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.

EMI: Why People Hate (and Happily Steal from) The Major Labels

That image is Ms. Ann Coulter, courtesy of a Google Image search for “heinous evil.” I kid you not.

Why would I put Ann Coulter’s bony, bitchy visage on my otherwise wholesome blog? Well, because I searched for an image of heinous evil and could find none better than Coulter. Because she sucks.

Why is heinous evil on my mind? Because EMI, in an act of infinite stupidity, has killed the “official” release of the album Dark Night of the Soul, an awesomely awesome collaboration between Sparklehorse and DJ Danger Mouse that was meant to accompany a book of photos from David Motherfucking Lynch. If that doesn’t sound amazing enough for you (what do you want?), here are some of the collaborators on the album: Frank Black, Iggy Pop, and the Flaming Lips. You read that right: DJ Danger Mouse producing a song featuring Sparklehorse and the Flaming Lips. You’re right, EMI, who wants to hear that? Oh yeah – everyone who is awesome wants to hear that.

Here’s the thing: EMI yanked the official release over a “legal dispute”, the details of which they’ve refused to divulge to anyone at all. But basically, if Danger Mouse puts the album out, he could get sued by the label. For putting out awesome music. In a move that is one hundred percent commensurate with his badassery, Danger Mouse is reportedly releasing a blank CD with the book (which is getting a release) and telling us to “use it as you will.” (I think he wants us to do something with the disc. What on earth could it be?)

But I don’t think that’s enough. So I wrote a letter to EMI. Here it is, in its entirety:

You guys have torpedoed the release of Dark Night of the Soul, the collaboration between DJ Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse. That is a dick move, EMI. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse have, judging by the stream I heard on NPR, put together a really great album there. So why not just put the fucking thing out already? I know Keith Urban is pulling in the big bucks for ya there, so maybe you could throw people with actual taste a bone here and put out Dark Night. People want to hear the music – your customers want to hear this music, and you’re denying them the chance. And I suppose you’ll get all irritated when people pirate the album because you’re too dumb to release it and give it the same marketing love you lavish on, say, Katy Perry (who sucks, by the way). This is why big labels are dying, EMI. You can bestow one last gift upon the world before you go, or you can continue to engage in legal bitchery like you’re currently pulling with Dark Night of the Soul. I can guess which option you’ll choose.
Sincerely,
Matt Chorpenning

I thought about trying to organize a boycott of EMI’s roster, but 1) most of their roster sucks and 2) I wouldn’t want people to stop supporting artists they love just because they’re on a crap label. So here’s what I thought of: teach kids to pirate EMI artists. Particularly the bestselling ones. If you know kids who are into Keith Urban or Katy Perry, why not instruct them in the ways of internet piracy – tell the kids that they’ll save money. In these hard economic times, that message will really resonate with them. And you might actually be turning away someone who might actually purchase an EMI album, which will hit ‘em where it really hurts (as opposed to where it theoretically hurts, as when the labels act like everyone who downloads an album would’ve bought it if they couldn’t get it for free). Do this anonymously, of course. I don’t want Bollocks! readers to get sued or anything, but if you happen to tell a kid that there happens to be a way he/she/it can maybe get a Keith Urban record for free, where’s the harm? Tell ‘em your name is Axl Rose or Billy Corgan. Let those assholes take the fall.

Anyway, if you wanna send EMI an email (I don’t believe that an email campaign will cause them to stop being twats, but if you’re like me and have spare time, you can enjoy talking shit to them and let them know how much they suck), here’s the linkage:http://www.emi.com/page/emi/Feedback/0,,12641,00.html

Clash of the Shitty Titans: Joe Satriani Sues Coldplay

If Bollocks! were a web comic about music it is entirely possible that I would come up with a storyline where a band I don’t like is sued for ripping off another band I don’t like. Like, ha-ha-ha, if Nickelback sued Coldplay for ripping off a song or something, ha-ha-ha. In the comic, the judge would rule that they have to fight to the death and whoever is left standing is crowned the Shittiest Rock Band in the World.

