Scroll to the bottom of this piece to watch the exclusive premiere of Tony Clifton's music video for "Lonely Girl". It's safe for work... ish.

Before the flood, Jeremy Johnson and his wife were always in the process of starting or ending some new independent business venture. Nothing ever stuck. Before Hurricane Katrina filled their New Orleans home with poisonous water, they’d curated a personal museum of pop-culture knick-knacks that they eventually tried turning into a thrift shop. Looking back on it, the most important items in Jeremy’s collection included the official WWF Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler figurines, and a copy of Lynne Margulies's Kaufman documentary I'm From Hollywood, which told the story of the aggressively strange, groundbreaking comedian and performer’s venture into the wrestling ring. “Andy Kaufman hit me hard at a young age,” Johnson explains. “In sixth grade, this male friend of mine would get these girls in the neighbourhood to come over, we would watch videotapes of Andy Kaufman wrestling women and we would wrestle the girls in his parents’ living room while watching the videos.”

Katrina also flooded the school where Jeremy had been teaching moderately disabled high school kids, so in 2007, at the age of 27, Johnson began working at a coffee shop, while rebuilding his home. As an emotional booby prize, Johnson finally had the time to indulge his amateur filmmaking urges. “For a long time, I’d been denying my creative side,” Johnson says. He slung coffee to a number of New Orleans layabouts, including an old, grey-haired hippie type who began coming in every day to chat up Jeremy about pop culture, especially film. Not until the ponytailed fellow asked Jeremy to help him film a commercial for insult comic and “singer” Tony Clifton’s big comeback tour did Johnson recognise him as Andy Kaufman’s former writing partner, Bob Zmuda.

By the time he approached Johnson, Zmuda had been doing charity work for decades, pretty much ever since Kaufman's death in 1984. He founded the American version of Comic Relief in 1986 in Kaufman’s memory and put on a number of high-profile comedy shows to raise money for philanthropic causes, mainly benefitting the homeless. The organisation has raised tens of millions of dollars and, in the process, helped break the careers of Dave Chappelle, Bill Hicks, Dane Cook, Sarah Silverman and many others. In 2006, after an eight-year hiatus, Comic Relief reemerged to put on a show to benefit the victims of Katrina. When he hired Johnson as a videographer, Zmuda was working on a more ambitious project than a one-off gig: a tour featuring two dozen New Orleans musicians and dancers that would both raise money for performers still dealing with the effects of Katrina and restart the long-dormant career of Tony Clifton.

Clifton is a character, both figuratively and literally. Andy Kaufman claimed to have “discovered” the drunken, foul-mouthed nightclub performer in 1969, but in reality – if the word "reality" applies to any of Kaufman’s projects – he might have emerged from Kaufman’s head, like Foreign Man. In any case, since the 70s, the Clifton costume and persona has been passed around like a handle of warm whiskey in a green room. In his book Andy Kaufman Exposed! Zmuda copped to having first worn Tony’s signature thick prescription sunglasses, and starting in 1979, Kaufman impersonated Clifton as well – so often and with such hateful aplomb that audiences quickly came to consider the character Andy’s original creation and forgot that a “real” Clifton supposedly existed somewhere. In public, Zmuda and Kaufman played an elaborate, years-long Tony Clifton shell game that lasted until Kaufman’s death in 1984. In the 1999 Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey played Kaufman doing Clifton, and Paul Giametti imitated Zmuda imitating Clifton. Andy’s brother Michael Kaufman has also publicly donned the Clifton leisure suit, as has Criss Angel, though both Johnson and Clifton say Angel sucked at it.

“I work for the original Tony Clifton, though,” Johnson says, “the guy Kaufman discovered in a Vegas nightclub.”

Most people believe today’s Tony Clifton to “be” Zmuda, who’s now old enough that he no longer needs prosthetics to approximate Clifton’s jowls. Either way, Jeremy has always served two bosses: Zmuda – who Johnson by now considers “a dick” – and Clifton, whom he much prefers. Johnson has spent over five years as Clifton’s de-facto assistant, on-call videographer and sometimes writing partner. People close to the duo have suggested that Johnson is to Tony what Zmuda was to Kaufman. Which still doesn’t mean he can answer the most basic of questions: Who is Tony Clifton?

Jeremy Johnson and Tony Clifton pose in a photo booth.

Jeremy’s employment with Comic Relief began in earnest in 2008, when Clifton and his Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra spent several weeks' worth of long afternoons practicing more than 100 songs at One Eyed Jacks in New Orleans’s French Quarter. A lot of work needed to be done if the crew was to revive Clifton’s career – other than a one-off appearance in 2004 commemorating the 20th anniversary of Kaufman’s death, Clifton hadn’t performed live onstage since 1985. Suddenly here he was, rising from Katrina’s toxic floodwaters for a second act.

Johnson’s job was to film the shows and also run the videos that played during the performances, like the footage of ships battling on the high seas that accompanied Tony’s nasal rendition of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. The show did not debut in New Orleans, but rather with a successful run in Georgia. Jonhson was then asked to stay in Chicago for the summer to shoot another set of Clifton’s live shows, a gig that turned into a cross-country tour. The show’s cast included famed burlesque dancer Trixie Minx and members of her Fleur De Tease troupe, plus musicians on the level of backup singer Whitney Meyer, who recently impressed the judges on The Voice. Clifton’s trumpet player Ashlin Parker has backed Aretha Franklin, while saxophonist Adrian Crutchfield has played with Prince and Lionel Ritchie.

Like so many other well-meaning Katrina charity projects based in New York and LA, Clifton’s show helped in one way but also removed a lot of important talent from an already weakened New Orleans music scene. Still, Clifton maintains, “I did a good thing getting them out of this hellhole.”

Despite fronting a charity project benefiting New Orleans, Clifton claimed to hate the town. “While Bob Zmuda, president and founder of Comic Relief, cared a great deal about New Orleans after the flood,” says Johnson, “Tony Clifton didn’t give a fuck about it.” Tony supposedly only ended up on the tour as part of a plea bargain in a New Orleans rape case. Tony calls it a drunkard’s simple mistake: he came back to his hotel very late and wasted, accidentally entered the wrong room and crawled in bed with a woman who got the wrong idea, freaked out and pressed charges. “That broad was old as dirt,” he says in his defence. “I do not under any circumstance fuck anything over half my age.” He claims to have only led his band of Katrina survivors as part of his community service. “Fuck New Orleans. New Orleans put me in fuckin jail," Clifton grunts. "I think the best thing that happened to this place was that big fucking wave comin’ here and cleaning out a lot of the nigs.”

Another thing about Clifton: he has the tendency to be as racist as you’d expect a weathered old alcoholic lounge singer to be, both privately and especially publicly.   

The Katrina Kiss My Ass tour came to a close with two killer shows in New Orleans. The first night’s collection of songs, skits, racist and paedophilic jokes and puppet shows was so awe-inspiring that I returned the next night and caught a completely different, equally hair-raising show. A lot of comedy is falsely described as “dangerous”, but at those two shows it genuinely felt like something bad might happen. Clifton doesn’t use the word "nigger" to break down its associations and our prejudices in the same way Louis CK does with hot-button words; he spits it out with abandon.

Tony makes Quentin Tarantino seem tasteful. You wonder how he would ever find even one black musician to work for him, much less five of his 11 band members – especially since he claims he doesn’t warn anyone what they’re in for before he hires them. Johnson admits, however, that the show’s musical director went behind Clifton’s back to explain things. “Think of Tony Clifton as Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse,” Johnson says, quoting the official line. “Heʼs a bigoted Archie Bunker–type man and he says what he wants. Part of his shtick onstage is to always push boundaries. No matter how hard it hurts, he’s just going to go for it all the time.”

Carved into Jeremy’s shoulder is a large Public Enemy tattoo, which makes one wonder how he feels about hearing the N-word constantly from a white man. Chuck D likely wouldn’t see it as funny. “I have felt guilty in certain situations, where I just don’t want to be there while he’s saying that stuff,” Johnson admits. “But then I remember this is part of the game, the ride, the act. And also, what the fuck else am I gonna do?”

Zmuda claims to not like the racial component to Clifton’s act either. “I don’t agree with people saying the N -ord onstage,” he says. “But Tony’s able to get away with it because people perceive him to be a character. Use your own name and say it? You’re dead. It’s different when said by a character. But to do it at all, it has to be well thought out.”

It was Clifton’s offstage verbal abuse, however, that finally sunk the ship. “One night Tony didn’t like the ending of a song, or something,” Johnson recalls. “He was hammered as usual, and backstage, I’d never seen Tony Clifton more pissed. He was runnin’ around with his shirt off, stomping up and down, yelling, screaming in the hallways, ‘Just fire these fucking niggers!’ And the band was like, ‘Wait a minute. We were cool with what you were doing onstage, but you’re not on stage right now.’” At the next night’s performance in Denver, Colorado, an extra large dose of N-words finally compelled four black members of the Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra to abandon Clifton midset. Trombone player Kyle Rothchild got behind the drum kit and moved the awkward show forward. “Some of the burlesque dancers came out on stage crying,” remembers Jeremy. “They still felt they needed to do the numbers to get the paycheck.

“I came to tears, too,” he admits. “I mean, this really wasn’t what I signed on for. It was too much, every day for a month, with no relief, stuck out on the road with Tony Clifton.”

When asked why he abruptly quit on Clifton, respected New Orleans sax player Khris Royal answers simply, “Somewhere there has to be a line.” While he doesn’t regret walking off stage that night, Royal does feel conflicted. “Tony just wanted to see where our line was, so in some ways I was a sucker,” he says. “I did maintain my line, but he got the reaction he was after.”

Clifton claims that “the Denver Massacre”, as he calls it, made him realise he needed to henceforth really befriend all of his employees. “I am now very close to my band members,” he says. “I’ve learned that I need to be talking with my people and communicating with them directly. People who work with me now know who I am, and know where I’m comin’ from... Some of the people who decided not to leave the band that night, by the way, were also black. But they saw the bigger picture. So, it’s not like all the blacks left the band at once. Just the niggers left.”

Tony Clifton's house.

After that precarious first tour, the remaining employees were rewarded with an invitation to Clifton’s killer digs on Lake Tahoe just south of Reno, Nevada – a grand estate equipped with a recording studio, movie theatre, dance studio and hot tub. His backyard opens onto 10,000 acres of protected forest and mountains. When Johnson arrived there with the rest of the staff, he had been working for Clifton for seven months. “In Tahoe, Tony was the most relaxed I’d ever seen him,” recalls Jeremy. “He pegged us all with a lot of questions about what happened on the road, and a lot of truth came out. He also needed to know where his loyalties lay. He invited us out there so he could figure out who had to go and who needed to stay.”

At that two-week retreat, Johnson and Clifton grew close, as the story of Comic Relief’s new Sony Z7U camera illustrates. “I was at first using old hand-me-down gear from the 90s,” says Jeremy. “But I wanted to stay on the Clifton project so badly I went into $7,000 (£4,592) worth of debt for a serious camera. Then, after a while, I told Comic Relief we really needed a second camera. I got shut down by Zmuda. But when the cast was out in Tahoe and we finally got to hang with Tony as a real person, I brought it up again. After a few drinks, he asked me, 'Will the HD make me look good?’ I said, ‘The HD is gonna make you look fabulous.’ He said, ‘OK, I’ll talk to 'em.’

“So the next morning I got a phone call from Zmuda. He said, ‘I’m kind of angry about something. We hired Tony to do this thing mainly because we don’t have to pay him, and it’s not costing us much money. But I got a phone call from Tony this morning, telling me that he thinks the HD is going to make him look good, and that we really need to get this second camera. You’re not in trouble this time, but any time you’re fucking hanging out with Tony Clifton don’t you ever talk to him about money or ask him for any kind of fucking equipment. He will always want it, and we’ll have to pay for it. And we really don’t have any money, Jeremy.’”

Johnson got down on a more personal level with Tony after the cast all left the estate and Jeremy stayed behind. Soon, a snowfall made Tony’s driveway impossible to traverse – and Johnson didn’t have the money to return to New Orleans even if the ice melted. He was trapped, forced into living alone with Tony Clifton in Tahoe for a winter that turned into an entire year.

During that time, Johnson never saw Zmuda – meaning he either never broke character, or else Clifton's not his character. Jeremy and Tony filmed continuously and made six music videos. “There’s so much beautiful green space there around Tahoe,” says Johnson. “We shot tonnes of stuff up in Reno, Carson City, in the woods, up on a mountain.” It wasn’t all beauty, though. “Tony Clifton was all up in my shit the whole time,” Johnson recalls. “Once he had me there, he had me. I was on the clock the entire day, and the day would stretch into weeks and then months. I just couldn’t get any fresh air. We started to not have such a great relationship after a while because I was trapped in his magic castle. Any time of the day he could bombard me. I mean, I like talking about ideas, but it was just nonstop.”

Meanwhile, back home in New Orleans, Johnson’s marriage began to crumble and he was losing his house to bankruptcy, situations aggravated by his absence. “I was having a total breakdown,” Johnson says. “The only thing I had that I could almost call stable was the Tony Clifton gig. It sounds fucked up because you should also have a commitment to marriage but… it’s not every day that a historic comedy icon gives you a job. Sometimes something will cross your path and you have to have the gumption to take it."

Predictably, Clifton wasn’t exactly Ann Landers when it came to marriage advice. “When I first mentioned divorce to Tony, he immediately said, ‘I think that sounds like a good idea,’” Johnson remembers. “He has a strict policy: no relationships with women except hookers. So there were a lot of times in Tahoe that I just wanted to say to him, ‘This is not the life I pictured for myself at 32 years old, you know? Getting divorced and having no friends and being trapped in the snow sleeping on your couch… Can’t you just act like a human being?’”

Clifton and companions.

By Thanksgiving of 2009, Johnson was officially separated – and thus free to be taken by Clifton for the first time to Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Mound House, Nevada, the whorehouse most famous as the set of HBO’s Cathouse. Though Clifton admits to being a “big supporter” of legalised prostitution, and to visiting Thailand multiple times a year, he denies he bought his Tahoe property 22 years ago to be close to the Bunny Ranch. “He claims he lives there because he likes the fresh air,” Johnson chuckles. “But yeah, absolutely, he’s a 45-minute drive from the biggest legal brothel in America, with the best girls.”

Clifton tells anyone else who’ll listen how he's the “official tester” at the Bunny Ranch. He calls Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof “the PT Barnum of booty” and claims, “Nobody gets laid more than Tony Clifton... As soon as Hof gets a new girl, I go down there and test to make sure they can do all the nasty things that clients want. I’ve fucked, on average, two or three girls under 25 years of age every week for the last 12 years. And they get nervous that I’m not gonna give them a good report! So they’re like, ‘Do you want me to suck your cock again? Do you want me to swallow your cum? Do you want anal?’ I am the luckiest guy on the Earth.”

Zmuda has never joined the crew at the Ranch, so Johnson has gone either with Clifton or alone on all of his roughly 40 visits so far. Clearly, Tony has rubbed off on him. “Not that I have participated every time,” Jeremy says. “But I was completely alone in Tahoe with the snow, and I was going through divorce, and I didn’t have any friends. So just going to the Bunny Ranch and hanging out at the bar and shooting the shit with the girls, those were some of the most fun times I’ve ever had. You don’t have to be fucking ‘em.”

Johnson remains most impressed by the Thanksgiving feast he shared that first night with the girls. “There is always food at the whorehouse,” he says. “The Bunny Ranch has this immaculate kitchen. Hof hires special chefs. Great people come from all over the place to cook and eat in there.” Once, around an opulent Thanksgiving spread, Clifton gathered Johnson, Hof and all the girls to make a poignant toast. “Today is not a day for thinking,” he said. “I don’t want to intellectualise or think too much today. The only serious decision I want to make today, is: Will I have white meat? Or dark meat?”

It wasn’t until Christmas 2009 that Johnson finally came back to New Orleans for a visit. His marriage was officially over, but he had a partner in Tony Clifton.  

Following the stint in Tahoe, Johnson moved to LA and says that only recently, finally, have his prospects improved. This year Clifton and Johnson premiered their Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra concert documentary Tony Clifton: the Movie to a sold-out crowd at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Afterward, Tony and crew travelled to Austin’s South by Southwest festival to again screen their documentary, hang with the Flaming Lips and accept High Times magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “For a couple years after those Katrina tours, there was a lull,” admits Johnson. “And I wondered if the project was going anywhere. But MOMA reinstituted my faith, and [New Orleans-based event-planning company] Huka Entertainment has hooked Tony into events with all kinds of musicians and comedians. He’s working with R.E.M. and Smashing Pumpkins. I think Tony is about to blow up, finally. And maybe I can one day buy a house again.”

Johnson hadn’t been back to New Orleans – which he still considers home – until earlier this year, when he made the trip with Clifton for Buku Fest, where Huka had booked Tony to judge an air sex competition.

