pound, pound, pound, work, work, work hard so that every time I hit the stage it’s flawless. And if it isn’t flawless, I gotta work myself up to where it is — otherwise I’m just another pop chick with blonde hair."

But unlike Madonna, Gaga, like King, initially came from the flip side of the pop factory: as a songwriter, ghosting, she said, for Britney Spears and Pussycat Dolls. "I started to write pop songs mostly because I’m a classically trained pianist," she explained. "Beethoven and Bach and the structure of those classical pieces are really just rudimentary pop chord progressions. So it was something I understood." A vocal coach pointed out to her how easy it was to play a Mariah Carey tune by ear — "’It’s because you’ve been playing Bach inventions since you’ve been four, and it’s the same kind of idea’<0x2009>" — and she says, "That’s how I found out I had a knack for it, and I’ve been writing, writing, writing, since I was 13 years old."

Those skills came in handy when she started playing piano to beats in her undies at clubs in New York City’s Lower East Side, and had to come back to, for instance, a heckler who yelled, "Why don’t you play something serious?" Her response should be familiar to fans of "Beautiful, Dirty Rich"’s and "Poker Face"’s provocation: "I put my leg up onto the piano with my crotch pretty wide open to the audience, and then I did a very old school George Gershwin ragtime improv on the piano — pretty complicated. The whole idea was ‘Fuck you, I’m going to be sexy, sing about sex in my underwear, and then I’m going to do this really, really difficult piano virtuoso moment and show you it really doesn’t matter.’ People associate glamour and being female and being nude and being provocative with stupidity — there’s a great deal of intelligence and conceptualizing behind my work."

LADY GAGA

Sun/13–Mon/14, 7:30 p.m., $48

Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

99 Grove, SF

www.apeconcerts.com

Solar flair

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December 2, 2009
0

Sonny Smith knows how to write a song. He better, because he’s writing a lot of them. The Oakland resident is currently shoulders-deep in a mammoth project titled “100 Records” that combines music he’s composed and recorded with cover visuals by a not-small army of Bay Area artists. Anyone who has heard Smith’s 2006 album Fruitvale (Belle Sound) or read his column for the Examiner is aware that he has a direct, colorful way with words. Anyone who has found a copy of Tomorrow is Alright (Soft Abuse/Secret Seven), the new album by Smith’s group Sonny and the Sunsets, realizes he has a gift for classic melody: “Too Young to Burn” is worthy of Ronnie Spector; “Death Cream” is a balm; and “Planet of Women” is the kind of music that will give you that summer feeling on Christmas Day. In the immediate wake of Tomorrow, I asked Smith some questions.

SFBG Around the time of Fruitvale, you sent out a little black-and-white comic called Life and Times of a Mindless Ape as your musician’s bio. I liked reading about your Bolinas youth.
Sonny Smith My folks moved all around the Bay Area when I was young, so I wasn’t a Bolinas kid. That’s what you could do back then, even if you had no money — one year you could live in Bolinas, the next on a houseboat in Sausalito, then in the Mission, then in the Sunset, and back to Fairfax.
They met at an anti-Vietnam rally in Golden Gate Park in the Summer of Love. My dad was in the seminary in San Anselmo; my mother was a resident at Baker Street [halfway house]. One could be a bohemian back then. My dad was a fan of writers like Brautigan and Kerouac, and he was part of a circle of old-time string band musicians that included sculptors and painters and artists.

SFBG Can you tell me more about the gentleman with the tarot deck in Paris that you mention in Mindless Ape?
SS Laurent Despot was the man I met. At the time he was a freelance journalist working for magazines, smut or otherwise. I was transformed by the tarot reading and it might have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Basically he was a very nice man who helped a 17-year-old sleeping in the Paris Metro. He also lived exactly across the street from his wife, which I now see as wonderful.

SFBG I have to ask you about the Fruitvale song “Mario,” because it reminds me of a Mario.
SS I lived next to a big Latino family, and their driveway was by my living room window. The teenage son would hang out in the family minivan late at night and listen to tunes. One night I peeked through our blinds and I saw him in there putting on makeup and dressing up as a woman, partying a bit, making some phone calls, and then taking the makeup back off, going back to the Latino teen with slicked back hair. Fruitvale is a tough place to be anything but macho, so I was thinking how tough you gotta be to be a queen in the ghetto. We found the toughest beat ever created — “We Will Rock You” by Queen — and we started with that, then tried to make it a little desperate and sad but fighting to the end.

SFBG How did the idea behind your “100 Records” project come about? In terms of hypergraphia or forced hypergraphia, [the Magnetic Fields’] 69 Love Songs (Merge, 1999) comes to mind, but this is quite different.
SS I didn’t intend to write so many songs. I had written a novel last winter about all these fictional musicians, and I got a small residency at the Headlands to write songs for these fake singers and make sketches of what their albums would look like. I thought that might be cool to insert in the novel. But I farmed a few drawings out — one to artist Paul Wackers, one to Mingering Mike [godfather of fake 45s], some to a few artists at Creativity Explored, and a few others to people I met through Headlands. The pieces were so amazing that I couldn’t not do that for all of the songs, and I couldn’t slack on the song-production end. So my novel just kinda broke up into this epic art project. Now there are about 60 artists, and I’m trying to do 200 songs. Marc Dantona has been helping me produce some sessions. We have a little wrecking crew band, and we are knocking shit out left and right. The “100 Records” show will be in April at Gallery 16.

SFBG Tell me about some of the bands and musicians of “100 Records.” Who are they, what are their back stories?
SS There are about 50 so far — Beachticks, Cabezas Cordades, Little Antoine and the Sparrows, Earth Girl Helen Brown, Zig Speck & Specktones, Prince Nedick, Bobbie Hawkins, the Fuckaroos.
Prince Nedick for instance was born Washington Rice, and for a short period was a child preacher in his hometown of Turkey Creek, near Leicester, N.C. He started his showbiz career as a dancer, working at the 81 Theater in Atlanta as a young teenager. Rice was gay and flamboyant; he worked the tent shows in drag, a great Southern showbiz tradition in itself, and an important influence on rock ’n’ roll — hence the term “tent show queen.” He sang the repertoire of said tradition, many of the same tunes Little Richard would clean up and take to the bank, like “Tutti Frutti” (original lyrics: “Tutti Frutti/Good booty/If it don’t fit/Don’t force it/Just grease it/Make it easy”). He was known for his flashy style and violent temper. At the height of his fame, he went on the lam for assaulting his brother’s wife with an ax, and ultimately ended up in Minglewood, a lumber camp a few miles east of the Mississippi in Dyersburg, Tenn.

SFBG Are there box sets or large music projects (Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, for example) with an artistic element that you especially love?
SS Harry Smith’s is a huge influence definitely — probably the biggest. Mingering Mike, certainly. Woody Guthrie just swimming through all those songs over the years is influential. I wanted to step into a place where everything is available at all moments to be music, to be art, and it appears I had to come up with alteregos to allow that.

SFBG Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?
SS My girlfriend’s dad was named after Eugene V. Debs.

Answer me!

