There's quite an article in Coilhouse about misoginy in Industrial music and it really does call your attention as we take too many things for granted and while some attitudes from bands can be taken for simple provocation, the article points out most of what was once a scene build on boldness and adventurous thinking is now very much only a pile up of dangerous cliches and aggressive sexism.

As said in the article "The giants of industrial used subversive tactics to challenge audiences and create new awareness" has now turn to be "a disturbing trend of sexism, racism and anti-intellectualism". Bands like Combichrist or Nachtmahr seem to carry high the torch of violence lyrics against women and their aggressive videos display the band's dangerous stance for displaying women being nothing but objects of lust prone to betray the Alpha Male.

Men do tend to see the world thru a tainted illusion that women want them badly, whatever they do or say, and that women do feel the same way and while rock music has always been macho and superficial, it has most often exagerates the male message in a rather glamourous and silly way, not in what now seems to validate...

Matt Johnson, also known as The The, is a great character and a brilliant songwriter.

Very few like him can compose a catchy song that you will enjoy and probably whistle all day long and at the same have strong lyrics that actually mean something far above your typical boy-meets-girl 4 mins song format. Matt always succeeded in painting songs that are filled with great hooks and an always gotcha chorus while writing words that would live by themselves. And he always had a great sense for backing singers (he made duets with Neneh Cherry and Sinead O' Connor well before they were known).

But there's one facet of Matt that earns him even more the qualificative of "songwriter": just like previous politically engaged musicians like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan (in his early years) and Billy Bragg, Matt knows politics and life are deeply intertwined and not wanting the see the big picture by ignoring the small ones isn't what he does: Matt has always been involved in writing about politics, how Britain has lost all its excentricity and some of its very peculiar heritage to become USA's 51st state and how everything has now become leaded by global corporates. Poilitics...

It starts out like yet another rock music documentary where the band obviously believes he's the greatest thing since The Beatles but you soon cannot help to feel something is about to burst open...

And it does. Rebel Scum is an extraordinary documentary that begins with a Bible Belt punk band called "The Dirty Works" performing and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, his singer Christopher Scum starts to violently hit himself on the forefront with the microphone and obviously starts to bleed intensively while continuing to sing...You know this is not going to be an average movie...

And from then on, it's a deep dive into an abyss of addiction, delusion, bad times and even worst times again and again. But you cannot stop watching it cos it's one side of reality few music documentaries show: there's the glitter and the strass with Pop Idol where everything is just about how well the singer re-sang that Wilson Pickett song and how it looked good with that Armani suit on and then you have the sad reality of people stuck in a system where drugs, alcohol, family disfunctions, religion and hopeless hope just drive people in the gutter...

I watched Rebel Scum with...

Sabina England, multimedia artist, poet, filmmaker (see her excellent short movie on the left hand side) and playwrighter is going to hate me for this, but under her punk stance and fierce eyes that say fuck-you-world she's in fact a deeply romantic artist and her work embodies all the hopes, sorrows, violence, prejudice, desires, lust and envies, macaber angles and sunny moments that we all have inside ourselves when we haven't been eaten out alive and spit out on the pavement by The System.

At the same time, she doesn't play the game right: as a Desi (in Wiki, Desi refers to the people, cultures, and products of the Indian subcontinent and, increasingly, to the people, cultures, and products of their diaspora), some might expect a docile woman, waiting to fill in the shoes that have been carved for her by traditions, centuries of ways of doing/being. No way, no way, she's a strong opiniated woman with ideas, dreams and behaviors that will set your world and hers in fire if you don't look twice and see all the superb humanity, the warm Understanding and the Love behind it all.

As a brown skinned woman living in the West, she has to suffer being an outcast even...

Thanx to the amazing Network Awesome, we bumped into a great documentary about Sufism, its music, the questions it raises and the emotions it surely delivers.

In a society which is going into panic mode at the simple use of the word Islam, Sufism is a very attractive and strange mystery for us westerners but we tend to ignore it's in fact a rather popular movement even tho it's the total opposite of what fundamentalists want to see in the Coran as it symbolizes the Love for a God rather than the Fear of a God. Furthermore it has a message of Universalism and Tolerance which is something we do need in this tormented world.

Music in Sufism is of the higher importance as it elevates the Sufis nearer to his God, as do poetry and writings, altho many would argue, especially fundamentlists within Islam, that music isn't allowed and that Sufism isn't even Islam....Just like some chords were banished from the allowed scale back in our European middle ages, it seems the power of music in Sufism, and Sufism itself, is raising questions and questions are always a good thing.

Think for yourself and dance closer to the Gods !

the original article:...

In Germany, at the last Berlin elections, the Pirate Party made it to no less than 15 seats on the 141 available at the regional Parliament. That's enough to get the other political movements attention, I tell ya....

