Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

This is a pretty big weekend for local and/or indie rap aficionados like yrs truly. As Andrea's made it clear over the week, there's a ton of star power at this Sunday's upcoming Soundset hip hop festival, put together by Rhymesayers and featuring damn near everyone who's released a classic record on the venerable Twin Cities label -- or just about any other self-sufficient hip hop label. The full lineup's on the official Soundset MySpace page, and suffice it to say that I could sit here all day big-upping everyone on that ridiculously large roster. Even the so-called "small-type" acts -- locals like I Self Devine and Kristoff Krane; out-of-staters like Seattle's Blue Scholars and Kentucky's Cunninlynguists -- are cosign-worthy, and once you factor in political firebrand Immortal Technique, a fresh-off-a-new-classic (and hopefully non-impostor) DOOM, West Coast all-star supergroup Haiku D'Etat, the full original lineup of the Pharcyde, and the local juggernauts like Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Eyedea & Abilities, P.O.S. and Heiruspecs, it's like some kind of indie rap Woodstock but with better shoes and people who actually know how to dance. And even if these acts largely fall under the hip-hop-for-college-kids rubic, it's a pretty stylistically diverse lineup -- as personified by four other top-notch artists that also appear on the bill.

photo by bluesmuse

Ever since man first gazed upon the stars and took in the vast, almost infinite possibility of space, he has wondered what it would be like if robots played music. Why this required staring up into the sky, I don't know. History is strange like that. Science-fiction author and speculative robotician Isaac Asimov once said in 1976 that "A robot musician is a certain ideal; its reception to programming may mean that it would require less time to master its arts than a human who requires countless hours of practice to reach even rudimentary skills. As an additional bonus, robots do not smell bad and drink until violent; subsequently the ways and habits of flesh-and-blood musicians of a popular-hits ilk must certainly necessitate an android-based succession if music is to survive into the 21st century." The bitterness in this statement may have arisen from the fact that Asimov lost his coveted Mr. International Celebrity Muttonchop King title to Neil Young two years previous, but one look at the state of the music industry as it stands right now may prove his predictions of a non-robot-based record industry's collapse to be all too prescient. Not that there wasn't a concerted effort to see this glorious vision of automaton-created pop music over the decades...

This has been kind of a Wu-Tang month for me. Not only did I finally get around to seeing the film that gave their classic debut its name (it being one of those odd but great kung fu movies where the training sequences are the best part of it), but I got ahold of Enter the 37th Chamber, an album by Brooklyn funk band The El Michels Affair that replicates (and kind of mutates) classic RZA productions from various famous Wu-Tang group and solo records. Throw in the recent debut of "New Wu", the first single from the long-awaited Raekwon's Only Built for Cuban Linx II (which has a release date of August 11th, thus putting the vaporware-album onus back on Dre's Detox), and it's kind of difficult not to get at least moderately geeked out. So here's a few clips to keep that going.

Photo by dave_7

As if deadly pig-borne murder-flu, Air Force One's 9/11v2.0 false alarms and the continuation of the unfortunate tendency for Michele Bachmann to say things weren't enough, this monumentally stupid and/or shitty week for America has also been accompanied by the death knell of the Pontiac brand. I'm not the world's biggest peeing-Calvin-decal-applying loyalist to any specific make of automobile, particularly one that's perpetrated so many stylistic and engineering atrocities over the last couple decades. But as a pop-culture junkie, there's two permanent losses that come with the demise of Pontiac that'd make my 10 year-old self weep profusely. The first loss is the Firebird, which even the most gearhead-illiterate would recognize as being immortalized in Smokey and the Bandit and Knight Rider, though it's also entured in less-famous fare like Radio Birdman's garage-punk anthem "455 SD" and the not-actually-that-good 1976 David Carradine film Cannonball. The other loss stings just a bit more, though: the GTO, the vehicle that invented the "medium car/absurdly large and powerful engine" muscle car trend that peaked in the late '60s/early '70s, is also no more. And even that model's recent attempted revival didn't manage to capture the American imagination in the same way that the recent retro Mustang, Charger and Camaro did, it leaves behind its own legacy of cool. It's the car Iggy drives in "Lust for Life," the model Kool Keith turns into a hook in his bizarro-rap banger "Keith Turbo," the base for the insane Monkeemobile, and the muse for Ronny & the Daytonas' "G.T.O." (a favorite live-set standby of the Replacements and Alex Chilton). And that's not all.

