Revisiting “Shenmue: The Movie” from 2001!

Just in time to mark the release of Shenmue III, TIIIA takes a fond look back at the full-length feature movie that came with copies of the second game on the original Xbox!

Read More

PROPAGANDA REVIEW: MTV's 'Hate Rock' Special from 1993!

Yes, even back then MTV was trying to warn the masses about the scourge of white supremacy ... and in the clumsiest way possible, to boot.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Anybody who thinks MTV is just now rallying the SJW troops for a culture war against whatever the higher-ups at Viacom deem a "far right threat" really haven't been paying attention. The reality is that MTV has been bangin' the social justice battle gong for more than a quarter century, and nothing demonstrates that as well as the 1993 "special report" Hate Rock from 1993.

Yes, a full 25 years ago - LONG before Charlottesville and Andrew Anglin and Black Lives Matter and President Trump and Pepe the Frog - MTV was hellbent on convincing the same masses who unironically liked bands like Green Jelly and Ugly Kid Joe that, within their own communities, there was an insidious, underground menace a bubblin' that - if left unchecked and unconquered - would inevitably result in the Day of the Rope coming to fruition and scores of Jews and blacks and Hispanics and gays and Indians getting massacred by the Fourth Reich. And, as we are all keenly aware, such wouldn't start with the slow degradation of civil liberties in the name of amorphous multiculturalism, nor government policies that nonconsensually hoist globalization on the front lawns of largely homogeneous cultures economically and socially incapable of assuring its peaceful assimilation into the local fabric. Nope, it begins, naturally, with a bunch of shitty guitar players with bald heads screaming "nigger" into a microphone in front of crowds of literally dozens of rancorous racist fans, and it's up to MTV - the great cultural taste-maker it is - to enlighten and indoctrinate us all into stamping this stuff out BEFORE it gets too big (read: economically sustainable) and the Holocaust 2.0 happens.

You know, some readers have asked me what my favorite kind of propaganda is, and it HAS to be stuff like this - hardcore, ideologically-biased, fact-and-reason-resistant agitprop built solely to discredit and disgrace a competing flavor of hardcore, ideologically-biased, fact-and-reason-resistant agitprop. This thing isn't even really meant to be entertaining, as much as it is 30-minute secular worship service, kinda' like the politically correct version of the world's least articulate Sunday school teacher mumbling his way through the story of Lucifer's fall.

But really, we ought to let MTV speak for themselves, shouldn't we? Let's push this sumbitch in the old VCR player and take a trip down memory lane, why don't we?

Kurt Loder lets us know the following is a "Free Your Mind" special report, which, of course, is marketing-speak for "let us tell you how you ought to feel about things for the next 30 minutes." From there, we throw it to a concert in Canada, where the creatively-named band Aryan is singing some song about Jews or race-mixing or what the hell ever. Then there's a quick, totally context-less clip where a dude with a Nazi eagle tattoo on his forehead talks about shooting somebody and here comes Kurt Loder - apparently, strolling past though the set of the first Candyman movie - ambling into the frame and to say something to the effect of "boy howdy, I bet you sure have noticed the sudden surge in 'race-baiting skinheads' wreaking havoc in the underground 'oi' scene, and goddamn, isn't it terrible, folks?" That's our cue for some black and white footage of people getting hit with baseball bats transposed over Hitler speeches as we cut to stock footage of skinheads and Confederate flag-waving marchers looking all vicious and whatnot while Aerosmith's "Livin' on the Edge" loops around it.

Loder says the fall of communism IMMEDIATELY sparked a resurgence of far-right politics in Europe, which in turn began influencing racist dissidents in the U.S. We then get to briefly meet two skinheads named Sean and Mike - obviously meant to draw parallels to Beavis and Butt-Head - and Loder describes them as "beer-swilling thugs" before throwing it to archival footage of this Mexican guy talking about this time he got roughed up by some Skrewdriver fans, with the onscreen caption sure to note he was attacked by "racist skinheads," as opposed to the TOLERANT skinheads dotting our fine chemotherapy centers from coast-to-shining-coast. And that's the perfect excuse to take a look at the world of NON-RACIST skinheads, which does indeed exist ... in Canada. Well, WHERE else would you expect to find that kind of shit? Loder then explains how "real" skinheads love black people and their music, especially ska and "the working class sounds" of non-Hitler-inspired "oi."

Time to sample some of that insidious white power music, why dont' we? Here's a few lines of prose from some band called No Remorse - "Nigger, face to face don't try and mess with the master race." Well, that's still less uses of the word "nigger" than in the aggregate Kendrick Lamar song, so what's the rub, MTV? Kurt then goes on to say that the National Front basically INVENTED racist music by co-opting the oi scene in England back in the late 1970s. Then we meet a chap named Warren Miekle, lead singer of the New Jersey-based outfit Aggravated Assault, who says his music has a "political message." And because the aggregate MTV viewer in 1993 STILL needed helps filling in the gaps, this is immediately followed by another Hitler speech quip where Die Fuhrer is talking about white superiority or some such mess. Then a bespectacled Nazi nerd named Todd shows a banner  reading "Adolf Hitler Was Right" while another 'un shows off a tatoo of a Jew hanging from a tree, to represent what he believes DIDN'T happen during the Holocaust. Which, in one of the most surreal things I've ever seen in my life, devolves into Loder talking about the "Final Solution" over stock footage of Auschwitz skeletons while fucking George Michaels plays in the background." Then this Holocaust survivor is wheeled out so he can say it's not like 1933 in Germany no more, because THIS time they have a chance to defend themselves against the intolerant.

