Month: July 2017

Dressed to Kill: A hard rock retrospective part 4

The 1990’s were, obviously, a very confusing time. With Ellen making her big announcement near the start of the decade, to the revelations of the Bill and Monica scandal, the decade was over run with sexually confusing expressions dominating the news cycle. None of them were more shocking than seeing Marilyn Manson walk out on stage at the MTV music awards in his leather speedo singing about “The Beautiful People” to the bewildered youth sitting at home wondering what to make of this new “shock rocker” taking the world by storm.

Manson was not the first shock rock band, and they certainly weren’t the last. Unlike previous bands discussed, shock rockers aren’t identified by their sound, some are glam rock, others thrasher metal, while others a mix of industrial electro rock fused with 80’s dance pop. What united them was their ability to rely on stage antics, publicity stunts, and a growing anti-establishment movement that wanted to tear down the walls of Capitalism once and for all. Let’s start at the beginning.

You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog

Believe it or not, the first “shock rocker” was the King of Rock N Roll himself, Elvis Presley. Although his music and movies were very tame even by standards of the day, his stage antics lead to all sorts of controversies. All he had to do was shake his hips and stir young girls crazy. Of course the uptight mothers of those sexually aroused teen girls swooning for Mr. Presley didn’t take it laying down. They tried to have him banned from even appearing on television with the compromise being the camera had to stay above the waste.

I can’t get no satisfaction

To some the Rolling Stones are the turning point where rock n roll sheds it’s pop sound and returns to it’s urban blues roots. To others it’s just the continuation of the degradation of American culture. No matter where you stand the Stones rose to such prominence in the world of Rock music that to this day, the premiere authority on rock music is a magazine named after the band. Not quite as tame as Elvis, they certainly could fall into the camp of more shocking rock bands of the day.

School’s Out

There is no denying that shock rock as we know it today started the moment Alice Cooper stepped onto the scene. His theatrics, outrageous costumes, decidedly darker music themes, and eye shadow did more to create room for the counter-culture than any band before, or since. While their famous record, and the world-renown title track, were created by an entirely different band than who would later take on the name, the lead singer was really the star of the show anyways.

Ozzy

The Prince of darkness himself is easily one of the most recognizable early heavy metal rockers and clearly one of the pioneers of the shock rock genre. Of course he wasn’t the first to come onto the scene, he took it to dark places nobody else was willing to go. He was also well known for his theatrics, and is often mistaken for Alice Cooper, who both have similar styles in some ways. Black Sabbath and all bands inspired by are living proof that just being shock rock on the surface doesn’t mean the music itself can’t be taken seriously.

I Wanna Rock N Roll All Night

If you weren’t a member of the KISS Army you probably weren’t a hard rock fanatic in the 1970’s. It’s okay, I wasn’t even alive. What I do know about the and comes from second hand stories my mom told me, and what I learned from the classic comedy Detroit Rock City about a group of misfits on a road trip determined to see the band live in concert.

KISS is a prime example of a band whose style and image personifies the shock rock look and attitude, yet their music is so much softer and tamer than their image would have you imagine. Even in comparison to other hard rock bands of the time their music was very tame for the image they projected. Not that it was bad, they are still one of my favorite hard rock bands, but if you played a KISS song for someone and never showed them a poster or image of the band, you wouldn’t think they were shock rock at all.

They band was good at one thing even more than making music, business. They were not so much a band as they were a brand. They sold comic books, dolls, even video games, all trying to exemplify the shock rock image of children of the night. Yet somehow they managed to get away with recording a disco album and nobody even bothered to notice the irony. Hey it was a damn good song and still one of my favorites so can’t fault them for knowing how to make money.

Twisted Sister

By the time to get into the 1980’s there isn’t much left that shocks the metal world. You have already had Ozzy allegedly biting the head off a bat, or was it Alice Cooper? Yeah google how often those two get mixed up. There was the whole KISS backlash, you had Judas Priest on the scene and even a host of bands giving people reasons to label rock music as satanic or demonic. So when you see the cross-dressing Twister Sister come on the scene you think, okay, now I’ve seen it all. Now unlike KISS whose image didn’t fit their music, Twister Sister at least had a solid 80’s metal sound that blended in with the other hard rock bands of the time. The 80’s didn’t really see that many other cross dressing bands, aside from the one Boy George headlined, it still helped ease Americans into at least accepting there were people with different lifestyles, even if they didn’t accept those lifestyles quite yet.

Nine Inch Nails

To be more specific, Trent Reznor. This time he went in the opposite direction. The sound he created was infinitely harder and more shocking in many ways than the look he portrayed. On the surface he was just another heavy metal looking dude, nothing special. But his music, especially Head Like the Hole, really brought industrial music to the main stage. Maybe there are those who wouldn’t put NiN on a list of shock rockers, but he clearly paved the way for the mother of them all so he deserves a spot in this timeline.

Antichrist Superstar

Before I get too deep, Marilyn Manson is one of my favorite bands of all time. From the cover songs Sweat Dreams or Tainted Love, among many others; to their rock anthems The Beautiful People, Rock is Dead; to their darker tracks like Deformography, Worm Boy; or their WTF tracks like Kiddy Grinder, or Sh*tty Chicken Gang Bang, the band does shock rock better than any band before. Their music, style, videos, persona, and themes are a perfect storm of counter culture done right. Nothing about the band says conformity. During a time when rock bands sounded like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, or The Goo Goo Dolls, Manson was finding ways to churn the stomachs of their loyal followers, harshest critics, and even their peers, all while constantly putting out records that told stories that had to be experienced not just heard. The phrase nobody does it better always comes to mind when I think of Marilyn Manson and shock rock.

