Richard Barone’s Got A Secret: Kenneth Anger

Fronted by the nervous guitar and earnest vocals of Richard Barone, the Bongos grabbed the torch from the Talking Heads to light the way into the 1980s for a second generation of eye-opening New York bands that sounded nothing like their predecessors. Dedicated to the proposition that the tired and huddled masses could still find comfort at CBGB (or at Maxwell’s across the Hudson River), the Bongos ruled the greater-NYC roost. A stimulating succession of solo releases, topped by this year’s Glow (Bar/None), leaves no doubt that Barone is still hitting on all cylinders, a vital and imaginative force in today’s music scene when most of his contemporaries have fallen by the wayside. Barone will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.

Barone: Certain artists are so deeply embedded in popular culture that they become almost invisible. Andy Warhol is one. His style and sensibilities were so unique, then so imitated, that his work now seems to have existed forever. Another example is the work of legendary avant-garde filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger. Though he nearly went mainstream with his best-selling book Hollywood Babylon, which presaged the current fascination with celebrity scandals, his films remain pure examples of experimental cinema, with images and techniques that cast a long shadow on Hollywood. Each of Anger’s short films (primarily under 30 minutes) is more like a film “object” than a narrative movie. Like silent films, there is never any dialogue, and the “story lines,” if any, are wide open to interpretation. Take his rather homoerotic wet dream debut, made when he was 17, Fireworks. It is still as cutting edge as it was in its year of inception: 1947! Or 1969’s Invocation Of My Demon Brother, with its primitive Moog score by Mick Jagger. Or his classic, 1964’s Scorpio Rising, with its use of “ironic” pop songs that inspired directors such as David Lynch (hint: Blue Velvet) and Martin Scorsese. But the most blatant borrowing is even more recent, in Lady Gaga’s music video for “Alejandro.” The scene where she slides the rosary beads into her mouth and swallows is lifted directly from Kenneth’s Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome from 1954. Smart girl. She’s learning what David Bowie learned in the ’70s: If you’re gonna to steal, steal from the best.

Video after the jump.