[I was able to link up all the videos after a visit to BlackChampagne reminded me that I was a complete idiot. Sure the artists’ websites don’t have the music on them, nor do the sites of the recording companies, especially so for the older songs, but YouTube has everything. Let me tell you, if I was a band that had a couple of hits in the 80’s, I would want nothing more than to float that song around on the internet by any means necessary.
It sure does show the difference in logic though. Artists nowdays have the songs and videos right on their page for download, free for anyone to watch, cause, well, that is how they advertise. The older artists just expect you to rush right out and boost 15 bucks on a cd if you want to hear one of their songs. I wonder why they aren’t making any money? It has to be those kids and their damn file sharing software. Either that, or the fact that there are millions and millions of songs so easily available on the internet that if you can’t find the one you are looking for in about three seconds, you think of a different one and move on. I mean, I find it a bit unlikely that the Genesis version of Land of Confusion is in the top of the file transfers list (probably not even on it), and now would be a great time for them to actually be pimping it. The kids that watched that video in the 80’s are starting to get nostalgic (thus three complete series on VH1 called I love the 80’s), and would probably like to see that one again either because they remember it as being so much better than the new Disturbed version, or because they just enjoyed seeing Ronald Reagan portrayed as a puppeted caricature (though they could have seen that on any news broadcast during his presidency). But it really seems like these older recording artists think that this new-fangled internet thing is just a passing fad, and soon everyone will be back to buying all their favorite music on 8-track. Until they realize that the music is going to be available on the internet so they might as well endorse it, these artists are going to continue to fade more and more into obscurity. Until, as an eventuality, they will be nothing more than an answer in a trivial pursuit game.]
I never really realized that song remakes was one of my pet peeves, but digging through my archives looking for linkage (dear God I need to index that or something, it took me about an hour to find what I was looking for. Since they are titled only by date, google can’t hit them when I do a search for the terms in them either.) I found a couple of examples. Thus my transformation from punk kid to old dude bitching about how much better things were when he was a kid is almost complete. Almost.
I have three song remakes in mind today, and my reaction to them is as varied as the songs themselves. Chances are that anyone over the age of 25 is familiar with one of the originals, but you probably have to be over thirty to remember the other two. I will go into them in the order that they are listed on my notes page.
First up is Lacuna Coil’s cover of the Depeche Mode song Enjoy the Silence(Lacuna Coil’s page allows you to play the song, I can’t find anywhere on the internet that allows me to link to the Depeche Mode version)[Depeche Mode videoLacuna Coil video]. This one isn’t as bad as I thought it was when I added it to my notes page. The cover version makes it absolutely clear that it is a remake of an 80’s song, though I think it really loses a lot of its impact when the vocals are sang by a woman instead of being harmonized by some dude (as I was trying to find out who it was that actually did the vocals on the original track, I found myself reading the entire history of Depeche Mode, which, while interesting, is certainly not all that important for my purposes here. If you know off hand who it was, feel free to let me know, else it will forever be “some dude” getting the credit on my page). So, this one was not quite as bad as my initial impression, but if I am in a mood to listen to Enjoy the Silence, I am certainly going to grab the wife’s Depeche Mode cd even though it would be much less of a hassle to play the Lacuna Coil version.
Next up is Disturbed with a cover of the Genesis song Land of Confusion(again, the Disturbed site has their video for the song on it -which I only saw just now-, I can find no such linkage for the Genesis version)[Disturbed videoGenesis video]. I have to say that I really like the Disturbed version of this one. The Genesis song was cool enough that I wasn’t ashamed of owning the the Invisible Touch album back in the 80’s, and I really loved the puppets in the video (if you know of a link to that video, please do share). The song was timely in the 80’s for it’s ambiguously political lyrics, as well as the literal portrayal of the “men of power” as puppets. The song is every bit as timely today, and perhaps more so. I think Distrubed’s video for the song really nails the current political climate and doesn’t leave much question as to who the Nazi-esque, Money-hungry pig is. This is one of the few song remakes that I actually like more than the original, though the fact that it is getting played about thirty times a day on both the satellite radio and my local rock station may wear it out way faster than necessary. If you haven’t seen the video for it though, go to Disturbed’s site and check it out. Pretty good stuff.
Finally, the worst remake in the history of recorded music. I am talking about the Evanescence cover of the Nirvana (sorry, no link. I have no idea which website is the official one) song Heart Shaped Box(that is an odd link. Every time I click it, it plays the Nirvana video, but for unknown reasons it is on the page for a different band and a different song.) Now I was never a huge Nirvana fan. I did buy the naked baby album, but I never really got into them beyond that. With that being said, I think the real appeal of the group was Cobain’s raw, gritty lyrics and singing. There was a sincerity to the songs that came across and those that listened to the music could really connect with it. For exactly that reason, it really isn’t possible to remake any Nirvana song, since the reason the songs, hell the band really, did so well is that they were so real. Not some over-produced top 40 pop crap, you got what sounded like one take performances that you either got into or didn’t, Cobain didn’t seem to care one way or the other. When Evanescence did that acoustic butchering of Heart Shaped Box, the lyrics sounded like an A Capella rendition of the ingredient label on the back of a shampoo bottle [Evanescence version probably thankfully, this was the only version of it that didn’t have some 9 year old doing it karaoke style (what has the world come to?), or live. The live version of it is slightly less atrocious, since the A Capella voice doesn’t seem so easy to duplicate on the stage, it almost sounds like someone actually singing it! Not going to change my opinion on the cover though, worst remake in the history of music]-absolutely nothing real about, just singing whatever was thrown in front of her. Absolutely the worst cover song in the history of music. This one makes Avril Lavigne’s cover of the Metallica song Fuel seem downright rocking! (and she absolutely butchered that one. I love this one quote from the comments on Avril’s video “They could care less about avril in 1997. Her 15 minutes of fame came now they are over and in 5 years she will be some crack whore in Las Vegas“. It’s funny because it’s true.)
Now I’ll get back to bitching about these damn kids and their new-fangled “cell phones”. We didn’t have “cell phones” when I was a kid. If you wanted to talk to someone when you were out of the house, you just went to a pay phone and waited for it to ring. You could stand there for days waiting, and it was never the guy that you wanted to talk to on the other end when the phone did ring, but we did it because that was all we could do. I remember this one time I wanted to talk to my mom, it was probably back around, oh, say 93 or so. It was about three in the morning, middle of January, I walked about three miles to the nearest pay phone and I stood there for six day, completely naked, waiting for the phone to ring…
I was having trouble getting to sleep last night and found myself thinking about adding a new song to my little sidebar. Then I started thinking that the whole title of the entry over there isn’t accurate and hardly reflects what it was that I initially intended it to be. When I first started posting those songs over there, the songs that I was referring to were all either fairly obscure, or the b-sides of the radio singles at the very least. The last couple of them that I have posted were just random songs that really don’t have any meaning to me, other than I can remember a particular experience that I associate with them. Not that it was ever my intention to prove that I was a hard core fan of any band in the early days just by claiming that I used to have some of their bootlegged stuff (like Metallica for instance -I really should have let that thought go, I think I just disproved my point), but I didn’t want it to be just a space filler with a popular song from a couple of decades ago (in fact, I wanted it to be a space filler with an obscure song from a couple of decades ago. The idea was to turn people on to some stuff that they had probably never listened to, not to remind them of what was popular when they were young). With that in mind, I am setting out to come up with something to put over there that more accurately reflects the intentions that I based the idea on in the first place. Consider that fair warning.
