The Weak In Rock

Taking baby steps back into the fold here. I sent this to a dear friend earlier today:

5 things that signal to people that your band sucks and you are a clueless douche:

1. 1) You wear Hawaiian shirts on stage
2. 2) You hang a banner with your band name & logo on it behind the drummer.
3. 3) Your lead vocalist is the drummer.
4. 4) Your press photos were taken in front of a brick wall, on or near train tracks or in a public restroom.
5. 5) Someone in the band plays a Keytar.

What precipitated this wave of hate was a photo he posted of his band taken in front of a brick wall.

The last band who got to do this and get away with it was The Ramones. They sort of made it their trademark for a while. And it was novel and interesting in 1976. Same with Cheap Trick posing in a public restroom for the cover of their Heaven Tonight LP (which they had originally intended to call American Standard.

I’m not sure who first had the idea to do press photos of their band on railroad tracks, but I’m sure it’s of similar vintage. If I were to add something to the press photo rule it would be to ban all sad and dreary photos of bands standing in the snow or next to lonely trees in wasteland-like settings. U2 took all the energy out of that particular image decades ago.

I’ve repeated these rules to people dozens of times. I’ve even had to explain them to my own bands from time to time. The ones people seem to have the hardest time with are the Hawaiian shirt + musician = suck rule and the no banners rule. Lots of guys have about as much fashion sense as a deranged poodle, so not understanding that wearing a Hawaiian shirt makes you look like a tool when you’re playing an instrument is, I suppose, understandable. I simply do not get the appeal of a banner.

Sure, you want people to know who you are, on the off chance they like you and want to come see you again. It helps them remember who they liked. Of course, so does talking to the audience between songs and repeatedly saying your name, which is inherently more friendly, and mostly won’t make you look like a douche nozzle. A banner, however, can be hung crooked, hung sloppily and just plain be designed poorly. It also makes one think of being at a trade show, and that’s not a feeling you want to stir in the hearts of your audience… ever.

Having the lead singer also be the drummer is somewhat more complex.  Pop music history is littered with bands who have been massively successful with the dread singing drummer. Genesis, The Eagles, The Romantics, to name a few. The thing is, two of these three bands knew it was a bad idea, so when their drummer was singing they hired someone else to play the drums so he could stand out front, where the singer belongs. The Romantics didn’t get this clue, and thus got consigned to the cut-out bin with the rest of the one-hit-wonders. No one wants to watch your drummer sing.

Lady Gaga has recently severely messed up the obvious uncoolness of the Keytar. For those of you who need to be reminded of how icky one of these things is, I suggest you Google Jan Hammer or Jonathan Cain.

File this one under the heading of “Idiotic Lengths Parents Will Go To.”

Concerned with potential injuries, a group of “concerned” parents in Toronto have started up a non-contact ice hockey league for their kids.

I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Non-contact ice hockey.  You can read all about it here.  Gee folks, what’s next?  Non-moving bicycling?   Non-swallowing eating?

Yes, I’m belaboring the point, but I really am getting tired of my fellow parents.  Yes, we love our kids, and we don’t want to see them get hurt.  I certainly don’t think getting is a concussion is a good idea for an 11 year old boy, but it definitely seems like the world of parents is overpopulated by the overly cautious and incredibly confused.  Ice hockey is a full-contact sport, just like American football or rugby.  Take the contact out of ice hockey and you’ve turned it into figure skating with sticks and a puck.  Not only does that sound stupid, it sounds boring.

Personally, I don’t think the problem is with kids playing ice hockey.  Anyone who grew up in Canada or the northernmost parts of the US will tell you that kids have been playing ice hockey forever.  The problem, friends, is the same problem I see with Pop Warner Football and Little League Baseball - too much adult involvement.

Let me explain - games are things that kids play for fun.  When a handful of kids grab a football and head to the nearest park (or street) to play a game fun happens.  Likewise when a bunch of kids take their bats, gloves and a ball to the nearest empty lot or haul their sticks and skates over to the local frozen-over pond.  When a bunch of dads get together and drag their kids to a ballfield, an ice rink or football field, suit them up and commence to yell at them because they’re doing everything “wrong,” there is a distinct absence of fun.  In that circumstance what there is an abundance of are frustrated kids who want to be somewhere else, fancy/expensive uniforms that make the kids look like mini versions of pro sports stars and lots and lots and lots of structure.

What we parents forget way too easily is that our children don’t like structure.  They honestly get plenty of that at school (and they’ll get an ass-load of it in their adult lives).  So why do we insist on enforcing more and more and more of it on them?  Play, including play in the context of games, is by its nature an unstructured activity.  We adults tend to view things like rules, time limits and whatnot as things that are necessary, but kids don’t see the world that way at all.  Rules in a game are just tools to keep things moving (3 strikes in baseball, offsides in hockey or soccer, etc.).  Uniforms are pretty, but they’re really unnecessary to a bunch of kids playing a game - they know who is and isn’t on their team - they’re only necessary for spectators to tell the teams apart.