It’s a more corporate vibe than Andy Kaufman travelling the country, challenging women to wrestling matches to be sure – Huka is owned by SFX Entertainment, which, in turn, is owned by giant Clear Channel. But Clifton is clearly excited for new opportunities to do his act for a younger crowd who know nothing of the dead comedian who popularised him. “I have energy and I have a big fucking heart,” he brags. “And the trick is to keep yourself associated with young people. Going back to Dennis Hof: I don’t fuck any girl over half my age, and I promise you.” He pokes my chest for emphasis: “Fucking, young, girls, will, keep, you, young. Their pussy juice is the nectar of the gods. It’s my secret to life.”     

Clifton and Johnson at work on the set of one of the singer's videos.

Like the Republican party, Clifton may have to remake certain aspects of himself to appeal to this younger demographic. These days, Tony rarely unpacks the mean version of his act for strangers. “He’s trying to adapt to people he wants to work with,” Johnson says. “After 30 or 40 years, he’s learning to respect people.” And that includes respecting Jeremy. “One thing that changed after our miserable year in Tahoe,” Johnson says, “is it made us much more honest with each other, and helped us keep less secrets – secrecy being a huge part of this project. Up till then I’d been a good little soldier, but after that I just said what I thought, regardless of the consequences.” This mostly meant Johnson limiting his work hours and not answering his phone for every one of Clifton’s drunken 3AM epiphanies about women or performing.

When I accompanied him and Johnson to the Buku Fest, Clifton didn't insult even one young person, all of whom were clearly rolling their faces off – he was feeling the contact high and seemed enamoured by the incredible bass and ear-splitting squiggles that the kids these days call music. He smiled and waved at the oblivious young’uns who shouted, “Nice costume, man!” In New Orleans, he’s just another costumed kook.

“I don’t think Tony’s ever been able to come to life the way he has in the last five years,” Johnson shouted over the blaring dubstep. “Ever since he finished his community service, he’s felt rejuvenated to actually want this career again. And now that he finally has Andy Kaufman off his back, this is the first chance Tony’s had to just be himself, to be who he wants to be.”

A scantily clad Lolita led Clifton into some heavy, molly-induced flirting, and we all danced a bit as Kid Cudi performed “Man on the Moon,” which is named after the movie named after the R.E.M. song about Kaufman. An extremely high young man cut between us, aimed his swirling eyes down at Tony and asked, “Andy? Are you in there?”

As we headed towards the scheduled air sex contest, I noticed Johnson didn't walk beside Clifton, so I took the chance to ask Jeremy, finally, if he and Clifton are friends. “We definitely are on a certain level,” he replied. “But I’ve separated myself somewhat because I realised it wasn’t a good thing to be friends with my boss. Because one day everything’s good, then the next day he’s screaming at me. And then I’m like, ‘Wait, aren’t you my friend?’”

Here's the premiere of Tony Clifton's new video:

Epilogue:
The Katrina relief funding that had paid Johnson's salary has now run out. He is now moving home to New Orleans, where he will continue to do Comic Relief’s bidding on a more limited basis.  

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.  

More about Andy Kaufman and his legacy:

Kaufman on Kaufman: An Interview with Andy’s Brother

In addition to logging time with parent-repellers like KMFDM and Ministry, Nivek Ogre (né Kevin Graham Ogilvie) is best known as the guttural screech that is synonymous with Skinny Puppy, who arguably invented electro-industrial in the early 80s. This pedigree, coupled with a history of serious drug use and a penchant for slitting his throat onstage, has led generations of depressed teenagers who are curious about things like Anton LaVey and animal sacrifice to embrace Ogre’s macabre worldview: one in which we are all currently coasting along on a dying sphere, counting down the hours until life on Earth is made impossible due to human stupidity, negligence and aggression. 

This month marks the release of Skinny Puppy’s 15th record, Weapon, which features a giant spider made of guns, bombs and knives on the cover and a quote from atom-bomb developer J. Robert Oppenheimer in its liner notes. I recently spoke with Ogre about such joyful matters as the Fukushima meltdown, mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer and the giant “Machiavellian death shroud” that imprisons us all.

VICE: Here’s an almost stupidly obvious question to start with, but I’m curious: Why did you call your new record Weapon?
Nivek Ogre: I recently came to this weird gestalt in my mind that everything we do has the potential to either harm or cause good. This is a choice we all make with every action. But I view the human being primarily as a weapon, and a lot of the things that we’ve created have had disastrous effects on us as a species. Guns are a tiny element of a much larger iceberg that’s latticed throughout history. 

Did the Newtown massacre spark this record?
No, this started way before: March 11, 2011, when Fukushima melted down. It was at that point that I began to view abstract things as weapons. Right now we’re being inundated with a huge amount of radiation, so much so that in April, the EPA relaxed the amounts of radioactive iodine-131 allowed in water in the event of a radiological disaster like Fukushima. It was three picocuries per liter, now it’s 81,000 picocuries per liter. Now here we’ve got a huge Machiavellian death shroud being pulled over people, all based on nuclear power, and the underlying reason for that energy system is a weapons system. My question here is this: What inhuman force could possibly allow this atrocity to take place?

Speaking of inhumanity, I’ve read that Jeffrey Dahmer once came to a Skinny Puppy show. Is that true?
Yeah. Apparently Dahmer came to a show in Milwaukee to stalk a victim. I heard it from some people at a hotel I was staying at. We were playing a club that was sort of a gay and straight club. He would hang out there, stalking his victims. 

Getting back to the record, I keep listening to the second track, “illisiT”. In the chorus you keep repeating, “This is the Criminal Age.” Considering you started your career at the height of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, do you really think of 2013 as any more criminal than the early 80s?

Absolutely. At least during the Cold War, the military-industrial complex kind of trickled down [laughs], and that’s why there was this huge boom in the middle class. I’m not a proponent of this, but at least people’s day-to-day lives were a bit better, and there was a glimmer of hope. But if the 70s and 80s were the Plastic Age, today we’ve entered an age where we’re openly embracing criminality. Although there’s apparently less death from wars these days, so I guess we’re living in a comparatively more peaceful time. People are living longer.

I’m really worried about the average lifespan increasing, honestly. I’m concerned that people living longer is profoundly unhealthy, and creates a pretty serious strain on the economy –
Oh, you shouldn’t go there, Ben. You’re talking about eugenics.

That’s not what I mean, though.
No, I know. And look, I almost agree with you. There is a dark side of me that thinks that if we were all living like cavemen, things would be better. That’s for your generation to figure out. I feel like I’m fucking tipping the scales here at 50. 

Weapon is out this month on Metropolis Records. 

You know a music scene's really blowing up when Hollywood decides to make a movie about it. From Saturday Night Fever to Roll Bounce to that weird film David LaChapelle made about crunk, Tinseltown has always looked to capitalise on new youth cultures. Especially if it lets them wheel out those age-old youth tropes of dance-offs in empty car parks, big trousers, parents who are either religious, abusive or dead, people saying "word" a lot and bullies getting drunk and crying. It might seem a bit weird to you, but Hollywood scriptwriters go nuts for that stuff because they haven't been to a real club since dancefloors still had carpets.

However, the latest film to enter the youthsploitation canon doesn't come from Hollywood. It comes from Britain and because of this, it has been largely ignored by the wider world and banished into provincial cinema obscurity. It's called Beat Girl, and if you're lucky enough to live in Romford, Westgate-On-Sea or County Mayo, you might be able to watch it this week.

For those who don't, the film appears to be a blindfolded and ill-conceived leap onto the EDM bandwagon, the plot something like Bend It Like Beckham set in the shit nightclub from Hollyoaks. Let's face it, I'm not going to see it, you're not going to see it, Beat Girl herself probably isn't going to see it, so let's just try to figure out what it's about from the trailer alone. 

The trailer starts with an emotive piano piece that sounds a bit like a "Hometown Glory" rip-off commissioned by an insurance company who couldn't afford the original. As anybody who's ever been to a cinema will know, any trailer that begins with contemplative music will inevitably kick into life as soon as the film's narrative thrust is revealed. I wonder what will happen next?

Oh shit. Not even seven seconds in and we've already got a dead parent on our hands. A brash, insincere male voice ensures us that he's "not responsible for what happened to your mum". We all know that he is. 

The voice of the stepfather is revealed to belong to one of those "I swear I've seen that guy before" breed of British actors who seem to make their livings playing alcoholic GPs and racist desk sergeants on daytime TV. He creepily informs our heroine that "If you're gonna live in my house, you gotta play by my rules." If the film weren't so obviously set in that version of London which only exists inside Richard Curtis's mind, I'd assume there was some kind of implicit sexual bartering going on here. Judging by his five 'o' clock shadow and charity shop Henri Lloyd jumper, this isn't a man who's got a chore rota pinned to the fridge.

But wait, what's this? Disco lights! Aerial shots of London landmarks! The sound of awful gym house! All is not lost. There's a whole wide world out there for our girl, and rejected Taio Cruz numbers and tourist locations are the key to accessing the underground EDM scene that is literally under the ground beneath Big Ben.

Suddenly, the narrative reveals itself in all its hackneyed glory. Turns out Beat Girl is a talented classical musician who's got a chance of a scholarship to the famous Juilliard music school in New York. Unfortunately, she has also fallen in love with DJing for Italian tourists with CDs at shit clubs. To beat-match or to Beethoven? It's Sophie's Choice reimagined by Byker Grove.

Of course, all these films need a love story at the heart of them and Beat Girl is no different. Our Prince Charming comes in the unlikely form of a guy who works in a record shop. Weirdly, instead of scorning Beat Girl for her awful music taste, he smiles at her.

Try walking into Honest Jon's and asking them if they've got anything that sounds a bit like "When Love Takes Over". Chances are you won't get a nice guy in X Factor grungewear and a crap hat trying to chat you up, just a look from the clerk like you've kicked his kids' new dog to death and the words "TODD EDWARDS" scrawled on a torn-off page of Shook magazine.

Of course, now that our girl is a budding Nina Kraviz, she's gonna make some cool, new friends. These come in the form of a depressed city worker who's forgotten his tie and a girl who seems to be on a permanent lunch break from the Hummingbird Bakery.

For some reason, her dad gets really pissed off when he finds out she's given some other kid (it's not entirely explained who the kid is) a CD deck. Either he's really not happy with her DJ career, or he's an old school vinyl purist.

All this strife sets us up for the big reveal, Beat Girl's end-of-The-Wrestler moment. She stops in the middle of her piano recital, tells the audience that she "can't do this" and then tells somebody else on her way out that she's spent her whole life "trying to be the person that my mum wanted me to be, instead of who I really am".

So who is this person she thinks she really is?

Deep down, she was always the girl who dreamed of playing filter heavy euro house at fashion shows with a man in a pork pie hat. It's a moment anyone who's ever seen Ferry Corsten play "Adagio For Strings" in a Baltic hockey stadium has dreamed of.

Wahey! Even her dad managed to put those nebulous ideas about vinyl having more "warmth" behind him to enjoy her set. Theo Parrish might not be convinced that CDs are the way forward, but slowly, the dinosaurs of house are being brought into the digital age by people like Beat Girl.

Quite why they decided to reveal this narrative money shot in the trailer I'm not sure, but seeing as the film is showing in less UK cinemas than Run For Your Wife did, maybe the directors just decided this was the only way their story could be told.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of Beat Girl. On one hand it seems like a terrible ploy to attract a youth audience, concocted by the same kind of UK film Industry people who gave Sex Lives Of The Potato Men the green light and probably think that Jive Bunny is still at the forefront of British dance music. On the other, hating on it feels a bit like spitting in your nan's face because she bought you tickets to JLS at the O2 instead of Kerri Chandler at Warehouse Project. It's completely wrong, but you can't help but think that their intentions were pure.

I don't know if Beat Girl will become the Saturday Night Fever for the EDM generation. I don't know if anybody who wasn't directly involved with its creation will ever see it, and I don't know if anybody who was has ever been to a nightclub before. But at least it doesn't look like it's got any competitive street dancing in it.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

More things that predominantly took or take place inside clubs at night:

Things That Need to Disappear from Dancefloors Forever

I Went to a Foam Party in Magaluf

A Big Night Out at... the Worst Club Night Ever?

Continue reading over at The Creators Project.

Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning firm that’s normally one of the most accurate political pollsters around, sometimes has too much time on its hands. When it does, it takes national nonpolitical surveys of basically whatever the people running PPP think would be funny. In the past they’ve discovered that 62 percent of voters have a favourable opinion of Halloween, 47 percent think there’s a war on Christmas and a surprisingly large amount believe in all kinds of conspiracy theories.

This month, they polled over 500 Americans about music, famous musicians and hipsters. Some results went up yesterday, and it turns out that voters like classical music and jazz more than other genres by a fairly large margin, are into Adele and Taylor Swift, dislike Justin Beiber and Chris Brown, and like Beyonce better than Jay-Z. Oh yeah, and they hate rap – 50 percent of the voters polled said that it’s their least favourite genre of music, and 68 percent of them had an unfavourable view of it. Dubstep and Skrillex had bad numbers as well, but 47 percent and 54 percent, respectively, were “not sure” what their opinions of those entities were, which makes it pretty clear that a lot of the folks taking this phone poll had never heard of them.

The real purpose of this poll is to remind us that the voting population of the United States, especially the ones who get polled in surveys, is old. PPP weighs its results for age, but 60 percent of the people polled were older than 45, and only 16 percent were younger than 30. Part of this is due to polls only calling landlines (how many 20-somethings have actual “home numbers”?), and part of it is that more old people are willing to go, “Oh, sure, I do have a few minutes to respond to an automated polls about musical genres!” But also, the electorate – defined as the people who actually bother to vote – remains full of people who don’t like the rappity-rapping and who probably think Skrillex is a no-stick frying pan sold on QVC. Despite the efforts of Rock the Vote and its Youth Spokespeople™ like Madonna, the Ramones, Miley Cyrus and both Gyllenhaals, the olds are still kicking the youngs' collective ass when it comes to participating in democracy.   

So when PPP asks voters about music, it’s really asking old people about music, which explains the results of the other two sections of the poll, which PPP gave me a look at before their scheduled release. Some shocking statistics from the section dealing with classic rock: a whopping 26 percent of voters have an unfavourable opinion of the Rolling Stones (and only 61 percent of voters like them), more voters have an unfavourable opinion of Kurt Cobain (44 percent) than a favourable one (25 percent) and 86 percent have never downloaded music illegally. The average voter, as we speak, is listening to old-timey jazz on a CD he bought at Circuit City (RIP) in preparation to call his son via landline and ask, again, how to get Google on his computer.

The third part of the poll deals with hipsters without explaining the term, which has been diluted and redefined so much it now just means, “A young person who likes… bikes? And Wu-Tang? And flannel? And tattoos? I don’t know anymore, guys.” Not surprisingly, voters don’t like hipsters, whoever they are – 46 percent of them agreed that hipsters “just soullessly appropriate cultural tropes from the past for their own ironic amusement.”

The only notable thing about the hipster section of the survey is that when you filter the results to remove the old people, hipsters don’t have such a bad rap after all: 

Young people have different opinions than older people – not just on silly shit like Bieber and rap and whoever a hipster is, but on the more substantial stuff that pollsters usually deal in. Young people, for instance, have greater levels of cynicism toward government and politics. Their opinions, though, are often overshadowed in polls that tilt toward middle-aged and older people due to methodological reasons.

But that doesn't make them invalid. Today’s 18–29-year-olds are going to inherit the Earth, after all, and although the Cobain-hating, jazz-loving seniors haven’t left it in great shape, maybe the millenials will be able to improve it through the force of their ideas. For instance, young people are all about drugs:

And the 90s:

It seems to me that the world is going to be in pretty good shape when it passes into the next generation's hands.

@HCheadle

More on polling:

In Defence of Paranoia

Are Cats Spies Sent by Aliens?     

A weird phenomenon about being locked up in prison that many people probably fail to realise is how many people you meet in the clink-clink. They’re not all bad either. About a year ago, I wrote about one of my friends who got out and has turned into somewhat of a success story, holding down a self-sustaining job as an artist. Last May, a buddy named SunBlaze got out the damn slam can up in Riverview where we were at for a little spell. I only got to know SunBlaze for the last three or four months of my bid, but since we were neighbours we got to know each other pretty well and learned we had similar tastes in music.

A lotta dudes in prison are rappers, but I don’t pay them much mind. I don’t even pay myself much mind, but with the case of Blaze I had a feeling that he was serious bizness – the way he kept to himself, quietly writing and not talking a lotta shit like lotsa dudes do. Anyhow, he got out last May, and has been doing very well, holding down a job, following the rules, and putting out new music. So I decided to interview him.

VICE: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
SunBlaze: I was born and raised in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn… Growing up in a household that was musically diverse, I learned to appreciate all kinds of good music, but there was something about hip-hop that kept my ears open. I listened to Wu Tang, Mobb Deep, Gangstarr, and pretty much anything that the stations were playing. My neighbours and cousins were bumping the hip-hop hits at all times.

