Hey, Everybody! It's the Eighties! At least for two full floors of cavernous envy-inducing loft space at the temporary home in Chelsea of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. That's where we recently caught the other current buzz NYC exhibition (Christo's The Gates at Central Park being the buzz exhibition), titled East Village USA. If you can manage it, you should definitely check out this show before it closes March 19.

The curator for East Village USA has produced a definitive art collection that features the work of some of the best known figures of the downtown New York art scene between 1980 and 1987. It was in the many small galleries and event spaces of the East Village, which at the height of the art boom could be counted in the hundreds, where many of the artists whose work is shown here first gained critical acclaim and, for a few, enormous commercial success and international fame.

Futura, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Kostabi, Ann Magnuson, and the influential art-post-punk/indie rock band Sonic Youth were some of the important and more widely known creators to come out the era. The show is includes of lot of the first art to emerge from--or to be directly influenced by--early hip-hop culture: graffiti and street art, painting, film, music and and dance.

Of course, in terms of art, the East Village today is a shadow of its former self; the nabe has gentrified to the point where it's now a place where the word "luxury" describes apartments selling for millions of dollars. Sure, there are still signs, however, of the area's historic importance as the center of American radical bohemianism, both artistic and political. The East Village no longer attracts artists because they've simply been priced out.

The current artists' magnet of NYC is Williamsburg in Brooklyn, which lies directly across the East River from the East Village. But Williamsburg doesn't possess quite the same vibe--the hood is a relatively sedate and mostly residential area without the history of severe urban decay, violence and drugs that was once the edgy hallmark of life in the East Village and Lower East Side. What's more, because Williamsburg is in Brooklyn, it isn't as directly affected by the hyper-urban bustle of Manhattan.

Still, there are now dozens upon dozens of art galleries and hundreds of artists' studios in W'burg that we won't be surprised to see twenty years from now an exhibition at the New Museum called "Williamsburg USA."

That said, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is fittingly moving into its new, permanent home next year in a futuristic building designed by avant-garde Japanese arhitects on the Bowery in the Lower East Side, at the heart of where much of the art of East Village USA was originally conceived and created.

Related Links

The New Museum of Cntemporary Art Website

East Village USA - New Yorker Magazine Review

East Village USA - NY Magazine Review [NY Metro]

In December, A Bathing Ape, the secretive brand of reclusive Japanese designer and tastemaker Nigo-san, opened a store in New York City. The shop is called Busy Work Shop and has hung out its shingle at a newly renovated two-floor space in the heart of SoHo. The space includes a display window filled with a stainless steel conveyor belt (or "kaiten") that moves the latest in A Bathing Ape sneakers in a clockwise circuit of tantalizing rubber-soled freshness. Sister site GlobalGraphica.com has got the exclusive photos of the shop's display, sneakers, and interior and exterior. Check 'em out by following the link after the jump below ...

Related Links

A Bathing Ape Store NYC Photos [Global Graphica]

Bust out the crunk juice! Last year the Massive commented on Lil Jon and his foray into the porn video business. Like Snoop Dogg before him, Lil Jon was already hard at work building his entertainment empire while the white-hot media heat was surrounding him. Well, 2004 was quite a year for Lil Jon with the hip-hop artist pumping out a string of hits, a new album and getting plenty of inadverdant publicity that came with Dave Chapelle satirizing the limited vocabulary of the gold-toothed, dread-locked MC on Chappelle's Show. In 2005, Lil Jon's star is shining brighter than. His porn franchise has flourished beyond anyone's expectations and He's been put up for several Adult Video Awards, the porn industry's Oscars. The big players have taken notice. Lil' Jon and his production company have just inked a new two-picture deal with industry leader Vivid that promises more crunky porn titles in 2005.

The new titles will be called "Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz' Vivid Vegas Party" and "Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz Nightclubbin." The first picture is currently in production and will be released this spring.
Lil Jon and his crew will score the videos and introduce the sex scenes. As Lil Jon himself would say: Yeeeeaaaaaaah!

