Is There a Correlation Between Music’s Popularity and Its Shittiness?

So a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing my Grammys post-mortem with my pal Max and he asked me a question, inspired by my assertion that, statistically speaking, a Grammy-nominated band will be a shitty band. That question was, “Do you think music’s popularity and its shittiness are somehow correlated? And if so, why?”

I gave Max a short answer (“Not as much as people think”) but he and I agreed that an in-depth discussion of this topic might make a good Bollocks! post. So that’s what this is.

The first thing you have to get out of the way in any discussion like this is the (obvious to me) fact that this is all dependent upon taste. One man’s dookie is another man’s donut and all that. If you like a lot of really popular music, you would probably say that there’s a correlation between its popularity and its greatness. And that’s fine.

But Bollocks! is all about my opinion; for whatever reason, that’s what people come here to read. As I’ve said a billion times (and I’ll say it a billion more), we can love completely different music and still be friends. I promise. But the fact is, I don’t like very much popular music so it might be tempting for me to say that there is a correlation between how popular something is and how awful it is.

But I don’t think that’s the case. There’s plenty of insanely popular music that I like: Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, the Beatles, Cee Lo Green’s Ladykiller, and I could go on all day. I bring this up to provide you, humble Bollocks! readers, with evidence that I never dislike popular music (what the fuck is a Kesha, anyway? I won’t put the fucking dollar sign in her name, either. But what the fuck is she? Who is creating demand for a white trash pop diva?) simply because it is popular.

For purposes of our discussion, I’m gonna divide popular music into two categories: good popular music and bad popular music. Again, this is all based on my subjective experience of music (there is no objective experience of art, no matter what any pretentious asshole tries to tell you. It pleases you or it doesn’t and the reasons why you hate something might be the same reasons other people love it. My wife, for instance, does not like the Screaming Females because they are, true to their name, Screaming Females. On the other hand, this is precisely one of the reasons I love them). I think that good popular music becomes popular because it is just undeniably, universally appealing. This is why a lot of good popular music happens to be in the pop style – that particular genre is almost always on a mission to be catchy. Punk music, on the other hand, is typically designed to polarize and won’t appeal to a broad enough swath of the population to become truly popular if its any good. For “punk” music to be popular, it has to water down its message and attitude and stay vague about its politics. This is why Green Day’s American Idiot (not a punk album in my opinion) is more popular than Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ Shake the Sheets and it’s also why I tend to despise the popular shit that some people consider “punk” today.

Last summer, I talked about The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and his suggestion that stuff has to be “translated” for mass consumption before it can become really popular. At the time, I said that the translation idea was a killer for good music – my exact words were “By the time the raw, beautiful music you love is fit for consumption by everyone, it fucking sucks. Always.” I stand by that assertion, but I have to admit that not everyone likes the purest, rawest forms of music. For instance, you might like John Mayer where I like Chris Whitley or Son House. You can sort of see a tenuous connection between the blues of Son House and the white frat-blues of John Mayer, and Mayer definitely moves more units annually than the late Mr. House. Likewise, the Clash is undoubtedly an influence on Green Day, but fans of Green Day are not automatically fans of the Clash (and vice versa; I love the Clash and I think my feelings on Green Day are pretty clear).

So why does so much shitty music become popular? Well, to be popular, you have to appeal to as wide an audience as possible (duh). That’s extremely difficult to do without compromising your sound quite a bit (“compromising” might be a bit strong of a word, but we use strong words here). If you want to rock like the Screaming Females rock, you have to accept a smaller (though certainly no less devoted) audience than if you want to rock like Nickelback rocks (which is, in my opinion, not at all). Nickelback fits a definition of “rock” that appeals to a whole lot of people, some of whom most assuredly think about music a whole lot less than I do. That’s not a criticism of those people (in an odd way, it’s a complement), it’s just a fact. A lot of Nickelback fans probably want some drums and electric guitar, but they also want a couple sensitive ballads thrown in there for good measure (I, on the other hand, want “Buried in the Nude”) . Some of those folks might even take the commercial success of Nickelback as an endorsement of that band’s talents; “if other people are buying it, it must be good.” And I don’t think the fact that Nickelback sells lots of albums makes them bad; I think the fact that they suck at playing music makes them bad.

Because pop tends to be built around catchier melodies and major chords, it’s easier for someone like Cee Lo Green to become massively popular behind something like “Fuck You” than it is for someone like the Future of the Left to earn an appearance on everyone’s I-Pod with “You Need Satan More than He Needs You.” Snobs like me enjoy Cee Lo because he represents the cream of the pop crop, while I think some people will eat up “Fuck You” because it’s the best song on the radio, which in my opinion is like being the cleanest corn kernel in a chicken turd. So I think how you find music influences how you feel about the most popular stuff. If you don’t wanna work that hard to find music (again, that’s your right), you will choose what’s good and bad from what you hear on the radio – so you’re already choosing from stuff that is kind of popular. I use every resource I can think of to find music and I dismiss a lot of the homogeneous stuff that shows up on the radio because it all sounds the same to me. I’m not saying this stuff because I think I’m better than other music listeners; if anything, I’m admitting to you what an obsessive fucking nerd I am.

There’s a lot more to discuss on this topic, so we’ll call this Part I and continue our discussion tomorrow. Let’s leave it here for now: music that is popular is not automatically shitty. Since it was a Grammy post that started this whole discussion, I want to talk tomorrow about why it is I think the Grammys specifically reward shitty music (it’s to do with how albums and artists get nominated) and hopefully wrap things up by dispelling the myth that only so-called “non-corporate” music is good.

