It may or may not surprise you to learn we Seattle Weekly writers occasionally take other gigs. I recently had the pleasure of cheating on the Weekly with SIFF, previewing flicks for their festival guide.

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Ann Summa

"They should have been the band that went way beyond any of us that were influenced by them." - Les Claypool, Primus

If you're old enough to remember Fishbone from their early '90s heyday, chances are you already worship them. Though they never broke through to the mainstream, their funk-punk-ska-soul fusion influenced a slew of the most popular bands of their era, including Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, No Doubt and Primus. And last year's documentary about them, Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, is now streaming via Netflix -- and it's worth a look, whether you're a fan or not.

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This week I watched two music documentaries, Strange Powers and Better Than Something, both of which are about prodigious musical talents, Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields and Jay Reatard (RIP) respectively, who also have/had reputations for being, well, sort of assholes. Merritt, when not writing smart, archly witty pop songs with the Fields or his other bands turns out to be smart, archly witty, and rather prickly; he's a control freak in the studio (fair enough, obviously); he's a notoriously terse interview. Jay Reatard, when turning out poppy punk and metal influenced garage rock songs at a dizzying rate, is picking fights, abusing his bandmates or himself onstage, smoking crack, hilariously sass-talking interviewers, and so on.

I went into Stranger Powers (via Netflix) liking the Magnetic Fields quite a bit and not really caring about Merritt's eccentricities, except in as much as they might provide background color (brown, natch) about the band, and I came out of the film feeling about the same. I went into Better Than Something (at the Grand Illusion, playing tonight at 7pm and 9pm) not really caring about Jay or his music at all, but came out of it liking both a fair deal better than before. So which was the successful documentary? Both of them.

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spokanarchy.com

Nothing ends a tour faster than a burning Econoline van.

Opening tomorrow at the Grand Illusion, the new documentary SpokAnarchy! makes us want to add an exclamation mark to every sentence we write! Like this! Or maybe that's just the way punk rockers in Spokane expressed themselves during the '80s--because it was a very exciting time! And here's our review, after the jump...

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When I was in high school, a few of my friends were what you might call "serious ravers." Weekends at NAF and FX, Jncos and candy necklaces, that sort of thing. I was mostly going to punk shows, and harboring an unhealthy skepticism about club drugs, but I was also listening to the big electronic acts of the time. Only, I was doing it on my headphones, on car and home stereos, and via 107.7's electronic show Ultrasound and MTV's actually pretty awesome AMP. I also saw a few big acts of the day--Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers (both at the Paramount), the Prodigy at Endfest one year back when it was in Bremerton, Moby at RKCNDY and Crystal Method at DV8--and I've since been to far better dance parties and raves then I probably would have been privy to as a high schooler in Redmond, and overall I think I got the better, or at least equal end of the whole deal. But: I know what it's like to experience electronic music, and its attended rave culture, from a slightly voyeuristic, vicarious remove.

So the idea of trucking up to Northgate to sit in a movie theater and watch a film documenting the Chemical Brothers' live show strikes a weird nostalgic chord with me. Of course I had to do it.

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What drugs?!?!

You know why the documentary Pearl Jam Twenty was an arduous, self-serving, and above all painfully boring two hours? Not because director Cameron Crowe didn't have plenty of material to work with for the anniversary flick, but because Pearl Jam was an equal partner in the doc, not just participants. They told the story they wanted told, and it glazed over the touchy stuff--drugs, inner-band turmoil, all those drummers, etc.--that could have elevated the film above a mere infomercial.

The story a band wants to tell and the one that should be told are often two different things. Just ask Jasen Emmons, EMP's director of curatorial affairs, who was once instructed by Bob Dylan's management that there was to be no mention of his drug use in the museum's exhibition on the artist.

"If you get the band to buy in and they're contributing to [an exhibit], you're going to have that struggle of 'OK, can we tell that story?'," he says. "It's a richer story when you know those different points of view." Emmons says he was ultimately able to organize that 2004-06 Dylan exhibit to his narrative satisfaction.

