iggy pop, janelle monae and more: girlpants gets opinionated

It is with interest that I’ve been fol­lowing this weird week (month) of bizarre endorse­ments – does it not seem like everyone is shilling for someone these days? Some are artistic col­lab­o­ra­tions, some are out-of-genre forays, some are fundraisers, and some are straight-up curious wtf moments (like when Bob Dylan teamed up with Victoria’s Secret). Here are a few of my favorites genre mixups and lat­eral pop cul­ture moves of the past week.

• Iggy Pop and the Stooges played Ray-Ban’s rere­lease party for the Avi­ator glasses. More on this here. While I’m sure it was cool to see Iggy Pop per­form live, I can’t help but cringe when Google pre­dicts that I’m going to type in “Iggy Pop Raw Power” and I have to dis­ap­point it by typing in “Iggy Pop Ray Ban” instead. Yes, this is about me, girlpants.
• Beck, Vam­pire Weekend and others are on the sound­track for the new Twi­light ven­ture. The savvily indie track listing was revealed on MySpace (who uses MySpace still?) and you can see it here. Obvi­ously this means that Vam­pire Weekend will now and for­ever become a mall goth band, moody and dark save their col­orful, col­orful hair.
• Janelle Monae and Of Mon­tréal, together at last. By col­lab­o­rating, they’ve cre­ated what my iTunes had already tried to create by rapidly shuf­fling back and forth between the Idlewild sound­track and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? back in 2006 (seri­ously this was a problem). Luckily the song itself is way more rocking; listen to it here at Some Kind of Awe­some. It’s actu­ally pretty Of Montréal-heavy for being on Janelle Monae’s upcoming album, The ArchAn­droid (with its Baduesque cover), out on May 18^th.
• Nina Persson of the Cardi­gans and A Camp has teamed up with Swedish designer HOPE to reveal a limited-edition col­lec­tion that will become avail­able in August. I think this is lovely because I have always been a bit of a Nina Persson fan, and because A Camp is really good (watch the ABBA-parodying video here for proof), and because at the release party, the fashion col­lec­tion was inge­niously paired with avant-garde snacks, etching HOPE for­ever into my brain by cre­ating a food memory.
• Richard McGraw, whom we’ve dis­cussed here on Girl­pants before, has released the mp3 of his reworking of Leonard Cohen’s punch-in-the-eye classic “Chelsea Hotel #2”. It is not a cover, but a re-imagining of the emo­tional crux of the song into some­thing set in McGraw’s home­town of New­burgh, NY. Listen to “Balmville Motel” here.