The Very Worst Album of 2010 Part II: Reflection (And Maybe Just a Little More Hostility)

Having vented my spleen on Santana’s utterly shitty Guitar Heaven, I would like to turn now to a broader contextual discussion of the record. How does something like this come into existence (and I am not prepared to rule out the possibility that a mad scientist created it in an attempt to destroy the world) and who is it for? And what, if anything, could such a musical abomination mean?

To take the last question first, Guitar Heaven might be the last nail in the coffin that holds the rapidly putrefying remains of Rolling Stone’s credibility. The magazine gave the album three stars (out of five) and called the performances, “mostly faithful to the originals” which suggests to me that Rolling Stone‘s Mark Kemp may not have actually listened to Guitar Heaven. Not that I can blame him. If you think the Joe Cocker-sung abortion that they call “Little Wing” on this album is “faithful” to Jimi Hendrix’s original, I will fight you. I will literally, violently, will all the force of my rage, fight you. With a two-by-four and a sock full of quarters. If anything, Cocktana’s version of “Little Wing” serves as definitive proof that we should pass an international law that forbids people to cover Jimi Hendrix songs.

And how did something like Guitar Heaven come to exist? That’s the easiest question of all to answer: it came about the same way every Santana album has for the last dozen years. Santana decides he wants to buy a boat, some producers come in and write some shitty tracks, arrange the collaborations with some brand-name, talentless vocalists (I know some people think that lasting a few weeks on American Idol means you’re talented, but I submit to you that it means exactly the opposite of that), and behold! a full-length album’s worth of crap is ready to clog up your FM radio for another year. Santana gets his boat, one or more asshole collaborators get Grammys, and everyone wins except, of course, people who believe in things like truth and beauty. Guitar Heaven turns the formula on its head by eliminating the need to actually write songs at all – now, Santana and his partners in crime (let’s just call it what it is, okay?) can mangle songs that people already know and love. And don’t believe for a second that this is a one-time deal; I’ll bet you every one of Carlos Santana’s dollars that there will be a Guitar Heaven II some time in the near future.

So who’s it for? You might be inclined to guess that it’s for the same Baby Boomers who saw Santana, drugged off his ass, at Woodstock forty-one years ago. If so, shouldn’t they be outraged? After all, Guitar Heaven almost certainly represents the co-opting and watering down of some of the great, primal rock ‘n’ roll moments that were the soundtrack to the youth of a many a Baby Boomer. Santana’s guitar tone renders the notes of Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, and Angus Young in a warm, digitally polished shine that is about as vital as a road-killed squid (it happens more often than you think) and only one vocal performance on Guitar Heaven really does justice to the original song; Chester Bennington’s performance on the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”, is every bit as boring as Jim Morrison’s.

Of course, Guitar Heaven isn’t just a cynical attempt to create and cash in on the perfect Baby Boomer nostalgia bait. It also tries to nab those of us on the cusp of Generation X and whatever the fuck the generation after X was. “Photograph” was a song from my childhood and having Chris Daughtry sing it is a clear attempt to get fourteen-year-old girls to buy this album or at least get that one track from I-Tunes. And if we’re talking about cynicism, what other word describes putting “Under the Bridge” on the album at all? The song is clearly not a guitar classic, but it was on the radio twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for about two straight years in the 1990s. That one is aimed squarely at people my age (as is the inclusion of Chris Cornell, although I was not fooled into believing for even a second that Cornell is as great as he was even as late as Superunknown), but literally nobody my age has ever strummed a solitary air-guitar note to “Under the Bridge.” Why? Because it’s the slow, sensitive song you put on when you want to try and slide into second base (I never did that, but I knew guys who did).

If you’re troubled and/or infuriated by Guitar Heaven, allow me to provide you with some comfort: although you’re right to be infuriated by this album (because – and I’m listening to it as I type this – it really fucking sucks), you needn’t worry that it represents some new kind of musical evil. These attempts to cash in on music someone else wrote have always been around. Paul Anka tried it a few years back with an album called Rock Swings which was so transparently hungry for the money of twenty-and-thirty-somethings that Anka even attempted a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” There are, of course, good covers albums but they are the exception that proves the rule (the rule being, “Covers albums are generally cynical attempts to get money quick”). Astute readers will be in a hurry to point out that I loved Bettye LaVette’s Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook, and I say, “That’s very astute of you.” The thing is, LaVette, without any big-name assistance, took songs other people wrote and made them her own. There’s a sense, for instance, of the personal resonance that “Wish You Were Here” has for LaVette. When you listen to Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana choke the life out of “Sunshine of Your Love”, you can hear that the song means dollar signs to them and nothing else. They’re wringing it out like a sponge, waiting for money to fall out.

It might be tempting to try to link Santana’s decade-long mission to sell out as much as possible (which is his right, by the way – if you want to suck for money, that’s up to you, but don’t get all indignant when I call you a whore) to the Baby Boomer Generation as a whole. After all, a lot of these people spent maybe a decade (some more, some less) trying to stick it to the Man before deciding that they can save more for retirement if they just started working for him. Again, that’s their business and I certainly don’t mean that all Baby Boomer are sellouts, but I am willing to bet that those among the Boomers who buy Guitar Heaven are probably the most ashamed of their hippie-dippy past.  And to be honest, I don’t care so much that Carlos Santana is a sellout per se. I care that he’s a sellout who makes shitty music and now he’s making shitty music out of formerly good music.