I don't know about you, but I think naming your group "Unidentified German Oi Band" is just painfully pretentious.

We return from commercial break and Kurt Loder is walking around Berlin while "Winds of Change" by The Scorpions play because fuck it, subtlety is for pussies. There's this great transition shot where footage of people being all happy during the fall of the Berlin Wall is interrupted by scenes of skinheads throwing Molotov cocktails into buildings. Loder then talks about "economic paranoia" and "anti-immigrant sentiment" fueling far right ideologies in post-reunification Germany, which culminates with a clip of skinheads singing a song about giving Elie Wiesel cups of tea laced with Zyklon B. This ultimately leads to Loder stating that kids are turning to white power music because they feel as if their governments are sacrificing THEIR economic futures in favor of their own liberal social policies ... which, yeah, certainly couldn't explain why kids TODAY are into all of that "alt-right" Pepe the Frog stuff or anything like that. The narrator then explains how 1.5 million migrants from war-torn, former Soviet-controlled states have flooded into Germany since 1988, and that's making neo-Nazi skinheads ANGRY as all get-out. To demonstrate this, we get this one unintentionally hilarious scene where an Indian guy points to graffiti showing a swastika and carefully explains that it probably means "hey, these guys might be Nazis, be careful fucking with them." Then we get footage of a 1992 "anti-fascist" concert headlined by The Scorpions before another commercial break whisks us away.

Now we turn our attention to North American skinhead music, and it doesn't take Kurt long to start decrying outfits like "The Church of the Creator" and the "Hammerskins" as vile, reprehensible pieces of dookie who "hate all people different from themselves," all while praising "non-racist" skinhead groups like the Sharps, who - irony of ironies - hate everybody who thinks differently from themselves. That segues into the lead singer of RAHOWA talking about how important the Internet is to building the skinhead music fanbase, which leads to a scene in which a hacker acting on MTV's behalf infiltrates a BBS board that offers homemade explosives recipes and asks its users to send in the addresses of "queers" for some kind of database. This leads Loder to ask what is it about this kind of music that goads Americans into believing such incredibly "anti-American ideals?" One detective says it's probably because the kids are getting abused and neglected at home and they're probably longing for any kind of camaraderie that doesn't include their parents yelling at 'em or the cool kids at school referring to 'em as "weirdo faggots." 

Apparently, 1993's neo-Nazis looked like 2016's Bernie Sanders supporters.

Time to hear from the lead singer of RAHOWA again (who, of course, has renounced his Nazi ways over the last few decades, in case you forgot it.) He says some inconsequential shit, and now it's time for Kurt Loder to hit the mean streets of Orlando, wearing a gaudy red floral shirt and sunglasses as part of some "undercover" assignment.

Oh shit, he's there to interview the imperial wizard of the KKK, who is apparently a 16-year-old kid with four or five developmental disorders named Archie Johnston. Meanwhile, this dude in a Beastie Boys shirt makes fun of him for being into Hitler. He shows Kurt a noose in his bedroom and says the Klan is about "Christian Identity" and they argue about what the biblical definition of "neighbor" is. Anyway, they try their damnedest to make Archie look mentally retarded, which, yeah, he probably is. Then they show him talking on the phone trying to get a bunch of guys together to go scare some homosexuals while "Take The Skinheads Bowling" plays in the background. Loder than asks whether or not Archie and his ilk ought to be censored which - after citing the First Amendment - he begrudgingly says no. But that doesn't mean he doesn't think they shouldn't be under a constant state of surveillance, which Loder never addresses as a violation of the FIFTH Amendment, but what the hell ever. 

By the way, that Archie kid was later arrested for assaulting an interracial couple. And the special ends with him getting taken into custody while "The KKK Took My Baby Away" by The Ramones plays. Yeah - I can't imagine TODAY'S MTV being so tongue-in-cheek when it comes to TODAY'S skinheads, for sure.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gomer Pyle, S.S.

You know, this kind of stuff is getting harder and harder to get a hold of. In fact, the only way I could even screen this special was a secondhand copy of a copy taken from fucking Veoh, so it's probably safe to assume that within another five or ten years or so, this thing's gonna' be all but erased from the Web. And since YouTube and Dailymotion are getting so insanely Nazi-esque about both copyright protected material and "offensive" content (even if it's framed in a way to make fun of and demean people with radical viewpoints) getting posted on their respective platforms, unless somebody is ripping this shit to the Internet Archive en mass we could be on the verge of a multimedia purge the likes of which haven't been seen since the great MGM vault fire of 1967.