Photo by dotbenjamin

Listen: I don't want to encourage any irresponsible alcohol-related behaviors on the part of our readers. Personally, I'm one of those people that enjoys the hell out of drinking but knows well enough to keep it a relatively sporadic occasion and stops drinking when he starts feeling as though his inebriation could lead to awkwardness and social mishaps. (In my case, it's usually after my second Iron Butterfly. That's a White Russian with Bailey's; it rules yr world.) But it remains a solid fact that drinkin' is right up there with screwin', being mad about not screwin', and driving your car really fast as a metaphor for screwin' when it comes to great subject matter for pop music. People drink when they're happy, when they're miserable, or when they're bored; drinking can lead to anything from pathos-ridden lost-love tragedy to crazed fisticuffs to a woozy-headed, giddy sort of happiness; and everyone from the brokest of the broke (Thunderbird!) to the highest of all rollers (Goldschlager!) tends to get tore up every once and a while. So pretty much any genre can wrap itself around the concept of inebriation. Here's a few of my favorite examples.

The problem with being a big-time pop music junkie and taking in just about everything you can is that sometimes it's easy to take obvious, familiar greatness for granted. If I had to rattle off a list of my 50 or even 100 favorite musical acts of all time, I'd probably wind up omitting the Who -- not because I don't like them, but because... well, for one thing, they're another generation's band, so I didn't experience them firsthand (unless vague memories of hearing "Eminence Front" on the radio when I was five counts). More specifically, they're so heavily ingrained in the rock'n'roll consciousness that at some point I got tired of hearing about them, even though I haven't gotten tired of actually hearing their music, and so sometimes I get a flash out of nowhere, like "damn, Who's Next really was wall-to-wall great" or "Entwistle-Moon might be the greatest rhythm section in rock history". Or, better yet, "they really used to tear shit up on TV, didn't they?"

picture c/o John Pham on flickr

First off, my apologies for the unannounced hiatus -- not only have things been somewhat unexpectedly busy in my day-to-day life, but I accidentally lost my bookmark to YouTube and forgot what the URL was. But I'm back into this now, albeit as a once-a-week feature, to keep from stretching myself thin. And as it turns out, there's a video I absolutely had to break my silence for ASAP, though it requires a bit of an explanation.

Ever since he started distributing self-released albums out of Houston under the mysterious 'Corwood Industries' label some thirty-plus years ago, Jandek has proven to be one of music's most enigmatic outsiders. Until he made his live performance debut four and a half years ago, nobody really knew what he looked like; he rarely included photos of himself in his album art and even the pictures that could have been speculated to be him were largely unverifiable. But his mysterious identity, prolific output (some 55 albums and counting) and haunting, surreal interpretation of country and folk-blues made him a cult hero, possibly far further than he even realized. He had already been noticed as a bit of a cult artist by 1985, where he was interviewed for the first issue of Spin, and he eventually inspired -- directly or otherwise -- a number of similar home-taped efforts by artists like John Darnielle and Beck who would later go on to bigger, more accessible things. I admit to being less up on Jandek's material than I should be, though I've been told that his 1987 album Blue Corpse is a good entry point.

I gotta admit, it's been a shitty time to be a Minnesotan. We still haven't figured out the whole Coleman/Franken mess, and if that wasn't enough political embarrassment, we've got Michele Bachmann trying to foment some sort of dimbulb insurrectionary movement because the President wants to spend money on something besides Bibles and border-fence razor wire. Weather-wise, we're used to it being a gruesome ordeal, but we endured a winter with several consecutive days of 20-below weather only to see spring arrive under the kind of overcast cloud cover that'd have Seattleites feeling sorry for us. Sports? The Wolves are monstrously bad, the Vikings are their usual underachieving selves, the Wild are just on the edge of being mediocre and the Twins, well, they could be pretty good but who the hell knows when Mauer's coming back. Unemployment's at its highest since the last time Mary Tyler Moore had a sitcom, the Red River Valley's getting flooded, and some snack-food manufacturer thinks we're a bunch of baby-assed lightweights. Still, you know what? That's all depressing as hell, but you can't take away the Suicide Commandos from us.