And, lest I receive any Red-baiting comments, let me clear up what I mean when I say someone is a sellout. Making money doing what you love is not selling out. Watering down, pussifying, and taming your passions for mass appeal is selling out. Let the great Joseph Campbell sum it up for you: “There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.” Carlos Santana hasn’t just fallen “off the beam”; he’s swan-dived off of it into a swimming pool full of money, exchanging soulless, lifeless “music” (for it can just barely be called that, and mostly only because it consists of known chords and notes) for cold, hard cash. Or, to put it more succinctly:

Ladies and gentlemen, Carlos Santana has “lost his life.”

The Very Worst Album of 2010, Part I: Hostility

I know I already said that M.I.A.’s Maya was the worst album of 2010, but that was before I found out about Santana’s Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time. I don’t really have the words to tell you how awful this album is, much less to describe how much it personally pisses me off.

But allow me try.

Back in 1998 or 1999, Carlos Santana broke all the charts right in half with his smarmy Rob Thomas collaboration, “Smooth.” The song was huge and it was terrible. But the album upon which it appeared, Supernatural (I think. I really don’t care), became the blueprint for every album Santana will make for the rest of his life. Why? Because it earned him a swimming pool full of money.  I’ve mostly been able to ignore Santana (so much so that I forgot to put him on my list of the ten most overrated guitar players of all time, despite the fact that he is highly – highly – overrated as a guitarist) and his insipid collaborations with every corporate, top-40 flavor of the month that will give him the time of day. But I can’t ignore Guitar Heaven because I saw this fucking video on YouTube. That’s Gavin Rossdale (formerly of Bush, currently living off of Gwen Stefani) mangling T. Rex’s “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” with the help of Carlos Goddamn Santana. That video, which was taken from the American Music Awards, tells you pretty much all you need to know about what sucks in American music today. Not just the bludgeoning to death of a glam rock classic, but the crowd shots of other top-selling morons trying to awkwardly groove to Rossdale’s wooden vocal performance – seriously, Gavin Rossdale did to T.Rex what Mel Gibson did to Hamlet (and if you think that’s a compliment, I want to have a word with you. Well, my fists want to have a word with you).

So anyway, I done got the deluxe edition of Guitar Heaven (because if I’m gonna torture myself with this shit, I’m going all in – I need the version that includes Scott Stapp singing CCR’s “Fortunate Son”) to try and see just how furious it can make me. Turns out, it can make me plenty fucking furious. Even the songs on here that I’ve never liked (like “Whole Lotta Love” which Led Zeppelin stole from Willie Dixon) deserve better than Santana and his brute squad of talentless art-butchers give them. Except “Riders on the Storm.” That song has always sucked and Santana’s cover, with vocals from one of the Linkin Park assholes, just makes it suck more and helpfully proves that it will always suck.

Santana tries to play the intro to “Whole Lotta Love” with what I can only assume that he assumes is a certain Latin flair, but it ends up sounding dull and lifeless, which is actually kind of perfect because Chris Cornell comes in a few seconds later and removes any doubt about whether or not he will ever be good again. I swear, youngsters, there was a time when Chris Cornell was awesome. It lasted until about halfway through Down on the Upside and I fear those days are never coming back. “Whole Lotta Love” is one the first pieces of ordnance I launch when delivering my standard “Fuck Led Zeppelin and Here’s Why” lecture, but Santana and Chris Cornell have actually made me feel kind of bad for Led Zeppelin, which only pisses me off more. How dare Carlos Santana make me feel compassion for my enemy!

But what of the songs I like? For instance, the Rolling Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’,” which is sung by Scott Weiland, the sometime Stone Temple Pilot and all-the-time rehab dropout. Say what you will about Keith Richards, but his guitar tone fit the Stones’ good songs like a comfy pair of jeans. Carlos Santana’s tone is all wrong for the song and so is Weiland’s. He spends half the song sounding like Kid Rock. Come to think of it, I’m kind of surprised Kid Rock wasn’t tapped for this album. Maybe they wanted to get him for a song but then realized that with Scott Stapp and Rob Thomas already committed to the project, they would achieve some sort of critical mass of assholes.

So yeah, Rob Thomas is back and this time he helps Santana skull-fuck “Sunshine of Your Love” to death. This is one of the only Cream songs I like, and Santana and Thomas have smoothed (no pun intended) all of its rough edges and turned it into a guitar and vocal wankfest, which, come to think of it, is a fairly succinct description of the entirety of Guitar Heaven. Except the vocal performances are almost uniformly terrible and the guitar bits are the same fucking guitar bits that Carlos Santana has been regurgitating for the last twelve years. In fact, every track on Guitar Heaven is so sterile and bland that I’ve begun to wonder if maybe Santana secretly hates these songs and wants to destroy them. That’s the only explanation for something like the version of “Back in Black” that appears on Guitar Heaven. The song, originally by AC/DC (a band for whom I have no small amount of affection), is stripped of its signature riff and has the vocals handled by powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll vocalist… um… Nas. The rap guy. Carlos Santana hates “Back in Black” (and, presumably, all of humanity) so much that he teamed up with Nas to turn the song into a clubby rap-rock tune. By the time I made it through this track, I was beginning to wish this album was a person so I could hit it in the face with a brick.

