![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
twain and I what a bunch of dickweasles we are. Sorry we've been gone for a bit. Despite the Global Economic Crisis both Twain and I have been bogged down in work. And, since it keeps us off the breadlines, it had to be done.
But, I've got an essentially free day today and Twain and I have agreed to alter the rules slightly. While normally I'm only allowed to trash shitty UK bands (Mr. Gabriel, you know who you are) and he's only allowed to piss on US bands (hence why Nikki Sixx is right now trembling in his urine soaked chaps) we are mixing things up a little bit.
I get to trash Hall & Oates - and in return he gets to trash Coldplay. This is fine by me, because just typing the word Coldplay into this blog makes my skin crawl. (True story, I saw a kid wearing a Coldplay shirt the other day and said to Rome Girl: "Why not just wear a shirt that reads 'I have no taste.'")
Of course, Twain has rather infamously trashed Hall & Oates before, but why let that stop me? After all Twain was wrong about them.
His basic argument boiled down to "They are a couple gay white men pretending to be straight black dudes."
Here lies the rub. The problem isn't that they are gay. The problem is that they are not gay.
If they were gay, they might have undergone some struggle in their lives and developed some soul. They might have been immersed in cultural activities that would have allowed them to understand art at some basic level. They might have through exposure to the creative genius that was gay culture in the 1970s actually come up with some interesting ideas or styles.
But, they weren't. Instead they are the whitest straightest most vanilla dudes in the world. If Hall & Oates were sex, they would be three minutes of missionary position with your wife on the day of the month most likely to make a baby.
In other words they take something that should be spontaneous, fun and climactic and instead turn it into something short and completely utilitarian.
The only purpose of Hall & Oates is that they allow you to not think at all for three to five minutes at a time. They are like meditation without the hippy dude lecturing you about finding your mantra.
They are Mona Lisa without her smile, a bag of cocaine that is entirely baby laxative, a smokeless cigarette, a lion without claws and non-alcoholic beer all wrapped up into one shiny package.
Seriously, how was it possible to have 34 hits on the Billboard charts without one of them being somewhat daring or challenging? Shit, a broken watch is right twice. Even Rod Stewart managed to write Maggie May and redeem himself for all the other boring crap he came up with over the years.
But Hall & Oates never had that one hit that would make them interesting or shed light on anything else they did. Instead they cranked out formula pop songs one after another all of them designed to be equally friendly on white stations, black stations and elevators.
It's enough to make me wish at least one of them had taken it up the ass at some point.
They might have learned from the experience.
That said the wait has given Daryl Hall and John Oates plenty of time to comment on the blog and explain that they are not, in fact, fat middle aged women in Omaha.
Keep telling yourselves that boys!
But enough of that. Let's get down to business you hep cats, cool kids, bad babes and boy toys. It's time to shoot the shit.
When last you came to this blog my esteemed co-blogger, Twain, was giving Madonna the high hard one – and, really, who hasn't? If her bush had an odometer on it, it would have turned over at least twice by now.
Which isn't to say that Ms. Cicconne isn't beautiful, talented and important. People forget but back when Madonna started out it still wasn't cool for young women to express their sexuality openly. Men were still looked at as the ones who wanted sex and girls who wanted sex were either seen as powerless insecure victims, sluts, or both.
Madonna changed all that and taught a generation of young women that you could be sexual and still powerful. She encouraged them to use their sexuality to their advantage – as she did herself – and not be victims.
The Material Girl is and has been many things, but she's always been in charge and strong. Beyond that she brought gay culture to mainstream America, which had a huge impact on the gay civil rights agenda.
Did some of her later music suck? Sure. But I'm willing to listen to “Ray of Light” in honor of the light she shed on an entire generation of women. And she has never rested on her laurels, unlike the real subject of today's blog:
Sir Paul “Cute Beatle” McCartney.
Here we have a cheap git stump humper who is still adored by millions of people across the world whenever they've sipped a little too much chardonnay before driving home in their Volvos to their comfy McMansions.
This is a man who only sells records because of his accomplishments in his early 20s. If he had not been in the Beatles all of his solo songs would have been laughed to the bottom of the charts as the cheap pop drek that they so obviously are.
Twain will argue that Sir Paul is a fine tune smith and I'll agree with him. He would do a great job writing advertising jingles. He could craft tunes for up and coming boy bands. If Britney Spears wants to do a ballad on her next album, he'd be a great pick to write it.
But, none of that means that he should be creating rock and roll on his own. The man has no taste whatsoever. Worse, he has no soul.
While it's true that I'm no great fan of the Beatles, I can at least respect the sense of irony and the heart and soul that went into many of their songs. Sadly, it now seems that all that intellectual talent came from John and not from Paul.
Rock and Roll is nothing if it doesn't have a sense of challenge, introspection, humor and rebellion. This is why that even though John “Don't Call Me Rotten” Lydon can't write a tune or sing that he will always be 10 times the artist that Sir Paul could ever be.