So, let me try to drag this back to this idiotic attempt by some parents in Toronto to overprotect their kids with a non-contact hockey league.  The problem isn’t that ice hockey is horribly dangerous in and of itself.  Sure, bumps and bruises and maybe even gashes and broken bones will happen from time to time playing a full contact sport, but I think the problem is the parental involvement.  By organizing the league, keeping stats (heck, keeping score), and dressing their kids up like midget NHL players the parents are not setting up games for the kids to play, they’re creating a forum for the kids to play at being NHL players.

What do I mean by this?  Simple - not only are the kids emulating what they see pro hockey players do, namely hit each other really, really hard and at full speed, but because of the stats, the scorekeeping and the other parents acting as spectators there’s pressure to perform and win.  That pressure causes the kids to play like there’s something more on the line than simple personal pride.  And the organized teams, complete with pre-season tryouts and coach drafts, encourage the kids to see not their schoolmates and neighbors in the uniforms of the opposing teams, but adversaries.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think organized sports are a good thing, but I question their value for kids 11 and younger.  I certainly don’t think that all this organization, structure and parental involvement makes the games very much fun for the kids at all.  So instead of trying to take all the bumps and bruises out of a game, maybe what we ought to be doing is taking ourselves out of the game.

As a side note: One of thing I’ve observed in my own neck of the woods is that there are so many organized sports leagues that for a good portion of the year it’s nearly impossible to find an unoccupied ball field in a park.   So, if you do have a bunch of friends, a pile of gloves, a bat and a ball you’re going to find it pretty tough to find anywhere to pull together a friendly and unstructured game.  Same thing happens during soccer or football season around these parts.

You know, I’ve about had it with this whole zombie trend.  If you hadn’t noticed, everything has zombies in it now.  I blame the success of two movies - Shaun of the Dead (which is actually pretty awesome) and 28 Days Later (which was just sort of freaky).

I think the trend has jumped the shark though folks, with this: Pride And Prejudice And Zombies .  Someone has taken the great Jane Austen novel and edited in sequences of zombie carnage.

Exactly what do you have to smoke to think this is a great way to spend your time as an author - rewriting a classic novel so that it includes incongruous bits of zombie violence?  Worse yet, you just know that book publishing is in big trouble when a project like this gets a green light.  On the one hand, I totally see it - the publisher doesn’t really have spend a lot to make this book happen.  90% of the story is written, has already been edited and proofread, so the advance to the author of the zombie bits isn’t going to be that much, and you can figure half your sales will come from whatever nitwits are currently fueling this zombie craze who will buy anything with the word zombie on the cover, and the other half is going to come from dimwits like me who love Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and simply must see how dreadful the thing turned out.

Ah, there is nothing like art in an economic downturn.  But let’s just skip the whole publishing world right off, shall we?  Honestly, relatively few people actually buy books anyway.  Let’s go straight to the film remakes.  May I suggest:

When Harry Met Sally… And Zombies
Wherein our hero and heroine struggle through a friendship stretching back decades to when they first met after graduating from college when Sally gave Harry a ride home from campus… and they were attacked by zombies.  Trace our protagonists through their youth and growing friendship… and repeated zombie attacks.

or, how about…

My Dinner With Andre And Zombies
Join Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory spend an evening sharing dinner, great conversation and… a battle for their lives against a rampaging horde of zombies!

or perhaps…

Saving Private Ryan And Zombies
See the D-Day landings as they’ve never been seen before, with scenes of battle so realistic and graphic you’ll think you were really there… especially when the hordes of Nazi zombies cascade onto the beaches to pick the bones of the fallen soldiers clean.

Ok.  That’s enough for one day. Any studios interested in pursuing productions of these films please feel free to mail your royalty checks to me.

Technorati Tags: zombie, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, book-info/store, books/products_id, 7847/title, Pride-and-Prejudice-and-Zombies/">Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, Jane Austen, When Harry Met Sally… And Zombies, My Dinner With Andre And Zombies, Saving Private Ryan And Zombies

Selig comes out today and says that A-Rod “shamed the game” by using
performance enhancing drugs.

You have got to be kidding me. So, one player, albeit a very high
profile player, brought shame to the game through PED use, but Selig,
all 30 MLB team owners and the half-wits who run the Players’
Association who conspired to keep a lid on PED use for 20 years
because more home runs meant more money for MLB are blameless?

Give me a friggin’ break.

And don’t even get me started on what’s happening to Miguel Tejada,
who is looking at the very real possibility of spending time in
Federal Prison because he used PED’s and lied about it (along with
Selig, Donald Fehr and a host of other jackasses) to Congress.

