JUKE Vol.05 isn’t ALL music, we’re also feeling our second installment of M A D E, where we handpick the coolest  fashion brands in the world and create bespoke ad campaigns and limited edition items together.

Our Vol.05 designers include London’s Pam Hogg and Annie Phillips, Elliot Ward Fear (Australia), Fleamadonna (Seoul), Cape Town’s 2BOP, Romance Was Born (Australia), Yeah Right! (Japan), Géométrick Paris, Malgorzata Dudek, Brian Procell (NY), Degen (NY), Chromat (NY) and NVRMND.

If M A D E was a festival, the lineup would be ridiculous.
It’s not. That would be crazy.

Here’s the soundtrack to our Alter Ego issue. It sounds better with the latest copy of JUKE and a nosebag of Haribo, sure. But, if you can’t wait to get your paws on JUKE Vol.05 before hitting play, we understand. If this mix was a DJ set, the clown behind the decks would be sectioned 9 minutes in. That, as always, is our JUKE promise to you.

TRACKLIST

The soundtrack, like the magazine, goes a little something like this:

Who better to drape herself over the cover of our Alter Ego issue than Mz Brooke Candy? Here’s the real deal video trailer, in which she discusses the finer points of beastliness, twerks like no one’s watching and sets stuff on fire.

(Warning: Several stunt-JUKES were harmed in the making of this video).

You can catch Brooke Candy as you’ve never seen her before (unless you’ve got soapy in a hotel tub with her and a pygmy piglet before in which case, you’re hired) in JUKE Vol.05, out on shelves worldwide this Summer.

The issue also stars Iggy Pop vs Jacuzzi Boys, an arty day at Daniel Johnston’s Texan crib, Black Dave and Spike Jonze getting deep about skateboarding, hip-hop and film, Suicidal Tendencies, Fear’s Lee Ving, Ghostface Killah, Blowfly – and so much more.

For our Alter Ego Issue, we had to get deep with ultimate bad bitch pinup, Mz. Brooke Candy. We filmed her setting fire to some stunt-JUKES and hard at twerk in her dance studio. Watch this space for the full trailer and, of course, JUKE Vol.05, which drops on shelves worldwide this Spring and stars Brooke, Spike Jonze vs. Black Dave, Iggy Pop vs. Jacuzzi Boys, Daniel Johnston, Riff Raff, Blowfly and a bunch of other pop cultural noms de guerres.

CREDITS

JUKE Vol.05 teaser trailer, starring Brooke Candy 

By Miles Wilkerson

Track – “Don’t Touch My Hair Hoe” (Prod. Pase Rock)

Last Sunday’s installment of our Coachella Desert Weekender series saw JUKE taking a dancier trip to the deep end with Wolf+Lamb and Soul Clap. The Crew Love party saw a lot of genetically-gifted people hit the Saguaro Palm Springs for a chill all-dayer. We caught up with Zev and Gadi from Wolf+Lamb to say what’s up. Oh and this stuff too:

What’s your favourite animal? Ever? Tanner Ross drunk is pretty awesome.

You’re known for spending winters down in Miami and today you’re playing in Palm Springs. Both are retiree paradises – which one has better old people? We as a crew tend to focus more on the ‘augmented’ appendages… in that department, I believe Miami has Palm Springs beat. (For celebrity old people, definitely California!).

If you guys and Soul Clap really went through with that mock wrestling match on the K7! Compilation cover, who would’ve won? Zev does more pull-ups than anyone in the crew, so probably Gadi would win?

What’s Crew Love’s official stance on player hatin’? Do it often. Do it right. Just not on your Facebook fan page.

Photos: Valerie J. Bower

When we started putting together JUKE Vol.05 our Superhero Issue, Daniel Johnston was at the top of our hitlist. We spent an unforgettable day at home with the Johnstons, making art and inhaling Daniel’s own eclectic collection of ephemera, comics and pinups with the Space Duck himself.

Here are a couple of outtakes from the daytrip – you can read the full story and enjoy a private view of casa Johnston in JUKE Vol.05 – out on shelves worldwide in late May…

Fans with ADD can check out a series of Vines/mini video snapshots on our Tumblr too.