When you go through Paul's catalog you get a lot of pretty tunes that simply lack any and all substance or depth. Just think of “Band on the Run” or “No More Lonely Nights.” Like Patrick Batemen in “American Psycho” you just get a sense that while the surface is fine underneath there is nothing there.
As a human being he is beyond a pile of shit. This is a man who tried to change the writing credits on Beatles songs after his best friend was murdered. It's not like he needed the money. It's not like he needed any more fame. His ego just wanted to say “Hey, now that this guy is dead and can't argue with me, I'm going to take credit for his work.”
Worse was his reaction when told that John had been shot. He said, and I shit you not, “It's a drag isn't it?”
You insensitive fuckwit bastard. Fuck you, Paul.
When he got tired of his one legged wife he dragged her through a ridiculous expensive and nasty divorce – even though he has more money than the Queen of England. At one point he threatened to have his crippled ex-wife arrested for “stealing” cleaning products from their home.
It made me want to mail him a box of Tide.
Can you imagine Mick Jagger treating Jerry Hall or Bianca this way? I can't.
At the end of the day Paul McCartney is a slimy little man who got lucky by starting a band with an actually talented dude in the early 1960s.
Beyond that there is nothing there. He is the Wizard of Oz, the Emperor's New Clothes and the empty soul of the American Psycho all wrapped up in one pretty package.
twain had put me in a conundrum. There are so many, many egomaniacal pieces of pop trash that came over from the British Isles that it's impossible for me to pick one.Do I want to go with 80s shit, 90s shit or something worse. My first instinct was to go with Victoria Beckham who is the UK version of Madonna, but she hasn't done anything really interesting musically so I'd have to attack her as the Skeletor clone that she is. That said, I have really nothing against writing a Posh 'N Becks post, but there are other options.
Elton John is of course the more feminine version of Madonna and then there is the shit storm of awful that is Robbie Williams.
Of course if you want to talk about someone who has managed to remain famous and popular despite releasing 30 years of bad material (much like Madonna) Sir Paul is the first face that comes to mind, but I don't know if trashing his solo career is really necessary since his crap speaks for itself.
So, I'm throwing this out to the readers.
Let me know who you want kicked to the gutter.
I'm lacing up my steel toed boots as you read this.
Poll #1330325 The British Madonna
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18
Who Is Worse Than Madonna
View Answers
Robbie Williams
2 (11.1%)
Elton John 3 (16.7%)
Posh Spice - As A Human Being In General 2 (11.1%)
The Spice Girls 3 (16.7%)
Wham! 0 (0.0%)
George Michael 0 (0.0%)
Duran Duran 0 (0.0%)
Sir Paul McCartney - Post Beatles 5 (27.8%)
Hall & Oates 3 (16.7%)
I have two feature articles to turn in by Monday, 5,000 words of novel to have in a publishable state by Friday and a tax return to finish. And, I think I'm starting with flu.
But, fuck all that really. My heart's not in it because I wanted to do Elvis. I even voted twice when the poll was neck and neck - but Bart changed his vote to Madonna, putting her back ahead. Thanks Bart.
It's not that Madonna doesn't give me plenty to work with. I mean, in some ways she epitomises the ugliest of America. She's intellectually vacuous but ignorantly vociferous. She has that "can do" spirit - but most of the time she can't (see, for example, every acting role she's ever had, every record she's made since "Ray of Light").
If American taste has a defining trait though, it's fakeness - and Madonna has it oozing out of her arse like old person's mucus.
Madonna's entire career has been one desperate round of mask wearing after another. One long Christmas afternoon where she's the exuberant, gap toothed six year old fresh from her first six weeks of dance school, doing her whole routine for the Aunties and Uncles. And they applaud politely at first - but after the ballet demonstration and a rendition of that song from "Annie", you just want the child to get out of the way so you can watch the telly for a bit. That's when they come back in wearing tap shoes and do "Me and My Shadow".
Madge's version of that is "Here's me in a video and I'M KISSING JESUS" and "Here are some pictures of me WITH MY FADGE OUT". And so on. It's never "Here's me making a really great album that stands on its own musical merits".
No - the reason my heart's not in is that I think Madonna these days and I think "so what?". How much more of a joke can you make of a woman who spent the first part of her career fucking herself with a crucifix on MTV, yet now bounces aimlessly from one New Age teat to the next in search of fulfillment-milk? How much exaggerated snark can you fling at a person who, while married to her English husband, spent five years pretending to be English? She adopted a mockney accent, drank "pints" down the local and - God fuck me with his big Jewish cock - went pheasant hunting. Her off-duty uniform in these unpleasant years appeared to be a tweed jacket and cloth cap.
What. A. Cunt.
So, I'm curtailing this entry so that I can do some real work - and not have to spend the rest of my morning seeing Madonna's wirey face, her big chin and shark eyes in my mind. And next time, fuck the polls. The King is dead.
twain I think of the colonies as akin to the portrait of Dorian Gray. Instead of the ravages of age though, the New World reflects the British Isles’ potential for idiocy. When I look at America, I see what a bunch of shallow, mammon-worshipping fuckwits the British might have become – had we kept the founding fathers in our gene pool.