The whole thing, from start to finish, is barely 22 minutes long and once you've caught it once there's not really anything noteworthy enough to inspire you to rewind the cassette. It definitely has a weird late '80s, early '90s vibe going on, meaning it doesn't really feel like it belongs in either decade, but still has enough aesthetic imprints from both to kinda feel familiar.

While MTV today hosts entire awards show anchored around white guilt, I suppose it's safe to say they weren't nearly as deft with their counter-propaganda back in '93. It's obvious that Viacom was trying to posit the emerging neo-Nazi skinhead music culture as a major cultural concern, but at the same time it's presented in such a hokey package that it's hard to take the program seriously. That's evident from the goofy Beavis and Butt-Head onscreen font and the downright bizarre musical interludes (I'm STILL not over the whole Auschwitz-set-to-George Michael music video), not to mention the depiction of Archie Johnston as a dude literally too retarded to answer basic questions about the U.S. Constitution, let alone usher in an ethnic purge of millions of people.

Eventually, Viacom would get significantly better at using the Music Television format to push sociopolitical agendas, but Hate Rock is certainly evidence that the powers-that-are at MTV have been trying to use their platform to engineer culture for decades. As an anti-white supremacist spiel, it's pretty weak and flaccid, and as a random abstraction of its time, it's not all that entertaining nor enlightening. Indeed, I think we'd all rather have watched the commercials that originally ran on the program than the program itself - and if that isn't a testament to the fact we've become a truly post-racial society (if not a colorless, mass-marketer-tested, consumerism-uber-alles Valhalla) I don't know what is.

ADDENDUM!

A while back I actually got an email from a guy who said he knew Todd and the circle he hung out with back in the day. I asked the reader if I could publish his email comments in full, which he agreed to under the condition I keep his identity secret. Anyhoo, here's what he had to say — by the way, I'm publishing it unedited, just because. 

I knew Todd (last name Keller), in fact I still have some junky old tattoos from the kid. (he was) Dumb as a rock,  I moved away from Orlando just a few months before this MTV episode was filmed. 

I'm NOT a racist, but sadly I was. I grew up and avoided the criminal life that killed or jailed everyone I knew from that time. I'm writing to give you some insight to what happened then and there in Oviedo.  

There is no justification for this ignorant bullshit but Todd wasn't  raised by some redneck - his mother was normal and frequently admonished Todd for his racism. He wasn't poor. He didn't do drugs. He believed most of what he aspoused to believe mostly because of the school system in Oviedo.  

Jackson Heights middle school and oviedo high were racial hotbed in the mid 90s. Both schools had a majority of African American students, these children were also having very hard lives. Crack was king and given the rural history of the town many of them where grandchildren or great grandchildren of real slaves. There were murders, race riots (in school), and if you were white you sometimes bore the brunt of issues. I saw two murders one in 6th grade and one in 9th. 

Time and travel continue to impress on me how strange of a world I live in. No one had hope, everyone hated everyone. In all honesty we (black and white) should have probably fought for a better school, teachers that cared, and our future. 

And really, there's only one thing I can say in riposte to that. And that thing, of course, is ...

Read More

CD Review - 'LIE: The Love and Terror Cult' by Charles Manson (1970)

To commemorate the passing of Charles Manson, we take a look back at his one and only studio album.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

"You wouldn't know what crazy was if Charles Manson was eating Froot Loops on your front porch."

- Suicidal Tendencies, "You Can't Bring Me Down" (1990)

"So how do you communicate to a whole group of people? You stand up and take the worst fear symbol [swastika] and say 'There, now I've got your fear. Now I've got your fear.' And your fear is your power and your power is your control. I'm your king of this whole planet. I'm gonna rule this whole world."

- Charles Manson, Penny Daniels interview (1989)

By the time you're reading this, Charles Manson will either be dead, or almost dead, or in the final throes of death, or maybe still alive but way closer to being dead than he has at any other point in his life. So while this pseudo-epigraph might be a tad premature, we all know the guy's gonna' kick the bucket much sooner than later, so we might as well start printin' out the obituary notices and get a jump on things.

Ol' Chuck is one of them guys that - in an alternate reality - probably would've been a bigger act than Bob Dylan. Alas, he started taking The White Album a bit too literally, and I think we can all agree - getting your goons to butcher a pregnant woman to death during a "creepy crawl" really isn't the best way to get your name in the papers.

Before you fucks start thinkin' I'm going to give this guy post-mortem praise, the fact of the matter is that Charles Manson was a five-star lunatic, which makes his idolization by acts like System of a Down all the more befuddling. This was a guy who literally thought the Book of Revelation was a secret handbook for starting a race war, who is said to have forced his doped up followers to perform sex acts on their own infants. Lord knows how many horrible things he got away with, and needless to say - this cocksucker's demise shoulda' happened a looooong time ago.