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Pulp, to borrow a line, weren't supposed to be. They were working class (which is rather a bigger deal in England); they were from Sheffield, in the North Country (which, again, apparently a big deal); they were brainy and effete, louche and viciously witty; they made rock records when rave was rising and flirted with disco while the rest of the country was going from shoegaze to big, retro Brit rock. They were formed by Jarvis Cocker in 1978 and released their first record before the Smiths, but they didn't have a hit until 1995, when, with an assist from an improbable last-minute headlining spot at Glastonbury, they stormed all the way to number 2 (of course) with the brilliant, oft misunderstood anthem "Common People." (Basically: it's neither a proletarian rallying cry nor a flat condemnation of the slumming 1%, so much as a sharp observation of what it's like to be stuck straddling cultural class lines while still having no real material mobility.)

If you're much of a Pulp fan, The Beat is the Law - Fanfare for the Common People (which, btw, good Copland pun fellas) will likely be the third documentary you've seen about the band--after the ace, though generalist, Brit Pop doc Live Forever and the BBC documentary about the making of "Common People"--but it's an excellent addition to the canon, made with the full cooperation of the band and delving deeper into their, as well as Sheffield's, story than did those other films.

The Beat is the Law - Fanfare for the Common People premieres this weekend at Northwest Film Forum, Friday 1/6 - Sunday 1/8, 7pm and 9pm. More info and tickets here.

Artist: OC Notes
Album: Emerald City Sequence
Label: self-released
Release: out now

Emerald City Sequence is a twenty-five minute audio and visual remix of 1978's Afrocelebratory Wizard Of Oz spin The Wiz, that starred Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor, with a soundtrack that featured the likes of Quincy Jones, and of course Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. Seattle's OC Notes provides the flowing soundtrack to the new creation, and, by the looks of it, the visual edits as well.

In case you forgot, Notes, A.K.A. Otis Calvin VIII, is a borderline genius and a studio wizard who pretty much takes life, in all its disjointed glory, filters it through his brain, and uploads it onto his Bandcamp page (and various other internet housings) for us to enjoy. Watch/listen to Emerald City Sequence here. You won't regret it.

Original riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna was memorialized in film earlier this year in Kerthy Fix's documentary Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour; now the Brooklyn filmmaker Sini Anderson is taking a more extended look at Hanna's life with her own film, The Punk Singer. Of the film, Anderson writes:

The first question that the mention of a documentary about Kathleen Hanna prompts is usually, Why hasn't one already been made? Credited as a founder of the third wave of feminism and Riot Grrrl - Hanna has been a seminal radical activist, musician, and cultural icon for over twenty years. She's also been a lightening rod for controversy, and a famously private person. Five years ago, she disappeared from the public eye, and is only now re-emerging. The Punk Singer combines twenty years of archival footage and an intimate look at four consecutive seasons of Hanna's present life, to tell the story of what happened, and who she is now.

Anderson and her crew have finished shooting the film, which includes interviews with Hanna's husband Adam Horovitz, her Le Tigre and Bikini Kill bandmates, Joan Jett, Corin Tucker, and Carrie Brownstein, but now they're out of money needed for the editing process. That's where Kickstarter comes in.

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Although I'm a lifelong Madonna fan, I'd never watched Truth or Dare. But late Wednesday night, it came on VH1 Classic, so I decided I'd watch it until I nodded off in a comfy gray chair in my living room. To my surprise, I made it to the closing credits, and thus had to search for a crappier film to nod off to.

Truth or Dare is not a great film. As rockumentaries go, it's decent. It paints quite the rose-colored portrait of its subject. Yet it's a worthwhile time capsule in that it proves that Madonna in her prime (and maybe now) could wipe the floor with the likes of today's pop divas with her choreography and athleticism. But what mainly held my attention was just how not scandalous the film's more controversial elements would be if Truth or Dare were released today.

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