We are an island the size of California, and yet our contribution to popular music is second to none. No other country in the world has produced bands as innovative, consistent and unwilling to sell out. Names like The Beatles, The Who and The Stones, The Sex Pistols, Joy Division and The Smiths. These names all changed the face of music – and there are many more.
America? Even its greatest icons are also-rans. Elvis? As John Lennon said, Presley died when he went into the army – two years after his first record for Sun. Bruce Springsteen? Worshiped in New Jersey, reviled everywhere else. Madonna? 63 years old and apparently made of string, but still making records despite the fact that everyone stopped listening to them in 1992.
And I have to pick one of them for my next column…
Readers, dear readers. Choose away and I shall take the sacred cow to its righteous slaughter.
Poll #1326217
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33
Which bloated example of American mediocrity should I target next?
View Answers
Elvis Presley 11 (33.3%)
Bruce Springsteen 7 (21.2%)
Hall & Oates 2 (6.1%)
Madonna 13 (39.4%)
twain. Spending his time attacking Hall & Oates and Whitney Houston. Your desperation is showing. Whitney and Hall & Oates have their place. Gay men need to have sex and there needs to be music playing when the top bottoms out and his balls start bouncing against bottom. Do you really want to deny them the pleasure of hearing "I Will Always Love You" or "Maneater" when they spread to stretch their sphincters?
Of course the English don't understand Whitney, Daryl and John. In America we are progressive and our gay men are out, proud and buying records. In the UK, the gays get jobs at boarding schools or working for Prince Andrew. Then, they pretend to like Echo and the Bunnymen and Kate Bush.
They vote for Gordon Brown, before going home, putting on a Margaret Thatcher wig, shoving a hairbrush up their ass and thinking lurid thoughts about Tony Blair, all the while playing their secret stash of Whitney CDs that they keep well hidden under their mattress.
It's sad really.
But, deep down in your hearts, you know that children really are our future and we need to teach them well and let them lead the way. This is the type of uplifting message that we need to hear day in and day out.
Whitney will always love you.
Now, let's get on to the real deal. One American actress when she got her first academy award screamed "You like me! You really like me!" After yesterday's poll, Sting should stand up and bellow "You hate me! You really hate me!"
Sting is the anti Midas. Instead of gold, everything he touches turns to shit. His fan base consists of:
1. Advance stage Alzheimer's patients.
2. Those who think that Paul McCartney is "too radical and edgy."
3. People who have failed in life and therefore truly understand him.
4. The deaf.
He once wrote a song about it being difficult to get tea in New York City, because everyone drank coffee. I suspect that what really happened is that nobody wanted to serve him anything and figured that by offering him a cup of joe, he might simply walk away. Or, that the caffeine might give him a pulse.
Listening to Sting is like taking morphine. Take a little bit and you'll fall asleep. Take too much and you will destroy your soul, and quite possibly die. Become addicted and you will lose your friends, family and self respect.
While normal rock and popular singers are capable of getting on stage with three or four guys and rocking the house, Sting plays with hundreds of backup musicians, whose sole purpose seems to be to drown out his whiny voice.
This is a man who could not hack it as a teacher in a socialist country. That's like not being able to get laid in a Tijuana whore house. He is a bassist without rhythm and a singer who thinks that pomposity and vacuousness will confuse people enough to listen to him.
His music is like his sexual technique - it fucks you for hours without getting off.
I could list his horrible, horrible singles one by one, but what's the point? Just thinking about the Dance of the Blue Turtles album makes me want to shoot up.
Instead, I think I'll just pour myself a shot of vodka, crank up Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and dream of a better world in which Fortress Around Your Heart never hit the airwaves.
twain would start to trash the idea of Divas. After all it was the British who created Divas - when they started the fine tradition of boarding school buggery.The only difference between American and British Divas is that our Divas tend to have three holes to violate, while the British ones, in general, only have two.
In fact, the sheer numbers of UK divas is so astounding that I'm facing a challenge. I can't decide which to savage. So, I've narrowed it down to the three most ridiculous poison worthy UK Divas and now I leave it in your hands.
Let me know which one of these cunts most deserves a kick in the ass and I'll be happy to oblige.
Poll #1320959
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20
The Worst
So, friends, the final result of the poll was that 32% of respondents wanted me to trash the oeuvre of Shania Twain, who, it turns out is Canadian and therefore ineligible for a trashing. Damn. She’s so ripe for a kicking. Actually, she’s ripe for a titty-basting with man batter first, then a kicking – but that's quite enough about my sexual predilections.
That leaves us with a tie between blonde haired pop-muppets Hanson and crack-faced, singing Skeletor look-a-like, Whitney Houston. Of the two I veer towards Houston because this blog isn’t so much about bad music as bad taste in music – and Whitney is both terrible and one of America’s most successful recording artists. Hanson are just an insipid bunch of hairless little cock monkeys – like albino mice with guitar flavoured farts.