Now I am left with all the other songs, the main stream stuff, and nothing to do with it. So I have decided that, just for fun, I am going to compile a list of the ten songs that had the biggest influence on me. These are going to be songs that obviously had a huge influence on the kind of music that I listen to today, but also songs that I actually think had an impact on the course that my life took. When you think back on it, I am sure that you will remember some songs that really defined areas of your life, your attitude at the time, the decisions you made. For better or worse, I think we can all probably narrow our vast audio libraries down to about ten songs that really shaped and molded our character and actions over the years. Whether you started to rebel against the authority figures in your school because that was what The Sex Pistols told you was cool, or you formed a band because Night Ranger was seriously scoring chicks with their ballads, you have to admit that the songs had a lot more influence over you than just what you were listening to while you were smoking weed in your parents’ basement.
We will consider this an experiment. I am going to try to make it ten songs, but I am sure that the number will likely go up when I find that another song was just too huge for one reason or another. In situations where there were several songs that were all popular or influencing me at the same time, I am going to pick one to go with, although I will probably note the other ones as well, but it will only count as one entry. I am also not going to presume to put these in an order of how much influence they actually had in relation to one another, only that I know they had an influence. For that reason I will try to put them in chronological order, starting with the days when I was but a wee lad -Back when I would sing B-I-N-G-O and think I was rocking out. Well, enough preamble.
1)Queen: Another One Bites the Dust
Growing up in Oregon, we had no rock radio stations or even top 40 for that matter. The only music that I had heard up to that point had been country and the stuff that my parents had on vinyl -this included a lot of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the Beatles- none of which I really ever got into. I did listen to the Beach Boys quite a bit, but when your options are the Beach Boys or listening to some woman practicing for the spelling bee over and over again (the song was called “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”), you take what you can get. My oldest brother got a tape deck (long before the era of the boom box) and brought home a tape that had Another One Bites the Dust on it. Another song that was on the tape (which was just a copy, and a horrible one at that) was Don’t Try Suicide. Needless to say, these songs were quite the departure from the Man in Black and Tanya Tucker. I was far too young at that point to realize that Queen was a reference to Freddie Mercury’s sexuality, and didn’t care why everyone seemed to hate these guys, all I knew was that the instruments in that music straight rocked, and I wanted to hear more of it. There was also a controversy about the song Another One Bites the Dust because if you play it backwards it sounds like it is saying “it’s fun to smoke marijuana”. I tried that later in life (both the drug and playing the song backwards) and can confirm both -though you really have to be listening to actually make the slurred audio sound like those words. Of course if that is what you are trying to hear it wouldn’t be so difficult. Queen forever! (hmm. I would have put money on me never typing that phrase.)
2)Nazareth: Hair of the Dog
I remember this song being popular at about the same time as Joan Jett and the Blackhearts: I Love Rock and Roll. Whether that is the product of a muddled mind or they actually were released at the same time I may never know. Both were huge on the playground in the third grade though, and we would huddle around Nathan’s tiny little tape recorder to listen to them every day at recess. In the end, Nazareth gets the nod over Joan Jett only because it introduced “Son of a Bitch” to my lexicon. Certainly not the only time I would let music make my little mouth say things that made my mother blush, but the first to be sure. I bet if you were to look on some historical numbers, there were probably a lot more third-graders getting reprimanded in 1981 for saying son of a bitch than any other year in history. Nazareth was leading our charge! While none of us really understood what their songs were really about, particularly songs like Cocaine, and even Love Hurts was something that would be another five or six years before we would be seeing the business end of, a third-grader really thinks that anyone who actually says “son of a bitch” in a song is the coolest person on the planet, and will try to emulate them in every way. Long live Nazareth, you sons of bitches! (yes, the plural version loses a bit of the oomph, but what are you gonna do?)
3)Quiet Riot: Cum On Feel the Noize.
Now I could have picked any song off of this album, as it was the first hard rock album that I owned (yes, on vinyl) and I wore it straight the fuck out. It was also the first time I had ever actually heard a guitar solo (Battle Axe). Simply put, this album blew my mind. Between Cum on Feel the Noize and Metal Health, I was bound to never be that innocent, doe-eyed child again. I was starting to experience the world around me, and ready to feel the noize already. I should probably have known better than to idolize some idiots that couldn’t spell come or noise properly, but I was young. I would later learn that the misspelling of cum was probably intentional, though I never did find any reason for the misspelling of noize. But these guys are rockers, so I assume that they probably didn’t really excel in grammar school. Again, these guys were cool, I wanted to be like them. I was ready to “feel the noize” while I was “banging my head”. My parents were less than enthused. Quiet Riot Rulez!
4)AC/DC: Back in Black.
Chronologically, this one is in the wrong place. I think it would be number two on the list if I was going by release dates alone, but I didn’t actually hear this until 1984. Kind of an interesting story to it: There were kids in two age groups where I lived, those in my age range, and those that were about eight years older. There weren’t really any kids in between. The ones who lived just behind us were of the eight year older variety, and had a huge party one weekend, I assume while their parents were out of town. Sometime during the party, someone yanked Back in Black off of the record player and winged it. It ended up in my back yard, where I found it a couple of days later while mowing the lawn. It was either that or it was a gift from God, dropped there to turn me on to the Devil’s Music, which would make for a much better story, but it probably isn’t true. Back in Black also holds the distinction of being the only album that I have ever owned on Lp, 8-track, cassette, CD, and now mp3. Anyone who listens to rock will have to have this one somewhere on their list of greatest albums of all time. You could search forever and probably never find a more gritty, no-frills, in-your-face rock album. These guys weren’t about showboating, although they are all excellent with their instruments, they wanted to kick you in the gut with a tight, powerful song that made you throw your fist in the air. Let’s just say that I bought into that mentality completely. The road that I started to meander down when I first heard Queen a few years prior was now being paved in solid Black. It probably helps that some show (the 700 club or something) was saying that the name stood for anti Christ/devil’s children. Oooh, telling a youngster that listening to this music would make your parents afraid of you might not have been the best move you religious nutjobs… AC/DC Forever! \m/
5)The Hair Bands: I Remember You while Every Rose Has it’s Thorn in Heaven. But, you are my Love of a Lifetime and I Think I Love You, possibly More Than Words can say. But,Is This Love?, ’cause if it isn’t, I Won’t Forget You ’cause I am nothing Without You. Well, Love Bites, but Girl, Don’t Go Away Mad or I’ll Close My Eyes Forever and let Don’t Know What You’ve Got(’til it’s gone) put me to sleep. Alas, here I am Alone Again, Without You
(I chose Every Rose has its Thorn for the sample) Yeah, there were a bunch of them. I was walking a slippery slope there for a while, watching all the girls getting all squishy listening to that dribble. But, being that I had a penis and no functioning brain at that point, I was all about the hair bands (if you try to deny that you listened to it, you are probably a liar). I don’t really remember any of the songs per se, but I sure do remember who I was getting to second base with while listening to them. I was coppin’ me some feels. I probably wouldn’t have known what to do if I had managed to get their pants off anyway, but boy them was some times. That is also why I would never want to have a daughter; If any fourteen year old boy ever did the things that this fourteen year old boy was doing to thirteen year old girls, and he was doing it to my daughter, well, I just wouldn’t want to be the boy in that situation. Good thing I knew that when I was playing with the panty hamsters. I did have to leave rather unexpectedly, and with blistering speed on more than one occasion. Because of this music, well my desire to play with the panty hamsters really, I was dressing exactly like all of the hair bands -some would call it cross dressing. Praise be to the baby Jesus that I was pretty camera shy at the time, and as such there is very little visual evidence of the lengths I was willing to go to play me some tonsil hockey while trying to hide various appendages in various orifices (ahh, isn’t that romantic?). Ummm, long live the hair bands, or whatever, I can’t really throw the horns on this one. (no one ever said I was going to be proud of the music)
