Friday, January 4, 2013
On Video / Music There's no good music news so we're watching a Taco Leg video
Posted by Miles Raymer on 01.04.13 at 03:28 PM
It's a slow news day for music, which isn't surprising since this is the slowest time of year for music news. There's stuff being reported on, since the machine has to keep grinding away even when there's the slimmest amount of raw material for it to chew on, but none of it's any good. Two up-and-coming female rappers in New York City, Azealia Banks and Angel Haze, are beefing over a tweet that Banks wrote about how rappers who weren't born in the city (Haze, for instance) can't claim it, which is stupid. (It's also reinforced the seriously unpleasant streak in Banks's persona, which is a shame because I like her as a performer.) R. Kelly released a song dedicated to the victims of the mass shooting in Newtown but, for as much as some of us are willing to give Kelly a pass for some of his past behavior, hearing him singing with a children's choir is too icky to want to deal with. Yesterday a ton of dangerously understimulated music fans flipped out over the rumor that Lil Wayne was being cast for a Pixar movie, which turned out to be every bit as unlikely as it seemed. The most exciting thing to come into my inbox today was a 500-word-long press release about a joke that Marlon Wayans made to a third-rate celebrity-gossip blog about Kanye and Kim's baby that managed to be the least funny of the literally hundreds of unfunny jokes I've seen on the topic.
So we're just going to say "fuck that" to current events and watch Taco Leg's video for their song "Raiders." I discovered the Perth, Australia, trio late in the year, but their deliberately brain-dead take on postpunk—imagine Mark E. Smith as a chronic inhalant abuser—was an unexpected treat that landed a spot on my year-end Spotify playlist. The video for "Raiders," like the song's lyrics, is a shoddy, low-budget recreation of an iconic scene from The Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's dumb, but at least it's entertaining, which is more than you can say about Marlon Wayans.