But first, I suppose I should defend The Clash from Bart’s previous savaging. If I remember it rightly it went like the this: “The Clash , blah blah, fake, blah blah, London Calling has a great cover, blah blah, not punk blah etc…”
Sigh.
The Clash are not the greatest of punk bands, admittedly. They’re not even really a punk band – more of an agit-prop pub rock combo with dub pretensions. But, who among us has not chicken danced to “White Riot” or scratched their chin in awe at the lyrical majesty that is “London Calling”?
What’s that? Is that a resounding “No” that I hear our American readers cry? You’re saying that you hair brush mimed to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” instead? Well – I’m sorry but that makes you officially GAY.
And, when I say “gay” I mean “gay” in the modern sense - meaning “lame”. And also in the old fashioned sense meaning, you like it up the sphincter from a 1980s hair rocker wearing leopard print spandex.
Anyway enough casual and ironic homophobia, and onto the subject of this week’s brief tirade; Whitney Houston.
Poor Whitney. Poor, poor Whitney. She’s like the Judy Garland of Generation X – except Judy could still belt out “Over the Rainbow” at 55, when a diagrammatic cross section of her stomach looked like the shelves behind the counter at your local drug store. Whitney hasn’t done anything for years except smoke crack, get smacked in the face by Bobby Brown and scratch her vagina. Live, on television.
This is much better, of course, than what she was doing before; making records. Houston belongs to a class of performer that we British like to call “a pile of shite”. Americans call them “divas”. A diva is a female performer convinced that her meagre talent is so huge that they can get away with performing the vocal equivalent of a trapeze act whenever they’re let loose on stage; the kind of gymnastic antics that usually end with a leotard wearing Eastern European face down in the sand, a spatter pattern of blood and teeth radiating from their broken head.
Surrounded by compliant lackeys, no one dare tell Houston that it really is better to just sing the melody as it was written, and not always try to stick seven more notes into every one that appears on the page.
The zenith of this was, of course, the day Whitney chummed up with Mariah Carey to sing some fucking Disney song I can’t be arsed to Google. YouTube it. There’s a live version that's the vocal equivalent of two pigs being slaughtered with a rusty coat-hanger. Incapable of picking a single note, each of the preening prima donnas criss-crosses frenetically over the other’s performance, canceling out any musicality inherent in either, producing the musical approximation of an 18 car pile-up on the motorway. Sorry, “freeway”.
It’s not enough for Houston that she has made some of the world’s cheesiest films either – showcasing “acting” skills that rival her vocal “talent”. In “The Bodyguard”, they put her next to Kevin Costner and she still looked like a hat stand with wheels. When she appeared in “Waiting to Exhale”, British people prayed to their pagan Gods that Houston would forget to exhale altogether, turn purple and drop dead. But it’s her singing in these pictures that makes most sane people (i.e. Europeans) want to stick a steel spike in both their ears and stir vigorously.
It’s not enough for her that she gave the world “One Moment in Time” – a schmaltz-fest archetypal of her back catalogue that builds insincere platitude on top of fake sentimentality with layers of soup and syrup, until it explodes into a gratuitous grandstanding fog horn of a key change that screams “LOOK AT ME! I’M SINGING! I’M SINGING! THIS IS THE BIT WHERE YOU SHOULD CRY NOW!”
And then they wheel on the mentally handicapped children and all the Americans come in their pants.
No - none of this history of dreck and drugs is enough to make her want to give up. It’s rumoured that Whitney has put down the “alooominnum” foil and Zippo and is now, finally poised for a comeback. And where did she choose to make her first live appearance for five years?
Kuala Lumpur. Kuala. Fucking. Lumpur.
You know what? She could have chosen Timbuktu and no one east of New York or west of LA would have given a flying fuck. Houston is everything that makes American musical taste shit; she’s overblown, insincere, saccharine and dumb as fuck; a big-mouthed shiny bauble; a spastic limbed show-off with absolutely nothing to really show off about. Like, for example, America.
And that brings me to the end of my evaluation of Whitney. I'm so glad that I resisted the urge to call her "Shitney Pukestain". That would have been childish.
Meanwhile, any Hall and Oates fans still tuning in should check out this video from time index 0:35. You may learn something shocking and disturbing about your heroes. Normal people, the kind who don’t need slip on shoes or a special device to open jars for them, will simply have their suspicions confirmed...
Someones wants us to tell you about their cool company! And they are pretty coolz!!! But they are hardz to figurzs out!
They mostly sell stuff like cool Metallica bobbleheads and shit like thatz, but their bannerz are all about GI Joe and who givz a craps about that!
Still! they have cool stuff if you click through their banner!
P.S. This iz Squirt. I iz bart's cat.
twain doez not know me, but I think he'd like me. Bart seems to likes me. He givzes me tuna when the rome food bitch is not around. Maybeez he give me more if you buyz a Metallica bobblehead! 