6)Metallica: Master of Puppets Holy mother-fucking fuck! I mean, fuck. I mean, well, just, well, fuck! A kid in my school by the name of Jason Thrush wanted to borrow five bucks from me one day, but I didn’t trust him to pay me back. He gave me this tape as collateral. I had never heard of Metallica before (was I ever so pure?) and found the gravestones intriguing. What was this, some satanic music? What would it hurt to listen to just a little bit? It was in the middle of the first song when I put it in, but I used my snazzy new tape deck to auto-fast-forward to the start of the next song (that was some cool technology, huh?) and started the song. And. Well. Fuck. That shit just kicks you in the teeth and dares you to come back for more. Man, I knew I was never going to be the same again. Jason never got his tape back, and “Fuck it all with Fucking no regrets” would become my motto for the next decade or so (probably not a good call), and I desperately wanted to be Metallica. At the time, the Metallica fan club was actually based in Roseburg, Oregon (where I lived) and there were all sorts of rumors going around that they actually originated there (which was completely bogus, it was actually just a guy that lived there that wanted to be Metallica a little bit worse than me dedicating himself to spreading the word). It was about this time that I took to wearing a string of bullets from a machine gun around my wrist when I went to school (don’t remember what type of gun it was, my buddy Steve stole them from the National Guard while he was there one weekend a month, two weeks a year), oh yeah, they were actually blanks too. I started to grow my hair out, not shower nearly enough, wear nothing but black t-shirts and jeans, and I bought a guitar. The guitar was a “Memphis” brand, just some cheap ass, blue electric guitar. I couldn’t play a single note, honestly couldn’t even tune the thing (never would have been able to since the tremolo was broken and the neck looked like a topographic map of a mountain chain), but I slapped Metallica stickers all over that son of a bitch (hooray Nazareth) and carried it everywhere I went. I seem to recall that I actually used some nail polish (it was what I had, remember the hair bands?) to write “EET FUK” on it, as a tribute to James Hetfield. Some might say my fascination might have been borderline unhealthy, they would be wrong. My obsession with them was so complete as to be damn near self-destructive. Metallica! Fuck it all with Fucking no regrets! (interesting aside about regret. It is soooooo much better to regret something that you didn’t do (I should have bought that IBM stock back in 78) than to regret something that you did do (ahh shit, now where am I gonna put the body). Just thought I would throw that out there.)
7)Metallica: Enter Sandman.
I would have liked to not have to put two Metallica songs right next to each other, but I simply have to. Enter Sandman was what forced me to actually buy a playable guitar and start to learn some notes. I have never been so obsessed with anything in my life -not before or since- than I was with the guitar at that point. I would play that thing like 10 hours a day, possibly more. It was in my hands while I watched t.v., I took it with me when I was in the car with Dave, I actually skipped a lot of days of school to stay home and practice. I wanted desperately to be able to play, and slowly, over about a year, I started to get good. I was never all that great at lead, I mean, I could belt out a few solos, but I didn’t really know a lot of modes and scales so they all pretty much sounded the same. What I could do was play every song on Metallica’s Black album note for note, front to back. My buddy Steve also played the guitar, and Dean’s grandparents bought him a nice Tama drum kit, then we all obsessed about being Metallica together. Every weekend was spent at Dean’s house (none of us had a car to haul the drums) jamming Metallica way to fucking loud. As the time went by, we started to do all of Metallica’s stuff, including the ones that most garage bands stay away from just due to the sheer speed of them -Blackened (the forearm cries), Battery (I miss one note in that one every fucking time), Creeping Death (down-picking madness), Disposable Heroes (all hail the quintuplet), The Four Horsemen (what is that, like 7/5 time or something?) Master of Puppets (again, all down-picking), you name any song you can think of, as long as it is Metallica, and we could play that shit start to finish, note for note (with the exception of that one note in Battery that I always missed). Yes, we were Metallica. Well, we lacked the originality, the money, the fans, the talent, the equipment, and a few other things, but other than that… Metal Militia!
8.)Megadeth: Holy Wars…The Punishment Due.
I was sitting at Dean’s house (his mom had an awesome stereo system that she really only ever used to listen to Alice Cooper’s song The Man Behind the Mask), when Sean came over and popped a CD in the tray, turned the radio up to like 28 (it was digital, went to 30) and started cranking out this one. That intro just kicked my ass, remember, I was all about guitars now. IMHO, that song has not one, not two, but three of the coolest guitar riffs ever written in it. I was sooooo hooked. Within a week, I had every Megadeth album CD in my collection and was listening to/learning to play the ones that I thought were the coolest. I would never have the success playing Megadeth like I did with Metallica; Metallica has straight forward riffs, repeat it four times and you got your song; Megadeth has weird riffs that have different fills damn near every bar, the two guitars are rarely ever doing the same thing, and trying to learn it made my head hurt as much as my fingers. I was able to play everything from the Countdown to Extinction album, and few choice songs from other albums: In My Darkest Hour, Lucretia, Rust in Peace, and even some that weren’t on either of those two albums! So, while Megadeth had a great influence on my playing, and while I consider them my favorite band of all time (I almost pissed myself when I found out that my wife got me tickets to go see them live less than a year ago -even though Mustaine is the only original member still in the band. The crowd at that show was an odd mix, lots of guys my age and a lot of teens, but man Megadeth -what is left of them- rocked that fucking place.), I never had the drive to want to be Megadeth. You can only try to be one band, right? And Vic is about the second coolest mascot ever, with the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil irons all bolted to the skull. Yeah, you can’t go wrong with Megadeth, but they are hardly a band anymore, so, Mustaine forever!
9)Slayer: Skeletons of Society.
I was going down the road to metal stardom, but I still wasn’t comfortable with all the satanic overtones that Slayer put into their music. I was raised as a church-going little tyke, and while I was still undecided on the whole existence of God issue, I didn’t want to be actively pissing him off if he was really out there. Skeletons of Society was the first Slayer song that I heard -someone was playing it on their car stereo while we were kicking around a hackeysack under the bridge-, and I found that the lyrics weren’t evil at all(a lot of pop-ups through that link, sorry about that). I wouldn’t go so far as to call Slayer political activists or anything, but the lyrics, at least to this one, put me more in mind of a cautionary tale of the future of mankind than, say, selling your soul. The guitar work in Slayer is pretty extraordinary, both Hanneman and King could easily be the only guitarist in the band, but having both of them allows for some beautiful harmonic melodies (no, really), and blistering dueling solos. I found that I kind of liked the way that people left me alone when I was sporting the “Spill the Blood” t-shirt, so I went with it. My dad thought I was completely nuts, hell he might have been right. The good thing is that while I was listening to the music, hanging around with the wrong crowd, and getting into all sorts of illegal mischief, I managed to keep away from the drugs (I did smoke a little weed), which is more than I can say for a lot of the guys that I used to hang out with. So, Slayer kind of helped me realize that I am a pretty introspective, and that I don’t really need want to be the guy that is the center of attention. I do just find in social situations, and don’t actively avoid them, I just find that I much prefer being alone (with my wife now) than being out following a crowd. 666, Baby! Those religious nuts stay away!
