30 Day Song Challenge, Day 11: A Song From Your Favorite Band/Artist

Another impossible one: Who has A favorite? So I’m going to do the DJmix/song thing again:

Perc, FACT mix (2014)

https://soundcloud.com/factmag/fact-mix-426-perc-feb-14

Perc is the shit (so, in the word of 2 Chainz, you should spray Febreze on him (this, ftr, is also an amazing song. The combo of both Diplo & Skrillex AND 2 Chainz all collectively taking the piss, sonically and lyrically? It’s lulz in exactly the perfect way.). Sonically, his influences are right at that sweet spot between industrial and techno. You caught that this mix features my aforementioned favorite old song at around 38:40? Politically, he’s also fantastic: there’s a (queer) politics there, but it’s the sound that’s driving the music. (Listen, for example, to about 27:oo in this mix, where there’s vocals of “Pics of me and Putin fucking.” This mix came out right at the height of the controversy of Russia’s anti-gay policies.) Perc manages, both in his mixes and in his original work, to be both entirely brutal and entirely subtle at the same time. His label, PercTrax, releases some of the most face-melting shit around, some of the most exquisite shit around (see the Slowly Exploding comp), and his collaborations with Truss are, like, at the level of Deleuze & Guattari or Marx & Engels or Bey and Nicki. (Hey Ali, please, PLEASE tour the States?)

Youth Code, “Consuming Guilt”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h5uEPH5IFE

Youth Code is an industrial/EBM band out of LA. I’ve seen them twice in the past year: once at Coldwaves III, and once in ATL when they opened for Skinny Puppy and F7A. They’re clearly my favorite new artist–because, in part, they sound old…by which I mean, this is what the kind of industrial I like sounded like before everyone (and I mean EVERYONE–I’m looking at you, Die Krupps) went metal. And Sara is one of her generations best frontpersons. Her stage presence and performance is AMAZING. She brings the absolute emotional immediacy and physical limit-pushing of the hardcore scene from which she came, and conveys that really really spectacularly to the audience.  The band is pretty politically vegan, and this video combines that politics with a concern for animal testing reminiscent of Skinny-Puppy.

Runners Up: B-52s, “Channel Z” (in junior high and high school, I was seriously seriously into the B-52s. I pretty much wanted to BE Fred Schneider.); Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris, “We Found Love“; Nitzer Ebb, “Isn’t It Funny How Your Body Works”