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December 2, 2009
0

SONIC REDUCER As changeable, transformative chameleon year ’09 draws to a close, El Niño flurries sweep out the past, and all present plunge into the hassle and hustle of the holidays, I’m looking for answers — signposts if not certainties. Like so many others, I’m poking at the tea leaves and searching for clues to elemental queries, laying out the cards and reading into the arcana, listening to the muses and studying the alchemy generated by that admixture of human breath, reverberating strings, and sounds that make the air shiver and shimmer.
Q: Who are you?
A: Bend an ear to the recent past: namely Devendra Banhart’s What Will We Be (Warner Bros.), a release that likely never truly got its due. A lethally laid-back hybrid of ragged ragtime, weird new blues, and soak-in-the-rays beach music perfect for lounging in the hot sand, What Will We Be struck me at first as almost too amorphous, soft and shapeless, languorous and borderless to get a grip on. It’s as if Banhart has made the sonic equivalent of a slippery-slidey alien sock monkey.
But listen to it loud with headphones or earplugs, and you find plenty of earthly details and many off-kilter digressions to love — and recognize, like those Renaissance Faire carousers who live in the flat below on “Chin Chin and Muck Muck,” the young turks on the loose in “16th and Valencia, Roxy Music.” You’ll also discover a deep spiritual yearning (aphorisms and nuggets of wisdom stud the album) to break through the bounds of pop forms into something wholly else. Banhart has acquired some major industry projectors of late — Warner Bros., and Neil Young manager Elliot Roberts — but considering What Will We Be, a cunning, sprawling work that gently urges you to sink your feet into its mud and stay awhile, it’s clear he’s chosen a higher path.
Q: What do you want?
A: Parse “What Would I Want? Sky” and the petite, avidly recycling footprints of Animal Collective on the new five-track EP, Fall Be Kind (Domino), out digitally last week and physically Dec. 15. Marking the first time the Grateful Dead have ever licensed a sample — the exquisitely sweet, polyrhythmically complex “Unbroken Chain” — “What Would I Want? Sky” artfully entwines Animal Collective’s flirtations with dance music, washes of choral color, and a snippet of Phil Lesh’s tweaked “sky” cry.
The Dead’s blissed-out ode to the threads connecting the singer and the song of the western wind, lilac rain, and willow sky grows fresh, forceful tendrils and takes on new contours as Animal Collective chooses one beat (a levitating one) and one natural image and follows it. “Oh, grass is clinking/and new order’s blinking/and I should be footing/but I’m weighted by thinking,” goes the call to the natural world, as synthetic violins ripple like blades of grass. The woods of would-be “would”s and clanging metal percussion fall away, and the thicket of vocals unifies into a declarative, “What I want: Sky!” Just one gem among many within this a sparkling end-of-the-year grab bag.
Q: What shall we do?
A: We shall have a “Funky Funky Christmas,” according to Electric Jungle on In the Christmas Groove (Strut), a comp of rare soul, funk, and blues tracks. Bumping the brass and the organ vamp like the holiday party in some lost Blaxploitation flick of your dreams, “Funky Funky Christmas” pays tribute to mommy fixing food and daddy watching football, along with, oh, yeah, love and peace (“Pass that biscuits please”).
Gimme a piece of the shit-hot harp ’n’ bass interplay of In the Christmas Groove‘s Jimmy Reed opener, “Christmas Present Blues,” and the locked-down rhythm section, background screams, and jittery, shopping-damaged guitar solo of Funk Machine’s “Soul Santa” (“Wouldn’t it be so revealing if Santa had black janky hair?” the Machine asks). I’m irked that for whatever reason the reputedly super-soulful “Getting Down for Xmas” by Milly & Silly isn’t on my copy, but Strut has put together the best Christmas album in an age — and the perfect soundtrack for your next funky ’Mas massive.

——-

TWO TEARS
The ex-Red Aunt garage-rock girl Kerry Davis ekes out the rage alongside the South Bay rockabilly fiend Legendary Stardust Cowboy. With Touch-Me-Nots. Fri/4, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, S.F. www.hemlocktavern.com
JONATHAN RICHMAN
Succumb to real-deal righteousness as the SF legend breaks out the annual holiday show. Sun/6, 8 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

Spacemen two

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December 2, 2009
0

“I think our interest in the spheres is less scientific, less intellectual, and more primal,” Ripley Johnson of Moon Duo says, when asked if he and bandmate Sanae Yamada have a particular fascination with deep space. “I see it as a sort of existential mirror, or perhaps a visceral catalyst for existential experience.”
The eye-catching quartet of NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope images on the cover of Moon Duo’s four-song EP Killing Time (Sacred Bones) evoke untouched realms and a sense of unknowing, even foreboding. But in their uniformity, they don’t bring across the recording’s range, which sways from bass-driven gothic isolation (the title track) to an organ sound that pulses with druggy intensity (“Speed”) to haunted house psych rock (“Dead West”) to tranquility (“Ripples”). Impressively, Killing Time’s disparate songs seem built upon a single mutating rhythm. “I think of it less as motorik than as biological, like the beating of a heart,” says Johnson. “It’s the pulse of life, and I think that’s how we relate to motorik, the sounds of machines, engines, wheels on the highway, trains going down the track. That’s why the song ends but the beat always goes on.”
Moon Duo’s sound isn’t as dense as that of Johnson’s other Bay Area band, Wooden Shjips, but it’s at least as potent. A satellite release before Escape, an album out on Woodsist in the new year, Killing Time essentially throws down the gauntlet in the space race amongst local kosmische- and krautock-influenced groups. The visceral peak is “Speed,” a blast worthy of its obvious antecedents, Suicide and Spacemen 3.
“The first Suicide album [Suicide, 1977; Mute/Blast] is one of the great rock albums of all time,” Johnson says, promptly drifting from Suicide-al thoughts into a discussion of the second word in his band’s name. “I was thinking about favorite duos, because it doesn’t seem like a common arrangement for rock. The inspiration for us initially came from jazz, like the great Rashied Ali albums with John Coltrane and Frank Lowe. But some of my favorite rock-ish albums were made by duos or near-duos: Silver Apples, Royal Trux, Moolah, Chrome, Cluster.”
As for favorite moon movies, Johnson has some. “Probably either A Trip to the Moon (1902) or Countdown (1968),” he says. “I really like non-Hollywood action sci-fi movies, like Solaris (2002), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Alphaville (1965), Fahrenheit 451, and La jetée (1962).”

Love sex fear death

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December 2, 2009
0

Philadelphia freedom can become Philadelphia gothdom. Cinematically, I’m thinking of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), the very definition of black-and-white bleakness, and a Philly-filmed movie set within a nightmare. More recently (and obscurely), I’m thinking of Andrew Repasky McElhinney’s far-from-literal 2004 film adaptation of George Bataille’s Story of the Eye, seemingly based in blasted-out sections of the City of Brotherly Love.
Bataille’s obsessive focus on eros’ fusion of love and death is in keeping with Cold Cave, the latest musical project of Wesley Eisold. But gothdom and an appreciation of the occult or morbidity took root in Eisold’s life long before he set base in his current home of Philadelphia, let alone visited Madame Blavatsky’s house there. “We’ve really kept to ourselves, which was the impetus for settling in Philly for a bit,” he says, referring to bandmates Dominick Fernow of Prurient and former Xiu Xiu member Caralee McElroy. “Less distraction, more work. Cheap rent, no need for money.”
For Eisold, the influences behind his current sound can be traced back to adolescent VHS tapes of 120 Minutes, a rare constant during a nomadic youth. “I met my cousin Jacy — who lives in San Francisco, actually — for the first time when I was 11 and he was maybe 13,” he remembers. “You never know what your family is going to be like. He came into my house wearing a Sisters of Mercy shirt and I had a Cure shirt on.”
If the bass on “Hello Rats” from Cold Cave’s Love Comes Close (Matador) recalls the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds (Fiction, 1980) and “I’ve Seen the Future and It’s No Place for Me” on the group’s compilation Cremations (Hospital Productions) sounds like the Cure’s Pornography (Fiction, 1980) blaring from a room down the hall, then cousin Jacy’s tee-shirt cast a spell as well. The bottomless baritone of Sisters of Mercy leader Andrew Ridgely informs Eisold’s vocal approach to tracks such as Cremations’ “An Understanding” and “I’ve Seen the Future,” and Love Comes Close‘s “The Laurels of Erotomania” and title track.
But Cold Cave has more going on than mere ’80s pastiche and nostalgia. A fan of small publishers such as Hanuman and Black Sparrow (“I think Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger is massively underappreciated,” he says) who runs his own small press called Heartworm, Eisold doesn’t merely strike dark poses in his lyrics. An example would be Cremations‘ opening track “Sex Ads,” a direct, truthful song about a pretty common phenom in contemporary life: sexual self-commodification.
“It’s probably the most literal song I’ve ever written,” Eisold says of the track, which ends with a sense of ghostliness akin to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film Kairo. “Of course, us humans will find a way to make intimacy even more detached. I don’t find it strange at all. We’ve built all these machines to do everything else for us, so of course we’ll have a computer be the enabler our friends could never be. It didn’t catch on, but remember 10 years ago or so the Internet was trying to sell thse pieces you could attach to the computer for a simulated fuck? This makes much more sense. Really, I can’t believe how unexcited we are about the world we live in and how realities overlap from a screen to the day-to-day. This meshing of worlds happens so fast that no one has the time to appreciate how strange it is.”
Not exactly “Boys Don’t Cry” — or Fall Out Boy, for that matter. One gets the sense that Cold Cave is still developing, an exciting and perhaps hauntological prospect considering their music to date. Cremations contains some powerful sounds and instrumental passages, from the Nico-caliber fugue “E Dreams” to the outer space loneliness of “Roman Skirts” and the apocalyptic, nuclear radiance of “Always Someone.” If Love Comes Close sacrifices such experimentation on the altar of pop, during a track like McElroy’s vocal star turn “Life Magazine,” the blood tastes like fine wine. Alienation has rarely sounded so ebullient.