The AVN nominations were given for "Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz: American Sex Series" in the categories of "Best Music" and "Best Themed Release." Both titles were produced by Afro-Centric Productions and Legacy DVD Works and distributed by Vivid.

RELATED LINKS

Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz Crunk Out New Porn Flix
[SOHH]

Lil Jon To Star In Hardcore Porn Movie [FemaleFirst UK]

Yeah!!! Platinum Hip-Hop Artist Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz Sign Two-Picture Deal with Vivid Entertainment [BusinessWire]

Lil Jon Online - Official Lil Jon Website

Lil Jon Spills The Secret of Crunk Juice [Playboy's Dirty Dozen Interview]

In the previous post, we mentioned that the Beastie Boys have a great web site. Well now it's time for us to give a shout out to an unofficial fan site we've grown fond of called Beastiemania.com. But first some perspective and context.

Back in June 2004, when the Beastie Boys released the single "Ch-check It Out," the first single from the album "To the 5 Boroughs," the hip-hop trio also re-launched their newly redesigned website, which had been languishing as a mere splash page devoid of content beyond a simple logo in the intervening years since their last big album and the demise of Mike D.'s Grand Royal record label. However, in the process of re-launching the site to promote and support the new disc and upcoming tour, the Beasties created one of the best band web sites we've ever seen.

As the medium goes, www.beasties.com is exemplary in terms of content, design, functionality, multimedia and--especially--interactivity. The site demonstrates how a well-planned web strategy can really add another dimension to the way fans experience the artist's music and how band and fan interact, as well as how the audience turns into a community. The application of the band-site idea is not new--it's as old as the Internet--but the Beastie Boys have raised the bar by employing the Internet so intelligently and by making their site such a high-quality online destination.

The flipside of the offical band-site coin is the unofficial fan web site, the amateur sites cobbled together by hardcore fans with the time and passion to set up the site and maintain it. The results of said efforts can be surpisngly good, but more often than not these sites just look plain crappy, offer little meaningful content or interactivity, and amount to so many stale online shrines in tribute to the artist, be it Justin Timberlake or Judakiss.

But, some of these sites aren't crappy, and, in fact, some of them are amazing resources for the serious and and casual fan alike. The Beastie Boys may have indirectly set the standard here, or rather, the Beasties have inspired an excellent unoffical site.

Beastiemania.com has a wealth of fresh, compelling content. Some of it is the general info on the New York rap group that one would expect, like the Beastie Boys biography and discography. And some of the content is the obscure minutiae that sets the site apart, such as a stunnningly thorough who's who of people who have been involved in big and small ways with the Beastie Boys throughout the band's twenty-plus-year career.

The person(s) behind Beastiemania.com have actually created some well-made stylish graphical elements ( see their logo above) as part of the overall web design. The site design itself is competent and solid, even if style is not quite our cup of tea as far as web site look-and-feel goes. The key, as a fan site, is that Beastiemania is not harsh on the eye. It's not crappy.

In a good way, the old cliche that "content is king" holds ture with Beastiemania. The site goes a few giant steps farther than most such unofficial online fan sites. The producers have conducted their own interviews with all sorts of people related to the Beastie Boys in even the remotest ways. These interviews have been published to the site periodically over the past few years.

One off our favorite interviews is with the Beastieboys.com webmaster, a dude named Minton. Though the interview (as well as the fan site) predates the Beastie Boys current website by several years, Minton himself is still involved with the New York rap group and tours with them. The Q&A is funny and revealing. Minton must have felt like the luckiest webmaster in the world when he got that gig.

Anyway, props to Beastiemania.com. Check it out.

