The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard #1: “Waiting On the World to Change”

Well, folks, the new year is officially here and Bollocks! is coming off a pretty satisfying 2010; this blog was viewed 19,000 times last year, which probably ties into the unemployment numbers somehow, but I don’t want to dig too deep into that lest I start feeling all depressed. Since I’m always looking for ways to improve your Bollocks! experience, I decided to come up with a new feature called “The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard” to shed some light on some of the worst individual songs of all time. Why would I do this? Because I have heard all of these songs (some of them occasionally get stuck in my head) and I need you to share my pain. This is not a countdown – like my much-vaunted (well, by me) Great Fucking Albums feature, The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard is listed in the order that these things occur to me. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the first installment – I’ll put up a page so you can gain easy access to your (least?) favorites as the list grows. Because believe me, it will grow.

The reason I decided to do this feature is because I hear bad fucking songs all the time, when I’m out shopping or dining somewhere with my wife or when her alarm clock goes off in the morning and the radio station it’s set on greets us with the Ataris cover of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” (which, I mean, it should just be the soundtrack to a book called How to Make Bad Things Worse). But that’s not the song I wanted to start off my list with.

No, there was a clear favorite for the first song against the wall when I started thinking about The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard: “Waiting On the World to Change” by John Mayer. Released in 2006 on his Continuum album, “Waiting On the World to Change” is a great way to find any reason you can think of to dislike John Mayer’s music (and maybe him as a person just a little bit).

Musically, the song is not that noteworthy, unless you’re noting that it is a ripoff of Curtis Mayfield’s vastly superior “People Get Ready” (you might have noticed that I sing the late Mr. Mayfield’s praises quite frequently here. Listen to his music and you’ll see why). But the music mostly keeps to the background so as to better highlight the “gee-ain’t-I-deep” lyrics which are some of the most laughably stupid I’ve heard this side of the first Hanson album. Mayer starts out singing about how he and all his friends “just feel like we don’t have the means/ to rise up and beat”… um… well, whatever it is he’s talking about. Oh: “everything that’s going wrong.” Well, John, let me tell you a little secret: nobody, in the entire history of everything, has changed anything by attempting to tackle “everything that’s going wrong.” So your problem is all in your approach. Why don’t you start small by maybe recycling or protesting a war or something? John Mayer and his friends are content to sit at home and wait for the world to change because they can’t solve every problem all at once, and the chorus, complete with an airy gospel choir, tells us that Mayer & Friends are willing to sit on the sidelines as long as necessary to get the job done. Imagine if Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks had thought that way.

“Just you wait,” thinks Rosa as she dutifully moves to the back of the bus, “In about fifty years, we’ll have a black president, and then you honky motherfuckers are gonna get it!”

Mayer’s assertion basically amounts to “I don’t wanna do anything about any problems because doin’ stuff is hard.” First of all, you fuck, you play guitar for a living. Your job is to rip off Stevie Ray Vaughan and wallow up to your neck in celebutante pussy – and you can’t take a few minutes on your day off to, I dunno, clean up a beach? Fuck you! There are people with real goddamn jobs who make time constantly to try to help other people, which is world-changing shit. There are people whose whole job is helping people. And none of them got to fuck Jennifer Aniston.

My favorite part of “Waiting On the World to Change” – and by “favorite part”, I mean the part that sends me into a nearly homicidal fury – is the part where Mayer sings, “One day our generation/ is gonna rule the population/ so we keep waiting (insert gospel chicks with a “Waitin’” right here)/ waiting on the world to change.”  Now I’m guessing that John Mayer, being 33, is part of my generation and I’m happy to say that none of us elected John to lead the charge on this whole “ruling the population thing.” Many of the very good people in my generation don’t even think in those terms, and I’m glad. It seems to me that John Mayer has created a convenient way to never do anything meaningful or helpful for humanity. After all, if he and his pals are operating on the premise that the time for action is after the world has already changed, can’t they just keep saying that it hasn’t change yet? “Hey John, can you take out the trash?” “Nah, I’m still waiting for the world to change.”

In an interview with the Advocate, Mayer said that “I know that if I were engaged in changing anything for the better, or the better as I see it, it would go unnoticed or be completely ineffective.” So Mayer doesn’t wanna try because he’s afraid no one would notice. Well, John, I’ve got something you could do that would not only change things for the better, but would be immediately noticeable: stop making music, you fucking hack.

Of course, right after Mayer said the above sentence, he added, “A lot of people have that feeling.” And what pisses me off is that he’s right - a lot of people don’t lift a finger for anyone else because they feel like nothing they do will help. They see a vast sea of troubles and don’t feel like there’s a vast sea of people who can do anything about it. The problem is, if we all did simple stuff that was completely within our means (like just being kind to each other, for starters), it could make a big difference (is that naive? Fuck you, we’ve never tried it, have we?). And I get that it’s tough to know what to do to help humanity (that’s a pretty general term to start with), but writing an anthem that excuses apathy (“It’s not that I don’t give a shit, I’m just waiting on the world to change”) is fucking pathetic. John Mayer has made plenty of music to be ashamed of, but I don’t think any of his songs tops “Waiting On the World to Change” in terms of audacious stupidity and general suckitude.