Well, Bollocks! isn’t a web comic (and you should be grateful – my drawing makes XKCD look like Leonardo Da Vinci) so I can’t really provide that kind of hilarity. Fortunately, reality has stepped up to the plate and given us the news that Joe Satriani filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against Coldplay, claiming their shitty song “Viva La Vida” contains substantial portions of his shitty song “If I Could Fly.” If I were DJ Danger Mouse, I would mash these songs together and call it “If I Could Die Laughing.”

You can find a YouTube video comparing the two songs and the melodies are certainly similar, but for my money, it’s probably just coincidence. I mean, have you heard the guitar-playing on Coldplay albums? There’s no way they listen to Joe Satriani.

Not that I’m defending Coldplay on this one – if they could both lose this lawsuit and be restricted from making music, I’d be a happy guy. Or maybe they’ll end it like my imaginary comic.

Hilarity en-sues!

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.

Chinese Demo-crazy

So…

The FBI cannot seem to catch an ailing rich kid (and accomplished terrorist) who lives in a cave somewhere between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but they can sure as hell catch Skwerl (real name: I don’t know and I don’t care). What did Skwerl do, you ask? Well, he found himself in the possession of 9 leaked tracks that are supposedly from the perennially forth-coming Guns ‘n’ Roses release, Chinese Democracy. (You’d think Axl Rose, a whore if ever there was one, would’ve tried to get the album out in time to coincide with the Olympics. But he’s too busy blowing record label money on hookers and… well, blow, probably.). Skwerl streamed those nine tracks on his blog and Axl Rose pulled a Metallica (any wonder he used to tour with those assholes?) and decided to bring the hammer down on poor, hapless Skwerl (who was also wanted by the Spelling Police for his epic failure of a handle).

Skwerl was arrested (at fucking gunpoint!) by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and freed on $10,000 bail. Apparently, Skwerl is a black belt in cop-killing-karate or something (okay, yes, I know it’s techincially a federal case, but seriously: at gun point!) because the FBI (who could, you know, be out solving important federal crimes) was apparently not taking any chances when they booked him.

Predictably, the reaction from the GNR (is that how they abbreviate it? I have never cared less about anything) camp (and non-camp) was basically that Skwerl should get the chair. Slash, who is not even in GNR anymore (he’s moved on to the even more corporate and awful Velvet Revolver), said that Skwerl should “rot in jail.” Slash also said that Skwerl’s leakage (ahem: if you are any kind of decent punk band and wish to use the name Skwerl’s Leakage for your band, you hereby have my permission to do so, completely free of charge. I, unlike certain Guns and certain Roses, am not a whore) would cause Axl to “lose a lot of money on that record.”

Um… Slash? Can I call you Slash? How ’bout I just call you Fucko the Clown, ‘kay? Good. Listen up, Fucko the Clown – you’re making two major assumptions of the most deeply spurious variety. First, you’re assuming that every morbidly curious schmuck that stopped by the Skwerl blog would actually have purchased the album if they couldn’t get it for free. Incidentally, this is a common argument that the record industry makes to inflate the impact of downloading (all I’m gonna say on the subject is this: if you really like a band, support them, whatever that means. There are bands that deserve my money and I make damn sure they get it; conversely, there are bands that deserve no one’s money and I do my part to make sure they don’t get it) and make it seem like artists are directly suffering from the epidemic of downloading. The problem is this, though  – I only ever hear major labels bitching about this when some tepid turd of a record by one of their most commercially viable acts is leaked to the 14 year-olds who are slobbering uncontrollably over it. A few years back, when a fan emailed Jeff Tweedy to say he’d downloaded A Ghost is Born (no matter how you feel about piracy, you gotta admit, it takes balls to email a musician and be like, “Yeah, I just stole your record and I was wondering…”) and he wanted to verify the track listing, did Tweedy go all Axl on him and call in the feds? Nope. In an act of increasingly uncommon graciousness, Wilco put a tab on their website where you could donate to alleviate your guilt over downloading their album. Dontate to whom, you ask? To the band? No. To Doctors Without Borders. And they raised a shitload of money, too. Wilco issued a statement that said (paraphrasing here, but not by much) that they don’t exist to make and sell CD’s; they exist to play music for people who like to hear them do so (this is one of a zillion reasons I fucking love Wilco, by the way.). Are the major labels going to shit a brick if you download Neutral Milk Hotel, Jonathan Coulton, or Okkervil River albums? No. Because they don’t know who those people are.