When did you realise that you wanted to pursue music professionally?
I was always rappin’ in ciphers just for fun, but I started getting serious once I realised that I could rap, and was actually doper than most the people around me. In 2004, I put out my first mixtape, The Shining, so I’ve been doing it for a while now.

You obviously had a setback getting locked up. You getting bitter at all that time you’ve spent grinding and not getting the recognition you deserve?
Not really. At this point in the game I choose to go underground. The rap shit on corporate radio doesn’t seem real to me. Of course, I’d like to have more people exposed to my music, but that’s why I’m working on my next project now. I’ve got five or six albums and mixtapes floating around and a few more coming out this year.

What’d you get locked up for, if you don’t mind me asking?
Man, some dumb shit I’ve been kicking myself in the ass for. Everything was cool, I had a good job, music was going well, and me and some friends decided to rob someone for cash with a stun gun back in ’08. In ’09, I copped out to three and a half years and did three.

Stick-up kid look what you done did! Got sent up for a three and a half bid…
Prison sucks, it really does, but I took it as an experience and always keep in mind those thoughts of being locked up before I go out and do something stupid. I was young and ignorant, but when you’re out in the streets playing with fire, sooner or later that fire is gonna get back at you and burn hard. I don't regret it, it made me wise and it made me the man that I am today. I no longer look for crime as a form of amusement, I have a good job, and I focus on my truest passion – hip-hop.

I can say overall that prison time has been a huge waste for me, but all the hours I spent writing definitely developed something in me, and I imagine the same happened with you spending all that time with your pen and your pad.
Definitely. A three-year stretch gave me a lot to think about and goals to lock down. Since I’ve been home, I’ve released two mixtapes, done plenty of shows and open mics, been on a few radio shows, and I’m working on future projects as well. I’m focused to just do the right thing and move forward with this music thing and main thing of all... stayin’ outta prison!

SunBlaze and I are currently in the studio working on a track called “Un Bicho Gordo.” Stay Tuned. Check out his music here and here. He is a lyrical monster with a very original New York street sound.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Previously: Addiction Isn’t a Disease, I’m Just a Dick

Previously: Panda Bear

Passed Out Juggalos is a crew of girls in their underpants who terrorise the sleepy Faygo people at the Gathering of the Juggalos. When I first came across them, I became aroused, then intrigued. I used to subscribe to the popular opinion that all juggalos are extras from Deliverance, but these half-naked girls made me want to know more. I wanted to hear all about the POJ straight from their smirky, potty-mouthed faces, so I stalked these mad bitches all over the country.

I discovered that most of them live in Sacramento. One is in Louisville. I’m now officially a weird and obsessive person with a collection of human heads, probably. There are five POJ regulars, making them kind of like the Spice Girls, if the Spice Girls were into paralytic clowns. The three I spoke to are: Killette (OCD germaphobe), Neveah (has a taint piercing), and Ryan (got a guy’s name).

VICE: I get the impression that you girls might be strippers.
Killette: I’m the only one who isn’t. The other girls are though, yeah.
Nevaeh: I’m a stripper. It makes sense, I guess!

Do any juggalos ever come into your club, Nevaeh?
Nevaeh: It has happened, but not very often. I’ve never been recognised on the street from POJ. I think it’s because my… face doesn’t really show a lot in the pictures. I do have some fans because of my pictures. Yeah. That’s what I’ve heard. “This guy’s just in love with you, that guy thinks you’re awesome…” I’m apparently a Twitter star because of my X-rated pictures. That’s enough for me. I really don’t care if people, like, point me out and say, “Oh shit, there’s the girl who shows her snatch all over POJ!” It’s whatever.

Are you technically “juggalettes”?
Killette: Yes. I call myself a juggalo, but “juggalette” came around in 1999 or 2000. It’s all the same shit, though. I have been one since I was like 13, and I’m 26 now.
Ryan: Oh no, no. I feel like juggalos are a little bit more extreme. They’re really into it. I’m into the music and everything, but it’s not my thing, it’s not my identity. They take everything about it very seriously: the artists, the music, the lifestyle, getting tattoos of hatchet man and all that stuff.
Nevaeh: No. I just like the music. They do a lot of crazy shit and I like to do a lot of crazy shit. I don’t claim to be a juggalo or juggalette. You know, everything happens with a little bit of alcohol in my world. I’m known to drop trou when I’m wasted. Especially now, 'cause I got my taint pierced.

A taint piercing?
Nevaeh: You’ve never seen one?

I don’t even know what a taint is. [Editors' note: Toby is new around here and has some archival reading to catch up on.]
Nevaeh: OK. It’s the spot between… the taint is really on a guy. It’s the spot between your balls and your asshole – the gooch, or whatever. I have the spot in between my pussy and my asshole pierced.

You’re my favourite. What’s it really like out there at a Gathering? 
Killette: There are some people who are fucking retarded. But, juggalo or not, there are just people in general who are retarded. There are retarded-ass juggalos who act stupid, but I don’t personally know them. I don’t hang out with retarded people.
Neveah: That’s a really common misconception. It’s crazy because very few are like that, but they’re the ones who make everyone else look like dumb-asses. Everybody I talked to was hella cool. They all came from different parts of the country. Some people came from other countries. It’s like something out of a story, and you kinda just make it how you wanna make it. You choose your own path in there. I met some hippies, I met some gypsies, I met carnies… then I met blue-collar, very high-class people. Then I met white-trash people. I met everybody!
Killette: It depends on where you’re from in the US. Most juggalos are from the Midwest. I’m from the West Coast, and that’s not how it is out here. Juggalos over here are actually quite different to juggalos from the Midwest, or the south. East Coast juggalos are the only ones I can compare to West Coast juggalos. They’re very similar. It’s more, I guess, hip-hop and ghetto influenced, whereas the South and Midwest is more… hillbilly influenced.
Neveah: I had my tarot cards read by a gypsy at the Gathering. He was crazy. The guy had the sleeves ripped off his t-shirt, total white trash-style, but his reading was so dead on that I looked at him and told him how much he was fucking my mind. It tripped me out. Everything he talked about happened. That was the craziest $3 I ever spent.
Killette: I’ve had some weird incidents, too. One time I had this guy come up and grab my hair and he just goes [makes deep inhaling noise, followed by a sigh], and I was like, “Whoa, you need to stand back; please back up.” Another time a guy came up to me, got right up in my face and was like, “Will you punch me, please? Will you just hit me so hard in my face? I’ll love it.” I was like, “Oh… no?”
Ryan: I think a lot of people think juggalos are super dirty and white trash. They think they’re a gang. That’s stupid. A lot of people prejudge them. Honestly, the Gathering is one of the tightest things I’ve ever been to. There’s nothing like it. When I tell people about it, I tell them it’s like Woodstock with rap. People will judge it, but everyone loves each other, pretty much. I’ve seen a couple fights break out, but they were both split up right away. When that happens, they’ll put the people who were fighting in juggalo jail. Have you heard about that yet?

No, what’s the deal?
Ryan: Oh my gosh. OK, in Hogrock, where they have the Gathering, there are these, like, stripper poles, but they look like bird cages. When people fight or do something bad, they’ll put them in juggalo jail and leave them in there without a set release time – they’ll lock up the door and stuff. They have their own system of dealing with people.

Meanwhile, you ladies “capture juggalos at their most vulnerable moments and expose them.”
Killette: I think it’s hella fresh. We are not making fun of anyone, I swear. We do this to our friends, too. If you pass out, you’re getting fucked with. That’s the rules. ICP doesn’t pay us to do it, which is a rumour that’s been going around on the internet. We don’t even know ICP.
Neveah: It’s hella funny, because you see people hella passed out in these crazy positions that look so uncomfortable. What could be better than putting your ass right in their faces? They have no idea.
Killette: They’re all fucked up. They’re all really, really drunk and we know they’re gonna be drunk, so we just wait. We usually do it at around 6 or 7AM.
Ryan: Oh yeah. We look, we look. I’ll toot my own horn and say that I’m the best at finding passed out people. I see a silhouette of someone hunched over and I’m like, “Let’s go.” I remember somebody was passed out by one of the tents one time with, like, poles and stuff around. Kali climbed up there and spread her legs. Who would think to do that? Her and Killette are the most likely to go inside people’s cars and shit and lie next to them and cuddle with them, like spoon them.
Killette: I don’t really make skin-on-skin contact, though. I don’t actually touch anybody. The other girls have, but not me. I’m a neat freak. I’m one of those people who puts hand sanitiser on every 30 seconds.

The Gathering sounds like the wrong place for OCD clean machines.
Killette: I know. It’s crazy, right? All my friends are like, “How the fuck?” I carry the hand sanitiser with me at all times. I go in the RV constantly and baby-wipe my whole body.

Does anything ever go horribly wrong when you guys are doing your thing?
Ryan: Probably ten percent of them wake up. They’re in a haze. What would you do if you woke up and some girl’s ass was in your face? I think one time this guy woke up and was like, “Cool.” Then he went back to sleep.
Killette: We’re like little schoolgirls, too. If they wake up, we run away laughing, like hella stupid and shit. Who cares? When I graduate college and have my bachelor's and stuff, I’m gonna be a psychologist. Can you imagine me being a psychologist? In, like, one year.
Ryan: Kali doesn’t care. She’ll get right on top of people’s faces, basically. Guys will be, like, grabbing her ass and shit because they don’t know what’s going on. At the same time, it’s funny too, because now more juggalos know about it. I swear people are gonna start pretending to be asleep.

What kind of response does POJ get from the public?
Killette: We get hate mail all the time, like, “You nasty sluts! You no-talent whores!” Anything you can think of. It’s usually jealous girls, sometimes guys. If we’re so shitty, why do we have over 10,000 likes? Honestly, it’s because we’re just hot girls showin’ our asses, y’know?
Ryan: I’m still trying to figure out if I can go to the next Gathering. My brother – he’s not blood-related, but he might as well be – is getting married the same weekend, so I have to pick. I’m still not sure yet. Sadly I am leaning toward the Gathering. I’m sure he’s only gonna get married once, but it’s the Gathering!
Killette: It’s the best scene to be in. You’ve seen our pictures – does it not look like we’re having a great time? I’ve watched Vanilla Ice perform almost every year at the Gathering. Vanilla Ice! He was like one of the biggest rap stars in all of music! When I was 16 years old in 2003, he was at the Gathering, and I just wanna say, I smoked with him.

Would you POJ Vanilla Ice?
Killette: Yeah. I would get him. I would get him hardcore. 

Follow Toby on Twitter: @jane_tobes

For more Juggalos:

We Interviewed the Insane Clown Posse

In the Land of the Juggalos

The Juggalo Summer Reading List

Continue reading over at The Creators Project.

Former Motherboard editor Sean Yeaton used to be Mr. Science. He'd walk around the VICE offices carrying a Bunsen burner and saying stuff like, "Drones! Chemistry! Saturn's rings!" No one knew what he was talking about, but that's true of most scientific geniuses. Then his band, Parquet Courts, took off and he was all like, "Working at a computer is the pits! I'm going on tour." We tagged along on their recent tour to document midnight desert peyote sessions and foreign language festival love.

Here's a statement from director Andy Capper: 

At 5AM on Monday, I jerked myself awake and looked down at my body to find I'd fallen asleep nude in a large hotel bathtub under a steady stream of scalding hot water. My contacts were dried out and suctioned to my eyeballs, and a ring of black dirt outlined my frame. Half of my hair was knotted up into one massive dreadlock so gnarly it would've put the bass players in nu-metal bands to shame. Yet despite my broken body and haggard appearance, I was overcome with pride: I'd successfully survived the first half of the two-weekend-long adult spring break known as the Coachella Music Festival.

Coachella is the annual desert-music event held in Indio, California, which happens to be one of the most physically gruelling places this side of the equator. This was my third time attending, so by now, I've seen it all: from Rave Dad to a technologically reincarnated Tupac Shakur. For those of you who are going for the first time next week, or are just insane and attending for a second time, here are some tips to making it out of Palm Desert in one piece.

DO BUY VIP

Music-festival passes are extremely overpriced. However, if you're baller enough to blow half a month's rent on going out into the swelteringly hot desert to see a bunch of bands you could watch live on a laptop from the comfort of your own home, it only makes sense to shell out a couple more duckets to obtain VIP status. There is little to no cell reception at Coachella, so your phone battery is guaranteed to die. But VIPs have multiple charging stations. It's hot as Satan's taint in the desert, but VIPs have shaded areas, misting fans and an air-conditioned bar.

When you're in GA, you can't drink alcohol on the fairground. But the VIPs have more than one bar spread out in a closed-off section where they can easily watch bands and get plastered. And let's not forget that parking is a bitch, but VIPs get to park closer to the entrance, so you don't have to walk a mile to your car in the dark and possibly get stalked by bros in tacky tie-dye T-shirts. Plus, as a VIP, you have a better chance of conning your way backstage into the artist areas if you keep yourself from breaking character when lying to security guards about how you're part of the Earl Sweatshirt entourage, when really you're just trying to creep on guys with guitars and the topless girls who are having them sign their tits.

DON'T WEAR INAPPROPRIATE FOOTWEAR

Considering that everything is far away, and you're constantly walking around in circles in a bunch of dirt, your footwear choices will really make or break your entire festival experience. Unless you're there with the sole purpose of having a bunch of sleazy "blog photographers" snap photos of you for obscure fashion sites that no one has ever heard of, don't bother sporting high heels. It's already bad enough having to trip over the blacked-out idiots laying on the ground in the middle of the crowds at the main stage, but it's even worse when you sprain your ankle and have to sit in a hot medical tent with a bunch of kids who ate too many drug brownies and are screaming to EMS workers that they think they're going to die. Even more retarded are the people who wear sandals or choose to walk around in bare feet, as there are no proper bathrooms; you have to pee in Porta Potties. Between that and all the cop-horse manure you have to walk through, you're setting yourself up for a pretty shitty experience. 

DO BRING EXTRA CLOTHING

When it's 105 degrees out, you're going to find yourself sweating in places you never knew you could sweat before. This kind of weather quickly renders all deodorants and perfumes completely useless because the stench of "I feel like I'm dying" is basically impossible to remove from clothing without a proper washing. The best chance you have of keeping yourself from smelling like you have swamp ass is by bringing extra clothing you can change into once you finally begin to notice people are holding their breath around you.

If you don't want to carry a bunch of stuff around, you can rent a locked storage space at one of the entrances. If you're too scared you're going to trip so hard you'll forget the combo, you can just leave your things in your car and walk back to change while all the bands you hate perform. Also, most people don't seem to realise that the desert gets cold at night. So unless you want to spend $60 at the merch stand just to wear the same Wu-Tang sweatshirt every flip-flop- and cargo-short-wearing bro at the festival is pit-kicking to the Dropkick Murphys in, come prepared...

DON'T FORGET TO CARRY WATER

Whether or not you're trying to live out all of your wildest Burning Man fantasies at Coachella by wasting your day in the Sahara Electro tent, drinking gargantuan amounts of water is 100 percent necessary, and it is imperative that you always carry a bottle of it with you. If you're actually going to the festival to see more bands than attend parties, you're going to be a hot mess by the end of the day. Shows start around noon and the heat peaks around three or four, when all of the best artists start to play. If you start drinking alcohol when you arrive, you have no chance in hell of making it until the headliner goes on at midnight without proper hydration.

Also, there is no water anywhere for you to wash your hands ever. You're stuck with nothing but cheap hand sanitiser that stains your clothing blue. And God forbid one of those nasty sandstorms of biblical proportions happens to blow through the festival like it did this past Sunday night during Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' performance. You will end up ingesting so much sand and dirt through your throat and lungs, it'll feel like you just shoved a full stack of Saltines into your mouth and tried to swallow them whole.

DO HAVE A REAL PLACE TO STAY

Figuring out where you're going to stay the day of the festival is about the dumbest thing anyone can do. If your friends are all renting a house, make sure you definitely have a spot to crash and that 25-plus people aren't also going to be staying there. If you decide to stay in a hotel, book one ahead of time so you don't end up having to spend $300-a-night rates for crappy "retro inspired" roadside hotels that have minifridges stocked with rotting food and questionable hooker-makeup-face-plant marks on the pillows. And under no circumstances should you ever camp on the fairground in a tent. You'll be right smack in the centre of the stampede come late night when everyone is high off their minds trying to bolt back to their cars to beat Palm Springs party traffic. I can't even count how many couples I've tripped over and probably injured as they lay midcoitus in flimsy $39.99 Kmart tents. 