COLD CAVE
with Former Ghosts and Veil Veil Varnish
Thu/3, 9 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com

Killer ‘Droids

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November 24, 2009
0

kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What is a Japandroid? Sure, it sounds like a mashup of two monikers (Pleasuredroids and Japanese Scream) hatched by guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse when the Vancouver, B.C., twosome were dreaming up a Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style power trio back in ’06. But I imagine it looks way cooler than your average Transformer, less like a toaster and more like an Astro Boy-style skin job. Or maybe it’s a less humanoid rock ‘n’ roll machine — picture a R2D2 jukebox — generating a battering flurry of distortion and bashed-at beats that’s less noisy, more melodic than No Age, and five times more buzz-saw aggro and dense than White Stripes.

But perhaps calling Japandroids machine-like goes too far. "That kind of indicates a certain efficiency that we don’t have," Prowse demurs sweetly by phone from Somewheresville, Ohio. "There are a lot of kinks in the rock ‘n’ roll machine, though we’re trying to get things done."

And right now the thing for Japandroids is a major drive south across the U.S. to St. Louis, Mo. "We’re just driving for days — it’s great, very scenic," Prowse observes. "We’re seeing every small town in America. It’s like a dream."

Apparently the two 27-year-olds are living the dream: they’ve made the break out of Vancouver, which Prowse describes as "not necessarily a musician-friendly city," despite the presence of, for instance, the New Pornographers. The ‘Droids got a major rocket-powered boost after some successful festival dates — one show at Pop Montreal led to the band signing with its current Canadian label Unfamiliar — and a rave review on Pitchfork.

"It’s a weird form of tourism. You kind of get to see places," Prowse — far from jaded and still marveling at the reception the band received — says of the twosome’s recent U.K. tour. "You get to see a bar in each city in the United Kingdom and then the spot where you get breakfast and few truck stops in between."

All this seems somewhat unexpected for the two friends, who met at the University of Victoria and formed the band post-college. At the risk of getting too reductionist, Post-Nothing (Unfamiliar/Polyvinyl) captures that moment of aimless fury, unbottled passion, and naked masculine innocence that comes after graduation, once you’ve fulfilled all your course requirements, done all that’s expected, had your heart broken, and wondered what’s next. It’s worth asking — when everyone, postcollegiate or otherwise, appears to be wondering what the 2010s will bring — what is "post-nothing" anyway?

"It’s kind of a long-running gag at the labels of musical genres," Prowse explains. "A long time ago Brian started referring to our band as post-nothing on our MySpace bios and other places." Just don’t lump them into the post-hardcore lot. "No, no," the drummer says almost apologetically. "We’re too wimpy to be associated with that moniker."

Japandroids, it turns out, aren’t easy to sum up — these ‘Droids are too unpretentious and/or smart to peg themselves with any tag. Neither will Prowse acknowledge certain 1990s alt-rock affiliations you can hear bristling at the edges of the combo’s sound — though both love the Sonics and Mclusky and went through a mid-to-late ’90s hip-hop phase. "Some songs sound like we’re ripping off one band and then another one," Prowse confesses good-naturedly. "There’s a bit of variety to our musical piracy."

Prowse, however, will cop to an anthemic quality in Japandroids’ songs. "I think part of that comes from the fact that neither of us are super-confident singers, so we kind of belt it out," he explains. "It comes back to being a two-piece band — one of the things is to make as much noise as we can between the two of us." *

JAPANDROIDS

With Surfer Blood and Downer Party

Sun/29, 7 p.m., $10–$12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF.

www.rickshawstop.com

BUILDING A BETTER MUSICAL MACHINE

SAVOY FAMILY CAJUN BAND

Ready to get on down to N’awlins with these cajun music vets? Fri/27, 9 p.m., $20 Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

SIMIAN MOBILE DISCO

Ape must not kill ape yet must sometimes serve up a live set. With JDH and Dave P and Tenderlions. Fri/27, 9 p.m., $22.50. Mezzanine Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

GEORGE HURD ENSEMBLE AND BUILD

Classical and contemporary composition meets throbbing electronics. With Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble. Mon/30, 8 p.m., $10. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

Gone, here

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November 24, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC No one has ever heard the real Sa-Ra, declares Shafiq Husayn during an evening phone interview. And I believe him.

Formed in 2001 between L.A. musicians Om’mas Keith, Taz Arnold, and Husayn (a former rapper/producer in Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate crew), Sa-Ra Creative Partners is more powerful as a myth than an actual group. It emerged in 2004 as part of Kanye West’s ill-fated G.O.O.D. Music venture with Columbia, fomenting buzz for its never-released debut, Black Fuzz. After the group left the label, many fans falsely speculated that Sa-Ra had broken up, dissipating like a midnight dream.

Since then, Sa-Ra Creative Partners has issued two collections of songs, 2007’s The Hollywood Recordings (Babygrande) and this year’s Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love (Ubiquity) The latter, a magnificent and powerful foray into drug and sex addiction, redemptive spirituality and love as a circadian rhythm, incorporates dozens of musicians both famous (Erykah Badu) and memorably eccentric (Rozzi Daime). Nuclear Evolution, patched together from songs recorded over the past several years, triumphs in spite of its sporadic assembly.

But Husayn, who sometimes refers to himself and Sa-Ra as third-person entities, says he doesn’t consider Nuclear Evolution a cohesive body of work. "Sa-Ra as a group has not released a debut album yet," he explains, perhaps perpetuating that myth himself. After all, wouldn’t a "Sa-Ra" album be the same as "Sa-Ra Creative Partners"? "We’re waiting for the right [distribution] situation to put it out. People are still sluggish, and not understanding." He adds, "What else do we have to do to show people that Sa-Ra is for real?"

So consider Husayn’s recent Shafiq ‘En A-Free-Kah a statement from a man in exile. He’s grateful to work with Plug Research, an L.A. indie best known for developing new artists. He’s also realistic about the small label’s ability to promote his music. "A lot of fans don’t even know that we have albums out," he rues.

Unlike the Sa-Ra Creative Partners collections, Husayn considers his solo debut a full-fledged philosophical treatise.

"’Kah’ in the ancient Kemetic language means spirit. So to be in the spirit of the Most High is infinite, it can’t be circumscribed by anything dealing with time and space. Thoughts originate in the spirit realm. They don’t originate on Earth," he explains. "So ‘en a-free-kah’ is a demonstration of using your higher self as a natural law. Or, as it is on Earth, shall it be in heaven, or as above shall be law, the unification of soul and mind, body and soul, all becoming one in a format of music. This is an album for the free nationals, meaning all in the international community who are not slaves, and when I say slaves, I mean not slaves in the mind, the ones that are open for a difference, for change. It is dedicated to the spirit of freedom."

It’s to Husayn’s credit that Shafiq ‘En A-Free-Kah sounds more fun than a history lesson. It sparkles with allusions to Loft-era disco and French coos ("Le’Star") and bass-bottom blues modernized with clipped electronic edits ("Lil’ Girl"). Protests against nuclear war ("Major Heavy") and fearless activism ("Rebel Soldier") play out against a fusillade of deep soul homage.

Sa-Ra may be the soul equivalent of DFA. While the home of LCD Soundsystem and Hercules and Love Affair rips off old Bohannon disco and Inner City techno tracks, Sa-Ra shamelessly references Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On (1971, Epic). These reinventions soar through canny production tricks and fidelity toward the original’s bright futurism, editing out any postmodern commentary. Husayn’s "Changes," for example, revisits the same synthesized optimism elements as Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book (1972, Tamla/Motown).

But while DFA rules the indie-dance world through a distribution deal with international entertainment conglomerate EMI, Sa-Ra languishes, forced to license projects with modest albeit sympathetic companies. Husayn explains that his group is waiting to partner with a powerful company (ostensibly a major label) before it presents the full Sa-Ra experience.

"Any time Sa-Ra puts some music out, it should be a big deal," he says. "But you can’t know if it’s a big deal if you don’t even know it’s available." Well, now you know.

Songs of Norway

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November 24, 2009
0

MUSIC Hey Annie fans, relax. How many pop princesses are savvy enough to begin the intro verse of an album’s kickoff song with a couplet that casually and subtly incorporates the titles of Shannon’s "Let the Music Play" and Chaka Khan’s "I Feel for You"? Years in the making, Don’t Stop (Smalltown Supersound) has gone through more permutations than a combinatronics expert could comprehend, yet our girl brings the goods — the first seven songs are quip-sharp, catwalk-strut perfection, especially the initial one-two-three punch. The opener brings its introductory marching band motif back around at the climax with a potency that Tusk–era Fleetwood Mac might envy. "My Love is Better" is so sassy it’s funny, and so catchy it’s near fatal. Resplendently melancholic, "Bad Times" matches the femme finesse of Saint Etienne’s best uptempo moments and the melodicism of Johnny Marr and Kirsty MacColl’s peak collabos.

The higher Annie’s feather-light voice soars, the deeper the undertow of sadness in her words, and in that regard, "Bad Times" is her second album’s "Heartbeat." It might not become everyone’s pop song of the year the way her "Heartbeat" so obviously ruled 2004, but that’s only because it’s a little too introverted. If anything, it’s more sublime.

