Category: [Music]

Go west no homo

Village People’s Victor Willis okay with ‘Y.M.C.A’ for Trump and the gays

Victor Willis, one of the Village People’s founders, posted to social media on Monday defending President-elect Donald Trump’s use of the song “Y.M.C.A.” and threatening legal action against any news organization that labels the iconic tune a gay anthem.
Willis, who portrayed the cop with a nightstick in the band, cowrote “Y.M.C.A.” with Jacques Morali who provided the music while Willis provided the lyrics. Morali died of AIDS-related illness in 1978*.
Willis acknowledged he had asked Trump to stop using the song after receiving “over a thousand complaints” from fans.
“With that many complaints, I decided to ask the President-Elect to stop using Y.M.C.A. because his use had become a nuisance to me,” Willis wrote in his post to social media on Monday.
Willis said he reconsidered his decision after seeing so many other artists withdraw the rights to their songs from the President-elect. He said the decision to reissue the licensing agreement with Trump proved financially sound.
“Y.M.C.A. has benefited greatly from use by the President Elect. For example, Y.M.C.A. was stuck at #2 on the Billboard chart prior to the President Elect’s use. However, the song finally made it to #1 on a Billboard chart after over 45 years (and held on to #1 for two weeks) due to the President Elect’s use,” Willis wrote. “The financial benefits have been great as well as Y.M.C.A. is estimated to gross several million dollars since the President Elect’s continued use of the song. Therefore, I’m glad I allowed the President Elect’s continued use of Y.M.C.A. And I thank him for choosing to use my song.”

(*sic. It was actually 1991.)

I like the bit at the end where he stresses he actually supported Kamala Harris in the recent debacle, it’s not like he approves of Trump… just the amount of money Trump’s made him. I like, too, that he’s happy for gay folks to consider it a “gay anthem”, but don’t you dare actually call it that or he’ll sue you.

As for another debacle that has “reached a fever pitch” amid Trump’s continued use of “Y.M.C.A.,” according to Willis, the singer wrote that any branding of the track as a “gay anthem” is “completely misguided” and “damaging to the song.” He also threatened legal action against “each and every news organization that falsely refers” to it as such starting in January 2025, although he personally doesn’t mind if “gays think of the song as their anthem.”
“This assumption is also based on the fact that the YMCA was apparently being used as some sort of gay hangout, and since one of the writers [Jacques Morali] was gay and some of the Village People are gay, the song must be a message to gay people,” Willis wrote. “To that I say, once again, get your minds out of the gutter. It is not … such notion is based solely on the song’s lyrics alluding to [illicit] activity for which it does not.”
“Y.M.C.A.” has indeed been widely adopted by the LGBTQ community over the years, with many interpreting the lyrics as references to the gym chain’s reputation as a popular cruising site back in the day — plus, the track comes from a 1978 album titled Cruisin’. Even so, Willis’ latest post is not the first time he’s sought to distance the track from the gay anthem label, writing in a 2020 Facebook post: “No one group can claim Y.M.C.A. as somehow belonging to them or somehow their anthem. I won’t allow my iconic song to be placed in a box like that.”

So you don’t really want teh pooves to claim the song as “their” anthem, but you’re fine with exploiting that demographic to make a career and a fortune out of them. Hope any lawsuit Victor does try gets laughed out of court. What a cunt.

RIP Quincy Jones

As I noted when he celebrated his 90th birthday last year, Quincy Jones did well for a man who was supposedly dying of not one but two brain aneurysms in 1974, beating them and living another 50 years… his passing the other day has obviously generated a lot of comment on social media, amidst which I saw someone saying about how they were discovering just how much music he was behind, and, well, I made my own discovery:

I have known this piece of music for years (I gather it was the Austin Powers movies that brought it back), but have never known what it was, never knew its name, and consequently had even less idea who might’ve written it; indeed, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was actually a recent composition like a bit of stock music or something pastiching 60s lounge music or some such. But then last night Youtube suggested this somewhat randomly, so I clicked on the video… and OH! It’s THAT music! It’s ACTUAL 60s music! And Quincy Jones wrote it? I will indeed be damned. So if other people are amazed to discover some of the things “Q” was responsible for, so am I…

“Morals”?

