We at ChinaShop spent the day Thursday in Austin, Texas celebrating St Patrick’s Day. What better way to share our love of the Emerald Isle than to whip out our favorite pair of shades and help with the green effort in the process.
Picture yourself as the tour manager for a platinum-selling band; your first management job right out of college. It’s your first day, and your band is playing a gig at an Austin venue called the Exodus. It’s the week of South By Southwest, and the crowds are massive. To close their set, your band grabs their instruments and starts to parade offstage, playing the crowd out of the venue and onto the street like pied pipers; something they’ve done many times before. Then things take a turn for the worst. The police order the band back inside—citing breach of a local noise ordinance—but it’s too late. The crowd has already swelled to mass proportions, co-mingling with the sidewalk patrons already posted up outside the venue. Threats are issued, pepper spray is brandished, and chaos ensues. Two of your band members and the band’s manager are taken into custody, and the rest of your night is spent trying to undue a situation that should have never occurred in the first place.
Oh, and the first charge on your new credit card is $10,000 in bail fees.
Edward Norton – Fight Club: A scrawny-looking schlub, Norton plays a sort of yuppie Man With No Name who takes sh*t from everyone and in his spare time orders stuff from an LL Bean catalog. Then Tyler Durden comes out. “You’re not your f*cking khakis,” he growls at Norton/us, and thus is born one of the greatest vigilantes in cinema history. Now Norton is free to go bat-shit — which is not restricted to beating himself senseless to frame his boss for assault, shooting himself in the face, and soap-bombing a bunch of evil conglomerates. Not to mention braving the man-boobs of Meatloaf.
Ooooh the sun is shining, the weather is beautiful here in the NYSheezy (it’s about damn time), Friday is finally here and two of my favorites get into town from good ol’ London this weekend! All of which makes for a very excited panda. So, let’s kick off this week’s music news with a track from the immensely talented, Skream! Stream. Check out his remix of Miles Kanes’ (formally of the Last Shadow Puppets, now doing his own thing) “Rearrange” after the jump.
The Power of the Riff festival debuted at the Echoplex in Los Angeles last summer. It was by far the loudest day of the summer! And the most fun festival to debut in Echo Park in years.
Today, The Power Of The Riff descends upon Austin, Texas with a FREE all ages day party at ND at 501 Studios with Trash Talk, The Secret, The Funeral Pyre, All Pigs Must Die, Trap Them, Masakari, and The Country Bucks.
I had the pleasure of speaking to festival co-founder Sam Velde about Power Of The Riff and the following is what he had to say…
Between the bands going off in the Cedar Street Courtyard next door, the sweaty green mass of St. Patrick’s Day revelers under a tent across the way, and the loud mix of patrons taking refuge in the restaurant we’re currently dining in, it’s nearly impossible to catch a break from the constant barrage of sound. It attacks from all angles, topped off with a steady flow of bass emanating from the floorboards underneath our feet. Yet for all the clamor and confusion, Raphael Saadiq is about as well composed as Beethoven’s 5th.
On Saturday, March 26, Saadiq will take part in his very own Red Bull Live Session, performing multiple sets that draw material from both past albums and the forthcoming Stone Rollin’, set to drop on May 10. The following interview is a taste of what’s to come. Make sure to tune in next weekend as we broadcast live from Red Bull HQ.
The wall of sweat hot air hit me with gale force as soon as the back door was popped to sneak us in the raging over capacity club. I was running a bit behind and wasn’t quite sure if I had missed awolnation and the first of only two performances this SXSW 2011.
Here in Austin, there’s just as much good stuff happening on the street corners and outside of venues as there is on the inside. From dawn to dusk and beyond, it’s nothing but end-to-end music, which leaves very little time to remove oneself from the slipstream and relax. That’s where ChinaShop comes in. We’ve always fancied ourselves as purveyors of good taste, communicating the best of what’s out there straight to your computer monitor, but this week we thought we’d go the extra mile provide a tangible service to the band’s themselves. The music makers. The dreamers of dreams. So here’s what we did.
“Psycho Dwarf,” “Hit Me With That,” “Get Funky,” “Off The Books,” “No Escapin This”— these are just a handful of hip-hop hits from Queens, New York’s long-lived duo The Beatnuts that will instantly evoke head nods. Fan or not, it’s hard to deny the potency of these two beatsmith/MCs Psycho Les and Juju’s sample-centric, hard-hitting productions. Hell, even J Lo’s team jacked the same Enoch Light disco sample that The Beatnuts used for their club-ready and biggest single ever, “Watch Out Now.” They may not be known as critically-acclaimed lyricists, but as Blaq Poet rhymed on Da Nuts 1997 track, “Thinkin’ Bout Cash,” “The beats are nuts so you critics can’t say shit!”
Let me preface this by saying I’ve never been to Austin before. I know, I know. Tragic, right? San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso and maybe a few other random destinations, but never Austin. But if everything is bigger in Texas and Austin is “weird,” then I felt comfortable in my assumption that everything would be big, weird, and maybe smell a bit like barbecue. Maybe some beer. Okay a lot of beer. And a ton of food trucks.