There are some interesting subtexts or subplots at play in Don’t Stop. One is its meta-pop aspect: at least a few songs address fellow songwriters and pop stars. "I Don’t Like Your Band" delivers a series of conciliatory kiss-offs and pieces of advice. This gambit would be deadly if Annie wasn’t on point, but she serves up immaculate wit and melody. (Robyn has to admire this track.) "Songs Remind Me of You" flips the Casey Kasem-era Top 40 conceit of an old song conjuring memory of an old love — in this case, Annie wonders if the pop prince or princess she’s singing to is haunted by his or her past creations when they materialize from a nearby radio.

That "his or her" is worth noting, because Annie has almost never added gender-specific touches to her songs. For sure, when she’s put together a put-down lyric, it’s easy to imagine a boyish man on the receiving end. But Don’t Stop‘s one plaintive ode to a particular person, "Marie Cherie," addresses an ill-fated girl "who never made her sweet 16." Some unimaginable yet just-right marriage between Claudine Longet and P.J. Harvey’s "Down by the Water," it’s as seductively Sapphic — and remote — as a daughters of darkness fantasy. Annie at her best: more than strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.

Punk-rock farewell

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November 24, 2009
0

cheryl@sfbg.com

MUSIC In late October, I spent a particularly thrilling evening at Annie’s Social Club, watching North Carolina-by-way-of-Venus band Valient Thorr fling copious sweat beads into a beer-soaked crowd. Annie’s, one of my favorite spots in San Francisco, was the perfect setting for the show — cozy (but not cramped), dark and low-ceiling’d enough to feel like the coolest basement ever, and packed full of friendly punk and metal fans. On that night, the décor had been ghoulishly enhanced in honor of Halloween, complementing the bar’s usual mise-en-scène — red lighting, a black-velvet painting collection, and ever-present horror and sci-fi flicks on the bar’s TVs.

"I always tried to make it feel like an extension of my living room, where people could just come in and feel comfortable, no matter what scene they were in," says the joint’s namesake, Annie Whiteside. On Nov. 13, Whiteside and co-owner Sean Kennedy announced, via the SF Indie List (where it was soon widely re-reported in local blogs and media), that Annie’s Social Club would be closing New Year’s Eve. Though the posting didn’t offer a reason, Whiteside is forthright in her explanation.

"The recession just got the best of us. We tried really hard to keep the place going, but with the recession the last two years it’s just been really hard on us," she says. "The overhead in San Francisco is so high, and our mission was really to support small bands and small touring bands, and keep our cover low and keep our drink prices low. Try as we might, we still just couldn’t cover the bills."

Annie’s Social Club opened at Fifth and Folsom streets (site of the storied CW Saloon, which closed in 2002) in 2006. Prior to that, Whiteside had operated Annie’s Cocktail Lounge, a little further South of Market, for seven years. Annie’s Social Club built off Whitehead’s experience working at Slim’s and other local music venues; besides bands, Annie’s hosted rock n’ roll karaoke, stand-up comedy, and burlesque shows.

"It’s a community of people I really liked supporting and being part of," Whiteside says. She’s especially upset about saying goodbye to her employees, who’ll all be out of jobs come 2010.

"I feel so badly that they are all gonna be out of work at the beginning of the year, which is a horrible time to look for work," she says. "So anybody out there who wants a good staff, I got a great staff."

Add Shawn Phillips, who books metal shows at Annie’s and other venues under the moniker Whore for Satan, to the list of folks who’re sad to see the club close.

"It took a special person like Annie to bring back the old CW Saloon format when she reopened it as Annie’s Social Club," he says. "Those people are few and far between these days. Annie’s was a home away from home for a lot of people."

Whiteside, who says she hasn’t met the incoming occupants of Fifth and Folsom, didn’t want to comment on the future of the space. It doesn’t seem likely, though, that raucous noise will be part of its milieu. Phillips points to clubs like Thee Parkside, El Rio, the Knockout, and the Hemlock as being well-positioned to help fill the void after Annie’s shuts its doors.

"The live music scene in SF may miss its footing in the pit and land on its ass for a second, but we’ll pick it up, someone will give it its shoe back and it’ll keep going," he says.

Whiteside, too, will keep going — she hopes to eventually regroup and open "bar No. 3" if and when the economy ever turns around. For now, she’s grateful that Annie’s had such a great four-year run.

"It’s been a lot of fun," she says. "I want to thank all the bands and other performers and staff and customers for supporting us for as long as they did. Believe me, I cried a lot of tears when we had to make this decision. I feel like I’m losing a member of my family. It’s been really hard. I’m sure some people don’t care, but the people who do care, care a lot — and that has meant a lot to me."

www.anniessocialclub.com

Trimmings

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November 24, 2009
0

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Child, there is no better place to digest your Thanksgiving giblets than a leather bar. (For all my non-homo homies and vegan amigos, meet me at the rather hopping Mission Hill Saloon — 491 Potrero, SF — for some cheap après-pie Chimay. I’ll bring the family-recovery Vicodin. Is Vicodin vegan? Anyway.) Hunky and slightly distressed-skin leather queens will actually cruise the holiday fat off those chunky drumsticks poking through your peek-a-boo chaps with their hungry, hungry, laser-beam eyes. And let’s not even get into all the "stuffing" double-entendres here because what do I look like, an anal-leather-metaphorologist? Gag, not hardly.

But say, what’s better than a leather bar? Saw VII: Lady Gaga? Nah, it’s several leather bars — which is why I’m harnessing your attention to the upcoming Folsom Friday dead-cow spectacular, hosted by the chacondo folks of SoMa enclave Truck. Board the free shuttle there and get carted to such dark and lovely glories as Chaps, Lone Star Saloon, Powerhouse, Mr. S, Blow Buddies, and Off Ramp Leather to get you good and plucked. I’m not sure why the juicy Hole in the Wall and Eagle Tavern aren’t on the list, but the whole man-megillah’s a testament to our thriving leather scene, once thought strangled by the Web’s insidious tentacles. Flog that bird!

FOLSOM FRIDAY Fri/27, 9 p.m., free. Truck, 1900 Folsom, SF. www.folsomfriday.com

DARK SPARKLE

Goths — always in fashion because they’re above it. They’re even immune to hiatuses, as the 10th anniversary fete for this once-regular, now-rare goth-glam jamboree attests. Return from the grave to rock’s frigid underside with DJs Miz Margo and Sage.

Wed/25, 10 p.m., $5. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.darksparkle.com

NEXTAID BENEFIT

World AIDS Day is Dec. 1, and incredibly on-top charity NextAid (www.nextaid.org) is rolling out a ton of worldwide benefit parties, starting with an all-star bonanza here, with long-standing L.A. techno king D:Fuse, Sen-Sei, Rooz, and Fil Latorre

Wed/25, 9 p.m., $15. Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF. www.supperclub.com

BASSGIVING

A gaggle of local woofer gobblers of all bass styles invades Paradise Lounge to sauce your canned cranberries. Ginsu-wielders include Smoove, Mozaic, Influence, Uncle Larry, Cruz, and Antibiotik.

Wed/25, 9 p.m.–3 a.m., $5. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. www.paradisesf.com

JOKER

Poor Joker. This year, the young Bristol, U.K., phenom tried to start a more melodic "purple" dubstep movement to get more women on the dance floor — and was immediately accused of stereotyping. Truth is, he’s got killer bass instincts and soulful taste, a rare combination these days — as rare as women on the dubstep dance floor, in fact. With Lazer Sword, an-ten-nae, and loads more.

Fri/27, 10 p.m.–late, $10. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com

GO BANG!

Pop your cork early this year, love. All-star disco DJ dream team Sergio Fedasz, Stanley Chilidog, Nickie B., Flight, and door-slut Stephen You Guys! are celebrating one year of monthly high-hat spritz at Deco. Plus: Ken Vulsion of Honey Soundsystem and Disochorror.com’s Ash Williams, who’ll be offering a "Cosmic Beardo Lift-Off Set."

Sat/28, 9 p.m.–late, $5. Deco, 510 Larkin, SF

LOWDOWN

Hall and Oates meet hyphy classics in the crunktastic mashup universe of DJ Roots Uno. He’s the house decks wrecker at the new weekly Sunday joint from the too-high LOW SF kids who, when they’re not peeing in someone’s swanky pool, are keeping the electro-disco dream alive.

Sundays, 9 p.m., free. Delirium, 3139 16th St., SF. www.lowsf.com

CHASER

I finally have to put in a good word for my favorite shady lady Monistat’s Tuesday night drag cataclysm at EndUp. (EndUp just turned 36! Where have all the flowers gone?) Every week brings a more thrillingly horrifying theme, with outré performances, rotating DJs, and a bountiful bouquet of mayhem. Outwit, outplay, outlast.

