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

No Life On the Horizon

Let’s open the case file of “Great Moments in the Pot Calling the Kettle Black”, shall we? A couple of weeks ago, while doing  a radio interview to promote No Line On the Horizon, Bono (he’s in some band or other… can’t think of which one) apparently called Chris Martin (for the heterosexual males in our audience, Chris Martin is the guy from Coldplay) a wanker on the air. The DJ tried to wrestle an apology out of Bono, but didn’t really get one. Which is ostensibly good because, come on… Chris Martin is a wanker. But so is Bono. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Bono and Chris Martin are engaged in some kind of Highlander-esque battle of wankerdom that will culminate in one of them beheading the other on a mountain top and becoming the Ultimate Wanker.

My cyncial side (which is about 75% of all of my sides) says that Bono was trying to drum up a little controversy to boost album sales. There was a massive media blitz to promote No Line On the Horizon before it came out, including a five night residency on Letterman and the afore-mentioned live BBC Radio interview. When you’re hustling that hard to promote a U2 album, there’s a reason. And the reason is that No Line On the Horizon is a complete meandering mess of a record.

This was touted as U2′s Big Change Album, the one where they set out to radically change their sound. Apparently, that meant hiring Brian Eno and jamming some songs into 5-Plus minute territory. No Line On the Horizon is the kind of change you make at U2′s age – a safe, calculated “change” that’s mostly in the wrong direction. There’s still The Edge’s annoyingly chimey guitar tone (although it’s buried in some of the songs), Bono’s histrionic vocal spams, and his lyrical cliches (“Only love can leave a mark like that,” he sings on “Magnificent”), which are getting lazier by the day (see all of “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” if you can stand it). The only really surprising thing about No Line On the Horizon is its uniform awfulness. But even that’s not much of a stretch in my mind, because I’m one of the only people on earth who didn’t like How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (I thought “Vertigo” was a pretty embarrassing song, but then I heard “I’ll Go Crazy  if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” and “Get On Your Boots”).  In fact, when I think about it, Achtung Baby is the last U2 album that I still listen to from start to finish and I only do that on occasion.

There’s some new musicality to be found on No Line, a few more keyboards and electronic noises, but it’s not compelling enough to help you forget the tossed-off lyrics – it’s almost as if Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois were brought in to try and hide the fact that Bono is becoming a worse writer by the day. Not only does “Get On Your Boots,” weld the vocal melody from Elvis Costello’s far superior “Pump It Up” to the melody from that 80′s song “Wild Wild West” (who the fuck did that song? I can’t remember for the life of me. Was it Culture Club? Who cares?), it features the not-at-all-revelatory statement, “You don’t know how beautiful you are”, a line I was putting in songs back in the 9th grade. For the record, those songs have been destroyed.

“Be careful of small men/ with big ideas,” Bono warns on “Stand Up Comedy,” a song that makes me sorely miss “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”, and that seems like a credible warning for someone who is going to brave a listen to No Line On the Horizon. For all its attempts to shake things up, it only reveals that U2 is incapable of the radical departure that they think this album is. If they really wanted to shake things up, they’d make an acoustic blues record, or a stripped down punk album, recorded live in one take (in other words, they’d plug The Edge straight into a Marshall amp with no goodies, forbid him from playing clean, and see what he’s really made of. I suspect the answer is that he’s less than the sum of his annoying effects pedals), or… well, it doesn’t matter because they can’t do it. Take Bono’s Coldplay-baiting radio comment. It’s exactly the sort of faux-controversial comment you make when you’re incapable of being really challenging. I’ve no doubt that Bono really believes Chris Martin is a wanker and that’s kind of my point – everybody believes that Chris Martin is a wanker. Bono – and his bandmates – are buried too deep in their own innocuousness to come up with something really radically different. For instance, Bono could’ve gone on the radio and said, “Gordon Brown is a monkey-fucker” or “I’m sick of Morrissey’s bullshit and I hereby challenge him to a pistol duel at dawn,” or really anything more interesting than pointing out something that is already ingrained in the public consciousness as firmly as the absolute knowledge that Chris Martin is a wanker.