Anyways, it's a good job that I don't have time in my busy schedule this week to write my new entry, because I'm in a bit of a dilemma. There's so much bland, terrible American music (loved by bland, terrible Americans) that I really don't know what to go for next. Slimy middle of the road metal, or sugary country? Teeny pop candida albicans or saccharine, autotuned RnB slop?
So - I thought I'd let you folks decide. This week I'm giving you five acts to choose from. The one that gets the most votes will receive the kicking of a lifetime on Tuesday, which is when all my very important deadlines will have passed. I will, from the comfort of my jacuzzi, here in Twain Manor, compose a singularly insightful piece of invective designed to skewer the most deserving candidate (using a specially waterproofed laptop, of course).
Here, beautiful friends, are the choices. Feel free to vote below, then discuss your decision in the comments section - because, people of the world, it's good to talk:
Poll #1317286 Who Don't You Love?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26
Which example of American musical diarrhoea should I eviscerate next?
View Answers
The Ramones 4 (15.4%)
Hanson 5 (19.2%)
Shania Twain 8 (30.8%)
Whitney Houston 5 (19.2%)
Hall and Oates (again) 4 (15.4%)
twain twain complaining that Axl Rose is both fake punk and trying to be black. Given that he comes from a country of complete poseurs ranging from Mick Jagger (who has made a career out of pretending to be a black American drag queen) to The Bay City Rollers (man, even typing their name disgusts me) to Boy George (who pretended to be a human being and not an alien) the man must be mad to think he has a leg to stand on.Beyond that Axl never claimed to be punk. He always insisted that Guns N Roses were a hard rock band in the tradition of The Stones or The Who - simply because people treated them like a metal or punk band does not make them one.
Guns N Roses was however necessary to get people away from the weirdo hair metal bands that were sweeping both the UK and the US at the time and demonstrate that musicianship is what really matters. Sure, Axl is an insane drug addict, but he's an insane drug addict who has really good taste in hiring band member. Matt Sorum is an incredible drummer, Duff nails the bass better than John Paul Jones ever could and Slash actually manages to make his guitar sound like it''s singing.
This continues on Chinese Democracy where the old school boys are replaced by new also awesome talent - particularly in the form of Bumblefoot. I'd like to see you, Twain, play your guitar with your foot. Did it take 17 years to make Chinese Democracy? Yes it did but so what? If J.D. Salinger were to come out with a new book today would people scoff at it simply because he wrote Catcher In The Rye so many years ago?
But anyway, I was talking before about British poseurs, which brings up the subject at hand - The Clash.
This is a group that sounds suspiciously like Celine Dion trying to do a bunch of punk cover songs.
Here we have one great album cover in search of a band. And, yes, London Calling has the best album cover every made - it screams we are rock and roll and are going to fucking change things. It's too bad that once you start playing the album you realize that what is inside isn't punk or rock and roll, it's shitty bubblegum pop.
The lead single actually has them complaining about a Broadway play about the Beatles - because, you know, the poor and downtrodden are always concerned about the state of the latest theater openings. Then we actually get a jingle (I wont' even call it a song) about getting lost in a supermarket.
How punk! How outrageous! How phony!
This, of course, makes sense given that these boys weren't punk at all. They were a bunch of middle class kids who saw The Sex Pistols become successful and thought they could make a bit of cash off the hard work and inspiration of others.
As John Lydon once said,"Find your own fucking rebellion."
It's hard to describe how truly awful The Clash became. The three disk "Sandinista!" album is a ridiculous mix of Jamaican dub with the noise of a cat being dipped in acid. There isn't a single coherent song on the album. It's the kind of music you buy for your girlfriend after you find out she's cheating on you, but don't quite want to break up with her yet. You simply want her to suffer and you figure that she'll feel so guilty she'll have to listen to your present.
Of course while Sandinista! is awful, one could argue that they were trying to do something different, which certainly can't be said of the Combat Rock album.
By this point they apparently realized that pretending to be punk was quite lucrative enough, so they now wanted to be MTV stars - leading to the pop insanity of "Rock The Casbah" including a video that even the members of Motley Crue would have rejected as being too silly and racist.
Thankfully by the mid 1980s, The Clash finally gave the only correct response to their own question "Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now" in the affirmative.
The downside of course is that this meant that Big Audio Dynamite was about to be created.
Joe Strummer is said to have wept, when he learned that "Rock The Casbah" was the official song of the American bombers in the Gulf War. He should have wept when he realized that he'd spent a career selling people fake ideals and bad music.
P.S.
I forgot to give
twain shit about his trashing of heavy metal.I think this is because heavy metal, being the best genre of music ever created, doesn't need any defense.
