The Bees - Chicken Payback

Oh come on! How can you not listen to this without breaking out in a huge grin? :-)

The Bees (or Band of Bees if you're in the US) come from the Isle of Wight, of all places (yes, that's a real place) and released a few albums in the early 2000s but seem to have been pretty much dormant for the last decade or so. A shame really as they were quite fun...

Bonus Clip: Their cover of 'A Minha Menina' by Jorge Ben/Os Mutantes (who I may do a feature on in the near future).

Bastard Pop/Mash Ups

Long time, no blog! Apologies for the absence which was mostly due to a change of job and family life but I'm back with a special single topic posting of a genre that was briefly popular almost 20 years ago but left an impression on the popular culture we know of today. Back in 2001, thanks to the advent of P2P file-sharing technologies such as Napster and Audiogalaxy, a new form of 'mash up' - that is, the laying of musical elements from one track over elements taken from another - was being created and distributed firstly online and then as bootlegs and white-label pressings. This genre was referred to as 'Bastard Pop' thanks to its DIY underground and somewhat illegal status and was popularized via websites such as Boomselection and Get Your Bootleg On. 'Bastard Pop' did have its antecedents e.g.

• Buchanan & Goodman's novelty 'The Flying Saucer' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7RXRLao17k
• DNA's remix of 'Tom's Diner' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXg5pOF2PvY
• The Source - You've Got The Love http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnwFepoE3l8
• John Oswald's Plunderphonics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHY--X-r7To

and many other examples such as Negativland, Double Dee & Steinski, Coldcut, EBN & ECC.

Here are a few of my favourites from the early 00s:

Freelance Hellraiser - A Stroke Of Genius (Christina Aguilera - Genie In A Bottle/The Strokes - Hard To Explain)

One of the most successful 'Bastard Pop' creations, this got quite a bit of airplay at the time. Freelance Hellraiser actually did remix work of Aguilera and also wrote & produced for the likes of Little Boots and Ladyhawke.

Girls On Top - We Don't Give A Damn About Our Friends (Adina Howard - Freak Like Me/The Tubeway Army - Are 'Friends' Electric?)

Girls On Top was the alias under which Richard X produced bastard pop. Other tracks included 'Being Scrubbed' (TLC - No Scrubs/The Human League - Being Boiled) and 'I Wanna Dance With Numbers' (Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance With Somebody/Kraftwerk - Numbers). 'We Don't Give A Damn About Our Friends' was covered by The Sugababes and Richard X went on to work with Liberty X on 'Being Nobody' their mash-up of the aforementioned 'Being Boiled' and Chaka Kahn's 'Ain't Nobody'. The link to the original is above, plus here's The Sugababes re-recording and "Being Nobody' by Liberty X.

CigarRos Vs Sealion Dion - Bium Bium Bambalo (Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On/Sigur Ros - Bium Bium Bambalo)

An anonymous release on the Unbearable Recordings related English Muffin Records (so I would guess it was either Gamers In Exile or Goodiepal), this works far better than it should!

Kylie Minogue 'Can't Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head' (Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out Of My Head/New Order - Blue Monday)

This originally appeared on the 2 Many DJs (an alias for the Belgian band Soulwax who popularized Bastard Pop with their Radio Soulwax and 2 Many DJs mix sets) album as a hidden track and was then performed by Kylie live at the Brit Awards in 2002.

Bonus Tracks:

Osymyso - Intro-Inspection

One of the best UK artists who came out of the Bastard Pop scene, Osymyso put together this track that used 101 song intros.

Girl Talk - Feed The Animals

One of the few artists to actually get a fully-released album out there (instead of releasing a bootleg), Gregg Gillis' latest release is an excellent example of the plunderphonic/mash-up scene. It's pay-what-you-want to boot! http://illegal-art.net/shop#release117

DJ Danger Mouse 'The Grey Album'

In 2004 Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Buton) took some Jay-Z a cappella's from The Black Album and mixed them with some unauthorized samples from The Beatles' White Album to create The Grey Album. Unsurprisingly, EMI were not too enamoured with the results and sent him a Cease & Desist letter - by then it had been downloaded over a million times! Brian went on to Gnarls Barkley and Broken Bells.