Of course, it's a little weird combing through the Twitter-verse commentary on Manson's (near) death. I've seen this GIF comparing Manson's facial gestures to Donald Trump's hundreds of times by now, as the liberal hive-mind (the unthinking brain in a vat it is) keeps making the same joke over and over about assuming Chucky was trending because Trump gave him a cabinet position (an aside, but the fact these people can't interpret ANYTHING without dragging Trump into the equation seems to smack of a very Manson-like manic obsession, doesn't it?) My favorite comment by far, however, has to be the wise mullings of professional racial grievance peddler Tariq Nasheed, who tweeted why the media never brings up the fact Charles Manson is a "white supremacist." Long story, short Tariq: because he wasn't sentenced to life in prison for being "a white supremacist," he was sentenced to life in prison for ordering his stooges to slaughter six innocent people ... a fact which, as evident by its absence from Tariq's tweet, would seem to suggest the tweeter in question doesn't find sextuple murder anywhere near as immoral or ghastly as thinking black people are generally inferior to white people.

Oh, there's plenty of great Manson-related material on the Web. His interview with Geraldo Rivera is pretty much required viewing come Halloween time, and I'll be goddamned if there isn't a HUGE Wikipedia page outlining what Manson thought "Helter Skelter" was really about. Trust me - this shit right here is WELL worth the read. 

Alas, as we wait impatiently for Chuck to keel over, perhaps it would serve us well to revisit the music he left behind. Yep, Charlie did indeed record an album, which was released after the 1969 Sharon Tate and company murders. The collection of Charles M. originals was ultimately titled LIE: The Love and Terror Cult, a riff on the famous Life magazine cover which featured him in stark black and white looking like - well, what everybody thinks of when they think about Charles Manson.

Granted, it was a pretty rare little oddity back in the day, but thanks to the magic of Internet uploads, you can no listen to the whole album whenever the hell you want. But assuming you just don't have the 32 minutes in your schedule to listen to the album the whole way through (but, for some reason, you do have the 32 minutes to read this article), I've gone on ahead and given you a track-by-track review and summary of every song included on LIE. So, on this, the precipice of Manson's exit from the mortal coil, have you ever wondered what kinda' aural treats you've been missing out on over the years? Well - wonder no damn more, you morbidly curious motherfuckers, you ...

Now who's ready to boogie!

TRACK 01

"Look at Your Game Girl"

We start the CD off with probably Charles' most famous composition. The song is probably best known for being covered by Axl Rose for The Spaghetti Incident? as a hidden track, and I'm not gonna' lie - I think this is a downright beautiful fuckin' song. It's such a soft and sweet little ballad, that sounds like something you'd hear in the background of a Billy Jack movie. In fact, in high school, I even made a "mix tape" of me singing the song while playing the bongos - if I ever find it, I'll be sure to upload it for ya'll to hear and obsess over.

TRACK 02

"Ego"

"No, it's in the back, no it's in the front," Manson repeats over and over again while violins and a mad bongo beat blares in the background. He also drones on and on about Freud and the subconscious being the "computer" of the brain and naturally, none of this shit makes any sense, but then again, everybody was on acid back then so I guess it was never meant to make any sense in the first place. That said, it's still better than ANYTHING the Beatles ever recorded, and that's an objective fact.

TRACK 03

"Mechanical Man"

"I am a mechanical boy, and I am my mother's toy" - shit, if you thought the last track was opaque, just wait 'til you get a load of this shit. I'm pretty sure everybody on the song was high on crystal meth at the time of the recording. You've got this weird, out of rhythm drum beat going on the whole song, with everybody humming and moaning in unison. And just when you think the cacophony of sitar plucks and idle chatter can't get any weirder - then Chuck starts singing about his pet monkey getting hit by a train and the London Bridge. And in case you're wondering - yes, this is where the lyrics from Marilyn Manson's "My Monkey" come from.

TRACK 04

"People Say I'm No Good"

Another sentimental, downbeat acoustic song in which Charles tries valiantly to play the guitar but, by golly, he just can't figure out how those tricky frets work, it appears. Also, this song is probably exhibit A for what I like to call the "Charlie hum" style of singing, in which every stanza of the song ultimately concludes with the last syllable turning into five-second long hummingbird impersonation. "Those diamond rings, they're all the same," Manson laments - which, yeah, I guess is kinda' true, when you really think about it. "You've got more sicknesses than you've got cures for - cancer of the mind," he concludes the song, after going on a rant against "cough medicine" and "wonder drugs," which is pretty dang hypocritical considering this man's bloodstream is STILL about 65 percent LSD to this very day. But then again, if you're looking for sense out of Charles goddamn fuckin' Manson, you lost the game of life a long time ago.

TRACK 05

"Home is Where You're Happy"

"Home is where you can be what you are," Manson declares, "so burn all your bridges and leave your old life behind ... as long as you've got love in your heart, you'll never be alone." Man, what lovely words from a man who told his drugged-up followers to murder half a dozen people because they wouldn't give him a record contract. I mean, it almost brings a tear to your eye.

