Youth In Revolt – The Anti Ferris

Nike Sportswear and Flux kicked off the new year with a special advance screening of Miguel Arteta’s Youth in Revolt at The Montalbán Theater in Hollywood.

Based on the acclaimed novel by C.D. Payne, Youth in Revolt is the story of Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) – an awkward and precocious teen who prefers Sinatra and Fellini to punk and video games – who falls obsessively in love with the hyper intelligent Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) while on a family vacation.

This movie has been 17 years in the making, after a failed MTV series and many attempts to bring it to the big screen.
The character of Nick Twisp is a daunting one to bring from the page to the silver screen. He is epic. Sort of a Holden Caulfield armed with a copy of Mad Magazine, a copy of Playboy and a torch blower.

The book is side splittingly funny, juvenile, and coming in at 499 pages, nearly impossible to adapt into lightweight summer teen fare. My thought at once was please don’t do this and if you’re going to do this: Don’t. Fuck. It. Up.

Of course the casting would always be a huge problem, Where could one find a teen self possessed enough to play Nick Twisp: a nerdy, hyper intellectual who is capably of burning down the city of Berkeley but not of talking a teenage girl into having sex with him? It takes a special kind of actor to have the charisma and charm to be the anti Ferris Bueller – to have the entire city chasing your infamous ass down.

Perhaps that is what the decade plus delay was about…enter Michael Cera.

A guy who excels at the teen dweeb deadpan with charm and aplomb.  But in taking on Twisp, Cera not only gets the familiar through line of ankling his virginity, but this time he gets to try rebel and felon on for size and adds split personality on for size, with his smooth talking, chain smoking tight white chino wearing persona, Francois, who appears mid-film.

Whittling down a massive book with a cult following is a big undertaking so it’s no surprise that it would take someone like Migel Arteta – a man who very carefully chooses his projects (Star Maps, The Good Girl) and leans towards the bizarre and controversial (Chuck and Buck) to tackle Twisp. I was surprised at how Arteta managed to cut massive amounts of the zany story line, major characters (a sister Joannie, the jock like partner in crime Fuzzy De Falco) and still somehow move the plot forward. Of course it did seem like many of these juicy characters were little more than blips on the screen – Ray Liotta’s psychotic cop Lance who in the book plays a cat and mouse game with Nick,  is barely involved here. And, I am biased, but I do think Zach Galifiankis’ swindling Jerry is much too short lived.

Also, Nick’s preppy arch nemesis Trent Preston only appears as a Deus Ex Machina in tennis whites, sort of disappointing.

But what Arteta does capture is CD Payne’s writing style and rhythm, which are the heart of the book and the heart of Nick Twisp. To take a miserable teenager, make him ‘Be Bad’ and plunk him down amidst a gaggle of characters where he shines like a diamond of morality and still manage to engage the audience in a lot of fun, well then you’ve done justice to Payne’s work. Phew.

After heaving a sigh of relief that breezy fun justice was done to the novel, I was able to relax and partake in the festivities Flux had planned for the after party.

As Sheeni and Nick were fans of vinyl, and Sheeni had a penchant for Francoise and French culture (particularly Serge Gainsbourg) film guests were invited upstairs to the mezzanine which featured a live music performance by “Paris loves L.A.” featuring Adele Jacques. French actress and singer Jacques contributes a track to the Youth in Revolt Soundtrack.

As revelers enjoyed the soothing sounds and showed their Ugly American-ness by double fisting free Belvedere vodka drinks and pushing others to get more open bar treats. Dozens of Be Bad pins crunched under foot. The crowd, though not so youthful, was in full revolt, and determined to behave badly and out-do any Twispian maneuvers. In a town like Hollywood, I’m fully aware of the damage the average hipster is capable of, so I quickly made my exit. Safe with the knowledge that Payne’s book made it to the screen, I leave it to the drunken hiptards to ‘be bad’.

A Very Raging Christmas – Crap Music Is Over, If You Want It

In a land far, far away, called Great Britain a yearly war wages every winter. In this magical Narnian Isle, music is still a viable commodity taken very seriously. Their denizens actually record new holiday songs every season in the hopes of having the top Christmas single of the year.

We cynics across the pond are fine to do with the recycled, rehashed songbooks – over the river and through the wood, decking the halls and all that. Why would you need MORE freaking Christmas? A trip outside for a few hours on Black Friday and we’re drowning in so much Christmas it’s enough to move to the Aboriginal outback.

