Une Beaute Russe

Photographer: Stefan Giftthaler 
Stylist: Marzia Fossati 
Posted in Behance.net 

Come Undone

Photographer: Brendan Zhang

Styling: Cheryl Chan
Hair and Makeup: Andy Razali
Model: Patricia Silk

Colpo di Scena

Colpo di Scena a darkened retro punk pinup spread by Kenneth Willardt in A magazine No. 46 published: Nov 23, 10.  Model: Candice Boucher.

Kid Creole: I Wake Up Screaming

There is something reassuring about the fact that August Darnell is still making music. Best known as the zoot suit-sporting Kid Creole, he carved his own musical path in the 1980s along with The Coconuts, resulting in a unique and recognizable blend of what Darnell would call "Mongrel Music." [Review by Jason Randall Smith, Impose Magazine]

The daring hybrid of disco aesthetics, big band bravado, and tropical island influences all resurface on his latest album, I Wake Up Screaming. It's a return to form for Kid Creole, assisted in part by the steady co-production of Darnell's own sons and mix engineering from Brennan Green. [Review by Jason Randall Smith, Impose Magazine]

August Darnell, an  underrated studio whiz  was responsible for some of the weirdest, funkiest tracks to come out of New York City in the late 1970s and early '80s, when no-wave mavericks emerged from the fringes of the city’s music scene to create grooves that in some alternate dimension would pass for disco.[The Man Behind the Kid by Jason Anderson, CBC News]

Kid Creole, the zoot-suited alter ego who earned a large measure of fame in the 1980s for Stool Pigeon, Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy, Endicott and other exuberant hits from the '80s heyday of Darnell’s band, Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

"The Kid Creole character is just what he was created to be: a flamboyant, devil-may-care bon vivant who represented a lot of things to a lot of people. It was pure escapism."

Borrowing a moniker from the Elvis movie King Creole and modeling himself after Cab Calloway – no wide lapels and bellbottoms for this cat — Darnell created his alter ego after he split from his brother Stony Browder’s band, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, in 1979. [The Man Behind the Kid by Jason Anderson, CBC News]

Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, circa 1976.

Darnell cites sibling rivalry as his reason for leaving Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band when it was still on the rise, but he credits his late brother,who died in 2002, for teaching him how the old and the new could be blended with such startling results.

Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band’s panache worked for listeners, too – the effervescent single Cherchez La Femme/C’est Si Bon, off the band’s self-titled debut, became a major hit in 1976. [The Man Behind the Kid by Jason Anderson, CBC News]

24 years later, it was remodeled as Ghostface Killah’s Cherchez La Ghost. Sunshower, off the same album, would later be sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and, most recently, M.I.A.

Prompted by the success of songs by M.I.A. and Ghostface Killah containing samples of Darnell’s music, the Strut label recently released a superb compilation titled Going Places: The August Darnell Years. 


Ranging from the witty early singles by Kid Creole and the Coconuts to Darnell’s productions for other acts on the left-field label Ze Records, the disc is turning contemporary hipsters onto a musician and producer who was much more than a real-life cartoon. 

Tom Waits: Bad As Me

Photography: Jesse Dylan

Tom Waits recorded his new album Bad As Me, his first collection of all-new studio recordings in eight years, in his studio, which he calls "Rabbit Foot" for good luck. The space, a converted schoolhouse, still has class pictures dotting the walls of each classroom.

"I never had my own place before," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross [Note: This post is a re-post of Tom Waits: The Fresh Air Interview]. "[In a studio], you know there was a band before you and you know you have to pack up at the end of your session because there was a band behind you. You have to photograph the board so no one changes your settings. Now, this is my own rig. It's my own trailer."

Bad As Me, Waits' 20th album, references the people he normally sings about: loners, losers, drunks and eccentrics. The "poet of outcasts," as The New York Times once called Waits, romanticizes loneliness, the city of Chicago, death and love, among other topics. 

The album also pays homage to some of Waits' favorite singers, including James Brown, Peggy Lee and Howlin' Wolf.

