The Wild Tchoupitoulas. The Wild Tchoupitoulas.

Today is the day I traditionally spend biting off the impulse to tell people they have schmutz on their forehead, which means that once again Mardi Gras has come and gone and I missed the opportunity to post this album.

I’ve never enjoyed the various pleasures of Mardi Gras, nor even visited New Orleans, although I did once attend Key West’s Halloween celebration, Fantasy Fest. I imagine they’re somewhat similar, although Fantasy Fest (when I attended in ’94 at least) was primarily being enjoyed by droves of middle-aged naked people in body paint. I do recall one delightful couple who had dressed from head to toe in vintage ‘50s duds and were wheeling around an old fashioned baby stroller. When people leaned in to see the “baby”, a little person dressed in leather bondage gear would leap out making boogada-boogada-boogada noises. So I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re looking for a getaway built around heavy drinking and nudity, Key West is probably the more family oriented destination. Although New Orleans’ celebration lasts all week and they could probably use the money more. As I’m sure you’re aware, New Orleans has not exactly been suffering from a surfeit of good fortune lately. The way things have been going, we all know it’s only a matter of time before Ben Stiller unleashes Fuck the Meters (“the hilarious and heartwarming tale of one man’s struggle to overcome dyslexia and join a New-Orlean’s funk band”¹) upon the already punch-drunk metropolis.

Speaking of the Meters, they, along with several of the Neville brothers, can be found on this non-stop rump-shaker from the heyday of New Orleans funk. Despite the pedigree, the stars of the show are the Wild Tchoupitoulas themselves, a tribe founded by George Landry (better known as Big Chief Jolly) in the early 70’s. It’s a swampy stew of New Orleans jazz, R&B, and blues, with an emphasis on appropriately dirty funk. The songs are built around traditional call-and-response chants, with niceley rough and raw vocals from Big Chief Jolly and the rest of his tribe. If you’re a fan of Professor Longhair, or early Dr John, grab this now.

The word fonktaculastic gets bandied about a lot in favor of bands who would barely be in danger of catching gonorrhea if it were actually spread by rhythmic clapping. But the Tchoupitoulas are the real deal. They're more than infectious. They'll leave rabid hoodoo brand upon your brain.

1. Script available upon request. You may also be interested in my original screenplays Forrest Gump II: The Gumpening and Abel Gance’s Napoleon Dynamite.

Wild Tchoupitoulas

My Favorite. The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

The ghosts of dead teenagers sing to me while I am dancing.

Speaking of nostalgia, I was a total classic rock snob in high school. If the band hadn’t existed prior to 1970, I wasn’t interested. There were occasional cracks—an REM tape inherited from a friend, an abiding love for The Cars (who I still think were highly underrated, despite being popular)—but for the most part, I listened to The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, and Buddy Holly. I considered dance music the bane of my existence. Groove Is In the Heart was wildly popular during my senior year, and I wanted to stab it in its shiny, happy face. As a teenager with insufferable hippie pretensions, there was nothing I hated more than mindless happiness. I reveled in miserabilism and wanted my music to do the same. If it wasn’t whiny, depressive navel-gazing then it wasn’t about anything, maannnn. So fuck you guys coping through communal ritual and physical ecstasy, because I’m going to my room where I am a rock, I am an island. (I’m reminded of Robyn Hitchcock’s line that “It’s the privilege of youth and beauty to hate themselves”).

Thankfully, Fuchsia introduced me to all sorts of 80’s alternative, goth, and college rock, and eventually the power of a good beat was more than I could resist. It was a revelation—I could dance and be depressed! Now, of course, all the best dance music carries sadness in its heart, even at its most escapist. My Favorite understood this dichotomy perfectly and crafted an elegiac love letter to those intense days when it felt like everything in the world could break your heart, but you still really wanted to dance and get laid. So now I’m nostalgic for a band creating meta nostalgia for a scene that I had no interest in when I was actually living through it.

Michael Grace lives in a scintillating twilight world of gray New Order melodies and Andrea Vaughn has the sort of cool, clear, schoolgirl voice you used to find on Sarah Records releases. They understood the comfort of being sad, but they also found the humor in it. Their lyrics are positively littered with throwaway couplets of bitter wit: Loneliness is pornography to them but to us it is an art. They won’t read your biography , these men, they will only break your heart…Your darkness is brighter than all the lights in the disco tonight…The streets were crawling with vampires, because after your shelf life expires you’re not a kid, you’re a monster…I spent five years in the infirmary but he never sent me letters. He only sent me dirty polaroids…I wear her dreams like a badge, pinned upon the wrong uniform...

