Le Tigre : Rock or Rot?

I'm a little taken aback by the overwhelmingly negative response so far. I think Le Tigre are fantastic. Really catchy quirky electronic pop music shot through with the old Bikini Kill attitude. And Kathleen Hanna is dead cool.

The Need, on the other hand, were great -- I've always wondered why they don't get more attention than they seem to.

Hot Topic name dropps my ex-video professor, which makes me not but ONE FUCKING DEGREE AWAY FROM KATHLEEN HANNA!

When KH ended the set of the firt Bluestocking show, she did a cartwheel into full split.

Like, awsome. Oh wow!

it still pisses me off though when some of these bands are held up as geniuses in a gensture of "scene solidarity." post-riot grrl and it's rhetoric tries to set itself up as immune from aesthetic criticism, mostly because none of the music makes it out to a wider discourse. (hampered a bit as k and kill rock stars become bigger labels.) i can't wait for this one to hit google.

And excuse the word "politics" to describe a human's natural right to be proud of who they are...it's my programming into language.

and a side note to maryann's comment would be: how much of grrrl-outsider culture, despite its claims of striking back against the patriarchy etc, is structured in ways that echo the conventions of 'cool' in the so-called oppressive space? i'd say a lot; i think tom's piece on the gossip is an insightful window into this tendency.

So I don't think I could say whether they're rock or rot. It just depends on the choices you want to make: Do you want to live somewhere pleasant and agreeable or take a chance at being weird and uncertain?

true of kathleen hanna, but i found it pretty wierd that for a while i didn't know whether one (jd samson, i think) was a man or a woman. Le Tigre are good and enjoyable but they do rely on cool cliches,

"cool" is what you see it as. trying to distance oneself from what is "cool" is a pretty "cool" thing to do, don't you think? i do.
i like le tigre, they are fun, and the music is unpretentious. but i find the uncompromising nature of kathleen hanna's politics quite hard to relate to. its a fine line between being uncompromising and being closedminded.

They are FUN!

I don't really care what Kathleen is onnabout, but _she_ does, she really does and that's one of the things that makes the music so great. Okay she's an idiot, but aren't we all?

http://www.geocities.com/hellaneotwee/bands.html

MY MY METROCARD

I thought that song was about the joys of having a travel pass/rider card for the New York underground system. Then I listened to it properly and read some stuff about it and it seems to be whining about a mayor of NY who I've never heard of before or since.

Meh, it's great either way.

I'm quite positive that if the crowd at LT's live show in DC was only composed of people who were there for the music and not just for the left-wing solidarity blah blah, we would have had more room to get down. You could say the same thing about a lot of shows I've seen recently.

tons of ppl in Addis Ababa know about him due to 9/11 so i can understand surprise at not knowing who he is.

Why was he knighted/Nobeled/Personned? What did he actually _do_? I really don't know much about that terrorist attack last year.
Great pictures on TV - yes I know they were horrific but they were also amazing.
Then lots of smoke and mirrors about who did what to who and why and how it can all be sorted out if we just kill the right people -what all wars seem to come down to.

congratulations. I never thought anyone would manage to say anything worse than "I don't like ugly lesbians" on this thread, but you did it.

Did you watch the pictures? More than once? Why? You didn't have to did you?

Thousands of people dying in an event that was sure to have repurcussions for decades with huge clouds of smoke and screaming airliners. If it had been a film it would have won a special effects oscar.

But it wasn't a film, thousands of people died. This is why I don't watch the news.

Most people who saw the pictures had no direct involvement with the events. Their daily lives changed little (though their thinking might have done). They watched TV, passing time in a manner of their own choosing rather than, say, going for a walk or playing chess. The pictures on TV were for most people entertainment, even though they wouldn't admit it.

Sure they wouldn't choose these things to happen just to be entertained, but they are entertained by them nonetheless.

This is why I don't watch the news.

You may avoid the news because you'd like to think that in doing so, you'll avoid the weird, cruel detachment from the concerns of other human beings when people confuse terror for entertainment. But by shrugging off what people felt on 9/11 and afterwards as a mere species of vicarious thrill, you yourself are showing a weird, cruel detachment from the concerns of human beings. So fuck off.