10)Slipknot: Duality.
I have to end this with something fairly recent, and I think Slipknot’s Duality is a good one. While many from my generation have since had children of their own, and now find themselves frightened of the way that their children are dressing, the masks that the guys in this band wear, and all of the very things that my dad was concerned about when I was their age, I find myself still relating to these kids. Sure, I do find a bit of humor in the fact that they are all dressing up exactly like their idols in some vain attempt to find their individuality, but that is exactly what I did when I was their age -I bet their parents did too, though they may have tried to look like the preppy guy from Revenge of the Nerds instead of Jason from Friday the Thirteenth-. Ten years from now that music won’t be shocking or cutting-edge, it will be in rotation on some classic rock station somewhere. The new generation of kids will move on to the newer, heavier music, and I will be right there with them; The creepy old guy at the concert in a Metallica t-shirt, throwing a goat way past its prime, trying not to break my hip in the mosh pit. Because when you strip away the kabuki masks, the multi-colored contacts, the black eye make-up, and the horrible hair-dos, what you have left is the music, and if it doesn’t kick you in the teeth, it isn’t worth listening to.
We will call those my tentative ten. I may change them at some later date if the fancy strikes me, but for now it will have to do.
As I expected, I am completely disappointed with one of the entries, but that is what happens when I try to keep it down to 10. Number 7 on the little list there is the one that actually forced me to buy a guitar, so it has to be there, but in order for it to be there, I had to kind of overlook the fact that it was the beginning of the decline of possibly the greatest metal band ever. At roughly the same time as Metallica started pussing out, there was another band that had just got a major record deal and was most certainly not concerned with shortening and sweetening their songs in the interest of better radio airplay. I give you my first glaring omission:
Pantera: Mouth for War.
This was Pantera’s second (studio) album, and while I did own Cowboys From Hell, it had to fight for precious play time with such albums as Megadeth’s Rust in Peace and Metallica’s …And Justice for All, tough gig. At the same time as Vulgar Display of Power was released, however, Megadeth and Metallica had just released what were by far their most radio-friendly and technically accurate albums in Countdown to Extinction and Metallica’s Black Album. While I loved those albums for their ease, and thus my introduction to the guitar, it was ultimately that ease that pushed me away from them as well. Pantera was like the lover I ran to when my first two lovers were asleep, and I just needed that dirty, dirty sex… They provided.(I really need to come up with some better analogies) Again, I could easily have chosen any song from this album, and in the end it really comes down to a particular guitar riff that made me go with this one. Hair bands were still in the spotlight, but starting their decline, Nirvana had just exploded onto the scene (they almost made it onto the list as well), and the monsters of rock were pandering to the audience of the New Kids on the Block, when Pantera dropped this one. The whole album comes across as pretty real; when you listen to Walk, you go away from it thinking to yourself that you probably don’t want to cross Phil Anselmo, lest he get Fucking Hostile.
I am sure there were a lot of other bands out there that were still playing gritty, heavy shit without apologies, just like Pantera, and the best part is that they genuinely didn’t seem to give a fuck if you listened to it or not. Hell, Pantera realized early on that they were being a bunch of posers with the spandex and hairspray and gave up that image to let the music speak for them. I am probably not a very good Pantera fan, since I only own three of their albums, and the mood really has to hit me before one of them hits my stereo (i.e. I need to be pretty angry). But I was angry back in 1991 when Megadeth, Metallica, hell, even Ozzy all released albums that were and are some of the best albums ever, but which also gave them the mainstream exposure that would ultimately lead to their transformation from underground phenomenon to over-produced pin-up boys. Pantera was there to kick you in the teeth, when the other bands were off getting manicures.
Man it sucked when Darrell got killed on stage a few years ago. Pantera was broken up at that point (why does that always have to happen when a band gets so damn good), but DamagePlan straight rocked. I heard rumors at the time that they guy who killed him thought that it was his (Darrell’s) fault that Pantera broke up. While I have no way to know if that is true, it sure seems like the wrong way to go about getting the band back together. It just seems so sick and wrong and that some psychopath is able to get on stage and gun down one of the best guitarists to ever pick up the instrument, yet no one has yet managed to do the same to any of the myriad 16 year-old, MTV created, pin-up icons whose only talent is their ability to dress like sluts and lip-synch the words that some unknown vocalist layed to track months before the concert. I guess I should say it would be a crying shame if that happened, but I am not going to. Not that I am bitter or anything…
There really isn’t ever much on television at two in the morning. Last night I wasn’t tired enough to sleep and found myself flipping through channels. Alas, I had already seen all of the infomercials a couple of times (let me tell you, that Oxi Clean: Orange Action stuff isn’t worth nearly the 19.95 I paid for it, but they were giving away so much free stuff with it I would have been a fool not to order it) so I found myself at the high end of my Satellite’s channel list, looking at a free preview for the E! Action channel (at least I assume that is what it was, the channel tag said “eactn”). I had just finished watching The Butterfly Effect on that channel, and it was pretty good, so I figured I would give the next film a go as well. Of course since it was a free preview there was no program information available, so all I knew about it was that it was called Fair Game.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you take a second rate model and a third rate actor, gave them a fourth rate script and 50 million dollars to make an action movie? Me either, but evidently someone wondered that very thing in 1995. And I, being a glutton for punishment, sat through every frame of the movie last night (which is not entirely true; I actually got up at one point to look it up on IMDB to see what year it was released, because I was laughing so hard at what was going on).
I would give you a spoiler warning but, let’s face it, I am the only one that has seen this movie in the last decade, and there is no way in hell you are ever going to watch it –barring some evil mastermind forcing you to. So, let the fun begin.
To believe the plot of the film, you would have to either be mentally challenged, extremely young, or more likely both. There is a rogue group of former KGB elite operatives (sort of like James Bond, only the bad guys) who are out of work with the fall of the Soviet Union. Their retirement package sucked, so they need to make a lot of scratch really fast. Being the experts they are in absolutely everything except marksmanship, they ultimately decide to electronically steal a whole bunch of money from someone’s (and it really doesn’t matter whose) bank account in the Cayman Islands. But the year is only 1995, and evidently technology has only advanced about as far as land based phone lines at this point, so the only way they can complete their mission is to splice into a phone line that is buried under the ocean -note that this is the most believable part of the plot.
