Alice Bag's got a book out!!!!

[the_future_modernes]

Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story [Paperback]. Get it now!


Q&A: L.A. Punk Rocker Alice Bag on Life as a Chicana Rebel and Violence Girl, her new book.

Punk literature is often given to tiresome romanticizing and rehashed clichés, but Alice Bag's recent autobiography, Violence Girl, offers a poignant, personal story from the unique perspective of a poor Hispanic woman raised in East LA. The book focuses on Bag grappling with her Chicana identity and feminist politics while fronting her seminal 1970's punk band, The Bags. In the radical punk scene of late-70's Hollywood, she found the strength to reconcile a tumultuous relationship with her abusive father and acquired skills that propelled her pursuit of political activism and teaching later in life. In this interview, Alice reflects on her early experience with punk and glam rock and analyzes the role of her book and persona in the larger feminist and Chicano movement. In the Bay Area this week, Bag will be reading and performing short acoustic sets: Jan. 11, San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch; Jan. 12: Amoeba Music, Berkeley; Jan. 13: 1-2-3-4 Go! Records, Oakland.

How has the book tour been going?
It's been great. My publisher is very small, so I book all my readings, do the networking and even have to buy my own books and then resell them to stores where I'm reading. The feedback I receive is really what keeps me going. It encourages me to book another show and drive across the country to some place I've never been before and sleep on somebody's couch so that I can read in front of strangers.

Violence Girl Trailer Survive - The Bags

What do you think of the progress that female musicians have made in the past 30 years?
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Interview w/ Alice Bag

On November 27th 2011, Alicia Velasquez "Alice Bag" of first wave L.A. punk band, The Bags gave an in store performance/reading at Dr. Strange Records as one of many stops on tour for her recently published book, Violence Girl. Afterwards, she was kind enough to answer a few questions for the Punk Globe readers.


The Bags - Survive
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The Bags - We will bury you (1978)
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The Bags are not the only musical group she's fronted:

Alice Bag on Signs of The Time
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Brief interview and profile of Alice Bag aka Alicia Armendariz on a local Los Angeles TV show. Alice talks about Las Tres, music, bilingual education and stargazing.


Alice Bag's Blog: Diary of a Bad Housewife: Wherein Ms. Bag gets to babble, babble on

Interesting posts include: Work that ho, tilling the soil of punk feminism

Beginning the world over


Women In LA Punk - Killer


Alice Bag's website. The Bags website. Wikipedia

Flashback: the 5678's

[the_future_modernes]

5678's - Woo Hoo (Reading 2004)

Watch on YouTube

5.6.7.8's "Guitar date"

Watch on YouTube

The 5,6,7,8's Live

Watch on YouTube

Original post here.


What are you listening to?

TISHMA: Rock Princess and Pop Diva of Bengal

[the_future_modernes]

Tishma, a singer, guitarist, keyboardist, composer, songwriter renaissance woman isn't strictly a rock musician. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article, the young woman who released her debut album in 2002, is credited with introduced Bangladesh with a dizzying array of musical styles including r & b, punk-pop, rock, dance-pop, ballads, funk, opera, rap and others, in addition to bringing in glitzy music videos and singing in English and is the first Bengali rapper and hard rock singer on the Bengal subcontinent. In addition to that and more, she's studying to be an engineer. Woman has GOT it!
Now we are primarily interested in the rockier parts of her career, so here we go:

TISHMA - Rock Rajkonna [ Album - "X Factor" (2008)] (Smile Show)

Pankaj feat. Tishma

Tishma : BOYFRIEND (1st English Song by a BD Female Singer, written by TishmA ,2007 )
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TISHMA - Shohor Jure ( Bangla Rock Song )
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TISHMA - Charti Deyal ( Bangla Pop Rock Song )
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TishmA - Urey Jaye (2002)
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Tishma Myspace

Tishma Facebook


List of nine albums on Wikipedia, here.

Cerys Matthews, guitarist and vocalist

[the_future_modernes]

Catatonia - Goldfish and Paracetamol (Live)

THE WELSH ARE COMING! THE WELSH ARE COMING! An Interview with Catatonia's Cerys Matthews 1998 interview

What would you be doing if the band had still gotten nowhere by this stage?