DON'T RELY ON ANYONE BUT YOURSELF

Everyone loves a good road trip with friends, but don't mistake simple buddy bonding for anyone actually holding your hand through the entire festival. At an event with 80,000 people running around wasted in a massive field, you're going to get lost a lot. Your phone won't work most of the time, and you'll get angry "WHERE R U?" texts hours after your friends have already given up looking for you. Designated drivers will disappear and get tanked and won't be able to drive back to your home base. Palm Springs, where most people stay, is a good 45 minutes away from the fairground, so catching a ride doesn't always mean you're going to end up where you're supposed to be staying.

You can't get mad about it or take it personally – your friends are not your babysitters. The only person who can look out for you is you alone. So try to have a plan, select a spot so you all know where to meet if you get separated. Don't get so jacked up that you can't see where you're going. And if it comes down to it, always be prepared to walk home.

DO HELP OTHER PEOPLE OUT

I'm not suggesting you should pick up hitchhikers and give them a ride to the festival or let homeless strangers crash on your hotel floor. I'm a firm believer that some people are genuinely just killers by nature, and fuck dying because you went out on a limb to help someone out. But festival karma is, in fact, a very real thing. It's really easy to be a selfish bastard when it's hot as hell and you're just trying to have a good time, but extending a hand to someone you don't know will result in good things coming back to you.

Give a mutual friend a ride to Palm Springs, and you might get a free VIP pass to the shows. Buy someone a beer at the bar, and you might get into a party you were never on the list for. Let a buddy shower at your hotel, and you might be gifted a bounty of chocolate mushrooms. Leave the festival early on the last night and give a bunch of Mexican teenagers your discarded festival wristband, and someone might offer you a ride home and save you from walking two miles back to your house in complete darkness in the middle of a sandstorm. Don't be a dick, and everyone wins!

All photos by Vincent Perini. 

@ABUNNY

More from Annette:

Brooke Candy Wants to Fuck Right Now

The Very Best of New Zealand Fashion Week

I Walked Around in a Burqa All Day (And I’m Not Muslim)

Adam Richardson, formerly of West Country doom masters Ramesses and Lords Of Putrefaction, is one of UK metal’s great raconteurs. He tells an amazing story about how he once went into a cave with a blotter sheet of acid and a six-string, only to emerge a few days later with no LSD left but a better guitar player and able to speak some conversational Spanish.

I interviewed him in 2010 for Metal Hammer magazine about how photographs of Fucking Hell – the infamous giant sculpture of thousands of eternally damned Nazis by the artists Jake And Dinos Chapman – came to grace the sleeve for the trio’s Take The Curse album.  

He told me about the almost psychedelic effect their artwork had on him: “The first time I saw Fucking Hell was just so bizarre… experiencing something that strong when you're with other people. You could easily just stand there in the one spot because [the sculpture] is so detailed you could just get lost in it for hours. Days, even. When I first saw the art, I was surrounded by people saying 'Fucking Hell.' Their mouths were hanging open. It was really funny hearing this mantra going on while people were looking at the most harrowing things possible to the imagination. I said it myself because it reminded me of an Autopsy album cover.”

Determined to get to meet the artists, Richardson made them an occult artefact. A huge black rubber canvas with an upside down cross painted in black on it was wrapped round the band’s back catalogue, lashed up, sealed with wax and nailed shut into a 100-year-old wooden box, cast with spells and sent off to them.

The next thing he knew, he was round their studios by invitation being told to take as many photographs of Fucking Hell as he wanted to use as the album art.

When asked if the brothers liked his music, he had this to say: “It’s difficult for me to talk about but yeah, I think they do. When I first gave them Take The Curse they put it on in their stereo at what can only be described as a painful volume – even for me. I thought, ‘Surely they are not going to listen to the whole thing at this eardrum bursting volume.’ And sure enough, an hour later, they finished listening to it. Nothing was on the stereo before and nothing went on after it. And then they just asked me loads of questions about how it was recorded… Normally I’d have to be off my nut to listen to music that loud.”

Dinos Chapman breaks into a huge grin when I mention the Ramesses front man: “Isn’t Adam like Jesus? He’s such a nice guy. He’s totally not what you’d expect from such an extreme band. We wanted to get involved with them again to do this project at [giant London department store] Selfridges. They were re-launching the shop a few years ago so we phoned up Adam and said, ‘Do you want to play a gig in Selfridges’ Food Hall?’ Jake was going to play guitar with them. I couldn’t work out how my music was going to fit in with what they were doing so I was just going to dance like Bez. We wanted to see if we could fill one end of the hall with loads of amplifiers and see if that would smash all the crystal and glass in the room with noise. It got quite far down the line until someone pulled the plug. We couldn’t believe it took them so long to realise it was such a bad idea, from their point of view.”

Now this is the point where anyone with any sense should be crying accusations of dilettantism. Even I feel like saying: “Ramesses? So what? That doesn’t give you a free pass…” But as much as I usually hate the idea of synergy and “dabbling” in unfamiliar fields, let’s have a quick look at the Chapman Brothers’ musical credentials. In 2009 they made the video for PJ Harvey and John Parish’s "Black Hearted Love". (The brothers have been a direct influence on Polly Harvey’s lyric writing, or at the very least she shares their obsession with Goya’s Disasters Of War sketch A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men!; as heard in her 2011 song "The Words That Maketh Murder": “I’ve seen and done things that I want to forget / I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat / Blown and shot out beyond belief / Arms and legs were in the trees.”) They collaborated with art-savvy post punks Wire and DJ Kirsten Reynolds for an AV performance at the Barbican in 2003. They curated one of the best All Tomorrow’s Parties events ever – the 2004 Nightmare Before Christmas weekend, which featured Throbbing Gristle, LFO, Aphex Twin, Liars, The Fall, Wolf Eyes, Rob Booth and SunnO))).

That should do for starters. Do you want some sort of comparison? Okay: Damien Hirst directed the "Country House" video for Blur.

When I meet Dinos Chapman, in the nice, open-plan offices of the Vinyl Factory who have put his Luftbobler album out, he’s literally just found out that he’s lost ten years’ worth of musical work. All of the stems – each component of the multi-tracks – of his electronic music recorded over the last decade are gone. Of course, he made no backups or hard copies…

However Dinos, a tall, handsome but extremely tired looking man in reassuringly expensive but unflashy clothes and jewellery, doesn’t really look like he cares.  

“Oh well!” he grins.

One gets the impression that this was probably also his response when he heard about the Saatchi warehouse fire in East London, 2004 which destroyed their other, earlier, huge Nazi figurine diorama, Hell. And perhaps if I were to give free reign to my imagination I could even picture him laughing at the idea of the blaze, thousands and thousands of Nazi skeletons and demons melting into liquid lead and pouring across the landscape like a toy town Dresden.

We head down a flight of stairs into a massive (and presumably very expensive) basement under Phonica Records in Soho. The space is being prepared for the album launch which will be kicking off in a few hours. Four large projection screens line the walls showing short films made by the artist using a digital camera and default MacBook film editing technology. One shows a rich lysergic sunset over Hastings – his home town – as seen from the promenade.

“Look at that,” he says absent-mindedly. “It’s apocalyptic. Like the inferno.”

He looks at it quizzically for a few more moments and shouts to an engineer: “This is upside down. Do you think someone could put it the right way up before tonight?”

True enough, leaden, undulating waves of sky hang implacably over a bonfire coloured sea full of little fluffy clouds.  

He grins like a schoolboy: “It’s a little bit naughty. It’s filmed from where Hastings Pier burned down.”

He confesses that the films were incredibly easy to make and serve as an eye boggling and ear dulling strategy: “They were an attempt to divert people’s attention from listening to the music too hard. I like the fact that they’re incredibly benign films. There are a couple of car journeys with the camera hanging out of the window. There’s one of my kids dancing and jumping around in the waves. There’s one of bunny rabbits. I just love the idea that by the simplest means possible you can just fuck it all up. It’s all done on iMovie. It’s just like that, sliders all to one side, slow it down and it works. You can do this with any video and set it to music and it’ll work. I think your brain just puts two wires together. No matter how far apart [the music and the images] are, they fit.”

And all of a sudden you’ve got an entire generation claiming that Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wizard Of Oz fit together, I say to him.  

“I’m sure they do,” he says, looking at another of the screens. Giant techno pets – robotic children’s rabbits – leap past the camera as if clinging to the ceiling.

“Sean!” he shouts to the man from the Vinyl Factory. “This film’s upside down as well! Is everything going to be ready for tonight?”

Nothing is quite as you expect with Dinos Chapman. Everything is inverted.

Dinos Chapman – "So it goes"

No matter how deeply engaged the artist is with music, Luftbobler has divided opinion. Dinos (Konstantinos Chapman, born 1962) doesn’t help matters, either. Naming his album after the Norwegian word for the bubbles in an Aero bar and gleefully relishing in his primitavist, messy approach (something he calls “schamplige”), he winks with a toothy, expensive grin at all the techno producers and DJs toiling away in obscurity with the certain knowledge that they will never be interviewed by the Guardian or Wallpaper* (or indeed VICE).

Personally, I think it’s great music though; it’s essentially the electronic side of his Nightmare Before Christmas selection condensed into one album with clear links to Autechre and TG as well as nods to Aphex Twin and LFO. True, there’s a touch of Radiohead’s brittle and glitchy angst-step to it, but then you can’t have everything. The music was created on a set up that’s comfortably above minimum entry-level but he’s also obviously not a gear head or interested in the idea of genre authenticity or pure analogue sounds or effects.

Not that you can tell from listening to it, but some of the tracks contain samples from typically perverse sources including Kylie Minogue talking about plastic surgery and audio pornography for the blind. He lists the sources: "On one of the tracks it's my children who are sampled. Then on 'Pizza Man' the source is a website called Porn For The Blind, where this guy watches a porn film and just describes what's going on in such a monotone. I can't imagine a blind person getting any gratification from it. I can't work out whether it's a joke or not. Stuff that didn’t make the final cut included a séance and David Lynch. But it’s the voices themselves that I’m interested in, not what they’re actually saying."

His use of the word “schamplige” is revelatory: “I’m slightly obsessed with weird German words. I like the fact that they’re like the linguistic equivalent of a sawn off shot gun. It means so many different things. I took the word to mean sloppy or unfinished work. I made some sculptures before and I called them Minderwertigkinder after trying to find a German translation for “shoddily made children”. Of course there’s German word for it. I was like, ‘Great!’ But then I found another one and then another one and of course there are about 15 different words for shoddy humans and this relates back the Nazis. I think the Poles were referred to as Minderwertigmensch. I thought I’d apply the same to the music. Someone told me it means slutty as well…”

I mention how annoyed some techno people are at the coverage he’s receiving and if he, in turn, is annoyed because he’s been working on this project for a decade and they’re painting him as some arriviste wanker. He’s disappointingly diplomatic: “I’ve always been interested in electronic music for as long as I’ve known it’s existed and I’ve had many failed attempts to get involved in it. Basically, I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know what you were supposed to do and all my questions to people who were making electronic music were answered in the most obscure way possible. Basically no one wanted to help me, so I had to find my own way through. I started by using the most basic Fisher Price sequencer before thinking, ‘Hmm, maybe I can do better than that.’ And by the time you get really into it you realise you need to get the proper equipment to produce it right. I use Maschine – lots of Native Instrument software and I’ve got a little KORG keyboard. Basically I don’t want a spaceship. I like the idea I can put it all in a box and take it wherever I want to go. One of the most interesting things about electronic music is that I don’t need very much. It’s a universe inside a very small box but there’s plenty in that box to mess around with.”

I tell him that I like the album but I shouldn’t do really – that I have real misgivings about musicians making art. It’d be a lie to say that every musician is a bad artist but it’s not far off a statistical 100 percent. Even David Bowie is a bad artist, that’s how bad the situation is. He retorts that Bowie is also a bad musician but apologises almost immediately saying that he doesn’t mean it. So much for the enfant terrible that I’d been led to expect by so many poorly researched, thin-skinned newspaper profiles…

I ask him to approach it from the opposite direction and to tell me truthfully if artists are usually bad musicians or producers of music. He’s blunter when on home ground: “Yes, they are. People become artists because they have great big over inflated egos and they crave attention. And they shouldn’t be given it most of the time. But when they do get attention they suddenly start believing that they are good in any given field. Artists who make cakes, for example, believe they are the best cake makers there are. They think they dress amazingly. But yeah, there is a long history of artists making music that deserves to be flushed. Which is why I’m surprised that anyone’s giving me attention.”

I restate my mistrust of synergy, saying that if an idea’s good it should be expressed in one medium not across numerous ones. This is obviously not something he believes, given that this is a multi-media project.

He explains: “I think ideas are ideas and they express themselves in whatever you do. I mean think about what Jake and I do: we pretty much only have one idea. It infects everything we do. Everything we do is just another manifestation of that idea. It’s a big idea – it’s not just a nugget – it’s this great big, messy, uncontrollable, angry thing that inhabits our work. Whatever we do is always a representation of this idea no matter what we try and do. Even if we tried not to represent that idea, we still would. The thing with the music is that it’s the same: it’s not different, it’s just a different way of doing it.”

If there’s a debt to be paid to anyone by Dinos, it’s to Autechre. (He knows Rob from the group and admits freely that he would love to sit in on one of their recording sessions to see what their process is like: “I’m only interested in the process, not the end result.”) No bad thing. More people, not less, should be influenced by them. There’s something I really like about the way some of Autechre’s material is recorded and this is because they come from an electro / hip-hop / hardcore background so they scratch in samples, set tapes running in real time, trigger samples by hand so it’s not all coming in quantised, rigid by sequencer. And I get a sense of organised chaos in the artist’s music as well. On "So It Goes" there are a lot of satisfying clanks and groans and bursts of noise. I ask him where these bits of organic sound come from.

He says: “I played [Luftbobler] to my sister and she said, ‘This is so you.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘It’s like a fairytale gone wrong. It’s like Hansel And Gretel, you’ve left a trail of breadcrumbs behind you but something’s come along and eaten them and you can’t find your way home.’ I think the noise you’re talking about is someone talking but it’s been affected so many times that over time it’s become this rumbling, thundery noise. After a while you stop knowing where they come from, they just become these things that you’ve tried. It just makes me laugh. It’s so sloppy. I don’t know where I’m going half the time. It’s like a great big bucket of things that have been snipped off and fiddled with.

"You know when you’re a kid you have a toy box and your favourite ones are the broken ones right at the bottom so you have to tip the whole thing out just to get that thing that’s in the corner? It’s like that. It’s wilfully disorganised. I didn’t think any of this stuff would turn out like this.”

He adds: “When my sister, my brother and I were young, when we were growing up in Hastings in the mid-70s, we were all pretty much forced to play the electric guitar. We’d troop down there and pretend that we’d been practicing all week but of course we hadn’t. Jake continued playing guitar, he’s very good. My sister carried on playing classical guitar and was very good but then packed it in. I stopped because I realised that I was too shy to play guitar in front of anyone. Guitar is a performative instrument. So then I found this thing, the computer – I can do it completely on my own. It’s perfect because no one needs to hear it. If Sean [from Vinyl Factory] hadn’t dug [the music] out of me I don’t know what would have happened. I think it was fortunate that Sean managed to get me to release it. I don’t think I struggled too much though, it wasn’t too difficult for him to persuade me to make an album…”

He wanders off to test out the DJ equipment for the opening, leaving me to listen to the album at full volume through the big rig. It’s very satisfying at first but then the basement starts slowly filling up with berks in terrible hats chunnering on and clinking champagne glasses. There is much high frequency pitched chatter which is threatening to spill over into full-on braying at any point. When one berk in a terrible hat takes a photograph of the shoes being worn by another berk in a terrible hat, I leave. There’s only so much a reasonable man should be expected to endure in the line of duty. I’d like to hear Luftbobler in Corsica some time, though. It’d probably sound great in there.

Luftbobler is available to buy on Amazon and Dinos is playing at Sonar on the 15th of June.

More from John Doran:

The British Masters – Johnny Marr

The British Masters – Luke Haines

Talking to Bryan Ferry About How He Controlled Our Brains, Minds and Libidos

JOIN THE LISTENING PARTY FOR THE NEW SNOOP LION ALBUM REINCARNATED BY CLICKING HERE.

You might want to go buy a couple of beers and get ready to awkwardly loiter around the office for another 45 minutes, because at 6PM today, Noisey are streaming the new Snoop Lion album Reincarnated in its entirety. I suppose if you've got a fancy phone you could live stream it on the bus, or whatever, but then you'd be one of those people who live stream music on the bus, which makes you kind of insufferable, regardless of how great the music is coming out of your tinny phone speakers.

This is the second in Noisey's new series, "Listening Parties" (the first was of the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs' album) and, like the last one, it's only streaming live once (because that's how "live" works). We'll put up a permanent full album stream tomorrow, but make sure you listen to it now if you want to have first dibs on bragging rights. 