In their day, U2 was a really great pop band and there’s nothing at all wrong with being a great pop band (The Beatles, anyone?). I can understand the band’s desire to change their sound a bit, but they don’t have to sacrifice good songs to do it (again, The Beatles, anyone?). The biggest change that U2 has made between How to Dismantle a Decent Band and No Life On the Horizon is that they’ve gone from ignorably bad to actively terrible. No Line contains three of the worst tracks I’ve ever heard from U2 – “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” “Get On Your Boots,” and “Breathe,” which apes Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on the verse and doesn’t get much better on the chorus.  Granted, I’m not the biggest U2 fan in the world (can you tell?) but there is one test that U2 should be able to pass with flying colors: my beautiful girlfriend, who can fully acknowledge and forgive both Chris Martin and Bono for their inherent wankerdom, likes both Coldplay and U2. Her take on No Line On the Horizon? “It sounds like Old People music.” I can assure you that she has no greater perjorative in her vocabulary for music (she’s much nicer than I am) and I’ve cringed with despair when she’s leveled that charge at some of my favorite acts. I used to think that only 2 things were objectively true about music: 1) everyone’s girlfriend loves Coldplay and 2) everyone’s girlfriend loves U2. Number 2 is on shaky ground at the moment.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?

Is nothing fucking sacred anymore?

I just found out that My Chemical Romance covered Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” for the Watchmen soundtrack. I just watched the fucking video on YouTube. The whole thing. Guess I’m lucky they didn’t cover all 11 minutes of it. But still, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Fuck you, My Chemical Romance. Fuck you in the face.

My Chemical Romance’s latest crime against music came at the expense of my favorite Bob Dylan tune. Such an atrocity can only be interpreted as an act of war and I shall respond in kind.

This aggression will not stand, Dude.

Chinese Democracy: A Review of A Review (or, Where the Fuck is My Free Fucking Dr. Pepper?)

All right. The first issue I have with Chinese Democracy is that the folks at Dr. Pepper made a promise and then were not technologically equipped to deliver on this promise. The window for getting the free Dr. Pepper has closed with me on the wrong side of it, despite two solid hours of attempting to get the fucking site to work. See, I was gonna review that Dr. Pepper on this site today because I’m sure as hell not gonna give Axl Rose my money so I can tell you what you already know about Chinese Democracy. But we’ll deal with that later.

In the meantime, the Los Angeles Times has come to my rescue – their “pop critic”, Ann Powers, wrote a huge story on Axl Rose’s magnum dopus and I have chosen to critique her critique in lieu of actually paying money to listen to an album I know will be of less artistic quality than Death Magnetic. Probably.

But first, I wanna tackle this “exclusively at Best Buy” deal that Axl made. I know Guns ‘n’ Roses is not the only band that has gone the exclusive release route (AC/DC originally put their new album out exclusively through Wal-Mart and Smashing Pumpkins released a special Target-exclusive version of their last shitty record). But, by releasing an album exclusively through a store that does not exclusively sell music, Axl Rose has helped put a nail in the coffin not just of independent record stores but in the experience of buying albums. Now look, I know we’re all digital nowadays and I’ve certainly got an expansive mp3 collection (don’t worry Axl and Lars, I didn’t steal your shitty records), so you may be thinking, “Matt, who gives a shit about the record buying experience?” Well, motherfucker, I do. When I walk into a music store and see the rows and rows of discs, aisles of musical wonder, usually sorted by genre, I get a thrill unmatched by any other feeling. It’s like Jacques Cousteau must’ve felt before jumping in the ocean. I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna find in there most of the time, but I’m usually gonna walk away with a treasure (I even, on my last trip to Amoeba Music, scored a $7 used copy of Redemption Song, the excellent and definitive biography of Joe Strummer). Or, more precisely, a pile of treasures. When I ask the flunky at Target about a band I like, I get a blank stare, as if I’ve switched a light off in his brain or spoken in some long dead, dark language. Sure, I can get Smashing Pumpkins and Kanye “Self-Declared Voice of His Generation” West at Target but, like all thinking people, I don’t give a shit about those two particular artists. Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy can sell albums cheap because they make money by selling a lot of other products. Amoeba Music sells music, books, and DVDs while still managing to donate some of their proceeds to preserve the rain forest (I shit you not); so who’s exclusively releasing through them? Well, everyone who releases a Live at Amoeba EP, such as TV on the Radio did. Or The Hold Steady, who released a live acoustic EP exclusively through members of the Independent Music Retailer network (not sure I got the name of the organization right, but Amoeba is part of it; basically, it’s a large group of independent music stores across  the nation). Bands that are exclusively releasing through Wal-Mart and companies like them are making the implicit argument that they care about making the most money possible. Obviously, that’s their right and obviously, if you took 14 fucking years and millions of dollars to make your shitty little record, you might be a little bit more concerned with your profit margins. But the fact is, I reward bands that want to make music, not bands that want to make money (Honestly, who wouldn’t want to make money playing rock ‘n’ roll? But there are bands that are focused on their music first – bands like Wilco who have gone so far as to say that they don’t exist to make CDs per se but to create music. Bands that put music ahead of money make better music and thus, deserve my money. Bands that simply want my money – like Kiss, who can definitely go fuck themselves – do not deserve it and never get it). TV on the Radio and The Hold Steady make their livings off of their music. I’ve read that Matt Berninger from The National didn’t quit his day job until right before they started work on Boxer. I guess what I’m driving at here is a question of hunger. Young, hungry, independent acts do what they have to do to make music, including hanging on to the day job a little longer (I work two jobs so that I can pull my weight launching my little band). Old, tired, washed up acts, apparently ink exclusive deals to pump out their crap through giant chain retailers and then have the gall to blame the death of the record industry solely on downloading.