Cindy Crawford plays some chick whose greatest contribution to the film was the flashing of her left breast. Thankfully though, she seemed to have had that trademark wart removed, or well hidden at least. She is the requisite damsel in distress in the film, but if you find yourself rooting for her in any way, you obviously had a way bigger crush on her wart than I did back in high school. The script calls for her to play a vapid pretty woman, which she pulls off remarkably well -with a real actress, you might not believe that she could really absolutely forget about her Cuban client (The one that she was discussing not ten minutes earlier), with Crawford, that seems absolutely possible. Which is really a good thing, since about ten minutes into the film you quit taking it seriously and start looking for comedy. Cindy provides. I love this quote from one of the reviews at rotten tomatoes (where the film managed to score an astounding 2/22 fresh rating -with one of the fresh ratings being from a guy who was obviously beating off when he saw naked Cindy skin):
But it was not my intention to rip on Cindy Crawford… Well, I guess it was actually, but that was not my only intention so I have to keep going. I am going to give up entirely on bitching about the acting though, because honestly, if William Baldwin is getting first billing, the film is obviously not going to be winning any “best actor” awards.
The film starts out with Crawford being shot at by some guy for no damn reason. She ends up in a police station where is left in an interrogation room that is fully equipped with telephones, fax machines, computers -hell, if she was the bad guy she could have hacked into the pentagon with all the equipment there. This entire scene was actually all just a setup for the only joke in the movie though -and possibly the worst joke I have ever seen in an action film- so I will give them a bit of leeway on this one. Of course the inept detective forgets to get his victim to sign a statement because the plot requires it.
In the hour or so that Cindy (no, I can’t call her by her character’s name. I honestly don’t know what it was) spent in the police station, the bad guys had been setting up her house with a bomb. Of course they used a bomb because that is the only way that they could absolutely guarantee that they would actually fail in their attempt on her life. This ingenious device was wired to her television, and blew up with such ferocity that it absolutely destroyed a 3-4,000 square foot, two story house. Of course Cindy was not harmed in any way, not a scratch, not a bit of dirt or smoke from the Hiroshima-sized blast, not even scared (though that might have been her lack of ability as an actress more than an unintentional result). Of course Willy is there to save her anyway! He stands flat-footed in the middle of an open driveway shooting his revolver at the van filled with machine-gun-toting baddies, manages to dodge around 3,000 flying bullets with nothing more than his looks, and dives into a swimming pool just in time to make enough noise to wake me back up. Asshole.
It is now clear to our heroes that there might be someone trying to kill Cindy. No one ever takes the first attempt on their life seriously, right? But when someone takes the time to turn your house into a mushroom cloud, you have to start thinking that maybe your dog messed on the neighbor’s lawn or something. So they needed to get away from Cindy’s H.O.A. as soon as possible since she can’t remember if she left her trash can out past dark the day before.
They end up in some hotel somewhere. She is under heavy police surveillance (especially while she is in the shower) at all times. But the cops get hungry, so they order some pizzas for delivery from the local pizza joint. Of course no one has any cash, so they use Cindy’s credit card (it was at this point that I went to IMDB to see what year the film was released, ’cause, I mean, come on. How stupid are we supposed to believe the police really are?). Somehow the bad guys manage to find them! Shocking!
The bad guys are using some pretty advanced thermal imaging technology. They are able to see people through the walls of the hotel in absolute perfect red silhouette. The thermal imaging technology is far from perfect though: It can only sense things that are exactly 98.6 degrees. While one of the heroes is in the shower, he completely disappears to the thermal imaging. So, is he showering in ice or what? Doesn’t the average person shower in water that is between 115 and 130 degrees? Why can’t the thermal imager pick up the hot water? Best not to ask. Slick Willy kills three of the ex-KGB agents with the scent from his Zest-fully clean underarms, and loses a few of his best friends as well, but manages to drag Cindy out just before she gets killed -which is long after I had quit caring, but the next good infomercial was still an hour away.
The heroes stop at a payphone somewhere to call the police station, the phone line of which is already being monitored by the ex-KGB guys even though they don’t know at this point that Willy is a cop, and even if they did know, they don’t know who he is and would have no way of knowing which district he worked for. Willy thinks some of the cops are dirty because the were discovered so quickly at the hotel, it never crosses his mind that using the victim’s credit card might have tipped them off. He wants to get the FBI involved. He has figured out that the phone lines are being monitored and won’t actually say the location where he wants to meet them (the only intelligent thing any of the heroes does throughout the course of the entire film), and refers to it only as “that place that you used to go on Friday’s”. Of course the guys monitoring the call show up at the station posing as FBI agents, even though no one ever actually called the FBI, and all of the cops believe them. So, off to the meeting place.
Slick Willy has hidden Cindy somewhere before the meeting (which I will not credit to him as an intelligent decision because of what he is about to do) and adamantly refuses to turn her over to the protection of the FBI without first seeing their credentials. One of the guys whips out an I.D. -it has a picture and everything- that says “Akshule FBI Agint Identefikashun Not Fak At All” (I am paraphrasing). That’s all Slick Willy needs to see, he frees Cindy from the back seat of his car! Clever hiding place, that. And no one questions it when the Akshule FBI Agints want to split everyone up to get Slick Willy and Cindy alone in a car with one of their operatives. All of a sudden, the Akshule FBI Agints turn! They aren’t really the FBI! They are the bad guys! (written as a five year old, since it was obviously written for a five year old) Slick Willy picks up on the clever ruse after the Akshule FBI Agints manage to take out another half dozen or so of his closest friends. Using nothing more than his flowing hair, Slick Willy kills another three or four of the elite ex-KGB guys to save the girl and make his escape. Which he cleverly makes in his own car. His own car that happens to have Lojack! (no kidding) -I dare you to try to make up a worse way for him to make his escape. Come on, just try. There has to be a worse way.
Anyway, the bad guys manage to stay hot on their trail. Even without the Lojack, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to follow them because, yes, they were still using Cindy’s credit card (I wonder if that was a prop credit card or if it was actually Cindy Crawford’s personal VISA). To the surprise of only anyone who has never seen any movies, read any books, and has not been paying much attention to the first hour of the film, Slick Willy’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere to allow the bad guys to catch up. He doesn’t think to even pop the hood to look at it, just calls a tow truck (with the cell phone that he now has even though he has been using only pay phones for the first half of the movie. Of course the bad guys don’t trace his cell phone for some unknown reason, which makes very little sense since they can trace any call he makes from any random pay phone on the planet, but try not to think about it.). When the tow truck arrives, Slick Willy notices the Lojack under his hood (which is just absolutely unbelievable in every way. The whole success of Lojack is that it is hidden well enough that experienced car thieves can not find and disable it. They don’t just strap that shit to the hood) and simply unplugs it (which is probably why they didn’t use Lojack’s actual name in the movie: Lojack would not want to be associated with that crap. In fact I wouldn’t doubt it one bit if Lojack sends me an email telling me to remove their name from this post or they will sue me for libel).
Where were we? Oh yeah, the bad guys show up with machine guns blazing. Slick Willy jumps into the tow truck, which is now pulling his Suburban, and takes off down the road, but Cindy is at the wheel. The ensuing chase reaches speeds in excess of like 20 miles per hour. The bad guys fire around 1,000 rounds that actually hit the tow truck (more like 6,000 total), not one of which manages to hit any of the tires, although it does somehow catch the suburban on fire. Slick Willy is hanging on the swinging passenger door, shooting single shots with sniper-like accuracy, and managing to kill all but two of his pursuers, all the while dodging hundreds of machine gun rounds using nothing more than his shiny t-shirt. Somehow the bad guys get ahead of them and stop in the middle of the road. They get out of the car and stand there. Because it doesn’t appear to have crossed their minds that firing thousands of rounds into the cab of the tow truck might have given Cindy and Willy the idea that they were trying to kill them. It never crossed their minds that maybe Cindy and Willy wouldn’t stop and would just run over them. Well, their gamble paid off. Cindy and Willy didn’t just hit them and end the film right there, instead they turned at the last minute to avoid killing the guys that they had just spent the last ten minutes trying to kill in a high speed car chase. Why? The boat hadn’t been blown up yet.