Other bands like Garbage, Godsmack, Orgy, etc., would come onto the scene and push the envelope of what was decent and acceptable with many more to follow. By the end of the 1990’s heavy metal, hard rock and rock n roll had each splintered into more than a dozen sub-genres, scenes and movements each equally important to their respective followers.

 

Up Jump the Boogie: A hard rock retrospective part 3

“rollin’ in my ‘4 with 16 switches
And got sounds for the bitches, clockin’ all the riches
Got the hollow points for the snitches
So would you just walk on by, ’cause I’m too hard to lift
and no this ain’t Aerosmith”

Who doesn’t remember that line from Dr. Dre’s gangsta rap classic The Chronic. The line, well the whole record really, took shots at the entire hip-hop scene up to that point. Between the split with N.W.A., beef with Eazy E and Ice Cube, to him launching his new record company, Death Row Records, Andre Young was on a warpath.

“The Day the W****z took over”

Dr. Dre was referencing a 1984 track where Run DMC recorded a new version of the hit Aerosmith song, Walk This Way. One year later the Beastie Boys burst onto the scene with their Hip-Hop masterpiece, Licensed to Ill. The thing with the Beastie Boys is, they started out as a punk rock band from Brooklyn. Before long they were trading in their instruments for turntables and microphones. The rap group gained significant airplay with their rap hits like Hold it Now, Hit It, Slow and Low, Brass Monkey, and Girls. However, the record had a noticeably heavy metal sound underneath the raging frat boy exterior. Their biggest hit from the record, and one of their most famous songs from the period was not a rap song entirely, it was the metal anthem “Fight for your Right to Party.” Between this and the clear mix of genres Run DMC did previously it was clear that hard rock and hip-hop could blend together in a world that would take both to new heights in the 1990s.

The Beasties would strike back in the early 90’s with another rock/rap anthem, this time it was able to not only get significantly more radio play, it was featured on late night talk shows. Sabotage quickly propelled the Boys back into the spotlight, proving they were not a one-trick pony. The band was able to effortlessly navigate both worlds of punk rock and hip-hop while gaining more than enough respect in each community to legitimize their unique sound.

To the Extreme

At a time when the Beastie Boys and Run DMC were helping blend hard rock and heavy metal together Vanilla Ice was emerging out of the shadows to bring black urban hip-hop music to the white suburban masses. Hits like Play That Funky Music, Ice Ice Baby and Ninja Rap all helped spring the wannabe rapper to the forefront of the middle America radio waves. It didn’t take long before rap music was quickly accepted by those masses and with that came the push to separate the colors, a watered down flavor of hip-hop that was palatable for the white middle class, but with enough heavy metal edge to keep the industrial working class interested.

Vanilla Ice was a flash in the pan, but he deserves credit for his contribution bringing rap music to the parts of the country that weren’t entirely welcoming up to this point.

Rage Against the Machine

They weren’t really the first, true, rap/metal band, but they were by far the most popular. What made them unique is unlike Beastie Boys who could slip in and out between their rock and rap personas seamlessly, Rage was 100 percent punk rock/heavy metal, while remaining 100 percent hip-hop/funk at the same time.

My first entry into the rap/metal genre was the Godzilla soundtrack. Between No Shelter from Rage to Puff Daddy’s rock remix of It’s all About the Benjamin’s, I became curious of a growing sub-genre of both scenes.

With record after record, the one band that could truly be classified as rap/metal and not be ashamed of it was Rage. They even managed to lift from hip-hops cousin, reggae. Fortunately that never became too mainstream…

N together now

While Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine were both finding ways to blend rap and rock in ways that made creative, and artistic sense, a new band emerged that threw all of that out the window.

With their break out hit Faith, a cover of a George Micheal song, Limp Bizkit didn’t exactly instill much confidence in the music world. They picked off the DJ from the hip-hop duo former known as House of Pain, blended their record scratches and fast rock lyrics to freestyle sounding raps over the top of heavy metal guitars and hard rock drums, the sound was a mess from start to finish. Somehow they managed to get big with Break Stuff, Nookie, and their crossover hit with Method Man, yet for all the diplomacy they might have been seen partaking in, what they really did for the music industry is perpetuate stereotypes on both sides with wannabe gangsters pushing the envelop to increase their street cred while musically cluttering the airwaves with a sound that didn’t really appeal to fans of either genre. By the time they released Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water, people had grown tired of their antics, and lack of musical talent. Even Vanilla Ice was able to mount a mini comeback thanks to them, albeit as a cheap knock off.

Bawitdaba

By the time Kid Rock hits the rap/metal scene it’s clear the genre is not uniting anyone. Up till now you had some southern California NuMetal rockers with Fred Durst and his Klan of misfits, you had the post-metal Rage Against the Machine and an almost industrial sound, and you had the Beastie Boys firmly planted in the roots f hip-hop sheding any remnants of their former rocker pasts. Kid Rock decided to throw one more sub-genre into the emerging kitchen sink of a mess that was becoming the rap/metal “genre.” He added country music to the mix. And he wasn’t alone, he unleashed the insufferable Uncle Cracker on the world, paving the way for Bubba Sparxxx before eventually turning into a full blown country rocker turned political activist. His “rap” songs were offensive to fans of the genre, his rock songs were hardly anything to get excited about, and his country songs are, well country.

By the end of the 90’s the rap/metal scene was far from united. Unlike the decade before where experimenting with sounds was still acceptable, the 90’s hip-hop scene was firmly established with solid funk riffs, smooth jazzy tones, and hard core gangsta stories woven into  a tapestry that celebrated urban youth culture, the white rockers who attempted to cop-opt the sound in the 90’s did it out of some form of protest, although most of them didn’t know what they were supposed to be protesting, and left the world scarred with the aftermath of turning lose Slim Shady to rectify the mistake.