I’ve never actually heard a note of As I Lay Dying’s music, cos metalcore just isn’t really my thing, but I know all about their… difficult history; it’s not every band whose lead singer causes the breakup of the band by hiring a hitman to kill his wife, then reforms the band after getting out of jail and carrying on his career… but over the years most of the rest of the band got jack of him, and now the ringers he replaced them with have done the same…

American metalcore band As I Lay Dying now contains just two members after guitarist Ken Susi, drummer Nick Pierce, and bassist/singer Ryan Neff departed the band. At the time of publication, As I Lay Dying now consists of vocalist Tim Lambesis and rhythm guitarist Phil Sgrosso. […]
“My time playing with As I Lay Dying has come to an end today,” Susi wrote, adding that he left with “so much gratitude” for everyone who’s supported his career to date.
Explaining that he had “full knowledge” of the band’s “heightened dramatic history” before he joined, he said that he had a “drive” to play “great music with great friends.”
His statement continued, “Unfortunately, my personal morals have recently been tested to a breaking point, and it’s now the saddest ending to what could have been the greatest second chance for this band.”

Ken, my brother in metal, FUCK YOUR PERSONAL MORALS. You knew the band’s history, by your own admission, and you were still happy to join it. Where were your personal morals two years ago when you did that? I mean, I don’t respect ANY of the other band members for rejoining Lambesis (I do think it’s faintly hilarious that the only one apparently still with him is the one who reportedly took the most convincing to come back to the band), except insofar as three of them quit again later, but I respect these other three replacement characters even less. Morals? Morals had piss all to do with it…

RIP Paul Di’Anno

Apparently even he agreed Bruce Dickinson was the definitive Maiden vocalist, but let’s not discount his own good work out front of them on those first two albums; and, to be fair, he was in the band a lot longer than most of the other early members of the band, which was a chaotic affair that didn’t really settle down until a couple of years after this stuff…

RIP the Angel of Frequency

And it’s goodbye to Ollie Olsen, pioneer of electronic and experimental music in Australia since the punk era. He’s been an exceedingly ill man for a lot of years now with multiple system atrophy, so his passing isn’t surprising, but still it’s another door closed on that time and place…


Firstly, here’s one I’ve only just discovered via a friend on FB: Olsen’s own Whirlywirld version of “Rooms for the Memory”, which would be redone by a certain Michael Hutchence from INXS for the Dogs in Space soundtrack…


…and the aforementioned pop hit version. Obviously sounds much bigger and more mid-80. I love this. I also love that it was a top ten chart hit here when the film was rated R, so a bunch of Hutchence’s younger fans wouldn’t even have been able to see it…



Logically, therefore, we continue with the other great Hutchence/Olsen collaboration, Max Q. “Only fear under another name…”


And we probably shouldn’t overlook Ecco Homo, which Olsen put together for another kind of extraordinary figure, Troy Davies…


This was where Olsen went in the 90s, you can kind of hear it starting to happen on “Sometimes” but he started properly trancing out with Third Eye and the Psy-Harmonics label…


I can’t find a Youtube video for The Reals, Olsen’s first band in which he played guitar, and whose “Nothing to Say” (on the old Do the Pop Redux compilation from years ag0—try hunting that up) has one of the most obnoxious guitar sounds I’ve ever heard (and granted that recording is a rehearsal demo so not an even remotely professional one, but still), so I’m ending us instead where we began with Whirlywirld. RIP Ian.

