The funniest email I've received in a few weeks came from PC:

Musical Content Labeling
Similar to nutritional content labeling
Force record companies to disclose what really goes into their products. Must be in large, easy to read print on the outside of the package. For example:
Third-party writing content: 100%
Third-party instrumental content: 80%
Third-party vocal content: 30%
Vocal sweetening: 100%
Sampling: 80%
Contains 30% recycled material
Band member talent: <1%
WARNING: Contains no original concepts
WARNING: Band members shown on cover made no musical contribution whatsoever and were only taught to dance through the exhaustive use of cattle prods

This has the look and feel of something that's been passed around the internet for a while, so I'll admit it if I'm way behind on it. But it came during a particularly "gray cloud" moment in my day, so it burnt those suckers off and let the sun shine through. If PC cooked it up himself, he should be given a medal.

Speaking of sun, Sunday is Football day, and Banjo Picks have been severely delinquent, to say the least.

Washington + 2 1/2 at New York Football Giants
Everybody but Tampa is a road dog this week. Joe Gibbs is like a classic country artist from the 70's: showing up in Casinos and flooring the blue hairs who just fell off the climate controlled, floating whorehouse of a bus outside the front door. I'm not sure what I think of all this Eli Manning business, but what he did to Denver last week was cruel and mean spirited and basically made Mike Shanahan cry. If Washington's defense disrupts him early, maybe they win; but, you'd have to think that Toby Keith is a genuine outlaw classic country honkytonker to put your money behind a Skins upset here. (P.S.--Rest in peace, Wellington Mara)

Green Bay +9 at Cincinnati
His dad died, his wife has cancer, his childhood home was destroyed by a hurricane, his team is 1-5, and everybody on that team is hurt; no one is picking Brett Favre, and when I say Brett Favre, I mean the Packers, because if they have a shot at all, he has to be perfect. This is one of those games where Vegas is going to take a bath. He's going to pull something out of his ass down in Cincinnati and leave everyone shaking their heads. You heard it hear first. This is just like the scene from deliverance: "What ya wanna go down there fuckin' with that river for?" "Cuz it's there."

Chicago +3 at Detroit
Run away from this stupid game. Two days before the movie comes out, CBS is going to run a Johnny Cash tribute show where Joaquin Phoenix plays guitar while Norah Jones sings "Home of the Blues." Dennis Quaid played Jerry Lee Lewis back in the day, and spent the next umpteen years trying to get some love for his "music" and his "band." What does any of this have to do with the Bears/Lions game? Well, everybody is a professional here, so we're pretty sure they don't want to embarrass themselves, but they've either created, or put themselves into an environment where it's almost a guaranteed certainty that someone is going to fall woefully short. This game might be too ugly to watch, and it's certainly too ugly to bet your kids' milk money on.

Minnesota +7 1/2 at Carolina
If someone walks up to you and says, "I'm taking the Vikings, give me 20 1/2 points," oblige them. Further down this list, Ben Roethlisberger has basically never lost; comparatively, this bunch of Vikings have never won on the road, outdoors, on grass. In that situation, they play like Kenny Chesney sings whenever he's making a cameo or not the only star onstage: off key, off beat, and barely audible.

Oakland Pick'em at Tennessee
If they had played this game at Oakland, you would have seen what it really means to celebrate Halloween. Until you've spent Halloween within a hundred miles of either Oakland, California or Detroit, Michigan, you don't know shit about Halloween. This game is going to feature cartoonish speed and violence, with occasional fun-house mirror images of the terminally ill Kerry Collins and Steve McNair. Don't let your children watch this.

Arizona +8 1/2 at Dallas
If you know somebody from Dallas--or for that matter, that one buddy of yours who roots for the Yankees, Cowboys, Lakers, and Notre Dame football--take pity on them, because they believe this is the year, all over again. The lastest scuttlebutt is that the next band to do that lead singer replacment, music idol type contest is going to be Van Halen. The whole Parcells/Bledsoe relationship has a sort of Van Halen feel to it. I loved the late 70's and early 80's like any kid, but hey, maybe they oughta hang it up. There should be a quarter page ad in CityPages today that says, "Appearing Halloween at Myth Night Club, Janie Lane of Warrant, Steven Pearcy of Ratt, and Don Dokken...and oh by the way, Drew Bledsoe is starting at Quarterback for Bill Parcells in Dallas." That show is an acoustic version of their gasoline powered metal hits, and Dallas' offense is the same goddamned thing. This line is too high.

