Pop music and the apocalypse
December 12, 2013 6:27 AM   Subscribe

Never Forever is Prince Rama's new 18-minute rock epic. "I think music videos will evolve to a point where they are embedded holographically within the songs themselves, so that as your brain is translating the music as auditory information, it will simultaneously be reading it as visual material as well, projecting a unique holographic map of imagery onto the brain that is tailored to the memories and desires of the listener himself."

Sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson formed the band in a Florida Hare Krishna community and released a series of trance-psych albums on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label, as well as ephemera like "group exorcism videos disguised as VHS workouts." (NB: also noted for their continually misplaced pretension.)
posted by hereticfig (11 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Uh...Bless their hearts.


I mean, er...they look like they're really having fun up there.




Let's see what Nature has to say.
posted by louche mustachio at 6:36 AM on December 12, 2013


"After the incident, Larson took shelter in the Plaza Hotel, and then was taken to the hospital. Staff questioned if she might have mistaken another animal for a raccoon. "I'm like, 'Yo, I'm sure it wasn't a squirrel,'" she said in the ABC interview. "I think I know what a raccoon looks like." She was then given 15 shots in her ankle."
New York squirrels are a special kind of badass. Totally possible it was wearing a disguise.
posted by zarq at 6:55 AM on December 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


This feels like Xanadu had a Mutant Child with Bhagavad Gita ...
posted by homodigitalis at 7:55 AM on December 12, 2013


This feels like somebody watched Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, turned the Casio on "demo," and made sweet love to a Bedazzler while gazing adoringly into a mirror.
posted by louche mustachio at 9:12 AM on December 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


*raises army of raccoons*
posted by louche mustachio at 9:15 AM on December 12, 2013


It also occurred to me that Taraka Larson strongly resembles Ke$ha.


And the I thought, "I wish that really was Ke$ha. This would be so much funnier."


Then I thought, BUT WHAT IF IT IS? What if Taraka Larson is Actually Ke$ha? IS KEDOLLARSIGNSHA GIRLYPOP'S ANDY KAUFMAN? I mean, she did think her vagina was haunted, and ir would explain the ridiculousness of the manifestos.
posted by louche mustachio at 12:24 PM on December 12, 2013


In a nutshell, I think pop music provides the quintessential "lure of utopia" that makes an apocalypse possible, be it microcosmic or macrocosmic. It is a destruction of the self through the promise of self-perfection, a self-induced amnesia that cannibalizes memory and immortalizes nostalgia, a black hole formed from the collapsed stars of collective memories into which we pummel ourselves time and time again with reckless ecstasy.

Pop stars are the brightest keys to unlock the darkest of eternities
This both excites and drains me, because I have a permabackburnered novella type thing I'll never finish in which there is this whole background thread about a hallucinatory pop star whose music induces visions of utopia in listeners culminating rarely in coma, a world drowning in artificial nostalgia that nonetheless indicates qualities of experience lost to the present, nested realities of greater and lesser idealized natures and imminent apocalypse as revelation of Eternity, etc. So, to see real musicians doing more or less that exact thing is both wonderful and soul-crushingly depressing. Creativity is just another thing for me to suck at.

Fantastic video, though, and fascinatingly out-there thoughts and attitudes. This is a band to keep an eye on, for me. Thanks!
posted by byanyothername at 12:40 PM on December 12, 2013


OK. Here I go down the rabbit hole...I'll probably be back here to say more later, 'cuz I know/knew Taraka and Nimai, who were, at that time at least, most definitely not sisters, by which I mean they were/are siblings, as far as I know, but Nimai was/is very much not a sister but a mister, and, whatever, those things can change, I guess, but...I have to figure out what's going on here...Back later. Maybe.
posted by eric1halfb at 1:06 PM on December 12, 2013


Brilliant. Like GOAT reimagined by my cousin Dave after reading a few too many neo-theosophy webpages.

Actually, nothing like that. More like the stuff I knew was on late night TV in the late '80s, but which I was never allowed to watch ...
posted by Sonny Jim at 2:23 PM on December 12, 2013


I knew Taraka and Nimai from the Hare Krishna temple in Boston, nearly ten years ago. I admit that I didn't know them all that well. We were acquaintances, at most. But my impression was that they were friendly, though somewhat reserved, and fairly normal young hipsters (frankly, more normal than a lot of the people I knew from that community). Though I didn't know them at all outside the temple, I knew they had a band called Prince Rama (that I understood to be a sort of psych-folk sort of thing).

That's definitely the Taraka I remember (though significantly more spaced out, drugged out?) in the article/video louche mustachio links to above.

But Nimai is a little harder to find. As I said above, Nimai was definitely Taraka's brother (not sister) when I knew him. I thought the sisters thing was a typo at first, but that little blurb appears in several places (including their own website and the wikipedia entry about them). So, my next assumption was that Nimai is now (or was then, quite imperceptibly) transgender. Or maybe he's just posing as female for the sake of the band's mythology.

But he's really nowhere to be found. That's all Taraka in the Never Forever video. I thought perhaps that was Nimai on the other motorcycle at the end of the video, though it's really hard to tell. That's who the credits suggest it should be.

But then, here, in the first picture under the title BLOODY HIGH TOPS, is the Nimai I remember. Fine. Not so curious. At any rate, it does nothing to confirm or deny what I'd imagined. But not too far down the page is the title MONSTER AIR WAS SERVED BY NIMAI LARSON, followed by a picture of someone, most probably in drag but also pretty clearly not the same someone pictured above whom I knew as Nimai Larson.

Anyway, how much does any of this matter? Probably not much at all. Obviously there is more of artifice than art in what Prince Rama is apparently all about. Personally, I find the manifesto more interesting than the music. But these kids are most certainly going for it, and that's great. Bully form them! I guess I'm just trying to make sense of what I knew or thought I knew about them. As far as that perspective goes (one filtered through the lens of the modern Hare Krishna movement and our nominal involvement in it), perhaps this is in part what comes from being raised in a religion that believes the world was created by a celestial being with four heads who rides a swan and who was born in a lotus flower that grew out of God's belly button. At least from that perspective some of that Forever Now video makes a certain sort of sense.
posted by eric1halfb at 6:17 PM on December 12, 2013


So...Digging deeper...The internets seem to be telling me that the person I thought was Nimai Larson is, in fact (perhaps in fiction), actually Michael Collins, former member of Prince Rama. Whatever. I give up. Sorry for the intrusion.
posted by eric1halfb at 6:38 PM on December 12, 2013


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