TRACK 06

"Arkansas"

This song starts off with Manson's acolytes talking about nondescript "struggles." This one actually has a pretty cool acoustic guitar twang to it - it almost sounds like a Dick Dale song at points, if Dick Dale was a fucking psychotic sex criminal. Anyhoo, the song is about living in abject squalor in, you guessed it - Texas. More "Charlie humming" ensues, so if that ain't your bag, go on ahead and hit SKIP right now.

TRACK 07

"I'll Never Say Never to Always"

We get a creepy as fuck all-female chorus opening the song, with babies crying in the background and there's this eerie echo that sounds like they recorded it out of a bucket 20 feet underground. It's only a couple of seconds long, but shit, is it unnerving.

TRACK 08
"Garbage Dump"

Holy shit, this sounds JUST like a G.G. Allin song - no wonder he wound up covering it. Anyhoo, this is a song that, well, is about a "garbage dump," which is a term that apparently confused Manson, since the chorus is "garbage dump, oh garbage dump, why are you called a garbage dump?" Umm - do you think it's because it's usually a place where people dump their garbage, guy?

TRACK 09

"Don't Do Anything Illegal"

Huh - an ironic title, eh? "Beware of the eagle, in the middle of your back, don't be illegal," Manson begins the track. "They've got you in a sack, and they keep you looking back." So I take it this is an early anti-police song? "Every time I go to the store, I've got to have an I.D. with me so they can see what they want to be," Manson wraps up the song, "I'm free." Man - this is the perfect song to steal cars to so you can convert them into dune buggies in anticipation of the upcoming racial holy war!

TRACK 10

"Slick City"

This is probably the best guitar work on the whole album, which is kinda' like having he highest test score in remedial math, but whatever. The weird thing is that Charles actually does have a semi-decent singing voice, when he's trying to be low key. Alas, he just has to hum-mumble his way through this track, thus turning what could've been a legitimately decent song into one that's just sorta' kinda' alright. You know what Manson really needed? A producer to keep him in line. Can you imagine what sort of A-plus material this dude could've cranked out with Phil Spector calling the shots behind the soundboard? Baby, there aren't enough Grammys in the world for stuff like that. 

TRACK 11

"Cease to Exist"

Yep, this is the infamous Manson song that the Beach Boys pretty much stole and released as "Never Learn Not To Love." It's funny how that one little act of recording industry malfeasance eventually resulted in Chuck becoming a psycho cult maniac. Had they given him his props, who knows? Maybe the asshole actually WOULD have had a real career making and writing music, and Sharon Tate would still be alive today and maybe Roman Polanksi never would've raped all those 14 year-olds and there's an alternate reality where the soundtrack to Ice Pirates was done ENTIRELY by Charles Manson himself. Shit - it really makes you think, don't it?

TRACK 12

"Big Iron Door"

If you like onomatopoeias, you'll love this one. This is Chuck "clang-banging" his way through a tune recounting his earlier forays in the clink. It's also barely a minute long and sounds like it cuts off halfway through. You know - not that it's necessarily a loss or anything like that ... 

TRACK 13

"I Once Knew A Man"

This one has a sorta' Western, classical guitar bent to it. I think there's also somebody blowing into a jug while Manson sings, and there might be a dude drumming on a milk crate somewhere in the background. Alas, something seems like its missing. Oh, I know what this track needed - a nice, long kazoo solo.

TRACK 14

"Eyes of a Dreamer"

"All the songs have been sung," Manson begins the album's concluding track. "And all the saints have been hung." So I guess it's kinda' of an anti-war song, or an anti-corporate song, or an anti-government song, or hell, maybe an anti-capitalism song. "A thing is just a thing, that's a thing," he continues, "it's all in the eyes of the dreamer ... and you are the man." Well ... the fuck if I have any idea what this goof's talking about here.

Your life was like a candle in the wind - a candle that forced drugged up 14-year-olds to have sex with animals.

Well, what more can I say about that? For years, LIE has been one of the most coveted "true crime" albums out there, probably second only to Jim Jones horrifying recording of the night he gave 900 people poisoned Flavor Aid. As far as kooky, way off the beaten path albums go, you'd have a hard time finding anything that manages to out do this in the "dude, that is some fucked up shit" department.

Objectively, you can't really call Manson's music, well, good. This is pretty much the definition of a one-track album - "Look At Your Game Girl" is legitimately, unironically outstanding, but everything else on the album is just sorta' meh, with the last four or five songs pretty much melding into an indistinguishable pile of blandness. You can see that Manson had at least a modicum of musical talent, but the fact of the matter is that even here he was too zonked out of his mind on drugs to be coherent. Had he not started drinking peyote 14 times a day, maybe - just maybe - he COULD'VE gone on to become a real recording star. But, as they sometimes say, that just wasn't how the cookie crumbled; amazing how thin a line there is between somebody becoming Neil Young and becoming a psycho cult leader and unborn child skewerer, huh?

Yeah, it's probably in bad taste to pay money for the CD, even if the royalties never went to Manson or his adherents. Moreover, the music itself really isn't worth paying for, so I'd suggest snagging "Look At Your Game Girl" off the Internets and leaving the rest of the album for others to drudge through (your sins, I paid for, you ungrateful pricks.)