Photo: Bryan Schutmaat

By: Laura Lark

For JUKE Vol.05

Yes, we know you just got around to feeling semi-human since Coachella weekend 1 had you hypothalamus-deep in a DMT session when Monday’s 10AM meeting rolled around. But dust yourself off in time for Coachella weekend 2, where JUKE heads for the Saguaro Hotel, Palm Springs for a weekend of epic pool parties in the desert.

Friday 19th – we party in the name of graffiti artist Curtis Kulig’s ‘Love Me’ line for Urban Outfitters, with Warpaint, Twin Shadow, Data Romance and more.

Sunday 21st, it’s an all-dayer around the pool with Soulclap, Wolf + Lamb, Pillowtalk, Nick Monaco and more beats than a meth-head hummingbird’s heart. RSVP here… 

Dalston is reeling after news of the most audacious Macbook teefage since Jesse Pinkman’s got swiped and Breaking Bad geeks had to take blood oaths not to read any spoiler alerts. (No worthy moral codes exist in the buzzband sphere, apparently). The latest hipster-on-hipster theft, involving Jai Paul (the elusive one-track unicorn from outer Tumblr) and a very buzzwise (and possibly chill) criminal – came to our attention just after we’d written a tentative post about the record. In fact, the 16 track collection being advertised on Bandcamp this morning as Jai Paul’s debut album is an illegal leak.

After fans forked over the random sum of £7 to download 16 unnamed and unclaimed tracks, it transpired that Paul’s laptop had been stolen. Paul confirmed the release to be fake in his first ever tweet: “To confirm: demos on bandcamp were not uploaded by me, this is not my debut album. Please don’t buy. Statement to follow later.”  Yes, as far as crimes go, this one’s about as badman as photoshopping Lil Bub as a victim of a Furries gang rape  - and, with actual money from fans being swindled, just as horrifying. Oh well, if you’re kind of post-empathy and craving actual new sounds from the Jai Paul (band)camp, you can still go stream an awesome cover of Jennifer Paige’s 90s cheesewave anthem ‘Crush’ right now! Who says crime doesn’t pay?

NY’s gnarliest skate rat Black Dave shreds on this ode to keeping it real on the urban battlefield, complete with lo-fi Call Of Duty paintballing visuals (it’s called a metaphor, people!). You can catch Black Dave in conversation with Spike Jonze in JUKE Vol.05 – out on shelves worldwide this May.

 Zig Zags are a rare breed. A band that reminds you why you started listening to loud punk rock in the first place. The video for the A-side to their Mexican Summer-released single ‘Scavenger’just belched onto the internet: loud, raucous and heavy-riffing; while 2011’s Party at Dave’s House was all motorik krautrock jams and vibed-out Stooge-punk. Basically, Zig Zags churn out music as eclectic as Courtney Love’s bathroom cabinet.

One of the first shows Zig Zags played was on a closed-down stretch of road in downtown L.A. where the 3,000 attendees could hear the band from over six blocks away. As long as you’re no freeloader, ZZ play it just like we want it on the West Coast.

J&A

This is the weird issue of JUKE. What can you tell us? Patrick: Jed has some pretty fucking crazy stories from when he worked at Hustler and was bros with Larry Flynt.

Jed: Yeah basically, I didn’t do anything except come up with funny names for porn movies. People would tell me what they wanted to see and it would get made into a movie. That’s how the classic film “America’s Next Top Butthole” came to fruition.

 I saw you played a party in the desert outside L.A. recently. Patrick: Yeah we played out at the Palms Tavern in Twentynine Palms. There’s this completely lawless free-for-all vibe that governs the place. Forgotten in time, I suppose.

Jed: We shot off some model rockets everyone took a bunch of drugs and we freaked and got freaked out by the locals.

Patrick: They have a jukebox that doesn’t work. All of the song cards list only one song/artist. ‘Under The Milky Way Tonight’ by The Church. That fucks with my mind. Also, the drinks are either, free, really cheap, or really expensive; depending on when you order and if the barkeep remembers what to charge, if they even charge you at all.

