Paint Fumes "If It Ain't Paint Fumes it ain't worth a huff."

 

(Get Hip, 2016) Nasty!

Walls of Genius Meets Harry Smith

 

(Walls of Genius, 2015) This group, including outsider musician Little Fyodor, takes the legendary low fi field recordings of The American Anthology of Folk Music, and significantly lowers the fidelity, while raising the weirdo levels. A few moments sound like the Cheech and Chong blind bluesman skit, but most sounds like psychedelics, alien abductions, and mislabeled meds got together to have a highbrow salon that went off the rails.

The Complete Strange Growths by Jenny Zervakis

(2017, Spit & a Half) I loved this mini comic in the 90s, and eagerly devoured every issue, It was the most natural comic I have ever read! Not just because Jenny connects really well with the actual biological world around her, but because it felt like it was being drawn with a pure flow of creative expression, excited to get ink on the page in a way that a more polished visual loses. Not that it s haphazard; the narratives and personal stories seemed thoughtful and considered and important, but  the visual storytelling just felt perfectly authentic, and lovely, and, pardon my redundancy, natural.

Round Eye "s/t," "Monster Vision," LHS/Round Eye split

(2013/2014/2016, Rhttps://roundeyeband.com/) This is a motley crew of American expats living in China and making music that isn't so much dissident or revolutionary in the Tiananman Square Tank Man sense, but more in the punk rock/Zappa/free jazz/Dr. Demento/R. Crumb/Moondog/GWAR/noise sense where everything is possible and often ugly and sometimes funny and always ridiculous. The most obviously impressive element of the ambitious act is that despite living in an ostensibly repressive situation they really don't know what they can't do. No one told them that you can't just ask Steve Mackay from the Stooges to be in your band, but they did, and the sax man recorded and toured with them until he passed. They don't know that Joe Bob Briggs doesn't host albums, popping in before tracks tracks on vinyl, so they booked him. They don't understand not to hang up near-pornographic band posters around Beijing (and that one almost got them deported or worse, so they may know that know). It is hard for legit weirdos to thrive as experimental nutjobs in a country where a cult of personality near-dictator curbs reasonable expectations of freedom and human rights. So it's a good thing these guys moved over to China where things are better these days.  

Lay's Kettle Cooked New York Style Pizza FLavor

 

(Lays) This are 100 times worse than pizza and 38 times worse than a regular potato chip. There is that very untrue statement about there being no bad sex or pizza (discounting sexual assault and Domino's), and if anyone ever tries to tell you there are no bad potato chips make them taste these flavor-challenged atrocities.

MAD books

(Signet/Warner, 1954-1993) During quarantine I attacked a very specific section of my bulging bookshelves. I own a complete set of dog-eared editions of every MAD paperback (one copy of each book, not the dozens of cover variations that a deeper MAD-head would covet). Between 1954 and 1993 MAD Magazine worked with publishers to release about 250 pocket paperbacks, 93 of which were eye-straining reprint compilations, with the rest featuring original material, or books by individual MAD artists compiling new or previously published work (plus a few outliers, like a William Gaines biography, and The Mad Morality, a faith-based reading of MAD's ethics). I read one or two of these a day most of the year. It was a stupid thing to do, as MAD revels in hack-ish, Vaudeville-era expiration date humor, and elbow-in-the-ribs pseudo-Yiddish wordplay. In small doses this is harmless, but ther MAD brain you get from overload iis something else. HOWEVER the artwork by Al Jaffee, (who turned 99 under quarantine this year, and retired), Jack Davis, Sergio Aragones, and a dozen other genuine geniuses (80s-era Paul Peter Porges’ illustrations knock me silly) make the worst jokes worth it. Mort Drucker (who did not make it out of this terrible calendar year) drew some of the best, most hilarious pages in history illustrating jokes that the Full House writer's room would reject. And on the non-too-infrequent occasions when something is actually funny the yucks are more intense after being primed by puerile punnery.  I saved my last Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions tome for the grand finale, and when I finished it i felt more snappy than stupiid for spending my year embracing a unusual gang of idiots.

Mr? Billie McAllister "What a Big Piece of Meat?"

 

(Kent, 1972-ish) I loved the Eddie Murphy Dolemite movie. We interviewed Rudy Ray Moore and worked with him a few times and those were the exact stories he told, but Murphy went further than the great narrative, capturing the optimism and enthusiasm that such a prolific, fiercely independent artist needed to be able to tap into to drive forward, and I like it more than than the similarly-themed (great) Ed Wood movie. Not to mention Davine Joy Randolph's performance as Lady Reed was genuinely incredible. That said, one thing about the world of Rudy Ray that doesn't get explored enough is the gay content. There is a frequent punchline about pivoting without second thought to having sex with a man because no women are around at the moment, and Rudy's right hand man, the great Jimmy Lynch (peripherally played by Mike Epps in Murphy's movie), has whole album sides revisiting this topic. But most interesting is Moore releasing two LPs by drag veterans at the height of his success. Mr? Billie Mcallister was a blues and drag veteran (cutting some singles in the 50s) and her album (and Rudy only refers to her as "her" in his intro, as well as dubbing her "The Lady of Pure Nonsense") is full of confident, dirty diatribes, and decent bawdy blues numbers. Singing about her pussy, joking about dick size, raising the stakes on the Man from Nantucket limerick with dripping semen references, and posing as a castrating chef chopping a pair of naked men's giant sausages on the cover, this is a bold record (if not the funniest in the Kent cannon). The biggest laugh on the album is her story about a man's post -coital complaint, "You got shit on my dick!,"to which she responds, "Motherfucker, what did you expect...peaches and cream?" The other drag album Rudy released around that time, Mr. Jerry Walker, has the comic dressed as a gigantic fairy godmother on the album cover, and has somewhat better songs and funnier jokes than McAllister's. But McAlister's charisma, and anal sex specificity, seems really special, and I imagine catching this show in real life would have been monumental. Now obviously I know that drag performers have ALWAYS fascinated every audience, and I also know that in every industry, especially, in entertainment, there have always been a lot more gay/trans/bi figures than folks talk about. However, what seems interesting in Rudy's world is that they are talking about it. A lot. And not to make fun of the topic, or to shock, but just to laugh at the absurdity of sex. And life. And giant men in gowns talking about dick.

Neal Morse "Songs From November"

 

(Radiant/Metal Blade) When the soaring smooth jazz/Uptown sax solo comes in during the opening track of this Prog veteran's album of poppy, optimistic, faith-filled, post-Jackson Brown singer-songwriter hook fests one thing becomes very clear: Metal Blade is a weirder label than I could imagine even at their Cannibal Corpse/Mentors/Cattle Decapitation heights/depths! 

Dirty Sidewalks "bring down the house lights"

(No-Count, 2017) These Dirty ditties clean up nice! The power pop sheen and energy marry seemingly contradictory shoegaze dreaminess. And the marriage works out!

Motel Universe 2 by Joakim Drescher

 

(Secret Acres, 2020) I am not saying this is the best comic of 2020, but this is truly THE comic of 2020. Drescher's bizarre, raw, upsetting, Mark Beyer-meets-Bosch renderings paint ugly pictures of evil, dysfunctional governments, of impassioned rebellion, and of the dark, oppressive manipulations and labor crimes associated with the tech and style the proletariat turn towards to cope with dark times. This great Dane's work is sadly too real to be surreal.