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.

My Year in Lists 2008: The Worst of 2008

Welcome to My Year in Lists!

Regular music reviews will resume after the holidays, but now it’s time to indulge in that not-so-secret passion that every music critic (and many a casual music fan) falls asleep thinking about, usually after an intense wank (and if we’re being honest with ourselves, we must admit that wanking is a large part of what music critics do during their waking hours). I’m speaking, of course, of the completely arbitrary compilation of year-end lists. What was the best song? The best album? The best whatever?

So over the next few weeks, Bollocks! will be bringing you my thoughts on the good, the bad, and the ugly for 2008 (watches as site traffic statistics plummet). To get the bad shit outta the way first, I wanna talk about The Absolute Worst Music of 2008.

It goes without saying that Metallica sucks, but to bestow upon them the dubious honor of Worst Album of the Year would still be to grant them some form of accomplishment, however negative. They’re at least near the top of the Worst Song of 2008 pile, but I’m not good at making long lists of songs that are terrible because, as a rule, I try to avoid terrible music. Here are the three worst songs I heard this year, in no particular order:

“Unforgiven 3,” by Metallica – There was a time when Metallica didn’t make music videos because they didn’t see the need to make commericals for their songs. Then they decided two things: 1) They want money. Lots and lots of money and 2) They hate their fans. These two decisions pitched Metallica headlong into a race to out-whore their past achievements in Whoredom. Taking a page from the Hollywood playbook, they wrote a sequel to a massive hit (“The Unforgiven”). The sequel sucked, but that didn’t stop them from making a third, which really fucking blows. It gets extra “Fuck you” points for ripping off the keyboard part from “Comfortably Numb.”

“Welcome to the Third World,” by The Dandy Warhols – I could’ve picked a lot of songs from the Dandy Warhols utterly shitty Earth to the Dandy Warhols but I really chose to focus on this one for one simple reason. It steals the bass-line from The Clash’s “Magnificent Seven.” For a shitty Dandy Warhols song. That doesn’t say shit… about… shit. The Clash is an iconic band – they’re at least 85% of the reason I’m in a band (and probably a large reason why most people I know who are in bands are in bands) , they made really great music and they meant every note of it. I get that Courtney Taylor thinks he’s Lou Reed and every once in a great while, his Velvet Underground tribute band thing kinda works. But for The Dandy Warhols to rip off the Clash is to spit on everything the Clash stood for. If Joe Strummer were alive today, I’d like to think he would beat the living shit out of Courtney Taylor (and if Lou Reed were alive today, he’d do the same). “Welcome to the Third World” is a horrible song by a horrible band that appears on a horrible album – to call it a shit sandwich would be to offend shit sandwiches everywhere.

But probably The Worst Song of 2008 is “I Kissed A Girl” by Katy Perry. I’ve heard this in passing and I guess it’s a big hit for her, but it’s got some serious strikes against it. Chiefly, Katy Perry cannot sing. The verses on this song are merely unbearable but when the chorus rolls around, I want to stuff my ears full of nougat and run around the malls of Los Angeles slashing blindly with a machete, hopefully severely wounding anyone who would even so much as nod their head or tap their foot to the beat of something so insipid. This song is probably shocking to Katy’s parents, who might remember her better as the girl who started out singing Christian music before deciding that she could make a shitload of money writing schlocky turds like “I Kissed A Girl.” Perry’s debut pop album, One of the Boys, features other great song titles like “Ur So Gay” which annoys me not just for its utterly stupid spelling but also for the fact that this girl is so obviously trying to create shocking mall pop. It’s risque if you were home-schooled and still think girls shouldn’t show their ankles or if you think Jars of Clay is super hardcore, but if you want shockingly graphic lesbian music, pick up an Alix Olson album. Katy Perry is about as shocking and surprising as a post-it note, but I’ve got some song titles for her next album that will really help her kick it up a notch:

“I Finger-Banged Lynn Cheney During Sunday School”

“Dear Mom and Dad, My Boyfriend’s a Black Atheist”

(and last but not least:)

“Who Does A Girl Have to Blow to Get an Enema Around Here?”

So there you go, Katy Perry. You can use any of those you want. I promise not to pull a Joe Satriani and sue you.