Old-school funk revival's turned out to be one of this decade's most rewarding genres, one of those rare Brooklyn-based music scenes that hasn't actually wound up getting all self-indulgently smirky on its way to disappearing up its own coke-strewn nostril. And if you asked me which five groups best represented this scene, I'd rattle off four: the '60s-soul reconstructionist Dap-Kings, who've backed up Sharon Jones and other, lesser lights like that Amy Whatserfacehouse; the El Michels Affair, who take a hip hop cratedigger's approach to vintage soul stylings (their spring releases include tribute albums devoted to both Isaac Hayes and the Wu-Tang Clan); Antibalas, who play their own punchy, high-energy update of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat sound; and the Staten-by-birth/Brooklyn-by-proxy Budos Band, who cover all those bases and throw in a bit of Latin soul for flavoring. As for the fifth, I'm not entirely sure the Menahan Street Band counts -- primarily because they're comprised of musicians from those other four bands. When Daptone first gathered together this gigantic Afro-Latin-soul-funk-b-boy supergroup, the result was a knockout 7" (yes, this is the kind of label that still presses 45s): "Make the Road By Walking" b/w "Karina," which came out in 2006 and eventually somehow found its way into the hands of the biggest musician to claim Brooklyn as his turf.

I know, I know, this column's kind of slipped into a nostalgic holding pattern: check out how people used to dance back then, this currently-embarrassing artist used to be good, music video special effects were cheap-looking a decade ago and super-ridiculous 25 years ago, etcetera and so on. But let's look at now, at least via a couple years back and a couple months into the future. I was in the midst of a musical discussion with some of my friends recently about the band Phoenix -- a French four-piece rock band that's had a modest following in the United States -- and the feeling persisted that, as good as they are, there isn't exactly a reserved place for them in whatever passes for mass pop culture these days. I have a couple vague theories as to why:

-Americans aren't big on continental European pop acts, especially French ones, unless they are cleverly disguised as ro-bots and conduct mind-boggling house music from atop a magical glowing pyramid
-"Phoenix" is not only a fairly indistinct-sounding name (although not as distinct as it'd be if they called themselves "Crystal Phoenix" or "Phoenix Wolf"), as well as a google-mishap-prone one, it was already claimed by another band or two
-US distribution of their first few albums was handled by Astralwerks, who seem to have given up on appealing to the American zeitgeist once our critics (wrongly) declared Moby more cool than the Chemical Brothers ten years ago

But above all else, the one theory that comes close to explaining this phenomenon can be outlined thusly: pop success, or lack thereof, doesn't have to make any sense. If the Killers and Franz Ferdinand can get themselves noticed, why not Phoenix? It is a mystery.

I went to high school in the early-mid '90s and had hair down to my shoulders -- of course I'm miserable at what Chris Cornell's wound up turned into. Soundgarden are one of those rare 120 Minutes bands from my high school years that I still like (along with Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Nirvana, Beck, Dinosaur Jr. -- OK, maybe "rare" was the wrong word here), and between Chris' baffling James Bond theme and the hamfisted attempt at Timbaland-assisted pop crossover that is Scream -- not to mention his dopey, Twitter-abetted feud with Trent Reznor -- the more I cling desperately to the remnants of greatness contained in records like Ultramega OK and Superunknown. But occasionally, long-lost pieces of evidence can reemerge in the case for Cornell's onetime greatness -- like, for instance, a live dual tribute to Spinal Tap and Cheech & Chong.

photo via Sir Mildred Pierce on flickr

I consider James Brown to be possibly the greatest performer in popular music history. He was a hell of a singer, a double-hell of a dancer, fronted some of the greatest bands around (especially the J.B.s, who did for rhythm what Bruce Lee did for beating people up), could captivate you just by yelling out random syllables (as Eddie Murphy memorably demonstrated in Delirious), and did the music world a double favor first by hiring Bootsy Collins, Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker to back him up, and then later by pissing them off enough to get them to quit and subsequently make P-Funk that much better. In 1964 he was in a concert that was captured on film as "The T.A.M.I. Show," went on second-to-last, burned the house down and terrified the living shit out of the band that had to try and follow his act. (That band? A very young ABBA The Rolling Stones.) He could do just about anything. Anything, that is, except a TV show.