That said, I will offer some lyrics from the great Jack Black which pretty much sum things up:
Punk-Rock tried to kill the metal
But they failed, as they were smite to the ground
New-wave tried to kill the metal
But they failed, as they were stricken down to the ground
Grunge tried to kill the metal Ha,hahahahaha
They failed, as they were thrown to the ground
No-one can destroy the metal
The metal will strike you down with a vicious blow
We are the vanquished foes of the metal
We tried to win for why we do not know
New-wave tried to destroy the metal, but the metal had its way
Grunge then tried to dethrone the metal, but metal was in the way
Punk-rock tried to destroy the metal, but metal was much too strong
Techno tried to defile the metal, but techno was proven wrong
And yet... every teenage American boy since Led Zeppelin has been a metal fan. Some grow up to be perpetual teenage men, who in turn are still metal fans. Then they buy guns and blow shit up - mainly themselves. In that sense, Led Zep gave you half the music played on American radio. The other half came, of course, from Milli Vanilli.
Case in point; the American media's obsession with Chinese Democracy, the long playing (actually, in this case, "interminably" playing) new recording by the singer out of Guns N' Roses - who now calls himself "Guns N' Roses" because he's a big weirdo girl who no one likes. Apparently it took him 47 years to make, because there wasn't enough cocaine in Bolivia left to wake up Axl Rose's remaining brain cell - the one that enables him to squawk like Robert Plant's Down's Syndrome sister being fucked by Forrest Gump.
Last month, on the way to Manchester (home of many truly creative bands like Magazine, Joy Division and the Smiths) I spied a poster on the station wall for Chinese Democracy. It said "Good things come to those who wait: Chinese Democracy - Guns N' Roses". Underneath that someone had pithily written "who?"
Ok - it was me - but my argument still stands. Who?
Because - really folks - it's 2008 now. We don't need Guns N' Roses anymore. That's what the late 80s and early 90s were for. And even then, we needed them much less than we ever needed U2 or INXS - or even Wang Chung, come to think of it. Because, even then, GnR were the sound of hair being swallowed by a litter of electrified cats inside a metal bin, being pushed down a hillside towards a trash compacter.
I can't say anything cogent about Chinese Democracy. I haven't heard all of it. The tracks I have heard sounded like death metal being played on a pipe organ while someone blasted out the album "Appetite for Destruction" backwards in their bedroom. And Appetite for Destruction was shit enough.
If that doesn't convince you that Gn'R are the tramp's pants - here are five other reasons to hate them:
5. Axl thinks he's punk, but songs like "Welcome to the Jungle" are actually about as punk as Queen. Or, indeed, the Queen. Britney's single song "Toxic" is more punk than anything Axl has done. Probably. (Britney is the one US artist everyone agrees is brilliant. But that's only because she mostly has European producers).
4. Axl wears a bandana and has dreads. Dude - you're white!
3. The entire band quit and went on to form "Velvet Revolver" without Axl - a band so shit that that when they took the stage at Live Aid 2, every single person in Hyde Park, all 5 million of them, went for a bathroom break.
2. "Sweet Child O' Mine"
1. They're called Guns N' Roses in the mistaken belief that it confers rebel attitude upon them when, in fact, it makes them sound like a brand of anti-perspirant from Alabama.
Guns N' Roses; makers of the wank soundtrack for millions of spotty teenage boys (who grew up into hobos, benefit cheats and traffic light windscreen cleaners), please vacate the planet. Your time is up.
twain twain can bitch about Hall & Oats being white guys playing black music.Fuck me! That's all the fucking English have ever done! From the Beatles to the Rolling Stones to Amy Winehouse the British have a tradition of taking the music of poor black Americans and recycling it for rich white kids.
This is because the last time the English had a unique musical idea was when they invented "Skiffle" - which in and off itself was simply a way for artists and record companies to avoid paying royalties on good songs by crediting them as "traditional."
The English are to music what Japan is to electronics. They take good American ideas, cheapen them, and then sell them to people too dumb to know the difference.
Beyond that there is nothing wrong with Hall & Oates. After all, vanilla gay men need to have some kind of music to play when they are fucking. They sound great in elevators and when you are placed on hold by your utility company.
Also "Private Eyes" probably makes paranoid people a little better because it confirms their suspicions that they are constantly being watched.
Now, let's get to the good stuff. Since
twain thinks I was shooting fish in a barrel with my Wang Chung post, I guess I'll go after one of the sacred cows - Led Zeppelin. What's astounding about Led Zeppelin is that it is composed of four great musicians who still manage to sound like shit. That must take a lot of hard work.
Seriously, it very often sounds like all four of them are playing different songs. The bass and drum never go together and Jimmy Page usually just sounds like he's forgotten there are other people in the band.
The worst thing is that they could be good. They simply have the worst taste in music in the world (a fact deeply confirmed by Jimmy Page's solo career.)
Plus, who the fuck thought that singing about J.R.R. Tolkein characters was a good idea. Was this band put together by 13 year old girls?
It would be like if I created a hard core metal band and then wrote songs about Herminone Granger. Then, what the fuck is up with all of the fucking Indian shit they put in their songs. They took what could have been relatively decent blues numbers and made them sound like happy Hindu crap.
Of course, their worst sin is that with Stairway to Heaven they invented the concept of "overplayed power ballad anthem." If you hate Bon Jovi, Motely Crue and all the fucking other bands who have long songs that are played over and over again, blame Stairway To Heaven, because it's the motherfucker that started it all.
