The Null Device
2004/12/7
The BBC speaks to some self-styled "goth" kids in Norfolk; complete with photos. (via caycos)
Josh, also known as Shadow Mercy, Jessica, who calls herself Misery Whispers and Anton who is known as Lord Mercy, are all Goths and 12-years-old.
I listen to Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Green Day, Good Charlotte and other sorts of punk metal or gothic rock. I like to do magic spells and to look at runes books. ... My advice to people who want to become a Goth is don't be too cocky.
("Don't be too cocky"? What's the bloody point of it then?)
Meanwhile, the comments section at the bottom yields a bounteous harvest of pure comedy gold.
In parts of California, cities are reserving parking spaces for SUVs, and ticketing drivers of un-American small cars who attempt to use these spaces. Mind you, anybody who so obviously disdains large cars, that unifying sacrament of contemporary America, is probably a French sympathiser or something, and thus to be regarded with suspicion.
Jeremy Deller, one of the masterminds behind Acid Brass, has won the Turner Prize, with a video exploring Crawford, Texas and the Branch Davidian siege in nearby Waco. Deller is also known for staging a re-enactment of a battle of the 1984 miner's strike (using former miners to play riot police), placing ads containing Smiths lyrics in the Guardian's Valentines pages, installing a mirrorball in the "vilest alley in Liverpool", and various objects to commemorate ordinary lives and deaths; he is now planning a nationwide exhibition of spray-painted cars, gurning competitions, crop circles and other folk art.
Meanwhile, Momus weighs in, comparing Deller's socially-aware art with the terminally conservative and staid nature of rock, in particular, the rigidly formulaic variety that graces the pages of NME:
UK rock and pop awards in 2004 showed pop music, and specifically rock, to be in a terminally mannerist and museumlike place; dead, irrelevant, tongue-in-cheek, out of touch with contemporary events, as conservative and hung up on the past as opera or classical music at their most decadent, smug, pastichey and tribute-ridden. Awards like the Brits and the NME Carling this year went to sadly Spinal Tappish bands like The Darkness, The Libertines and Kings of Leon, whose moronic-ironic pomo neo-primal rockism seemed to narrow the world down to retro-reverence and in-joke tribute-nudges to rock's heyday, the 1970s (did I mention that satanist-turned-celebrity dad Ozzy Osbourne won the NME's 'Godlike genius award'?).
It seems that everything from cheese to pornography, from technology to obesity to all-terain vehicles, is "the new heroin" these days.
Ultra-groovy MP3 record label Comfort Stand, who brought us the Two Zombies Later lounge/exotica compilation and the Ghouls With Attitude vintage monster/spooky/horror-themed music compilation, are back with a new compilation, titled Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka. Subtitled "Porn Music For The Masses Volume 1", it's inspired by porno soundtrack music, and features sleazy lounge grooves, wah-wah guitar, bootywhangular guitar/sax/Moog solos and the odd dose of sexed-up 90s dance music, industriogothic cyber-metal, alpine oom-pah-pah and obscene MacInTalk dialogue. (via bOING bOING)