The standout is the devastating Homeless Club Kids (especially the Future Bible Heroes remix on the second disc). Over a beautifully melancholy melody, Andrea eulogizes the lost kids trying to escape the daytime world through a new type of family on the dancefloor. The kids see themselves as “indivisible”, but Vaughn can see their eventual doom (whether through actual death or the eventual death of all youthful dreams). Like a less jaded version of Pulp’s Sorted for E’s and Wizz, Homeless Club Kids can’t help but wonder: Are you a shimmering, transcendent beast moving as one organism, or just a bunch of awkward kids in a warehouse basement? Well, both probably, just as Vaughn both mourns their loss while wishing she were one of them. As the song fades out, she’s walking home with their voices still in her ears, “and they’ll be sad and young forever, and I cry until I throw up.”

CD 1
CD 2 (remixes)

Tearist. CDR.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus

Holy fucking fuck. This.

A Siouxsie-Salem-Suicide goth freak-scene making out with the memory of the Cocteau Twins, trying to find out what really made Elizabeth Fraser’s voice quaver so ecstatically. Yasmine Kittle (really) bleats round, aching, bruise-black moans and screams over sticky-fingered synth fugues and clittery-clacking subway-track beats. It’s dark and powerful and flushed with sex.

I keep thinking, goddamn, why doesn’t anybody make music like this anymore? Not “like this” in the sense of sounding like the bands I think they sound like—although that counts, too—but “this” in the sense of a band that arrived just for you, that says here I am, singing in your voice, even if you cannot make these sounds. Something that can infuse you and take over your DNA. I can barely remember the last time I fell fucking hardcore for a band. Maybe it’s my age; maybe I listen to too much music to be intimate with any one album anymore, but this makes me want to string up Christmas lights over our bed and commence with the gettin’ it on.

Digging for music is looking to find your true heart. Or to rediscover it, to bare your chest to a melody’s dart, slipped like a needle through your red heart and suturing you with long, swooping silver threads, a riotous fray of impossible roller-coaster loops and knots strung like telegraph wires to passing clouds and buzzsaws and dizzy helicopter-seedlings and fractured cups of papershell eggs and fingernail clippings and nothing at all and nothing more so than (and above all) Fuchsia.

Memory is a graveyard of carefully stowed cardboard boxes and index cards; things you’ve snipped off with shears hoping to preserve. But I still want them in me. I stop the world. I melt with her. I pull out my web of veins and peel them back like I’m unrolling an elegant glove, until it hangs like a mirror from my fingertips, and press the tips and tracery into the ground, or into the mossy, crushed-velvet cave between her legs,

(legs, hips and arms smooth and taut as a sapling, her gamine body, the pearlescent skin of a crepe-myrtle draped around a tangle of antlers, her scapula and pelvis revealing themselves in subcutaneous parabolic swells like waves in the ocean, and at the apex of her inner thighs, two creamy divots like the first scoop from a clean spoon through a freshly opened box of vanilla ice cream)

but every pulse and fluid surge between us ticks off another perfect sphere of unrecoverable time—glass candle grenades strung like morse-code crystals on chandelier strands stretching back into the inky black nebula of a startled squid’s ejaculate—time making its slipstream getaway the moment it’s been noticed.

I worry that I am succumbing to nostalgia. Things used to be different and I was used to that. But it’s still the same (and new) every time.

I need to hit play again.


Tearist

Au Pairs. Playing With a Different Sex.

A bit of queer feminist reggae-disco punk-funk for your weekend. Have The Gossip covered We’re So Cool, yet? They should.

Like Gang of Four, The Au Pairs made authoritative, tight, and imminently danceable songs that rocked their politics just as hard as their grooves. Lesley Woods sang with a smoky, snarky, blues voice and played a twitchy guitar that she used to scratch up the hollows of the throbbing, syncopated punk rhythms. They wanted to take over the world, or at least the pop charts, but disappeared after two albums.