Drink and party. Is there anything else to do in this town? Jed: L.A. is actually pretty rad. It has the weirdest of the weird from all over the globe and you can make your own reality here, without getting pissed on by the rain.

Patrick: Apparently you can do yoga and eat fucking kale for every meal, but I try to avoid that. LA is the most amazing place. Everyone hates on it, so that’s fine, don’t fucking come here then.

So you recently signed to Mexican Summer. Patrick: We just did a bro deal with them for the 7″. No contracts or whatever.

Jed: We just do it ourselves and if someone wants to step in and put it out, and they’re good people and they want to do it right, they can.

If the wrong person stepped in would you wipe your ass with a record contract? Patrick: This is the digital age and we don’t use paper contracts any more. So no, we wouldn’t wipe our ass with the contract – we’d just shit on their mouse or something.

(Laughs) So if  Simon Cowell came in and offered you a million bucks to do a split with Zig and Zag, you’d shit on his mouse? Patrick: Yes.

The 7” is like side A: Motörhead, against side B: The Stooges. Who’d win in a fight? Patrick: Yeah, we confuse the shit out of people. A-side is Budgie / Motörhead covered by high school kids and the B-side is a snotty, West coast, skate punk song.

Jed: Isn’t this like that joke from that shitty movie? Lemmy can’t fight God, cause he is God right? So Lemmy wins. I went to the Rainbow on Christmas eve to buy Lemmy a Jack and Coke and he wasn’t there.

The single has some pretty batshit crazy cover art. Jed: Chad from this rad band The Outdoorsmen drew it. It’s freeloaders coming to my house when I have BBQ’s and not bringing beer or weed or food or whatever. There’s a lot of freegans in L.A. Vegans that don’t eat meat or ice cream, unless it’s free.

We’ve always been told there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Is there such a thing as a free ice cream? Jed: There used to be a guy who drove around all over the states giving out free ice cream at shows. So yeah, sometimes you get free ice cream. Bands used to get paid, but everyone complained in the comments section on YouTube so now we just get ice cream.

Patrick: (Laughs) Chad’s got an amazing hand for drawing really fucked up shit. Like, even we had to tone down the cover image a bit. There were dicks everywhere screwing cactuses and such. Pretty rad but what would our moms think? (Laughs).

What would Larry Flynt have thought? Jed: Fart fart burp cough pussy pussy pussy food vomit…

By Robert McCallum

Photos Peter Juhl

[For JUKE Vol.04 - The Weird Issue]

As soon as we lost that second psychedelic hour on the Flatbush Zombies’ batshit Tumblr, we knew they were prime targets for this, our Weird Issue. But how could we infiltrate their secret lair and question them on breakfast cereals without our massive delicious brains provoking them to a gory feeding frenzy? Well, if the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, we got out the Spirograph and let it work its twisty magic on a scenic route. It involved our rudest writer in South Africa sending questions to our young fiend, Jorge, in NY who then dropped in on the Zombies in Brooklyn, ripped on ill-advised zombie bongs, read out the questions, videoed the whole thing on his phone, transcribed it, sent it back to the tip of the Southern Hemisphere, where it spent a month in an inbox being ignored until finally, the Good Count sent us this. That’s logistics.

By The Good Count via Jorge Wright
Photos Melinda Griffith

I get bothered by shit. As I get older, my bitterness – nay – pure fucking hate… reaches levels only seen in the radiation readings in soil surrounding the badlands of Japan. What used to be mundane bullshit now creates squatter camps of ulcers, which seem to appear immediately and with the sheer intensity of a post-rum-and-coke binge wet fart.

I get bothered by shit. As I get older, my bitterness – nay – pure fucking hate… reaches levels only seen in the radiation readings in soil surrounding the badlands of Japan. What used to be mundane bullshit now creates squatter camps of ulcers, which seem to appear immediately and with the sheer intensity of a post-rum-and-coke binge wet fart.