Setting aside the fact that Santana and company just completely fuck up every single song on this album (don’t even get me started on what they did to “Little Wing”, which just happens to be my favorite Jimi Hendrix song. It makes me wish Carlos Santana was a person so I could hit him in the face with a brick), one glaring issues remains: whoever decided that these songs were the “greatest guitar classics of all time” has probably survived on a steady diet of paint chips and their own paint-fumed feces, because there are tracks on Guitar Heaven that even the lowest-functioning retard (Sarah Palin) wouldn’t mistake for a “guitar classic.” Fucking “Riders on the Storm” isn’t even a guitar song! It’s a meandering, bullshit electric organ tune that proves beyond all doubt that the use of electric organs in music should be tightly regulated. How do you make an album of great guitar tracks and not include at least one early Black Sabbath tune? Or “Search and Destroy” by the Stooges? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad some of my favorite guitar songs didn’t suffer at the hands of Carlos Santana and his flying monkey squad of songfuckers.  But the logic in terms of track selection is mind-boggling and it underscores the utter stupidity that clearly drives the whole project. These aren’t the greatest guitar tracks of all time – they’re just some guitar tracks from select periods in time and, in many cases, their greatness is subject to serious debate. Who, even among people who can stand the fucking thing, thinks “Under the Bridge” is one of the greatest guitar tracks of all time? This album isn’t an anthology of great guitar songs at all; it’s just a place where some rock tunes went to die.

At the end of the day, people whose priorities are so fucked that they made time to vote for Chris Daughtry on American Idol (and also made time to get angry when he didn’t win) might find something to like on Guitar Heaven, but just like the fundamentalist view of Christian heaven, the whole things strikes me as perverse and wildly unimaginative. If Kirk Cameron’s Heaven is the “right” one, who would really wanna go? Cameron’s god is an abusive (possibly alcoholic) stepfather who would’ve sent Ghandi to hell, and if you’re willing to condemn Ghandi after the life he lived, you’re fucking nuts. But you’d probably enjoy Santana’s Guitar Heaven.

Oh Good. A New Hole Album. (Part 2)

If you’re just tuning in, beer (Ninkasi’s Total Domination IPA, to be exact. The good folks at Ninkasi have helped me through a lot of shitty records, but they’re also there for me during the good times and I would like to give them a very special Bollocks! shout-out) and I are reviewing the new Hole album. So far, neither of us like it very much.

The track I’m listening to now is called, “For Once in Your Life” and the music is a blatant ripoff of a song from 2005 or 2006 (I remember it from a Boston winter, but can’t remember anything else) that I can’t remember for the life of me. It’s driving me nuts that I can’t remember what song this is. Is it a Perishers song? Snow Patrol? I don’t know, but it’s definitely hackwork. I spent a fucking hour trying to figure out what song “For Once in Your Life” is ripping off – if anyone can help me out with this, I’d be much obliged. Vocally, she’s impersonating Bob Dylan circa Blood On the Tracks, to which I can only respond with some of Dylan’s lyrics from that album: “You’re an idiot, babe/ it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”

Super good. The next song is called “Letter to God.” My Cloying-Meter just broke. OH LOOK, EVERYBODY. COURTNEY LOVE IS WONDERING WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT AND WHO SHE IS AND WHAT THE POINT OF IT ALL IS! WOW! NO ONE HAS EVER WONDERED THAT IN SONG FORM EVER BEFORE!!!!1!!!ONE.  If you’ve deduced (correctly) that I hate Nobody’s Daughter at this point, think about how much I hate the whole album, multiply it by a thousand, and you’ll get to about half as much as I hate “Letter to God.” This song is pretty much everything I think is wrong with music and writing in general right now.

The next song is called “Loser Dust.” It’s really dumb. Love doesn’t really bother staying in tune much on this song. I want you to ponder something with me, Bollocks! readers: how much did Kurt Cobain have to loathe himself in order to shack up with someone like Courtney Love? “Loser Dust” is the typical Love ego married to a bad Foo Fighters song (i.e., one that came after The Colour and the Shape). Also, it’s about – what else? – how people are always waiting for celebrities to  fuck up in public. You know what? There are two cultural things that make me wanna riot right now: 1) movies where well-meaning white people come into the inner cities and teach African American kids how to read* and 2) songs by spoiled famous retards about how tough it is to be famous because everyone is watching you all the time. If it sucks that bad, Courtney Love, try getting a real fucking job. You wouldn’t last a minute – your job now is “do drugs in public and make shitty records”. That doesn’t exactly qualify you for anything in the private sector, does it? Maybe you can be some town’s Doddering Fuck-Up in Residence**, but that’s about it.

Not too much to go, but “How Dirty Girls Get Clean” is pretty awful. See, it starts out with an acoustic guitar for a few lines and then it gets all loud. To show the emotional impact of Love going through rehab or something. All the dynamics on Nobody’s Daughter are trying to be the dynamics from the Pixies’ Doolittle and they’re failing miserably. “How Dirty Girls Get Clean” is packed with the same lyrical cliches that plague the whole album. Also, more Dylan-impersonation. Minus a million points.

Last track! It’s called “Never Go Hungry.” Love sings about how she’s hungering for dignity. It’s a little late for that. “Never Go Hungry” has a sorta folky vibe to it, but the overall message is that Love will do anything so long as she doesn’t have to go hungry again. You know, like Ghandi did. Actually, I think Courtney Love is making a pretty bold declaration of her morals here: “I don’t care what I have to pretend,” she sings with more conviction than she has shown on the album so far. It’s cliche as fuck, but Love has finally let us know what she stands for: Courtney Love stands for Courtney Love and if you don’t like it, she’ll Twitter some incoherent nonsense about you.

