Rihanna and the Sphinx

Rihanna sings "Where have you been" at the Hackney Music Festival last weekend. 

I like the glowing pyramid behind the Sphinx. This is totally part of her Illuminati mind control conspiracy program. Between that and those stocking-shorts things she's wearing, I think I've become a minion.

Agamemnon vs. a leg of lamb

Wait wait, there's also this incredible dubstep number about Agamemnon and a leg of lamb. There's booty clapping.

Another fine production of rathergood.com. But the song on iTunes, along with many, many more in this vein!

Return of the Viking Kittens

Was listening to Zeppelin this morning and I had the realization that I NEVER SHARED THE VIKING KITTIES HERE. Watch as they drive their ships to new lands.

HAMMER OF THE GODS!

This meme is so old it's dead (2004?) but that doesn't mean we can't have a revival. Original flash video is hosted here. Mastermind Joel Veitch has a website packed with strange flash videos and weirdo songs. I like these Stalinist Laibach kitties and this hard techno track about ultraviolent German coal mining machines and Godzilla.

Music to Dig By: Cut Copy, 'Pharaohs and Pyramids'

Australia's Cut Copy play with archaeology lately. Check out the video for 'Blink and You'll Miss a Revolution', featuring some medieval Planet-of-the-Apes dudes resurrecting the band via ancient rituals in an cave shrine. Wha!? It's off last year's album, 'Zonoscope'.

Cut Copy - Blink And You'll Miss A Revolution from Cut Copy on Vimeo.

I also dig 'Pharoahs and Pyramids':

  Cut Copy - Pharaohs and Pyramids by modularpeople

House is burning, she's so cold / Hands of silver, hands of gold / Rising from a pyramid
She'll take you where the pharaohs live / Neatly packaged, sleek design / Glossy pamphlet, neon sign / Borrowed like a cigarette / So that way you'll be good, I guess

That's Egyptological in only the most abstract way of course. 'Pharaohs and Pyramids' is the classic Cut Copy sound. I think this is their best album so far, including the tracks where they sound EXACTLY like Andy McCluskey from OMD!

Electro-funk, Bewigged

Reader Sean submits the amazing nostalgio-futuristic styles of the Jonzun Crew, an electro-funk outfit ca. 1980-1983 that floats somewhere between Parliament and Kraftwerk.

Images stolen from hell of cool music blog by SALTYKA. As he says:

"These dudes totally rocked it VICTORIAN FUTURISTIC SPACEDUDE style. What more is there to say?? Seriously, these guys were on some whole other thing. They took part of their inspiration from the whole Parliament/Funkadelic spaceship thing, but no one could even come close to the one and only Jonzun Crew."

I have to dispute the 'Victorian' part. It's more like Louis CXXXII with the Three Musketeers in outer space. The band was Michael 'Spaceman' Jonzun, Maurice Starr, 'Gordo' Worthy, 'Stevo' Thorpe, and Princess Loria.

This photo sums up everything good about New York. Read more at SALTYKA, and definitely watch this Pack Jam video off of German television (of course). The costumes there are more sci-fi than archaeo-pop, but aren't they the same thing anyway? The past is what inspires us for the future.

Music to dig by: Tragic Error, 'Tanzen'

SEAN turned me on to this tight and super Archaeopop video. Sean sez:

New Beat was an underground Belgian dance music that peaked in 1988. It mixed EBM, Acid House, Hip House, Electro & Euro Disco into one style, with very martial-looking dance moves. Epitomized by acts like Silicon Dream, Hithouse & Plaza/Confetti.

Love it. This song has incredibly serious Belgian girls with frizzed-out hair and day-glo t-shirts doing their "martial-looking dance moves"  in a gallery of Classical sculpture, while the singer guy does jerky crazy dances and fondles the statues. Best three minutes of my day, almost.

This video could make a great class game for Greek Art 101: spot the famous sculptures in this video! I see the Laocoon, how about you?!

Genghis Khan Week: Dschinghis Khan

Let me introduce you to Germany's 1979 entry into the Eurovision song contest: Dschinghis Khan.


Music starts at 0:46. Some of the finest German historical disco ever produced! The song is basically about Genghis Khan's conquests, loves, horses, etc. Totally mesmerizing faux-Mongol outfits and disco dancing. Read this fantastic DK fan blog for translations of a ton of interviews and lifestyle pieces about the band. The video for 'Moscow' is pretty good too.

Dschinghis Khan was insanely popular, spawning cover versions in English, Estonian, Spanish, Finnish, and especially Japanese. Here's a recent cover by Japanese girl group Berryz Koubou ('Berry Workshop'):



I wish there was a reality where I could sit down with Genghis Khan and show him this video while drinking a Chinggis Beer.

Music to Dig By: Pink Floyd plays Pompeii

In October 1971, Pink Floyd recorded six songs in the amphitheater of Pompeii, without an audience. The film 'Live At Pompeii' was released in 1972 (and a director's cut in 2003).

