No way, Skrewdriver's really catchy.

Billy Childish.. always stayed underground but still..

Who?

The dude from Thee headcoats!
Super-prolific garage rock guy

Wouldn't really put him in this category though....

http://baark.org/h1_artist/graphics/billy_childish.jpg

Remember that face!!!

It will haunt my steamiest dreams I'm sure.

so did he actually screw Tracey Emin then? eww

Billy Childish is the man with the stauche.

Looks like it

agreed on the eeeew


btw her art is lame

agreed, that's Basquiat in your avvy isn't it?

Go get yourself a Buff Medways album (Doesn't matter which they all sound the same) and educate yourself man.

Yeah. Do you like his work?
Most of my friends don't

Me

Those yank bastards couldn't handle the shit I was dishing out back in the day.

Are you a new breed of troll?

yep, love it, generally anything with 'expressionist' on the end and palettes like that I am a sucker for, his work reminds me of Don Van Vliet's stuff for some reason, jsut less primitive

Ray for mod!

I was just thinking about Billy Childish....
His music isn't really controversial
but his Stuckism was pretty damn controversial in the art world, controversial and ****.

f*ck yeah i had to remind myself what their manifesto was but f*ck yes. Whta i have found of their stuff i really like aswell, it's all part of Billy's Victorian chic isn't it really, and according to wiki they were founded as an alternative to Saatchi who I inherently distrust (even though I havent been to his gallery)

Im not really a fan of stuckism,
I don;t like their whole anti-postmodernist stance and the real artists paint deal. I'm into more abstract styles generally.

i am also but this is the first figurative painting i have enjoyed, i am not a classics person. it's gootd though i think they are taking a style that was tainted with religion and glorification of war for hundreds of years and made it their own.
Unless you count that others 80's movement in the US that i can't remember... neo-realism or something, i suppose one virtue is that it's accessible

sorry for bumping an old thread, but i just discovered this.... awesome conversation.

it reminded me of the most controversial thing that the Pistols did after releasing Bollocks and GSTQ. Their manager, Malcolm McLaren booked them for a U.S. tour of the deep south, just b/c he knew it would be a disaster and would create news wherever they went. It actually ended up being a really sad flameout, but it did spawn some great stories.



Also the Jubilee Boat Trip is pretty legendary.



for punk related controversial stories,Please Kill Me is a great book.
some great stuff about Patti Smith, The Dead Boys, NYDolls & Thunders, etc... some harrowing stuff to be sure. Ultimately mostly just sad though.

For American Punk I would also throw Minor Threat and Fugazi in there for being controversial INSIDE the world of Punk which was a neat trick when it happened.

I'd say Elvis Presley was hugely controversial; while he was in reality just stealing music from the black community he was still making it accessible to the white world, where most people were listening to those ****ty bands that just stood there and had 4 people sing and look pretty.

Mayhem was pretty bad too. I forget who, but one of their members shot himself in the head with a shotgun. I'm not sure how much of the story is true and how much is urban legend bull****, but I do know a picture of his dead body with part of his head shot off ended up on some album they released or something. I think they did a lot of other wierd **** as well.

Also, when they first came out, I believe I recall hearing about Black Sabbath being banned from certain cities in the deep south over here because people thought they were actually satanists. They stirred up a lot of controversy in their early years.

i was just watching an Iron Maiden doc and thinking about how much my parents and other people freaked the F out about metal in the 80's.... to them, listening to The Number Of The Beast was the same as sacrificing a goat on the altar of a church. lol.
Bruce D. was basically saying how funny Brits found that, since in the U.K. it was just seen for what it was... marketing hype and crafting an image to sell records, whereas, many in the U.S. took the image as reality and truly believed there were 'dark forces' at work.

Growing up in the South sucked in many ways but it gave me an early window into the extreme ignorance and hypocrisy that people can descend into when free thought and reasoned debate are absent. In other words.. wherever religious dogma takes over completely.