Now, being an overweight kid with a penchant for anything filthy, my natural affinity for horror movies was a given. In particular: zombie flicks! Perfection: blood, guts, severed heads… and ZOMBIES! I FUCKING LOVE ZOMBIES! But wait – this is when my young, coloured brain started getting fucked off – WHY WERE ALL THE ZOMBIES WHITE !! WTF WAS THAT ALL ABOUT! I demanded to see black zombies, goddammit! Fast-forward a couple decades, shit tons of LSD, marriage, a cute little kid and a Volvo station wagon and, delivered via the wizardry of the internet: black zombies! RAPPING black zombies! PURE FUCKING GENIUS!

[PS. Lucy, I don’t have an Xbox - I have a fucking daughter. I don’t know what the fuck "Resident Evil" is.]

J & A

J: ‘Thug Waffle’. Is it like an actual waffle made from a real thug? How do you skin and butcher a thug?

Meech: You gotta ask America how to do that – ask the government. Or watch a Tupac documentary!

J: Yeesh. How did that track even come about?
Erick: I actually made the beat two years ago, before I started producing for these dudes, I thought they sound hot on it, so we smoked up and wrote to the track. I created the ‘Smoke Break’ part the same day we recorded, while the rest of the beat was two years old. The beat was called ‘Thug Pancake’- and then that’s when it turned into ‘Thug Waffle’

J: Who are the Flatbush Zombies and what are your roles?
Erick Arc Elliot: Architect, producer, visionary. I’ve been rapping since I was 16. I started producing bout a year ago for these niggas. But people know me as a producer, even though I’ve been rapping longer.
Juice: My role is backup singer. I do a lot of vocals and help train these guys voices (laughs). Nah, I’m just a part of a 3-man team – there’s no specific role; we just combine our “braaaaiiiiins” together!
Meech: My role is to be a black man. Which means to be leader and shit.

J: Seems people are gonna give you some fuckup name anyways, so set them all straight! Describe the Flatbush Zombies sound – what you would call it?
Meech: It’s zombie music – there’s nothing like it. It’s organic. It’s our shit.

J: Top 5 zombies of all time?
[Everyone starts yelling.]
Meech: Jesus, Osiris (pretty much the original Jesus that they stole – do your research!)
Erik: The Asian dude from that episode of Dawn of The Dead with one arm that was running when they closed the door!
Juice: That wrestler Deady also known as Eddie Guerrero – part of the historic Guerrero family. With the mullet!
Meech: Walt Disney. He’s gonna be a zombie soon, even though he’s still frozen.

J: White people generally seem to be the ones who are always fucking with and/or becoming zombies in movies. Where did the zombie thing come from?
Meech: Those white people in those movies are sick and have viruses and shit. We’re not that kinda zombie. We’re supernatural higher beings. [Everyone cracks up]

J: Did you guys know that Flatbush was originally chartered as The Dutch Niew Nederland Colony Town of Midwout in 1651!? What’s your heritage? Any Dutch in your lineage?
Erick: I’m Jamaican as shit. But we all were born and raised in Brooklyn.
Juice: The actual guy on the Dutch Master products happens to be my great, great grandfather! So yeah, I am Dutch! [laughs] I was born in Kings County too – funny story: my mother actually had sex with a spiritual demon in her sleep and that’s how I was born!

J. Wow. I won’t allow anyone who hasn’t taken LSD to become a proper friend, ever. You guys ever enjoy a good LSD-induced fuck-out?
Erick: Fuck out? With each other?
Everybody: Nahhhhhh!
Meech: Hell yeah, I’ve taken acid like numerous times. I’m on acid right now. Even when I’m not on acid, I’m on acid. Acid is god; acid is love. If you’re an oblivious person and you have no spirituality, I guarantee you take some acid and look at a tree, you’ll realize what life and living is, outside of all that material shit.

J: You guys exist in a cloud of weed smoke. What happens when you get somewhere and you don’t have the weeds? Do you like, lose your rapping power and shit?
Meech: Fuck no! I’ll probably perform better sober. I can’t speak for Juice though…
Juice: I think being sober is like a drug in itself – so when I am sober, it’s pretty fucking trippy and just pretty fucked up.
Erik: I was performing sober this whole time, until I turned into a zombie. You said weed though… I was drunk A LOT.

