Cut Your Face Cut Your Face Cut Your

I declare summer officially open.

Has nothing to do with the weather, or the holiday weekend.  Has everything to do with the gals-and-guy of Toronto-based Shitt Hottt and how they're bam-clap-clapping out my stereo speakers.  They have summer up North too, y'all, and the way these guys go at it, the Canuck season's got an extra R and three or four additional M's.

It's summer!  Stable your Dark Horses, shelve your Bible.  Shove the awesomely titled Are You There God? It's Me, Shitt Hottt into your boombox and gogogo.  God? blasts through ten songs in twenty-three minutes.  It's exuberant and horny, sloppy and sticky.  It's music to jump around and spill your beer to.  It's music to hook up with someone convenient to.  It's summer.  Do it!

Shitt Hottt - Boxx Damage (mp3)

Is that some radical reinvention of form?  A reassessment of heretofore underappreciated musical tropes?  Helll no!  You haven't been listening.  It's summer.  Every song should basically be "Cool Jerk."  Or "Rock Lobster."  Which was "Cool Jerk," too.  Shitt Hottt is great gobs of garage band goodness - always on the organ, heavy on the handclaps - delivered with a lick of riot grrrl snarl.

I have no idea what "Boxx Damage" is about.  The worst ever day at Mailboxes, Etc.?  Rough sex?  They've got a song about what socks you should wear on a date with the star of Who's the Boss?!  It's called...

Shitt Hottt - Tony Danza Dancetravaganza (mp3)

"...and dance dance dance dance dance dance dance!"  This next one's a lovely little thing with a bit of bent guitar.  Sending it out to your inner inner dirty dirty baby baby:

Shitt Hottt - You + Me = Awesome (mp3)

I'm summercrushing pretty hard.  Tragically, God? is only available in one single record store in Toronto.  So what you should do is go to the band's myspace - where there are a couple more tracks available - and bully the band into shipping some stateside.

*

Ah, summer...

Don't laugh.  That's how they made babies, back then.

There's been some wrongheaded outrage concerning this Dr. Pepper-sponsored "Band in a Bubble" stunt.  For the uninitiated:  MTV has locked Georgian pop-punkers Cartel (NOT to be confused with The Prairie Cartel) in an air-tight sphere off Pier 54.  Will they be able to record their next album before the oxygen runs out?  Tune in and watch!

So:  The usual cries of Sell Out! and some tiresome to/fro between some curmudgeonly twat and the band.  The problem as I see it isn't that the band is forever associating itself with a lame stunt; it's that a really forgettable act might sully the proud Dr. Pepper tradition.  Sure, the soda might rot your teeth (and DNA?); but it's responsible for musical memories that last generations.  Spend ten seconds at Cartel's myspace and you'll realize they're never gonna pen anything as immortal as this:

The bubble isn't the first waterfront Dr. P production.  Back in 1964, the soft drink company helped finance the second film in AIP's series of Frankie and Annette cheapies, Muscle Beach Party.  They ponied up the bucks in exchange for product placement and an appearance by spokesgirl Donna Loren (Is that her in this ad?  And this one?).  Here's a clipped-clip of Loren, with Dick Dale, singing "Muscle Bustle" (co-written by Brian Wilson):

(Don Rickles, by the way, plays a character named "Jack Fanny."  Downright erudite, that William Asher.)

Apparently, that's the only scene in the movie that doesn't feature the sponsor's product.  Loren stayed on in the cast of the subsequent Beach Party flicks ("It Only Hurts When I Cry" is fantastic; amazing that an acoustic guitar makes all that sound!); you can't say Dr. Pepper harmed her career.

The soft drink giant also helped out an up-and-coming jingle writer named Barry Manilow.  If you want, skip to the 3:35 mark of...

Barry Manilow - V.S.M. (Very Strange Medley) (mp3) (buy)(via WFMU)

Love that the mp3 has the crackly needle at the beginning; love how the audience is greeting commercial slogans with Beatlemaniacal screams.  (Here's an ad featuring Manilow's work (and voice, I think).)

The soda's bland bubble band may have in-your-face exposure... but it sounds invisible.  Every commercial has a hot single from a hungry band as its soundtrack.  It's some delicious, 23-flavored irony that a generation so obsessed with pop culture and soundbites and ringtones is unable to do anything more memorable than chopshop songs-of-the-week into a 15-second spot.

tags: shitt hott  cartel  dr pepper  band in a bubble  shitt hottt  yeah i forgot a t  

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