Look at yourself; your life's a mess. A government that defines itself by helping the rich and fucking the poor has slashed your benefits and priced you out of an education. You haven't been able to afford a holiday in years, you've just endured a seven-month winter and the happiest you've been in weeks is when you were celebrating an old woman's death in the streets with a bunch of crusties. When the voice in your head starts to sound like John Cooper Clarke, what do you want to do on a Friday night? Hang out alone listening to Jello Biafra spoken-word lectures, displacing your knuckles on your bedroom walls? Or take enough drugs to forget about how terrible your life is and embrace smiling strangers to "Everybody Dance"?

I know people have said this before, but I genuinely think it might happen this time. I genuinely think we could be on the verge of a summer of disco.

When the world is mired in the shit, popular music generally reacts in one of two ways. Typically, in the way that Mojo and BBC Four are fond of, it tends to address social problems by becoming explicitly angry about them. However, we don't currently have artists like Public Enemy or Joan Baez to do that for us, we have the clunky, new-left analogies of Plan B’s iLL Manors, Frank Turner’s libertarian folk and a slew of wishy washy, “We’re tryna make a change here, people!” charity pop offerings. Unfortunately, the vast majority of "socially conscious" music being made today possesses all the subtlety of a George Galloway anti-Zionist rant.

Our culture seems desperate for some kind of catharsis from the nightmares of rising youth unemployment, makeshift missile throwing and easily consolidated debts, yet none of our musicians seem to want to take it on. Which is understandable. It's all relative: The internet's done to their industry what Thatcher did to mining communities. You imagine many young musicians are just as keen to keep that drip-feed of royalties, easy sex and bad drugs coming in as you are to keep your home internet up and running.

Photo of Hackney looters in 2010, by Henry Langston.

The limp wrist of apathy has wafted the pendulum back towards another idea – rather than let the bastards grind you down, why not just turn the lights off, shut your eyes and play music so loud you forget the bastards even exist? Legendary Manchester DJ, promoter and A&R guru Mike Pickering told me that club owners "always say that it’s during recessions that clubs do the best business". While dance music has flirted with politics in the past, it's always been more inclined to offer an escape from everyday travails. And that's not necessarily a criticism – offering someone that escape route can be just as socially responsible as writing a protest song. It certainly seems like it's gotta be worth more to public morale than whatever shitty Thatcher joke Chris T-T has RT'd in the last few hours.

It’s not just returning veterans like Daft Punk channelling David Mancuso rather than David Guetta these days. On almost every Boiler Room set (bar those from rappers and the mutant techno hardcore crew), you’re bound to hear something at least a little bit disco. The likes of Krystal Klear, Medlar, Floating Points and Disclosure have all been proving that there’s a world beyond pitched vocals and Poundland synth breaks. Even the godfather of suburban fearstep, Skream, has recently been heard playing the kind of stuff that was, until recently, resigned to Monte Carlo roof parties, while his Croydon comrade Loefah’s new Norwood Soul Patrol show on Rinse sound more like Tony Hadley’s shift on Heart FM than a Night Slugs b2b.

Bear in mind that Todd Terje’s camp, stomping “Inspector Norse” currently occupies the nation’s dive clubs with the same omnipresence previously reserved for “Skeng” or “Cockney Thug” and – weirdly – you begin to suspect that our tastes have lightened up a little. It could just be that disco is simply the next island of safety for producers to move on to, a dance music halfway house before the inevitable reintegration with urban dread. But I have the feeling it's down to electronic music needing a bit of flamboyance again after years of dragging its feet through the trenches of sub-bass and supposedly profound moments of silence – sonic tropes usually associated with a kind of "kitchen sink" clubland, the sound of weeping single mums echoing off the walls of piss-stained estate stairwells.

Even aspects of our culture that have nothing to do with the old cliches of hairy chests and syncopated bass-lines have begun to appropriate the disco manifesto. Take Spring Breakers, for instance. Sure, it's got Gucci Mane in it and has the kind of trap-step soundtrack you'd expect from a movie set in the Florida of 2013. But it also harks back to the Saturday Night Fever idea that a youth film should submerge itself in the silly, decadent world around it rather than take on any objective moralising stance. It's a 1977 movie in a way that This Is England could never be.

Photo by Holly Lucas.

On the surface, disco might seem like fluffy, materialist nonsense about sex, expensive clothes and the mythical state of grace that is "Funky Town". You might think that a reversion to this sound is basically admitting defeat and jumping on the good ship free-market towards a nu-Dubai.

Well, while I won’t deny that it sounds better with a chilled bottle of Dom than a frozen tin of Skol, disco is still essentially a rebel sound. There might not be any Commodores joints blasting out of "cycle soundsystems" at Thatcher death raves, and Diana Ross never released anything on Dischord, but – in its purest form – disco is the escapist sound of the oppressed. Both culturally, in that it began as the sound of gay, black and Latino New Yorkers who wanted to flee the AM radio rock nightmare the rest of the nation was trapped in, and musically, too. Go out to a club where they play disco at the volume it's supposed to be played at, and you'll hear a new sharpness to it, a kind of hedonistic, top-end viciousness you don't get when you're listening to Magic FM through a cab radio at 2AM.

I’m not saying that Jamie XX playing a Rose Royce track is the rallying cry for a British spring, but it's surely a statement suggesting that perhaps all we really want to do now is forget about our problems and have some fun, rather than dwell in the weed paralysis nightmare that was clubland in the latter part of the last decade. In fact, listening to SpaceGhostPurpp and Denzel Curry, I can’t help but wonder if we just shipped our skunk paranoia off to the States in return for the “party every day” manifesto of the Black Eyed Peas (though obviously their parties would be shit).

While political (or just miserable) art will always play a part in any society, ours doesn’t seem to want to listen to the steel shutters of Foot Locker screeching as they're pried open any more. Instead of the deathly silence of public apathy, why not disco? It makes sense that the society that suffers together should celebrate together, too.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

More parties:

A Big Night Out at... the Worst Club Night Ever?

There Was Another Thatcher Death Party in London This Weekend

Thatcher Got the Falklands, but She Couldn't Get the Pillheads

In a new series, with direction from Ed Lachman, we take a look at the collaborators behind Random Access Memories, the new album from Daft Punk. For episode three we spoke with Pharrell Williams.

Pre-order Random Access Memories on iTunes.

What's up with all this crap I'm hearing about people hating Rick Ross all of a sudden? Reebok, are you for real with this shit? You think the man's lyrics are about rape? If you don't know what I'm talking about, then I'm about to tell you. Basically, some women's rights organisation called UltraViolet got all mad at Reebok because they're endorsing the greatest rapper of all time, who in the Rocko song “U.O.E.N.O.” supposedly raps about committing date rape. The exact lyrics are as follows:

“Put Molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it/ I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know,”

Rick Ross tweeted an apology that he later deleted, but it was transcribed in this article by Rap-Up. Ricky Rosé doth twat:

“I dont condone rape. Apologies for the #lyric interpreted as rape. #BOSS”

However, it's too late. Reebok dropped him because they didn't feel his apology was good enough. You want to know why it wasn't good enough? Because he didn't need to apologise at all. You heard the man himself say it. The lyrics aren't about  rape. We all just misinterpreted it. It's so obvious. I don't get how no one else sees it. The real issue here is the mainstream media and our educational system's paucity of quality humanities instruction. They just don't understand what Rick Ross was trying to say. 

You think when that John Keats guy wrote the poem, "Ode to a Grecian Urn," he was describing an actual Grecian urn? No way, idiots. These are symbolic metaphors we're dealing with. That urn was probably his Greek grandma who was a good singer or something. My point is, what Keats was doing back then is exactly what Rick Ross is doing right now. There are so many possible interpretations for these lyrics, but the media had to go ahead and focus on what the lyrics literally mean as opposed to what they figuratively might mean. Off the top of my head, I have at least one other interpretation for these lyrics that has nothing at all to do with date rape.

For instance, what if Molly is a person and not a drug? I think it's super possible that this Molly is a burlesque dancer, who performs inside a giant champagne glass as a part of her act. Rick Ross must have seen her and was like, “Wow she doesn't even know how good she is at slowly removing the majority of her clothing inside a giant champagne glass.” Then he took her home after the show – to her home, mind you – and enjoyed doing it because he was so delighted to see her wonderful performance. You know Rick, he's all trying to put up this act like he's a real tough guy, but at the end of the day, the champagne-glass burlesque dancer named Molly melted his heart, and he was too embarrassed to tell her that he liked her. She ain't even know.

OK, so I can see how some of you might be skeptical about that interpretation. I get it, Rick Ross is a baddie. A real tough guy. Being so shy around an exotic dancer does seems too far out of character. So what else could this all mean? Well, how about we concede that this Molly he speaks of is in fact the drug more commonly known as ecstasy and not a person? OK fine, but that still doesn't mean rape was involved. I bet this woman texted Rick earlier that day and wrote, “Hey can you remember to put some Molly in my champagne glass tonight? Don't tell me when, I want it to be a surprise!” So, being the true friend Rick is, he did. Then he took her to his home to make sure she would be taken care of in case she had a bad come down. He provided her with plenty of water, and good music, since he's Rick Ross. She didn't even know what a good host he was. He probably even had a bear-skin rug in his bedroom that she rolled around on for hours. He then fell asleep on the floor right next to her.

Actually, I suppose that's still out of the realm of possibility. Nobody has a bear-skin rug these days. What the hell else could it be though? I mean come on, the guy is a super famous, insanely talented and rich rapper. There is no way on earth he could be that vile and disgusting, knowing full well he can get consensual sex from plenty of women. Especially in Miami. My uncle Barry lives in Miami and he gets laid by willing women all the time. This guy has four different pairs of Crocs and two different strains of herpes. There is no way my uncle Barry is a more decent human being than Rick Ross. Right? Shit, I don't even know anymore. I'm trying so hard to see what else these lyrics could possibly mean. I'm drawing blanks here. Just like my uncle Barry, actually.

Rick, is it true? Is everything I thought I knew about symbolic metaphorism wrong? Are you literally rapping about drugging an unsuspecting woman and taking advantage of her in her altered, defenseless state? Even if that's true. How could you not even be sorry about it? You deleted the only evidence of you showing any remorse, and even that was completely disingenuous.

OK, I changed my mind. I hate Rick Ross. He's a fucking asshole. Reebok, you did the right thing. UltraViolet, I'm sorry I ever doubted you. There is no way these words can be misinterpreted. Damn, I guess the same goes for that Grecian urn. I'm about to delete every Rick Ross song in my iTunes library, which leaves me only with the new Justin Timberlake album, three Bob Marley tracks and a bunch of Klaus Nomi (I have very strict, yet eclectic taste). I suggest you all do the same. Don't let Rick trick you into thinking he's all deep and misunderstood. That shit died when Corey Haim did. RIP. 

First she came for the milk. Then she came for the mines. Then she ran out of things to come for, so she went after the football fans arranging recreational punch ups and acid house.

It might sound unlikely in an age where there are a pair of decks and TV screens showing Sky Sports in every pub, but if you wanted to go toe to toe with the establishment at the tail-end of the Thatcher years, the fast track to getting filled in by the police was to watch football or listen to a series of repetitive records with the intention of dancing.

If you were looking for a measure of how the country has adjusted since Thatcher's reign, you could do worse than consider how two constants of the modern mainstream – football and electronic music – were once painted as folk devils by a regime fast running out of new things to point its police horses at.

Granted, football fans had been under few illusions about where they stood in the perceived scheme of things since the 70s, and anyone with industrial or union connections would have been aware of Tory policy well before Thatcher came to power in '79. But for anyone younger, and especially anyone younger and southern, the harshness of the establishment’s war on the twin evils of football and dance music came as something of a surprise.

Photo by Gavin Watson.

It wasn’t till I fled a party in Dalston (yes, we had Dalston back then, too) in 1989 that I felt it firsthand. The motivation for my hasty departure was the sudden entrance of a group of cops based at Stoke Newington Police Station who were notorious in the local area for their thuggery. They'd come in, take the numbers off their uniforms and break things up about as violently as you can without firearms, swinging for male and female alike. Say what you like about violence – and this is what the state often forgets when it chooses to apply it – but it doesn’t half focus the mind. If you were looking for a way to galvanise some of the last non-pissed off people in the country (white, middle-class men on strong, euphoric drugs, in my case) then sending the Territorial Support Group onto the dancefloor was an efficient way to go about it.

However, until the law actually turned up to do the truncheon two-step, you'd be hard pressed to find many people who genuinely cared about the government despatching them. The photographer Gavin Watson – whose book Raving '89 documented, funnily enough, acid house raves in the late 80s and early 90s – agreed: "Politics became superfluous during rave. All of the bullshit that Thatcher was coming out with started to fall on deaf ears, because we were so wrapped up in the culture that we just didn't have time to care about politics."

A collection of Boy's Own covers.

Cymon Eckel, a co-founder of iconic acid house and football casual culture fanzine, Boy's Own, has similar thoughts to Gavin. "The kind of tragic thing about rave was that, unlike many other musical scenes, it was completely depoliticised," he explained. "I suppose you could say that people maybe wanted to escape the negativity of politics at the time, or that they'd just fucking given up."      

Either way, what followed was an object lesson in how to turn hedonists into heretics. "Because a few people had the power to assemble thousands of young people with a phonecall, the government thought there was a political angle to it when there wasn't," says Andrew Weatherall, another co-founder of Boy's Own and now one of the most pivotal figures of British dance music history. "The government, rather than the people actually involved, started to politicise it by having the police follow them and film them, and by asking questions about it in Parliament."

Photo by Gavin Watson.

The Conservatives and the media propagating their outrage were, in Gavin Watson's words, "caught with their pants down – they were five years behind when they first even started to address it". In what was arguably the best example of how uninformed – and, apparently, averse to basic research – the media were when it came to rave and acid house, one paper reported finding "ecstasy wrappers" littering one post-party dancefloor. Watson elaborated: "Their attempts at propaganda were just laughable – that total sense of powerlessness. We ended up going to raves and just laughing at the government and their 'ecstasy wrappers'."

The writers giving the rave scene a hard time in the press weren't averse to the lure of the assignment either: "Yeah, course there were journalists there!" laughs Weatherall. "There were people working on those tabloids, we knew who they were. Some of them would come to the parties."

Photo by Stuart Griffiths.

Prior to the introduction of seating, football – like acid house – could pitch you into a crowd that might seem to be out of control from the outside. But what could feel euphoric to participate in became a spectacle to be feared. As people died at football and spurious narratives spun through the media suggesting the victims had only themselves to blame, so acid house and its associated pastimes were painted as activities whose participants must be protected from themselves. Or, failing that, clobbered.

I appreciate that this might be tough to imagine in an age when Stewart Downing is permitted to DJ in his spare time, but there was a time when plugging in a record player in an abandoned building brought a police response more appropriate to the assembly of a nuclear device. Whatever rattled the establishment about rave, in their own warped way they had a point. It was dangerous.

Before “repetitive beats” – as the 1994 Criminal Justice Act would come to define them – went mainstream, the shortage of places to hear that music meant that, when people did gather, you had people of every kind listening to music of no fixed genre, under the influence of drugs that dis-inhibited them without recourse to violence. Serial football heads of the day often talk of their dilated amazement as men who would have fought one another for pleasure in the mid-80s bound each other up in loving, fraternal embraces and dissolved into the great perspiring mass of possibilities that unfolded at around 120bpm as the decade drew to a close.

Photo by Gavin Watson.

I’m not one for elaborate conspiracy theories, but even the most simplistic divide and conquer analysis suggests that, from a ruling class point of view, everyone – people of all races, backgrounds or football allegiance – getting along like that wasn’t something that could be entertained for too long. At least without sponsorship.

"Rave was more about unity," explained Watson. "And, unlike other scenes, there weren't really any faces from the scene for society to grab on to and scapegoat, which must have been frustrating for the government and media at the time. Because it was kind of this big, inclusive faceless mass, I also feel like the social pressures that got people seeking a release from rave did a lot of good things to make the racial divide less of a divide."

Although having to deal with police relentlessly busting up the fun was undoubtedly a downer, Eckel can see the positives in the Thatcher government's war on youth culture. "Where Thatcher created that dearth of culture with her policies, and filled the high streets with brands, conformity and mundanity, what you got is young kids looking to fill that void, which can only be a good thing."

Weatherall agrees, citing the politicisation of the acid house rave scene as something that, in many ways, actually helped it: "When politicians act like they're morally outraged and ask questions in parliament, they get kudos by being seen to be ‘upholders of morals’. But the people that are breaking the morals, the youth cult, they also get kudos, because young people like to shock. Shock sells records and sells tickets to acid house parties. Youth culture is very symbiotic; the man and youth cult are two sides of the same coin, really."

Photo by Gavin Watson.

And what happened next? Well, things happened fast, and the forces of darkness got fiendish. More effective than any legislation would be assimilation. First came the 1990 World Cup, New Order’s England theme and soon the terraces and the Technics would be safe for everyone. Now, Manchester City are doing the "Harlem Shake" for Comic Relief.

