Posted on 10/05/2010 11:03:41 AM PDT by a fool in paradise
Lyrical tidbits best capture the essence of this past weekend's Matador at 21 series of concerts at the Palms Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The words arrived in rhyming couplets and shattered-monocle verbal abstractions, delivered by 26 acts over three days.
...“You've got the flavor,” shouted the Blues Explosion's Jon Spencer, dedicating the song “Flavor” to his former record label, the East Coast indie tastemaker Matador Records, during a raucous set of meta-blues and trash rock at the casino's concert venue the Pearl Theater. The New York label, with the aid of L.A.-based promoters FYF Fest, threw a memorable, nearly seamless bash to celebrate its 21st birthday.
“I'm working, but I'm not working for you!” yelled Superchunk's Mac McCaughan during the event's most exuberant performance. Celebrating the do-it-yourself ethic of the independent rock music scene of the mid- and late 1980s, from which Matador and its ilk sprung, it was delivered by a band whose members went on to start their own indie label, Merge. (That label just earned its first No. 1 album on the Billboard charts — for Arcade Fire's “The Suburbs.”)
Alongside Merge and others, Matador rose to prominence as one of America's most lauded indie imprints, whose specialty — literate, boundary-stretching art rock — was on full display at the Palms. Many of the bands that earned the label's reputation played during the concerts, including Yo La Tengo, the New Pornographers, Cat Power, Pavement, Liz Phair and Sonic Youth.
...Two decades ago, the pair of New Yorkers and their kindred spirits reinvigorated independent rock in America by building the foundation of not only a musical niche but an entire movement...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimesblogs.latimes.com ...
Didn’t Sonic Youth hate Reagan and Bush?
Public Image Ltd wannabes.
Too bad my fave Matador band didn’t reunite for this - the mighty Pizzicato Five!
Velvet Underground wannabes.
You are correct, they didn’t play. Looking online I see they ended in 2001 (with some scattered concerts later)
Here is the full list:
http://www.matadorrecords.com/21/
Pavement
Sonic Youth
Belle & Sebastian
Guided By Voices
Spoon
Yo La Tengo
Liz Phair
Cat Power
The New Pornographers
Come
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Superchunk
Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
Guitar Wolf
Chavez
Girls
F***ed Up
Harlem
Cold Cave
Shearwater
Kurt Vile
The Clean
Perfume Genius
Dead Meadow
Esben & The Witch
Used to like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, but not so much these (sober) days.
More Pavement!
How about Butter 08, lol.
The later albums kind of diluted the discography. I can still listen to some of the albums in smaller doses.
It’s one of the things Paul’s always been worried about with the Beatles. That it was a quick mad rush but if the subsequent albums had been like their last few (x number of tracks from each member), they would have had more peaks and valleys than the White Album. He didn’t even want to do a reunion and have it compared to “what had been”.
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