They aimed big while revolutionizing the small. Unlike a lot of political-with-a-capital-p bands, their politics were personal, honest, funny, awkward and unflinching. They weren’t telling anybody what to think, or even what they thought. They were just dramatizing situations and roles, and left it up to their listeners to make the connections to larger contexts. Most of their lyrics address power hierarchies, whether between romantic couples, governments and people, or even within bands. The mixed genders of the group and their use of Jamaican dub aesthetics were both ways to bypass and test the flexibility of those levels of authority. Simultaneously playing with and ignoring sex and gender (sort of like The Raincoats), they mixed it up with everyday stories of the negotiating that goes on in all types of relationships.

Come Again (banned by the BBC) looks at the way even the most private of spaces and moments are fraught with competing demands and sympathies. There’s nothing more transcendently fun than an orgasm, but here (even progressive) women have to be aware of the pressures on them to perform for their partners—it’s only polite—and sometimes fake it; even when they want it, even if they know their partner is trying, especially when they don’t and he isn’t. And what about feeling like you have to because you’re a new woman who changed the rules, and has sex on your own terms—because those women always have orgasms, now, right? Just thinking about it can throw you off your game, even when things had been going well. An allmusic review patronizingly called their songs “hectoring”, but Come Again rocks like crazy and ends with this hilarious and all too recognizable chorus:

Is your finger aching? I can feel you hesitating.
Is your finger aching!?!
Yes, thank you, I got one. Yes, it was nice.
Yes, we should go to sleep now. Yes, yes it was fine—
We must, we must do it again sometime. We must—
Yes, but I'm tired. Cum again? Wot?
Shit, I forgot to put my cap in!

The album came out at a time when the British government was busy ignoring rising levels of Fascist youth violence directed at Asian and Pakistani communities, gay clubs, feminist spaces and performers—anything not white and right wing. At the same time, the government was torturing female IRA prisoners (many falsely accused) while maintaining a public face of innocence. In Armagh, Lesley calls out the way torture and rape are used as tools of governments and patriarchies, both of whom hide behind professions of belonging to a higher order that couldn’t possibly be guilty of those things. We don’t torture / We’re a civilized nation / We’re avoiding any confrontation, Lesley mockingly chants throughout the song.

I wish she were still around today. In just under thirty years, “We don’t torture, we’re a civilized nation” has mutated from denial to excuse to justification. “We’re civilized people, and civilized people don’t torture, therefore all that stuff you’ve seen and heard about that looks like torture isn’t.” It’s become a hallmark of right wing discourse to argue in bad faith and to claim that the horrible thing being done isn’t really happening, and even if it is, they’re just doing it to protect you. Witness the disingenuous claims that anti-choicers don’t hate women or want to punish their sexuality. Why, no! They love women so much, they’re taking away their rights and choices so they don’t make any of those stupid decisions women (especially poor women) are likely to make when there isn’t a man around to tell them what they really want. Right now, in the US, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) is trying to make the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal Medicaid funding for abortions services) permanent law. As it stands, it’s a budget item that gets voted on each year (which is bad enough, and has been going on for 34 years), but making it permanent law would have the effect of making abortion coverage illegal for low income women on Medicaid, federal employees, and military women. It would also effectively end abortion coverage in private employer policies, and endanger life-saving emergency abortions at state and local public hospitals. If you live in the US, visit this link to The Center for Reproductive Rights, where you can write to your Congressional representative and tell them to oppose this act.

Playing

Anorak Girl. Plastic Fantastic.

If it weren’t for the references to the Spice Girls and Tamagotchi, and the fact that they claimed to be a Helen Love cover band, you could easily believe that this long lost bit of casio-powered pop had danced its way out of the band’s bedroom back when twee was going all electro. Even the name is an obvious nod to the scene’s choice of outerwear.

As it is, they showed up out of nowhere in 1996, released two singles and promptly disappeared. No one’s entirely sure who was in the band (There’s some speculation it involved Helen Love members in an even goofier mood, or a spoof perpetrated by the Reading UK band Cuckooland. Another bio claims they were from the Isle of Wight, so who knows). Whoever they were, they left some adorably twee disco tunes full of chirpy, sparkling keyboards, punk guitar, and heavenly vocals.

To give you some idea of how cartoonishly fun they were, I’ve half convinced myself that Andrew WK stole the thrashing keyboard/ guitar intro and rousing horn section from the chorus of Cybersex.