But what do they want ? Their platform very much revolves around legalization of file-sharing sites, legalization of cannabis and generally more freedom and less state involvement in citizen's informations and data. It also wants open governement and the availability of API's to be able to control said-governement (which is actually a really cool idea).

All this sounds interesting, but do they really know the subjects ? One wonders after reading a surrealistic debate (in Der Spiegel) between a german pop artist who lives, or tries to, from his music and a Pirate Party member who's one of the 15 elected at the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus. (House of Deputies). Clearly, the Pirate Party member doesn't know what he's talking about and it feels like he's finding excuses for downloading illegal material more than having a vision of a society where culture will be available to all at the speed of light and for little or no money.

Something somewhere...

Acrassicauda was the first Iraki heavy-metal band and as such it has been thru hell...They kinda could play gigs under Saddam's regime but headbanging wasn't authorized as it was too reminescent of the orthodox jews headmoves when praying (!) and they had to compose a song to the glory of the ex-dictator.

Vice magazine, a Montreal-born pop cutlure mag, wrote about them back in 2004 and that started interests from readers everywhere, and maybe too much interest from islamic factions which started to persecute Acrassicauda, thinking they were Saddam's protegees or, wost, US Forces protegees. Life began to be extremely difficult for them and they had to flee Irak and went to Syria. In 2007, the documentary "Heavy-Metal In Bagdad" (with Spike Jonze as exective producer !) started to be filmed and that angered the Syrian authorities who threw the band out of visa. They had to go to Turkey and sell all their equipment to be able to survive.

The Vice Magazine somehow felt guilty of such troubles as they were the ones behind the exposure of Acrassicauda to the world, and the documentary was their project. They decided to give 40.000 us $ to the band and relocated them to...

We have it good here, in the West. We can safely make music and while the production tools costs are going down every day, we still can complain about bad sales and piracy and Spotify paying artists 0,002€ per song streamed. And we have shows like Pop Idol or The Voice mis-educating people about what's an artist and what it takes to become one...

While we're doing these things confortably (I mean, the more upset we are is when the broadband access is down, right ?) other artists and musicians are confronted to far worst situations. Take Tinariwen, the "african tuareg blues" band from Mali who just won a Grammy Award: they are as far from your basic top 40 music band as it can be....

The core members of Tinariwen actually met in 1982 and are quite the focus of attention on the Tuareg movement as this used-to-be-but-not-anymore forgotten (rather desertic) region of Africa is wanted by many people; multinational corporates (the region is rich in petrol and uranium), drug smugglers (very useful platform to Europe for the South American cocaine cartels), AQMI terrorists (the north african leg of Al Qaida) and diverse people, communities and countries wanting a piece...

By now, if you're an avid reader of this blog, you surely have seen that while we're not dipping too much into politics, we're still a looooong way to be Tea Party material for sure. Politics and music have always been linked, politics in music as well, and so does music in politics...

Barrack Obama, running for a second mandate as Numero Uno in the USA, has made public his Spotify favorite list. Now, that's quite a change from earlier elections where candidates had to look uber serious and only concerned by America. Here, we have a president that sings, smiles, dances, cries...and whether you think his 4 years at the helm were a huge success, a moderate one, a just-about-right or a total disaster, Obama will still come thru as someone who knows when to let go and get to that famous bridge. Amen to that. (see below a few videos of President Obama singing. In tune. Yes.)

So, his Spotify list ? Well, there are some rockin tunes there for sure, and a couple of I-wouldn't-be-caught-alive-singing-that, but overall it's rather ok....This said, when we wanted to hook up to his playlist on Spotify, we had a pop up asking us if we had a Spotify account or not ? Knowing...

Jim Morrison would have turned 68 today if he hadn't die in a french hotel in 1971 at 27 (aaaah, the famous 27 years old tag).

History recalls a turbulent teenager, a great looking lead singer in black leather fronting out an interesting band in an interesting political era: the rise of the Youths in the USA, the psychedelic movement, music rapidly becoming a decent business venture as rock music started to flood the Nation. He was also one of the first "controversial" singer on stage, directly interacting with the crowd (and as such is praised by many, including Iggy Pop) and engaging people as his shows were hectic and filled with tension and subdued sexuality and angst/nervosity...

The music of The Doors still sounds good these days (a testament to analog recording equipment and talented musicians and producers) and we can still feel in it the poetry of the lyrics but also the radical (for the time) meaning they sometimes had. Jim Morrison was known to be troubles and people still recall his problems with the Police and how The Man arrested him on stage. Of course this boosted even more The Doors' reputation for being anti-establishement, something that, at...

You know at Kollector we're very much into people taking pride in their work as artists and while mainstream music rules fine in most cases, there's nothing like someone standing up from the crowd and being the voice of a generation, or a cause, or a movement, (or just for himself) but with a difference: a unique individual who never takes NO for an answer.