RELATED LINKS

Beastie Boys' Who's Who [Beastiemania.com]

Beastiemania - Unofficial Fan Site

Beastiemania Interviews

Interview with Minton [Beastiemania.com]

Beastie Boys Official Web Site

The Beastie Boys' concert series has been passing through its Australia leg this past week, following on a quickie tour of Japan. The journey Down Under included stops at the massive annual summer outdoor music festival, the Big Day Out (remember, kids, Australia is in the southern hemisphere). The Beasties have been receiving a lot of positive press in the so-called "lucky country" for their shows throughout the country.

Fortunately the Beasties diligently update an online tour diary--a tour blog--on the band's excellent website (notice to all other musical acts--this is how you do a band/tour website!). The site has not only regular entries for each day of the tour and note on perfomrances in each city and set lists, but also tons of photos. There are even some homemade backstage video clips that are hilarious. In the most recent video entry, Mike D. and MCA talk at length about "pageantry," or their ethos on the subject of their onstage wardrobe choices and that of their fans, who are encouraged to dress up outrageously for the shows.

Aside from the multimedia documentation of their tour, the Beasties sweep through Australia holds something special for fans there--it's a none-too-regular hip-hop visitation of authentic American/New York hip-hop culture.

RELATED LINKS

The surprising Beastie Boys [The Australian]

Beastie Boys Tour Photo Gallery [Beastie Boys Website]

The Big Day Out Official Website

Beastie Boys Official Website

The Beastie Boys, Horden Pavillion [Sydney Morning Herald]

Okay, so take a guess. Which of the above three recording artists has an iTunes Playlist that doesn't suck? (Well, to be fair, we mean, "doesn't suck in our opinion.") The answer is at the end of this posting after the jump-link below.

But first, some background. The New York Post ran a feature a couple of weeks ago about celebrities and their music playlists that get published online. The playlists are Nick Hornby-esque catalogs along the lines of the personal Top Ten or All-time Favorite recordings. Think "High Fidelity," but instead of record-shop loser facing mid-life crisis, the song list is compiled by, say, Avril Lavigne.

Apple's iTunes online MP3 music store perfected the idea and by far provides the ideal model for this sort of thing, though several other major (legal) music download web sites have also made celeb playlists a feature of their content offerings.

Most of the celebs asked to contribute their playlists are, naturally, pop stars and successful musicians, which makes for, one hopes, revelations as to the musical influences on said celeb-musician's own sonic output. But famous actors, celebutantes and even novelsits (Nick Hornby, in a severely obivious kind of inverted irony, is among the celebs on iTunes) offer their favorite tracks.

The impression is that these are, by virtue of sharing their tastes with the public, recommendations and suggest the broader sense of muscial tastes and appreciation such accomplished musos-actors-whatevers are capable of far beyond what we know of them and their own music or, rather, from their mostly two-dimensional public personas.

This is where the concept can get silly. Most--and we emphasize "most"--of these playlists, in a word, suck. Some celebs seemed naturally suited to sucky playlists by the very nature of their fame. Others reveal a kind of sonic narcissism that manages to surprise even music industry cynics. As the Post article pointed out, superstar pop-R&B-soul-hip-hop diva Beyonce Knowles, lists mostly her own songs or those of her erstwhile pop vocal trio Destiny's Child. See, kids, forget the hype about rapper 50 Cent making it big on the strength of his DIY mixtapes--plugging your own music on your iTunes playlist is the way to promote yourself to supa' dupa' supa' stardom. (Ok, ok, we know--Enough snarkiness already.)

One notable exception to the shameless self-promo is that Beyonce likes a John Mayer song, which isn't exactly a huge leap--it's not as if she said she loves rockin' out to the Boredoms "Acid Police" or relaxing to ditties by Louis Armstrong or Merle Haggard, but rather it merely reveals that she's got a basic-cable package and has watched MTV at least once in the past two years.

Other playlists show a predictable tread of artists and music rougly equivalent to that of the playlist-maker. Ahem, John Mayer, by the way, as the Post also noted, does not have an interest in Beyonce's song book--none of her many popular hits is among his playlist.

