I’m not gonna front like I wasn’t excited. Like everyone else in the world, the overzealous traces of teenage fandom overtook my rational mind, which conveniently forgot the premier natural law maintaining the delicate balance of the space-time continuum: Reunion tours, by their very nature, ALWAYS suck. The early reports–nothing short of preposterous in their […]
Zac Pennington
Posted inMusic
It’s Who You Know
Kidz Bop
A couple of months ago, we here at It’s Who You Know (along with about six million other people) were bitten by a rather infectious blog meme in the form of the Kidz Bop Kids’ rendition of “Float On,” the painfully ubiquitous Modest Mouse single of last year. Kidz Bop is a brilliantly misguided (and […]
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The Great Europop Swindle
Stereo Total Sell It Right Back
Stereo Total Wed May 25 Berbati’s Pan 10 SW 3rd Though they seem generally hesitant to admit it, it’s easy to get the sense that a good many Europeans romanticize the notion of America. Take, for example, Europe’s selective interest in American popular music over the last quarter century: Reigning exports include the thuggish, violent […]
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Freak Scene
Folk That’s Not For the Faint of Heart
Faun Fables Fri May 13 Dante’s 1 SW 3rd “My voice was given to me as an instrument for inspiration for my friends, and as a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies.”–DIAMANDA GALAS It’s with this quote that the biographical section of faunfables.net concludes–a succinct assessment of what is without doubt the most […]
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It’s Who You Know
I ♥ The ’90s
Recently, the New York club owners who spawned the painfully misguided nostalgia chains Polly Esther’s and Culture Club (focused on bad ’70s and ’80s nostalgia, respectively) broke new ground in questionable taste with the opening of NerveAna, New York’s–that’s right–first ’90s nostalgia dance club. This abomination seems to merely put face to a much more […]
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In A Good Way
Kill Me Tomorrow Sound Like Shit
Kill Me Tomorrow Monday, May 9 Holocene 1001 SE Morrison The cover of Kill Me Tomorrow’s full-length debut, The Garbageman and the Prostitute, looks like shit. Which isn’t to say that the artwork (illustrated by KMT bassist K8 Wince) is necessarily shitty, but that it quite literally looks like excrement–filthy, glitter-coated red-brown splotches methodically splashed […]
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It’s Who You Know
Hotel
The first week that I arrived in Portland, a handful of friends ushered me downtown for what promised to be my first proper social engagement as an Oregonian–a voyage of exploration that found me traversing three flights of stairs of a building that looked invariably vacant, into a crowded hallway where I passed virtually everyone […]
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Ghosts Haunt These Halls
The Gris Gris’ Yawning Cathedral
The Gris Gris Thur April 21 Dunes 1905 NE MLK There are moments on the Gris Gris’ self-titled debut record in which tape hiss is the loudest discernible instrument. It could simply be that the sound of magnet on plastic is the only audible element that’s not completely obscured by a hollow cavern’s worth of […]
Posted inMovies & TV
America’s Next Top Phony
Or… How I Pretended to Care About Becoming America’s Next Top Model and Meeting Tyra Banks
Before we get started here, I’ve got something important to get off my chest–to the judges, fellow models, and producers of Portland’s local casting call for America’s Next Top Model: I’m sorry I lied. I know I told you I desperately wanted to appear on the show, be a role model for young women everywhere, […]
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It’s Who You Know
The Aesthetic of Commerce
I like LPs. I like CDs. I like all of the wasteful, superfluous junk that keeps music from being truly free of corporate commerce. I’m not particularly proud of this, but I long ago came to terms with the fact that, for me, music can often be more about its tangible product than its essence. […]
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Adam Green Don’t Give a Shit
And Other Reasons to Swear Profusely
Adam Green Mon April 11 Doug Fir Lounge 830 E Burnside For someone who has hinged virtually an entire career on an inexhaustible appreciation of sophomoric scatology, Adam Green sure goes to impressive lengths to appear as though he doesn’t give a shit. As one half of early-oughts anomaly the Moldy Peaches, Green and company […]
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It’s Who You Know
Death Week
With International Death Week finally coming to a teary-eyed close, we here at “It’s Who You Know” come to you with heavy hearts. Buried beneath the much-publicized passings of the raisin-faced hatemonger, the guy who let the Juice loose, and poor ol’ Feeding Tube were the infinitely more tragic departures of Mitch Hedberg–possibly the last […]