I absolutely cannot wait for Ally's response to this.

I'm sorry Michael, that's not what I meant at all.
It's probably my fault for mis-writing it rather than yours for misreading it.
I can't always express in writing what I mean. I don't mean that people are thrilled by the news at all. They are mostly horrified. They should be horrified, I am horrified.

There are people in the world that would do those things. How could anyone do that? What could possibly be going through their minds that they think killing thousands of innocent people is a good idea?

I avoid the news because of the terrible things that happen which I can't do anything about. I _do_ care about the people involved and what they felt, I can't detach myself from them. Watching makes me feel helpless and sad for those - I can't do anything about it. It's not as if my watching helps those involved - a public display of sympathy can help but no one knows I'm watching so they don't know that I _do_ sympathise.

All I mean when I say that people watch the news as a form of entertainment is that they use it to fill in their time (usually leisure time). They do don't they? Tell me I'm wrong about that. That's not a challenge, if I am wrong I genuinely want to know it.

I probably would watch the news if it didn't effect me so much.
It's also a source of information. I don't mean people enjoy the tragedies, but they must watch it for some reason that I don't claim to understand.

Stockhausen to thread!

I have absolutely nothing else to say cos the WTC thing isn't worth any of our time.

messageboard poster in interweb anonymity shockah!!!

Meirion: following the news "helps" the people involved by giving you the information you need to vote, act, organize, spend, or protest accordingly. Your paying attention is what holds others back from doing things they know will upset you. By your logic all of us unconcerned citizens would mentally vacate the Earth, staring off across the desert while governments and NGOs and terrorists and militias ran freely about carrying out their business. Do you pay taxes? It's the news that tells you what you bought.

Ned: in the "sources of information about the world" category, I think the FOLLOWING NEWS vs. STARING AT A WALL, FITE issue is pretty much settled? This is beyond the question of what source of news -- I'm only suggesting that we should all try to absorb some form of information about developments in the world.

Nabisco you make a very good point:
Meirion: following the news "helps" the people involved by giving you the information you need to vote, act, organize, spend, or protest accordingly. Your paying attention is what holds others back from doing things they know will upset you.
(Why is the word 'helps' is in quotes?)

But this I don't agree with because you claim I said something which I didn't:
By your logic all of us unconcerned citizens would mentally vacate the Earth, staring off across the desert while governments and NGOs and terrorists and militias ran freely about carrying out their business.

I'm not suggesting that everyone stops watching the news, all I said was that I don't watch it.
Is that what I've really done wrong? That I don't watch the news? I end up knowing most of the things that are on the news anyway because I hear it on the radio or talk about it with friends, and I do watch or read it sometimes. I know what's going on in my local area. I am concerned about what's going on in the world. It would be a bad thing if no one paid any attention.

You separate concerned citizens from governments, NGOs (non-government organisations?), terrorists and militias when in fact all of those are real people too and they are all more concerned than the average, concerned enough to do something.
I wish the terrorists weren't concerned enough to do something.

Do you pay taxes? It's the news that tells you what you bought.
Yes I pay taxes and I vote. You get lots of information about where the money goes from sources other than the news.
Whether or not you can get medical care, how safe you feel in your bed at night, the state of the roads - they all tell you something and none of them are mediated.

Ned: in the "sources of information about the world" category, I think the FOLLOWING NEWS vs. STARING AT A WALL, FITE issue is pretty much settled? This is beyond the question of what source of news -- I'm only suggesting that we should all try to absorb some form of information about developments in the world.

Yes we should all absorb some information about the world. Tomorrow I am going to sit down and really watch a news broadcast. I will take notes because that helps me and really try to see what I've been missing. I'm not being sarcastic, I don't like sarcasm, I will really sit down and watch the 6 O'clock news and really pay attention.