Why the Share A Coke promotion is bad

We already live in a world where social media dominates our lives. We are so connected to our digital devices we sometimes forget there are real people attached to the other ends of those devices. One of the fallacies of online relationships, making friends say in message boards or through social media only, is you don’t ever really get to know the person, just the personality. That can be dangerous because people are not always their true selves online. Not just being anonymous, but also distant. They don’t connect with people face to face so they don’t take their feelings into considerations. Nuances like tone, facial expressions, body language, these things do not come across through a cold computer screen. Sure people have learned to pepper their messages with emoji in recent years, but that still doesn’t really convey the true human emotion.

As someone who suffers from severe social anxiety, a trait more and more common among people of my generation and younger, I can tell you that making connections with people is hard enough without having surface level connections we get online. What originally drew  me to the internet world was how I could find people with shared interests and discuss things with them without getting to know the people. I became cold, distant, emotionless and people responded in kind. This is how internet trolls are born. At the start they are people like me, outsiders who don’t share in the communal rituals of the various internet communities, instead they waltz in unprepared expecting a casual discussion of comic, games, toys, etc., and are in reality confronted by other ill-prepared social outcasts whose deeply held beliefs stem from years of making “friends” with inanimate objects.

When I first saw a random persons name on a Coke label that said Share a Coke with Susan, my first reaction was who the hell is Susan? She can go to hell I’m not sharing my Coke with her. Upon further examination I realize that I would dig through the coke cans looking for a name that didn’t have some emotional stigma attached to it. There are people I have  had dealings with whose very names stir up negative emotions, I sure as hell am not going to pay someone else money to drink a soda with their name on it. Now granted, I personally, am not a huge coke drinker, still the whole practice bothered me. Now I understand why. If I sit down and touch a can of coke with a random persons name on it with a message telling  me I am “sharing” this can with said person, it recalls those times of logging into Yahoo chat rooms or internet message boards or discussion groups and pretending the usernames on the other end were real people I had real connections with. Once you start to realize the psychology of how we socialize you start to realize this anti-social digital world we live in doesn’t have room for a physical product invading our privacy and forcing us to connect with people we otherwise might not care about. What it does is makes us grow colder, more apprehensive. Sure it could be seen as a harmless promotion intended to remind the digital generation there are real people in the world outside of our computer screens. But the real question is, did we really need a corporate giant like Coka Cola being the ones to tell us hey get off your damn devices and meet real people in the real world. In a way it’s creepy.

For those who don’t think about these things it’s easy to just dismiss it. The trouble is, not everyone can be comfortable with the social interactions of everyday life. Some of us, especially me, have extreme difficulty socializing, even in the safest environments. It’s not because of anything wrong with us, or society, it’s just the way our brains are wired and there isn’t much we can do about it. Still the less intelligent who don’t take the time to think because thinking hurts their brains, they don’t need to give it a second thought, they can shrug it off or happily grab a random coke with a cheers to whichever random name appears on the bottle or can they picked up. Not me, not ever. I hope Coke drops this ridiculously offensive promotion and returns to a less preachy form of advertising. Sure, soda advertisements often to emphasize the social aspect of drinking soda with a group of friends; as long as they are good looking, highly energetic, athletic types with no discernible flaws that is. I don’t dig into the facade that tv commercials create, it’s a fantasy world I don’t live in. As someone who uses media as a form of escapism, I am okay with the good looking people dominating TV, trust me I am fine with that. What I am not okay with is a company telling me I need to sit and have a drink with a damn stranger I never met, or worse, tempt me to remember people who I would prefer not to think about. Thank you Coke for unleashing probably the worst promotional campaign to the human soul you have ever devised.

The Spiders Lair Podcast Episode 5

In this episode I discuss two movies I watched recently, Power Rangers and War of the Planet of the Apes. I talk about if I might get into record collecting. And I talk about why it’s a good idea to collect for the PS2 generation, and why I have determined that was, probably, the greatest generation in gaming.

 

*UPDATE*: Since I recorded this I did check out prices on Amazon for records and they were actually very reasonable so that one point I made is probably invalidated. I only remember looking at a few in the “Customers bought this also liked” section a few times and seeing outrageous prices for records.

Megalomania, Pyrotechnics and Freedom of Speech: A hard rock retrospective part 2

When I was in the 7th grade I entered the world of band for the first time. My band instructor was a little pushy, his name was Mr. Hall, for some reason or another he really tried to get me to play the saxophone. I tried it out for the back to school parade and I hated it, I couldn’t get any sounds to come out of that thing that any reasonable human would consider pleasant. So I switched to percussion. He was against this because, in his views, percussion was easy and only lazy kids wanted to play drums. It was true the majority of the drum line in our school were lazy, pot-smoking good for nothings, myself and one friend being the exceptions. Still I quickly fell in love with banging the trap set and begged him to put me on the pep squad so I could play fight songs at the sporting events. We started out with a classic easy rock n roll tune called Rock N Roll Part 2, aka “the Hey song!”

Over the years I fell away from drumming despite my very strong desire to keep going. I would bang my drumsticks on anything I could, cardboard boxes, pots and pans, trash cans, whatever it took. I was able to cobble together a make shift drum set when I was 14 using money I earned throwing newspapers at people’s houses. Once I firmly got into my teen years I was clamoring to form my own heavy metal hair band with my friends.