By the time they are on the boat, the movie itself even stopped taking itself seriously. They weren’t even trying to make the shoot-outs look real anymore. The actors were pretty much just blatantly aiming at all of the fuel barrels that were being stored in ship’s communications center (for no reason other than to make a bigger explosion. I bet if you were to ask the director of the movie he couldn’t give you a plausible explanation for why they would be there). The bad guys just have to hit one final key on the computer’s keyboard to complete the 700 million dollar transfer when the ship eventually blows up, three times. Not the same explosion from three camera angles, three completely separate explosions -one of which I am fairly certain wasn’t even the same boat. All of the bad guys are dead. In fact, every character in the film except for Willy and Cindy are dead -that is not an exaggeration-. It ends with Willy and Cindy kissing on the beach as they watch the ship burn. A good, solid happy ending. It sure is a good thing they don’t think about the dozens of friends that they lost in the last 24 hours or they might get depressed…
It never really explains why they want to kill the woman so bad other than to say that she knows the guy that owns the boat. That’s great and all, but just knowing who owns the boat doesn’t necessarily mean that she is going to know the ex-KGB guys that are somehow involved with that guy, also in a way that is never explained. Nor does it actually explain why anyone needs to die in the first place. In fact, had the bad guys not set out to kill anyone, they would have completed their diabolical plan at the same time and with a hell of a lot less trouble. I know action movies are just explosions and gunfights strung together with weak plots, but can’t they at least make the premise of the plot somewhat realistic? A four year old could have come up with something more believable.
They say that in order to enjoy a movie you have to be able to suspend your disbelief. There is no chain or cable in existence strong enough to suspend it for the duration of this film. If you have a stout chain, you will need to bind your disbelief, silence it with a ball gag, take it to a darkened basement, and put a couple of rounds through its temple. Then you might might be able to enjoy this one, but I really doubt it. I am actually a bit surprised that it only lost 40 million dollars.
All that being said, I think this is probably William Baldwin‘s best work.
This does make me curious about something though. If this is the kind of crap they show you for free when they are trying to get you to sign up for the E! Action channel, what is the average crap that they show on a daily basis? Could it possibly be worse than this? I am sure not going to sign up and risk finding out.
I went to a job interview of sorts on Thursday. It lasted from 9:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m.. It was a position where I could have made a great deal of money (easily double my previous income to start) but which required about 20 hours of overtime a week. If I were about ten years younger, I might actually think about something like that, but at this point I am pretty sure that I don’t have it in me to work that many hours -and especially not with a two hour commute each way. But damn I need a job.
I have realized, albeit about ten years too late, why I was never able to really excel at playing the guitar: I had been trying entirely too hard. I walked into the living room yesterday, picked up the guitar, and belted out part of Yngwie Malmsteen’s song Eclipse. Instead of concentrating on the notes and mashing the string to the fret, I just let my mind tell my fingers where to go (which doesn’t really do much to explain the actual difference). The difference was night and day. I have had the notes memorized for years, my fingers have always known exactly where they had to be on the fingerboard to play them, I just lacked the ability to make my mind connect with my fingers. The problem was that I was trying to use my eyes as a tool to make the two meet, but the eyes are not as fast as the mind, and the fingers are frequently behind the eyes (which I know doesn’t make any sense, but bear with me), which was leading to a lot of notes getting played at the wrong time, or not at all. Once I removed my eyes from the equation and trusted my mind to get my fingers where I knew they needed to be, it just came out. The epiphany that I really needed a decade ago, when I really cared about music, finally comes when I am only playing for amusement. Perfect.
If you are a guitarist and have been playing long enough that you can get your fingers to any given fret by feel, yet seem to have problems with particular riffs, just make sure you aren’t looking. Your mind can move your fingers a hell of a lot quicker than your eyes can, but you have to trust that your mind knows what it is doing -a real stretch for me- to be successful. I mean, don’t be envisioning the neck of the guitar in your head while you are playing, in fact, think of something else if necessary to make sure that your mind is making your fingers move without any visual cues. Trust me, and trust yourself, once you are able to do that you will become infinitely better. It is sort of like typing; I haven’t had to actually think about where the keys were for years, my thoughts just appear on the screen with an absolute minimum of intervention from the eyes (I do occasionally have to look down to see where some of the keys are, & and $ for example.). The guitar needs to be the same way, and if there is an occasional “typo”, so be it. The typos will dwindle with time and you will find that you are far better than you had ever thought possible.
When I said that I put the guitar back in the spare bedroom never to speak of it again, I was lying. Sue me.
I restrung one of them yesterday, ’cause you would be amazed what three or four years of disuse can do to the pretty nickel plated strings, unless you own a guitar, in which case you already know. Then it was time to Shred! Well, “shred” might not be the appropriate word here, I might be looking for something more along the lines of “Then it was time to hope I didn’t outright suck!”
As I sat there plugging away at it, I started to remember bits and pieces of all of the songs that I used to play. I would remember one riff, play it, then try to remember the next part. Of course I could never remember the next part, so I would move on to another song, only to then remember the part from the last song. So basically I was sounding like every twelve year old that ever picked up the guitar. Sort of like a really bad guitar player to begin with, add in a little A.D.D., and you pretty much have my sound -at least I have the good since to do it with the amp barely audible, to spare the ears of any humans, pets, or NSA agents (yes, I intentionally made sure that I excluded the NSA agents from the “humans” category. Just one of my things) who happen to be listening in.
I decided that focusing my butchery on just a couple of songs would probably benefit a lot of people. Most notably, every band whose name is not Metallica, since old Metallica is the most new guitarist friendly music ever written (in general. It is often fast, but from a purely technical standpoint, easy). The two songs I chose were Master of Puppets and Welcome Home (Sanitarium). The former because it is one of the more difficult songs to play just for the sheer speed you have to maintain for 8 minutes or whatever (here is where every kid that ever touched a guitar chimes in with “I can play that”. To which I say, “No, no you can’t.” Playing the intro doesn’t qualify as playing it. When I say that I can play a song, I am saying that I can play every note in the song from beginning to end ((although some of the solos have always been beyond my ability)), albeit with an occasional mistake). The latter was chosen because my fingers need to re-learn how to get the hell out of the way to let the clean tone ring through without muffling it.
Every kid with a guitar really thinks that he can play Sanitarium though, and they think they are good enough to video tape in the process, and they think the resulting video is worthy of posting for all the world to see. Seriously, Check out some of these videos (the second page is where the real hackery starts, although the intros played on the first page of results could probably create a whole new level of “suck” all on their own). I can proudly say that having not touched the instrument in year, I picked up the guitar and still play it better than any of those guys. Of course that isn’t good enough for me, I need to be able to play it so precisely that you can’t tell the difference between my play and the album, which will probably only take a couple of weeks more practice, and the practice is only on the solos since the rhythm parts are so damn easy.