One of the (many) flawed arguments of the no-downloading crowd is that every downloaded album is money out of the artist’s pocket. This assumes that everyone who heard the album for free would have purchased it if only they couldn’t get it for free. Slash, one of Axl Rose’s former pals, lamented that Axl would lose a lot of money on Chinese Democracy because some jackass streamed seven or nine leaked tracks on his blog. Of course, at the time, there was no guarantee that those were finished tracks from a finished album, no guarantee that those tracks would appear on a finished album, and no guarantee that people who downloaded those leaked tracks would automatically skip out on buying Chinese Democracy. Unless, of course, they discovered from those tracks what I intuitively understand – that this album, like its creator, is a bloated mess. Smart bands adapt to the downloading phenomenon in various ways – Bloc Party offered a 10 dollar download of Intimacy a month before it came out and then gave me a total of four bonus tracks for free later. Radiohead famously let people decide what to pay for In Rainbows. The Hold Steady (I love those guys, but you knew that) streamed Stay Positive in its entirety on their MySpace page and then slapped three bonus tracks on the physical release. The Flaming Lips have released the coolest deluxe version of a movie or CD I’ve ever seen – the Christmas on Mars deluxe release includes a T-Shirt and a bag of popcorn!

So anyway, Ann Powers apparently went to the Best Buy and got a copy of Chinese Democracy. She went on to not only compare the album to Citizen Kane but also to compare Rose to Orson Welles (in personality, not physical stature). She later credits Rose with “Brian Wilson-style beautiful weirdness.” You might get the feeling that Powers really fucking loved Chinese Democracy, but, at the end of the day, Rose’s “lyrics, like the songs’ musical twists, are hard to praise”. So after a long article that makes an interesting attempt to capture the magnitude of Chinese Democracy’s release (many writers have already focused on how much of a fucking farce the whole process has been; genuine kudos to Powers for trying to give it more of a fan perspective. The problem is, the farce crowd is right on this one), Powers is forced to admit that the actual music, the thing people have been waiting 14 years for is hard to like. That’s not exactly album-of-the-year material.

Now, I will admit that I have not listened to the final product. And I’m not going to download it either. I will, however, give Chinese Democracy a fair hearing on Bollocks! as long as I don’t have to pay for it. If you bought the album and will let me borrow it or if I get it for Christmas (by some strange magic), I will give it an honest musical critique. I am, at the end of the day, a music lover and I’m willing to have my mind changed – I used to hate hip-hop until I found some artists that opened my eyes to the potential of that genre. So I’ll make a promise to those of you out there who pre-hate me for pre-hating Chinese Democracy: if a copy of this album, a legitimate copy, falls into my hands in some manner that keeps me from putting money in Axl Rose’s pocket, I will:

1) listen to the album and judge it on the music, keeping my hatred of Axl Rose separate from my appraisal of the music he makes

2) render that verdict on this blog with my usual literary zest

And

3) if Chinese Democracy manages to please me more than it displeases me, I will purchase a copy of it and a copy of Metallica’s Death Magnetic and give them away to the first two people who can convince me they deserve them. I’ll find some fun way of determining that.

The odds that a) a copy of Chinese Democracy will come to me for free and b) I will like it more than not are about 1 billion to 1 against. But I’m willing to keep an open mind, despite the fact that I have no free Dr. Pepper to enjoy while I do it.

Earth to The Dandy Warhols: Please Stop

There was a time, what seems like eons ago, when The Dandy Warhols’ blatant bush-league Lou Reedisms were (mildly) amusing. Around that time, they released 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia, an album that I still enjoy listening to. Since then, the Dandy Warhols have managed to squander every last bit of good will that I had toward them.