Plastic Fantastic

Washed Out. Tour CD-R.

We saw Washed Out with Small Black a while back, and I snagged this little tour-only CD of demos and samples and experiments at the merch table. Having only heard Washed Out’s split 45 remix of a Small Black song (which is excellent, btw), I was a bit surprised that his solo portion of the show was mostly a techno/rave type thing. It sounded nothing like the sun-bleached, Balearic “chill-wave” that I’ve since encountered by him on record. His portion of the set with Small Black was amazing, though. I loved the self-titled EP they put out, but (like Le Loup, who we saw a couple of nights later) they’re so much better live. Their endlessly yelping, pogoing, joyous, upwardly spiraling indie-tribal dance jams reminded me a lot of Animal Collective’s energy back around Sung Tongs. Anyway, I wish this little album were longer and more fleshed out, but only because what’s there is so sunny and good natured. It’s dance music for people in hammocks.

Washed Out

V/A. Cambodian Casette Archives. Khmer Folk & Pop.

A wild and wonderful collection of Cambodian pop culled from mostly unidentified tapes found in the Asian Branch of the Oakland Public Library in California. Covering recordings from the 60’s through the 90’s, it’s a

blend of folk and pop stylings - Cha-Cha Psychedelia, Phase-shifting Rock, sultry circle dance standards, pulsing Cambodian new wave, haunted ballads, musical comedy sketches, Easy-Listening numbers and raw instrumental grooves presented in an eclectic variety of production techniques. Male and female vocalists share the spotlight, embellished by roller rink organ solos, raunchy guitar leads and MIDI defying synthesizers.

Despite the wide range, the album plays as a very cohesive whole, and it’s slinky, funky, and fun as hell throughout.

Cassette Archives

Public Image Ltd. Commercial Zone.

From wikipedia:

In May 1981 PiL moved from London to New York City, but in October 1981 their American record contract with Warner Brothers expired and was not renewed. In January 1982 the British music press reported that PiL had tried to record a new album in New York with producers Adam Kidron and Ken Lockie, but split instead - this was promptly denied by the band in a press release the following week.

In May 1982 drummer Martin Atkins rejoined the band and PiL started recording their new studio album for Virgin Records at Park South Studios in Manhattan, with sound engineer Bob Miller co-producing. On 29 August 1982 new bassist Pete Jones joined the band in the studio, the new line-up played its debut concert four weeks later (28 September 1982 in New York City). During the summer and autumn of 1982 the band planned to form their own record label (Public Enterprise Productions) and license its releases to Stiff Records USA for the American market, but these plans never materialized.

In early November 1982 PiL announced the imminent release of a new single "Blue Water" and a six-track mini album You Are Now Entering A Commercial Zone on their new label. This did not happen, instead the band continued recording at South Park Studios for a full-length album.

By May 1983 a new track "This Is Not A Love Song" was earmarked as a new single for Virgin Records, but PiL broke up when first Pete Jones and then Keith Levene left the band. The remaining members, John Lydon and drummer Martin Atkins hired session musicians to fulfill touring commitments and carried on under the PiL name. The single "This Is Not A Love Song" (with "Blue Water" as a 12" single B-side), both from the Park South sessions, was released by Virgin Records in September 1983 and went to no.5 in the UK single charts.

In summer 1983, in PiL's absence, Keith Levene took the unfinished album tapes and did his own mix. He then flew over to London and presented them to Richard Branson as the finished new PiL album for Virgin Records, but John Lydon decided to completely abandon the tapes and re-record the whole album from scratch with session musicians. This new version of Commercial Zone became This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get in 1984.

Levene decided to put the album out himself on the American market and founded the label PIL Records Inc. for this one-off release. The first limited pressing was released in November 1983 and was heavily imported to the UK and European market. A second pressing (with the track listing changed around and a shorter mix of "Bad Night") followed in August 1984 in an edition of 30,000 copies, to compete directly with the official re-recorded album This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get. Virgin Records promptly took legal actions and stopped the distribution and any further re-pressings of Commercial Zone.

Commercial Zone

PIL on myspace

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. +/- Rob's House 7".

