zed equals zee

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and that means it’s time for the annual party under the Space Needle. The lineup for Bumbershoot 2008 features a number of zed equals zee faves, including The Weakerthans, !!!, Battles, Dan Deacon, Tapes ‘n Tapes, Band of Horses, and Death Cab for Cutie. After a few years of the Pitchfork Music Festival, it’s nice to only have to worry about getting rained on, and not also about getting sunstroke (sadly, the forecast looks a little mixed as of this moment).

MP3: !!! – Take Ecstasy With Me (Magnetic Fields cover)

It turns out that my perception of hip-hop lyrics—that they are all about butts and masculine self-aggrandizement—may not be entirely incorrect. Artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg analysed 10 000 songs, in a range of genres, and extracted all references to body parts. They then produced a nifty interactive graphic, “Fleshmap: Listen,” that lets you explore body-part mentions by genre [links are NSFWish]. In most genres, including alternative and electronic, the top five were ‘eyes,’ ‘head,’ ‘face,’ ‘arms’ and ‘hands.’ In hip-hop, though, not only are body parts are mentioned far more frequently than in other genres, but ‘ass’ leads the pack (it would have an even greater lead if ‘booty’ and ‘butt’ weren’t broken out separately). And ‘cock’ displaces ‘arms’ to take position #6.

I can’t help but notice the absence of ‘heart’ in the graphics, but I guess internal organs don’t count.

Personally, I’m interested in knowing more about the 0.05% of alternative songs that mention shins.

[via the Wired Music Blog]

MP3: Freezepop – Do You Like My Wang?

Growing up in the pre-Internet world, I was fortunate enough to have a decent independent indie-and-alternative radio station in Toronto, as well as a much cooler older sister who listened to CBC’s Brave New Waves and exposed me to new stuff. Then I moved to Boston, just as music was starting to migrate to the Internet, and I pretty much stopped listening to radio (with the exception of WMBR, of course). As I was preparing to relocate to Seattle, the radio station KEXP kept coming up, mostly in sentences to the effect of, “You’ll want to listen to KEXP.” So I switched my stereo over to 90.3 FM, and set it to turn on in the morning.

As I was lying bleary-eyed in bed, I gradually realized that I was familiar with the song that’s playing, an instrumental. Even more gradually, it dawned on me that it’s Holy Fuck. Holy Fuck! On the radio!

This Friday morning alone, they played The Hold Steady, Hot Chip, The Hidden Cameras, and both Oasis and Pulp, plus great older alternative artists like James, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and the Dead Milkmen. And, of course, a whole slew of new bands I’d never heard of. Fortunately, KEXP also maintains an amazingly detailed playlist, updated in real time.

Sadly, however, there is a significant downside to my newfound love of KEXP – since it’s replaced NPR as my morning auditory stimulation, I’m probably going to be significantly less well-informed this year.

KEXP 90.3 Seattle (streaming links in top left corner)

The video for the second single, “Impatience,” from We Are Scientists’ sophomore album, Brain Thrust Mastery, was just released. And it features one of the band members as a werewolf. Like pretty much everything else WAS do, it’s an entertaining mix of funny, geeky and strange (check out the ‘Advice‘ section of their blog for more of this characteristic blend). We Are Scientists are busy, busy guys – they just finished an East Coast tour. Next up is two weeks of festivals in the UK and Europe (including Reading and Pukkelpop), then they are spending most of September supporting REM in Europe, and then they return to the US for a cross-country tour with Kings of Leon, playing Seattle on October 20, 2008.

More We Are Scientists: website myspace allmusic

I think that the BBC Olympics title sequence video, created by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett (better known as the brains behind Gorillaz) is probably my favourite bit of promo for the Olympics ever.

[via Neil Gaiman’s Journal]

zed equals zee is still settling into its Seattle headquarters, so just a quick post to tide you over. Courtesy of the Guardian, an illustrated list of the top ten uniforms in rock. Unsurprisingly, Devo (above) tops the list.