Cleveland +2 at Houston
Houston is favored in this game? Really?

Miami +2 1/2 at New Orleans (Baton Rouge)
Let me get this straight...St. Louis didn't have its Head Coach, starting quarterback, its two best wide recievers, and its two best defensive linemen...and the Saints still lost that game? Are you saying that Miami isn't better than the Rams' B Team? I'm confused.

Jacksonville Pick'em at St. Louis
See above. The Jags aren't the Saints.

Kansas City +6 at San Diego
Apparently Vegas still believes in Shittenheimer, no matter what happened in Philadelphia last week. When Lamar Hunt gets all cut down on Old Granddad bourbon, he slurs the name "Shittenheimer" into the PA system out at Arrowhead in the middle of the night. And why not? It's his joint, and he had to put up with nearly ten years of the worst kind of failure. LaDainlian Tomlinson might get 200 yards on Sunday, but the Chiefs will win this game, probably by at least two touchdowns.

Tampa Bay -11 1/2 at San Francisco
No one who lives within 100 miles of San Francisco calls it "San Fran" or "Frisco." If you do that, stop it, it marks you as a rube, and to anyone who lives out there, both names are like fingernails on a chalkboard. San Francisco is simply known as "The City" to the locals, or buy its fully qualified domain name, San Francisco. Tampa Bay is going to destroy the Niners.

Philadelphia +3 1/2 at Denver
Denver this, Denver that. Mike Shanahan is still shitting blood over that Eli Manning gut punch last week. He's going to do everything in his power to prevent that from happening this week, instead of focusing his team on proactively winning this game. Eagles in a walk.

Buffalo +8 1/2 at New England
I'm bored with the Patriots without actively hating them. Kind of like how I feel about Brad Paisley. Buffalo is the food in this game...you know those info-mercials with kitchen gadgets that have razor sharp blades that go through cement-hard foods like turnips, like they aren't even there? Right.

Baltimore +10 at Pittsburgh
Until he loses, betting against him is a fool's errand, especially with Ray Lewis hurt.

Before you read the blog below, recognize that KEEY, K102FM won this year's CMA Award for Best Major Market Country Station partially on their record of charitable service. I don't think it's stretching the truth to say that the station, as a whole, goes out of its way for charitable causes, its jocks and personalities chalking up hundreds of hours on the street doing good works for those less fortunate. It also took extremely large sac for Anselmo and the morning guy to go over to Iraq this past year. I just want to get it on record that the station can't be impugned for any of that. Nobody is holding a gun to their heads to do that stuff, and God knows with the current little Bible banging trust fund squirrel in the White House, if you're less fortunate, you have to rely on things like radio stations, Branch Davidian cults, and strangers in minivans at off-ramp stop lights, when you need a bit of a helping hand.

That being said, though...

Yeah. Strange, huh, Miles, but--something ya gotta know about specialists--they pay a premium, and they never cause fuckin' trouble. Sometimes I imagine in my declining years runnin' a small joint in Manchester, England, catering to specialists exclusive. And to let 'em know they're amongst their own, maybe I'll operate from the corner, hanging upside down like a fuckin' bat, hmm? Oh, we're not such bad sorts here, huh Miles?

--Al Swearengen, From the TV show Deadwood

I'm a specialist; in my finer years I was definitely hanging upside down in a corner like a bat. Why? I'm not sure, but the narcissistic and paranoid egomaniac inside of me says it's because I refuse to lay down and stop fighting. For instance, I believe the movie "Titanic" and the subsequently screeching histrionic soundtrack music "produced" by Celine Dion were part of some modern day experiment in mass psychosis and melodrama hatched from the personal notes of Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl. Hanging upside down in the corner, I was rooting for Leonardo to go down into the cold blue water and put my eyes--which I had unsuccessfully attempted to pluck out with a spoon--out of their misery and restore peace to my inflamed soul. Because of a bunch of cartoon characters in period dress, an entire generation of America believes that the tragedy of the Titanic was really an unrealized romance between a deliciously plump British girl and a dashing skinny Italian-American kid playing a Mick, and not the senseless deaths of thousands of people in ice cold North Atlantic waters. Fuck you Celine Dion.