Glam Metal, Hair Metal, pop metal, call it what you want, the 80’s took the fully established hard rock genre and took it mainstream. What memories I do have of the 80’s largely consist of hair bands rocking out to their various anthems.

Def Leppard- Pyromania

As a drummer, it would be my duty to pay homage to the band world-famous for having the “one armed” drummer. Okay so they have some good music too, especially Foolin, by far my favorite heavy metal ballad, if you can call it that, and Rock of Ages, among many other rock hard tunes. It might be their best work, it might not, but by the time Pyromania lights the metal world on fire, the hair bands have firmly become the norm.

Ratt

As someone whose initials spelled RAT, and whose nickname was “THE RAT” all through school, this was a band I had to check out. I instantly fell in love with Lay it Down and Round & Round, their two biggest hits to the best of my knowledge. I was able to get one of their greatest hits CD’s and discovered the draw of power rock. They might be tame by some standards but their music was just hard enough to keep throw coals on the hair metal fire throughout the 80’s. Too bad it all died suddenly when Nirvana crawled out of bed and said with a shrug, eh, entertain us.

MTV

Nothing was more instrumental in bringing heavy metal to the forefront of American pop culture than the budding MTV and it’s constant rock videos bombarding the youth with images of hot babes, fast cars, and loud guitars. This was the era where Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees were gutting teenagers with hair metal blasting in the background to set the mood.

If you really want to trace the rise of metal music, look no further than the introduction of the rock music video and the video stars that would soon follow. By the end of the decade every metal video was just trying to be more outrageous than the last, eventually leading us into the 90’s where music videos took on a more artistic approach with the rise of shock rockers Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.

I have written extensive articles both here and in college on the importance MTV had on American youth culture so I will just say dust off the VCR and pop in the VHS copy of Hot for Teacher if you want a reminder of what the decade was all about.

Van Halen vs. Bon Jovi

Musically the two aren’t that similar. But if you were alive in the 80’s you know the impact they had on your sisters sexuality. These two bands were the symbol of heavy metal rock stars as sex symbols, pushing the mantra of sex, drugs, and rock n roll deep into the minds of American teenagers. Van Halen was edgier with their music, while Jovi was more of a showman in their concerts. Both bands came out of the other end of the 80’s relegated to relic status, while Jovi made an attempt to make a come back in the 90’s alternative infested airwaves, Van Halen were all but forgotten by the mainstream.

One thing the two bands did was really help push the divide between the hard rockers and the glam rockers. Bon Jovi appealed more to the masses while Van Halen stood as a symbol for the troops to rally behind. The core metal audience was splintering into sub-factions by this time and these two bands were among the dividing forces.

Megadeth vs. Metallica

Here comes another fork in the road. The rise of “thrasher” metal is largely credited to the formation of these two bands, whose DNA is very inbred in some respects. The bands both kept taking metal music to even darker places with Metallica being able to cross over into mainstream success while Megadeth remained a reminder of the hardest rockers of just how heavy, heavy metal could get. There were other dark bands of the time, Dio, White Zombie, a few others, but these two stood up and carved out their own little corner of the market, then started a metal war whose repercussions were felt throughout the entire rock industry.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Hard Rock gets a vagina. Okay that might be a little crass, but hell metal music is all about tits and ass so suck it up, whiners. Joan Jett was one of the early punk rockers with her band the Runaways, and she emerged among a world of male metal bands to be the lone wolf woman warrior for the female power rock of the decade. Sure you had rock n roll bands comprised of woman leads before, and after, namely the Go-Go’s, Heart, Hole (yeah an all female band named themselves hole and I get flack for making a vagina joke) and Garbage. The list goes on. Still, Joan Jett was able to prove women could be hard rockers too.

Everyone remembers her anthem “I Love Rock N Roll” it’s a rock classic. I enjoyed her music with the Runaways more, which yes I discovered thanks to a certain movie. Still, she had the balls to stand up to the men who dominated metal music and I gotta respect her for that, to some degree. Not to mention her music wasn’t half bad.

Live shows and stadium rock

In the early days of hard rock, metal was a fringe movement. It was born out of the punk rock scene where the bands were making a statement. That statement was make noise and have as much fun as you can while disrupting the establishment every chance you could. By the 80’s metal bands had risen to become the dominant rockers selling out arenas all across the globe. Sure new wave bands like Devo, Duran Duran, and the like, would emerge in the 80’s to slow some of that fire trying to keep rock music in the center of the pop world, but it was still the decade where arena rock finally became a real thing. There were bands selling out arenas in the 70’s, sure, but they weren’t the bands playing this new, harder sound, not as as much anyways.

Once the live shows became a mainstay bands had to resort to theatrics to keep concert goers happy. This was the period where pyrotechnics were quickly becoming staples of the rock concert. Costumed bands like KISS lead the way, groups like Twisted Sister, Black Sabbath, Motley Crue and Guns N Roses would take on the mantle before passing the torch to Manson and his spooky kids in the 90’s.

By the time you get to the end of the 80’s heavy metal is starting to wane. Mainstream America has started to discover a new, edgy sound in the form of gangsta rap, which would soon supplant heavy metal as the go-to sound for the counter culture of the teenagers looking to piss off their adult role models. Sure heavy metal was loud, it was flamboyant, and it glamorized a darker lifestyle, but hip-hip had guns, pimps, and thugs rapping about killing cops, raping hoes, and cooking crack. Times were changing, and the two were bound to merge sooner or later. Enter Rage Against the Machine and the rise of Rap Metal…

For those about to rock: A retrospective on the evolution of hard rock- Part 1

My first exposure to headbanging was while watching the film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It was a comedy film about a dimwitted animal lover solving crimes. It was a Jim Carey movie, it was the 90’s, it was a comedy movie. I thought the scene where he goes into a rock club and the guy was “headbanging” to the rock music was obviously a joke, nobody actually did that, right? Little did I know it wasn’t a joke, it was a very popular thing.

