Category: music

Nick Taras reviews a One Direction concert

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for beat magazine in Australia:

(Please excuse the occasional bad language.)

For those unaware, One Direction are a teenage British boy band who are just the right combination of good looks and shitty pop music to seduce the hearts of young girls worldwide, and just young enough for Kony to kidnap. They released an album calledUp All Night (which has dominated charts worldwide) and got away with it because of their young, clean image. It was considered “cute” and “playfully naughty”. Yet if Dr Dre put out an album with the exact same title it would be considered “extremely vulgar” and “too heavy on references to hardcore everlasting sex”. One Direction are in their late teens. Just sayin’.

I must admit that I was not in a grand mood before One Direction. Firstly, in some form of sick joke, I was asked to review this band, and then I was told I couldn’t get a +1. I was alone. At One Direction. And I paid $10 for parking. And then I was seated between two groups of horrifyingly loud 14-year-old girls. It wasawesome depressing and a low point in my career. But then things got better, and I was transformed into a good mood becausethese girls were hot! I was interested in seeing why such a colossal chaos was made of this boy band.

One Direction, with less collective hairs beneath their underwear than hairs on my face, came out to the sound of a screaming pre-pubescent frenzy. I knew I was in for a musical orgasm after Niall (is that even a real name) started strumming his cool air guitar in time with the drum beat. As both instruments do in fact make a form of noise, I will refrain from further criticism.

Not long after, they performed their most puzzling hit, What Makes You Beautiful, a gem which contains the bizarre lyric: “You don’t know you’re beautiful/Oh oh/That’s what makes you beautiful”. I can’t understand how this lyric has gone under the radar. It roughly translates to “You have no sense of self-worth/Oh oh/That’s why I like you”. One Direction are obviously sickeningly attracted to girls with low self-esteem. Other lyrics from that song include the repetitive chanting of “Nana Nana Nana Nana Nana Nana Nana Nana” – quite reminiscent of the schoolyard tease chant of “Nana Nana Na”.

By far the highlight of the evening was a break in the performance where the band read the tweets from audience members which featured various questions. My favourite tweet was “Who can jump the highest?” The members of the band then all attempted to find out who was the most talented jumper. They each took turns, one by one, jumping on stage and then high fiving each other. It was a moment that will go down in rock history; a moment where I can say, “I was there”.

I hate my fucking shitty job.

BY NICK TARAS

LOVED: When Louis jumped really high.

HATED: The expensive price of chips.

DRANK: Didn’t serve alcohol but I had chips. They were good but not cheap!

*shrug* At least he enjoyed the chips.

Rejoice!

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Much rejoicing Chez 6000 as it appears that after my only partially successful repair of iTunes last week, I have managed to find another 1788 tracks that were “missing”. I’m still not 100% sure that I will be able to get them onto iTunes, but at least they’re safely somewhere on a hard drive. The next step might be a little messy, but it should be pretty straightforward.

The tracks disappeared when I plugged in my daughter’s prize from Kfm (not that I’m blaming her or them) – a shiny little iPod shuffle she got for dancing in the rain while watching the Two Oceans Marathon last month.

It brought up a beautifully clean iTunes window, to which I added some songs she liked (Coldplay, Freshlyground, Slipknot etc) and all seemed well. However, when I later plugged my Big Daddy iPod in, iTunes comprehensively failed to revert to my previous library, leaving me with about 30 tracks, some of which were by Shakira.

Issues.

I have since pieced together a rudimentary replacement library, but there were gaps. Massive gaps of several thousand tracks.
I had to root around on external hard drives and the like, but with today’s discovery, there’s “only” a discrepancy of about 900 items. I have yet to check whether they are important items, replaceable items or stuff I can (or will have to) manage without. This may be a difficult task, since sometimes, I’m just heading to the lab when I have a “must listen to” moment. It will be then that these discrepancies will become immediately obvious. Rage will surely ensue.

My advice to you if your 3 year old wins an iPod is not to plug it into your computer. At all. The best way is to find another computer and use iTunes on there. Or sell it on gumtree. It will save you sleepless nights, much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I’m sure that there is a safe and surefire way of running two (or more) iPods from the same computer. More fool me for ever imagining that Apple would have made it as simple as just plugging the new device into the USB port.
By all means, let me know the best way of doing it in the comments section below, but don’t expect me to let that little silver square anywhere near my desktop ever again.