Okay. It’s nearly 1 in the a.m. and my Ninkasis are nearly drained. Musically, Nobody’s Daughter is bland, derivative, and obvious. Lyrically, it is cliche as hell when it’s not being irritating as hell and the combination serves to make it, overall, fucking dreadful. I wouldn’t even recommend this album to people who hate themselves.

*I know someone is going to say that Dangerous Minds and movies like that are based on true stories, but that’s bullshit. “True story” movies are almost always embellished for dramatic effect (hate to rain on your parade, but the real guy from The Pursuit of Happyness was a bad father who abandoned his kid for his precious Wall Street career; the coach in Rudy actually wanted to let the runt play football, they just needed a villain for the film; and don’t even get me started on Braveheart). Know what I wanna see? A movie where Samuel L. Jackson goes to the backwoods of Georgia or Louisiana or Kansas and teaches white rednecks about evolution. Hell, if Mr. Jackson is game, I’ll fucking write that movie myself.

**It’s sort of an advanced version of the Town Drunk.

Jesus Christ Reviews the New Creed Album

Editor’s Note: I said I was going to review Creed’s new album, Full Circle, knowing full well that I wouldn’t like it. Well, in this season of giving, I’ve decided to relent. I sought out someone who would be infinitely more merciful to Creed than I could ever be. My first choice was His Holiness, the Dalai Lama but when I sent him a copy of the album he said, “I love you, Matt, but we Tibetans have suffered enough.” So then I remembered that Creed kinda has a thing for Jesus and I figured I’d let him take the reins and share his thoughts with us about Full Circle. Below, completely uncensored, is Jesus Christ’s review of the new Creed album.

Hi. I’m Jesus Christ. I don’t usually contribute to Bollocks!, but I’m doing a friend a favor (Chorpenning and I get together about once a year; I bring him John Coltrane bootlegs from Heaven and, in exchange, he supplies me with delicious microbrews. Keep this on the do-lo, okay? I don’t want the zealots getting all lathered up about the Rapture – I’ll initiate that particular party when y’all stop speculating about it, savvy?). I am a big fan of a lot of different kinds of music (Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix collaborated on an album last year that literally induces the listener to orgasm – but you can’t get it down here) and I was quite game to give Creed a listen since my pal claims he’s incapable of giving them a fair hearing.

Contrary to popular belief, I’ve never listened to Creed before. I hear that their singer, Scott Stapp, likes to imitate me from time to time. That’s cool, I s’pose. At any rate, I’ve listened to Full Circle several times now and, since I’m the All High Judge of Everybody (what can I say? I love my job), I expect that you will take my word as Gospel.

Full Circle is a great album.

Permit me to clarify: Full Circle is great album if you like trite, empty, corporate rock that fits like peas in a pod between Kid Rock and Nickelback (by the way, if Heaven has a greater musical enemy than Kid Rock, it can only be Ted Nugent). It’s great if you like a singer who sounds like he’s trying to shit out a bowling ball while simultaneously attempting to imitate Eddie Vedder’s sound from the first two Pearl Jam records (try this for me: while you’re listening to any given Creed song, just put on your best Vedder and sing “Jeremy spoke in class today” all weird and elongated – you’ll see what I’m getting at here). It’s awesome if you like a band that likes to sandwich wanky guitar solos between verses of single-fingered, Drop D “power chords” (for non-guitar people: you can tune your low E string down to a D, which gives you the option of playing “power chords” with just your index finger instead of the typical barred-chord fashion). I am only going to say this once, ye believers, so listen up: single-fingered “power chords” are the last refuge of scoundrels and complete pussies.

Lyrically, Full Circle is a mishmash of pain, blood, rain, crumbling walls, shame, heartache, hope, and light. I think Stapp (I assume he writes this dreck) might literally just be pulling words like that out of a hat and pasting them into lines about how tortured he either is now or used to be or both. He starts the album off by singing about how he’s “entitled” to overcome. Let’s examine this phrase, can we? It bothers the piss outta me and here’s why: overcoming things (usually obstacles) has nothing to do with your rights. In fact, obstacles tend to arise in direct defiance of what you think you’re entitled to. You don’t earn the right to overcome an obstacle, you get off your ass and overcome it. I’d have no problem with Stapp singing about “trying” to overcome something (other than the fact that song is by-the-numbers radio rock. Like Metallica meets Switchfoot. And by the way, if that combination fires up your salivary glands, you should know that you’re going to hell) but singing about having the right to overcome something is nonsense. By the way, Mr. Stapp, I overcame motherfucking death and I didn’t need to sing a song about how I was entitled to do so. That’s how you roll Messiah-style.