Soon afterwards I would continue my exposure into the metal scene. I watched the pair of time traveling metal-heads Bill N Ted on their various quests. This was around the time I started to really question why on earth anyone would listen to this hard rock music. I wasn’t even sure what constituted hard rock to begin with. Not to mention I wasn’t even completely accurate on what people were calling rock music. My dad was an old time rock n roll fan and he would always correct me saying this band or that bands was not rock n roll, they were hard rock or heavy metal or something else. My dad wasn’t exactly an authority on rock music either, he just was sort of glued to his childhood favorites and dismissed the music of the youth. I wasn’t quite so dismissive, however I was more into dance music, electronic music, hip-Hop, disco, funk, and pop music. I was having a hard time determining not only what was hard rock, but what was the appeal.

Doing my research it appears rock n roll has it’s roots in soul music, bar music and blues. None of these were genres I was a particular fan of in my early days so I had to dig a little deeper. The earliest example I could find of a mainstream song that was the beginning of the hard rock sound was Helter Skelter by the world-renown Beatles. Having listen to this song a number of times during my research I can almost hear the start of what would become, what I considered, heavy metal, yet it still sounded really primitive to me. I didn’t spend a lot of time chasing down all of the obscure references, I stuck to the mainstream stuff like Born to Be Wild, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Dude Looks Like A Lady, and Smoke on the Water. None of these were too hard but they were often cited as the early examples of the scene.

As someone who has thoroughly studied the roots of techno, house and rap music, I can attest that different fans while share different tales of what lead from one sound to the next. The branching path of genres and sub-genres in rock music is just as complicated as the branching genres of the dance scene. To this day I can’t get people to tell the difference between Techno and House, whereas to me they are as different as night and day.

My earliest attempt’s at this included me creating a playlist of songs that one could follow from the old time rock n roll to modern day hard rock. Depending on what the end goal is determines which sub-genres or paths you cut off from the main path. For example, punk rock also has it’s origins in a lot of the same bands that metal does, yet punk eventually lead to alternative, grunge rock and ska, sub-genres I have more experience with than true metal. That didn’t stop me on my journey to find the path of least resistance.

I started with The Beatles.

Helter Skelter is such a different sound from anything I had heard by them up to that point. I don’t mean to sound as if I was around for it, I mean in the timeline. I do listen to Beatles but I was more into their early pop stuff not so much their later stuff.

When I originally did my digging I downloaded the various songs from iTunes and created a playlist when I did that I tried to see if the dots connected in a manner that made sense. I noticed there were a few missing links.

Admittedly I am missing a few sounds from some of the bands I know are often cited, yet I have no samples of their music to go off. Call me whatever name you wish, I have, to this day, never sat down and listened to a Led Zeppelin song, not one. If I have heard one of their songs, in passing I imagine or perhaps in a movie or TV commercial, I wouldn’t recognize it unless it was pointed out to me. So why am I writing this if I can’t call up the sounds of one of the bands often regarded as the fathers of metal? Sometimes you have to make do with what is available to you, also this is my journey so I wanted to discover this my own way. That being said, I have listened to bands that were described as inspired by or similar to Zeppelin so I can say that I am at least vague familiar with the sound they are attributed to.

Judas Priest

In my search I didn’t want to start entirely at the roots, I wanted to see how Beatles, Elvis Presley, Chuck Barry, Buddy Holly and others could morph into AC DC, Metallica, Iron Maiden, etc. I did pick up Alice Cooper’s School’s Out which I also cited as one of the bridge sounds, but Judas Priest was the first record I picked up that had a very prot-metal sound. In later years their music evolved more into the sound I always attributed as hard rock or heavy metal, depending on who you ask. I often used the term interchangeably with the understanding metal was the harder stuff. Now that I have done some more digging I discovered it’s even more complex than that. I placed Judas Priest at the earliest point of Heavy Metal on the timeline.

KISS

Specifically Destroyer and Alive but I dug through their entire catalog, first through their various compilations, beginning with Smashes, Thrashes, and Hits, and working my way back. KISS doesn’t have the hardest of sounds, they are more hard rock or even edgy rock n roll than metal, but they have the attitude and the look of what would become the signature metal theme, the dark medieval fantasy tones, some would describe as satanic but let’s not split hairs. Anyways they had the theatrics for sure but their sound was admittedly soft in comparison to what would follow. Still they are at the early point as well. They are also cited as a starting point for punk rock, but I won’t follow that path here.

Deep Purple

This is another one I place under the category of proto-metal. They have a very hard sound in some songs, but a very 70’s blue rock vibe. I did listen to more than one song, but the one that really matters is Smoke on the Water. This is another point where you can really start to hear a new sound emerging from the underbelly of American counter-culture.

Black Sabbath

Once you get into “the other Alice Cooper,” Ozzy Osborne and his ilk, things really start to get serious. By all rights you could make a case Sabbath and Ozzy are about as close to what would become Metal as it gets. If you follow them through the 70’s and into the 80’s, even after all the shake ups and restructuring, their sound is very much in line with what I would classify as heavy metal and hard rock at the very least.

Iron Maiden

This is the point where Metal begins to emerge as it’s own thing. By the time this band hits the scene it’s fully developed. It would be really hard to argue Iron Maiden isn’t heavy metal, and from what I have heard this is the goods through and through.