I'm trying to imagine what the elapsed time was between the establishing of YouTube as an actual internet presence, waaaaay back on February 15, 2005, and the first time someone took a video that first appeared on YouTube and screwed around with it (almost inevitably resulting in something involving anime, video games and/or yelling like a dumbass). I'm also pretty sure that in the four-plus years since people finally found a place to upload footage of themselves practicing Pink Floyd songs on an acoustic guitar or singing off-key renditions of top 40 hits, someone somewhere attempted to create some sort of extended mix of YouTube amateur musicians' greatest moments. Israeli composer/musician/animator Ophir Kutiel -- better known as Kutiman -- took things even further, and put together an entire EP's worth of YouTube-sampling music. It's inspired stuff, to be sure, and it's been making the rounds in typical "hey, check out the Amazing Power of the Internet" fashion for about a week; I heard about it back on the 10th through music-critic circles and it's already burning up Gawker and Slashdot. But while it's brought up a lot of questions as to legality, the accelerated viral spread of memes and the future of shared content, at its essence is the fact that source material notwithstanding it's still sample-based pop music. And on that base level, how does it sound?

The music industry's going down the toilet. I know it, you know it, and everyone who follows popular culture has at least the vaguest sense it's happening. I'm trying to think positive about this development: hey, maybe the majors are suffering, and it's a bit less meaningful (and fun) to follow the pop charts when an artist can hit the top 20 by selling 20,000 copies of an album, but there's a glut of product out there that makes avoiding shit you don't like and finding stuff you do a lot easier, and independent labels and artists don't seem to be suffering that badly yet (at least not if I'm going from the number of breathlessly excited SXSW promo e-mails that I wind up tossing into my trash folder every hour). Best of all, maybe labels will think twice about dumping exorbitant amounts of money into music videos that 95% of viewers will see in a 400-pixel-wide window on their computer screen. There's only one track less than five years old on this list of the 20 most expensive music videos ever -- for Kanye West, naturally, who seems to be the only current superstar capable of justifying a million-plus budget -- so this roster creaks mightily under the weight of the industry's pre-iPod, pre-Rapidshare, Hype Williams-fueled late '90s excesses. (Or, in the case of Kanye, Hype Williams-fueled mid '00s excesses.) At least most of these videos at least look like they got their money's worth, albeit by the standards of the time; you could probably burn a lot less than $7 million of today's dollars to create something as slick as Mark Romanek's 1996 video for Michael Jackson's "Scream," but it still looks pretty decent. This million-and-a-half-dollar Blackstreet video, though... not so much.

Everyone has their vices -- it's just that mine, lamely enough, happens to be soft drinks. I've never smoked cigarettes, pot did nothing for me the two times I tried it, and every time I've gone out drinking with friends I've easily been able to cut myself off before I make a drunken idiot of myself and guarantee myself a morning hangover. But keep me away from easy access to Pepsi for 48 hours and I will start fiending -- at least, if you can call lurching around inside my apartment in a stupor and occasionally falling asleep while standing up "fiending". Still, after being tired of having to drink caffeinated sugar-water just to maintain even the most modest level of energy during my work day, I decided that enough was enough and it was time to throw the high fructose corn monkey off my back. I will say that I've made it this far without hallucinating, which is good, because I was starting to get concerned that I'd be lying in bed, shivering, in a cold sweat, and then I'd look up at the ceiling and the 7-Up Spot would be crawling towards me to the droning tones of Underworld. Or maybe I'd wind up seeing something far, far stupider.