From the start, if you're going to read this space with any kind of basic comprehension, you need to understand that I think a great deal of our mainstream cinema, music, radio, and television is at least subtle, if not overt, brainwashing. Most of it is complete shit and the only reason any of it gets consumed is because some fairly brilliant, yet nefarious, folks are working the strings to get rich and aren't worried about the long-term consequences to their own souls. Look, I'm not voyeuristically peeping at Julia Roberts as she runs on the treadmill with my copy of Catcher in the Rye firmly embraced to my chest, but, if you think Big & Rich is some kind of edgy act, hatched out of organic club touring, and a fresh approach to the height and breadth of Country Music, I've got a sure-fire cure for the Bird Flu for you in aisle 3 of the new Wal-Mart I just opened down the street from your tract house. These two men recorded and released their first record for a small little independent outfit called Warner fucking Brothers, and are a product of one of the most sinister, greedy, and cynical money-grabs in the history of recorded music. Various members of the recording and radio establishment in Nashville were afraid they were going to lose audience share to the burgeoning urban hip-hop and post-grunge vibes, so they went out looking for two saps who were beat down enough to do exactly as they were told as they were synthesized into all of the most cliche parts of the 90's genesis of the various styles, and then paraded out on stage in an embarrassing circus of meaningless hiccups and belches that were somehow supposed to represent the envelope of 21st Century twang. Muzik Mafia my ass. Someone tell the tall asshole to give Slash his hat back, and remind them that Kid Rock was genuinely heart broken when his midget friend died, so copying that portion of his bit probably wasn't in the best taste.

I, too, don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra to stay away from that sort of stuff, but someone comes along saying, I've got powders where if you put up a three to four thousand dollar investment, you can make fifty thousand distributing, then there is no way to resist it. I want to keep it respectable. [shouts] I don't want it near schools. I don't want it sold to children!

--Don Zaluchi, From the Movie The Godfather

But I'm a reasonable man...you all know me here...

If you're going to throw accusations and criticism around, you should always go to the source. The Mainstream Country recording industry in collusion with Mainstream Country radio has perpetrated the biggest hoax on the American public since Orson Welles broadcast "War of the Worlds" in 1938.

I'm going to make a number arguments here about this and that, but I want to make the most important one first. It's what you should always come back to when considering the state of Mainstream Country radio, its cynical, greedy approach to the music, and the recording industry's cynical, greedy response and delivery. If you download the document at the above link and turn to page 40, you'll see that in trumpeting 35% of their entry's overall score, they crow about their pull with the female demographic:

Overall
#1 W18-54 (W = Women listeners, 18-54 = age range)
#1 W25-34
#1 W25-44
#1 W25-49

Middays
#1 W18-34
#1 W18-44
#1 W25-34
#1 W35-44

Afternoons
#1 W18-44
#1 W18-49
#1 W18-54
#1 W18+
#1 W25-49
#1 W25-54
#1 W35-49

Weekends
#1 W18-44
#1 W18-49
#1 W18-54
#1 W25-34
#1 W25-44
#1 W25-49
#1 W25-54

This is it; this is the Rosetta Stone, the Code of Hammurabi, and the Dead Sea Scrolls all rolled into one. No matter what else I write here; no matter who Ed Benson trots out on stage in New York City in a couple of weeks to make the Bloombergs feel like the Beverly Hillbillies; no matter how many glowing reviews of Big & Rich or Toby Keith records by otherwise seemingly sane music critics you might read at this and other sites; never ever lose sight of the above information. The numbers above are all that matters to Mainstream Country Radio and the Mainstream Country recording industry. Anything and everything that delivers these numbers is in; anything and everything that doesn't, is out. This is why Johnny Cash died, Van Lear Rose won a Grammy and not a CMA, and why Willie still gets stoned.

