Matador’s Sordid Spectacular History : The Mysteries Of UM-170
September 18th, 2008 at 6:04 pm by Gerard We’ve been chit-chatting for a while now about adding a feature to the Matablog specifically devoted to a former Matador band and/or old moment from the label’s history, and such a move is long overdue. It just so happens this notion came up again a day or two after some rocket scientist posted on the Sonic Youth.com message board that Matador was a big heap o’ crud because we “dropped Bardo Pond.” Listen pal, unless your name is Darren Mock or Barry Hogan, you can fuck off. We put out 4
Bardo Pond albums and did the very best we could. Seriously, the web is Blame The Label Central. How about blaming some of the fans who aren’t interesting, attractive, charismatic or funny enough to get anyone to check out their favorite bands?*
But I digress. There’s a video reel marked “UM-170″ featuring a succession of mid ’90’s promotional clips by Matador bands. Some shadowy figure has uploaded it’s contents to YouTube (thank you very much). From time to time, we’re gonna link to a few of them and give you, the adoring public, yet another opportunity to lambaste The Record Company Assholes for their failure to make fill-in-the-blank (in this case, NYC’s fantastic Railroad Jerk) as big as Interpol. Or conversely, lord it over everyone under the age of 35 just how fucking awesome you were to have known about this stuff the first time around. If you wanna talk about music, by all means, feel free, just keep in mind space is limited (we’ve got a strict 75% recriminations / 25% rock division we’re sticking to, mostly out of habit.
Railroad Jerk - “These Streets”. Directed by Jim Spring & Jens Jurgensen, from the album ‘Raise The Plow’
(* - we do genuinely believe the majority of Matador record buyers are extremely interesting, attractive, charismatic and funny. Especially when they are giving us money. Even when they’re griping on message boards)