As for the taxes: yes, we all receive a decent amount of firsthand information about how well our governments function. But we can't experience it all (I have no interest in personally observing, for instance, the U.S. welfare system!), and moreover our firsthand knowledge doesn't always tell us what we can do about the things we experience -- in other words, my personal experience of high crime or bad roads can't tell me which of two politicians has more effective ideas for making these things better. As for how safe you feel in your bed at night: assuming there's no one crouching in the closet, how safe you "feel" is entirely mediated -- it's an evaluation of how likely you think you are, overall, to be victimized in some way. (You get a better statistical sampling of this from media than you do from personal experience or the personal experience of those immediately around you.)

The Presiding Officer of the Welsh Assembly is Dafydd Elis-Thomas. Here.
Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of NYC, has been covered. Here.

Also, I hope those of you in NYC enjoy staying in Manhattan hotels on Sunday night so you can get to work on time, or if you're not that important to your employer, scrunching up in ridiculous Bloomberg-mandated carpools and waiting five hours to get across a fucking bridge (Strikes are fun, that's why we in the military aren't allowed to go on them).

Speaking of strikes, how about that Fire Brigade? Too bad Prescott's such a bumbling ass, you might not have such a problem over there.

Not watching the news because it's horrifying is ridiculous. I don't clean my toilet, because it stinks! I don't take out the trash because it's dirty! I don't do math, because it's hard!
GO KINDERGARTEN

If you plan to complain about anything in a democratic society then your duty as a citizen is to be informed and to develop sound opinions on policy. Otherwise you'll just elect people based on name recognition which ultimately results in dynastic BULLSHIT like a certain world's only superpower is dealing with right now. So if you don't watch the news and you don't keep up, go live in the goddamned woods and don't try to share with me your paltry insignificant little nuggets of wisdom like 'war is bad'.

Because you're not doing anything to stop it. The very least you can do in a democracy is to be informed. It's not the least bit difficult in our saturated society to catch fifteen minutes of headlines every night. I WISH we had something as well-rounded as the BBC over here.

Also, did anybody else notice that the new Treasury Secretary ALSO worked under Nixon in '72? I guess Dubyaman is just going to bring back every single living relic from that era if he has to.

Ugh. It's weissebier time.

Did anybody else also notice that CSX stock has dropped 17% during John Snow's tenure as CEO? And that he was (until he resigned after his nomination to Treasury this week) a member of Augusta National Golf Club? And that CSX, under his tenure, did not pay federal income tax in three of the last four years? And that CSX received $164 MN in tax rebates from the federal government?

Fuck this country.

i've also changed my mind on this point, in fact, i can't even understand why i said it in the first place, i'm such a hypocrite.

Anyway.

First album: Rock! Rock!! Rock!!! Rock!!!

Second Album: Rock and Rot.

ha ha i never liked Le Tigre in the first place ... so i gotchas beat!

everything else = rot

Anyway, Le Tigre. Get the debut. Such an instant classic that I knew people who loved it but sold their copies because they knew they'd be able to hear the entire album straight through at any party they went to. The Mr. Lady EP (irksomely, ironically, never released on vinyl) is also pretty much all good, featuring "Bang Bang," their most affecting foray into really ANGRY, no-playing-around politicking - seriously, it makes the hairs go up on the back of my neck, it's fucking great. I started to lose interest on Feminist Sweepstakes - the music just isn't as varied and exciting and the hooks aren't as solid. Still some killer tracks in there though - "FYR" and "Keep On Living" being the best, great, great audience-rousing anthems.

Which brings me to the point at which I sort of forgot about Le Tigre, stopped mentioning them as a favorite band, etc. Then This Island came out, I kind of checked out some Mp3s, didn't really give a shit, but ended up going to their show anyway (the second one of theirs I'd seen - the previous one being on the tour for that totally inessential and bad remix album) and, wow. They still put on a fantastic show. The energy in the room is STRONG, and the band rides it. There's some element of just the exciting living-legend thing of, that's really Kathleen Hanna, right there! But it's a genuinely good show. A great show. I screamed till I was hoarse. This is a band I had given up on, mind you! What's bizarre is that even though everything is all pre-programmed and everything, it still sounds better live. Maybe what helps is the cherry-picking of songs - "TKO" and "After Dark" are about all I need from This Island and that's what you get, I think.

