Friday Round Up: Oct 7th, 2016

The best thing I saw / listened to all week! Bask in the beauty of Wiki edits is real time. It is like listening to a gentle but persistent rain storm produced by Eno. It also accidently double as a band or song name generator.

Roger Shepherd shares his stories behind the photographs found in his new memoir In Love With These Ties: My Life with Flying Nun Records, everyone's favorite record label from New Zealand.

Meet the women participating in Ragnar Kjartansson's "Women in E", nine of whom will also perform with their bands on October 22nd at an all day festival at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC.

I've written about my love of the X-Girl clothing line before and it appears Kim Gordon has passed the torch down to her daughter this year. Can we all agree that an Earth Crisis turtleneck is pretty funny?

Pretty darn excited to discover there is a L7 documentary coming this fall. I can't say this clip tells me much about the story of the band but with my nostalgia being what it is for this band, I am sure I will love it regardless.

One of the other great things I saw this week are the photographs of the queens of the metal scene in Botswanas which is fairness is feature from last year but it never gets old to me.

I am not really a halloween person but spiders tune their webs like a guitar at that is as close as I get to getting seasonal. Oh, and music is ruining our opinion of sharks. And then there is this; you can submit spooky music for a pretty cool project here.

A new Mannequin Pussy record is coming! God I love the tension between their angst and melodies.

If you love cassette tapes so much, maybe you should know more about them.

Who are you and what are you doing here? Self sabotaging is the worst and Kat Harding shares her experience in the Nashville music community as she copes with "imposter syndrome".

Backyard report: local Richmond DJ, artist, and musician Sara Gossett created the breathtaking cover art for Tompkins Square release by Harvey Mandel.

Some speaker stains are actually dust patterns made by sound. Here is someone who has made an art show out of it.

Crystal Fairy is a super group featuring member of The Melvins, At The Drive-In, and Le Butcherettes.

Dot from The Shaggs opens up to Rolling Stone. Don't call them outsider Rock, they are more like outsider Mt. Everest according to their rabid fan base.

Patti Boyd has inspired 10 very well known rock and roll songs. Who the heck is the real life Layla anyhow?

The history of library music - for you soundtrack / incidental music fans.

Kathleen Hanna is having a busy year. It appears Le Tigre is reuniting.

Spend forty-five minutes with Francoise Hardy! Who doesn't want that?

The real life feminist bookstore made famous in Portlandia is putting a bird on it and that bird is a middle finger. 

Yé-Yé Girls and X-Girl

Once upon a time Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head) and Daisy Von Furth started a clothing line called X-Girl that was a ying of sorts to X-Large's yang (one of the original X-Large owners was Mike D of the Beastie Boys).

Their small store opened in the early '90s on Lafayette Street in New York City's SoHo neighborhood and across the street from X-Large. One of the highlights to the X-Girl brand was that artist Mike Mills created much if not all of X-Girl's iconic graphics and shirt designs. Limited posters of his gorgeous brand work were also available for purchase and I think of anything I regret not purchasing back in the day, it is these pieces of art.

The general look of the X-Girl clothing line was androgynous and simple. The idea was to produce timeless classics that featured clean lines and were form fitting compared to that time period's grungy counterpart. To be as accurate as possible, it was practically the Mac store of '90s fashion. The business was short lived as the shop closed at the end of the '90s and then the line was sold to Japanese company that still produced it to this day.

I would be lying if I said X-Girl clothes fit anyone above a size 10 but that is a different story all together. This believe it or not brings us to the subject of French Pop musiccalled yé-yé sung by girls and young women in the 1960s.

This genre of music was said to be inspired by The Beatles and their hooky line "She loves me YEAH YEAH YEAH". The fashion sense of these yé-yé girls (tasteful Euro-mod) were also said to be an influence on the X-Girl fashion line and often playing on the small TV inside the store was a video compilation of these original yé-yé  music videos. I had several friends that worked there, including my then boyfriend. As they were closing up the shop some nights, I would sit on the bench waiting and watching these campy and totally intoxicating videos. This was my introduction to French Pop and I have collected it obsessively ever since.

It should be noted that this genre of music spread like wildfire all over the world so there a are ton of groovy girl records from the '60s to check out from many other countries too.

Here are the kind of videos that were on the X-Girl VHS collection:

Read more about X-Girl here.