But I didn’t write this post to brag of my guitar prowess, it just kind of turned out that way when I went to see if anyone had made a video of them playing Sanitarium. Anyway, it was while I was searching through the horrible mockeries of the song that I came across one of the many that is just so horrible you almost can’t believe it is for real. This video is either the funniest parody ever conceived, or the most sad thing I have ever seen. The description of the video says:
Much metallica is gooder whith electric axe. Hear new digital delay, DOD rawks metal hard kore.
That is parody, right? RIGHT? God I hope so.
Hell, judging by these videos, I don’t really even need to practice. I just need to start booking gigs and banging groupies, all for the love of music, or something.
attitional note: There must be a tabliture floating around for this song on the internet, because almost every one of the videos has The same mistake in it at exactly the same place. I know that internet is never wrong and all, but you really ought to at least compare your tabliture to the song before you commit to it.
There is a radio ad playing on my local radio station, I think it is for Ultimate Electronics, although I can’t find anything on their website or google to support my claim. Anyway, the commercial goes on to say that your t.v. isn’t simply a t.v., it is a personal theater where “gifted thespians like Steven Seagal ply their craft”. I don’t know why, but that just makes me laugh every time I hear it.
Speaking of Steven Seagal, he was in a new movie that came out last week. Shadow Man was a direct to video release (like every Seagal film should have been), that I happened to catch a couple of scenes from. All I can say is wow. It has been so long since I have actually seen Seagal in a movie that I had completely forgotten just how bad he is at acting. I do see parodies of him quite a bit on MadTV, but those were just parodies, obviously exaggerated, right? Nope. The truth is that the parodies of him, where the actors are doing their absolute best to act horribly, are still better than his actual acting. Since it is clear that he isn’t going to go away, why don’t they just set the movies around his character being a mute who has lost all ability to feel emotion, hell he could probably win an Emmy in that role.
During a bout with boredom sometime last week, I went ahead and tuned one of my guitars and plucked away at it a bit. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the only things that I could remember how to play, and actually still play with only minor mistakes, were all from Metallica’s Black Album. Of course I did spend thousands and thousands of hours playing that when I was a teen.
I dug out my old Yngwie Malmsteen tabliture book for the Rising Force album and and started trying to play Black Star again, it has been an awful long time since I attempted that song. Anyway, while I had a pretty good idea what the song sounded like, I couldn’t remember it exactly. So I went to you tube to see if I could find a video of it. Well, I found a video of it, but I also found this video of a kid guy playing the second song from that album.
Watch it, right now. Seriously, I’ll wait.
Then I put the guitar back in the spare bedroom. Let us never speak of this again.
Well, blogger has been pretty fucked up of late, and since it would be a real pain in the ass to update the front page manually, as I used to do, I have instead lost a couple of complete posts by being a complete idiot. You see, when I first started using the blogger script, I continued to write all of the posts in notepad (including all the html for links, etc). The thing is when I transferred them over to blogger, I would have to do it either a paragraph at a time, or else it would not put in breaks, or I would do it all at once and lose all of the actual html from the document -I would have to go back and reinsert italics, bold, any links, etc. I’m sure that there was a way to get around that, but I never bothered to look it up, I just started using the blogger text editor since it is basically the same as notepad anyway.
Unfortunately for me, I have a habit of not making copies of what I am writing into the text editor over here, so when blogger is continually going down, I don’t actually know that I am going to lose the post until after I have already lost it. That is to say, I didn’t paste the html back to notepad before I attempted to publish the last two posts, and since blogger was down I was not able to retrieve the contents. Stupid blogger and your stupid downtime. Fear not, I am sure the missing posts probably wouldn’t have been earth shaking, they rarely ever are.
Instead I will offer a couple of random things, and for the best reason: no damn reason at all!
The local jocks on the radio were being their normal obnoxious selves this morning. It is sometimes funny, sometimes thought provoking (hard to type that with a straight face finger), sometimes, well most times, just completely, unapologetically chauvinistic. So, kind of humorous in doses, as long as you try to tell yourself that it has to be satire (don’t even question whether or not it is meant to be satire, you will be disappointed with the results. Unless you have a very small mind, in which case you probably don’t think it is satire, but then you probably agree with all the “get your ass back in the kitchen, take off your shoes, and have my baby” type “humor” they throw around).
The show is at its best when it is unintentional though. Like this morning. There was something in the middle of one of the valley freeways, it may have been an animal, but no one was really sure. Anyway, the jocks instantly assumed that it was an animal, and were actively asking the person who had hit the animal to call the show. Of course there were a couple hundred people who called up claiming to be the person who hit the animal, ’cause hearing yourself on the radio is probably at the top of their “must do before I die” list. Some of the calls were funny, just for the outlandish stories the people were telling. For example, one person said that a UFO dropped a mutilated cow on the freeway in front of him and he didn’t have time to dodge. But the best part was that they started playing a stock “tire screech, car crash” audio bit before each new call they took. Until the last one, when someone hit the wrong key. So just as the jock says something like “There is a dead animal in the middle of the I-10”, Marvin Gaye’s song Let’s Get it on started playing in the background. Classic, in that “it’s funny because it’s necrophilia” way.
Taurus April 20 – May 20:
It seems like no matter how many times you pick up the Bible, you always discover something new within its pages for you to wildly misconstrue.
That applies to a lot more people than just Taurusus Tauruses Taurusis Taurus’ Tauri the ones born under the sign of the bull. The problem is if you own a bible, and you think that the statement doesn’t apply to you, you are exactly the person that it applies to, but you will never admit it.
Finally, Wil put up a link to the following video and it is the funniest thing since sliced bread:
So I was lying around the house today watching some hardcore porn…Actually, that isn’t true, although admitting to that would be so much easier than admitting what I was actually watching. There is a new show on The Learning Channel called Honey, We’re Killing the Kids, which I thought was going to be an interesting docudrama that followed a couple around as they hunted down their own children and savagely beat them to death with rusty machetes. When it turned out to be something completely different, I was far too lazy to push the button on the remote that would end my misery, so I watched it anyway.
First off, shouldn’t Disney file a lawsuit against the creators for using their intellectual property? Isn’t it an obvious ripoff of the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids? Bleh. The series is probably owned by Disney, or the network is owned by Disney, at any rate I am not going to waste the time to look it up. Because when it comes down to lawsuits, I think Mattel is the company that really has a case. Look at the images and judge for yourself1:
At any rate, the show is all about exploiting fat children. The premise is that a nutritional expert will show the parents what the child will look like at age 40 if they don’t change their lifestyle, but the reality is that it is a show that will be watched by millions of people so that they can think that their children aren’t really all that fat by comparison. The particular show that I watched had a twelve year old kid on it that was only 10 pounds lighter than I am despite the fact that I am almost two feet taller than him. It truly boggles the mind. I really can’t see why anyone would ever watch more than one episode of this show. I watched the very beginning of another episode and it is exactly the same thing only the people have been changed. I don’t think this is going to be a Jerry Springer type thing, where people like to watch it just to see what happens when the gene pool dries out. I can’t see how this show would be any different ever. Act 1: show the parents grossly exaggerated (or not when you look at the exploding waistline of the U.S. population) age renderings of what their children will look like in a couple of decades. Act 2: Insert change in the form of better food and a more healthy lifestyle, which the family at first rejects but slowly starts to accept. Act 3: show the parents grossly exaggerated (for sure this time) age renderings of what their children will look like in a couple of decades now that they have eaten a piece of fruit (imagine that, they could all be runway models). The End. It would be nice if they were to go into the epilogue. You know, fast forward a couple of years to find out that the second the cameras were off everyone reverted to old habits and the kids are fatter than ever, but that would sort of make the entire premise of the show kind of pointless then, wouldn’t it?