Your second (way off) assumption, Fucko the Clown, is this: that Axl can somehow lose money on an album he hasn’t actually released. In fact, Axl can only lose money on Chinese Democracy if he ever releases the sure-to-suck album for public consumption (because stores have to order the thing, receive it into stock, and move a lot of units without having to return it to the vendor – meaning a physical fucking product has to exist. For the record,  I hope, should Axl ever release this steaming load of dogballs, he loses everything he has and is forced to work at Taco Bell for the rest of his life). So far, only the various labels dumb enough to coddle Axl have lost money on it (dude has blown hella advances on this thing). Seems only fair to me that Axl should feel a financial pinch for locking himself up in a studio to masturbate and then cry foul when one of his two remaining fans gets excited to hear the new tunes.

Which brings me to the thing I really don’t understand in all of this – if you read an article online that has ANYTHING AT ALL to do with Axl Rose or Chinese Democracy (Fark has one or two a week on their music page) and you’re brave (or drunk) enough to flip down to the comments section, you will still find rabidly devoted fans who will literally try to preempt your dislike of an album whose existence is only slightly more proveable than God’s. I’ve seen comments from people who don’t want me to hate the album before I’ve heard it! Well, I’m a busy man. I’ve hated every other GNR release (Slash was a pretty good guitarist back in the day, but now I have Tad Kubler so Slash can – and should – go fuck himself) and there is no evidence I’ve seen that would convince me that Chinese Democracy will be anything other than an overproduced, underwritten, drug-addled, jackoff of an album foisted on the public by a man whose ego long ago outgrew his talent. So, for the sake of efficiency, I’m gonna go ahead and hate Chinese Democracy with about half the level of rage I reserve for pretentious twats like Axl Rose (note: that’s still an ungodly amount of rage). The fact that Axl, a man who is impossible to take seriously as a person, let alone a musician, still has zealous defenders would be astounding if it weren’t such a clear signifier that either 1) the apocalypse is upon us or 2) we’re careening wildly and quickly toward the society envisioned in Idiocracy, which means that one day, Axl Rose will be President. He’ll arrive for his inauguration late, high, and cranky. And Chinese Democracy, the worst album no one’s ever heard, will still only be a rumor.

Skwerl is now making appeals on his blog at antiquiet.com to get people to chip in for his legal defense. You can if you wanna, just pop over there and do it. I leave it up to you. It will be interesting to see if Axl’s label has to prove in court that those songs were definitely going to be on the final release of the record or not. That fat fuck Rose has been at this album for more than a decade – he’s probably got stacks of demos lying around; probably leaks them all the time to guage the public interest. The point here is not that people won’t buy Chinese Democracy because some dude posted songs from it on his blog; people won’t buy it because it will be, without doubt, the biggest disappointment in the history of music. Chinese Democracy has given the handful of GNR fans that remain on this crazy planet the biggest case of musical blueballs ever. There’s no known cure, and it’s just as well; Axl Rose doesn’t deserve fans.  What he does deserve, his fans won’t give him.

But I will:

Axl Rose is (and always was) a fuck-awful singer, a corporate whore, a bigot (‘member that song about “faggots” and how they “spread some fucking disease?”), a beyond-terrible (bordering on infantile) lyricist, and now he’s fat. Have at you, Axl!