And Joe Strummer, who sadly passed away December 22 2002, was that: a loud, opiniated but charming man, very politically aware that stood up for the rights of the People, but also an exceptional artist : he was member of the iconic band The Clash and helped give Punk its best letters. He was also very involved in politics and took part in many Rock Against Racism concerts, AIDS campaigns, and his last records were actually pressed carbon free as Joe Strummer had trees replanted to offest the carbon foot of his releases...

Together with The Clash, they released two of the best rock albums ever: Sandinista and London Calling.

Julian Temple, an excentric and adorable english movie maker, has made a magnificent documentary on Joe Strummer http://www....

In an interesting blog entry from Tunecore, numbers show that only about 6.000 artists made more than a 100 $ in their monthly statement. Not afraid of big numbers ? Ok, Tunecore artists are...600.000: so that's only ONE percent of musicians making a decent (and sometimes very, very decent, income from their art)
(http://digitalaudioinsider.blogspot.com/2011/11/tunecore-releases-some-f...)

This is why it's not surprising the Occupy Movement started in NY a few months agois reaching more and more musicians as they are also part of the 99% of people off the Rich Grid, and they suffer directly from the effects of the big R, the recession hiting the planet. Moby, Kayne, The Kiils and many, many more artists are joining in as the peaceful movement grows and grows. What are the Occupy Wall Strert about ? Simple, yet worth the effort:

"Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of...

Very interesting article in Pop Matters based on a documentary, "The Birth of Punk Islam" by canadian born Omar Majeed, describing how Islam Punk creates a few tiny but reel waves in the US muslim community.

In a culture eager to find a normality between the Soufi dancers on one side and the integrists haters of music on the other side, US muslims artists find themselves between a rock and a hard place...Yet that doesn't stop them for trying to get their music across. One could think that's enough of a challenge, but they're raising the bar real high: they're playing punk music which already attracts prejudice and misunderstanding from most people anyway.

Add in the equation young rebels trying to find themselves in an US society obsessed by 9-11 and you have a cocktail ready to go Go GO!

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We tend to forget music as we know it now wasn't always the aural background to a car advert (Eminem and Chrysler, Peugeot and Universal) or hymn to a luxurious perfume, nor were rebel looking Hollywood actors like Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt cream of the cream of the Hollywood chain food.

There was a time, children, where John Wayne and Charlon Heston were the top of the iceberg and anything left of them was deemed anti-establishement and DANGEROUS. Rock music was starting to grow but it was mainly all nice and satinized until some decided to sing about politics and changes and how things really were beneath the surface of well-oiled western civilisations.

Some songs have been mirrors of that. Time Out, the London magazine, has a long article about 100 songs that changed history but we will narrow that countdown to 5 songs. 5 only. But 5 songs that scared The Man a lot...

PUBLIC ENEMY: "Fight The Power" the 1989 song was an undestructable element of Spike Jones's amazing movie Do The Right Thing and it has that drive that will last forever. It was all about the Ghetto and not two years later was the background sound to the LA Riots...

FELA: "Zombie...

We already had Henry Rollins in our Kollector Blog, and he was on about "Selling Out" and that was insighful and funny (wich may very well be this blog's aim actually).
The ex-Black Flag and Hollywood's favorite thug (or good guy, Henry does well both sides on the screen) has here a very interesting monologue on how some feel the urge and need to rewrite history, and in this case Creationism.

He has that great phrase: "History isn't broken but it's being fixed all the same". Sooo true, Henry, so true !

Since Black Flag, Rollins has done many things, musically or politically. He's been doing various radioshows and TV ("The Henry Rollins Show").
Henry Rollins is also a strong voice for various political causes, including promoting LGBT rights, World Hunger Relief, Water Relief, ...He has also a strong position against US fighting wars abroad.

For the die-hards, a very cool video showing Mr and Ms Rollins at home :) http://vimeo.com/19458864
more on that interesting man on: http://henryrollins.com

Without getting into the nitty gritty of things that happened in the UK last week, one has to draw some lines between the 2011 explosion of violence and the No Future attitude Punk seemed to have 35 years ago.

The Guardian comes back to it in a interesting article written by Krissi Murison from the NME. If you think the punks were ever so empty back then, wait till you see today's youths: they don't even seem to have people talking for them, and the rare candidates have a hard time actually defining motives, desires, hopes and perspectives while The Clash were (self) educated, proud, politically aware, and ended up writing two of the best rock albums ever: London Calling and Sandinista.

The No Future attitude which was heavily featured and pushed by the medias was in fact counter balanced by hundreds of artistic outsprings from the punks: from graphic to the movies to books and paintings. Punk eventually died, yes, but it left an impressive artistic legacy.

Interesting also to see in Kollector how The Clash London's Calling and White Riots did get more airply than usual...

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