Some guesses on why Cambridge, Massachusetts, noise-hopper K-The-I??? uses Liza Minnelli as a metaphor for (presumably) whoever broke his heart:
1. Liza still goes through husbands like her moms went through uppers.
2. Liza still rocks a cute indie-rock pixie cut even though she’s 60.
3. Liza was on that Arrested Development TV show where she played a character who dates someone on accident.
4. Liza’s got hella cred among emos and the generally dramatic (check her guest appearance on the new My Chemical Romance album—who knew?).
5. Liza’s last husband claims she hit him until he got vertigo, hid her herpes from him and forced him to dance naked in front of the fire.
The chorus—“Oh Liza, oh Liza Minelli, ready and willing/The penicillin hasn’t even kicked... in... yet”—is probably just a bummed dude playing magnetic poetry ’cause it feels good. It’s OK—you think when Fat Lip wrote the first verse to “Passin’ Me By” he was actually cockblocked by someone named Lee who drove a Z? But the verses reveal K’s candid relationship snapshots. How his voice made her moist (well, it is a booming beast). How good she smelled. Maybe something about his friends coming to pick up his stuff. And the rest of K-The-I???’s Broken Love Letter plays like that over NMS/Bomb Squad/Soul Junk glitch-skruzz. A lot like that Clumsy little book of Jeffrey Brown comix—the one where dude scribbles out all those intimate, sad, emasculating, fucked-up, fucked-out moments from some long-term relationshit. And, yeah, you can’t stop flicking through it because it feels like some voyeuristic blood/sweat/tears/cum-inked Dear Jill letter written two months too late. You’re sucked into the honesty and the vulnerability and the voyeurism and the minutiae and the sweetness and the ugliness... But seriously, you can’t help but wonder how the human girl represented in this story feels about being a character in such a one-sided tale. Who knows if K-The-I??? loved and lost, or loved and lost a whole shitload (like Clumsy, his story bounces around from break-ups to make-ups to first dates—one second he’s telling Miss Gofuckyourself that she’s wack and it’s all her fault, the next he’s doing the Manhattan all over vaginal secretions (dude!)). But it’s impossible to put down this big box of T.M.I.—whether he’s doing something petty (like scratching a wet “be-e-e-e-e-e-e-y-y-y-yoo-otch”) or sweet (when he says he’s in love, best believe he’s in love, l.u.v.). Emo by urbandictionary.com definition, sure, but the realest shit he ever said. - Paper Thin Walls |
1XLP/Out Of Print