Understand one thing about these numbers: they are impressive and they are real; the men who delivered them are geniuses. They had a goal and they acheived it. The proof is in the moldy, thickening skin of the pudding they've left rotting on the counter of the Country kitchen.

Page 64 and beyond reads like a plot sketch for the crummy movie "New Jack City." The Cash Money Boyz have the artists into the private screening room. They know what their customers like and what will keep them coming back. When they get some really good pure shit, they take it down to the Quest and Mall of America and hand it out for free (just count the feminine heads vs. the masculine heads in those photos on pages 65 & 66). Hooked, the junkies turn the dial and leave it there. A bit melodramatic, to be sure, but that doesn't make it less true.

By the way, fuck you Kenny Chesney. Haven't said that in a while, felt good.

Let's go back to page 57 and ask Gregg Swedberg what he thinks:

I think it's well-known that K102 breaks records...You condition the audience to expect and want new music just like they want and expect your morning show or any program feature. We've done pretty well with that philosophy, but I think it's a constant investment in the format.

Freud was a schizophrenic, who liked to self-medicate, but he had a lot of theories about spoken words meaning two things, especially when one has used them often in other similar contexts...they just slip out. People have been conditioning audiences for centuries over a lot heavier shit than this, so at the end of the day, nobody's gonna die because of it; but this little slideshow of self-praise over their assembly line tactics is like K102 sitting back, relaxed in front of an empty beer glass and smiling at their bartender over what a good boy they've been, while I and others like me metaphorically portray their AA sponsor in the doorway, shaking my head in tears at their latest relapse.

Finally, you have to go back to the really pitiful part of the thing: their "Number One" status. Page 44:

Look, BOB106 doesn't count. K102 is Number One in a market of one. They spend the next few pages comparing themselves to major stations in other markets that have actual competitors. The brilliant Stevie Wonder said, "nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin.'" Back in Scheming Bastard, I mean Law School, we used to call claims like this prima facie absurd.

Number One in a market of one, brainwashing their audience while jealously protecting it from true innovation and growth, ladies and gentlemen (well, not really gentlemen, because they don't give a swinging rat shit about you guys), I give you the CMA Major Market Country Station of the Year: KEEY, K102, Minneapolis.

NEW YORK (Billboard) -- A few hundred lucky wedding guests got the surprise of their life last weekend as R.E.M.'s original four members reunited to play a seven-song set at the wedding of one of the group's road crew.

The action went down Saturday at Kingpins Bowl & Brew in the group's Athens, Georgia, home base and marks just the second time Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills have performed with drummer Bill Berry since his amicable 1997 departure.

The group went on to play some of its most beloved early tunes: "Don't Go Back to Rockville" (with bassist Mills on vocals), "Wolves, Lower," "Begin the Begin," "The One I Love," "Permanent Vacation" and "Radio Free Europe."

That little Asian kid on keyboards that Jay Farrar stole from Canyon really wanted to rock out last night because he's pretty psyched that he's in Son Volt.

But Son Volt never showed. Instead, a few thousand people were treated to a really good Jay Farrar show. I've said many times before that Jay sounds better with a band around him, especially a band with really loud guitars. But let's not get carried away and start snapping our fingers as if it were 1997 all over again, because frankly, Jay's not doing that either. In fact, Michael Johnson ran his world record 220-meter dash at the Olympics more slowly than Jay plowed through Loose Strings, Drown, and Windfall. I'm not a cretin, I do enjoy it when artists rework old material to make it fresh not only for their audience, but also to psych themselves up a little to play it. But that simply wasn't the case. Until my dying days, I won't understand why some people cannot embrace their catalogues of music. All those people who paid $19 for the Son Volt name showed up at the gig to hear Drown, complete with intermixed breathless pauses and stiletto sharp guitar riffs. How fast can you play it Jay?

Understand what I'm saying here: I like Jay Farrar's music. I think he's brilliant.

But that wasn't a Son Volt show last night. That was a Jay Farrar show. A Son Volt show would have included some Son Volt. We got almost the entire "Okemah" album before any of the older songs were played. Would the Stones play the entire "Steel Wheels" album before playing Bitch or Under My Thumb? Shit, even R.E.M. showed up at a bowling alley and played Rockville. Do you know why? Because it's okay to play your music, embrace your past, and have everybody down front go bananas. Granted, I'm an idiot, but I have a hard time believing you can call yourself Shakespeare and not do "Hamlet."