I always felt I was unshockable until I read about Mayhem and the whole Norwegian black metal scene.... since they were indeed, actually 'for real'

Crazy stuff

Yeah I always thought it was pretty hilarious when people reacted like that. In fact, growing up in a non-religious household I thought the entire concept of satanism was pretty funny to begin with so seeing people freak out about fake satanism was hysterical.

back in the days when i had to ask my parents to buy me music... i would always hold up a copy of Maiden's "killers" and ask them to buy it for me.

after that, they would pretty much buy me whatever I wanted. lol.

so i made it work in my favor.

i had it pretty bad though, b/c my parents were even 'afraid' of motley crue.
/facepalm

lol. Well they did encourage smoking in the boys room!

:laughing:
:yeah:

plus they taught millions of teenage girls how to improperly apply eyeliner

Well, I did a skim over the thread and didn't see these two, one of which I experienced first-hand and saw the related picketing etc, and the other one is something I've read and come to understand as controversial based on the ideals of the period.

The first is Marilyn Manson, who I saw in Indianapolis in High School and I remember sizeable crowds of picketers waving banners and defending their religion against this apparent poster child for the antiChrist or some bullsh*t because he supposedly ripped up bibles and was generally abrasive toward religion, although I think it always was and still is a calculated act.

The second is Ray Charles, who combined gospel music with sexual content and night club context.

Of course, there's always Black Sabbath.

Of course. I was always amazed that those picketer-types weren't able to see that it was very clearly just an act. Also the idea that Christians somehow need to defend their religion in a country that's 85% Christian is always funny to me.

Laissez-fair. If they didn't do what they do, we'd have little to talk about.

Yeah, the irony is that they wound up basically working as volunteers for Marilyn Manson's PR team.

Yup, that's usually the way it turns out. Any publicity is good publicity, to a degree.

Tipper Gore was the best thing that ever happened to W.A.S.P.

:)
see: The P.M.R.C.

I wish I could get myself in the political headlines...

I guess she's got to make herself feel important. Good for W.A.S.P. It's like, songs and poems and sonnetts have been about this stuff for centuries, and now, just because folks are coming out and saying what's on their minds instead of shrouding it in whimsicle foreplay it's bad and wrong and wicked and must STOP! lol tarded.

agreed 100%

For me, The Shaggs is a big one. For those who don't know about them, their dad pretty much shut them up with instruments and told them to play . They had no musical training whatsoever and its really interesting to hear how that effected their music. There's no beat really or melody. Their music sounds really juvenile, like when a toddler bangs on the piano. But Frank Zappa declared them to be "better than the Beatles". It's awful, unskilled, almost painful to listen to. But, there's something so pure about their music. Especially "My Pal Foot Foot" (Written about Dot's stuffed animal).

"We're bigger than Jesus."

Pretty controversial huh?

I haven't heard them mentioned here recently, I really like the Shaggs. If you listen carefully, there's certainly a beat and a melody. However, I also suspect that they didn't have many influences other than a little bit of children's music, because I can't think of really anything earlier to compare them too. The strange thing is, despite the fact that they really, really did not have the slightest clue about how to play their instruments, they actually had a huge influence on later bands. For example, The Raincoats, to me, sound like the Shaggs if they knew how to play their instruments... but I'm not saying they're better. They were also very influential on Kimya Dawson and The Moldy Peaches, both of whom I really like. The thing about The Philosophy of the World, though, is that there is such a split between fans and people that think it is the ****tiest thing ever recorded. I, obviously, am one of the former, and here's why. When you listen to this album, you hear the innocence of the band just bleeding through there music, and it reminds me off children banging on their instruments. Songs like Halloween further enforce this point, with simple lyrics about it being Halloween and going out to trick or treat. But at the same time this innocence and complete honesty about everything they feel combines to create a very strange, eerie at times album when they sing songs like "My Pal Foot Foot" about a derelict imaginary friend or "Who Are Parents". And they have a melody and actually often a rather complicated song structure, but it is buried beneath the guitar players complete lack of rhythm. I'm not even entirely sure how to describe the feeling I get listening to it; there is something absolutely amazing to hear when you find a band like The Shaggs that makes music with absolutely no self consciousness and little to no influences from other musicians. Simply put, this band is absolutely unique, and no one will ever record anything that sounds like this. And it's very interesting to listen to.

The entire mistique of some artists is the controversy they create. How else could Lady Gaga sell 32,000 records?

By having catchy well written pop songs.

fixed