Came across this lollipop culture candy the other day and wanted to share here. I hope the new year is as absurd and unexpected as this. Here’s the set-up from Open Culture…

When it comes to music however, 80s retro tends to confine themselves to early hip and hop and electro, the synthpop of Gary Numan and Duran Duran or the cheesy hair metal of Mötley Crüe. But this lens misses the significant 60s revivalism that emerged at the time. Garage, surf, and psych rock and the jangly sounds of The Byrds inspired R.E.M., the B52s, the Replacements, the House of Love, and the Fleshtones, a much lesser-known NYC band who may never have gotten their commercial due, but who certainly appealed to 60s art star Andy Warhol.

When Warhol remade himself as a TV personality in the 80s with his MTV variety show Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes he cast the Fleshtones as the backing band for rising theater and film star Ian McKellen, a match-up that represents another hallmark of 80s pop culture—the postmodern juxtaposition of genres, styles, and registers which Warhol helped pioneer 20 years earlier when he brought kitschy silk-screened soup cans, sexy street hustlers, and the Velvet Underground into the art scene.

Warhol’s television work turned this impulse into a multimedia circus featuring “The high and the low. The rich and the famous. The struggling artists and the rising stars,” as Warhol Museum curator Geralyn Huxley puts it. In this particularly fitting example, McKellen and the Fleshtones bring Shakespeare’s racy Sonnet 20 to young, hip MTV audiences in 1987. L.A. Weekly lists a few of the “cool points” from the clip:

A young, hot, already insanely talented Ian McKellen
Wearing awesome New Wave fashions
At Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1987
Backed by cult group the Fleshtones
Reciting a Shakespeare Sonnet

Here’s the video…

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Devo rejected hippie escapism as well as the ungrounded aggression of punk — “We knew why we were angry. We knew who we were angry with” — to criticize technology, social conformity and dumbed-down consumer culture. The band’s name alludes to “devolution,” a concept born from the idea that the band felt everything and everyone in America was becoming stupider and uglier as the country descended into the Reagan-era.

While the band’s modus operandi is familiar to fans, even many Devo loyalists don’t know the full details of Devo’s origin story: Mothersbaugh and fellow Devo co-founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis were all attending Kent State University in 1970 when the Ohio National Guard opened-fire on unarmed student anti-war protesters killing four and wounding nine. It was a catalyzing event for the band and one that proved their then-nascent idea that idiocy found its reflection in art in the form of a kind of spastic tragedy.

Are We Not Men is an in-production documentary of the band that’s got fans waiting on pins and needles. While I prefer to post full films/docs/shows here, this fat clip from the upcoming movie offers an illuminating glimpse at how the lighting-flash-horror of the Kent State shootings brought Devo yelping and jerking to life. The video also includes the band’s jaw-dropping debut on SNL…

Devo Documentary Kent State from Tony Pemberton on Vimeo.

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The Beastie Boys are the bastard sons of the kind of b-boy/hardcore mongrel that could’ve only been born in 1981. After a short tenure as young punks inspired by Black Flag, the boys teamed up with Rick Rubin to create a metal/punk/hip-hop sound that sounded like the inside of the head of a 13 year old boy.

Three Jewish kids doing rap seemed more than a little odd in 1986 when the Boys released License to Ill and became household names on the strength of party anthems like “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)” and “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” The whole thing was catchy enough and the Beasties were really funny, but anyone can be forgiven for dismissing the trio as a novelty act.

Of course, groundbreaking music followed and the Beastie Boys proved to be one of the most important bands of the 1990′s and beyond. Following the cancer death of Adam Yauch/MCA in 2012, the Beasties officially called it quits although there is an autobiography project in the works, slated for a 2015 release.

Today would’ve been Adam Yauch’s 49 birthday. While you’re waiting for that new book to come out, here’s MTV’s exhaustive documentary of the band, Beastiology…

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