Amanda Palmer
Amanda MacKinnon Gaiman Palmer (April 30, 1976-March 1, 2009), sometimes known as Amanda Fucking Palmer,[No seriously] was an American performer who first rose to prominence as the lead singer, pianist, and lyricist/composer of the cheesy pop duo The Dresden Dolls. She later started a solo career, and was one half of the Evelyn Evelyn duo, until her murder following a savage review from London-based rock magazine The Financial Times. She was the daughter of Robert Palmer.
Early Life[edit | edit source]
Amanda Palmer was born in 1976 in Salem's Lot, Massachusetts but owing to a bureaucratic mix-up, was unable to speak any language other than Swedish until the age of eleven. This situation was complicated by her father's occupation: little Amanda grew up surrounded by pretty but creepily identical looking young women who, unable to speak at all, communicated entirely through playing electric guitars.
Amanda spent her early years playing Octopush in the National League (Eastern Division) Tier 2, Zone 5, Green Sector and was taught how to play the piano by Schroeder out of Peanuts so that throughout her career, she insisted that all keyboards just have the black notes painted on rather than being actual keys.[1]
The Dresden Dolls[edit | edit source]
Following a brief and unsuccessful career as a giant robot threatening to destroy Tokyo, Amanda met and did not fall in love with the other one out of the Dresden Dolls who everyone seems to forget about. They decided to form a band (although a really small one) and name it after a city in Germany and small models of people played with by children, but they are also thought to have created a shadowy far-right paramilitary organisation known only as "The Brigade" whose actions were later to become notorious for reasons too horrible to talk about here. Oh dear.
The Dresden Dolls released no less than nineteen albums, most of which were eaten by ponies in 2002 because of the high hay content of their packaging, as well as touring alongside bands which had already split up, such as Herman and the Hermits, The Squeeze and Czechoslovakia. Always a target for the Paparazzi, Amanda was romantically as well as psychically linked to former FC Inter Sibiu goalkeeper Constantin Adrian Blid but this turned out to be just something dreamed up in a drug fuelled haze and then written on one of those tiny bits of card small enough to fit in the little side windows they used to put in school sports bags for people's names. The Dolls' one hit, "Coin-Operated Boy" is the story of Amanda's struggle with her addiction to gambling with slot machines. That means putting money in slot machines, by the way, not walking around in the company of magically animated slot machines and placing bets, or sitting round a table playing poker with a load of slot machines. Which would be a bit of a waste of time.
Solo Career and Murder[edit | edit source]
The Dresden Dolls split up in 2007 citing Windows wallpaper differences and Amanda embarked on a solo career. Her solo album was entitled Who Killed Amanda Palmer as a tribute to the tragic murder victim Laura Palmer. Despite being an intensely remote and private person, Amanda's songography or whatever it is you call it, is made up of biographical references: "Oasis" tells of her brief affair with Noel Gallagher, while "Astronaut" tells of her brief affair with Buzz Lightyear and "Ampersand" of her brief affair with a little & sign on a keyboard. She also branched out of music in a branchy and non-musical kind of way by announcing that she would release her own brand of perfume called Slip, but this was just an announcement and there was never any intention of doing any such thing in real life.[2] Amanda even commented later that 'People who release their own brands of perfume are from Mars' which is not, strictly speaking, true.[3]
Her career and her life came to an end when she was destroyed by a scathing review in The Financial Times, a publication frequently accused of bias towards heavy metal acts. Amanda Palmer was murdered in March 2009 by irate readers who poisoned her with an overdose of Haliborange. The actual killers have yet to be brought to justice: they are thought to be holed up somewhere, pacing about nervously, arguing and smoking a lot of cigarettes.
Despite her untimely death, the zombie of Amanda Palmer has continued to tour excessively, and has recently married writer and suspected sorcerer Neil Gaiman.
In May of 2012, Amanda Zombie Palmer broke all previous Kickstarter records crowd-syphoning for her upcoming, label-free album, "Theatre is Better than Theater", earning an unprecedented 1.2 million yen. In late June, she announced that the overwhelming success enabled them to purchase a label-maker, and that fans would not have to sharpie the disc as anticipated, except of course for her backers who would be receiving the album by download in September as per their agreement.
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Hrvoje Mestrovic, "The Dresden Dolls" in The History of EBM, Punk Cabaret and Other Weird Musical Genres That People Just Made Up Istra Pula (1994)
- ↑ Mladen Posavec Even More Methodological Foundations of Relativistic Mechanics, Varteks Varazdin (2006)
- ↑ Zeljko Pavlovic, Extraterrestrial Origins of Celebrity Perfume, Zagreb (1989)