So all that to say? Yes, Charles Manson indeed COULD kinda sorta sing and play the guitar, he made at least one truly great song and now - he's dead as shit. Or getting close to being dead as shit, or at the very least taking considerable strides to being dead as shit. 

Which, regardless, I think we can all agree is long overdue.

Read More

Six Horrible Bands That Shouldn’t Have Survived the ‘90s

…and another half dozen who should’ve ruled the freaking world.

The 1990s were a great time for music, it being the era that gave us Cynic, Nada Surf, Wu-Tang, Anal Cunt, Merzbow, good Johnny Cash and of course, the Wesley Willis Fiasco. While most bands from the era have long since dissolved or turned into calcified husks of what they once were, quite a few bands from the era have remained quite popular ever since.

Today, we’re going to be taking a look at a dozen bands who, after becoming popular in the ‘90s, have had extended careers into the aughties and beyond. To be different though, we’ll largely be looking at six bands that have proven extraordinarily popular beyond the Sega Genesis era, who in my humblest of opinions, never deserved their success to begin with. Serving as palette cleaners, we’ll then bring up a band that SHOULD have had the post-Clinton success that the overrated artist did.

Odds are, this one will probably irk some fan boys, but that’s not exactly territory we here at the Internet Is In America is even remotely afraid to get into. Get ready, folks, it’s time to chow down on some supremely overrated sacred cow…

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER ONE:

Tool

Tool, and their fans, are people who overstate their own intelligence. They think tunes like “Prison Sex” and “Schism” are profound and intellectual and probing, but no -- they’re actually pretty fucking stupid, pointless and meandering to the point of being indecipherable.

Tool is pretty much Pink Floyd for people who might shoot up a school building some day. You HAVE to be high to listen to their music, because anyone with even the remotest sense of pitch and tune would hear three seconds of “Stink Fist” and probably mistake it for air conditioning static. The H.R. Giger claymation videos and lenticular album covers of Vitruvian Man and dudes blowing themselves pretty much tell you all you need to know about the band as an act -- they’re boring, they have nothing to say, and they have to be inauthentically “shocking” and grandiose to even be worth mentioning. At least Marilyn Manson and his followers know how stupid his shtick is -- Tool is a band glibly unaware just how painfully mundane they truly are.

Tool is the worst kind of band, the kind of band who thinks their music is better than what it really is. Ultimately, they’re just a shitty industrial band -- probably worse than Ministry or Prong -- who think they can overcome their drabness by filling their music with creepy stalker poetry and Bill Hicks references. You know why Tool songs often drone on for more than ten minutes? Because it gives you ample time to get up and find something better to do with your life, that’s why.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

DEATH

Far and away the best death metal band of all-time, and pretty much the act responsible for turning the genre from a goofy thrash offshoot into arguably the most intellectual and technically demanding genre out there. Truly intelligent people listen to “Human” and “Symbolic” -- mush heads keep waiting for Maynard James Keenan to write another song about egg recipes.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER TWO:

Nine Inch Nails

And speaking of shitty industrial acts, hey ya’ll its Trent Reznor and pals!

Really, NIN shouldn’t have had a career after “Pretty Hate Machine.” “Head Like a Hole” should’ve made them a one-hit-wonder, and they should’ve faded away into obscurity by the time the mid 1990s arrived. But somehow, they managed to become goth-rock-Prozac heroes with “The Downward Spiral,” the techno-metal-emo magnum opus that’s probably been the soundtrack to more teen suicides than any other album in history.

Magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone praised NIN for being “emotional” and “innovative,” which is codeword for “playing like shit, but since its arty, we want to sound enlightened too, so we like it.” With a rock world tired of “woe-is-me” mopey  flannel shirt shit-grunge, Reznor had the business sense to cook up some “woe-is-me” mopey black fingernail polish electro-shit-emo to fill the lucrative void created by Kurt Cobain’s doped up corpse. Like a turd that won’t flush, they float up to the top of the commode every four or five years, with another boring-ass album that sounds just like the last one, but rest assured, the NPR crowd will eat it up, anyway. They say all you need to make it in show-business is talent, hard work and a hell of a marketing campaign. Thanks to NIN, we know now you only need one of those to thrive in the recording industry.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

MONSTER MAGNET

Quite possibly the best pure rock and roll band on the planet, and a group that’s been releasing consistently great dope smoke rock since the early 1990s. With a lead singer who looks just like the dude from “American Movie,” Monster Magnet is the kind of old school rock act that knows how to rip it up and get groovy at the same time. Whereas NIN is overproduced, computerized drabness, Monster Magnet is raw, mechanical sexualized fury -- in short, everything that makes actual rock and roll fucking awesome.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER THREE:

AFI

AFI was -- and still is -- the Backstreet Boys of goth music. 98 percent of their fan base are prepubescent teen girls (who may be in their late 30s by now), who dream of being seduced by some 120 pound weakling with a lip ring while “Invader Zim” romantically plays in the background. AFI is a pseudo-band who makes pseudo-music, and they’ve undoubtedly made a lot of money courting the Hot Topics crowd like Jerry Lewis serenading kids to the gas chamber.

