Philip Overton: When the song's about the dance

             Philip Overton does not sound his age. From his manner of speaking to the voice that’d be better suited to a blues veteran far before his time, the easy-speakin’ gentleman is out of place for this era. To begin with, old country and delta blues fans should easily swoon over his old-school serenade-- he can effectively cover Son House with ease (not a careless feat for most) and channel Tom Waits, all the while keeping his guitar consistent, in time and just plain swell. Everything is spot on, simple but deceptively masterful. 

Photo courtesy of Philip Overton

            Overton was introduced to the old sound by “a very bad old friend from school” at a bar—“we were too young to be in the place”—and has been listening to all sorts of old rhythm and blues ever since. "The recordings are old, but the tunes are timeless. That still is how I got hooked,” he says. “The live experience. The best thing about a live show is you can dance. I don’t mean jumping around the place like I’m looking to hurt somebody; I mean with a girl. You can call me anything you want but I still like to dance in a pair… Sometimes the song is about the dance.”

            Overton first picked up the guitar at the age of 15, and started singing as a result of an of an old band he founded all trying their hand at vocals before he landed the mic.

“It turned out I was the one who really wanted to do it after all.”

            The man doesn’t consider himself “very special” for what he plays, but says “I’ll be playing and singing so long as I’ve got sparks in my brain. It’s the creativity that I really dig; I can pick up the guitar and just make something up. That’s instant art. As soon as the thought appears, I send it through my nerves and out of the guitar. Instant expression—I don’t even need to wait for the paint to dry.”

            While discussing influences, Overton divulges his “trinity”—Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Jack White. Waits is Overton’s dream collaborator— “It’d be wild. I'd stroll over to the piano like I know what I'm doing and he'd just go to town with an old tire-iron and a dustbin lid,” he says. “He could growl and I'd whistle; he'd stomp and I'd holler; he'd clang, boom, scream and I'd shake, rattle and pop. Even on conventional instruments, there are a few tricks I'd be keen to steal off him.”

            He also adds Patti Smith, Nick Cave “for Murder Ballads alone,” Pokey LaFarge, Boxcar Joe Strouzer and The Midnight Barbers.

            Non-musical artistic inspirations include David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Ai Weiwei (who’s “doing something bold,” though Overton fears it’ll be over before he understands what it is).

As he puts it, when Overton performs, he tries to tell the story of the evening: one song should follow the other, from the themes to the lyrics to the melody. He likes to keep it simple, and keep the audience on the same page—preferably sentence, word, breath.

As Overton tells it, the greatest trick of the artist is to become immortal and then die. This artist in particular could have quite the story.

His tunes are just a click away at sharpnoir.tumblr.com. 

Bleed the Pigs: political powerviolence "dream team"

Photo courtesy of Bleed the Pigs

Bleed the Pigs, a sludgy grindcore-powerviolence band from Nashville, Tennessee are a four-piece force to be reckoned with. Starting out as a two-piece with a vision in 2013, the band gives a ferocious voice to statements that are typically shut down and shunned. 

“The idea behind the band was to create intense, heavy and fast music that matched the intensity and aggression carried through by the lyrics,” says guitarist David Hobbs.

“I love having control over something that's typically white male dominated,” says Kayla Phillips, vocalist, on performing their music live. “I especially love it when black girls come up to me after a show and say that they felt safe being there because I was there. That's really important.”

Prior to Bleed the Pigs being formed, Hobbs had played with drummer Taylor Carpenter and bassist Christian Smith in another band for over a year, and describes their songwriting process as both easy and “pandemonium.”

“Taylor, Christian and I will jam on certain concepts for songs and Kayla always keeps us on task and focuses our direction. Sometimes songs come easily and the riffs just flow one after the other, while other times we spend a lot of time sculpting how the song will sound in the end,” he says. “All of our songs, though, are carefully scrutinized and altered substantially before being played live.”

“I’ll tell them certain things that I like, a faster part here, or a sludgy part there. It comes really easy. I think we’re a dream team,” says Phillips.

Their EP, Mortis Fatum, is tight and cohesive, using slightly different styles of metal on particular tracks to convey a message as hard and heavy as the sound. Songs like “Endless Void” and “May” are reminiscent of black metal like Gorgoroth, whereas “Scum Fucker” is a righteous shove to rapists. "I know what you are- a worthless piece of shit," snarls Phillips over furious riffs.

Photo courtesy of Bleed the Pigs

The band is influenced by a grab bag of other grindcore, hardcore, powerviolence and metal bands, including Neurosis, Converge, The Endless Blockade, Hatred Surge and Yautja, as well as Phillips’ favorite, Nirvana.

