Get Excited, 2010! The New Year in Music

By this point -- a mere two-ish weeks into the new year -- I usually find that the novelty of said new year has worn off. The excitement gives way to how overwhelming the opportunity of a new year can be, for me, anyways. I also tend to get discouraged by cold weather and the encroaching spring term.

But this year is different. Maybe it's because I've managed, between this forum and my schoolwork, to effectively make studying music my job, but I can't seem to stop being excited for what will happen this year in music. Though I've been trolling magazines and music websites for their picks for 'the most anticipated albums of 2010', and though I've been disappointed and entirely unsurprised to find few women on these lists, there is good news. New albums from Quasi, M.I.A., and the Shondes and then there's the new record from Christina Aguilera, which will allegedly feature songs produced by Le Tigre and Ladytron.

What really makes the lack of "mainstream" attention to female musicians tolerable though is everything that seems to be developing locally. Concrete information like tour dates and record release dates are scant but still, so much seems to be happening. Things seem quiet, but I have this feeling that the local bands whose work I attempt to chronicle here are regrouping and planning. You can just tell that new music, tour dates, and new projects are being set up. That friends are talking with other friends about new bands, art projects, and other types of collaborations. That stuff is coming.

For those of you who want names: my faves Zombie Dogs mentioned last year that they're working on a 7". Little Lungs has a 7" coming out for real on Salinas Records next month, and they're scheduled to tour through March. Their friends, (who are technically not local, but whatever) P.S. Eliot, have a 7" coming out too, and have some tour dates posted, and are in talks with my faves from way back, The Two Funerals. A joint PS/TTF tour, as well as a split release, might well be in the near future. In the meantime, TTF is working on a new release for The Cottage Records.

It's strange. it doesn't sound like much, but the handful of conjecture, speculation, and pseudo-gossip is more engrossing and uplifting than all the magazine and website lists of new releases put together. Or maybe it's not strange at all: crossing days off of your calendar as you get closer to a confirmed release or show date is great. But talking with your friends and bands about what they're up to, even when they're not entirely sure, supplies you with a kind of hopeful, blissful feeling that anything is possible, where a calendar really can't.

Hump Day Treat: Inaugural Double Header!!!

Here at Rock and the Single Girl, we find that Wednesday can often be the hardest day of the long school-slash-work week. You're not as tired as you are at the end of the week, but you're getting there, and at this point, you still have the energy to wish for the week to be over already and feel bad about yourself, but you're not close enough to the weekend to start relaxing.

Well, here at Rock and the Single Girl, we also say, to hell with all that! Sometimes a little music is all we need to turn our day or even our whole week around. So from now on, you can come on down to R&tSG and get a little Hump Day Treat -- a video with an upbeat, empowering song, sometimes old, sometimes new -- to help brighten your day!



I often feel like this performance is the one decent thing Carson Daly ever did on his stupid show. The quality is not so great, but that's okay because you can still see how much Le Tigre is having here. And serious points for the jump rope at the end!



Brought to us by the fine folks at Punktravesty, here we have a live performance of "TKO", Le Tigre's first single off their their major label debut, This Island. It's unfortunate that the official video is not available for embedding purposes, because that video is a lot of fun, but a live video might be better -- watching people get up onstage and play a song for an audience is always inspiring to me, anyways.

Were you one of those people who was utterly devastated when Bikini Kill broke up? I can't lie, I wasn't. It took me years to realize BK's deceptively simple genius. When Kathleen Hanna announced new projects Julie Ruin and Le Tigre in the late '90s, making old school fans and riot grrrl salivate at the thought, I was too busy having my face melted by early Sleater-Kinney and Team Dresch and trying to get through my first year of high school.

But even though I didn't like Bikini Kill when I first heard them, I was always, always, always intrigued by their lead singer. I still am, because Kathleen Hanna is more than a frontwoman, and more than a musician. Hanna is an ideologue. I'd go so far as to call her a successful feminist ideologue. She's a talented and charismatic artist, and she's used these skills to make feminism and feminist thought relevant to a new generation of women and music fans. Perhaps more shockingly, she and her bandmates JD Samson and Johanna Fateman have made feminism both relevant and danceable.

So listen to Le Tigre on this fine Hump Day -- listen, dance, and be proud to be a feminist!

This Hump Day Treat Double Header is dedicated to my dear friend Leigh Phillips, who is suffering an unbearable winter in upstate NY. Shake that groove thang baby, just like we did at The Shondes last June!!!

p.s. Got any good ideas for a future Hump Day treat? E-mail me and let me know: soundoftheatlantic@gmail.com