Now I could have spent more time on proto-metal bands like The Who, The Kinks, Zeppelin, or any number of others. As I did my digging though, I realized that while there are individual songs or even portions of entire albums that are recognized as having elements of what would become metal, they were still entirely different sounds in their own right. You could make a case that without the sounds of the Jackson 5, Hip-Hop wouldn’t be what it is today, but you could be hard pressed to make a case for Michael and the Gang being rap.

AC-DC

This is one of those transition bands you could argue is really just “hard rock” and that would be fine by me. Without getting into sub-genres I classify rock into the following top-level categories: rock n roll, rock, hard rock, metal, grunge, punk, ska, and alternative rock. For the most part there is a TON of overlap, I still try to avoid splitting hairs over what sound equals what genre. AC-DC is one of those bands I could firmly place under rock n roll, rock, or hard rock, but I would be hard pressed to call them full on metal and they certainly aren’t punk or ska. At least not as I understand them to be.

You will notice as I go through this series I don’t often stray from the general consensus, at least not up front. However as I discover more to this story I fully intend to give credit where due. As I looked into this it took on a life of it’s own. Consider this entry number one in a series where I take a deeper look at the origins of this music genre that I have found an affinity for, yet continues to boggle my mind and elude my sense of true understanding. Until next time keep on head banging friends.

 

Dusted off the old Nintendo Wii today

As one of the few people who stood in line on launch day I can say that the Wii’s massive popularity was no surprise to me. I often look back on the console with mixed feelings. A little over a year ago I picked up two Wii’s at a flea market and haven’t done a whole lot with either of them since. Today as I was playing some Minecraft I was starting to remember how fondly I loved the good old GameCube. I was thinking to myself how much I wish I had the money to go out and buy a GameCube and pick up a copy of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life to go back in time and play a game I enjoyed tremendously over a decade ago.

Well turns out I had forgotten that I bought a copy of the game a while back and it suddenly hit me, I had a Wii, I had a GameCube controller and sure enough I pulled my copy of The Legend of Zelda Collector’s Disc off the shelf and inside the case was my little while GameCube memory card. I dusted off the Wii, hooked it up, configured the Wii remote, threw in my copy of Harvest Moon and what do you know my old save from all those years ago was still in tact. I loaded it up and picked up my farm life right where I left off, little baby Mark showing me his toy car while wife, Nami, was in the kitchen apparently mulling over “life on the farm.”

Harvest Moon isn’t even an exclusive to the GameCube, yet it remains one of my fondest games for it. I remember putting endless hours into this game when it was brand new. I haven’t put that many hours into a game since discovering Minecrat, which I mostly play as a Harvest Moon substitute anyways. I didn’t spend a lot of time before I booted the Wii memory manager up just to see what other game saves remained in tact. I must have cleaned house at some point as most of my favorite games were gone. Still there were plenty of saves ranging from Metroid Prime, dozens of retro collections, Smash Bros. Melee, even my Robotech Battle Cry save was still there.

It wasn’t quite the same as hooking up the quaint little purple lunch box I fell in love with over a decade and a half ago. However, there was still a little of that GameCube charm left in the dusty old Wii. I always tell people the GameCube wasn’t a failure, it was Nintendo’s BEST SELLING console of all time, when you factor in the motion controlled redesign that Nintendo slipped into people’s homes through the back door. While most people who picked up a Wii were probably getting it for Wii Sports, Wii Fit and any number of waggle-wand casual fluff, some, like myself, picked it up as a full on replacement for our beloved, underappreciated little ‘Cube that could.

I don’t currently have hardly any games for the GameCube. I do expect I will be picking up a few just for old times sake in the near future. As I look at my small game collection I see five GameCube discs on the shelf. That wouldn’t be quite so bad if I didn’t have twice as many Wii games. The real reason I haven’t bothered trying to get back into GameCube collecting is the same reason I got out of Sega Saturn collecting. The units didn’t sell well enough to reach mass market saturation. That makes the games harder to find in good condition, which makes them more expensive all the time. Still, there is a very strong possibility I might talk myself into seeking out a few choice titles here and there in the near future. I would be more than happy to trade away my dust old Wii for an actual true GameCube someday. After all, I have a Wii U which is basically a Wii with it’s backwards compatibility. In the meantime I think I am going to be spending more time digging into the handful of GameCube games I do have to see what new memories I can make as I try to reconnect with old memories.

I sometimes go back and forth between SNES and GameCube, trying to decide which is my favorite Nintendo console of all time. I don’t have anywhere close to the time, or money, to begin collecting Super NES games, so I might just have to settle for my second favorite for the time being and be okay with that. One of the reasons I do wish to own an original GameCube over just a Wii is the Game Boy Player. However, as those are also getting expensive I might pass on that for a while. Again, it’s not urgent that I acquire one since I have a Game Boy Advance and a Game Boy Color.

I miss the days when I had a GameCube with a collection of 60 or so games, a half dozen controllers and a good old Sony Trinitron CRT tube television set. For now I can get by with a Wii hooked up to my HDTV LCD TV playing GameCube games.

 

New theme live, new features on the way

First, I updated the theme. That was long over due. I am not entirely done customizing it to fit the tone and mood of the website, so be prepared for more changes soon.

I also added a couple of social media buttons. As of right now all I have set up is a Facebook page and a Twitter account. I don’t know if I will be setting up any other social media accounts for the site or not. I might add a few additional share buttons but I haven’t gotten around to that just yet.

The Youtube channel is getting closer to launching. I don’t have any firm plans on what video content is going to be on the channel, just throwing around a few ideas. I want to make sure if I do any video content that it’s worth watching while also easy enough to produce so to not interfere with my other projects. I do have a full-time job that takes up a lot of my time.