I honestly think that nobody really likes Led Zeppelin - people just claim to enjoy their music because it's "cool" to say you are a Zeppelin fan and they don't want idiot music snobs to look down their nose at them. Sorta like the literature assholes who claim to love "Finnegan's Wake" even though we all know that nobody in the history of the world (including James Joyce) has ever finished Finnegan's Wake.
At the end of the day, Led Zeppelin is simply four asshole drunks who occasionally decided to get on stage together and create the musical form of masturbation.
This does not surprise me.
The superior taste of the British music fan means that we embrace those acts from over the Atlantic that America ignores. Jimi Hendrix got his start in blighty, as did The White Stripes. Iggy Pop’s solo career was almost entirely successful due to European patronage.
Meanwhile, America embraces the limpid dregs we can’t abide – with a curiously predictable hankering for the plastic and fake. Cod grunge chancers Bush, for example, are unknown in the UK – but have sold 10 million records to gullible Americans. Rubbish punk Billy Idol continues to have a pantomime career of sorts in LA, and we all know how much the Yanks love Leona Lewis. They can keep her.
Oh and, while we’re here – Whitney, Mariah and all those other diva “vocalists” who can’t seem to pick a note to sing and stick with it? You’re shit and make my ears bleed . Now fuck off.
Still, it shows what meagre cloth Bart has to work with in his attempt to deride British taste if he has to ridicule an obscure bunch of 80s synth twiddlers – which very few people in Britain have actually heard of - in order to parry my attack on the terminally saccharine Bon Jovi; one of the biggest selling bands in US history… And in only his second post!
So, allow me to counter Bart’s pea shooter assault with a Trident ballistic missile; Daryl Hall and John Oates. Hall and Oates; creators of 27 U.S. top 40 hits, 6 of them number ones, all of them shit.
This stunted pair of cunts stand accused of popular culture’s most egregious crime; pretending to be black. Really badly.
They sing what is euphemistically known as “blue eyed soul” – that is, a middle-of-the-road imitation of Motown mores, with polished production instead of piss and vinegar. And America, poor deluded America, loves it.
“Yum, yum,” they say, “This sounds a bit sexy and cool but, curiously, doesn’t make me want to go and lynch the artist from a tree or set fire to Ma’s crucifix”.
Really though, I don’t know why I’m wasting my words when all I really have to do is post this:
What else can one say but “ew”. Let's pray they haven't bred - but from that picture I fear it may be too late. It's rumoured that Oate's moustache isn't made of munchkin hair at all, but is actually a smear of shit from Hall's gaping arse cavern. Allegedly.
I suppose I should say some more about their music, but not much of it really made it's way over to Blighty. It was too lightweight and insipid to survive the journey. And, also, who cares? Just look at them.
Wankers.
bart_calendar defends Bon Jovi and thinks Wang Chung sucks. First off, let's set the record straight. Bon Jovi is not from Philly. John Boy is from Sayreville, New Jersey. I know this because once when I was a reporter I pissed off my boss and was then assigned to do a profile interview of John's dad, who is a hairdresser there.
In fact, he's the dude responsible for the original haircuts for all of the band members. One can only assume that John did something really awful as a toddler and his father patiently waited years for his revenge.
Not that I can complain about geographical ignornance. I wrote that Oasis was from Liverpool – when it's actually their fans who are either Scouse gits or well used Essex girls.
That said, what's wrong with Bon Jovi? It's been proven that Ted Nugent can repel evil and bullets with the power of his rock, so why shouldn't people be afraid of Ritchie Sambora's loaded six string.
Remember, if you piss him off you might get “shot to the heart.” Beyond, that, Bon Jovi has a message that is so important in this time of economic distress:
“Tommy's got his six string in hock
Now hes holding in what he used
To make it talk - so tough, its tough
Gina dreams of running away
When she cries in the night
Tommy whispers baby it's okay, someday
We've got to hold on to what we've got
cause it doesn't make a difference
If we make it or not
We've got each other and that's a lot
For love – we will give it a shot”
How can that not bring a tear to your eyes in these troubled times?
Now, let's move on to the real issue at hand – Wang Chung.
Here is a band that changed it's name from Huang Chung – because they thought their own fans would be unable to pronounce the correct spelling of their name. If there is a better example of intentionally targeting the bottom of the food chain – or having no faith in your own country's education system - I've yet to hear it.
Now, consider the glory of “Dance Hall Days.”
“Take your baby by the hand
And make her do a high hand stand
Take your baby by the heel
And do the next thing that you feel”
So, wait – they want to perform oral sex on a girl while she's balancing in a hand stand and blood is rushing to her head? Fine. Everyone has their fetishes. But, please, can somebody tell me what these lyrics mean:
“So take your baby by the wrist
And in her mouth an amethyst”
Someone at Geffen Records must have been so high on coke that he was like “Yeah, whatever, put it on the album and we'll just shoot a video.”