But I am happy, proud even, to say that many of the good things I’ve been involved with since – numerous relationships that abide to this day and much of what I consider to be the better side of my nature – were formed under those forces. It seemed at the time that any resistance offered to Thatcher's political scene-smashing was transforming what might otherwise have been a matter of mere musical taste into something tangible and strong.

As the figurehead of that era passes, it seems that even if you aren't having the best time of your life every weekend in a field with thousands of other people, your right to party remains intact – over and above even some of the more ancient civil liberties that have been steadily eroded since the battle of the beats was apparently won.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @thewrongwriter

More rave:

A Big Night Out at... a Psytrance Rave!

Shuffling: the War at the Heart of London's New Dance Scene

Music World – Donk

In 2007, Sophie Lancaster was kicked to death in a park in Lancashire. Sophie and her boyfriend Robert Maltby were set upon by five boys, arguably because Sophie dressed like a cybergoth and Robert looked a bit like a blonder, prettier Gerard Way. Lancashire Police's Detective Super Intendent said it was one of the most violent murders he'd ever seen and, during sentencing, the judge described the attack as "feral thuggery". Two of the attackers – all of whom were too young to have bought the litres of cider and Peach Schnapps they'd been drinking on the day of the attack – received life sentences. The other three got between four and six years each.   

Much has been made of what motivated those five boys. Was it all the Peach Schnapps? Was it poor parenting (one of the boys is reported to have laughed about the incident with his mum while being interviewed by the police)? Was it that they were just evil cunts? Or was it because of how Sophie and Robert were dressed? In the 999 call from the scene, the caller can be heard saying, "We need an ambulance, this mosher's been banged because he's a mosher." And, at the end of the trial, the judge remarked that, "This was a hate crime against completely harmless people who were targeted because their appearance was different."

Last week, Greater Manchester Police announced that they will now be recording crimes against "alternative subcultures" as hate crimes. In doing so, they are now the first and only UK police force to recognise emos and goths as holding the same social status as racial minorities, religious groups, homosexuals, transgender people and the disabled. The decision – which was made after years of campaigning by Sophie's mother, Sylvia – won't necessarily mean that people who attack goths in Manchester will get longer sentences than if they attack, say, a guy wearing 501s, a pair of Air Max and a Hollister hoodie, but I guess it might help the local alternative community feel a little safer on their wanders around town.

I wanted to see what the people of Manchester thought about the new approach, so I went out and asked a few of them.  

VICE: How do you feel about alternative subcultures being protected by their new hate crime status?
Bilal: Well, if somebody's intentionally gone and abused somebody else for how they look, then yeah, you could say that counts as a hate crime.

So would you say that being alternative shares some similarities with being religious? 
No, I don't think so. Religion is more than just a way of life that you decide you want to be a part of. Culture and religion shouldn't be classed as the same thing.

So do you think people who've committed a hate crime against an alternative person shouldn't be treated as harshly as someone who's committed a religious hate crime? 
No. If you're going to commit a hate crime, regardless of who it's on, it should be punished the same. You can't say that you should get one year for punching one person and two years in jail for punching another, you know? The crime is the same and the outcome is the same, so the punishment should be the same. It doesn't make sense to have two different punishments for the same crime, that leaves it open to manipulation.    

You feel the status is open to being abused?
Yeah, definitely. Being punched one time could turn into, "I'm going to really do this guy over." You could twist it a little bit, say you're part of a subculture and report it as a hate crime, when really it had nothing to do with that. You're giving people the opportunity to use it to punish others more than they deserve to be punished.

Have you heard of Sophie Lancaster?
Adam: The goth girl?

Yeah. How do you feel about alternative subcultures – like the one Sophie belonged to – being protected by hate crime status?
Well, it makes sense because they're a group. If they're their own specific group, it should be counted as a hate crime, I think.

But then there's the argument that they weren't born alternative and could grow out out of it. Or that someone could be wearing a fancy dress goth outfit and get beaten up, and their aggressor could charged with a hate crime. Do you think crimes against them should be measured the same as hate crimes against homosexuals, for example?   
Yeah, I think you should treat them the same. Also, they might not grow out of it – you never know how long they'll be part of the group. Regardless of that, any hate crime should be prosecuted more harshly than a normal crime because it hurts the victim more than normal crime, in that they're a minority and are being attacked because of it. 

Have you ever been the victim of a hate crime?
No. Unless I talk, people don't class me as gay, really. You see gangs of straight guys coming down to Canal Street to take the piss, but I wouldn't say that's a hate crime. Mind you, I've seen someone walk down here with a machete once. I don't know what that was for, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't for a hate crime. I have seen hate crime here, but I haven't been a victim myself. 

I'm glad to hear it.

After speaking to Bilal and Adam, I moved on to the park surrounding the Urbis exhibition centre – the hub for Manchester's young emo/goth/whatever community and the kind of place where a BBC3 producer might shoot B-roll footage for a documentary about Download Festival.

There was what seemed like a needlessly large police presence for such a small area, and the first people I bumped into were two youth workers handing out cards that urged people to report any hate crimes they witness. So the new classifications are obviously catching on within Manchester's alternative community, which doesn't really come as too much of a shock, because – for whatever reason – people are generally pretty into new laws specifically designed to help protect them.

Rachel (right), youth worker.

Do you agree that alternative subcultures should be protected by a hate crime status?
Rachel: Yeah, I do. Being on Urbis and looking around me, I think it's necessary, but I'm quite wary that categorising people could end up with them being treated differently. It's just another way of segregating them.

So you feel the harsher sentences are justified?
Yeah, those kinds of attacks are happening more and more and should be recognised as a hate crime. People have been arrested on Urbis for that kind of thing and haven't been treated as harshly as they would have been if it had been a racial attack.

Are attacks like this something you see often?
Yeah, it's a problem here on Urbis as there are always so many members of the alternative community hanging out here. And they aren't random attacks that just happen to be on goths or emos, or whoever; they target them on purpose and know all the CCTV blind spots. It's quite calculated.

Dark.

Have you heard of Sophie Lancaster?
Wayne: Yeah, I saw it all in the news the other day.

Do you agree with classing crimes against alternative subcultures as hate crimes?
Yeah, it's been a long time coming. It's good that Manchester is the first community to do it and hopefully more will follow when they see what a good result it's going to produce.

Would you say that being a goth is the same as being gay or Muslim, or whatever?
In a way, yeah. I know a lot of people will say it's just a fashion statement – that it's a phase you go through – but you see people who listen to rock and metal and punk growing up and continuing to dress the way they do. So people don't necessarily grow out of it – it becomes their way of life, just like a gay person is gay, a transsexual person is transsexual and everything like that.

Have you ever been attacked for the way you dress?
Not really. Obviously on nights out I've had name-calling and things like that, but, I mean, you get used to it after a while.

Eve (left) and Frank.

Have you heard of Sophie Lancaster?
Eve: Yeah, I know her mum.

So can I take it that you agree with the changes to hate crime classification here in Manchester?
Eve: Definitely. A lot of people I know grew up in families who were part of the rock culture here, and we shouldn't have to walk down the street knowing that we could get beaten up at any moment. Three of the lads who killed Sophie went to my high school and they all got pretty bad sentences, but they deserved to get a lot longer for what they did to her.
Frank: At the end of the day, if you're committing a crime against someone because you don't like the way they look or what they believe in, it's a hate crime.

Do you think this new classification might alienate emos, goths and metallers from normal society?
Frank: There's a belief that, as a subculture, we're violent people just 'cos of the way we dress. But we're not. People who dress a bit more, say, chavvy or tracksuit-ish – they're a much more violent subculture.

Do you think the changes should work both ways? So if the guys in tracksuits got attacked that would count as a hate crime, too?
Eve: Yeah, of course they should; it's the same thing. I have nothing against people who dress differently, obviously, but if I did and me all my mates saw someone in trackie bottoms and we attacked them, it should be the same punishment for us as what they'd get for attacking us.

Have you even been attacked for looking like you do?
Eve: I've been jumped before, yeah. Frank's been jumped about 50 times.
Frank: Not 50 times – three times.

Would you say that they were hate crimes?
Frank: Yeah, definitely. In fact, they basically told me it was a hate crime – they said, "It's 'cos you're dressed like a dickhead." 

Nicole (left) and a friend.

Do you agree that crimes against alternatives should now be classed as hate crimes?
Nicole: Yeah, they're the exact same thing as existing hate crimes.

But it's not like being gay or black, or whatever – you're not born a goth.
But you could say that people are born to like this stuff – it's the same thing. I'd imagine more random attacks happen because of appearance than anything else.

Have you ever been attacked?
Yeah, stuff like people throwing rocks, shouting "emo" or "mosher" at me, telling me to die, telling me to slit my wrists – all of that. I got a lot of it in school.

So do you think it's something that affects younger people more?
I think it's more frequent with young people but less serious. You get called a few things and have a few stones thrown at you when you're at school, but when you're older the type of abuse gets worse. If you're still hating on someone as an adult for the way they dress it's more serious, both because you should be mature enough to leave it alone and because you're more likely to do something violent as an adult.

-

So, while support for the new hate crime classification seemed unanimous among the people I spoke to, you still have to wonder if, in reality, it will actually make too much of a long-term difference on Manchester's streets. Was the way Sophie Lancaster was dressed that day the sole factor in her murder? Or was it just because the five guys who attacked her and her boyfriend were abhorrent examples of humanity?

To me, implicitly blaming Sophie's fashion sense is flirting dangerously close to the, "Don't blame the rapist, blame the girl for wearing a miniskirt" argument put forward by misogynist morons and particularly backward members of the Republican party. It is a really shitty, 100 percent idiotic thing to suggest and essentially shifts the blame on to the victim instead of the attacker, which is nothing but reductive.

Still, I guess if the re-drawing of the hate crime law makes it safer to listen to depressing, angry music in a city where it rains all the time, then it's gone some way to improving people's lives.

Follow Chris and Thomas on Twitter: @CBethell_photo / @thomasmarkrea

More goths:

Goth Day at Disneyland

The Loneliest Goth in the World

Making Friends at the Goth Picnic

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Phoenix will release their fifth album, Bankrupt!, on April 22nd in the UK/Europe on Loyaute/Glassnote/Atlantic Records UK. We travelled to Paris to hang out with in them in the studio…

Watch the video on Noisey

Depression Quest is a a text-based role-playing game that, according to its website, is “not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience”. Its objective is to simulate the misery of clinical depression, which probably qualifies it as the most masochistic video game of all time. But unlike the classic words-only fantasy RPGs from which it was derived, Depression Quest eschews slaying dragons in dungeons and buying elixir at the apothecary shop for actions that include tasks like “Defensively ask what she means by that” and “Don’t burden anyone with your problems. Distract yourself.” 

The intent of the game’s creators was to provide a realistic assesment of how depression affects your decision making, whether or not you’ve personally suffered from it. A morose soundtrack drones throughout, making it feel as if you’re lying in the fetal position at the end of a dark tunnel, struggling to hear the delicate notes of a pianist on the other end through a deep, hazy fog. The music was composed by Isaac Schankler, a Los Angeles-based musician whose electroacoustic orchestrations are somewhere in the zone of a toned-down John Cage playing with Brian Eno’s ambient gear. I realised that most of the music I like was probably made by people who were or are depressed. So after playing the game for a while, I started to wonder if music this sad could only be created by someone who’s depressed. And, if so, does making music this sad make you even more depressed? I called Isaac to ask him what he thought.

VICE: What do you think is the key to making depressing music? 
Isaac Schankler: A lot of it ends up being about relationships – bad relationships because those are always the most depressing. The Lyric Suite, by Alban Berg, is this early modernist piece, so it’s atonal, mellow, but it’s super harrowing. The third movement is extremely agitated, just devastatingly slow and bleak, and this was something that people wondered about for years: Why is it called the Lyric Suite? 

So they figured out what it was about? 
They found in his notes that it was all about this affair he had with a married woman named Hannah Fuchs… Threaded throughout the score are their initials, A-B-H-F, and that was the motif for the whole piece. It’s a weirdly intellectual way of writing about this tragic thing, and even if you didn’t know, it’s still harrowing to listen to. I was fascinated by it for a while because it took this weirdly personal thing and coded it in a really impersonal way. Writing about depression is like that because it’s really personal and different for everybody, and, to talk about it, you have to sort of make it impersonal. [Depression Quest] is like that, too. Details are unspecific and vague, because in early testing, they found people could identify with the character when it was vague. [Note: At one point, the game gives you the option of getting a cat, but if you don’t get the cat, it all goes downhill from there, which is very true to real life.]

Were you able to spend some time with the game before you composed the score?
That was the interesting thing. I sort of compared the decisions I made in the game to decisions I made at certain points in my life. The game does a good job of depicting [real-life decisions] to an extent because certain choices will be closed off. Some of the more rational choices you can’t even select, and some of that is dependent on your character’s level of depression. I thought when I first played it that I was going to select the rational choices, but sometimes in real life, you just won’t make the rational choice. 

Did you get depressed while composing the music?
I really only get down when I have difficulty on a project, but paradoxically, I didn’t have time to dwell on it too much with Depression Quest, so it came easy to me. The other game I was working on at the time I did struggle with more, and I felt like I wasn’t getting things right. That game is called Hate Plus. It’s a sequel to yet another depressing game, Analogue: A Hate Story. It’s about a space detective reading the logs of a derelict spaceship, but it’s mostly centered around a teenage girl who gets sick and frozen and wakes up in a future where things have regressed to a medieval society. The first game was so depressing, and so many bad things happened to the girl, that the developer said the girl should be eating cake through the whole next game. He said, “I don’t want her to do anything else, just eat cake.” 

Get virtually bummed at depressionquest.com. While you can play for free, we encourage you to pay its creators if you find it to be useful. They’ll accept whatever you can afford, and a portion of their proceeds go to the International Foundation for Research and Education on Depression.

More music stuff from VICE: 

The Dudes Behind Burger Records Feel Like Suge Knight Right Now

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Whether you landed here because you missed our Yeah Yeah Yeahs Listening Party or you just want to hear Mosquito again (we can't blame you), you're in the right place! You'd probably rather just get to listening to the album than read boring old words, so we'll keep this brief: stream Yeah Yeah Yeahs' latest masterpiece Mosquito below with track-by-track commentary from Karen, Nick, and Brian themselves, preorder the album here, and keep an eye out for its official release on April 16 via Interscope.

Listen on Noisey

Pre-order Random Access Memories on iTunes.

JOIN THE LISTENING PARTY FOR THE NEW YEAH YEAH YEAHS ALBUM MOSQUITO BY CLICKING HERE.

Cancel your dinner plans: tonight at 8PM GMT, we'll be streaming Yeah Yeah Yeahs' hotly-anticipated new record Mosquito in its entirety. It's part of a new online event series we're running called Listening Parties. Here's what we're thinking:

Remember the unifying universal experience of listening to an album for the first time the day it hits stores? Judging by our age demographic breakdown, you probably don't. Music's migration to the digital stage over the past 20 years has brought with it an abundance of positive developments – the ways we discover, distribute, and interact with music has evolved immeasurably – but we've lost something vital along the way. The experience of being a listener went from record releases dates, music mags, and "we," to album leaks, 140 characters, and "I."

It's time to change all that: Noisey is finally taking music out of beta with the announcement of our Listening Party series, a first-of-its-kind advance streaming platform that allows you to preview highly-anticipated releases and become a part of an actual global conversation. Each Listening Party is a unique, one-time-only event where fans and listeners from around the world convene to experience new music together, interact with one another, receive unrivalled access into the mind of the artist, and truly get to say that they were a part of something unparalleled. 

Of course, it only makes sense to launch an unprecedented platform with a band renowned for their creative ambition. That's why we're proud and excited to kick off the Listening Parties with Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Mosquito. You'll be able to react to the new tracks in real-time, interact with other listeners, hear the songs explained in the band's own words, and maybe even catch Karen, Nick, and Brian drop in via video explanations of each track. This is an online/offline event unlike any other, and you can't afford to miss it. Sure, we'll stream the record afterwards, but the party only happens once – so let's do this.

Keep your eyes on Noisey and @Noiseymusic for the official invite link, and we'll see you at the party. And don't forget to pre-order Mosquito by clicking right here.

So, Tyler, The Creator came over to the UK to promote WOLF, but rather than forcing him to go to another shitty press event to answer questions like, "YO, DID YOU EAT THE ROACH AT THE END OF "YONKERS" BRUH?" we decided to take him paintballing instead, so some sappy journalists and a few lucky fans could shoot at him. Keep an eye on Noisey.com for the video, but for now whet your appetite with these photos.

See the gallery on Noisey

It was a bank holiday weekend, so, me and my girlfriend bought some pizza, turned the heating on and pressed play on our (read: my) iTunes account. It sounds pretty good, we said. WOLF represents a mellow and pretty Tyler, bike-riding through the pastel coloured fields of summer love, we thought. But, what happened next, we could not comprehend. 