AFI was NEVER a real punk band. Even their ‘90s stuff was more “Green Day” than “Suicide Machines,” and their post “Girl’s Not Grey” stuff might as well be considered Top 40 pop. Their dark-romantic-Victorian-kinda-emo-straight-edge hook is one of the most noticeably formulaic in all of music -- their songs seem structured to sell iTunes downloads to fat punk chicks who would recoil in disgust at G.G. Allin’s mere visage.

There’s not much of a difference between AFI and the All-American Rejects or Fallout Boy, except maybe the clothing is darker. It’s major record label, niche target youth-baiting claptrap all the same, made worse because AFI and their fans actually think they’re a real band. Show me someone who enjoys AFI’s music, and I’ll show you someone with about as much depth as a drained kiddy pool.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

GWAR

Yes, GWAR, the group of Virginia art school students who dressed up like outer space bacon monsters and did stage shows filled with fake amputation and gallons of synthetic blood. To the untrained eye, it was all goofy showmanship, until you actually paid heed to the band’s lyrics, which were among the most subversively intelligent political satire of the last two decades. AFI are a bunch of rich pretty boys in eyeliner, whereas GWAR were a bunch of ugly motherfuckers who knew what TRUE art looked, sounded and sometimes smelled like. They were true audiovisual entertainment, not the commodified, Super Target discount bin-ready corp-pop that AFI has been for at least the last ten years.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER FOUR:

Tori Amos

I don’t know which I detest more: Tori Amos, or Tori Amos fans. Let’s pick apart both, why don’t we?

Despite all of the accolades she receives,  Tori Amos is really nothing more than the female equivalent of Ben Folds. Except Ben Folds has dexterity, and he has the good sense to not make super-long paens to rape and domestic abuse staples of his catalog. EVERY goddamn Tori Amos song sounds the same -- breathless, absurdly forced egocentrically emotional pornography. “Look at me, I’m a woman, men are bad, I’ve been through bad stuff, women are good.” That’s pretty much the lyrical range to the entire Amos discography. PJ Harvey more or less had the same gimmick, but at least she has a decent voice -- Amos usually sounds like a raspy-throated Disney on Ice singer who stopped giving a shit a long time ago.

And goddamn, are Tori fans the most annoying throng of wannabe intellectual artistes this side of the Animal Collective fan club. They’re all so emotionally distraught over the most menial wrongs that have occurred to them. The aggregate Amos fan isn’t some chronically abused outsider, but some suburban mall rat whose worst day ever was the time she got the wrong coffee at Starbucks and what’s-his-name from geometry class never accepted her friend request. Liz Phair beats the shit out of Tori Amos any day of the week -- I’d rather listen to a scratched disc version of “Exile on Guyville” than ANYTHING this overrated ginger has crapped out.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead?

MATTHEW SWEET

Matthew Sweet is the single most underrated artist of the 1990s, and under complete obscurity, he’s released nearly thirty years worth of the best guitar-driven power pop in the history of recorded music. If you want overblown, self-righteous sentimentalism, Amos is your girl; when you’re ready for no-frills, old-school emotional rock and roll, Matthew Sweet is waiting for you.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER FIVE:

Radiohead

In a just world, Radiohead would have gone the way of Wax, Greta and Quicksand. “Creep” would have been a popular contemporary hit, their follow-up albums would have sold like crap and with enough luck, Thom Yorke would’ve died of a heroin overdose sometime in 1998. Alas, the winds of fate have blown the other direction, and as a global society, we’ve all had to suffer.

There’s no way around it: Radiohead is the pussiest band in history. They make Morrissey sound like Slayer and The Cure sound like Deicide in their prime. You MIGHT be able to give their guitarist credit, but that still leaves three-fourths a shitty band to deal with. And then, there’s the discography as a whole.

“OK Computer” is the most overrated album of the 1990s, and its not even close. From “Kid A” to “In Rainbows,” they’re discography hasn’t gotten any better, with their subdued, low-key high production value-low-fi sound becoming the aural template for countless Euro and US suck-core acts such as The Killers and Coldplay. More than any band of the last 30 years, Radiohead has been the most responsible for popularizing wuss-rock, the effeminate, absurdly morose wannabe art house genre that more or less represents rock and roll music as a whole today. For that alone, Radiohead deserves the world’s collective scorn. And they probably deserve even more than that for simply being Radiohead.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead?

LOCAL H

Most folks only know Local H for their minor 1996 hit “Bound for the Floor,” and that’s a real shame. Unbeknownst to 99 percent of humanity, the Chicago post-grunge act has gone on to release outstanding album after outstanding album ever since, producing super-smart alternative rock that puts all of those egghead college rock groups to shame. Radiohead is music people listen to because they think it makes them look hip and intellectual; Local H is the kind of music people listen to because hot damn, does it ever rock.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER SIX:

Neutral Milk Hotel

Without hyperbole, “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” is the single worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life, and I once heard the death scream of a kitten before. I’m not trying to sound acerbically humorous when I state that I have no earthly idea how anyone could find this type of “music” pleasurable. It’s so pretentious, and inauthentic and insincere -- authentically shitty music, I can handle, but disingenuous shit like this? It’s the absolute worst of the worst.