I am thinking about doing two podcasts instead of just the one. The primary podcast is going to continue being the casual podcast where I sit and play a video game and leisurely talk into the microphone each week. I am working on getting a second podcast together that will shoot for a once a month schedule. This one will be more “polished” with a few guests and a video feed to accompany the audio. This one is going to take me a little longer to get up and running. I have an idea what I want to do, I am just working on getting a few regular guests that are willing to sit in and make it happen. I have at least a couple of people willing to do it and a few others I am trying to get on board.

I am also branching out in the types of articles I write. I don’t want to be a theme blog where the theme determines what I write about, I want it to reach an audience who appreciates the tone of my writing and the topics I write about. I don’t want to have a site dedicated to a specific theme, topic, or genre that forces my hand while limiting my creativity. And yes, that does mean politics are certainly not off limits.

Notice how the site is, mostly, devoid of photos? Part of that is I have no interest in stealing photos from other websites or photographers. I might occasionally download a public domain photo or something that is easily under the fair use category, but for the most part I want to ensure any photos I run on this site belong to me, either photos I took with my own camera, created myself using a photo editing software, or photos a contributor directly provides to the site.

Music reviews and movie reviews are coming. I want to do this, I have a lot of thoughts on a lot of different audio recordings that I think I need to get written down. Movie reviews are a little harder to get motivated to write. I don’t want to do anything that is going to bring any copyright notices against the site. As such I am working on finding out how to get licensed clips directly from studios for the purpose of reviews. I know you can do this, when I worked at the TV station we were able to do that so I know there are services out there. I remember a previous website I ran I had a paid subscription to a file video service so I know they are out there. I will look into what I need. I hate it when people just use other people’s IP without permission and then cry fair use when their ability to make money off other people’s works gets prohibited. It’s always better to just get permission first and then you have nothing to worry about.

That is the latest site update. Be sure to check back often and tell all your friends to share this website, follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.

The 90’s French Fried Youth Culture

In 1995 Kevin Smith released a movie in theaters called Mallrats. The movie celebrated the 90’s consumer youth culture by spending the majority of the film following two homebodies just wander around their local mall looking for things to do in an attempt to forget about their lady troubles.

When I was a teenager we spent most of our free time shopping at the mall. Between visiting the record store (Sam Goody), to checking out the local hip-hop shop where we picked up our B-Boy gear, underground break dancing videos as well as those mix tapes that every b-boy had to jam to. There were two places I made it a point to visit no matter what each trip I made to the mall. The first, obviously, was the video arcade. If I had quarters to burn they were going into whichever flashing quarter munching hit of the day was. My second stop was the world-famous food court. You had to fuel up with some chili cheese fries and a big gulp of sugar-filled sludge before you could head out on your shopping spree.

One of my favorite moments in the film was when the two were arguing over what constitutes being a part of the food court. Fortunately, the experience of sitting in a dark lit video arcade munching those chili covered french fries dripping with melted cheese was not just a staple of the massive mall shopping. We also had a local video arcade that also did us the favor of clogging our youth arteries with greasy carbohydrate over load while preparing us for our later in life diabetes as we chugged all those overly sweetened carbonated beverages they sold. Some of my favorite memories were setting my chili fries on the side of a Mortal Kombat cabinet while I dumped quarter after quarter into that machine that stole all of my allowance for many years.

Going beyond the food court at the mall and the video arcade, I also discovered how my friends and I enjoyed tremendously hanging out at snack bars, the bowling alley, or even the skating rink, always immediately going straight to the guy selling the french fries covered in Obamacare bait. Good times. As I look back I wonder though, why were the teenagers of the 90’s drawn to dark, noisy places that served the sloppiest of foods. Sure you could get more than just fries, you could often get deep fried onion rings, giant sized soft pretzels, a plate of nacho chips covered in cheese and jalapenos and black olives, or if you were lazy and in a hurry just grab a ready  made slice of pepperoni pizza. The food was always junk, the games were always the same games we had at home on our Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis game consoles, and the music was the same playlist from every MTV Party To Go cd your older sibling gave you as a hand me down when they moved on to the grunge rock of the era.

One of the things that I reminisce fondly was sitting at a table with a few friends just chatting about the coolest new music video we watched, asking if they caught the latest Snick skit on All That or Kennan and Kel, or hell there were days when our entire conversation was just repeating our favorite Boy Meets World quotes to 2Pac beats.

When I try to brag about how great the 80’s were followed by how dull the 90’s became I often forget that despite the flat “who cares” attitude coming from the crybaby rock, or the lazy, no effort talent-less hacks sitting on a couch arguing over who banged who on MTV’s The Real World, I often forget it was the decade of my coming of age. The 90’s had some great entertainment, if you were over the age of 25 and had already gone off to college, started your career and were gearing up to get your family off the ground. But if you were a teenager, pre-teen or somewhere in-between, chances are your best, fondest memories of the era were the junk food you and your friends scarfed down as you desperately sought anything that was either creative, original, or more entertaining than 2 poorly animated social delinquents sitting on a couch riffing on bad hair metal music videos. I don’t look back on the decade with rose tinted glasses, I admittedly recognize the moments that I hold dear because I was a teenager or the friends I was with making those memories, yet I think when your fondest memories are the toxic waste we shoveled into our mouths just to have some sense of joy when the entire youth culture market was telling us how much life sucked and we just needed to deal with it.

That’s why I say, next time your in the mood to revisit the 90’s do it right. Pop open a bottle of ice cold Mountain Dew, rip open a bag of Doritos, pour some melted nacho cheese over the top, pop in the Mallrats DVD and let Jay and Silent Bob remind you what the decade really was, not the idealized fantasy we often pretend it was.