J: If you could work with anyone, dead or alive: who would it be – and what would the project be?
Meech: I’d find Leonardo da Vinci and get him to paint my album cover. Get Beethoven and his peoples together with Kanye West and G.O.O.D music to put together some shit and sell it!
Erick: Honestly, I’d probably want to produce a track for Amy Winehouse. I love the ‘60s and Motown – and that was her.
Juice: I would probably be a part of the Philadelphia Experiment…

J: The what now?
Juice: [Laughing] Google it! [We did. It’s a conspiracy theory and 80s film about a US naval destroyer and its seamen gone bad - also: invisible!]
J: The Aerosmith song “Bone to Bone (Coney Island White Fish Boy)”, includes the lyric: “Flatbush boy, cruisin’ Sheepshead Bay”. Do you guys listen to Aerosmith at all? Who or what inspires you?

Meech: Steven Tyler is a G, but I’d be lying if I told you I had them on my iPod.

Juice: Ha ha! You can say that LIFE inspires us. But that Larry David – he the king of New York.

But you’d fuck with Aerosmith.
Oh yeah.

J: Thanks for your time and all, really appreciate it – but I guess time is one thing you guys have on your side, being undead and all. Lastly: Top 5 cereals!
[Juice grabs mic]: Pokémon cereal, which was only around for a limited amount of time. Very similar to Lucky Charms, but with Pokémon as the marshmallows! Cinnamon Toast Crunch – it’s so cinnnamon-y and toasty and crunchy and just unlike any other cereal! Apple Jacks are grand! Cap ‘n Crunch – peanut butter kind, NOT crunch berries! Those are too colourful – I don’t taste berries, I taste dye. Oooh and Coco Pebbles that turn your shit to chocolate milk are dope!

By The Good Count & Jorge Wright
Photos Melinda Griffith

[For JUKE Vol.04 - The Weird Issue]

If you survived nu-rave with any of your synapses intact, you might recognise model Lou Hayter, the Hitchcock dirty blonde in this noirish video, as the hot one from New Young Pony Club. If not, this is a pretty good first introduction – a cut from one of her more recent projects, Tomorrow’s World, a duo consisting of Hayter and Jean-Benoit-Dunckel (from Grand Designs ‘reveal’ soundtrackers, Air).

Tomorrow’s World release their self-titled debut album on April 8th via French label Naïve (that’s ‘Evian’ backwards).

When you’re a tangle of transmogrified rat corpses, you don’t need a lot of material belongings to be happy. Just a dank, graffiti-strewn Brooklyn studio, a couple of laptops, a renowned Dutch filmmaker to record your cramped existence on good old Super 16mm film and a dedicated zine to use as bedding.

You and 149 other people can get Ratking and Ari Marcopoulos’s collaborative ‘Piece of Shit’ zine and experience the year of the rat in person as they hit their live shows with GZA.

Melbourne’s Bored Nothing makes a lot of noise for one guy. Fergus Williams’ latest slab of heydey 90s lo-fi from last years’ eargasmic eponymous EP, comes with a sweet VHS video of his dweebwave posse skating around in an abandoned mental asylum, bombing codeine tablets purloined from a local crack den.  Somehow Bored Nothing’s jams make it through the grinding gears of his virtuously anachronistic four-track recording setup with both nostalgia and novelty intact, which is great news for people who don’t want to live in the past, but still aren’t sure about Twitter.

It’s Friday, get down and possibly even boogie to this ridiculously catchy disco anthem from the legendary gay biker house merchant Arnaud Rebotini, aka Black Strobe. We spoke to the eclectic giant a while back and then left the full interview to fester for some reason, almost definitely because of our slacker belief system. Well it worked out, didn’t it? (As being chill is wont to do).

A decade before Justice’s debut album, Black Strobe were the original Parisian house headbangers. Without them, Gaspard and Xavier would probably be ripping on Daft Punk’s style, dressed as a pair of giant vibrators. Rooted in post-industrial EBM, Arnaud Rebotini and Ivan Smagghe formed Strobe in ‘97. Describing themselves as ‘frozen Balearic gay biker house’, they emerged from the dark, damp shadow cast by the glittery behemoth that was French touch, like escapees from Fritzl’s basement.