Aimlessly flirting through the black-hole of YouTube, searching for that video of Forest Whitaker giving the G.O.A.T Oscar speech, we came across the video for “Sam (Is Dead)”. Then, everything clicked into place. 

Since listening to “Sam (Is Dead)”, re-listening through BASTARD, GOBLIN and WOLF on the walk to Sainsburys, and trekking through a Google Chrome sahara of forums, I’ve come to the audacious conclusion. Within the WOLF trilogy - BASTARD, GOBLIN and WOLF - Tyler, The Creator has created a directorial story-telling masterpiece. 

In fact, I’d go as far to say that he’s created the best multi-faceted storyline since Slim Shady told me to go and stick nine inch nails into each one of my eyelids. 

Let’s lay it out.

Read the rest on Noisey

Ann Pragg is a denizen of the night – a roughly humanoid creature who lurks in the swamps and wetlands, eating frogs and rats and caking itself in mud as it waits for the prime opportunity to limp into town and feast on the flesh of young virgins while whistling confounding but sweet melodies that paralyse anyone within earshot, allowing him to finish his feast in quiet. Ann Pragg is also the cryptic alter ego of one Matt Radick, a soft-spoken, hardworking and, some might say, slightly reclusive man who lives and works in Gainesville, Florida, a place just laidback enough for him to craft impressionistic and vaguely countryish songs, but, really, that description doesn’t do his work justice; he’s got his own thing going on. He also plays in fellow Gainesville-based band Holopaw.

Bitter Fruit, out May 7 in digital form and June 9 on vinyl from Wonderland Archives, is something like eight years in the making. Not one to fuss about his music or draw attention to himself, it took labelmate Boyd Shropshire (who is also the label’s founder) and Chase King months if not years to convince Matt to get into the studio to record a batch of songs that had been passed around on demo tapes and CD-Rs among a small circle of Floridians and New Yorkers for the better part of the decade. The result is one of my favourite releases of the year so far, and I encourage everyone to just submit and allow Ann Pragg to drag you into the bog. For now you can watch the video premiere for “Demolition Dust”, the first track off the album. Watch for what may or may not be an appearance from the aforementioned creature, and afterward, you can read my weird little interview with Matt below.

"Demolition Dust" from Bitter Fruit, recorded by Boyd Shropshire and Gabriel Galvin. Directed by Kelie Bowman and Jessie Rose Vala of Light Hits.

VICE: First question, how come this took so fucking long?
Ann Pragg: Well the short answer to that is… I didn’t really give a shit.

[laughs]
The longer answer is that a lot of good friends did and kind of cajoled me into doing it properly, you know? I always recorded stuff for my own little documents, just to pass around among friends. I wasn’t incredibly ambitious about it, but Boyd was really wonderful in helping it come into fruition.

And you’re playing all of the instruments on the record?
It’s mostly me. I do most of the guitars. Of course, I do the singing. Boyd does a little bit of vocals, a little bit of guitar. He does some percussion. Cassandra Ferland, who helps Boyd run the label, does some vocals and Chase King has some percussion on there.

Ann Pragg is a strange but memorable name. Where’d it come from?
Ann Pragg is an abbreviation of a term, but I feel like Ann Pragg is a lot of different things. I like to think of it as this humanoid creature that skulks around on the outskirts of town and forages for trash to kind of sustain itself. It might have supernatural powers, I don’t know. It probably doesn’t have opposable thumbs…

Have you ever drawn it?
Nah, I’ve never drawn an Ann Prag. Maybe I should. Maybe I should do a little doodle and submit it to you all.

Maybe. I would like it, but it’s also pretty strong, if you just have it in your mind.
Yeah, I feel like Ann Pragg is kind of like a sorceress or a sorcerer. Ann Pragg is androgynous. I think there might be a little bit of Ann Pragg in all of us.

What do you mean by it being an abbreviation? What are you abbreviating?
Well, I couldn’t tell you that.

Oh. Why is that?
I don’t know… I’m a really big crossword dork. So I never really fully fleshed it out. Occasionally in my mind, I’ll… well, you know in crosswords you’ll have like the theme of the crossword? Well, I don’t know if you’re into crosswords.

OK…
Like, with the longer starred answers, the italicised clues are kind of little puns or plays on words. They usually rhyme with the original axiom or whatever. Ann Pragg is kind of like that, but I just boiled it down and made it a little more manageable to come out of your mouth.

I like that answer, even though I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Basically it’s a fly-by-night term that I used to itemise my shitty demos in iTunes when I was importing them – something from years ago that just stuck. I’m kind of like a curmudgeonly, anonymous guy. And I’d rather not have my name attached to anything.

I take it you’re not someone who is really into social networking, which is a refreshing rarity these days – especially when it comes to musicians.
No, but just in order to get some kind of awareness out about the record I think it’s a necessity to have it. That Facebook page [for Ann Pragg] has been set up, and I’m not reluctant to encourage people from visiting that and giving it the thumbs-up or whatever they do [laughs]. But, yeah, I’m pretty adamantly opposed to Facebook. I don’t deny that to anybody else. We could talk for hours about my philosophical quandaries on Facebook and social networking. I will say that the hashtag is my number-one millennial pet peeve. A part of my personality wants to limit the content filtering into my brain, just for my own sanity. So if I have interactions, I prefer them to me more three-dimensional and substantive.

Mystery is powerful… would it be fair to say that your personality is like one of those Russian dolls where each compartment you open just reveals more layers until you get to a final one deep inside?
No, man, I’m more like a Shawn Kemp on the old Seattle Supersonics poster on your bedroom door, fucking slam-dunking over Scottie Pippen.

[laughs] Have you ever checked into a hotel or anything under the name Ann Pragg?
No, but I think that’s a good idea, and I think I’m going to try and do that. My exploits in that realm are… I’m probably pissed at myself for not doing more shit like that in my life.

Do you have plans to tour?
Yeah, the record comes out in May, and we’re going to do a little tour in the first week of June with this band Sanibel, which is Sander, Whit and Dave from the Mercury Program. So I’m going to go alone with them for a few dates for maybe a week in the Northeast. And Boyd, Chase, Sander and probably Whit are going to back me up. So I’ll go up there, and we’re going to do a frantic and rushed period of rehearsing and try to make the songs work live. Then we’ll play them out, which I’m really excited about. I think it’ll be really fun. I’ve never done it before. I’ve played living room house shows at my friends’ requests and stuff, but I’ve never really gone for it like this before.

Most, if not all, of the music on Wonderland Archives has this collective feel, and I believe all of the artists are Floridians who live or have lived in Gainesville. There’s also this overarching psych-country-folkish thing going on with everyone. Would it be fair to say you guys are exemplary of a certain type of music that is identified with Florida, and maybe more specifically Gainesville?
Florida really is a country unto itself. Where I live is the heart of Gainesville. With the university, it’s a more progressive-minded town, but if you go out on the outskirts, you are in the fucking country. But then you head south to the coasts, and you have the stereotypical, desperate tiki bar and beach culture – people who migrate down here out of exhaustion and desperation and just want to drink Coronas in close proximity to the beach all day long. It’s a huge mix, and I really love it. As I get older, I appreciate it more, just the variety of cultures and geography in Florida. Also, it’s easy to hide out down here. You have to go up into the belly of the beast to get some shit done. Like, I could easily just hide out in the swamps and play some guitar. I’d be fine with that.

@rocco_castoro

The first week of November 1989, filmmakers and executives from the Walt Disney Company gathered in a crowded room in Disney World in Orlando, Florida, to promote their latest cartoon to a group of pessimistic reporters. The press had reason to be sceptical: after two decades of critical and commercial flops following the death of its founder, Disney was bordering on bankruptcy, and the company's new CEO, Michael Eisner, had threatened to shut down the animation unit unless The Little Mermaid, its fall 1989 release, turned a profit.

As you probably know, they didn’t need to worry. The film was a huge hit, at least partly on the strength of its soundtrack. The New York Times praised the film’s music, and the movie won Oscars and Golden Globes for Best Song (“Under the Sea”) and Best Score. Two decades after its release, Disney World remodelled Fantasyland to create an entire section devoted to Mermaid. But back then, in the crowded conference room, nobody knew this. The room was grim, and for good reason – if the filmed flopped, their careers might follow.  

The panel that sat in front of the press that day included Ron Clements and John Musker, the geeky animation-directing team whose last film, The Great Mouse Detective, had performed reasonably well, but not well enough for Eisner’s taste. There was also Jodi Benson, the Broadway veteran who voiced Ariel, and Alan Menken, a composer from Westchester, New York. The last member of the panel – Alan’s collaborator, lyricist Howard Ashman – stood out like a sore, sickly thumb.

Skeletally thin and speaking in a soft but firm voice, Howard looked worn-out and effeminate, more like one of the gay men you’d see drifting around New York’s Lower East Side than someone who made family movies. He spoke with passion about Disney’s rich musical history, but after the panel, it was clear something was wrong. After the press conference, when the attendees adjourned to try out some of the park's attractions, Howard limped up the Dumbo ride’s ramp and had to call for his boyfriend, Bill Klaus, to assist him. Once Howard reached his Disney associates, he rode Dumbo, smiling like he was just another Hollywood native touring Disney World. As usual, he was doing the best he could to ignore that he was dying of AIDS.

“He was completely focused and energy driven,” Jodi recalled to me 23 years later. She didn’t realise the extent of his illness until 1991. “I got the call to fly to New York City from Los Angeles. When I arrived, I was able to visit him in his room as he was listening to auditions for the voice of Aladdin. Then it really hit me: this was very serious.”

After the events at the park, Bill rushed Howard to their hotel. Howard was gasping for breath; he struggled to walk. Inside their room, Bill took out medicine and an IV catheter and stuck the catheter into Howard’s chest. He considered advising Howard to retire or at least work less, but Howard had told Bill he was determined to focus on the film’s premiere, and on his next two movies, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. By then, Howard, like many gay men, had been dealing with AIDS and death for years.

From left: Howard in 1975; Stuart White (left) and Howard on a beach in Rhode Island in the summer of 1976; Stuart in 1975.

Fourteen years before that press conference, in 1975, Howard moved to the West Village to try to make it on Broadway, like so many others. He arrived with Stuart White, who had been his lover since they met at a summer theatre programme at Tufts University in 1969. Despite the widespread prejudice against gays that existed back then, they didn’t try too hard to conceal their relationship. “As much as two men in 1970 could be together as a couple, they were, without ever saying they’re a couple,” Howard’s younger sister, Sarah, said.

While looking for an entry-level theatre position in New York, Howard bumped into Kyle Rennick, an old acquaintance who had also moved to the city, and soon Kyle had become Howard and Stuart’s best friend. “We became New York gay boys, who went to see shows and stayed up to the wee hours,” Kyle told me. “I had a crush on their relationship.”

One night over drinks, Kyle told Howard, “I can’t tell you how much I admire your relationship. I hope I’ll be lucky enough to have that one day.”

“I hope it doesn’t deflate you that there are problems,” Howard replied.

The main problem was that Stuart – who was so charismatic, he was practically irresistible – slept with other men. When he was out and about in the Village without Howard or Kyle, he accepted sexual advances from strangers and took advantage of all the free gay love that post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS-crisis New York had to offer.

Howard agreed to group sex and collaborated on plays with Stuart to salvage the relationship, but neither play nor work prevented Stuart from cruising. In 1980, Howard moved out of the apartment they had shared for five years and began dating a man named David Evans.

Howard and David would later part ways, but neither Howard’s sister nor Kyle remembers when or why they broke up. By then, the early 80s, Howard had begun to collaborate with Alan Menken; their second musical, Little Shop of Horrors, an adaptation of a 1960 movie of the same name, beat out Cats for the Drama Desk Award for Best Musical and sold out night after night. After years spent struggling to launch a theatre career, Howard had a hit, but he never had the chance to celebrate his success. Shortly into the run, Stuart called Howard and asked him if he had heard about the “gay cancer” that the New York Times had written about. Stuart had it.

Over the next few weeks Howard visited Stuart at St. Vincent’s hospital. He forgave Stuart for his unfaithfulness and watched his first love age before his eyes, losing pound after pound, growing weaker and weaker, until he died in July of 1983.

“He was the first person I knew who died of AIDS,” Kyle said. “Something bad was happening, and there was absolutely no help.” Within 15 years, Kyle would slowly lose all his gay friends, including David, Howard’s second boyfriend. Because David’s old-money parents disowned him due to his illness, it fell to Howard to look after David till he died. Afterwards, he inscribed David’s tombstone with his real, seldom-used first name, Chester, in case his mother decided one day to search for his grave.

After all that tragedy, Howard found love again in the Boy Bar, a gay club in the Village, on Valentine’s Day weekend 1983 when he hit on a young Midwestern architect new to Manhattan.

“He courted me,” Bill Klaus recalled. Over the next few weeks, Howard invited Bill to dinner and to socialise with his collaborators on Little Shop. “He came on strong,” Bill said. “He was ready for someone to settle down with. I was reluctant, but I saw that it was working.”

That summer, Bill spent several nights a week eating and sleeping at Howard’s converted firehouse apartment on Hudson Street, 12 blocks away from Bill’s glorified closet in the East Village.

But the city triggered Howard’s memories of Stuart and David. One night, Howard took Bill to see The Fly, David Cronenberg’s sci-fi film that features Jeff Goldblum’s graphic transformation into a bug. Howard fled the theatre in tears. “He has seen so many healthy young men around him deteriorate. It was something he recognised,” Bill said.

Howard needed to leave New York, he needed a new life away from AIDS, and it was just at that moment that Walt Disney Studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg called him up.

Howard coaching Jodi Benson in the studio during a recording session.

After Katzenberg took over Disney’s motion-picture division in 1984 at Michael Eisner’s request, music producer David Geffen advised him to hire “the genius” Howard Ashman and his songwriting partner Alan Menken to compose songs for Disney’s animated movies. Geffen, who was one of the original producers of the Little Shop of Horrors play and was working on a feature-film adaption, predicted Ashman would become a legend.

In 1987, Howard began visiting Los Angeles for two weeks at a time to write the songs for The Little Mermaid with Alan Menken and improve the script. With a new career in front of him, Howard decided to use his new Disney money to build his dream home with Bill. As it happened, Bill’s gay Uncle Sid owned a plot of land next to his home in Cold Springs, New York, in the Hudson Valley. Sid told Bill and Howard, “If you want, we’d be happy to give the other half of the land to Howard, and you could build your house there.”

After years of anxiety, Howard finally had the career and home he always wanted. By the spring of 1987, Bill had hired contractors and had blueprints drawn up.

Then, in March, he woke up with white patches on his mouth.

Howard visited a gay-friendly doctor in Manhattan, who diagnosed the patches as oral thrush, a symptom of AIDS. He then checked Howard’s T cells. They were dramatically low, another sign that Howard had the "gay cancer" that had killed two of his boyfriends.  

Howard stayed away from Manhattan, where his friends would recognise his symptoms for what they were, and decided to postpone telling his friends and Disney associates about the illness till he had entered the final stages of the disease. He did tell Bill the news, which prompted Bill to wonder out loud whether they should make plans for the future. “Do we really want to start building this house?” he asked Howard. “We’re taking on a lot.”

But Howard didn’t want to give in to the disease that had already taken away so much from him – he insisted they build the house and keep his disease a secret. His partner agreed. “How do you take another dream away from somebody who has this condition?” Bill wondered retrospectively when I spoke with him.

But after The Little Mermaid’s release and success, Howard’s health deteriorated, leaving him unable to take care of himself or travel. Before production started on Beauty and the Beast, he called Jeffrey Katzenberg and finally told him he had AIDS. “I don’t know if you know what’s going on, but I’m not well,” he said. “If you want me to work on this project, I have to work in New York.”

Katzenberg hired Howard a private nurse and ensured that he received the most advanced medications available. Every few weeks, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin’s production crew flew to New York to collaborate with Howard. From his deathbed, Howard wrote the lyrics for Beauty and the Beast’s songs – three of them would be nominated for Best Song at the Academy Awards, and the movie’s title song would win the Oscar. The film was the first-ever animated feature to be nominated for Best Picture, but Howard wouldn’t live to see its release.

In Cold Springs, Bill oversaw construction on Howard’s dream home. “We lived with optimism,” he told me, but Sarah, Howard’s sister, recalls it differently. “As a lot of people discover, the construction and building process takes longer than you’d expect. [The disease and the house-building] were going against each other." 

On March 14, 1991, Howard succumbed to his illness. Beauty and the Beast, which he never got a chance to see, is dedicated to his memory. A month later, Bill finished construction on Howard’s house, where he lives alone today.

“If I had to do it over again, I never would have built the house,” Bill said. “We would have bought a house or something in the city. I fell into the house after his death. I did my grieving and mourning here. It’s an odd fit: it’s a house I like very much, but it was custom tailored for a life with Howard.”