Howlin Wolf

 "I've always looked to [Wolf] for guidance, and probably always will," Waits says. "He does have a voice that is otherworldly. It should be in a time capsule somewhere. When you're a kid and you're trying to find your own voice, it's rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin' Wolf, because you know that you'll never achieve that. That's the Empire State Building. You can scream into a pillow for a year and never get there."

 


One of the torch ballads on Bad As Me is called "Kiss Me," and has opening chords reminiscent of "Cry Me a River." The title, Waits says, was inspired by Kiss Me Like a Stranger, Gene Wilder's book about Gilda Radner.

 

"As soon as I heard it," Waits says, "I said, 'That's a tune waiting to be written.'"

To make the recording sound older, Waits added the sound of vinyl pops and clicks — using a piece of chicken barbecuing on a grill.

"It sounds exactly like vinyl if you hold the microphone up to your barbecue," he says. "It's the same sound, actually. ... I wanted to go back in time a little bit and give it a feeling like you're alone in a hotel with a record player."

For the words in "Kiss Me," Waits says he drew inspiration from songwriters like Peggy Lee, Julie London and Bessie Smith.

"For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too," he says. 

 "And you just do it by picking up the needle and putting it back down and figuring it how these people did this magical thing. It's rather mystifying when you think about songs — where they come from and how they're born. Many times, it's very humble and very mundane, the origin of these songs."

Waits says he also grew up listening to James Brown and Ray Charles, whom he admired for his ability to sing in falsetto. Waits takes his own turn singing in falsetto in "Talking At the Same Time," which he says was inspired by Charles, as well as Marvin Gaye, Skip James, Prince and Smokey Robinson.

 

"Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way," Waits says. "And that's really your job as an interpreter, to discover: 'What is the way in? Do I growl this? Do I eliminate all my growl and try to do it like a younger man? What does this song mean?' You're more like an actor."

 

But Waits says performing night after night on the road takes its toll on his voice.

"I bark my voice out through a closed throat, pretty much," he says. "It's more, perhaps, like a dog in some ways. It does have its limitations, but I'm learning different ways to keep it alive."



Related NPR Stories
 
Live in Concert
Glitter And Doom: Tom Waits In Concert

The Fresh Air Interview
Tom Waits: A Raspy Voice Heads To The Hall Of Fame

Music Interviews
Tom Waits: How The Skid Row Balladeer Found His Voice

Rihanna: Talk That Talk

Rihanna’s new album “Talk That Talk” will be out in less than 3 weeks. “Talk That Talk” will be in stores November 21st!

Rihanna rises to her 11th No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, as “We Found Love,” featuring Calvin Harris, ascends 2-1 with Airplay Gainer honors in its sixth week on the survey.

Rihanna is just the seventh artist in the Hot 100′s 53-year history to tally at least 11 leaders, joining the Beatles (20), Mariah Carey (18), Michael Jackson (13), Madonna (12), the Supremes (12) and Whitney Houston (11). She passes Janet Jackson and Stevie Wonder, each with 10 No. 1s.

Among women, Rihanna, thus, moves into a third-place tie with Houston for most toppers, after only Carey and Madonna.

“Found,” the lead single from “Talk That Talk,”  spends a second week at No. 1 on the Digital Songs chart with 243,000 downloads sold, up 5%, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 

The weekly sum pushes the song past a million in release-to-date digital sales (1,057,000), marking Rihanna’s 20th download to reach the million-selling milestone, extending her record for the most such downloads among women. 

Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie,” on which she guests, is her best-selling digital song (5.1 million), followed by her top-selling title as a lead act, “Disturbia” (4.3 million).

On Radio Songs, “Found” flies 11-7 [85 million, up 22%, according to Nielsen BDS]. The song marks Rihanna’s 17th top 10 on the airplay ranking. Since her first week in the chart’s top tier, July 2, 2005 with “Pon De Replay,” she ties T-Pain for most top 10s in that span.

Rihanna has also been nominated for Billboard's Breakthrough Award, which honors artists in their first decade of headlining who cracked the top 25 tours for the first time.

The awards are primarily based on box office numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore from Oct. 1, 2010, through Sept. 30, 2011.

Rihanna: Esquire's Sexiest Woman Alive

Photographs by Russell James

Rihhanna: Sexiest Women Alive [Esquire]