Call me a fool, but I think the guy who wrote Postcard is the same guy who wrote Medicine Hat and the same guy who wrote Grammophone. From what I saw last night, he doesn't think that, though.

I'm filled with some pretty weird, self-induced dread over tonight's Son Volt show at First Avenue. Don't get me wrong, Son Volt and Wilco were always the buses driven by the anger over the breakup between Farrar and Tweedy and Uncle Tupelo (which, we've come to find out, was just this side of creepy; apparently Jeff Tweedy is some kind of stalker, hero worshipper, like Kenny Chesney; you had me at hello indeed). It's not like Son Volt wasn't, isn't, and won't always be Jay Farrar's baby. But the Son Volt that's showing up in Minneapolis tonight is, at least on a literal level, Jay and a handful of musicians he picked. By comparison, doing what he's doing would be similar to Pete Townshend going out on the road solo and calling himself The Who; nobody's going to begrudge him the fact that he's the main cog of the whole works, but, all the same...

What adds another layer to this onion is that what you and I and they all know as Son Volt pretty much lives right here in town: the Boquist brothers. I still have fresh in my memory a night down at the Fine Line shortly after it was decided the Boquists weren't going to be a part of the new Son Volt, but, before I knew that fact. Everything I've ever read about Jay leads me to believe he's a pretty straightforward guy, given time, so maybe wounds have been salved, and things are once again amicable. But I want to know why I'm supposed to call this Son Volt. There's a continuity of musical story from Trace to Straightaways to Wide Swing Tremolo; who wrote this chapter, and does it really fit into the overall book? Maybe these questions oughta be answered.

I used to think that "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" was the absolute low point of anything known as Country Music. It's dumb on so many levels that Hell has reserved a special ring of honor for everyone involved in its recording, even if the studio musicians who participated were just trying to make an honest living. They should have drawn their own personal lines and said to themselves, "nope, not even this is worth a steady paycheck."

But, somebody named Dann Huff and, even more importantly, Trace Adkins have dramatically lowered the bar with "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk." It's hard for a person like me, who takes the majesty and beauty of the traditions of American Country Music seriously, to begin to describe the 9 kinds of awful that this song is. The real problem is that the P1 demographic for Mainstream Country Radio, women between the ages of 25 and 45 with household purchasing power, has been so inundated with garbage like this for the past, oh, 20 years that they are lapping this up with a spoon, and it's hard to turn on one of these terrible, awful, spine tinglingly bad stations without hearing this piece of dreck. Once again, it's yet another derivative attempt by Nashville to tap into the suburban appeal of hip-hop with meaningless lyrics embodying the worst clichés:

Got it goin on
like donky kong
and eww wee
shut my mouth
slap your grandma
there oughta be a law
get the sheriff on the phone
lord have mercy
how she even get them breeches on?

Are you kidding me?

We can now add Trace Adkins and Dann Huff to the list of people Johnny Cash wouldn't have pissed on were they on fire.

But you want to know the worst and/or best part of it all? Ed Benson is such a money-grubbing, cynical, shallow, callous Nashville businessman, that he's going to jump on this phenomenon and insure that he gangly stumbles his 6 foot 6 inch frame out on stage during the CMA awards (live from New York City!!!) to lip synch this drivel to millions of viewers worldwide. Needless to say, timing is everything in the Country Music radio and print biz, so don't worry gentle readers, I'm loading up the literary shotgun for that special event yet again this year, with more ammunition than I ever thought possible, so stay tuned.

Until then, make sure you change the channel when this song comes on the radio wherever you are. And, should anyone you know--or anyone you don't know for that matter--begin speaking about this song as if it were a good and vital addition to the Country Music canon, please have the common sense to tell them how poor their taste is. Because that's what this song is...the direct result of a very long and monotonous march toward overwhelmingly poor taste in Mainstream Country Music. So long Kenny and your sexy tractor...we hardly knew ya.