 

The zombie movie paradox: A look back at George A. Romero passing away

When I first started writing this blog I was still in college. During that time I was still in my phase where I had to be different just to be different. Part of that was I made it a point not to be talking about the same topics the rest of the media or internet world was talking about. I either didn’t want to be seen as needing to hurry up and get my thoughts out there first, like so many outlets appeared to be doing. At the same time, I didn’t really want to be seen as jumping on the bandwagon. So I determined my stance would typically be to take a wait and see approach to any breaking news to give myself a chance to process it, distance myself from the immediacy of it all before I made an effort to put my thoughts down. Since completing my education and leaving college to begin my career in the world of writing for the media I discovered that weather it is the local TV station or the Twitterverse, whatever is the big headline is what people are talking about. When I started working at a local newspaper that serves a small community I discovered that the words I wrote, the stories I chose to cover, the photos I took, those shaped the conversation, at least for a day, and I discovered that was part of the responsibility of the media.

Things are different with a blog. I can choose to be less formal, as I often do. Today I read the news about George A. Romero passing away. I had to do a double take to make sure it was the guy I thought t was and sure enough the grandfather of the zombie horror genre was dead. At first I also had to double check the date to make sure I wasn’t reading an old article. I hadn’t heard of him passing away previously, but there have been a few times where I was out of the loop enough I didn’t learn of a celebrity dying until months, or in a couple of cases years later. I chalk this up to not really following celebrity gossip and news that much. Once I confirmed that he did in fact die, it was the man I thought it was, and I had the correct date he wasn’t already gone and I just found out, I decided to write down on a pad that I would talk about my thoughts on the next podcast. Considering I aim to do one a week and the next one isn’t for another week, I decided to just go ahead and write down my thoughts as of right now, then if I decide to dig deeper next week, I shall do so.

The first thing I am going to say is it is rare for me to have a favorite writer, director, songwriter, band, etc., I tend not to pick favorites and honestly I don’t follow directors or even writers that closely. That being said, I will say that his original trilogy, if you can call it that, are some of my favorite zombie movies of all time. Of course, I need to get this out there, I am not the biggest fan of the zombie movie genre to begin with. I don’t hate zombie movies, I actually enjoy them quite a bit, however, I feel we just have too many out there and I have seen too many to really get excited. I was burned out on zombie movies long before I began getting fatigue keeping up with superhero flicks.

One thing you might discover about this blog is I rarely make my articles about the thing or topic I am writing about, as it is a personal blog I tend to make it about my personal experiences instead. So I am going to share some of my own memories of the Living Dead series of films. This is my best method to pay tribute to a man whose works I do revere without repeating the same life recap the other 50,000+ blogs on the internet are going to say.

My earliest experiences are when I was about seven or eight years old. I was watching the Tim Burton comedy classic Beetlejuice and there is a scene where one of the main characters says “are you like night of the living dead underthere” or something to that extent. I didn’t exactly know what she was referring to for a while. A couple of years later I was sitting in my room, I had this old black and white UHF/VHF dial TV with rabbit ears in my bedroom, and I used to stay up late at night on weekends watching the horror movies that came on. One night they were playing Return of the Living Dead. I instantly fell in love with this movie. It also referenced Night of the Living Dead so now I had two films reference a movie really increasing my interest. A about two years later I rented a copy of the Thriller music video cassette from our local video store and watched the Michael Jackson classic music video for the first time and now I was rally curious, I just had to see this zombie movie everyone kept talking about.

My first viewing. It was not on the black and white tv from my youth. It was not a VHS or even DVD rental from a store. It was one random night I was watching my then favorite TV channel G4, which is long gone now. They were showing Night of the Living Dead. I had already seen the Dawn of the Dead remake by this point but I hadn’t read up on them to learn they were connected yet. So I decided why not, I sat there and watched the whole movie, commercials and all. I was really amazed and for the first time I really regretted not seeing it earlier in my life.

A couple of years later I finally got a chance to watch Day of the Dead on good old Netflix. Again I was impressed and thought man I need to see more of these Romero zombie movies. So about a year ago I set out to add them all to my DVD collection. Unfortunately that is where the direct connections end. See I made it a point not to watch any of them until I had them all. I do currently own the three originals, but I still want to get all of his later zombie movies to see how they all stack up. That being said, I have the original Dawn of the Dead on DVD but haven’t gotten around to watching it at this time. I suppose I could just make a case that since I have already seen the other two in that “trilogy” I could go a head and just get it over with. I could also make a case that it doesn’t connect to the remakes or modern films in the series anyways, which I have all but two, I think. So maybe sometime in the near future I might try to make it a point to go back and actually watch the original Dawn of the Dead.

I am probably going to anger some die hard fans, should they stumble upon this, by stating this, I like the movies, but I prefer the Return of the Living Dead franchise more. I guess you could say I like horror comedy more than straight horror, but I don’t think that is it. I just think I liked the campy 80’s tone mixed with the imminent doom they presented verses the world he created where it was the end of the world, but somehow it just didn’t quite end.

When Wes Craven died I didn’t go back and revisit Last House on the Left, People Under the Stairs or any of his other movies that didn’t have Elm Street in the title. However with the passing of Romero in a way it just makes me wish I had seen more of his works when it would have mattered to him. I can’t say I will miss him, or his works, I can say instead that I appreciate what he did for the horror genre, and zombies in particular, and will say that I look forward to reading, hopefully, well-written articles looking back on his life, and career. I also am now thinking I have run out of excuses to keep putting off watching the 1970’s Dawn of the Dead, which I do have on DVD.