First, they named a shitty album after a Kurt Vonnegut book (that would be Welcome to the Monkey House) and then they followed it up with a monumentally shitty album (Odditorium or: Why The Fuck Are We Still A Band?), the only redeemable tracks on which sound exactly like tracks from 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia.

Now the Dandy Warhol’s are back with Earth to the Dandy Warhols, another pseudo-psychedelic platter of pig poo, the kind of bullshit album that should come with a warning sticker that says, “Warning: This Band Got Really High and Jerked Off In A Studio. Listener Discretion is Advised.” You know how you get when you’re stoned; no one should have to pay to listen to that over music you’ve ripped off from musical icons (usually The Velvet Undergound, but sometimes other great bands; but we’ll get to that in a second).

Courtney Taylor’s vocals are buried under a ton of annoying effects on Earth to the Dandy Dipshits, but it’s not like the music is compelling enough to make that forgivable. In fact, on “Welcome to the Third World,” The Dandies, apparently feeling they’ve mined The Velvet Underground for all they were worth, decide to brazenly rip off Paul Fucking Simonon’s bass line from “The Magnificent Seven.” Yes, that Paul Fucking Simonon, the bass player from The Clash. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? In the Overdrawn at the Memory Bank episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Crow T. Robot says, upon seeing a character watching Casablanca, “Hey, don’t put good movies in the middle of your crappy movie.” I would like to extend this warning to the Dandy Whorehols: don’t put Clash songs, some of the best songs ever, in your shitty little songs about… whatever the fuck your songs are about.

Which is another issue, among many to take with Earth to You Shameless Bastards: What the fuck are any of these songs about? It seems like most of them are somewhat about doing drugs and (maybe) fucking. I guess this is supposed to be psychedelic, but it’s mostly really annoying.  All the songs feel an hour long, slow, gauzy droning songs that must seem really awesome when you do as much drugs as the Dandy Warhols.

If you watched the documentary Dig!, about the on-again/off-again feud between the Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, you may have come to this conclusion: both bands are just chock full of dickheads. Regardless of how good their music sometimes (rarely) is, these are Grade-A assbags who seem to have an endless line of credit with their dealers. And part of what makes them so awful is that they seem to genuniely not give a single shit about anything. This is the music they want to make, and the fact that Anton Newcombe talks about either band starting a revolution is laughable. Both bands are stuck in the basement in a cloud of pot smoke, praying to Lou Reed to appear and pronounce them Officially Cool. Well, guess what, assholes: Lou Reed may be kicking it with the Killers these days, but he’s gonna need a whole boatload of senility to hit him before he dignifies your shit with a response. (I hope; for all I know, Mr. Reed may be planning to work with The Dandies for their next album, at which point I will just pretend he has died.)

If you’re interested in keeping score, Earth to the Dandy Assholes is slightly less shitty than the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 2008 offering My Bloody Underground which I’ve already cut to ribbons on this site. These two bands are capable of making music that doesn’t completely infuriate me, but they’ve elected to go the self-indulgent, insultingly derivative route, and have therefore earned all the scorn that can be heaped upon them. Hearing the bassline from “The Magnificent Seven” in a song as bad as “Welcome to the Third World” only reminds me that Joe Strummer (a man who once said that the most punk-rock thing you could do was to treat everyone with dignity and respect) will never again beat all six strings of his Telecaster and shout “Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust” but Courtney Taylor is still alive and making awful music. For which I can only say this: fuck Courtney Taylor, fuck The Dandy Warhols, and fuck fuck fuck this album.

Douche Bagnetic

It’s Rocktober 1st. Rocktoberfest is coming up on the 18th (if you don’t know what that it is, consider it a pity you’re not invited). I’ve bided my time. I’ve read Tad’s “words” if you can call ‘em that and I’m ready to weigh in.

So what do I think of Metallica’s Death Magnetic?

Though the internet is frequently derided as the home of indie/hipster types (I’ve been called a hipster for voicing my opinion – also an objective fact – that Journey sucks; I include this just so you have some sort of criteria upon which to judge me), it is full of people who will gladly call you a fag in a tirade replete with misspelled words if you happen to suggest either of the following: 1) Metallica sucks or 2) Guns ‘n’ Roses sucks, and Chinese Democracy is more likely to end the world than the Large Hadron Collider (how, you ask? Why, it will create a massive black hole of Utter Suckitude that will pull the entirety of the universe into it; I think Stephen Hawking has published articles on this). Stop by any given music thread on Fark if you don’t believe me.