Even before The Hold Steady made Craig Finn an indie favorite, there was a certain maniacal cult-band fervor around their precursor, Minneapolis' own Lifter Puller. And for good reason: all the noir strangeness, localized detail, intricate storytelling and arch referential humor that made The Hold Steady popular in the '00s was present in Lifter Puller during the '90s, to such a huge extent that Wikipedia's entry for "Lifter Puller Folklore" is actually larger than the one devoted to the band itself. Why, then, is there almost no live footage of the band on YouTube?

Banbarra's "Shack Up" has a pretty odd legacy: the first hit you get by Googling the name of the band is their page on Discogs.com, which tells you the names of the songwriters in the group (Joseph Anthony Carter and Moe Daniels), every release their solitary song has appeared on, and literally nothing else. Their allmusic.com entry is similarly blank, though it does add the interesting fact that "Shack Up" hit #4 on the Club Play Singles chart. Heading to that b-boy standby the-breaks.com reveals the fact that its appearance on one of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats compilations back in the '80s resulted in a good number of hip hop tracks sampling it, maybe the most famous being Public Enemy's "Yo! Bum Rush the Show". And Googling the indivudial names of Banbarra's two credited members gives some interesting results: Joseph Anthony Carter -- assuming it's the same man -- was a pillar of the Baltimore community who passed away sometime in or before 2003 and was the subject of a resolution to honor his passing in the Georgia Senate, while Moe Daniels runs his own record label, also out of Baltimore, and currently performs as a jazz pianist. So what's this obscure one-off single sound like?

Maybe you've heard of 15 year-old McKay Hatch and his No Cussing Club, probably in the context of running across some story about him online and subsequently starting office pools with your friends as to how many swirlies this kid will end up getting by the time he graduates high school. But if you don't take him seriously, rest assured that someone does -- namely Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors member Michael Antonovich, who actually declared the first week in March No Cussing Week in the city that made stars out of Ice Cube and Axl Rose. We (well, I) here at The Popstream are (uh, am) terribly alarmed at this development for a number of reasons: unless I've been reading my numbers wrong, something like 80% of my 20,000-weekly readership originates from Los Angeles County, and I assume that this whole No Cussing Week thing extends to advisories against the citizens of L.A. actually reading cuss words as well. This means I will have to go and censor all the cool new swears I was hoping to incorporate into my posts over the week -- words like d***wrangler and s***kneader and f***ateer -- in order to keep my column's hit count from plummeting. It also means that I am going to have to be careful what videos I post -- fortunately, I found a classic of golden age hip hop that won't damage anyone's delicate sensibilities.

pictured: The Alan Parsons Project (cf. H. J. Simpson); photograph by andyc20050

So, 1977: it's the year that critics everywhere officially and finally christened punk the savior of rock music and the default counterculture for anyone who even considered rebelling against something, which means that maybe it is not the most hospitable environment for the man who engineered Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to record a concept record. Yet Parsons' I Robot -- a carefully-constructed, studio-shiny concept album about the nature of being and consciousness in relation to the polarized relationship between nature and civilization, as interpreted through the poetry of William Blake robots -- did pretty well for itself. Sure, most critics of the time thought it was schlock, but tracks from this album have been sampled by both Divine Styler (the title track in "Make It Plain") and DJ Shadow ("Nucleus" in "What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 1"), so there: I have just proven it is a good album. Now, on to the clip.

Photo by Emily Utne

Drop everything you are doing right now and prepare yourself for a level of radness that is incomprehensible to the average human mind: King Khan, who kicked out at least fifteen kinds of jams with BBQ Show last October, is returning to the Triple Rock in May with his colossal, superbad backing band the Shrines. Why is this awesome? Well, in short, what the Cramps were to rockabilly, King Khan & the Shrines are to garage rock, classic soul and/or voodoo. They've been at it for something like ten years now, debuting with the EP "Spread Your Love Like Peanut Butter" back in 1999, and with last year's collection The Supreme Genius of King Khan & the Shrines and a show-stealing afternoon set at the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival, their following has only managed to grow in recent years. And if you still haven't heard 'em, check this clip out -- it's one of their best songs, set to one of the most insane b-movie horror-flick scenarios I've ever seen.

