AIDS Wolf

http://tiny.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006237.html

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e334/totalcoward/AIDSWolf.jpg

Isn't she doing both?

Sorry that you had to stumble across this on a cursory google or a link someone forwarded. I'm sorry for this:

http://www.joebrower.com/PHILE_PILE/PIX/FR/can_of_worms.jpg

Your pal,
Christopher

It's funny you quoted, "The band, see, they did not work because I was just annoyed and not, in fact, disgusted." That's the weakest point of the entire piece - she didn't even SEE THE BAND. If she was so concerned about the aesthetics of the band, wouldn't she want to spend some time, um, actually analyzing their music?

ha ha ha, oh plz dude, 110 posts yakking about something you blogged last august is the sincerest form of flattery

I only stayed for one band. Bloodyminded (see above) were still playing when I left.

but go ahead and keep pretending this noise stuff is really pushing people's buttons maaaaaaaan

(and I say this as someone who enjoys a fair bit of it!)

I call the bloom county bite!!!

If you take your aesthetics seriously then aesthetic boredom can easily cause moral outrage ------

but then again someone insisting that they've been bored when they've actually been disturbed is a pretty common gambit -----

But one can be offended without thinking something should be banned - e.g. "defend the speech I find indefensible."

And there are many ways to feel about an offensive band.
1) AIDS Wolf offends me, but I find value in their music.
2) AIDS Wolf doesn't offend me, and I find value in their music.
3) AIDS Wolf offends me, and I find no value in their music.
4) AIDS Wolf doesn't offend me, and I find no value in their music.

I'm still not sure which category Hopper falls in. Maybe I'm projecting, but I sense disgust dripping from her write-up, and I'm not sure if it's exclusively based in "I don't like their music."

Shakey, sorry you feel like giving up. I think this is an interesting discussion.

I think sometimes irony can be powerful, when irony is multi-valent. I feel like the irony of Aids Wolf and some noiseniks (Bloodyminded is by no means new school, then been around since back when Vandermark was still just some dude in Weasel Walters band, so I cannot typify, or broad brush it, as I am wont) -- is not multivalent. I feel like it is flat. I feel like it is a direct responce to emo, and I think bands that might otherwise be good come off as effete freshman art schoolers toying with the idea that nothing is shocking. I do not need everything to be DEEP META TEXTUAL STATEMENTS ON FEMINISM for me to like it. I grew up in the noise scene, my first job was working in the mailroom at Amphetamine Reptile in 1992, and granted, "noise" was different then, but I was exposed to a lot of new musics, experimental and faux-fascist, that was more "interesting" or successfully offensive, like... I forget his name, but the funnabe nazi dude that married Lisa Suckdog? Perhaps that makes me old and traditonal. Perhaps it's just a mark of new punks rejecting old punks moral center, or the evolution of such is whole-handed rejection. Like most punx my age, I learned right and wrong from imbued in the white-shame of Fugazi and the didacts in Olympia--political correctness is what I came up steeped in, so that is still my lens, even though such seems wholly inaapropriate in 2006. But, what is music if you do not take it personal.

I know it's like, against the law to post this long or this earnestly on these boards, but just thought I would clarify and then you can beef out, or whatever it is.

Word,
JH

fucking tourists.

That would be Costes. And yeah, he has more creative vision in his pinky than Wolf Eyes have in their combined bodies. But you seem to attack the entire proposition of making extreme/offensive art when it sounds like you just had a bad night out on the town. Who knows, the AIDS Wolf performance might have transcended their stupid name and immature merch guy had you stuck around for it. Sorry to keep harping on that point, but it makes you seem like the people who say, "I don't have to see Brokeback Mountain to know I won't like it."

Actually, this might also be a reference to Boyd Rice.

i actually don't need to see "brokeback mountain" to know i won't like it, tho.

Beef out, indeed!

- Lisa Carver, Rollerderby

Stop comparing wolf eyes to Aids wolf. The use of "wolf" in the name does not automatically make them similar groups.

Noise isn't about anything, it's a lack of a message, it is the abandonment of preconceived notions of music, that is why it has the draw it does. Personally I prefer noise's non-message over the contrived punk-politics that I have spit into my ear by every sad mid-20s activist with a leather jacket and a dead kennedy's patch when I go to a god damned rock and roll show.

RE: calling your band AIDS wolf.

Hmmm. There was a humor zine for people with AIDS called "Diseased Pariah News" that was pretty amazing. It's not as if you can't combine comedy with fucked up devastating illness, I guess the question is, who is making the joke and for whom? If the members of AIDS wolf are HIV positive, then fair enough, it's their party. If they're not, it's a different gesture. If AIDS is just another signifier of "heaviness" among the grab bag of signifiers, that's just an index of the comfortable position from which the gesture emanates. And comfort tends to make people long for things, and overcompensate. My first boyfriend made AIDS jokes all the time. Since his death from AIDS complications I have a hard time laughing along with AIDS humor. But something tells me this band is for people for whom AIDS is exotic, exotically "dated" as a thing to worry about, etc. I wonder if they're going to tour Africa anytime soon.

To state the super obvious: this is not a censorship issue. Of course they can call their band whatever they want.

Also to state the obvious: this has nothing to do with the "noise" scene as a whole or in part because this is a rock band. A "noisy" rock band, but a rock band all the same.

the entire "ha ha deliberately uncool AIDS joke ha ha" gesture was already played- and by a REAL noise band (in fact the greatest noise band ever) cf. the Hanatarash 4 CD subtitled "AIDS-a-delic" on Public Bath.

AND the "ironic hipster douchebag rocks AIDS humor" gesture was played circa Black Nasty's "AIDS Can't Stop Me" bedroom hip hop CD, years and years ago.

So, it's not even a new way to piss people off, and it's been done before by people whose actual sound/music was worth the time of day.

That is all.

Anyway, if there's anything notable about this group, it's how not shocking their shtick seems. "Transgressive" is definitely not how I would describe them. Their act seems completely pat and kind of traditional in a good way. Reassuring. I like Green Day/White Stripes/etc in small doses and if they ever made to MTV, I bet I'd like the Aids Wolf in exactly the same way.

Also one difference between calling your band "Cancer Clown" or "Child Abuse" or "Child Pornography" or whatever and namechecking AIDS in your joke band is that NOBODY in this country thinks cancer, child or child pornorgaphy are God's personal ethnic cleansing method / moral judgment upon their victims. AIDS has wiped out a huge swath of a generation of people, many of the best-and-brightest, whose swift and gruesome deaths were made even more egregious in light of the absolute political indifference to it in the first decade that it raged. Also, the fact is that today AIDS kills disproportionately more gay people and African-American people than any other demographic. Nice call, white art band. The name isn't "shocking" so much as staggeringly stupid.

P.S. Jessica Hopper is right too.