So, summary: buy their first two releases, skip the rest but go see them live by all means, and if you want to read some bloody awful, condescending, shit music writing, check the AMG review of Feminist Sweepstakes. God.

GETTING PUNKED OUT
by V1RG!N!A BR1DG£WA7&R

WHATEVER punkiness this band possessed – and there were brief glimpses during certain tracks (or maybe that was just the yelling) – was smothered by the undeniably wholesome feel Le Tigre projected.

Being a lesbian band is no longer enough in this day, age and city to be controversial or interesting and it especially doesn’t make up for being not very good.

Maybe it was the giggly chit-chat that interspersed the songs. “Thank you guys” and “Are you having an okay time?” were not quite on a par with expletive-ridden abuse Johnny Rotten regularly hurled at his Sex Pistols fans.

But then, Rotten’s audiences were nothing like the clean-cut crowd at Concorde 2, some of whom were barely old enough to drink, let alone bang up hard drugs.

Although the multi-coloured crowd were enthusiastic, it was in more of a nicely brought-up, clappy fashion than a head-banging, stage-diving, puke-on-the-bloke-in-front way. There were cheers but no tears, clapping but no collapsing.

Le Tigre began their 40-minute set with a cover of I’m So Excited – a strange choice for a band who class themselves in the electronic punk category and write their own material.

Lead singer Kathleen showed potential as a professional cater-wauler in the third track, of which I could not understand a word but was the most enjoyable so far.

The whole performance was much enhanced by the coordinated video on the screen behind them and by impressive and wide-ranging techno backing tracks – probably the best thing about the whole gig.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine the girls pulling off the gig without it.

The crowd, though appreciative, just never got going. There was a grittiness missing that may develop over time but somehow it’s doubtful, they were just too clean cut to be a proper punk band, although one of them did say the “f-word” at one point.
It wasn’t clear whether they were all lesbians or just some of them – but as a feminist band what better chance is there to display some blatant girl-on-girl titillation?

Cheap thrills for the crowd, a cool rep for the band but, no, instead, they chose an asexual semaphore-style dance move which became the theme throughout the performance.

A feminist ruse flying in the face of the suggestive floor show that is expected of most lesbian bands? I suspect it was just rubbish dancing.
And the word “lesbian” was only uttered in the guise of song lyrics. Did they not know which town they were in?

However Kathleen did have genuinely hairy armpits so that went some way towards making up for the lack of sexuality displayed – be it homo, hetero or anything at all.

At times, I felt as if I was at a high school gig. At others, I just felt really old.
Hole they’re not – Courtney Love would have jeered and then snogged them all – but, to their credit, they don’t pretend to be either. It seems the crowd felt as I did – not sure, not impressed but not angry or tearful either. Just left with an unfulfilled feeling that I had been shortchanged on the “punk” thing.

My guts were still all in the right place and I hadn’t even broken a sweat.

I like everything apart from This Island, which I've only heard once but I don't think I liked a single thing on it. They're still great live though. Feminist Sweepstakes is pretty good, really! I don't really get why most people only like the 1st album.

PS, the Julie Ruin record is absolutely aces and deserves way more exposure. Really the "first" Le Tigre record in a way, and probably the most diverse thing Hanna's ever put to wax. Search: "Stay Monkey," "Aerobicide," "Breakout A-Town," the whole thing really except for the samples on killrockstars.com, which are what sort of kept me from getting the record for three or four years.

I wonder what Kathleen Hanna's gonna do next...

Man, you guys really flipped out on homeboy for saying he didn't watch the news.

Who gives a fuck if someone in another country doesn't know who Giuliani is...

Anyway, I can't wait...

Hanna needs to put out a solo album...

Did anyone ever check out that MAN album with JD Samson and Ladybug Transistor's Michael O'Neill? Any thoughts?

Anyone who doesn't recognize Deceptacon as the greatest track of the 1990s is searching for meaning in music that would be better served by poetic and philosophic demagogues, just admit it.

like, shieeeet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56hJaRNq8go

Le Tigre before an English audience ca 2005 audience = Diana Ross before a White American audience ca 1964

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23UkIkwy5ZM

audience

New Radio edges it for me, but it's close