Sometime in 1965, Keith Richards woke up, taped two minutes of some riff he thought up in a vaguely lucid half-awake state, then fell asleep again, therefore assuring that an entire generation would have an anthem of disaffected, blue-balled teenage ennui to waterski through Vietnam to. And in subsequent years, it'd become a popular subject for cover songs -- wiry, heated soul via Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, neurotic and jostled proto-no-wave from Devo, glossy self-aware spectacle for Britney -- to the point where there's really not much to do with it anymore. Björk and PJ Harvey must've been pretty keenly aware of that back in 1994, when they collaborated on a cover of the Rolling Stones' most well-worn single for the BRIT Awards.

There are few certainties in life, but I know this much: the Lamborghini Miura is the most beautiful car ever built, there'll never be a martial arts movie better than Drunken Master II, and Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" kicks total fuckin' ass. Not just because it's got one of the best riffs and one of the best solos in early metal's history, and not just because it's Ozzy doing what he does best -- sing about his state of mental distress with that sneering wail of his -- but because it was done so effortlessly. "Paranoid" only came into being because Warner Brothers thought their second album (originally titled War Pigs) was too short for an LP, so Sabbath went back into the studio, cranked out three minutes of articulately-fuming angst and had themselves their first UK top 5 hit.

And then it got covered by the German equivalent of Sonny and Cher.

Seventies nostalgia was really starting to hit its stride when I was in high school: between Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, all those wah-wah-drenched funk instrumentals on the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication and the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction ("Jungle Boogie"! "Let's Stay Together"! "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" via Urge Overkill, whose career has ironically been outlasted by Neil Diamond's!), there was plenty for a disaffected post-Nirvana teenager to look back upon and feel envious for missing. This, as people who grew up disaffected in the '70s themselves were prone to reminding us, was completely insane; Mike Watt figured that he was responsible for the well-being of my generation and decided the best way to inoculate us was to write a song called "Against the '70s" and get Eddie Vedder to sing it. We shrugged, cranked up our copies of the Minutemen's 3-Way Tie (For Last) when their cover of Blue Öyster Cult's "The Red and the Black" came on, and geeked out at the news Pearl Jam was recording with Neil Young. But really, the thing about the '70s -- and the '80s, and as we'll eventually rediscover, the '90s -- was that the bad and the good, the inanity and the profundity, the ugliness and the beauty, were both indelibly attached to each other. Removing one from the other would be like trying to separate a pair of siamese twins with one set of organs; it would eliminate everything that gave the era its personality, for better or for worse.

(photo from The Mummies official website)

Imagine how the Mummies must have come across to the average rock enthusiast at the end of 1991. Mainstream rock was just about ready to enter the flailing, hype-fueled downward creative arc of the grunge movement, indie rock was starting to get permeated with the let's-pretend-we're-bored ethos of arch smartasses like Pavement, and punk rock had started to resign itself to sounding, now and forever, like a petulant suburban California version of the Ramones. Garage rock revival wasn't quite the little cottage industry it became at the end of the '90s, where even the most Matador-enthused college stations snuck some artists from the Estrus label onto their playlists and eventually left unsuspecting ears primed for the next-big-thing success of the White Stripes -- so what to make of a bunch of dudes wrapped in gauze, hammering away at '60s-vintage Vox guitars and Farfisa organs and screaming like lunatics? Nobody knew, and the Mummies broke up the day after New Year's, 1992, leaving behind one of the best garage rock albums ever recorded -- Never Been Caught (aka Fuck C.D.'s, It's the Mummies) -- and a couple brief European tours in 1993 and 1994. Then they remembered that Mummies aren't necessarily supposed to stay dead.

Let's talk about the wonders of last-minute panic-based inspiration. I was spending much of last night trying to figure out what to showcase in today's Popstream, eating reheated two-day-old Papa John's and pacing back and forth in my apartment with a look of sheer, unadulterated anxiety on my face. (It should be noted that some of this anxiety centered around the fact that I was not entirely sure if eating two-day-old Papa John's was going to send me down a lonely road filled with regret and stabbed-in-the-gut-with-a-penknife indigestion.) It was at this moment, with addled thoughts of High on Fire and Electric Wizard rattling through my brain, that I figured I could find something interesting if I did a YouTube search for the term "stoner rock". Well: I did.

