Duran Duran, Three To Get Ready

By Jemiah Jefferson

“No obscure cheeses.”
—John Taylor, giving directions of what the band wants on its tour rider

The film opens on a very dry, very droll Nick Rhodes rejecting most of a series of recent photos of the band. We see that he’s joined with Simon Le Bon, just as dubious about most of the pictures, but he does helpfully supply, “I like the shape in the middle.” The empty space might have once been occupied by their departed band mates, Andy Taylor and Roger Taylor. Without even meaning to, this signals a new Duran Duran than expected by the legions of loyal global fans seduced by their mixture of surrealism, style, and raw sensuality, but accustomed to the five faces and iconic mops of expertly teased hair.

This is Three to Get Ready, the 1986 documentary depicting a band all too aware of their market share, refusing to be fractured, and yet straining towards expressing the creativity embodied in the core members of Le Bon, Rhodes, and the remaining Taylor: John, a former art student, lover of punk rock and disco, and at this time, in the grips of raging cocaine and hashish addiction yet no less tenderly gorgeous as he manifested in the earliest days of Duran Duran (and was barely out of his teens).
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Trio The Band: Their Greatest Hit

By Emily Carney

Trio is a band generally known for two momentous things. First, they were obviously a trio (consisting of singer Stephan Remmler, guitarist Gert Krawinkel, and drummer Peter Behrens). Second, they had one of the biggest hits of 1982, even if you’ve never heard of them before reading this little tribute.
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Do You Want Trombone Or Do You Want The Truth?

By Jimmy Ether

In the documentary Kill Your Idols, Lydia Lunch expressed her frustration with the current music scene:

“The commodification and homogenization of especially bass, guitar, and drums is the downfall of music. Where’s the fucking tuba? A trombone! Anything but a bass, guitar, and drums!”

That seems an odd statement coming from someone who very successfully used those very instruments with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks to challenge rock conventions along side bands like D.N.A., Mars, and many of the other bands from the influential New York City No Wave scene. To a certain extent, she has a point.
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Les Oraliens, Or How I Found The Scariest YouTube Video Ever

By Emily Carney

Obviously, I am more than familiar with what scares me the most in my real life; in my attempts to look for “scary” videos for this issue of Popshifter, I stumbled across a lot of scenes from horror films, bad attempts at karaoke, videos of methamphetamine addicts doing their “thing,” clips of “actor”/mess Paz de la Huerta, and of course Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video (which I never watched until I was in my twenties. . . no kidding).

However, I can’t say that any of these actually frightened me; at most, they were mildly amusing. So, I became blocked on what to do for this article. . . that is, until last night, when I discovered a masterpiece of an absolutely terrifying kids’ show.
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Black Sabbath: The Secret History Of Black-Jewish Relations

By Hanna

The goal of Black Sabbath: The Secret History of Black-Jewish Relations, a compilation released by the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation, was to “gather the US history of Black-Jewish relations into a selective pop musical guide.” While a lot has been published about black and Jewish musical influences, there hasn’t been an actual musical guide to Jewish music by black artists, and this is what the Society set out to accomplish.

Of course, it’s slightly less universalist in its approach than that; Black Sabbath focuses on the ’30s through the ’60s, a time of enormous racial oppression for both groups, and also a time when the cultural exchange between the two was especially great. This really shines through in this compilation; for all that it’s only one CD. It is an amazing effort and even more amazing in that it succeeds.
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Hello, Allan!

By John Lane

Collectors’ Choice Music has just released eight out-of-print novelty albums (encompassing the years 1962-1967) by the singular Allan Sherman. Given that the novelty album is an art form now seemingly owned by Weird Al Yankovic, one could be forgiven for not understanding the lineage from whence Weird Al sprang.
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Don’t Be Afraid Of The DVD?

By Less Lee Moore

As a fan of the 1973 made-for-TV movie Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, the news of the upcoming remake made me skeptical.

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark was one of those movies from my childhood that could scare me just thinking about it. I can’t even remember if I actually ever saw it, but like I said a few years back, I always remembered it as “the movie with the things in the fireplace.”
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GOLD: Before Woodstock, Beyond Reality DVD

By Matt Keeley

GOLD: Before Woodstock, Beyond Reality is a 40-year-old lost film starring a comedy hero, Del Close. Like another film by a comedy hero, Savages (a Merchant-Ivory film written by Michael O’Donoghue), it’s a noble failure.
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Top Five Nerd References In Hip Hop

By Matt Demers
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Billy Squier, Don’t Say No 30th Anniversary Edition

By Christian Lipski

When there’s a re-release of anything to be reviewed, the question is always there: what am I actually reviewing? Am I revisiting the material, or the re-packaging?

I have a feeling that what I should focus on are the new features, in this case the liner notes, the mastering, and the bonus tracks. But before that I will say there’s a reason Don’t Say No was chosen for reissue, and that’s because the songs are loud and ballsy but also sassy. I didn’t pick up the album for myself for many years after its release in 1981, but by that time I already knew most of the songs by heart. Like Foreigner 4 or Journey’s Escape, it permeated the airwaves that year.
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