Tuesdays, 10 p.m., $5. EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF. www.endup.com

Friends forever

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November 18, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER We can’t all cozy up like Plant and Krauss, Timberlake and Timbaland. Fantasy jam sessions sometimes remain just that, as Slash found out when Jack White rejected the ex-Guns slinger’s request for a guest turn, but, hey, you can dream: Animal Collective’s Panda Bear paired with Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste — bear with me — or Droste coupled with Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth. Sure, they’re friends now, but chums have been known to kill each other.

And sometimes the daydream turns into a tepid ho-hum — as is the case of Them Crooked Vultures, a very, very promising supergroup on paper, composed of guitarist-vocalist Josh Homme, Dave Grohl on drums and backing vocals, and John Paul Jones on bass, keyboards, and backing vocals. Instead, despite likable if ickily-titled jams like the Iron Maiden-ish "Caligulove," the power trio’s new self-titled Interscope long-player just comes off like vaguely North African-flavored, watered-down Queens of the Stone Age, feeding on freeze-dried corpses of Zep and other AOR kin. At least the Vultures have named themselves well. Can I get another flavor of crunchy guitar, p’weeze?

Then you have bandmates — names all up there in the marquee — who might not even know each other, really, yet somehow stick it out for a decade. Chalk it up to "Young Folks" — or Swedish stoicism.

Peter Bjorn and John sound like they’re pretty much adhered for life: the threesome celebrates its tenth birthday with two shows at Great American Music Hall, Nov. 19 and 20, just the latest in a series of special soirees that have included guests like Spank Rock and Andrew WK and whistling contests.

No, they’re not overnight wonders and, yes, Bjorn Yttling has known Peter Moren for 18 years. Still, Yttling sounds a bit shocked when I ask him if, say, the cunning, jittery, almost-Afropop-hued title track of this year’s minimal synthy Living Thing (Almost Gold) is about one, or more, of the Peter Bjorn and Johns coming out. How else to interpret: "We didn’t do it together, and now is it too late? /It’s pretty tight around the corners and I no longer have your taste /What is it about a friendship that always keeps the closet closed? /But I can tell it’s dusty in here /So I don’t even want to think about yours."

"Oh, wow," he says of Moren’s tune. "I’m not sure if that’s about that. I think it’s about the band, the way we are when we work together, so it becomes something more than three people — it’s something else."

Reading the song Yttling’s way uncovers those not-so-fantasy tensions — coupled with a gimlet-eyed honesty displayed on baldly anxious numbers like "It Don’t Move Me" and "Lay It Down" — that give the band a depth that perhaps other Swedish popsters lack. And really, Yttling, who has produced and written songs for Lykke Li, sees Living Thing overall as "about moving onto other things and not being so stuck in the past about stuff. ‘It Don’t Move Me’ is about stuff that touched you before and doesn’t move you at all, doesn’t affect you anymore, and you get scared about that, but you got to move on because there will be new stuff that will touch your heart later."

A few things, however, remain the same, opines Yttling by phone from Toronto:

(A) "Rock ‘n’ roll is better live than on album, and electronic music is better on album than live — if you’re not on pills maybe."

(B) "We’re not a jamming band. We don’t sit around the rehearsal space forever and smoke dope and bang out an E minor riff."

(C) As far as songwriting goes, "We try to be as dancey as possible and at same time make good narrative songs. It’s tricky when you like a lot of styles — you gotta try to do what you like."

(D) Constant touring isn’t an issue if "you’ve always got your Nintendo and passport. Always ask for Internet code when you check into hotel, otherwise you have to go down or call. Also use the in-dining service if you’re in a hurry," though, he observes, "it’s more of a Peter thing to walk around and almost miss the show."

(E) And as for Niagara Falls, which Yttling just eyeballed for the first time: "They’re on 24/7. It’s weird."

PETER BJORN AND JOHN

Thurs/19-Fri/20, 9 p.m., $21–$23

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.gamh.com

THEM CROOKED VULTURES

Thurs/19, 8 p.m., $49.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl

www.apeconcerts.com

x plus x equals xx

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November 18, 2009
0

x one: 2009 is 1989 all over again. Exhibit 89: The xx intro themselves near Fascination Street, somewhere across the city from the fine times and vanishing points where Memory Tapes currently resides. Truth be told, that year is just one of many pre-millennial ones this sneaky group taps into and renovates. Their minor key, lowercase late night musings shine darkly like Young Marble Giants circa-1979. Their slowly uncoiling guitar lines accompany a less chaste version of the gorgeous languor on Unrest’s 1992 imperial f.f.r.r. (Teen Beat), an album whose male-female vocal duality was an outgrowth of the shoegaze craze of — wait for it — 1989. When they cast their eyes at infinity, the brooding atmosphere and cavernous reverb sound a bit like the wicked games and twin peaks of 1989, as well. The canny use of space and silence, masculine and feminine on The xx (Young Turks) might reach maximum seduction and propulsion on “Islands,” where the low-end throbs like Tricky breaking free from the Wild Bunch and the angular guitar melodies flutter with excitement as Oliver Sims’ sexy cig-rasp snakes in and out of Romy Madley Croft’s soft, lazy lead vocal. Too many British female vocalists go so wan they lose all sense of lust. But not her — not here. (Johnny Ray Huston)

x two: “Basic space, open air … don’t look away when there’s nothing there.” On the intimate Independent stage, what will the emotionally prickly xx share? The quartet’s just lost keyboardist Baria Qureshi due to exhaustion and their much-hyped live show at CMJ this year was called “warmed-over Tracey Thorn” by a cheeky New York Times critic. That would seem paradoxical (no one associates physical exhaustion with Everything But the Girl appearances) if paradox wasn’t the xx’s creative engine, the push-pull of sexual relationships churning lyrically within an obsessively polished, passive-aggressively spare musical backdrop. The xx‘s “Basic Space” might be the best encapsulation of this Ziploc-ed bleeding heart aesthetic. From its inverted horror-movie metaphors — co-singer Oliver Sims climbs into a pool of boiling wax, which provides him with a “shine,” a “second skin,” while Romy Madley Croft states, “I’ll take you in pieces” — to its plucky Smiths-pinching final phrases and tin-Casio organ chords, the track is at the razor’s edge of current indie pop sensibilities. What’s uniquely its own, though, besides the way the tune’s steel-blue flicker runs up your discs, and what the xx brings to the world of rock, is a voluble taciturnity — yearning for personal space while lamenting its necessity, holding yourself together by breaking into pieces, creating a killer dance tune just one whiff away from silence. Sustaining that attitude live will be a neat trick. (Marke B.)

THE XX

With Friendly Fires, Holly Miranda

Nov 23, 9 p.m., sold out

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

Perfect kiss

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November 18, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC When Black Sabbath comes on, I’m instantly transported to those high school days of driving myself to class and headbanging to every track on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (Warner Bros., 1973) so hard I could barely see the road. Led Zeppelin forced me to do ridiculous amounts of air guitar in my room, while the Beatles saw me go through puberty and live in fear of the male species. Years later, Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985) was my soundtrack to falling wildly, truly in love.

The floating world in which memories exist is the same zone where the narratives of our lives take form. For any music freak, certain albums, guitar solos, or screeched lyrics bring the mind’s-eye back to that realm. Alan Palomo, the man behind the electro-psych project Neon Indian explicitly mines this tendency with a laser-like synth sound that seems swiped directly from the early 1980s.

"Music is getting more and more referential," said the Mexican-born, Texas-raised Palomo. "It’s becoming all about context. It’s not just about hearing a song, it’s about hearing it reverberating out of a room and trying to find sense in that. It’s about hearing a song playing in the other room when you were four while eating Cap’n Crunch."

What ’80s kid doesn’t get wistful about watching cartoons in the morning over a bowl of soggy cereal? The music Palomo creates on keyboards, samplers, and mixers taps into the collective consciousness of anyone who lived through that particular decade. Neon Indian’s seamless first full-length Psychic Chasms (Lefse) fuses the more dancefloor-oriented sounds of New Order with the chugging electronic pop of Electric Light Orchestra. Lyrically, it taps into themes of youth that are forever cherished in the corners of our brains: mindless delinquency, the lazy days of summer, and unruly hormones.

"I feel like it was a whimsical generation," Palomo says regarding the pop culture decade that spawned many of his influences. "The music had a really strange quality. It’s cheesy but very sincere — there’s a heartfelt vibe. A lot of music these days doesn’t really attract me on that emotional level because it doesn’t have the same narrative qualities. Those songs [from the ’80s] tell stories, and now people are afraid to do that."