Karajan would never

I don’t suppose classical music actually has much of a public reputation for its practitioners misbehaving. Obviously it’s a field in which there have been and must still be dickheads, but I can’t think of many stories of orchestra members attacking each other mid-performance Jane’s Addiction-style, or so fucked on drugs they couldn’t play like Syd Barrett, that sort of thing. However, John Eliot Gardiner recently chose to make a public shithead of himself by physically assaulting a singer for the heinous crime of coming off the podium on the wrong side (?!) during a performance of Les Troyens last year. This, however, has had fewer complications for his career than you might think, apparently:

We learned some time ago that two of the ensembles Gardiner founded, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, would no longer be working with the conductor following his physical attack on a company member during a concert last summer. The rest, you could hardly make up. In a move that looks dangerously close to being motivated by spite, Gardiner looks set, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, to gazump those two ensembles in the most brazen manner.
Does the following sound normal to you? On 14 December, the Monteverdi Choir and EBS will perform two Bach cantatas and a Charpentier Mass at the concert hall in Hamburg, fulfilling a contract agreed many months ago. Given the decision by those ensembles not to continue working with Gardiner following his violent conduct, the conductor Christophe Rousset was engaged by the ensembles themselves to lead the concert.
Then, a few weeks ago, the Elbphilharmonie issued an oddly contorted press release. It announced that Gardiner would conduct exactly the same programme, a week earlier, with the musicians of his newly established ensemble The Constellation Choir and Orchestra. Just to make sure the Monteverdi Choir and EBS were thrown completely under the bus, the Elbphilharmonie got all excited about Gardiner’s new ensembles and offered anyone who had booked tickets to the Monteverdi/EBS concert the chance to exchange them for tickets to the Constellation one instead.

Damn. I suppose this is kind of the classical equivalent of Taylor Swift re-recording her old albums, except that “Jiggy” doesn’t own that music in the way she owns hers. Any ensemble’s entitled to perform it, Gardiner has no exclusive right to it, and this is just him being a dickhead. Kind of impressed by the apparent speed with which he’s pulled his new orchestra together and made it ready to do these shows, just not so sure how I feel about the people who’ve agreed to join it, cos I assume they know about the punching incident (the latter, for what it’s worth, seems to have just been the last straw, with Gardiner apparently having had a reputation for being short with his performers for years)… but that’s the show for you, it has to go on, doesn’t it.

What every music festival needs

Metal music festival loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest

If you were planning to go to the Shell Shock II music festival in Orlando and you like Kyle Rittenhouse … well, you are in luck.
But if you were hoping to see a handful of the bands — including the headliner, Evergreen Terrace — there, well … they apparently don’t want to be on the same card as Kyle Rittenhouse.
So, instead, the new headliner for Shell Shock II, per Loudwire, will be a Slipknot cover band.
You read that right, the festival is now, apparently, down to a cover band as its headliner after announcing that Rittenhouse would attend.

I have no idea what this festival is like, nor do I know anything about the apparently four bands that have pulled out of it, but I have even less idea what the organisers were thinking. I mean, music festivals generally don’t need people making speeches anyway, metal festivals need them even less, and none of them need this cunt. So what do the organisers have to say for themselves?

“We have been silent,” a post on The Antihero Podcast Instagram reads. “But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.”

Oh. So it wasn’t ideological when they hired (I nearly wrote that as “whored” for some reason; Kyle whores himself) Rittenhouse to speak at the festival, of all the fucking people they could’ve hired to speak at it if they had to hire anyone to speak in the first place? And getting a Slipknot cover band as your replacement headliner… THAT was the best you could do? None of the other bands still playing were good enough to promote? The Antihero Podcast, by the way, are a bunch of Trumpeters, which I learned from their Instagram and was somehow not surprised by this. I can’t find anything about the bands still playing the event, but whoever they are I’d be looking at them at least slightly askance from now on if they’re still OK with sharing the stage with Kill Rittenhouse. Damn shame, cos the festival’s actually in aid of veterans with PTSD, it’s a worthy charity event and that’s evidently what the bands thought they were signing up for… after this, though, I’d be surprised if Shell Shock III is ever a thing.