Now, let's move on to the biggest of their five (seriously, five) hits - “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.”
Here, they advise that everybody should “Wang Chung” tonight. That's right, if you want to be cool you need to make the standardized bass pitch of ancient China – and spell it poorly.
What's astounding is that they sound like some horrible record company manufactured one hit wonder, but instead thought of themselves as serious musicians who were not created by the corporate pop machine.
That's right – Jack Hues actually dreamed of sounding like this. As Malory says in his version of the Arthur legend, “A dream to some – a nightmare to others.”
Even sadder still is that they are planning a new album and reunion tour – that is being backed up by Geffen Records. So, either David Geffen is high after finally getting Chinese Democracy released or there are millions of hand stand fetishists living in the UK.
To quote Tom Petty, “I can't decide which is worse.”
twain begins with a statement that will seem controversial when you consider that his job here is to champion British music while Bart cheers for the Stateside artists:I agree that Oasis suck*.
They are a bunch of grunting no-marks, worshipped by people who most frequently listen to music on a small transistor radio covered in brick dust and plaster. To clarify, I mean builders. To clarify further, I mean the kind of builder who treads mud all over your new, white shag pile carpet, abandons your plumbing halfway through and pisses in your sink when no one is looking.
But if you were to take the amount that Oasis suck and multiply it ten billion times in a Star Trek replicator, flush it down a French public toilet so that all that accumulated suck spent fifty years marinating in garlic turds and Euro-trash tampons – you would still only have a tiny fraction of the suck that Bon Jovi suck.
Bon fucking Jovi.
Those poodle-headed soft metal peddlers are a pox on song, with their wailing and fret wanking and talk box solos. They take beautiful things, like authentic folk, country and blues, and polish it in the studio until there is nothing left but hair and air. And they never, ever go away.
100,000,000 (American) Bon Jovi fans can be wrong. Bon Jovi give rock a bad name.
But, I generalise. To properly communicate just how terrible Bon Jovi are, let us look at the lyrics from just one of their execrable songs. To wit, the dementedly idiotic Wanted, Dead or Alive:
I walk these streets, a loaded six string on my back
I play for keeps, cause I might not make it back
I been everywhere, still I’m standing tall
I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all
I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
I’m wanted dead or alive
Originally, I was going to deconstruct this segment line by line, but there’s so much to ridicule here that it would be as facile and mean an exercise as tripping up the slow children as they get off their special bus. And it’s not just the lyrics… the claim that they wield a weapon of such rockin’ power that all should tremble before them. It’s the delivery too – the whiney, shiny, slimy slickness of it all. It’s a mere imitation of music. Bon Jovi rock in the same way that Las Vegas has an Eifel Tower or Cher has a face.
And that’s before you even start to consider anything but the music. Their sense of fashion, stuck permanently in the shoulder-padded 80s, their bombast and seriousness, their Spinal Tap stage shows. And, perhaps worst of all, Jon Bon Jovi himself – a preening Philly pretty boy; so vacuous and so vain he gave his band his last name. Well, the last name he anglicised from “Bongiovi”…
Ultimately, the last laugh’s on him – ‘cos the band’s shit.
While Bon Jovi continue to sell records and tour the US, the collective musical taste of the great American public must be called into question. Like the dead bird in the bottom of the well, they taint the entire water supply.
---
* I will be using the British grammatical convention here, where I refer to groups in the plural. So Oasis suck rather than “sucks”, as do Bon Jovi. Only more so.
bart_calendar says Oasis sucks.Why in the name of all that is holy did the UK send these guys out into the world?
To say they are average is to demean mediocrity. Yes, I get that people like the Beatles, but what's the fucking point in worshiping a glorified Beatles cover band?
What's amazing is how fucking popular these Liverpool losers have become in Europe. Thankfully they only had a couple of hits in the US, but on the continent there are seemingly dozens of their hits that are played over and over and over again.
This is the type of group that makes you realize Vanilla Ice really wasn't that awful to listen to.
True story: When these guys were selling out stadiums in the UK about 10 or 12 years ago they did a club tour of the US - because selling more than about 500 tickets a night would have been impossible.
On the night they played near me - at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park - one of the dudes decided he didn't feel like playing. So the other brother sang all his songs, and nobody could tell the difference.
Think about that - how bad does your band have to be if one of your lead singers can just say "fuck it" without hurting the group's quality. And what kind of asshole says "fuck it" to his brother during their first US tour?
They also missed the memo that said that if you are going to be a complete asshole wanker rock star, you have to be a rock star first. And you have to be entertaining.
Axl Rose biting the ankles of Scandinavian room service girl is cool - because he's an established star and it's a funny thing to do.
These guys were abusive scouser drunks before they earned the privilege and continue to be do shitty drunken things in the most boring way possible.
It's like if the bullies at your local pub suddenly got a free pass from all bad behavior simply because they knew three chords.
Fuck them.
Profile
- bad_music_uk_us
- bad_music_uk_us
Syndicate