Some writers have pinpointed Neon Indian as part of a blossoming sound that boasts newfangled genre tags like chillwave, glo-fi, tape-hiss, or hypnagogic pop because of its laid-back, homespun, synthy, foggy-eyed psychedelic artistry. It’s been everywhere since this summer, as hazy bits of songs from the distant past of cassette music and analog sound are lovingly reinvoked by a slew of new outfits such as Washed Out, Toro Y Moi, and Memory Tapes. But Palomo, who performs with a full band onstage, believes that Neon Indian is distinct.

"I don’t see myself in chillwave, even though others do," Palomo says. "Neon Indian is not completely about nostalgia. It should also be about songwriting. And it’s not necessarily just revisiting stuff. I always see it as a continuation of the sound. Why does a genre have to end? It can just evolve. People really want that kind of emotional experience in music."
Psychic Chasms is a heady collection of inventive retro-futuristic pop homages that play with funk and disco, Nintendo bleeps and burps, bent and breathy vocals, and distorted guitars. Palomo, a self-described extrovert, wrote the album over the course of three weeks fueled by intuition and solitude. "I felt like a deadbeat and wrote music all the time," he explains. "It’s called Psychic Chasms because it sounds like an interior land survey, like I was trying to map out the way my mind works, the memories that plague me consistently, and how they determine my emotional dispositions now. The older you grow, the more convoluted memory becomes."

NEON INDIAN

With The Love X Nowhere, Nite Jewel

Thurs/19, 8 p.m. $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

The sky is his

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November 18, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

Call it revenge of the G-funk era.

Yes, the sound that sparked a bicoastal beef and led to the murder of two rap superstars has made a roaring comeback. It invited mimicry (Kriss Kross’ 1992 "Jump" and the Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 "Big Poppa"); scorn ("It’s the money," DJ Shadow noted with dripping sarcasm as he queued up that bleating keyboard line once more on "Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96"); and eventually got played-out like flannel shirts and Doc Martens. But now, it has returned. British music fans, always keen on a good nickname, call it "boogie-funk," referencing an additional presence: the early 1980s computer-funk of heroes like George Clinton and Dirty Mind-era Prince. The two scenes and sounds — 1980s post-disco funksters in their outrageously gussied-up costumes and processed hair, and 1990s West Coast hoo-bangers paying homage to their childhood with P-Funk and Isley Brothers samples — seem entirely dissimilar. But Damon Riddick, known as Dam-Funk, bridges the gap.

"I’m not a fad," says Dam-Funk. "I didn’t discover this six months ago. I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s real and sincere. It’s not fake."

With his straightened windswept hair and imposing mustached visage, Dam-Funk looks like a funk lord from the early ’80s — a potential target for Dave Chappelle. But he’s not being ironic. On his new album Toeachiszown (Stones Throw), as synthesized melodies waft about angelically, when he sings the title words of "The Sky is Ours" in a slight falsetto, his emotional sincerity is palpable.

Dam-Funk is both badass L.A. dude and sensitive soul. He misses the "boogie-funk" era, and the svelte keyboard-and-bass-bottom of Mtume’s 1982 "Juicy Fruit" and the Dazz Band’s 1983 "Joystick." It briefly flourished in early-’80s black communities before other forms like hip-hop, house music, smooth jazz, and New Jack Swing buried it. Mostly forgotten by scholars or inaccurately mixed up with disco or house, the "boogie-funk" period rarely drew serious attention until recently.

"What I’m trying to do is further the love of groups like Slave, Aura, One Way, Mtume," says Dam-Funk. "When Run-DMC dropped with "It’s Like That" [in 1983], it was over. Everything went hard, masculine, balls-out, throw your fists in the air, that kind of thing. Now that we got [past] the giddy excitement over that aspect of hip-hop, people are discovering the beautiful chords. It’s okay to do chords that feel good inside."

Dam-Funk’s hip-hop edge comes from playing keyboards for Allfromthai, Mack 10, and other G-funk artists in the late-1990s. His most memorable session was playing on Westside Connection’s 1998 "Let It Reign." "It was crazy to walk in the studio with [Ice] Cube on one end, Mack 10 on the other end with the red shoelaces, WC over at the other end, and there’s about 20 other dudes in the studio, with the weed guy showing up," he laughs. "And cats were so respectful, man. Nobody was really tripping. Everyone looks at those guys like they were hoodlums. But they weren’t. They were just really into music."

Earlier that decade, the man then known as Damon Riddick apprenticed as a teenager with Leon Sylvers, the super-producer behind the Sylvers (1975’s "Boogie People") and black radio hits like Shalamar’s 1979 "The Second Time Around" and the Whispers’ "It’s A Love Thing" (1981). He recorded a few demos with Sylvers. "It didn’t turn into anything, but I still kept in touch with him," Dam-Funk says. "He taught me a lot about production technique."

Dam-Funk’s L.A. swagger pops up in his song titles ("Hood Pass Intact" and "Killdat a.k.a. Killdatmuthafucka") and his postmodern (or post-boogie) approach to early-’80s computer funk. He weaves dense instrumentals that sprawl for up to eight minutes, but tosses in enough slight chord changes to maintain interest. And unlike his boogie-funk predecessors, who maddeningly flitted between brilliant dance floor ragers and sappy slow dance ballads, he sticks to a certain tempo and mines it.

At two-and-a-half-hours and two CDs long, Toeachizown is remarkably inventive. Its spacey, bedazzled vibe rarely changes, but it doesn’t bore, either; it’s like a lovely waltz. On "Keep Lookin’ 2 The Sky," Dam-Funk uses audioprocessing to chant over ascendant synth lines, creating visions of a computer-manned rocketship. "10 West," like so many of the tracks, is quiet and balletic, drawing inspiration from electronic fusion pioneers like Paul Hardcastle.

If G-funk launched Dam-Funk’s career, then Toeachizown launches him into the heavens. "The sounds [are] progressive, hood, fantasy, all those things mixed up," he explains. "1982-slash-2022."

DAM-FUNK

Nov. 24, 9 p.m., $22-25

With Warren G, U-N-I

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependent.sf

Dutch trick

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November 18, 2009
0

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Say what you will about trance: it happened.

In fact, it happened two ways. The first, in all its flaming-poi-twirling, shaman-transcendentalist, goa-gamma-psy-matrix glory, is rooted in underground dance movements of the 1980s, and still provides a few subversive, head-pounding kicks. For a local taste, check out the Tantra tribe’s omnipresent DJ Liam Shy (www.liamshy.com), Skills DJ crew honcho Dyloot (www.myspace.com/dyloot), and the new Club S weekly, benefiting SF Food Bank (Thursdays, 9:30 p.m., $3/$1 with nonperishable food item. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, www.paradisesf.com). This strain of trance gets props both for its hyperactive dedication to melting far-flung cultural influences into its obliterating 155 b.p.m. bam-bam-bam and its surge of female power behind the decks. Holy neon dreads of Gaia, it even has its own store on Haight Street! (Ceiba, 1364 Haight, SF, www.ceibarec.com).

Then there’s the other kind. "Popular trance" ditches the wonky metaphysics and morphs the progressive Euro-house template of build-breakdown-build into a numbing, arena-filling formula that somehow took over the 2000s and gifted us with visions of Ed Hardy dudes spazzing out in Glo-Stick necklaces. Queasy. No one is more representative of this slicked-up genre than Tiësto, the 40-year-old Dutch DJ and producer who started as an underground gabber and rose with laser-like ambition to claim the title of "World’s Biggest DJ." Tiësto’s my favorite "supastar" punching bag — the Reebok shoe, the knighthood by Queen Beatrix, the video-game ubiquity, the sigh-raising "Adagio for Strings" redo, the agro cloud of spiky-haired, wraparound Gucci wannabes. It’s a tad much.

But beating this particular bugbear’s too easy. As his ruthless marketing onslaught suggests, the guy is really on top of his game. Worse, he’s actually quite charming — infectiously enthusiastic about his scene and quick to praise up-and-comers. Although avowedly apolitical, he’s used his clout to raise funds for HIV/AIDS awareness through the Dance4Life project. And with his new album Kaleidoscope (Ultra), Tiësto shows he’s suitably self-aware to know when enough’s enough.

"My brand of trance has evolved," he told me over the phone from Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he was preparing to slay a stadium of Canadian fanatics. ("Canada is 10 years ahead of the U.S. — I don’t have to scale down my tour here," he said.) "It’s kind of freaked me out. It’s not about the drugs or the old communal feeling so much, it’s about this big urge to party. My shows are like rock concerts now — crowd surfing, moshing, singing along. I realized I couldn’t do the same thing I used to, just these long trance sets. It was time for something different."