Super epic and purely theatrical at the same time. The lack of an audience symbolizes what happened with progressive rock: the 18-minute jam became the end in itself, without the need to hold a live audience. 'Album-oriented rock' is meant to listen to at home, alone, and stoned, so you don't mind the fact that the song never ends.

Still sounds rad though. Here's 'Echoes', Part Two:

Campy Roman Moments with Soft Cell

Marc Almond as a spoiled Roman aristocrat. He does it amazingly well.



I like the extremely non-PC Nubian slave.


Just to be extra crazy, here's the Chipmunks version!

Music to Dig By: Two Takes on Joan of Arc

I've always liked OMD's Maid of Orleans. What would it be like to be in love with a ethereal and sometimes bloody saint? They got the video just right.



Leonard Cohen's version explores the same theme, but focuses more on Joan's longing to consummate her passions. Joan is fire here, rather than ice. Here Cohen sings with Jennifer Warnes:



The film clips are from the 1928 silent film 'The Passion of Joan of Arc', itself a cinema landmark (these scenes are eerily modern for a silent).

Just in case that was getting too deep for you, here's some more Whoopi. This time, she's trying to use her bladder problems to avoid martyrdom! Clever.

Nena, 'Anyplace, Anywhere, Anytime'

Submitted by Hannah, who describes this video as:

"Thriller" meets Indiana Jones, Karate Kid, Back to the Future and Bill and Ted, courtesy of the lady who brought us "99 Luftballons." I think the time travel is meant to convey the "anywhen" part of the title, the "anywhere" being ancient Egypt/revolutionary America/feudal Japan and the "anyhow" confined to methods involving electric guitars and synthesizers and cars with mohawks. Lest you think I'm think I'm making fun, I love this song.

She forgot to mention the trapdoors, random concert footage, and romantic rescue!

Music to dig by: Josh Ritter, 'The Curse'

A love story between an archaeologist and the mummy she discovers in Egypt. Music by Josh Ritter, from his new album "So Runs the World Away". Film by Liam Hurley (the band's drummer, also a puppeteer!).

For once I have nothing high-falutin' to say about this one, I'm just enjoying wallowing in the poignancy. If you want more, NPR's All Songs Considered covers the making of the film and its great puppets.

Thanks to Terry for the tip!

Palaeolithic Crete makes me feel cheerful

They found these on Crete. That's big news, because they're old. Like Palaeolithic old. 130,000 years old? 700,000 years old? No one's sure yet, but certainly is much older than any artefact on Crete is supposed to be. Why's that? Because Crete is an island, and has been for 5 million years. That means for people to have got there, they had to have been travelling long distances by boat a long, long time before anyone thought it was possible.

The evidence is from the Plakias Survey, led by Eleni Panagopoulou (Ephoreia of Palaeoanthropology and Speleology) and Thomas Strasser (Providence College), presented at the Archaeological Institute of America meetings last month in Anaheim. It's not just scraps, either - the survey found over 2,000 Mesolithic and Lower Palaeolithic stone tools, and backed it up with research on the geological deposits in which they were found. The terminus ante quem is 130,000 years BP, though they could be much older.

So people came to Crete. Or were they people? Anatomically modern Homo Sapiens didn't evolve until about 200,000 years BP, and didn't make it to Europe until about 50,000 BP. Moreover, these look a lot like Achulean tools, which are associated with Homo Erectus. As John Noble Wilford writes in today's New York Times:

But archaeologists and experts on early nautical history said the discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable populations producing an abundance of stone artifacts.

I wrote last week about "archaeological optimism", the idea that people in the past were much more capable than we moderns give them credit for.* As the quote above shows, the idea that our ancestors were stupid and uncreative - proverbial cavemen and cavewomen - runs deep and dies hard. In this case it may have been our cousins in the Homo Erectus and Homo Heidelbergensis families who deserve the props for sailing to Crete (from Anatolia? Libya? Greece? It was blue water, with no land in sight).

"I'm on a boat!"

Cognitive ability? Are you serious? No one bats an eyelash at the idea of Homo Erectus traveling 10,000 km from Africa to freaking Southeast Asia across mountains and rivers and deserts and tiger-infested jungles and whatnot - but it's shocking that they could build boats and hop 50km from the Peloponnesos to Crete?

To answer my rhetorical question above: duh, of course Homo Erectus and Homo Heidelbergensis and Homo whatever-whatever were people. They were badasses who colonized a whole world and figured out how to live in the harshest environments using nothing but stone, wood, and their wits. It's awesome, and we should send out love and respect to these people whether they were our direct ancestors or not.**

Thomas Strasser and Curtis Runnels are giving a lecture about the findings in Providence, RI on April 7 (details to be announced on the ACSCA website at some point). In the meantime, enjoy this topical music video based on a premiere archaeological film.




* Yes, I'm now feeling self-satisfied.
** And can we get some names for the cousins on the family tree that sound less perverted and/or German?