After Smagghe’s 2006 departure, towering Lemmy-alike, Arnaud, expanded Strobe into a four-piece live band and pursued his life-long rock and blues boner. This creative tangent alienated many of the Black Strobe faithful, while Pitchfork dismissed their album, Burn Your Own Church, as “bad metal” and likened it to a Belgian drag competition hosted by Trent Reznor, Danzig and Korn (kudos). With dance music starved of personality by faceless programming geeks, you could argue a little bad medicine’s just what the house doctor ordered – oh, and more handlebar moustaches.

JUKE talks metal, Napoleon and the steez-thieving Ed Banger Records with Arnaud Rebotini.

J&A

J: I heard you think Napoleon’s biggest mistake was selling Louisiana. Enlighten me?
[Laughs] It was a joke. But, I’m a big fan of music that comes from the South and maybe if Napoleon didn’t sell those states for practically nothing, the music story would’ve been different. I’ve always had a fascination with this area, with Louisiana and the Bayou and this music by people who were rejected and who were slaves. They hugely influenced mainstream music of the 20th century – and rock and roll and techno and whatever.

J: You used to be in a metal band didn’t you?
Yeah, it was a teenage band.

J: How did that come about?
My first band was really into that noise scene, stuff like The Jesus & Mary Chain, early Sonic Youth. After that, I met some guys who had a metal band and were looking for a singer. I was really involved in that and it was really fun. I always liked extreme music and you know when you’re a teenager and have this teenage anger, it’s really nice being in a metal band… it’s like doing sports haha. I still listen to stuff like Napalm Death for my own pleasure.

J: I hear you’re into black metal.
Yeah. I’m not really into pop music. I’m more into American styles of music like blues or country music. One of my favourite English bands is the Rolling Stones because they’re not English at all in a way. In pop, for me, the most acceptable is the Smiths or Dépêche Mode. I’ve always like the dark and extreme stuff in music and metal is great for that. But you can find that extreme stuff in electronic music, bands like Underground Resistance, or the second album of LFO is really extreme.

J: Disco and boogie have been quite big recently with labels like Hot Natured and Wolf + Lamb working with that sort of sound. Has that influenced the new album?
I really like those labels, when I’m Djing, I’m always starting with this sort of stuff. I like the idea of the boogie: boogie came from the blues in the American South. Disco and funk also have a style called boogie and I’m really obsessed with this kind of slow and intense and hot and sexy type of groove.

J: There was some harsh criticism about your change of direction for the Burn Your Own Church album. Some people weren’t happy about the whole rock vibe. Did that frustrate you?
Obviously the harsh criticism frustrates, but at the end of the day if that direction was so bad, why is ‘I’m a Man’[Strobe’s schaffel beat version of the Bo Diddley classic] a more popular song? When we play live, people are waiting for us to play it. So for me there’s two Black Strobe’s: the old one and the one after Burn Your Own Church. With the next album, I’ll try to connect them.

J: One thing I’ve always wanted to ask you, to me it looks like Justice is trying to steal your style with your whole metal image.
[Laughs] A lot of people say that. It’s probably true, with the metal and this kind of hard stuff, it was maybe a bit too early when we done that with Black Strobe and I don’t know, maybe they do the concept, but they’re able to do really more commercial music than me.

J: Have you ever bumped into them?
AR: We live pretty close in Paris, so I know them. But I didn’t know them before they became big.

J: You never asked them why they’re ripping your style?
[Laughs] No, no, I never asked them. Maybe… when I worked at Rough Trade, I was a record seller in the dance and electronic section and I always wore Slayer and Napalm Death t-shirts and Pedro [Winter, Ed Banger Records owner] was one of my clients… maybe the idea took ten years to get into his head.

J: Black Strobe has been described as ‘gay biker house’. Do you meet many fans that are gay bikers?
I have many fans who are gay.

J: But not just gay: gay BIKERS.
No, not gay bikers, no.

