By Kevin Longrie
Last month, I wrote about a collaboration between Jay-Z and Kanye West, one which was met with great critical praise and fan adoration. It seemed like a reasonable, and a perfect, fit. But this month, a collaboration has surfaced which is so bizarre, so utterly unexplainable that when I first heard it, I was convinced it was an Internet joke: Jack White produced a new single by the Insane Clown Posse which samples Mozart.
Truth is, after all, stranger than fiction.
Before you go reevaluating the intellectual depth of ICP (which, by the way, you can be sure doesn’t exist after watching the “Miracles” video—magnets, how do they work?), consider that it is a bawdy, throwaway song by Mozart called “Leck Mich Im Arsch” which, loosely translated, means “Lick Me in My Ass.” This seems like the perfect spot for an Anchorman reference; something like “Stay Classy, ICP.” But it would be out of place, logically. The Insane Clown Posse was never classy. I’m not even sure they attended many actual classes. How did the American public school system fail these two gentlemen so completely? Mr. Bush, there are at least two children left way, way behind.
A leak of the song has hit the Interwebs, and it’s worse than you could’ve thought. No one part of the song feels comfortable or at home with the others. ICP, Mozart and Jack White’s producerial presence all seem to smash together like some kind of, well, trainwreck.
Jack White is known as a bit of an eccentric, and this recent collaboration will no doubt be chalked up to that. But I’d rather think of it this way: he decided it would be really funny to play a joke on everyone that’s ever followed or respected his good music and dismissed ICP’s bad stuff. Jack White is the ultimate troll.
Moving on from that which causes so many ears to bleed to news which will cause so many ears to weep. Sigur Rós, a band comprised of charming and sensitive Icelandic gentleman who have written some of the most uplifting or sad or spiritual or life-affirming songs in the last 20 years, is set to release a new live album and DVD called Inni.
The band is releasing a special edition which will contain “an exclusive and unique-to-each-box artefact [sic] from the show itself in a numbered, printed envelope,” an etched vinyl 7-inch of “Lúppulagid,” four photographic prints, a badge, and “a black opaque envelope with 10 pieces of A5 light sensitive paper with instructions and special URL for posting your homemade images to the sigur-ros.co.uk website.” Fans of good music will no doubt be lining up for these; or at least, you know, sitting in bean-bag chairs at home and clicking on links and filling out credit card information.
Anthrax and Testament are touring together again for the first time in over a decade. When reached for comment, the bands’ representation said that “there just wasn’t enough herpes or hepatitis going around these days.”