The playlists, at least the better ones, tend to have notes explaining what the artist likes about the song or some related anecdote--as in the case of those compiled by Depeche Mode and Thievery Corporation. In a sense, the lists could also be interpreted as a celeb mixtape, and, not surprisingly, iTunes offers almost all of the songs included in these lists for sale on their music store, with direct links.

In a few minutes you could make the celeb playlist your very own. Imagine, say, ... a Carrot Top mixtape! (Well, we didn't actually see Carrot Top included among the celebs on iTunes, much to Apple's credit.)

With the mixtape in mind, another way to look at the list is as a creative endeavor in and of itself, or rather to think of it more like a true DJ mix and as a way to offer some insight not just into the tastes of the celebrity, but of the music itself. Which leads us to our favorite playlist on iTunes, which is by a spawn of rock royalty itself, New York DJ Mark Ronson.

His playlist doesn't suck. In fact, it's brilliant. Yup, Ronson is the answer to the question we posed at the beginning of the post. What Ronson has done is list about ten tracks, wherein the second of every two tracks he's selected is a hip-hop record that has sampled previous track, the first of every two songs selected on his playlist.

RELATED LINKS

A-List Does Playlist [New York Post]

Offical Mark Ronson Website

Mark Ronson Biography [VH1]

Offical John Mayer Website

Official Beyonce Kwoles Website

Apple iTunes Website

Beyonce, Your Mix Tape Sucks [Slate]!

Boom! Pow! Surpise! Walking into St. Mark's Bookshop in the East Village Monday evening, we were struck by the cover of the February/March 2005 issue of Index, the New York-based independent music-film-art-fashion-music mag. Screaming from the front of Index was Yoshimi, sometimes called Yoshimi Pee-Wee, singer-songwriter and frontperson for the influential Osaka, Japan noise band Boredoms.

If the name sounds familiar even though you can't quite place it, the reason may have something to do with the Oklahoma indie band the Flaming Lips, whose last record was inspired and named after the Japanese first lady of noise music. The album was called "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" and on it the Flaming Lips sing out her name--"Yooshiiiimiiiiii!"

Seeing Yoshimi on the cover reminded us of our salad days when, for a brief period of the 1990's, we lived in Osaka. During those heady days, we spent many a late Saturday night with friends in our tiny apartment sitting on the floor listening to the Boredoms' "Chocolate Synthesizer" over and over again, sipping hot sake while trying in vain to deconstruct the noise aesthetic and slowly getting cruelly drunk. (Aaaaah, to be young again!)

Yoshimi also fronts her own band, the all-female and accidental quintet OOIOO (pronounced oh-why-oh*), which released a record last year titled "Kila Kila Kila." We saw OOIOO perform a few years ago when the band opened for Buffalo Daughter at Club Quattro in Osaka. Yoshimi and her four bandmates blew us away.

In Interview magazine-inspired tradition, Yoshimi is interviewed in Index by one of her peers, Hisham Bharoocha, drummer for the NYC noise band Black Dice. The Q&A reveals that Pee Wee is now a mother, lives near the ancient Japanese town of Nara, not far from Osaka and Kyoto, and is really into Okinawan and indigenous Ainu music these days. To the uninitiated, this may seem a far cry from the screams, squeals, yelps and other indecipherable vocals Yoshimi is best known for on her many Boredoms' recordings. But the diverse musical forks of noise and indigenous Japanese folk music share some primal, vocal qualities.

Yoshimi also explains in the interview the connection between herself and the Flaming Lips. She relates a funny story about how she first found out that the Lips had sung about and named their CD after her--it was while in a record store in London while on tour with Boredoms, where she heard her name sung by the Lips on the shop's stereo. Of course, despite being friends with the group, the Lips' vocalist still managed to mispronounce her name.

RELATED LINKS

Index Magazine Web Site and Archive

OOIOO Official Web Site

Boredoms Bio [VH1]

Thrill Jockey Record Label Web Page for OOIOO

The Flaming Lips Official Web Site