Fun Fun Fun Fest in review →

At a time when trend-chasing (or even, if you want to be generous, attempts at trend-setting) is the only way anyone can think of to try to keep up with a music landscape that is ever-changing, uncertain and laden with an extremely short attention span, Slayer is a singular, iconic artist. It’s more appealing now than ever, to more people than ever, to hear a band that just does what they do without any of those other concerns. They like to play fast songs about death, destruction and Satan. They’ve been doing it for three decades. If you don’t like it, go watch Odd Future.

We live in uncertain times, but some things do not change. All hail Slayer.

I spent most of the weekend at Fun Fun Fun Fest, which lived up to its name. I was there, officially, to scout out some neat bits of music-culture weirdness for MTV Hive, which will start rolling out shortly, and did some moonlighting for my pals at CultureMap while I was there.

The above paragraphs come from the write-up I did for Slayer (duh), and there is more to be found in the links below.

I had a good time trying to contextualize all of the things I saw, because I think small festivals like Fun Fun Fun offer some interesting opportunities to get at the pulse of what people are into culturally in an increasingly fractured culture. The festival was huge, and absolutely packed with people, but it’s not an all-things-to-all-people event like Austin City Limits or Coachella — there’s a definite aesthetic here, and it’s designed to appeal to a few different types of people, finding what they have in common. How do Odd Future and Slayer and Major Lazer and Danzig and Passion Pit and Blonde Redhead and Public Enemy and Spoon all fit together? They all appeal to the nebulous beast known as the American Hipster, but there are people who feel passionate toward all of those artists who don’t fit that descriptor, if it means anything at all, in the slightest. What does the opportunity to see them all together offer?

I don’t know for sure that I found any answers, but I enjoyed very much trying to piece it together. Here are the CultureMap stories:

• FFF6 in review: Danzig Legacy an epic disappointment 
• FFF6 in review: Okkervil River eschews nostalgia for rock and roll 
• FFF6 in review: Wugazi proves itself worthy of the name 
• FFF6 in review: Childish Gambino owns the blue stage 
• FFF6 in review: Henry Rollins is your cool punk rock uncle now 
• FFF6 in review: All hail Slayer, deliverance from Danzig

The Hangover Part II.

We went to the tiny Texas town of Leakey for Memorial Day Weekend. (Pronounced “Lake-y,” but come on, 350 people who live there, you know your town is really named “Leaky,” like it’s got a hole in it.) Kat’s uncle has a house near the Frio River, so we went with her family to enjoy some time in the dusty heat of Stage 4 drought Texas. Which is a very nice thing to be able to do. It also gets a little bit boring, so on Saturday, we borrowed the car and Kat and her sister and I drove in to the town of Uvalde, the nearest place with a movie theater, to watch The Hangover Part II. Most of the harsh criticisms that the film richly deserves have already been made (except by The A.V. Club, which, whoops, was the only review I read before I committed my $5.50 — small town movie tickets are cheap! — and two hours that would have otherwise been spent sitting in a rocking chair), so I will spare the “it’s the exact same jokes, like, exactly, but with racism and transphobia and homophobia,” write-up (but go read Videogum’s!), and leave it at this:

I think that Todd Phillips and I may have the same exact taste in music. I was so stoked when he used the Danzig version of “Thirteen” (which he wrote for Johnny Cash, so it’s not a cover, Austin Chronicle reviewer who only talked about Danzig the one time we met and who therefore really ought to know better) in the original, and when I saw that he commissioned Mark Lanegan — my, like, number-one dude — to record a cover of Nick Lowe’s “The Beast In Me” (also popularized by Johnny Cash), I was all, “Man, I gotta get that soundtrack.” And now I have it! It even features “The Downeaster Alexa,” one of those Billy Joel songs that hearing immediately makes me feel like I am eight years old in the backseat of my mom’s 1984 Plymouth Reliant station wagon. And a killer new Danzig song, and Curtis Mayfield, and Jenny Lewis, and Wolfmother… And a bunch of the tracks feature, at the very end, sound clips from the movie.

And I hated the movie so, so, so very much that I actually went into Audacity and edited the mp3 files to remove clips of things like Ed Helms shrieking “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!”, even though I generally think Ed Helms is super funny, because I never want to be reminded of the experience of sitting through this vile, unfunny thing ever. Hearing Ed Helms talk about covering his orange juice with a napkin so he doesn’t get roofied (explicit reference to the first movie #7 in the first ten minutes) actually makes me hate the awesome Danzig song I just listened to. That is how vile this movie is.

It makes me hate Danzig.