“They’ve been my favorite band since I was 10 years old and I still feed off of them,” she says.

Non-musical influences include Smith’s dog, Tyler Coburn and George Orwell. Aside from naming him as an individual influence, Smith cites his pet as his dream co-headliner on tour, next to Dave Grohl.

The band loves crowd interaction during shows, and the opportunity to "convey as much passion and intensity as possible,” says Hobbs, in addition to "getting to play loud and live and get pissed off and vent all the pent up aggression towards daily injustices. The whole endeavor is just a wash of emotion and excitement and passion… Beyond that, I just want to have fun and play hard.”

“My favorite part about performing live is seeing people head bang,” says Carpenter. “I want everyone in the whole room to be head banging.”

You can listen to their music on their bandcamp: http://bleedthepigs.bandcamp.com/ and check them out on Facebook.

Krokodil

Photo of Jake Himelfarb and Aaron Lawrence engaged
in the creative process, courtesy of Krokodil

Though the rock scene is more splintered than ever, and it seems too often that metal is simply co-opted for trendy aesthetics, there are still some whose idea of a good time is that sweet heavy metal goodness. Krokodil—named after the flesh-eating drug—offers hard death metal with a cozy old school feel, and a contagious onstage sense of fun sets them apart from other local metalheads.

Singer-guitarist Jake Himelfarb particularly has a penchant for giving the audience something to remember: from mooning the crowd on multiple occasions, to alleging to an audience that he self-bleached his rectum in the parking lot prior to the show, to licking and munching on a bloody tampon that threw itself onstage at one show at the Cobalt Café. 

“His antics bring life to our death-ridden sound,” says drummer Devlin Baldwin.

Says Lumberjack of Vengeance for the Fallen, "Krokodil is one of the few bands to gross me out. Two huge horns up for that accomplishment alone! Black metal mixed with shock value mixed with a total disregard for personal health... it doesn't get any more metal than that."

"I must say that Krokodil jams out some real quality death metal," says longtime Krokodil concert-goer and fan, Sarah Schönberger. "Their stage performance is also extremely entertaining, and something is always bound to go down, especially with such a stupid-ass fan base."

The band draws from a variety of musical influences, including black metal, death metal, old school heaviness, old jazz and some other genres. While their music writing process initiates as fairly independent, the band collaborates more closely as songs develop.

“We’re all pretty musical people and the fact we’ve all got input into our songs is a really big part of how our songs come out,” says bassist Aaron Lawrence. “I draw different things from different bassists… everyone brings something different to the table and I try to learn from all of it.” Says Baldwin of music in general, he loves "literally everything about it and what comes with it. It is what gets me out of bed in the morning and what carries me to bed at night. Being able to create my own music has only brought me to love it more."

“It's really satisfying to see the songs you spent hours making and even more rehearsing come to life onstage, and then to see people's reactions to that creation that I worked so hard on making,” says Himelfarb. “It makes every little frustration in being in a band, writing music and playing guitar worth it.” 

Adds Lawrence, “I love playing live, especially when everything’s tight and everyone’s firing on all cylinders. It’s always fun being able to act like an idiot in front of people for a half hour. But what really makes gigs fun is when the crowd has fun. That’s a weird sort of energy that connects the whole room and aside from just loving to play music in general, that connection is what makes the shows so special.”

“We get up there and do our best to play our songs well and whatever happens, happens,” says Baldwin. “Being up there with two of the funniest dudes I know is super fun. Jake brings the autism while Aaron and I hit it heavy with our rhythmic sexiness. If, by the end of our set, I see people with smiles on their faces, I know we've done our job.”

Krokodil is playing the Cobalt Café this Saturday night, March 29^th at 8:00.

Photo courtesy of Krokodil

Laverne Cox is the activist we need

I recently saw an ad promoting Chelsea Clinton’s speaking gig for the Human Rights Campaign’s inaugural address, and immediately Googled her to see what connection she has to the LGBT community. She has none. She is a straight, white, cisgendered, privileged daughter of notorious politicians. She does not represent our community, and the concept of her speaking for us is insulting.

Of course, the Human Rights Campaign is pretty much a sellout; they promote sanitized advocacy for the most privileged members of the LGBT community. Just one example of this: at a 2013 rally for marriage equality in front of the White House, the HRC asked people not to wave trans flags because they don’t consider marriage equality a trans issue.

Not only is marriage equality very much a trans issue, that action alone showed their true colors of excluding trans* people from their “community.”