Elsewhere, Stapp is lyrically preoccupied with fighting and struggling (I guess, implicitly, he’s struggling to overcome. Or to assert his right to overcome if he should so choose at some point), though he never really articulates the nature of these struggles, the foes with whom he’s struggling (and the first person to suggest he’s struggling with himself will be struck by lightning. Don’t test me), or really anything other than maintaining that he’s going to keep on fighting. Over the course of Full Circle, Scott Stapp comes off as a completely humorless person and that makes me really sad. The old blues masters (I don’t mean Eric Clapton, white people. I mean Leadbelly and Robert Johnson) sang songs about being about as busted-ass as you can be – Leadbelly sang about not being able to go places because he was black – but there was always a sense of laughter behind the moaning. In the face of feeling about as bad as you can feel, these dudes maintained their humor (and my friend Mr. Johnson, I can assure you, also maintained a harem of womenfolk across the entire country, women who were willing and able to squeeze his lemon until the juice ran down his leg – this is part of what got him killed, but he hasn’t stopped to this day. Dude still gets all the finest women in Heaven. You can bet your ass Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts were shocked to arrive at the Pearly Gates and find an entire afterlife full of mixed-race blues babies). It’s a life lesson that is apparently lost on Scott Stapp, which is really too bad. Humor gets us through the very worst that life can throw at us. When I was on the cross, the thief to my right recognized me and said, “Jesus! What are you doing here?” I lolled my head over toward him and said, “Oh, I’m just hangin’ out.”

Jesus Christ can be reached through prayer, though he is not always inclined to answer. He wishes it to be known that, of his favorite 10 albums of 2009, only one can be found here on Earth: Middle Cyclone by Neko Case. He also told me to tell Neko Case to call him, but I patiently explained that I have no way to reach Ms. Case. If you happen to be Neko Case and you happen to be reading this (unlikely), I think Jesus has a crush on you. He also said that there’s no war on Christmas, so all the right-wing people who are on about that can “shut the fuck up” (his words, not mine. And his words are gospel, kids).

The Case Against Green Day

It’s actually pretty hard to describe how much I dislike Green Day. I’m serious – this is the fourth draft of this post that I’ve started because it’s also really hard to decide where to start discussing all the things I don’t like about them. Do I start with all the better bands they’re ripping off? Do I start with the black-dominated wardrobes and guyliner? Do I start with some of the laziest, most cringe-inducing songwriting I’ve ever heard? Do I start with the fact that they’re considered by some people who may or may not have cognitive disabilities (including themselves) to be a punk band?

Maybe I’ll start there, because that bugs the living shit out of me (and because I have a lot of love for good punk music. A lot of love). When I think of punk bands, I think of (who doesn’t?) the Clash, the Stooges, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, the Jim Carroll Band, early Bad Religion, and – for some current reference – the Thermals, the Old Haunts, Titus Andronicus, and the Future of the Left. Green Day is, at best – at best – a dull, lifeless distillation of the style of music those awesome (and vastly superior) bands play(ed). The Clash gave us, “Let fury have the hour/ anger can be power”; Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy” (one of the most repetitive, godawful songs I’ve heard all year. Billy Joe Armstrong knows one word that rhymes with enemy: “enemy.” Oh wait. That’s the same word. I hate this band) literally waters that down to “Violence is an energy” and “Bringing on the fury” and maybe I’m paranoid, but that seems a little close to be coincidence. Am I accusing Green Day of callously ripping of their betters? You bet your ass I am. And even their peers – one of 21st Century Breakdown‘s many awful tracks is “East Jesus Nowhere” which features a guitar riff eerily similar to (and by “eerily similar to”, I mean “shamelessly ripped off from”) Marilyn Manson’s “Disposable Teens.” Have you left no sense of decency, Green Day? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

When American Idiot came along back in 2004, lots of people loved it because they hated the President and all the bullshit he was up to. But what did that album really say about…well, anything? The answer is (drum roll please) fuckall. Sure, they got their best line ever on the title track (“I’m not a part of a redneck agenda”) but the rest of that album was generic suburban alienation bullshit. They spent 13 tracks saying nothing the Clash didn’t say better in “Lost in the Supermarket”.  The best moment of that album is “American Idiot” and it’s eclipsed in every way by (take your pick) “White Riot” by the Clash, “California Uber Alles” by the Dead Kennedys, “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols, and even “Time for Heroes” by the Libertines*.  And Green Day’s utter lack of ability to handle anything approaching substance led them to squander a great song title in “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Any punk band worth a damn (hell, any kind of band with any kind of sense) doing a song with that title in 2004 could’ve made an awesome song about how frustrating it is, only a few years after 9/11, to be constantly reminded to “never forget.” But what does Green Day give us? “The innocent can never last.” Really? That’s all you got? And this was their Big Meaningful album, folks. Not only does that fail to scratch the surface, it fails to come anywhere near the surface. It floats around in space, consulting maps and charts in a futile attempt to determine the location of the surface. And it’s fucking banal, musically and lyrically. Especially lyrically. In the span of one song, we get that prize-winner about the innocent and “here comes the rain again/ falling from the stars/ drenched in my pain again/ becoming who we are.” That might be fine for any given 8th grader’s Live Journal entry, but it doesn’t cut it for discerning listeners of rock music (much less bands that claim to make rock music). It’s like Armstrong just pulled words from his copy of Poetic Imagery for Dummies Pretentious Assholes. And don’t even get me started on “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” By itself, that song puts Green Day at the top of the list of bands that need a serious cock-punching.

But people are buying their shit at an ungodly rate. Rolling Stone, a magazine whose irrelevance actually increases exponentially with every review, raved about 21st Century Breakdown‘s “rage filled punk anthems.” The Los Angeles Times called the album a “dazzling musical journey.” If “Know Your Enemy” and “21 Guns” are rage-filled punk anthems and/or dazzling musical journeys, we’re in trouble. You can like whatever you want, but I’m warning you: if you let bands like Green Day (or My Chemical Romance or any other band that is just dying to write the anthems of your prepubescent/adolescent/adult angst) climb to the top of the punk and/or rock heap, you’re running the risk of creating a nation of black-clad, whiny dullards who are capable of expressing their feelings/desires/politics only in the most vague and offensively bromidic terms. That’s a nation where Green Day dominates the radio, every television show and movie is about emo vampires, and people think Dane Cook is funny. Believe me, America: we can do better than that. We must do better.