S.I.D.S. describe themselves as “a synth-punk trio from Atlanta. No electronics-lite here, just great driving punk rock done with keyboards, in the tradition of the Screamers and early Tuxedo Moon.” I’ll add that The Liars, Devo, and Throbbing Gristle also probably feature prominently in their record collections. Kind of dancy, kind of dark-wave, heavily distorted songs with frazzled bullhorn vocals shouted from the end of a very long corridor and vaguely evil John-Carpenter’s-Halloween-synths overtop a more intricate than expected, high-register drum kit.

Supposedly, the live version of the band includes a cardboard cutout of Sid Vicious playing a pre-programmed Yamaha keyboard. Awesome.

Plus Minus

SIDS on myspace

Liquid Liquid. Liquid Liquid.

Bass and drum (though not drum n' bass). Skeletal, tribal, punk-funk that's slinkier and tighter than a line of blow off the Thin White Duke's thin, white ass.

Liquid Liquid bubbled up from that period in early 80's New York when disco, rap, punk, no wave, and the cacophony of the street merged into a new mutant sound. Like Homer Simpson's demand that BTO just get to the chorus in Taking Care of Business, Liquid Liquid (and their labelmates ESG and the Bush Tetras) just wanted to find the core of a song—the part that jiggled the jello in your brain goo—and let it ride. Distilling drums, cowbells, Latin congas, Fela Kuti's afrobeat marathons, reggae, gamelan, and whatever rhythm the kids were banging out in the park, Liquid Liquid pounded out a hypnotic groove that's echoed through the Talking Heads, PIL, !!!, LCD Soundsystem, and Mi Ami.

Liquid Liquid

Liquid Liquid on myspace

Official website

Doddodo. Limited Express & Marousa Splits.

She's a dada-core glee-club, here to give your hard drive a new haircut.

Splits

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

Doddodo. Donomichi.

Like a bag full of overly caffeinated ninja-weasels running riot over a roomfull of broken casios, slicing and splicing thirty years of hip-hop/electro/noise, Doddodo has no use for genres or conventions. Public Enemy, Austrian waltzes, Add N to (x), harpsichords, random sound samples, and cartoon music get gleefully fed into a plunderphonic blender until they come out sounding like the Sound of Music fed through "Willy Wonka's Nightmare Emporium and Pants Shittery".



Only....a lot more fun.

Donomichi

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

Doddodo. Sample Bitch Story.

I normally don't repost stuff I just found on other blogs (h/t Autofunction), but this was so insanely good, I couldn't resist it. Once again, using nothing but a sampler and a casio keyboard, some Japanese kid manages to make an album so immensely fun that it obliterates everything else. Celtic flutes, calliope music, old-school record scratching, j-pop, rap, and video game music gets spliced and layered overtop a frenzy of stellar break beats that might be what the Boredoms would have sounded like if they'd been around in early 80's New York during the mutant disco/rap/no wave scene.

I've tracked down a couple more albums that I'll be posting in the coming days.

Sample Bitch

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

I Am the World Trade Center. Out of the Loop.

Things did not work out so well for I Am the World Trade Center. First, there's perhaps the unluckiest choice in band names, ever (The name and this album existed before the attacks. Also, the title of track number 11? September. Oooooo, spooky) and then singer Amy Dykes was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma (last I heard, she was in remission, thankfully). I notice that their website is gone and their myspace page hasn't been updated since 2008, so I assume they've retired. Such dour associations unfairly color their actual output of groovalicious tweetronica.

This is charming, roller-disco, bedroom dance music that probably had heads bobbing at the indie record store that went out of business five years ago, but never saw a sweaty body slamming on a dancefloor. They were on Kindercore, after all. Amy has a sweet voice that makes me think of an off-kilter Debbie Harry, and Daniel Geller constructs some terrifically catchy loops that bring to mind the frothy reveries of St. Etienne trying to produce a Ladytron record. Everything is jam-packed with jolly, bleepy sounds and bouncing, squiggly keyboard chirps. It's unabashed, homemade fun, like an Etsy version of New Order.

Out of the Loop

IATWTC on myspace

Kitchen and the Plastic Spoons. Best Off.

Wonderfully manic, deranged, tightly-wound, minimal, cold-wave synth band that sounded like a Teutonic Siouxsie fronting Liliput covering Devo. Fantastically barking mad in all the right ways. This was out of print for a while, but I believe you can buy a copy from the band on their myspace page.