The Human Rights Campaign truly extends very little effort in even making it look like they care about trans people and queers of color; to tie back to what made me write this article, this is reflected in who they choose to be the face of their campaign. Straight white cis people like Chelsea Clinton, easy-to-deal-with and already famous gays or lesbians… please, yall. Please.

The activist that, in my opinion, could best benefit and reflect the LGBT community, is Laverne Cox. As a black trans woman, she could provide representation to a huge part of the LGBT community that so often gets thrown under the bus. Additionally, she doesn’t waste time and seems almost effortlessly articulate—for real, check out the Katie Couric interview.

She was completely right in redirecting the focus away from transition to the extreme adversity and violence that trans people face so often—“The preoccupation with transition and with surgery objectifies trans people. And then we don’t get to really deal with the real lived experiences. The reality of trans peoples’ lives is that so often we are targets of violence. We experience discrimination disproportionately to the rest of the community… if we focus on transition, we don’t actually get to talk about those things.”

HELL YEAH. We don’t have any time to waste, and she knows it.

To summarize, I’m a massive fangirl for Laverne. The rest of the community should be too. As for the Human Rights Campaign—rename yourself. You’re a single-issue group advocating for a specific group, not the LGBT community.

Articles with supporting evidence:

http://www.policymic.com/articles/31563/human-rights-campaign-fails-to-advocate-for-minorities

http://themoonbat.com/2013/04/02/the-problem-with-the-hrc-logo-on-your-profile/

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=7291

Ladies, speak up- society's distortion of "nice"

We teach girls shame: Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they’re already guilty of something. As so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who have to silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think….And they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form. – Chimamanda Adichie

It feels like almost every move I make, there’s someone telling me I’m being too aggressive, too weird, crazy, asking for trouble, that I need to tone it down. Which is funny, because every time I’ve done something to be called “aggressive,” “weird” or “crazy,” it’s literally just been me being myself and thinking I deserve respect for being a person. All of my female friends who are similarly independent have dealt with similar adversity for similar reasons. And I don’t want to cause “trouble”—I just want to be understood and respected. But things aren’t that simple.

The truth is, most people do not want or like independent women. The same reasons for which people have called me “aggressive,” “weird” and “crazy,” guys my age would be called ambitious and assertive. They’re “going places.” I was about to re-affirm that people don’t like independent women, but let’s cut the bullshit: they don’t like women, period. So they tell us by standing up for ourselves we’re weird monsters, and they’ve fed us this gnarly idea about being “nice.”

“Nice” means, as most girls have probably realized by their early teens: don’t talk too loud, let guys cut across you, don’t disagree with guys, never tell them they’re wrong (it would make them feel bad!), don’t do anything to make guys uneasy, don’t say no when a guy asks you out, especially if he made a romantic gesture (that would be mean!), laugh it off and be flattered when you’re being objectified and degraded, and generally make yourself as easy to deal with as possible, especially for guys, and never stand up for yourself.

Spelled out like this, it’s easy to see how dehumanizing and sick this. When I think about it this way, I realize I have to intention of being “nice” in the way that many people think about it. Yes, I want to cause trouble for them: they cause a world of trouble for my sisters and I, and it needs to end.

My girlfriend pointed out to me recently that I speak so quietly a lot of the time that she can’t always hear what I’m saying. She’s right, and I started thinking about why I do that. I started thinking things like, Well, I don’t want to talk over people. I don’t want to be rude. But why the hell is me speaking at an audible volume being rude? It’s part of the internalized misogyny I’ve absorbed- that I should be sitting down and shutting up. But that’s wrong. Women’s place is in the revolution—we are not a product to be sanitized and commodified.  My role is not to be easy to deal with. My role is to call you out, sit you down, and rise up with my sisters to create a new way of thinking. Where women aren’t “bad girls” or made to feel ashamed for being humans with their own views and judgment calls. And it’s not just for next generation—as Kwame Ture said,

“I don’t think that we should follow what many people say, that we should fight to be leaders of tomorrow. Frederick Douglass said that the youth should fight to be leaders today. And God knows we need to be leaders today, ‘cause the men who run this country are sick, are sick.”

Black power has always resonated with me and is more relatable to feminism than many would have you think.

So, do I dress a certain way to bother people? No, and I’m tired of people being selfish enough to assume it’s about them. It’s not. Do I sit around thinking, damn, how can I piss off the most people? No. I gather information, do research and then form opinions. Ladies, we need to stop taking shit and letting them distract us. Speak up, stand up and define “nice” for yourself. I'm right here with you.