Kaleidoscope shows a definitive turning away from extended jams. Loaded with guest collaborators and indie darlings like Calvin Harris and Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, most of the songs are less than five minutes long and stick to a classic pop template. None of it’s particularly mind-blowing — Tegan and Sara number "Feel It in my Bones" is the definite standout — but there’s a refreshing sense of risk and a few nice hooks.

"I’ve been listening to a lot more indie and rock lately, so this transition is a personal one, too," Tiësto said. "I don’t consider myself underground. I’m a pop artist now. I’m even writing songs on the road that could be called Tiësto R&B," he added with a laugh. "But it’s just the way the music is going, toward more pop structure. You can see that with David Guetta’s chart success this year. Everyone’s becoming more song-oriented. I’m a producer more than a DJ. That’s why I don’t call myself DJ Tiësto anymore. Just Tiësto."

But he still tours as a DJ, one famous for delivering nine-hour sets to crowds of 100,000. So how does he fit short pop blasts into the revolving-stage and firework-erupting Tiësto spectacle? "I have this trick where I split the show in two parts, the pop-rock and singing in the beginning and then the classic longer stuff later on. It really works out."

As for his fans’ reaction to the changes? "Look," he said, "I see stuff on the Internet. Some people hate it. Some new people love it. It’s always been the same about me anyway. Love or hate. But like I said — even with trance, you can’t do that same thing forever."

TIËSTO

Sat/21, 8 p.m., $60

Cow Palace

2600 Geneva, Daly City

www.ticketmaster.com

www.tiesto.com

Komeback Kink

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November 11, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC MLK’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, shaken confidence in Vietnam after a bloody and vengeful Tet Offensive, Haight-Ashbury’s rapid dissolving into a breeding ground for lost and burned-out hippies pathetically clinging to the idyllic notion of a "Summer of Love," and a free Charles Manson settling in Laurel Canyon to plot the perverse and gruesome murders his "family" would soon commit. Yes, 1968 was the year the darkness had arrived. Certainly flower power had gone wrong, wilting its way toward a strong sense of paranoia that not only seeped its way into society’s psyche and politics, but into popular music as well.

Stripped in tone and oftentimes more raw-sounding than the overly-produced psychedelia that dominated the previous two years, the Kinks’ masterfully produced November 1968 classic The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is a prime example of Ray Davies’ maturing writing skill. It especially shines as an artist’s profound expression of his own insecurities. Village Green is loaded with accounts of Davies’ vain obsessions and his fears. It’s a document of the human condition — in particular, people’s longings to leave a lasting legacy and be remembered.

Thematically, Davies works himself into a frenzy, unable to live for the moment, facing the pressures of fading British tradition (on the title track) and changes in technology ("Last of the Steam-Powered Trains"), both of which symbolize a changing of the guard and uncertainty about how the album’s protagonist fits into the world. Don’t underestimate Davies’ fears of growing old. The bitterness on "Do You Remember Walter?" is almost too much to bear. It fits well, though, making Village Green a cohesive unit. Here he criticizes an old friend who he assumes has grown old, boring, and out of shape. But his disdain stems from Ray’s fear of being Walter (i.e., washed up), and is connected to the fact that Walter has moved on in life and perhaps wouldn’t even recognize or remember his dear old friend.

With its simple and bucolic flair, "Sitting by the Riverside" seems familiar enough. The ditty should be relaxing, with its nice, easy-going melody, but Ray even corrupts something seemingly innocent with a manic "la-da-da" that chimes in on occasion before bursting to a near crescendo during the song’s outro, sounding like a bad drug experience.

Listening to Village Green‘s "All of My Friends Were There," I’ve always imagined it playing at someone’s birthday party, with — of course — all their friends present. But it seems to be more of a performance with all eyes on Davies, because he’s built it in his head to be the biggest day in his life. Once again we see his sick longing to feel love, attention, and validation, this time through the power of numbers. Unfortunately, his gathering backfires to disastrous results. It’s just as well. Somehow I have a feeling that no matter how many people were present, he still feels alone and empty.

Two Village Green songs, "Picture Book" and the album-closing "People Take Pictures of Each Other," focus on how photographs are supposed to fill some sort of void, making us seem more important than we really are — as if a photograph is necessary to validate our feelings of love for one another and emotions from our past. Davies argues that we take pictures of one another to prove our existence. At the same time, he’s caught up in paranoid visions of what his own photograph will look like when he’s an old man: "Picture yourself, when you’re getting old." Finally a bit of optimism peeks through, but in an unsure way, when he sings, "People often change, but memories of people can remain." That is to say, I can remember you however I choose.

RAY DAVIES

Thurs/12, 8 p.m., $40–$57

The Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

Hello, cello

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November 11, 2009
0

molly@sfbg.com

There is something hauntingly beautiful — if not downright sexy — about the cello: a musician straddling the feminine curves of a human-sized instrument, bow sliding slowly and elegantly over the trembling strings, fingers plucking and vibrating in alternately gentle and assertive motions, and tones emitting from the smooth wood that range everywhere from soft whispers to deep moans.

It’s no wonder the cello has been compared to both the human voice and, in the many portraits of women’s backs painted to look like string instruments, the human body.

So perhaps it should also be no wonder that lately, particularly in the Bay Area, the cello has gained new popularity — one outside of the traditional concert hall. Cellists like Zoe Keating, formerly of Rasputina, and Sam Bass, of Loop!Station and Les Claypool, are gaining the kind of recognition formerly reserved for indie rockers. Cello Madness Congress, the monthly improv jam hosted by Joey Chang a.k.a. Cello Joe, regularly draws a crowd of musicians and enthusiasts alike. Cello Bazaar, a monthly cello concert held at Café Bazaar in the Richmond District, has become so popular it might have to expand. And Rushad Eggleston’s punk band Tornado Rider has rock ‘n’roll lovers moshing to cello music at venues like Red Devil Lounge. Not only does cello music seem to be a trend, as Cello Bazaar founder Hannah Addario-Berry says, "it’s a total scene."

Perhaps one reason for the increased visibility of cello in the Bay Area is due to recent developments in classical music. As symphonies get less funding and young musicians become more adventurous, classical musicians are finding new ways to play and new venues to play in. The most visible of these is Classical Revolution, which has taken instruments like violin, piano, and, yes, cello, out of the stuffy concert hall and into Revolution Cafe and SoCha Café for casual weekly concerts.

These gatherings are particularly advantageous for cellists. In an orchestra setting, cello tends to play a supportive roll. But there is a fabulous repertoire of music meant to be played by several cellos together, thanks mostly to the cello’s remarkable range. In a non-symphony setting, the cello can more easily take center stage.

Plus, cellists seem to like to socialize and harmonize together. Perhaps because of their role in larger symphonies, cellists tend not to be particularly competitive (unlike violinists, for example, who often compete for solos). Some musicians say people drawn to cello are naturally more easy-going than those drawn to other instruments. Others say that there is more a group of cellos can do together sonically than, say, a group of flutes. "Brass sections are incredibly social too," says Addario-Berry. "But of the string family, I’ve found cellists to be the ones who most want to hang out together."

But perhaps the largest reason for the cello’s new visibility and popularity is its versatility. The artist most famous for exploring the possibilities for cello is Yo-Yo Ma, but these days all kinds of artists are finding ways to use cello in other in the music of various cultures, in rock, and in electronic music. Indeed, it was the infinite possibilities for layering different cello sounds over each other and over the human voice that inspired the cycle of songs that composer/singer Amy X Neuburg began writing for the three-piece Cello Chixtet in 2005 — the same qualities that make Loop!Station’s sound so rich and varied, even though they’re only two people (and only one instrument).

One of the most exciting new developments, though, is not just using the cello with rock but to rock. According to Eggleston, who straps on his sticker-covered cello and plays it like an electric guitar, the progression is a natural one. With a cello you can play power chords with one finger instead of two, he says. There’s infinite sustain because there’s a bow. You don’t need a wah-wah pedal because you can get different harmonics from one string. Because there are no frets, you can bend notes various ways and get subtle details you can’t get from a guitar. Plus you have the option of sliding and jumping around on the frets. "It’s kind of like a vicious harmonica/slide guitar/ metal guitar/wild cat," he says.

But whatever direction cellists are taking, the Bay Area music community seems supportive. "So many people are intimidated by the concert hall protocol … not knowing when to clap and not to cough," says Addario-Berry. "The idea of taking cello music to people in a comfortable environment is really important."

Or as Eggleston puts it, "Yay! Cello power!"

UPCOMING CELLO EVENTS

CELLO BAZAAR

Tues/17, 7 p.m.