Now is the time on Sprockets vhen ve dance: Happy Funeral, Liberty, The Poet (kind of bauhaus-y), Filmen, Polska Korridoren, Instrumental

Best Off

K&TPS on myspace

K&TPS official website

V/A. Bro Zone. States Rights Records.

1. E*Rock feat YACHT on programming and DJ Hot Air Balloon on shouts - Bro Up 2005
2. Dirty Projectors - Nevermind
3. Bobby Birdman - I've Been Away
4. Hooliganship - Tropycal
5. White Rainbow - oooo yeah freedom 96
6. YACHT - Drawing in the Dark
7. Lucky Dragons - Mini Peace 5(Mint Aoa)
8. Jib Kidder - Yall Want That Drell
9. Atole - ¡Pancho!
10. Paper - Keep Distancing
11. Parenthetical Girls - Puritanically Yours
12. [[[[VVRSSNN]]]] - Return of [[[[VVRSSNN]]]]
13. Cains & Abels - Opportunity (Summer Moon Illustration)
14. Franz Prichard and Alex Bundy feat. Bobby Birdman - Deeper Vision, Pale Shadow (I Am The Ghost)
15. World - Rejoice in the U of the Flute
16. Thanksgiving - 99 Cents Bag of Chips
17. Dear Nora & Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Hot Boyz
18. Hooliganship - Meditation Song
19. S. American Agriculture - Close Your Eyes....
20. Kanda - In Celebration of Karaoke
21. Manta - Samantha
22. Golden Shoulders - Let My Burden Be
23. YACHT - Holy Sh (Demo Version)
24. Lucky Dragons - Ivy Girl
25. The Watery Graves of Portland - Caracas
26. The Kallikak Family - Dulce De Leche
27. White Rainbow - FROOZZZZZMIOP
28. Bobby Birdman featuring Little Wings - Dreemz
29. Kid Finish - Loving My People
30. Jib Kidder - Pattern of Plant Sabbath

Bro Zone

V/A. Own Zone. States Rights Records.

1. Lucky Dragons - Fake Is Forever
2. Bobby Birdman - And Then It Begins
3. The Blow - Hey Boy (DJ Aldar Forkmin "Alpha-Club" Remix)
4. YACHT - Sometimes I Doubt Your Committment...
5. Andrew Kaffer - Why (Do You Doubt Me Baby?)
6. Thanksgiving - Grandfather Dawn
7. The Dirty Projectors - So Stingy U Reign
8. The September Equation - How Much It Takes
9. MAY.23/2/0/0/7 - October 17th 2008
10. Parenthetical Girls - Love Connection (O Mix)
11. Andrew Kaffer & Adam Bayer - X1
12. Thanksgiving - The Lake At Night
13. Lucky Dragons - Mo Cheeks Edit
14. The Badger King - You Absent Referent
15. Dear Nora - Hey Tiger
16. YACHT - A Head That Smells So Good
17. Bobby Birdman - As Heavy As My Name
18. Jimmyjames - Hater
19. Portland Rhythm Makers - Struggle Riddim
20. MAY.23/2/0/0/7 - May 24th 2003
21. The Dirty Projectors - Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego
22. YACHT - Lulling You
23. Adam Forkner - Re-creation of the audio section of the White Rainbow Full Spectrum Instalation Feb 1-3rd @ The CCA Gallery, S.F. CA
24. Parenthetical Girls - Love Connection (X Mix)

Own Zone

Spoozys. Astral Astronauts.

I'm sure there are lots of genres and traditions in Japanese music that I would never pick up on, not being a native listener. Similarly, I often get the feeling that, to non-western ears, Led Zeppelin, The B-52's, Add N to X, Duane Eddy, and Devo could all be in the same band. That band would be the Spoozys. You'd think that would suck, but it's actually glitter-coated-cotton-candy-disco-balls-in-a-laser-blender glee.

Astral

Spoozys website (in Japanese)

Whale. Pay for Me.

Whale hailed from Sweden, and, having noted that their country made great porn but lousy music, decided to combine the two. Having already filled an album with sleazy/cheesy songs like Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe, I'll Do Ya, and Young Dumb n' Full of Cum, they naturally decided to pay tribute to the master of all things dirty and sexxy by covering Prince's Darling Nikki. As I recall, Buzzbox Babe was pretty rockin', too.

Whale

Whale wikipedia entry