But England doesn’t mess around. Music and Christmas are a very serious thing. I mean, they still have music programming on TV, AND the government pays for some of it. Can you imagine if our government gave PBS money to make old school MTV styled programming? I might actually still want to live here.

Yes, England gets downright fervent about music, specifically the ‘single’. Especially when it comes to the OZ like machinery of Simon Cowell and company, who pump out yearly soft rock balladeers with their contest shows like Pop Idol and X Factor.  Yes, we have our American Idol, but it pales in comparison to the juggernaut that X Factor brings to the UK every year.

I was treated to the wonders of X Factor this October when I was staying in London. I politely watched with some fervent friends over Sunday roast and found myself drawn in by a bigger, cattier, more sordid and maudlin type of idol where the judges mentor the contestants, take sides and cut each other down so furiously I’m surprised they’re not allowed swords onstage. I have to admit I did get a little hooked. OK, a lot. It wasn’t the music, which was mostly dreadful. It was the huge soppy spectacle of it.

X Factor Judges

But truly music is the loser in this scenario, if it’s nothing more than a soapbox stump for Rhianna or Janet to pimp their new album, in between green faced kids being forced to sing George Michael covers. The winner of this contest releases a single and that song, most likely, goes on to be the Christmas single winner, no doubt to be over played through out the holiday season and beyond, knocking struggling bands off the charts and out of our memories as the new year chimes in.

This year’s X Factor winner, pie eyed Joe McElderry is an 18 year old Geordie accented charmer with a lilting, soaring voice who is as sweet as a Disney cartoon heroine. Blech. They even chose for his first single, the Christmas single in question, to be ‘The Climb’, a Miley Cyrus cover. Jesus. Come on, England! Throw some tea overboard!

Well, Jon Morter for this revolting enough to do something.  Sick of the slick promotional big label machine and the ‘crap’ it pumps out, he decided to take a stand and protest by simply using social media. Jon made a Facebook page called RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1. On the page he asked the fans to buy his favorite band’s 1994 single, Killing In The Name Of, instead of X Factor Joe McElderry’s new Cyrus single “The Climb”.

The kid, Joe McElderry, seems nice enough – benign in a musical theater, syrupy sweet kind of way. He wasn’t even my choice to win the thing – I would have gone with the song and dance man Olly Murs, if I were holding a UK green card, but there I go, tipping my hand as someone who has seen enough of the show to care.

The fact is, there has always been pop music that was put together in a board room. Girl groups formed in the offices of the Brill Building weren’t exactly an organic creative process but still some of the best songs ever sung.

So some pop music can’t be denied, even if the singer didn’t pen the song themselves…but the pervasive problem today, it seems, is the onslaught of boy bands and mall makeovers done on any kid with half a voice who are put on diet pills and thrust into the spot light like Three Octave Barbie.  In a month their CD, filled with tuneless drivel, is overstocked at Walmart and outselling the grassroots band that actually writes music.

If you throw money and PR at a turd, the public will spend money on it. Sheeple are Sheeple, as the D Mode song goes…and the loser is not only the smaller musician out there, but ultimately the music listening public.

Enter Rage Against The Machine. Now they were invited to the party, unbeknownst to them, not because they are a small unknown indie rock band. No, they are a huge successful act on Sony, the very same Goliath label that Cowell and McElderry call home. But RATM started from humble beginnings and won each of their hundreds of thousands of fans, one by one. Not from a television show contest, but by playing small gigs and then larger ones. By touring relentlessly. By making music. And yes, by being political loud mouths and standing up for the little guy.

In an interview with UK paper The Sun, RATM frontman Tom Morello stated: “It is a historic campaign to save the UK pop charts from the abyss of bland mediocrity and we’re 100 per cent behind it. It’s really amazing and completely a grassroots uprising. It’s not like the band put this forward, it was the people. I found out about it when some friends of mine from the UK texted me.”

As the race between the two tightened, things got more heated. And weirder. Cowell kept accusing Rage of being bullies. Then the Facebook page went down and suddenly thousands of fans were inexplicably lost. And of course there were rumblings that this was all just an underground ploy of Sony executives to drive up sales of both singles – a major payday for Sony either way.