Bazaar Café

5927 California, SF

(415) 831-5620

www.bazaarcafe.com

JOEY CHANG AND THE SHOW

Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m.; $5

Blue Macaw

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 920-0577

thebluemacawsf.com

TORNADO RIDER

Nov. 20, 9 p.m.; $10

The Uptown

1928 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.uptownnightclub.com

CELLO MADNESS CONGRESS

Nov. 25, 8 p.m.; free

Blue Macaw

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 920-0577

thebluemacawsf.com

Button pushers

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November 11, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Bend an ear toward Fuck Buttons’ ecstatic second album, Tarot Sport (ATP), and you’re only a card flip away from shuffling the Rider-Waite deck of the mind and coming up with visual corollaries for the tracks. Frenetic opener "Surf Solar" obviously boogie-boards to the freedom-first of the major arcana’s card zero, the Fool, whereas "Rough Steez" burrows into the deep ‘n’ dirty low end of the Tower card, and "The Lisbon Maru" cozies down amid warmly glimmering Doppler synths, akin to the Sun image. The glorious polyrhythmic cluster-fuck of "Phantom Limb" sparkles hard, reading just like the Star, while finale "Flight of the Feathered Serpent" breaks into a mind-expanding, all-encompassing loop, à la the closing picture of the major arcana: a baton-twirling cosmic cheerleader dancing within a circle of completion, or the World. Bring it on.

The tarot of sport — see the Vangelis shout-out of "Olympians" — or the sport of tarot did inform the album, says Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power, by phone from D.C. "We’re both kind of interested in the mystical world in some way," he confesses, referring to bandmate Andrew Hung. But perhaps I’m reading too hard between the cards. Power and Hung didn’t quite rifle through the deck and riff off those airy swords, energetic wands, emotional cups, and earthy pentacles. Rather, they were both intrigued by the idea of formalized competition between psychics, which Hung had been reading about. "I mean, first and foremost, the words themselves were quite resonant for us," Hung says. "They struck a chord — and it’s quite a funny concept."

Battling psychics might conjure thoughts of Criss Angel mind-freaking the ladies of the Psychic Friends Network in Paranormal Activity‘s haunted townhouse, crystals and dowsing rods in fists. But the notion also plugs into Fuck Buttons’ music-making process — as well as the image of Hung and Power hunched diligently over their gadgets, pedals, and toy instruments at their packed, steamy Independent show last year. The hardcore-schooled Power is more serious. Hung, who has an electronic music background, is more puckish and playful. ("We’re based in a car right now," he jokes when asked where the two 27-year-olds live. Ask him what a Fuck Button is, and he quips, "I guess you’re talking to one.")

The Bristol, England, natives started playing together in 2004. "When we converged at the same point, that’s when things started to get quite loud," says Hung. Fuck Buttons’ writing process hinges on a similar sense of give-and-take. "We’ve always written songs the same way," explains Power. "We’ll get together in a room and it’s quite important that we don’t have any ideas brought in, that we approach it like a blank canvas. We’re both messing around with sound together — it’s been very free in that sense."

The beat-driven, less aggro sound of Tarot Sport, informed by the more ambitious musicians once confined to the New Age aisle, was the direct result of the twosome’s new equipment acquisitions — various analog synths, pedals, and "bips and bobs," as Power puts it — since their debut, Street Horrrsing (ATP, 2008). "The sounds are quite a lot richer on this record because we had a lot more stuff to play with," notes Power. "One particular thing that did happen was we got rid of our laptop. When a lot of people see a laptop onstage, they assume you’re a laptop band and just playing things off your laptop, which isn’t the case at all."

That’s where the psychic ability comes in very handy, though Fuck Buttons don’t cop to those powers — or even a good grasp of the Vulcan mind meld. "We’re definitely working on that one," Power deadpans. "We haven’t quite perfected it yet, but it’s something we’ve been trying to do, yeah." *

FUCK BUTTONS

With Growing and Chen Santa Maria

Fri/13, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

————

LOVER!

Onetime Jay Reatard bandmate Rich Crook turns up the twang with the No Dreams Please EP (Big Legal Mess). With the Splinters and Bass Drum of Death. Fri/13, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

BURAKA SOM SISTEMA

Way disorderly in the new world and shit-hot to boot — that’s the Lisbon, Portugal, hybridized electro-kuduro party machine. Sun/14, 9 p.m., $16–$18. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

THE BLACK HEART PROCESSION AND BELLINI

Dusky SoCal fantasies meet Italian-American brutarian post-punk. Sun/15, 8 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, S.F. www.theindependentsf.com

Information

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November 11, 2009
0

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Apparently there’s some sort of "recession" happening, which explains all the cat-hair wigs, duct-taped platforms, sideways boob-jobs, and flask-filled socks on the dance floor. And yet, peculiarly, new SF clubs continue to open at the rate of one a week. Among the recent delectations: SOM (2925 16th St., SF. www.som-bar.com), club impresario Peter Glickstern’s Brazilian-tinged redo of the Liquid-Pink space in the Mission; Siberia (314 11th St., SF.), an intriguing if somewhat directionless ramp-up of the old Fat City, and a relaunch of the cozy 222 Hyde (222 Hyde, SF. www.222hydesf.com), which is starting to attract some mighty piquant talent. Are there enough crisp bucks to fold and tuck into these newbies’ spangled thongs? Don’t sneeze at my wig!

DEVOTION

Good ol’ seamless sets of throwdown soulful house became a rarity in this fractional decade, and the rest seems to have done a world of good. That full-throated sound of yore is back on the rise, and former Bay Area fave DJ Ruben Mancias is bringing his joyful party back once more, hands up.

Thurs/12, 9:30 p.m., $10. Harlot, 46 Minna, SF. www.harlotsf.com

BEATS IN SPACE

I practically grew up on Beats in Space radio (www.beatsinspace.net), DJ and DFA member Tim Sweeney’s tastily eclectic show on New York’s WNYU. From Carl Craig to Faze Action, Diplo to Shit Robot, BIS’s guestlist has been a crystalline signal through the Web static. Now the 10-year-old show’s on the move, kicking off a monthly here with DJ Brennan Green and Sweeney himself.

Fri/13, 9 p.m., $5. Triple Crown, 1760 Market, SF. www.triplecrownsf.com

CLAUDE VONSTROKE

Mr. Dirty Bird Records should be credited with injecting a sense of humor into minimal techno and producing a signature Bay Area sound. Although he sticks with his usual tricks on his new album, Bird Brain — guttural grunts, jungle calls, tympani rolls, locker room jokes, and ornithological obsession — he’s still hitting a dance floor sweet spot and occasionally breaking through into beauty.

Fri/13, 10 p.m., $10 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

THE FUTURE 003

Yes, future bass is still happening, and starting to enter its baroque phase. (Luckily, wacky maestro headliner Daedelus was baroque to begin with). The first two gut-rumbling installments of this party focused on more aggressive, dubstep-related variations of the future sound. This one looks a tad jazzier, with electro-boogie aficionado James Pants and progressive warper Free the Robots looking ahead.

Fri/13, 9 p.m., $12 advance. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com

MERCURY LOUNGE

It’s all about Mason Bates, the local composer whose attempts to fuse classical orchestration with laptop electronics are never less than wowza. His Mercury Soul project is mixing up a fizzy Friday happy hour, interspersing live classical performances with house, trip-hop, and jazzy downtempo loveliness.

Fri/13, 5 p.m.-9 p.m., free. 111 Minna, SF. www.111minnagallery.com

BIG IDEA NIGHT

Another lollapalooza of art and nightlife who’s-who at Yerba Buena, this time taking on "The State of the Queer Nation." Yes, that’s far too much to swallow in one tipsy evening, but performances by HOTTUB, Tim Miller, Diamond Daggers, DJ Black, and more will certainly whet your appetite for funky homo-intellectualization.

Sat/14, 9 p.m., free. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. www.ybca.org

L-VIS 1990 AND BOK BOK

L-vis 1990’s videos, directed by James Connolly, are little slices of postmodern genius, positing a Soul II Soul meets Jane Fonda Workout era that never existed but kind of should have. His UK Funky sound, however, is definitely of the now, mixing tribal house beats with champagne-rave breakdowns. With fellow funker Bok Bok, he’ll bring the bangin’ Night Slugs party from the UK.

Sat/14, 10 p.m., $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

MALL MADNESS

I once jokingly lamented that among all the ’90s grunge revival in the clubs, there wasn’t a complimentary boy-band tribute night. STFU, Marke B.! Here it is in all its glory, a galleria-drag bonanza with a healthy and shockingly unironic dose of Tiffany, Stacey Q., and uncloseted Backstreet Boys. Accessories by Claire’s, Glamour Shots provided.

Sat/14, 10 p.m., $5. UndergroundSF, 424 Haight, SF. *

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