*This song features the line, “Did you see the stylish kids in the riot,” which I mention only because it occurs to me that Green Day are the stylish kids in the riot (the kids who show up to say they were there, but don’t expect them to hurl any bricks, thank you very much). For the sake of contrast, Joe Strummer, who wrote “White Riot” actually participated in a riot. He and Paul Simonon attempted to set a police car on fire while the British cops beat up some black kids. I’m not advocating destroying cop cars in hilarious ways, but it’s certainly nice to know that Strummer and the Clash weren’t afraid to put their money where their mouths were.

Ask A Musical Pathologist: Steel Panther and Genre Exceptionalism

Earlier this year, I brought Dr. Rebecca Mellor (no relation) on as part of the Bollocks! team to answer your questions regarding music and your mental health. Dr. Mellor is a well-established and respected musical pathologist and she’s helped me a lot over the last year and a half or so. Recently, we received the comment and accompanying video you can see here (update: I guess Universal Music Group posted the video to You Tube and doesn’t want it embedded here; if you click the video anyway, it’ll take you to You Tube and you can watch it in all its “butt metal” glory) about the band Steel Panther.Will asks us, “How much long term damage to my brain am I doing by listening to Steel Panther?” Well, Will, I ran your question and the video by Dr. Mellor, and she wrote the following response:

“Hello Will. Let me congratulate you on being the first submitter to the Bollocks! ‘Ask a Musical Pathologist’ page. Though I’m very busy with my normal work, I’m always happy to stop by and help my friend Chorpenning with his musical issues (or those of his 10 to 14 – on average – readers). It’s much easier to do this on a volunteer basis than it is to have him call or – much worse -barge into my house at three in the morning.

“In trying to determine how much long-term damage you’re doing to your brain by listening to Steel Panther, we must first determine both your reasons for listening to them and, in the case of the video for ‘Death to All but Metal’, the extent to which you agree with the sentiments expressed in the song.

“There is a certain amount of ironic enjoyment to be had from listening to bands like Steel Panther because, much like the fictional band Spinal Tap, they remind us how flagrantly silly and musically unbearable the 1980s were. Now, there are many high-functioning American adults who listen to the broad genre known as ‘Metal’ music, but Steel Panther quite clearly traffic in what some pejoratively refer to as ‘Hair Metal’ or ‘cock rock’ (my friend Mr. Chorpenning calls it ‘alcoholic stepdad music’ which tells you more about Chorpenning’s sordid past than it does about the music itself). This style is not the same as, say, the darker, more aggressive musical stylings of Mastodon or Disfear or even early Black Sabbath. ‘Hair Metal’ is more melodic (‘radio-friendly’ is a term that comes to mind, though it’s less applicable today than it was in the ‘Hair Metal’ heyday of the Reagan era) and the subject matter tends to be about one of two things: women (particularly their breasts) and/or how awesome metal is. All this is to suggest, Will, that rational human beings would not form strong attachments to the music of a Steel Panther when vastly superior forms of that kind of metal exist (Chorpenning will even grudgingly allow that the first Guns ‘n’ Roses record, Appetite for Destruction, is not only an iconic ‘Hair Metal’ album, but it actually contains some pretty good songs). Let me give you an analogy that might clear things up: some people believe that playing violent video games causes kids to become violent. People blame games like Grand Theft Auto for school shootings, often in a misguided attempt to blame somebody for a situation that is hard to comprehend on its own. In reality, video games can only inspire violent behavior in people who are already of unsound mind and have trouble distinguishing the real world from the video game world that allows them free reign to destabilize society to their heart’s content. Many of the most peaceful, nonviolent people I know play exceedingly violent video games and have no trouble functioning in society. So listening to Steel Panther, for someone who cannot recognize how clearly absurd their music is (that is,  someone of unsound mind – and, as perhaps the only articulate Guns ‘n’ Roses fan to respond to Chorpenning’s review of Chinese Democracy, Will, it is my professional opinion that you can count yourself of very sound mind indeed), could lead to long-term brain damage. But the upshot is, if you’re not brain-damaged to begin with, you can listen to Steel Panther as much as you’d like. After viewing their video for ‘Community Property,’ I was quickly able to ascertain that Steel Panther is not a band that takes itself too seriously. Therefore, we’d be doing them a disservice if we took them too seriously ourselves.

“I do have some concern, however, regarding the sentiments expressed in the video for ‘Death to All But Metal’. Any musical pathologist worth their salt must keep their mind open to the positive possibilities in any musical genre. There is even hope (though little evidence, in my opinion. And not to brag, but I am one of the most highly regarded musical pathologists in the United States, if not in the entire world) in the musical pathologist community that, one day, a ‘good’ emo song will appear and become the exception that proves the rule of that otherwise insipid genre. Steel Panther’s assertion (I’m paraphrasing here, so bear with me) that every non-metal genre is worthless, if treated as some sort of moral imperative, could cause severe damage to your psyche in the long run. Our minds like variety and truly healthy human beings allow their assumptions to be challenged. It’s easy to hate mainstream hip-hop (we in the musical pathology world have long treated President Obama’s off-the-cuff remark that Kanye West is a jackass as an objective medical fact), but mainstream hip-hop is not representative of all that hip-hop has to offer. As I write this, I have the new Brother Ali album playing on my stereo and it is very satisfying indeed. Again, though, this has to do with the state of the listener’s mind when they hear the song. If you’re a generally open-minded music fan, you can listen to ‘Death to All But Metal’ all day long without treating its main thesis as some kind of gospel. However, an already brain-damaged individual could hear this song and think that metal is the only decent genre of music.