Capisce?

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.

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More music? Yes, more music.

There was a bizarre route to my discovering this band – the brainchild of Sam Duckworth –  but we can leave the sordid details behind, because the new album “Maps” is out on Monday and I’m going to go (to my computer) and buy it.

Here’s The Real McCoy from that forthcoming album.

And if you liked that, you can download it for free.

There’s more Get Cape. goodness on their YouTube channel. I’d particularly recommend Daylight Robbery, with its parody video (how many other bands videos can you spot?) and The Uprising, featuring British TV presenter Adrian Chiles.

Get Cape cornet and occasional drummer Mikey Glenister is also a member of band The Power of Voodoo, who don’t seem to be very active currently but whose music is still available on their Facebook page – try It’s My Time (free download of that is here).

Dans, Dans, [censored] Dans.

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Much amusement in Newcastle (no, not that one) OVER the weekend as Afrikaans rapper JACK Parow was escorted off stage halfway through his performance, in order to protect him from a small number of the audience who labelled him “satan slang” (devil snake) and a “disgrace to the Afrikaans language” after he swore on STAGE.

Afrikaans rapper Jack Parow says he is “cool” about being led off the stage midway through a concert in Newcastle when his lyrics upset some in the audience, and that he had a “rad time” regardless.

Parow, whose real name is Zander Tyler, was taken off the stage at the Vodacom Winter Festival on Friday night when a group, upset by his lyrics – which included profanities – physically threatened him.

One man nearly jumped on stage, but was pulled back by police called in to help festival organisers with the group.

A war of words erupted on the Newcastle Newspaper’s Facebook page, with people calling Parow a “satan slang (devil snake)” and a “disgrace to the Afrikaans language”.

Now, I can take OR leave Mnr Parow and I can HAPPILY manage without swearing in my music, but seriously now, what were the audience expecting? It’s like turning UP to a Metallica gig and “hoping they don’t play anything too loud”.
I have kids and I try to shelter them from swearing (amongst other things) as much as possible. That MEANS not taking them along to Jack Parow gigs (amongst other things). No matter HOW backward Newcastle is, the allegation that this performance was instrumental in corrupting their youth is a bit OTT.

Parow, unsurprisingly, was unabashed:

Parow said he was singing his song Dans Dans Dans when the microphone was taken from him by an organiser and he was led off stage. He then noticed police trying to calm a few men beside the stage.

“Some people don’t like the swearing. I was singing ‘Dans, dans f***en dans’. This one guy was shouting at me and said: ‘Why are you f***ing swearing?’, but that was funny because he was swearing at me.”

As you will have noted above, all of this has (typically) reared its head on Facebook, WHERE a couple of comments by Anthon von Lisenborgh have captured the imagination of some individuals and INTRODUCED random CAPITALISATION to popular culture:

The biggest IRONY for me is that Jack Parow’s shortened act followed that of Afrikaner Steve Hofmeyr (and whom Anthon comprehensively fails to accuse of being an “Artist of Satan”), a man perhaps BEST known for his racist rants, being divorced by his wife after having “numerous affairs”, assaulting the female editor of a popular gossip magazine and being described by the Deputy CEO of the South African Institute of Race Relations as being a disgrace to South Africa and of using his “not insignificant following to sow anger and hate among young white people”.

When it comes to role models, it would seem that the Afrikaans culture is struggling somewhat, but while Jack Parow CONTINUES to use the F-word (and he will continue to use the F-word) Anthon seems conveniently blinkered to Mr Hofmeyr’s shortcomings.

UPDATE: A bit more on Anthon – he’s written a book: Apocrypha 999 – The Mystery of Solomon and Queen Bilqis of Sheba – and in his author bio (filled with MORE random capitalisation), he includes THE line:

…do with it as you feel fit or do nothing if you want, it is up to you to decide and not me.

Obviously, the same doesn’t apply to concerts in North West Kwa-Zulu Natal.