By Alekslandr

Having spent some time in the company of the living legend, we’re changing all those lame Chuck Norris jokes to NIle Rodgers jokes. As in: “Nile Rodgers doesn’t turn the lights on. He turns the dark off.”

“I’m not famous – never have been,” Nile Rodgers is saying – and I guess, if fame is living la vida loca as a bonafide household name, then maybe Rodgers is right, he’s dodged that bullet. But there’s still a good chance that, at any given moment, someone, somewhere, is helplessly grooving as inconspicuously as possible in an office chair to a song he’s helped stoke into being. Like the inventor of deodorant, or maybs, the spatula, Rodger’s work is as ubiquitous as it comes without being overtly traceable to any one act, sound or famous set of pipes and has roots so deep in pop history that incarnations of his vibes are still thriving in the planet’s cooler nightclubs, bedrooms and major record studios.

Despite, or as probably because of, his humble and deeply weird beginnings (Rodgers started life inside his teen mom about ten seconds after the first time she had sex, she hooked up with a junkie boyfriend and dropped acid with Timothy Leary as a teen), he has spent his life making the greats greater. Starting out as a session guitarist in the Sesame Street band, he played for Aretha Franklin, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Parliament-Funkadelic [check out our George Clinton interview]. He went on to co-found record-smashing disco group Chic, as in ‘Le Freak, C’est Chic’, whose hit ‘Good Times’ was sampled in the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rappers Delight’, which aka the “Holy crap!” moment for hip-hop.

He became a sought-after producer, taking on Sister Sledge’s gaygantuan anthem ‘We are Family’ and Diana Ross’s ‘Upside Down’ and ‘I’m Comin’ Out’, in between holding court in a Studio 54 cubicle over piles of white stuff with everyone who was anyone for about nine seminal disco-baller years.

After the tsunami-scaled disco backlash in the late Seventies by everyone except coke hags and those cool Central Park rollerskate dudes, Rodgers turned his Midas touch to gilding the artistic reputations of the biggest icons going. Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones, Duran Duran. He burnished Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ into a chart topping junkie-swagger anthem (he put the chorus at the beginning). He produced Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’- and was also kicked out of her 36th birthday party on account of being too strung out to stand. The man has lived. He’s also been pronounced dead eight times, mostly after a binge with Mickey Rourke, which kind of makes him kind of like an immortal dude from an alien planet you couldn’t get in to without having seriously amazing hair.

Between a Chic tour, working on a Broadway rendition of his life story, promoting his incredible autobiography ‘Le Freak’ and assisting several budding artists with production, Rodgers is a busy man, but he took a time out to chat to us about dressing like you don’t give a fuck, but also do – and serenaded us a little too.

J & A

You go on daily therapeutic walks and sing to yourself. What did you sing today?
Now that you’ve mentioned it, I’ll do it at some point during this conversation. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of who I am. I’ll give you an example, like, see this green? [points to my sweater], I promise you, without conscious thought, in my head, it’s gonna go [sings] “Green, green, it’s green, they say, the dark side of the hill,” but I won’t say that to you, you won’t know it. I think that it’s the composer’s curse—you can’t stop writing.

In ‘Le Freak’, you mention the “Deep Hidden Meaning” (DHM) criteria system you developed you’re your musical soulmate Bernard Edwards. Can you explain the idea of the “DNA” of a song?
My book proposal was originally done as a Broadway show. And if I had my computer, and I showed you the two documents, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out which was the book proposal and which was the Broadway show. If you have a good sense of artistic storytelling in a production, you know when it’s not doing that, and you can stop the artist, and you can stop the production and say, uhhhh… we’ve gone off the rails here; we’re telling a different story. So that’s all DHM means. We’re saying the song needs to say this to us, and if it’s no longer saying that, if all the sudden it’s like… if we were writing a song about an engineer and, all of the sudden, that engineer’s become a cab driver, we’d go, “Oops! Why are we calling the song, ‘Hey Mister Engineer?’ It should be, ‘Hey Cab Driver’.