“The belief that there is only one right genre of music and that all other genres are inferior and/or completely worthless is a disorder I call Genre Exceptionalism. It amounts to musical tunnel vision and stems directly from the same sort of utterly failed logic and probable insanity that led Adolf Hitler to articulate his theory of the Aryan ‘Master Race’. In effect, if you truly believe that one and only one genre of music is good and all others are bad, you are behaving like a musical Hitler. And no rational person would want that. Now, there are some interesting clues to me within the song ‘Death to All But Metal’; primarily, I’m fascinated by the musical performers that Steel Panther chose to call out by name. They list the Goo Goo Dolls, Blink-182, Papa Roach, Eminem, and Mariah Carey among the musicians who should die or, as I believe the singer points out, ‘can lick a sack.’ While explicitly decreeing death to all but metal, the band only really names some of the worst offenders in modern music. Your mental health will suffer much more from listening to Mariah Carey than it will from Steel Panther, regardless of the content. And, some in the musical pathology field even blame the rise of ‘pop-punk’ bands like Blink-182 for the death of Joe Strummer (I cannot entirely embrace this rather extreme theory, yet I cannot entirely dismiss it either).

“So at the end of the day, Will, Steel Panther is not the worst thing you can do for your musical mental health. It is far worse to close you mind to the wide variety of music available today than it is to listen to a hair metal band that clearly has fun doing what they’re doing and obviously does not take themselves very seriously.”

That’s the word from Dr. Mellor, Will. I think it’s pretty good advice. If anyone else out there has a question for the good doctor, you can email her at askdoctormellor@gmail.com

Brief Thoughts on the GH5/Kurt Cobain Flap

I want you to look at that picture real hard. Now I want you to imagine this guy singing the Bon Jovi (ahem) classic “You Give Love a Bad Name.” Apparently, if that’s the sort of thing you dream of, you should be kept out of the gene pool at all costs. Also, your dreams can come true in Guitar Hero 5: The Guitarening (may not be actual title).

As you might imagine, there’s been a bit of an uproar about this. Everett True got very sweary about this on his blog (seriously, Mr. True, that is an epic swear. I commend you) and Courtney Love ejaculated a billion tweets saying first that she didn’t approve the use of Cobain’s likeness and then that she did approve it but was somehow tricked into doing so by dirty lawyers. I’m guessing that “tricked” in this sense meant “handed a suitcase full of cash which will, over a period of days, be injected slowly into whatever good veins Courtney Love still has on her body.”

Activision confirmed in a statement (quoted in a statement from the Foo Fighters’ publicist) that they obtained the rights to plaster Kurt’s likeness all over GH5 “in a written agreement signed by Courtney Love.” That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, sounds pretty fucking compelling to me. If her name’s on it, she’s fulla shit. Sounds like Love wants to cultivate an image of herself as the protector of her late husband’s image while slowly selling bits of him off to the highest bidder. And who can blame her? She’s got a child to feed. A child named Mind-Blowing Drug Addiction.

What are we to conclude from all this? There are, no doubt, people who like Guitar Hero and like Nirvana (I am one of these people and I know several others) and they might enjoy playing as one of their heroes rather than one of those hulked-out, douchey cartoons that eerily resemble a composite of all the assholes from Kiss. But anyone who was even remotely familiar with Kurt Cobain knows full well he would never, ever in billion motherfucking years approve of something like this if he was alive. Courtney Love probably knew that too and it’s abundantly clear that she doesn’t give a shit.

I do give a shit, but I don’t see what’s to be done about it. I mean, I’m not calling for a boycott of Guitar Hero here. They try to get stuff people want for their games and by and large, they do a good job of it. But it’s always painful for me to watch the posthumous whoring of my heroes. I’ve heard Ramones songs in car commercials (and Pepsi commercials, those fuckers), Beatles and John Lennon songs in commercials for fucking everything, and ABC’s horrifying The Bachelor did a season subtitled “London Calling” (note to whatever prick executive came up with that: enjoy your balls while you have them, sir. For, should we meet, I’ll be taking ‘em off of you. With violence). This is shit John Lennon and Joe Strummer wouldn’t ever approve of (one of my living heroes, Tom Waits, has practically put his kids through college by suing companies who used Waits impersonators after Tom himself refused to shill for their shit. Waits also, it should be noted, admitted to a fantasy of John Lennon rising from the grave and kicking Michael Jackson’s ass for buying up the Beatles catalog and shilling it out. That’s how Tom Waits rolls.) and it’s in the same boat as putting Kurt Cobain in a video game. The idea has been floated of “re-locking” Kurt’s avatar in Guitar Hero 5 so that he can only do Nirvana songs. I’ll go you one better: keep him in the game but change two things: any time he’s on a Bon Jovi song (or something equally terrible), he shows up in his t-shirt that says “Corporate Rock Sucks.” Then, make it so players lose points for every correct note they play, thereby encouraging them to mangle these shitty tunes in a very satisfying way. Then they can unlock a Courtney Love avatar and smash their guitar into her skull. Come on you dark princes of the internet, how about whipping up some of that user-created content?