Music

Itzhak Perlman & Yo-Yo Ma, the Milli Vanilli of classical music?

They decided not to play the real thing. They pre-recorded the piece due to the cold weather and it’s affect on their sound and instruments. But this stinks. Aretha Franklin did not sound her best, but most people understand what cold weather does to sound, and she pulled off the real deal. What bothers me about this is that Yo-Yo talked about how he was nervous about the performance a few days earlier. WTF were you nervous about? You couldn’t do your best Ashlee Simpson impersonation? On top of that, it does not look good for the Obama administration. First HBO censors a gay bishop’s prayer, than these guys lipsinct classical music, and when Obama decides to take the oath over, he does not allow in TV cameras and forgets his bible. All in a couple of days.

Here’s the deal, Barry, we elected you because we were tired of censorship and GW Bush. Live up to your promises, let’s be transparent. I can’t take another 4 years of this kind of bullshit.

South Dacola Music Club with The Flaming Lips

If you’re into weird, eclectic music, then the Flaming Lips are your perfect musical companion.

From their biography on Rolling Stone.com:

Rock has produced few stranger or more daring bands in the last 20 years than Oklahoma City’s Flaming Lips, who embrace everything from merry prankster psychedelia to orchestral pop. At the outset, the Lips tried to bridge the seemingly insurmountable gap between Butthole Surfers-style dementia and bubblegum pop, with mixed results. Their early albums are jumbles of ideas, the weirdness genuine, the songs expansive and sometimes giddily incoherent. They’re as much a response to hardcore punk’s inflexible pithiness as to mainstream rock’s polish.

With In a Priest Driven Ambulance, a coherent vision starts to peek through the chaos. It comes courtesy of an irony-free cover of the standard “(What a) Wonderful World,” sung with wobbly conviction by Wayne Coyne. For all its disorienting ugliness and alienating strangeness, the world really is a wonderful place, the Lips insist — an unfashionable stance that the band would continue to explore with increasingly plangent results.

 

 

Lead singer Wayne Coyne goes crowd surfing in a big plastic ball
Lead singer Wayne Coyne goes crowd surfing in a big plastic ball

 

 

 

Another interesting article about them from Rolling Stone called “Okies From Outer Space“:

Wayne Coyne has not taken any drugs since his early twenties. This fact often comes as a shock to fans of his band, the Flaming Lips. The group has been making increasingly trippy and, to the surprise of even the band, increasingly popular psychedelic-rock albums since 1984, and its music, coupled with Coyne’s surreal cover paintings and bent lyrical aesthetic — song titles include “Jesus Shootin’ Heroin,” “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion,” “Pilot Can at the Queer of God,” “Talkin’ ‘Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants to Live Forever)” and, my personal favorite, “They Punctured My Yolk” — have led reasonable people to make certain assumptions.

If you haven’t heard them yet, check ’em out.

I guess I better give him back my signed copy of his X-mas CD

J.P. is gonna need the money.

From the RCJ;

Former “American Idol” finalist Jamie Paul Koehler has pleaded not guilty in 7th Circuit Court to a felony charge of grand theft by embezzlement.

Koehler, 32, Rapid City, is accused of stealing several thousand dollars from a family member. The maximum penalty upon conviction is 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine.

Koehler became well-known in the area after finishing in the top 44 performers on the televised “American Idol” musical competition in 2005.