I have said it before and I will say it again - so what? Professional
sports are entertainment, pure and simple. They are not
“institutions” nor do any other overblown, hyperbolic
characterizations of pro sports deserve anything but a sneer and
derision by anyone with half a functioning brain. We do not threaten
movie & TV actresses with jail time for wearing inflato-bossoms or
claim that Bruce Willis or any other follicularly-challenged actor is
setting a bad example for our youth when they sport a rug in order to
appear more attractive or youthful. No one is horrified that the
crowd scenes in recent epic films like Gladiator are digitally
enhanced rather than populated by real live extras, the way they did
it in the olden days.

This obsession with purity in sports has got to stop. It has to stop
if only because it cannot be reconciled with our cultural preference
for everything else around us being completely fake and
technologically enhanced. We love fake stuff in the country and we
love technology. Heck, we even love technology when it’s applied to
sports. Do you see anyone moaning about the mechanically wound
baseballs that are precisely manufactured to ridiculous industrial
tolerances in automated factories and how that’s detracting from the
game because we don’t use hand-wound baseballs anymore? How about
bats - ever hear anyone complain about the finely machine crafted bats
(other than about the handles breaking too often these days) that
allow a player to whip the bat around with considerably more speed
than Babe Ruth ever had at his disposal? And every year you hear a
new chorus of malcontents who want to replace the live umpires behind
the plate with sophisticated cameras that can precisely call balls and
strikes with no risk of error. We love that shit.

We also love things that are bigger than big and grander than grand.
Stadia full of tens of thousands of people do not pay outrageous
prices to watching low scoring pitchers’ duels (much as I wish they
would, but that’s more about the general stupidity of the modern
baseball fan and is fodder for another post some other time). People
come out to pay piles of money ($20 for ticket + $20 for parking + $8
for a beer + $7 for a hot dog = $55 - and that’s not counting
transportation to and from the game) to watch a ballgame because they
want to see dingers, and if they pay any attention to the pitching at
all they want to see 100 mph fastballs. We are not a nation of people
who appreciate nuance and subtlety.

The shame here is that the old white men in suits are wagging their
accusing fingers at players for doing precisely what the league
bosses, union heads and team owners wanted them to do - hit the ball
farther, throw it harder and break some records.

I’ve railed often about the plague of abject stupidity in our nation and the world at large, but today’s post from Scott Adams on his Dilbert Blog has made me reconsider.  We need the morons, the nitwits, the ultramaroons to save our bacon.  Money quote:

Our past economic booms depended heavily on morons. Those wonderful stimulators of the economy had to buy stock in perpetually unprofitable tech companies, or invest in real estate after it was clearly overpriced. Every economic boom is powered by the clueless.

All hail the imbeciles!  May you be fruitful, multiply and buy lots of useless stuff.

Technorati Tags: Scott Adams

I used to clutter up this space at the end of every year with a smart-allecky list of the top records of the year, followed by feeble attempts to find a witty way to say “I have no idea who any of these artists are, but they all suck.  Now get off my lawn ya darned kids before I fill yer britches with rock salt.”  I gave that up a couple of years ago, mainly because it was depressing me to feel so disconnected from youth culture and so obviously middle-aged and bitter about it.

Don’t get me wrong.  Being middle-aged and bitter can be very entertaining.  But I think I’d sort of shot my wad on that schtick.  Personally, I like Patton Oswalt’s approach - write a list of the best things you think are coming in the new year.  Here’s his list of music we can all look forward to in 2009:

ALBUMS

I Also Fingered a Girl in a Kiddie Pool of Wesson Oil
Katy Perry
In another collection of songs written for her by the editors of MAXIM Magazine, Katy Perry tries to stretch five minutes of titillation into a careers-worth of relevancy.

Night Grooves
Fugazi
Ian McKaye shocked his fans with this catchy, can’t-stay-in-your-seat collection of dance tunes.   Includes “Shimming the Beat”, “Dew-It Witchu” and “Positive Power Slide”

Gimme Dat
2-Fly
The Wyoming rap corridor finally found its Dr. Dre.

Go Get ‘Em, President Smokey
Toby Keith
Toby’s misguided tribute to our new incoming president effectively ended his career, but what a way to go!

A Very Metal Arbor Day
Mastodon, Anthrax and 13 other bands remind everyone to plant a tree and worship Satan.

Nice.

Patton, you’re an evil man.  Please come over to my house for dinner.  I’ll make steak.

I particularly like his skewering of Katy Perry.   Her hit from last year had all the depth of a latrine dug by a parapalegic Boy Scout.  The funny thing is there was a feature story on the wires last week about how *shock* Katy Perry’s new video featured her making out with a guy.  When she moves to Tijuana after she’s blown her royalties on hot pants and eyeliner she’ll make a new video about kissing an equus asinus.

Speaking of Jackasses - if only Toby Keith’s demise in the public eye could be so poetic and appropriate.

Seriously Patton.  Call me.  Steak’s on me.

Technorati Tags: Patton Oswalt, Katy Perry, Fugazi, Ian McKaye, Toby Keith, Mastodon, Anthrax, Boy Scout, Tijuana, equus asinus