So I might be incurring the wrath of these internet Metallica-lovers by saying so, but the fact is, Death Magnetic is not only awful, it’s frequently unintentionally hilarious. These are grown men singing about “death,” “darkness,” “blackness,” and things shouting things like “We! Die! Hard!” (clearly a reference to the fact that you get a stiffy when Rigor Mortis sets in). It’s like watching a Wes Craven movie. No one with half a brain is frightened by Wes Craven movies, just as no one with half a brain believes the spolied millionaires in Metallica are really the tortured souls they’re trying to portray on Douche Bagnetic. This shit should be dark and broody, and all that, but the fact is, Metallica is less compelling as a metal band than Dethklok. When you’re getting your ass kicked by a joke cartoon band, it’s time to hang it up.

James Hetfield, as ever, is a histrionic mess on Death Magnetic. I’m guessing that’s supposed to be cathartic for metalheads or whatever, but it sounds ridiculous. When he shrieks “This I swear!” on “The Day That Never Comes”, I feel like he should be a villain in one of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies. Hetfield’s villain  name could be The Nightmare and he could make puns about death and blackness while singing about hunting Batman down “All Nightmare Long.” Sounds more than a little plausible, doesn’t it? Fortunately, the Batman movie franchise is now in the much safer hands of Christopher Nolan.

Unfortunately, Metallica is still a band. There’s a place for brooding on mortality in song, don’t get me wrong. I See a Darkness is one of the finest (and most cripplingly depressing) meditations on love and death (mostly death) I’ve ever heard. But the difference between Will Oldham and Metallica is that I See a Darkness convinces the listener that this is what was on Oldham’s mind at the time, that he’d actually sat down and thought about this shit. Death Magnetic convinces me that Metallica had a meeting where they pulled metal tropes out of hat and said, “Ooh… that would be cool in a song. Like, what if we badly paraphrase Nietzsche and then scream ‘We! Die! Hard! at the end? That would tight, dog.” You see the difference? It’s not merely the subject matter that’s the problem here – it’s the assholes delivering it.

Death Magnetic runs rampant with examples of Metallica’s painful suck – on “Cyanide,” Hetfield drops this turd nugget: “Suicide/ I’ve already died” See what he did there? He rhymed “Suicide” and “died.” And then says “Cynaide/ dead inside.” Point being, this fucker cannot write. There is not one song on Death Magnetic equal in awesomeness or quality to Lordi’s “Devil’s a Loser.” Not one. There is also not one song shorter than five minutes on this album; Metallica has to allow for Kirk Hammett’s noodly, wah-drenched solos (I was hanging out w/ Radio America after their gig at the Viper Room a couple of weeks ago and Tom Stuart brougth up a salient point. When it comes to using a wah-wah pedal, you have to ask yourself one question: “Are you Jimi Hendrix? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then you can use a wah-wah pedal.”). At a certain point, you have to admit Hammett is an accomplished musician, technically speaking. At a cetain other point, you realize that pretty much makes him the Kenny G of the guitar. Knowing a lot of notes and being awesome at playing notes are two drastically different things.

Of course, the elephant in the room here (the bloated, corporate elephant of cock-rock excess) is “The Unforgiven 3.” On paper, this is just fucking stupid. On record, it’s shameless. Especially when Douche-tallica eases you into the song by ripping off Richard Wright’s (rest in peace) awesome keyboard lick from “Comfortably Numb.” Yes, Metallica has resorted to putting bits from great songs in their shitty songs. The result is an aneurysm-inducing failure of epic proportions. We find out in “The Unforgiven 3″ that, according to Hetfield “It’s me I can’t forgive.” I can’t forgive you either, James. Go fuck yourself.

At the end of the day, if you’re like Tad the K-ROQ intern (who was recently found dead, by the way, stabbed repeatly by a shiv made from what appears to have been a broken and/or twisted Red Bull can; contrary to popular belief, I was not at the scene of the crime but in my office listening to the new TV on the Radio album), you’re gonna love Death Magnetic and hate my guts for pointing out that it sucks so hard that it makes me laugh. If you’re like me (a devilishly handsome person with dignity and taste), you probably haven’t even trifled with Death Magnetic. In that case, you might be wondering why I even subjected myself to such torture; I can only answer that my best friend is paying me twenty bucks to sit through Beverly Hills Chihuahua next weekend, so it might have something to do with a masochistic streak buried none-too-deeply under the surface.  Whatever. Go look up “Devil’s a Loser” on YouTube.