Kyle has dealt with a different set of problems, including an intense case of survivor’s guilt. “Everyone I knew died,” he said. “I survived. I couldn’t understand that at all. Because I had done the same kind of behaviour, I deserved to die.”

In recent years, preserving Howard’s legacy and managing his complicated estate has become Sarah’s full-time job. When I met her last summer near her home in Tarrytown, New York, she discussed organising Howard’s papers for the Library of Congress and managing howardashman.com, a website dedicated to reminding fans of Howard’s life outside of Disney.

“I don’t want him to be romanticised as this Disney hero,” Sarah said. “I want people to remember that he was a person.”

Follow Mitchell on Twitter: @mitchsunderland

Also by Mitchell:

My Family's War with Animal Activists

Trying to Understand the English Gays at Oxford

Life After MySpace for the Scene Queens

It was the first showcase of Festival Nrmal, a five-day music festival in Monterrey, Mexico, a rich, cosmopolitan city less than 150 miles from the Texas border. Co-curated by Nrmal and New York independent show organizer Todd Patrick, the festival presented a diverse lineup of acts from Mexico and abroad, focusing on emerging Latin American and U.S. bands. Festival passes cost just 350 pesos, the equivalent of about £19, which included access to the main event on Saturday, March 9 and more intimate showcases and afterparties throughout the week.

This showcase, called Never Really Malicious, was a collaboration of ObjectNotFound, a nonprofit show space, art school and residency program founded by Monterrey-based visual artist Ruben Gutierrez, and the Netherlands contemporary audiovisual arts nonprofit Impakt.

Read the rest on Noisey

The main problem with most “Rappers to Watch this Year” lists is that they suck. They’re dictated as much by Trojan Horse PR buzz, social media favoritism, and plain hedged bets as much as actual taste, and at Noisey, we think that’s no good. In 2013, hip-hop is as diverse, fun, and straight-up incredible as it’s ever been, and we want to tell you who’s worth your time this year. Some of these guys you might not know about yet, others are already your new favorite rapper, and others still might be names you’ve written off who you should really reconsider. As such, this isn’t as much a bunch of predictions as to who we're guaranteeing to blow up this year as much as it’s a survey of what we find interesting, weird, and worthwhile in the realm of rap.

Read the rest on Noisey

Andrew Roseman, like thousands of American students, visited Israel last year to experience the country’s culture and history. But unlike some young tourists, who spend their days getting drunk and tan in Tel Aviv or secretly pleasuring each other in tents in the desert, the junior from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, embarked on a project to bring Israelis and Palestinians together, at least for a day. Since spending four months in Jerusalem, he’s been working to create a festival (called Man of a Thousand Teas) that would feature musicians from both sides of the Green Line. I haven’t heard of anyone trying anything like that before, so I called Andrew to see how it was going.  

VICE: What inspired you to try to organise a festival in Israel?
Andrew Roseman: Well, I was in the process of trying to book a [music] show in Jerusalem and I was talking to my [Palestinian] friends, and I was like, “Hey, I’m going to be playing in Jerusalem in a couple of weeks.” And they couldn’t come, obviously, because people from the Palestinian territories aren’t allowed to just enter Jerusalem without a special pass, and it’s very difficult to get. And on the other side, when I was booking shows in Bethlehem, my Israeli friends said, “Oh, I can’t go because I’m not allowed in Palestinian territory.” After a while, we were like, “You know, it would be kind of sweet if we could start a music festival that would bring together Palestinians and Israelis in a politically neutral area that both Israelis and Palestinians have access to.” There aren’t many places like that, but there are a few and with my friends’ help we were able to find a spot that you don’t need a pass or any sort of form to access – a Bedouin area in the Jerusalem wilderness, basically in the Judean desert. Little by little, it’s coming together, and I’m pretty excited about it.

What’s your perspective on how Palestinian and Israeli youth feel about the conflict between the two sides?
I was there when the most recent Gaza conflict was happening and the rockets were going back and forth. There were a bunch of protests and during one, you had Israelis on one side waving Israeli flags and shouting, “Get Hamas out of Gaza,” and then on the other side you had Palestinians waving Palestinian flags and yelling something – I don’t speak Arabic – about the Intifada. Those are two very different messages. I think young people from this part of this world just kind of grow into their context and they don’t necessarily get many chances to intermingle with each other and actually chill. Most of the people I’ve spoken to have really good intentions – at times, it appears that the issue is too complex and people are dug in too deep for anyone to make any sort of difference – but with that attitude we’ll never get anything done.

Have you got a lineup of bands and artists in mind?
Yeah, we’ve reached out to a bunch of bands. We’re in the process of talking to some booking agents. One artist that we’ve made a lot of progress with is Ben Blackwell – he’s a black Israeli rapper, and he’s got a song, “Israel We Go Hard,” that's pretty sweet. I’d never heard of him before but he’s got a nice following on YouTube and after listening to his stuff we figured he’d be really cool to get on the bill. We’re also trying to get Shadia Mansour, who is a Palestinian female rapper – she’s unreal, she’s got incredible charisma. One big name is Balkan Beat Box, a pretty famous band from Israel, and we’re hoping to get them to be one of the headliners. Ninet Tayeb is this Israeli singer and she’s so talented and really, really sexy.

What’s the hardest part about trying to put this together?
Right now it’s funding. It’s the most difficult part and it’s so stressful. We’re talking to a bunch of fairly affluent influential people and they seem pretty interested… but they keep trying to make sure the festival will have some sort of political slant – kind of like conditional sponsorship – and we didn’t want to deal with that at all. We’re not trying to establish any political agenda, we just want these people together, listening to the music they like and having a good time with each other. The funding part has been difficult but I think if we all do what needs to be done we can make this happen, because it would be unreal, it would be indescribable.

Anyone interested in helping Andrew and his friends out should email manofathousandteas@gmail.com

Follow Harry on Twitter: @HCheadle

Read more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Renegade Jewish Settlers

Palestive vs. Israel – Against The Wall

Did Israel Assassinate Hamas' Chief Peace Negotiator

Whoever coined the phrase “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse” had no fucking idea what they were talking about. Maybe your body is flabbier at 70 than it is at 20, maybe your sex organs are a little more malformed, maybe you’ve lost some teeth or eyes along the way – but you can still party, no matter your age. In fact, I think people should make it a goal to die at an advanced age while partying but not because of it. 

Case in point: Wirginia Szmyt, aka DJ Wika, a 74-year-old who can mix tracks on a pair of laptops better than most 20-year-olds with shitty attitudes who think they’ve mastered Serato. Wirginia’s been a fixture of the senior-citizen party scene in Warsaw for more than a decade, spinning salsa, rumba, and disco tracks for elderly folks who are on their second or third childhoods, as well as playing shows to younger crowds. As far as I can tell, she’s the oldest DJ in the world, and I kind of wish she were my grandma, so naturally I wanted her advice on anything.

VICE: Hi, Wirginia. Do you remember your first time DJing? Were you stressed out? 
Wirginia Szmyt: No, not at all. I was playing in a seniors’ club and there weren’t that many people. Everything was different when I started 13 years ago. You had cassettes and CDs and had to do a lot of stuff, like rewind a song manually. Nowadays, it is all more advanced technologically. If a four-year-old can operate a mobile phone, why shouldn’t a senior be able to? It’s the same with computers.

What do you think about contemporary music? Do you disagree with the stereotype that older people are annoyed by what the kids are listening to nowadays?
In my opinion, every kind of music is beautiful. It is natural that the older generation is used to different, slower, nostalgic beats. Young people like novelties, there is nothing strange in that – if they didn’t, there would be no progress. The only thing I don’t really like is that the music is played so loud you can’t really distinguish the rhythm, you can only hear the noise. But if young people like that – all that blinking of lights, the smog – it is good for them, I think. I like the type of music from the young people I’ve had a chance to play with. I don’t know if it is called electro, house, or techno, but it has those repeated rhythms that slowly change. It grows and grows and turns you on.

What do you think is the biggest problem young people face?
A lot of girls get pregnant after one-night stands. Sex is more available now than it was for the previous generations in Poland. You go to a party, meet someone, you like each other and sleep together, not thinking too much about it. For me, abortion is better than killing a child after birth. But with abortion being illegal in Poland, there are these horrible cases of throwing children into the garbage. Some people really should be castrated.

More from our Spring Break issue:

Welcome to the Twin Zone

Blacking Out Is the Other Universal Language

In There Like Swimwear

This year has been really distressing for Justin Bieber. It all started when he was caught having a couple of puffs on a dubious looking roll up. At first, it seemed like nothing more than harmless fun. But, in the last couple months the publicised controversy surrounding his mental state has increased ten fold with late appearances, paparazzi showdowns and hotel boot-outs culminating in a dramatised conclusion that lead to Bieber posting his own “fuck you!” message to Instagram and vowing to never return to London again.

We wondered, has Bieber gone off the rails? Will he follow down the route of the child stars of past, dabbling first in marijuana but reaching further and further into the void? Or, as the mainstream press refuse to believe, is he just a teenager pushing against the establishment?

We went out on to the street of Justin’s favourite place, London, to see what the public think.

Read the full piece on Noisey

Here's Edwyn Collins' new video, "Dilemma", from his upcoming 8th studio album Understated, which will be released on March 25th through his own label, AED.

Watch the video on Noisey

My tolerance for hip-hop music is at an all-time low. And that means something, coming from a guy who spent the entire 90s immersed in hip-hop culture. It was the only music I listened to from the age of 14 to 24. Most of my early interviews were with the legends of that bygone era: Wu-Tang after their first album, Big Pun after his first single, Fat Joe, Boot Camp, EPMD, and way too many more to list. I still follow some people from that world closely – anything Ghostface or Nas puts out I will purchase – but for the most part, I hate hip-hop now, and I’ve been trying to play therapist lately to figure out what my problem is.

Then it hit me: skateboarding, my other true love, ruined hip-hop for me.

There was always an unspoken understanding between the two worlds: skaters would not rap, and rappers would not skate. But somewhere along the line, white boys on wheels in Southern California broke that pact and started rhyming – terribly. Before long, some very well-known and talented skaters were picking up the mic or pretending to be producers (Muska Beats?) and giving skateboarders everywhere secondhand embarrassment. Some even quit their day jobs to pursue rap careers. Thankfully, skateboarding was still relatively small when this blight began, and we were able to shield outsiders from our shame.

At some point, the rap world found out our guys had broken the truce, and they wanted retribution. They also realised that white kids made up the majority of hip-hop record sales, and the majority of white kids were skateboarding.

And so it began.

The mutterings were initially low and mumbled…

“Did you hear Lil Wayne skates?” or “Lil Wayne showed up at the skatepark.”

At first it was kind of cool, like when rumours started surfacing that Dave Chapelle, at the height of Chapelle's Show, was showing up at skateparks around the country to catch a grind.

The difference is that Dave Chapelle isn’t governed by money, while Lil Wayne is a rich opportunist. So, naturally, the first thing Wayne does to prove how down he is for skateboarding is to start a skateboarding clothing line to capitalise on it. The saddest part was that many of skateboarding’s elite, just like Germany’s upper class with Hitler, looked past Weezy’s blatantly obvious motives and embraced him because they were fans of his music. Many of my dear friends and your favorite pro skaters are to blame for the past 24-month tidal wave of nonstop Lil Wayne skating photos and video.

And I can’t take it any more.

I don’t care if Wayne goes on a street mission with the Gonz, Ed Templeton, Natas, and God almighty.

If he spins a 900, I still will not give two fucks.

I do not want to hear Lil Wayne’s name mentioned anymore, please.

I just want him to go away and take all his rapper friends who stick the word skateboarding into their songs with him so I can start trying to like hip-hop again.

Please, Wayne, if you’re reading this, I’m begging you to go back to your career as a subpar rapper and just skateboard for fun and away from cameras, so I don’t have to hear about it.

I digress. The point of today’s post was to tell you about a dear old friend of mine, Noah Uman, whom I nearly killed in a drunk-driving accident in upstate New York a decade ago. I thank God every day that I didn’t because Noah is a musical genius. He teaches hip-hop history at Belmont University and just started working at Jack White’s label, Third Man Records. Not too long ago, he sent me a Fat Boys box set packaged in a pizza box. He’d written the liner notes for the set, as well as having done the audio, photo, and archival research. Like most people my age I liked the Fat Boys because they were a joke, much like the above-named rapper, but I was less excited about the CDs he sent than the pizza-box packaging by Get on Down Records. Visiting their website, I learned they had a bunch of other cool shit like hip-hop puzzles, rare CDs, vinyl reissues, and even a limited edition, 24-karat audiophile gold disc of my favorite rapper’s debut album, Ironman, with a 12'' x 12'' puzzle of the album cover.

Since the Fat Boys box set was the only project Noah worked on for the label, I instead decided to ask Get on Down’s co-owner/co-creative director, Matt Welch, a few questions about the brand.

VICE: As a white boy from Boston, how can you have such a strong grasp of good hip-hop? No good hip-hop has ever come out of Boston. Shouldn’t you be listening to Aerosmith?
Matt: Man, how did you find out I was white? The truth is, once I saw Yo! MTV Raps, I never looked back. All those 80s rock bands that were getting heavy rotation on MTV seemed corny to me. I guess once you see a PE video it’s hard to appreciate “Dude Looks Like A Lady.” [laughs]

How hood are you anyway, Matt? I danced to Ghostface at my wedding. What do you got?
I can’t mess with that. Papa Wu would be proud!

How did Get on Down start? And how were you able to pull off reissues with such big-name artists like Ghostface, Nas, Gza, and ODB?
Get on Down started because we felt there was a void that needed to be filled, so we jumped on the opportunity. We think there is still value in physical media and tangible items – a need that will never be filled by file sharing.

What involvement do the artists have in the projects?
Their involvement varies from project to project, but now that we have established a couple of solid releases and people have a better feel for what we’re trying to do, we are opening up better dialogue with the artists directly. When they are available, of course. I have plenty of stories about chasing dudes around to try and get them to be more involved, but I don’t chase and tell.

I love the packaging and presentation on these projects. The Fat Boys pizza-box case was brilliant, and the wood box for Ghost’s Ironman was beautiful, but it all seems very expensive to produce and you make so few of them. Do you actually turn a profit in the age of free file sharing?
This is a labour of love, but it is not a charity. We are turning a profit. We think we are helping to keep the album format viable and giving fans something that they can connect with on an emotional level. Let’s face it – there is nothing sexy or rebellious about file sharing anymore.

Personally, I feel that the 90s was the golden age of hip-hop, and nothing since has touched it, creatively speaking. What’s your take on current hip-hop?
I think that every generation thinks their music was/is better than what is out currently. But in our case we might actually be right about that.

The skateboarding world is plagued by daily sightings or mentions of Lil Wayne, and it makes me want to vomit every time. What do you think about him?
Again, once you hit your 30s you are kind of secretly hoping that the kids will come up with something that will shock or alienate you. After all, that’s pretty much the job of the youthful generation, isn’t it? In that regard, I was at least happy when Odd Future came out.

If you could pick any three artists/albums to repackage, what would they be?
Public Enemy and anything on the original maroon Def Jam label. Well, maybe not my man Orange “Juice” Jones…

Can you please make a puzzle of 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be for my sons?
Oh man, that would be a fun project. I think it’s safe to say that we’ll be rocking more puzzles in the future, since they have done so well for us. But nothing is locked in just yet. Stay tuned!

What are some of the next projects you’re working on?
Record Store Day, on April 20, is always big for us, and this year is no exception. We have a couple dope sets that we’ll be releasing info about next week so follow us on Twitter or Facebook if you want the quick news about what’s coming. But I’m really excited about how 2013 is shaping up thus far – we’re branching out into books (more news on that next week too) and have a lot of nice momentum. Keep in mind we’re less than a year old as an online entity, so shit is just beginning.

For more reissues and packaging go to Getondown.com

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko

Previously – The Wonderful Sieben of Oz

Mecury music prize nominees Django Django became obsessed by the infamous Indian Well of Death riders in Allahabad. So, naturally, they asked Noisey if we’d be up for travelling over to India and standing right in the middle of large lumps of precariously speeding metal for a day, to film a video for their track "WOR". We happily obliged, getting our shoes stolen in the process, but it was worth it to meet a bunch of guys with the most rock solid testicles we’ve ever come across.

Watch the video on Noisey

Have you ever heard such a cluster-fuck of a collaboration? If you’d have told me ten years ago that the original Sugababes (TM) line-up would be reforming to produce their own take of a hip hop track produced by an ex member of a thrash band-cum 21st century Prince, I’d have slapped you in the face with my copy of One Touch. But, this is 2013 and anything can happen. The girls, now under the Mutya Keisha Siobhan moniker put the track out earlier this week.

Read the full roundup on Noisey

London-based producer, Fort Romeau, makes his Spectral Sound debut with the single "SW9."