I just wanna sing for the rest of my life, so I'd still be playing in the pubs, places round where I live, y'know. We've been doing this for 5, almost 6 years, and you don't do it to get the approval of others. You do it because you love it. Getting the approval of others means you've got an easier life style and less financial pressures -- less worries about getting money to pay for your fix of music. You expect success, though. You must have faith in what you're doing. It's like the crock at the end of the rainbow, but the biggest buzz is, like, simply singing and playing and listening to stuff you enjoy y'know. And that won't change. I sing all the time, you can't shut me up!

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Catatonia - Lost Cat video
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Catatonia - The Mother of Misogyny.
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Catatonia - Bleed (Live)
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Cerys Matthews was the lead singer of Catatonia, a Welsh band who became famous in Britain and Wales in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the increased fame brought pressure on Ms. Matthews and the relationship between the band deteriorated. In 2001 it seemed that though there was tension, they may have put their troubles behind them.


'I'll end up a spinster, like my role model Anne Widdecombe'

It was June 1999 when it became clear that all was not well with Cerys Matthews. The Welsh singer and the other four members of her band, Britpop darlings Catatonia, were in Australia and New Zealand on tour. Q magazine flew a journalist out to write a cover feature on the band, expecting tales of joyous hi-jinks and alcoholic excess that the gregarious, party-loving Matthews invariably generated. But in Melbourne, things were very different.

The dismayed writer found Catatonia, in his own words, "in the worst state I'd ever seen a band". After months on the road, they were exhausted, homesick and factionalised. The band were scarcely talking to each other. Relations between Matthews and her former boyfriend, songwriter and guitarist Mark Roberts, were particularly bad. She appeared to be coping by taking every breakfast with a side-order of alcohol. When the magazine ran the ensuing gobsmacked feature, the cover line ran "Cerys: I'm in a bad way".

...
In fact, the opposite was true. Matthews set about salvaging her career and her mental state by throwing herself wholeheartedly back into her first love - making music. "I was determined, making this album, to be sure that I could agree with every word I sang and was comfortable with every sentiment and every note," she reflects now, eyes gleaming. "I knew it had to be exciting and poignant and heartfelt. I decided to rekindle my love affair, my first love affair, with music, because I was sick to death with fame and attention and what it all means."MORE

But it didn't last. The band broke up and she decided to go solo. A great deal of her stuff on youtube is her singing trad. Welsh songs, which are pretty beautiful in their own right. But since we are focusing on her rockier stuff:

Cerys Matthews - Chardonnay (Live)
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My favourite song of hers so far is this one:

Cerys Matthews - Into The Blue
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Apparently she has recorded albums in Welsh, and made history as the first person to record an album in Welsh and English simultaneously: Don’t Look Down/Paid Edrych i Lawr.

Cerys Matthews - Trwy'r Drych
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Albums: Albums
Cockahoop (UK #30, 5 weeks on Chart) (Blanco y Negro - 2003)
Never Said Goodbye (Rough Trade - 2006)
Awyren = Aeroplane (mini-album) (My Kung Fu 030 - 2007)
Don't Look Down/Paid Edrych i Lawr (Rainbow City Recordings - 2009)
"Tir" (Rainbow City Recordings - 2010)
"Explorer" (Rainbow City Recordings - 2011)

Here's a single from Explorer:

Cerys Matthews - Sweet Magnolia

What's On Wales: Cerys Matthews Interview

....Matthews’ latest album, Explorer, is her fourth solo effort and the follow-up to the bilingual double-album Don’t Look Down/Paid Edrych i Lawr.

“The album is about endlessly exploring music and how songs have the ability to travel,” says Matthews. It’s clear she’s also taken influence from her own radio show on 6music, delving into her vast record collection with songs influenced by a wide range of worldly sounds and her own trips on the road.
...

Matthews has been collecting music, in some form, since the age of seven. “I could read music very early on and used to visit the local library searching for sheet music, especially a lot of Welsh language music,” she says. A huge record collection was garnered soon after, but what was her first purchase? “I don’t know,” she says, “Probably something really dodgy like Video Killed The Radio Star by Buggles.”

The first song Matthews learnt on guitar was The Animals’ classic House of the Rising Sun (“It has that really simple four-chord structure”) and she will be on lead guitar duties with her band on her forthcoming Over Land and Sea tour in the UK. With so many global sounds filling Explorer, surely Matthews will need more than just her guitar? “I’ll be taking a whole host of different instruments on the tour with me,” she confirms. “One of my favourites is an Oud – it’s similar to a lute but much smaller and with fewer frets. It’s steeped in a fascinating history.”MORE

Wikipedia, Website, Twitter