Par-T-One - I'm So Crazy

I'm posting this more for the 'Bonus Clips' (see below) then anything else, but this popped into my head after I heard two related things the other day - one was a cover of the entire INXS 'Kick' album by Beck's Record Club project (more info here); the other was a edit of 'Like An Eagle' by Dennis Parker on some mix or other I was listening to.

'I'm So Crazy' is essentially a remix of INXS's 'Just Keep Walking' with a thumping beat and samples of the aforementioned 'Like An Eagle'. I believe Par-T-One were Italian and this example of the short-lived 'Punk House' genre is the only single I'm aware of by them.

Bonus Clips: 'Just Keep Walking' was the second single by INXS originally released in 1980. It's always sounded to me like two completely separate songs jammed together - the undistinguished Simple Minds sounding verse and the much more interesting chorus. It's the latter that was wisely remixed for 'I'm So Crazy'...

... Dennis Parker, an interesting story here - he started out as a porn actor under the name of Wade Nichols, made a disco album for the notorious Casablanca Records in 1979 (of which this is the title track) that was masterminded by the guy behind the Village People (Jacques Morali) and went on to a part in the US soap 'The Edge of Night'. He unfortunately took his own life in 1985 after discovering he had AIDS. This is a disco classic, albeit one with truly atrocious lyrics!

Britney Spears - Womanizer

I have to admit that I completely missed this when it was first released. In fact, I heard it only recently on one of the playlists my wife made when I first bought her a MP3 player. Actually, it's great - and one of the handful of tracks I can actually stand to listen to on said playlist. Also, it's pretty amusing listening to the kids try and sing along with it (and the video has some, um, interesting visuals I guess)!

Bonus tracks: Similarly to 'Umbrella' & 'Crazy', 'Womanizer' has been covered by many other 'hip' artistes. Here's an acoustic take by Lily Allen...

... and a live-in-the-studio take by Franz Ferdinand...

... and finally here's Ellen with the two out of Fall Out Boy that anyone recognizes in one of her 'Bathroom Sessions'.

Geraldine McQueen - Once Upon A Christmas Song

Anyone who has jumped on the Susan Boyle badwagon (though talented she may be) ought to watch 'Peter Kay's Britain's Got The Pop Factor', a brilliant spoof of Reality TV talent competitions and the contestants who enter them - here's the intro and you can find other clips on Youtube here. Geraldine McQueen, a transsexual former cruise ship entertainer (actually Peter Kay in drag), was the 'winner' and this is the single that was released last Xmas. It fulfills 2 of my Guilty Pleasures: novelty songs and Xmas songs (why does this nice Jewish boy love Xmas songs? Who knows...) and I apologise in advance if you end up humming it for the next 2 weeks! Co-written by Peter Kay and Gary Barlow from Take That, fact fans...

Bonus Clip: The entire 'Britain's Got The Pop Factor' - not the best quality but certainly watchable.

Blue - All Rise

Blue, Blue, Blue - a group so mediocre they couldn't even come up with a good band name. Another UK boy band debut, this one checks off a number of requisite boxes:

• Singing in a mid-Atlantic accent? Check.
• Wannabe R&B posturing? Check.
• Craptastic attempt at rapping in middle eight? Check.
• Rudimentary choreography? Check.
• One member who doesn't seem to do very much? Check.
• Stinging reposte to a woman who gone done 'em wrong (all of them? at the same time?)? Check.

The group have recently reformed after finding that the sum of the parts was much much less than the whole (which wasn't that much to begin with). IIRC, I believe my sisters knew one of them (possibly Anthony Costa).

Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip - Thou Shalt Always Kill

Insightful diatribe on new ways to live your life as it relates to culture in the 21st century or aimless rambling over squiggly electronic bleeps to create a hopeful pop hit? You decide. Me? I choose to believe every word (except for the spelling of Phoenix of course...)