What do you think is a trend people will be like, WTF about in a few years?
This thing (points to fringe/dreadlock combo) that I’ve been growing for the past 20 years now! When I was coming to perform these dates, I said to the girls in my band, wow, for some reason, I feel like wearing bellbottoms with really big shoulder pads… And they were like, are you sure? And I knew those two things didn’t go together, but I wanna do it! When you grow up with something, I think that, if you were really into it, it always has a place in your heart. Like, I think that if you’re like, a goth kid – you’re lucky enough to live to 80 years old, you look at yourself in the mirror and you still wish you had black fingernails! I really think that. Like, I see the world the way that I’ve always seen it. I feel very uncomfortable when I go to a college and they say, “Mr. Rodgers” – I look behind me and I go, “Oh shit, he’s here?” And I’m thinking they’re talking about Mr. Rogers that was on television when I was a kid, and I don’t realize that… I’m 59 years old! They’re talkin’ to me!

Do you think there are any drawbacks to using iPhones and iPads as instruments? Have you ever used the Tenori-On app, or anything like it?
I don’t think there’s any drawbacks to using anything. Like I know there’s a huge anti-Auto-Tune movement in America and I keep thinking to myself, if there’s such a huge backlash, and there’s ten new Auto-Tune records everyday… someone must like ‘em!

I think people get caught up in things not being “real” and organic.
Uh, pardon? [in a French accent]. So people just pick on Auto-Tune? What about the instrument you just mentioned? (laughs)

I saw that you’d done some music for the Beavis and Butthead movie. How did that happen? Are there any ‘90s cartoons you’d like to see brought back?
Mike Judge called me. Almost everything I’ve done in my life, the person has called me! Which is fortunate, cause I don’t have an agent or a manager. So thank God, they call me! But yeah, I’m not huge on commercial American cartoon stuff; although, I must say, Southpark is probably my favourite thing ever created, and whenever they do movies, it’s genius – and I can’t wait to see their Broadway show. It’s gonna be one of the most amazing shows of all time!

Nile Rodger’s book, Le Freak is out now…

FREAKY FACTS WITH NILE!
He did the soundtracks to Beverly Hills Cop, Coming to America and, um, Snow Dogs.
And… two Halo soundtracks.

And Thelonius Monk dropped by one day to buy his mum’s fur coat off her so she could buy injectible essentials for around the house.

And as a teen he was hospitalized along with Andy Warhol after being spiked with bad acid.

He also became a Black Panther and jammed with Hendrix.

He became close to MDNA herself while producing ‘Like a Virgin’. “Why don’t you want to fuck me?” asked Madge, irritated at his un-DTF-ness. “I’m your producer,” goes Nile. “That never stopped any of the other ones,” retorted Madonna.

And he recently blogged, “Daft Punk is hanging at my house” – and they might be doing a new album together [confirmed and apparently out this year]

By Emily Torem
Photos Jeff Yiu For JUKE Vol.04 - The Weird Issue

Pop’s alpha female Beyoncé bombdrops right into the deep end with schizophrenic new sneak peek ‘Bow Down/ I Been On’. First half: ‘Bow Down’, produced by Hit-Boy, bristles with trap grititude and more 808s than you can shake a buttpad at. Flipside, ‘I Been On’, by Timbaland, dabbles with chopped-n-screwed vocals, but is a little less of a walk on the weird side and generally less of an aural leangasm. OK Bey, you have our attention (as usual). In fact, it’s fair to say we’re about as intrigued by the new unhinged Beyoncé as we are for that Cottage Chicken for Supreme collab we’ve been hearing so little about.

Metal fans out there should already know Hellfest rules the roost when it comes to summer riff chasing. The name alone is enough to make us wanna go (let alone the oozing Brie).  Every year Clisson, France gets consumed by weirdos one sunny June weekend. It’s worth the trip to see a the local supermarket full of dudes in corpse paint buying baguettes.

Whether you’re into dad rock, stoner rock, death metal, grindcore, industrial, straight-up heavy metal, ok, or even the Korniest nu-metal, there’s an iconic act for you. Sleep, KISS, Pig Destroyer, Atari Teenage Riot, Danzig, Immortal, Down, Testament. Mmm… wine and cheese-flavoured metal.

By: Alex De Mora