Normally I am not the type to make vast and sweeping generalizations without factual basis2, but I am going to go with my gut on this one (pun intended). The only people likely to watch this show are going to be the parents of children who are borderline morbidly obese. If they can find just one child on the planet that weighs more than little Timmy, you see, then that means that little Timmy isn’t really that fat. Who else would watch the show? Parents of normal3, healthy, active children wouldn’t want to watch it, and certainly wouldn’t want their children to watch it. So I guess that means that they will always have an audience, at least until every family except for the fattest family in the U.S. has seen it.
1) I think I probably lose a lot of cool points for knowing the Mattel logo well enough to immediately recognize this blatant ripoff. Even more for actually admitting that I recognized it. Thankfully it wasn’t the Kenner logo or I would gain like 2d20 geek points on top of the cool points that I lost. In fact I might get those geek points anyway since Kenner was absorbed by Hasbro a long time ago and only the real Star Wars GeeksTM remember Kenner, and then only because it is printed on the front of their complete set of action figures from the first film.
2) I leave that to the Republicans. *rimshot* Thank you. I will be here all week.
3) That makes it sound like I am implying that the extremely overweight children are not “normal”, I would like to clarify that. I am not implying that they aren’t normal, I am saying it flat out.
I am not a basketball fan by any means. I did enjoy watching the game back in the late ’80’s – early ’90’s when it seemed that every game ended with a score of 135-131, usually on some miraculous buzzer beater. The last decade has been boring as hell for basketball. If the Jordan era was the era of big offense, the last decade has been the era of big defense. I suppose that from a purely technical standpoint the defensive play is a lot better. Technically better doesn’t equate to more fun to watch though; a well executed half court press pales in comparison to an offensive fast break that is capped off with an alley-oop dunk. These plays are still made, of course, but they are usually just in the garbage portion of the game when one team has already benched all of their starters and back-ups, leaving you reaching for the team roster to see if the guys now on the court are actually even on the team.
Growing up in Oregon, basketball was the one professional sport that our state actually had a team in. But rather than support them, I actively hated them. It was my (misguided) belief that if we didn’t have the stupid basketball team we would be able to have a football team, and football was always my favorite sport. Since I felt a need to hate the Trailblazers (and what a ridiculous name that is), I needed to choose someone from their conference to root for. My mother lived in Arizona at the time so I picked the suns, and at a damn good time.
Shortly after I started following the Suns they started what would become their “glory days”. Charles Barkley, Dan Majerle (the fact that I can spell that name is a testament to how much I respect the guy), Danny Ainge, Kevin Johnson, Cedric Ceballos, (what was his first name) Dumas, and others went on a tear that ultimately ended with them losing in the NBA finals to none other than Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls (for my money that was the greatest NBA finals of all time, of course I have only actually watched about four of them so I might not be the best judge. But one game in that series went to triple overtime, and it seemed like they were scoring about 150 points each every game -though a quick google search just revealed that the games were much lower scoring that I remember them).
Perhaps I am a bit cynical, but I really think that so much of the game now is about posing for the sake of posing that the game is virtually unwatchable. The latest high school draft pick needs to get himself a good poster shot that really showcases his signature pair of high-tops. The game, the score, the technique be damned, he needs a good panoramic photo doing a dunk over some nameless white guy in a game that he will ultimately lose 100-47 because he doesn’t know what defense is -and I mean that quite literally. He has really never played defense since he has always stood at half court waiting for one of his teammates to pass him the ball; he has a new 720 Tomahawk slam to try out, after all.
But I digress.
After the run of success that the Suns enjoyed in the early ’90’s, they went on a dry spell for about a decade. In that time there wasn’t a single person here in AZ that was actively following them, and if they claim they were they are dirty liars. As recently as midway through this season, sports commentators here in the valley were all talking about how the Suns were going to fall apart and miss the playoffs completely. Not just one or two of the sports commentators or the fans either, this was everyone. That talk didn’t stop until the Suns had actually clinched the playoff berth, and even then most of the talk was about how they would fall apart in the first round.
I really wouldn’t have cared one bit about whether the Suns won or lost, were it not for the fact that Kobe Bryant said (and I must paraphrase since I can’t find the actual quote) that it was good that they drew the Suns in the first round because they were the weakest of the top four teams (which I didn’t disagree with one bit, but I’ll be damned if I wanted to see that smug fuck win after that statement). I thought that my hatred of the Lakers would be done with once Mr. Ass-Bulldozer O’Neal left (how many thousands of people did he knock down with his huge ass and never draw a foul? He would just back into them and push until they fell over, hell it was Shaq, that was all he could do), but apparently I also hate Kobe (and all rapists for that matter. Before you send me that flaming email, I do know that he was not convicted. I also know that he was not acquitted. The fact that his accuser would not testify doesn’t mean that he didn’t do it; if he really didn’t do it he would never have paid her “and undisclosed sum” in an out of court civil settlement.) So I wanted the Suns to win the first round, just because I hate Kobe and his smug, rape-anyone-I-want-to attitude.
What I was getting really sick of, though, was they way every sportscaster in the state of Arizona was trying to make it seem as though they had been behind the Suns all year; knew they were going to the playoffs; never doubted that they would come back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Lakers. I know Arizona is a republican state, but we aren’t all that stupid. You can tell the same lie a billion times and it won’t become the truth (George W. Bush would be well served to learn that lesson), and, like it or not, you are on tape saying exactly the opposite thing.
I will use a local radio station as an example (because I know they have audio on their website, you could actually download some of the stuff from earlier this year to hear them dogging the Suns). 98 KUPD had been ripping on the Suns since the very beginning of the season. They were saying things like “well, this is a throwaway season since they don’t stand a chance with Stoudemire on the D.L.” and “Nash is an old man, he has a retirement home in Phoenix”. While the second one may have been said jokingly (at least partially), it was clear that the DJ’s had made up their mind that the Suns sucked outright and had no chance of making the playoffs.
Fast forward to the start of the playoffs.
“I knew the Suns were going to make it. This is the strongest team they have put on the court since the ’93 finals.” When asked point blank about what they said earlier in the season, the DJ’s went into evasive maneuvers, saying things like, “I never said they weren’t going to make the playoffs, I just said that Nash would have to have a standout year and someone would need to make up for the lack of Stoudemire’s 25 ppg.” Which was such utter bullshit that it was laughable. I know that there is a bandwagon that forms when a team starts winning, but can’t they at least be honest enough with themselves to admit that they are just jumping onto it? Apparently not.
To end this how it started: Suns lose! Suns lose! And not a moment too soon. If I had to hear someone say “Sun-sational” one more time, I was likely to climb a clock tower and take target practice on anyone in a Suns T-shirt.