However, to show that it wasn’t a Sony plot, Morello promised that the band would reunite and play a free concert for London fans if they were to win the number one spot. This earned him some scorn and harsh words from X Factor kingpin Simon Cowell, and fellow X Factor judge Cheryl Cole, a former member of all girl group Girls Aloud, who was Mc Elderry’s mentor on the show. Cheryl stated “If that song, or should I say campaign, by an American group is our Christmas Number 1, I’ll be gutted for Joe and our charts.”

Cheryl Cole and Joe McElderry on X Factor

Morello flattened Cowell and Cole’s jingoistic pleas for support of Geordie Joe.

“The X Factor song was written by a cabal of highly paid professional songwriters and was already made a hit by a pre-teen artists from the United States. That’s nothing I would feel too proud about hoisting the flag up on.”

“The X Factor suits have been pulling out every dirty trick in the book to get their single to No 1. They’ve been pressuring the big retail stores over the price of the single and there were some shenanigans that happened with the Facebook page where it went down mysteriously on the second day.

“Some of the things they are doing seem almost desperate and that’s because they’re afraid of the people.”

As the deadline neared for the tally, Joe was in the lead by a narrow margin. Tom Morello took to twitter and urged his online fans to download on itunes and help push Rage over the edge. They upped the ante by stating that they would be donating their proceeds from their Christmas single to charity. No Sony payout for the people who helped put Rage in the number one spot.

It looked as if Joe had the Xmas single sewed up, but in a Christmas miracle come from behind victory, the American revolutionaries toppled Cowell’s teen idol and took the number one spot. Davey had conquered Goliath!

Of course Cowell was ‘gutted’ for his protege, McElderry, but was gracious enough to concede the spot to a song with well over fifteen ‘fuck you’ s laden in the lyrics. Well done. Cowell supposedly even offered Jon Morter a job doing marketing for his music label, though that might just have been the PR equivalent of licking his wounds.

Whether or not you think that this contest of wills will actually change the stranglehold that Cowell and X Factor has on music, the fact is that this small group on Facebook has managed to raise 83,000 pounds (approximately $132,700) for the charity, Shelter, they’ve helped to break  two UK chart sales records…and it’s made music history and social media history.

It’s also an example that we do not have to sit idly by and listen to crap. Crap music is over, if you want it. If you don’t want it, turn it off. If you hate the television you keep seeing, turn it off. Or make your own. Vote with your dollar, your time and your energy. If you don’t like what is out there. DO NOT give it your time or energy. “I am listening to it cause it’s on” is no longer a viable option as we enter 2010 a supposed enlightened era. If you don’t like it, do something. If you can’t create an alternative, then at least turn it off.

When asked if they’d attempt to overthrow the Christmas No. 1 again next year, Jon and his team admit that it probably wouldn’t work again nor would they want it to. But they are most proud of the fact that they were able to motivate people to take a stand against mediocrity and change something in pop culture history.

On top of that, raising money for a good cause and making friends with their favorite band of all time…well that’s just part of the best Christmas gift ever.

Cassettes Won’t Listen launches a Beat Kanye site – It’s On!

Here’s a throw down for the ages…Cassettes is challenging Mr. West to an internet duel.

We all know how graceful Kanye is under pressure…and since I often enjoy watching egos implode, I highly suggest you log on and help CWL beat Kanye. Plus, it could provoke a “George Bush hates black people” truthiness response…fingers crossed.

Cassettes Won’t Listen Vows To Offer Up Next Album Free If Cassettes Won’t Listen Beats Kanye West

Cassettes Won’t Listen has agreed to to give away his next album for free if he beats Kanye West in the nominations for Best Male Video.  MTV is giving fans the chance to nominate their favorite artists for this year’s Video Music Awards. So far, Cassettes Won’t Listen’s latest video for ‘Paper Float’ is in the running.  So, Cassettes Won’t Listen launched BeatKanye.com, because we know Kanye is a good sport when itcomes to losing awards, so people can cast their vote and help make MTV about great music once again.

And to show he’s serious, Cassettes Won’t Listen is offering his next single for free right now!  Freeze and Explode, which Pop Matters calls “stunning, gorgeous, flawless pop song just explodes off of the speakers, filled with an incredible sense of rising catharsis. It demands your attention, simply because it is one of the best songs that 2008 has produced to date,” will be released in the September with remixes, unreleased b-sides and a brand new video.  But for now, you can download
 
        
Visit BeatKanye.com to view the Paper Float video and
click the ‘VOTE’ link on the left to have your chance at helping beat Kanye West!”

Check out www.beatkanye.com for more info!