So what’s the Worst Album of 2008? Well, for my money, it’s My Bloody Underground by The Brian Jonestown Massacre. This is another band from which Katy Perry can learn a lesson in the “Transparent Attempt to Shock Soccer Moms” department. See, Anton Newcombe has cleverly titled two of the songs on this musical Gorgon “We are the Niggers of the World” and “Automatic Faggot for the People,” and because they have naughty words, hoo-boy, they must be really shocking! Except that they suck. The whole album sucks. It’s Newcombe masturbating in the studio and then asking you to pay for it so he can go buy more heroin. Fuck this guy and fuck his band. The only good thing I can say about them is that, in all their fuckery, they’ve never ripped off The Clash. But you know what? I’m drawing a line here, folks. If the Brian Jonestown Massacre records a Clash rip-off I solemnly swear to find Anton Newcombe and kick his opiate-addled ass. For the good of all mankind. Earlier this year, I wrote that My Bloody Underground is the album I would make if I hated music and wanted to convince other people to hate music as well. In retrospect, I may have been understating things a bit. My Bloody Underground is the album I would make in an experiment where I was trying to create a black hole of shittiness that would suck all of the fun, joy, and creativity out of life.

Shortest Bollocks! Review Ever

Recently, we here at Bollocks!were accused of creating (and foisting upon an unsuspecting public) “overwrought prose.”And by “we”, I mean “me”.

So in an effort to be less overwrought (more underwrought, or just wrought, I guess), I thought I’d sum up 4:13 Dream, the new Cure album, as succinctly as possible:

This album is a fucking mess.

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.

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!

The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Revolution of Suck

Hard truth time: I dug 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia as much or more than the next guy, but I would never, no matter how inebriated I may be, say to you that the Dandy Warhols are in any way, shape, or form, an original band. Their records consistently sound like whatever music they’re listening to at the time. Ditto The Brian Jonestown Massacre. In fact, the hardest part of watching the documentary Dig! is not the constant heroin-filled infighting that plagues BJM – it’s listening to the lead hacks in both bands (Courtney Taylor for the Dandy Warhols and Anton Newcombe for Brian Jonestown Massacre) walk around pretending that they’re going to start a musical revolution. If anything, both bands are perpetrating a musical devolution; both bands sound a lot like early Stones and/or The Velvet Underground. That can be pleasant enough at times and, at their best, both bands pull that off pretty well. But do you need more than one album by either band? No.

Self-proclaimed genius Newcombe’s latest contribution to the pastiche-pile is the horrendous, pretentious, and just fuck-awful turd of a record, My Bloody Underground, a punnily titled album meant to signal that he and BJM have been listening to more Velvet Underground than Rolling Stones lately. Or something.

The songs are long, they are boring, they are repetitive, and their titles are the kind of designed-to-shock horse shit you’d expect from a fifteen year old, “We Are The Niggers of the World” (but ha-ha, this one’s a fucking piano instrumental that Anton supposedly composed when he was but a wee lad. Sweet Zombie Jesus, someone should kick this guy’s ass) and “Automatic Faggot for the People,” the chief would-be offenders among them. Six of the tracks pass the six minute mark and the ones that don’t definitely feel like they do. In short, My Bloody Underground is a long, hard slog through a narrow tunnel of shit, not entirely unlike what Tim Robbins’ character in The Shawshank Redemption has to endure in order to escape prison.  It would be difficult to overstate how terrible this album is, but I’ll give it a try.

Forgoing any attempt at a track-by-track analysis, let’s get down to real shit here: this album is a fucking mess. It’s the product of a heroin-addled ape tooling around a studio with whatever hapless assclowns are still brave enough to be in his band. Half the time, the vocals are buried under droning noise and when they aren’t, you wish they were. “Who Cares Why,” not only exemplifies the masturbatory nature of this album but also my feelings towards it. Lots of musicians have gone the “experimental” route (like John Motherfucking Coltrane, thank you very much) and managed to make it come out sounding like music. My Bloody Underground sounds like shit. In fact, if I hated music and wanted to make the rest of the world hate music as much as I did, I would probably release something very much like My Bloody Underground.

People who can cling to the myth (largely perpetuated by the man himself) that Anton Newcombe is some kind of tortured genius (and I’m sure that’s an ever-shrinking or perhaps – hopefully- non-existent demographic) might be able to convince themselves that My Bloody Underground is yet another artistic achievement for The Brian Jonestown Massacre. I’d wager, though, that these people are probably on the same drugs as Mr. Newcombe. Even if I was a fan of BJM (and I’m not – I acquired My Bloody Awful Album from emusic just before canceling my account with them – it was an act of pure morbid curiosity for which I’ve not yet forgiven myself), I would be pissed to shell out even one hard-earned penny for this bloated circle-jerk. In fact, I’m mad as hell that part of my brain is being used to think about My Bloody Underground. I shall make a rigorous assault on that part of my brain with alcohol.

Anyone who talks (much less writes) about any kind of art knows that there’s a perverse sort of fun to hating an album, a book, a movie, whatever. But I can’t even take pleasure in how much I hate My Bloody Underground. In that regard, maybe Anton Newcombe has achieved his revolution after all – he’s pioneering a new kind of terrible, setting the bar of suckitude almost impossibly high for any pretentious, heroin-addicted douche who might dare to follow in his footsteps and, in so doing, taking all the pleasure out of hating his fucking guts. Well, almost all the pleasure…