Everybody: you deserve an apology. I realize that I subjected many of you to a glimpse of unremitting awfulness on Monday, and while I hold no pre-conceived ideas as to the moral or intellectual quality of person that views this column on a regular basis, I at least assume that you are all reasoning, sentient beings with emotions and the ability to think and comprehend. This means that exposing you to brokeNCYDE may actually be grounds for a human rights violation. I have to cancel this out in some way or another, so here is one of the greatest rap songs of all time, performed by actual cool people in front of an audience that actually exists outside of MySpace.

I really don't have the words. Well, OK, maybe I do, but they're ones that aren't particularly strong enough since the internet has made them overused and diluted, and new curse words must be invented and then cemented to other, even newer curse words in some kind of cluster-filth portmanteau in order to properly depict the amount of horror and/or rage one is harboring while experiencing something especially atrocious. More than a decade's worth of internet culture and its attendant preversions and grotesqueries, all the shock-site trolling and the adolescent fanboy overreactions and the double-reverse-meta-unfunny memes, all the introspection-free, reflexively-deployed terms like "douchebag" and "fucktard" and "douchetard" -- it's all just a tiny, trembling underdeveloped embryo of loathing in comparison to what we really need to kick back against everything that is truly, venomously stupid, what we need to keep from becoming the empty husks the 21st century is turning us into. We're trying to hold back a Panzer division with a handful of thumbtacks and a middle finger. We, even in a global-wide, instant-communication epoch, are completely unprepared to deal with the task at hand here: what to do about brokeNCYDE.

I think all of us have bands and artists that we've heard a little of, liked, and then somehow never entirely followed up on -- and then the band breaks up or a prominent member dies and all these feelings of guilty underappreciation come to the forefront and finally motivate us to buy one of their albums. This happened to me on Wednesday when I heard about the death of Erick Lee Purkheiser, b/k/a Lux Interior, the lanky, theatrically scuzzy and note-perfect lead singer of neo-rockabilly deviants the Cramps. Even in an alternate universe where their classic 1978 single "Human Fly" was the only song they'd ever recorded, the Cramps would have a special place in my heart -- hell, the moment Lux menacingly hiccuped "I got 96 tears and 96 eyes" should've been enough of a catalyst to send me running to the nearest Cheapo to cop their whole discography. Unfortunately, I wound up going through life for a while as though it was their only song, and I never got around to nabbing one of their whole albums until I heard about Lux's passing, after which I promptly kicked myself and bought Smell of Female off the internet. And then I kicked myself again after hearing what I'd missed.

I came pretty late to cable TV, though I do have the honor of making Cartoon Network's then-new Adult Swim block the first thing I watched religiously when I finally got my apartment hooked up in 2002. Probably my earliest exposure to the Williams Street brand of anarchic humor (also manifested in Sealab 2021 and Aqua Teen Hunger Force) was the "Flipmode" episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast -- the one with a completely zonked-looking Busta Rhymes as guest star -- and it was and will likely remain the hardest I have ever laughed at a single episode of television. The comedic timing was unnervingly abstract, the unpredictability was bracing, and the tendency to be fearlessly nonsensical was something I didn't even know a major cable network program could even be capable of at that level. As it turns out, it wasn't even the craziest episode Ghost Planet Industries had done in their final years.

I kinda feel sorry for David Lee Roth in a way: maybe we as a society have finally gotten over his getting replaced by a Tequila-hocking smarmball at the height of Van Halen's powers, but over the last year or so he's been goofed on by comedy fanzine Chunklet, who leaked his vocal-only track of "Runnin' With the Devil" and spawned a flood of ridiculous YouTube memes and mashups, not to mention this recently-circulated (and hilarious) Asteroids remake. The end result is that more people than ever think he's a bizarre, capering karate imp who runs on sheer hubris -- but how accurate a description is that for a man who went the extra mile to record his solo debut LP in two different languages?