Neutral Milk Hotel isn’t a band. I’m convinced of it. It’s actually some kind of far-reaching, longitudinal MK Ultra experiment on mimetic desirability or something. The masterminds at DARPA used algorithms to create the absolute shittiest kind of music possible, and via media engineering, have convinced all of the pop music barons that it’s actually great, and since kids today are a bunch of mush heads who can’t think for themselves, they too, have convinced themselves that NMH is, and I definitely quote here, “good music.”

Between Jeff Mangum’s make-believe hillbilly yelp, the band’s inability to find a rhythm of any sort and the group’s sickeningly avant-garde for the sake of being avant-garde shtick (hey, let’s make an alt-country concept album about Anne Frank!), Neutral Milk Hotel is -- without question -- the single worst alt rock act to achieve critical or financial success in the 1990s. They may not have recorded any music since 1999, but they made enough shit from 1992 onward to forever leave their undeniable streak mark on the industry. I can be flexible on most things, but if you’re into Neutral Milk Hotel, I automatically hate you. It’s something much worse than having bad taste -- it’s a sign you, as an individual, have absolutely zero ability to think beyond what shitrags such as Pitchfork tell you to. To summarize: fuck Neutral Milk Hotel, and everyone on planet Earth who likes them.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

VIC CHESNUTT

If you want REAL alt country, it doesn’t get any better than Vic Chesnutt, the Athens, Ga. singer-songwriter who is probably best known for being the guy in the wheelchair in “Sling Blade.” With soulful, haunting songs about faith, disease and depression, Chesnutt was an artist who really made music that connected with you. As insincere as Neutral Milk Hotel is, Vic Chesnutt is every bit the real deal; as much as you owe it to yourself to avoid Jeff Mangum, you definitely owe it to yourself to give Chesnutt a thorough listening.

Read More

Music Midtown 2013: A Spiritual Odyssey into Adulthood

How a trip to Atlanta’s largest annual music festival proved I’m no longer the young Turk I used to be…and why that’s ANYTHING but a bad thing. 

Every year in Atlanta, this multi-day mega festival is held at Piedmont Park, called “Music Midtown.” This year’s line-up consisted of bands whose general discographies I more or less enjoyed -- Weezer, The Black Lips, Tegan and Sara, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- and a couple of bands that, in my opinion, are extraordinarily overrated -- the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queens of the Stone Age and Imagine Dragons, among them -- and a whole hell of a lot of acts I’ve never heard of before -- ZZ Ward, Mona, The Neighbourhood and pretty much everybody else on the schedule.

I’ve never been to Music Midtown before, but this year, I said “why the heck not?” After all, there were a lot of quasi-decent bands there, and it’s a full Saturday filled with rock and roll, food trucks, and all sorts of kitschy, kooky stuff that you really don’t get to see anywhere else (primarily, because the rest of society isn’t littered with alcohol and weed-intoxicated twenty year olds averse to wearing shirts.) I’d heard from quite a few folks that parking there is generally a nightmare, so I asked my other of much significance if she wanted to get there extra-early; as in, like six o’clock in the morning (when the first act, mind you, wasn’t scheduled to begin until about noon.) Because she’s the most awesome girlfriend in the world, she said yes, and after filling my stomach with a 22 ounce Styrofoam cup of QuikTrip Cappuccino, we were on our way to what is pretty much the largest musical festival in the Southeast -- not called Bonnaroo, of course.

Now, I know Atlanta quite well. In fact, I’ve spent pretty much every other weekend of my life for the last three years hanging out there. That said, I’ve never really been on the streets of Atlanta on a Saturday morning, and it was downright surreal. For one thing, there was hardly any traffic at all on 10th Street, and if you know anything at all about the ATL, you’d know that stretch of real estate (basically, everything from The Varsity to the Midtown Art Cinema) is usually congested like a mofo. Alas, there were few vehicles on the pavement, and even fewer people ambling around (outside of the joggers, of course -- by the way, half of Atlanta is populated by people in really bright shoes just running around aimlessly.)

So, me and Miss Internet Is In America grabbed a quick coffee at Starbucks (for Atlanta area travelers: the one next to the Chick-Fil-A at Colony Square is one of the few public spots within walking distance that has guaranteed bathroom access) and just watched the sun come up. That sounds like something really boring people do, but watching the sky turn from purple to light blue as the giant-assed orange sun just radiate across all of the skyscrapers was something truly magnificent, and something suburbanites just can’t bear witness to on a daily basis. You know, for a city that has a reputation as being one of the hardest places in America, Atlanta truly is a beautiful town, in many respects. Well…as long as you stay out of Vine City, I suppose.

From there, we did some ambling. Not walking, “ambling,” which is sort of like walking, only without any true direction in mind. If you don’t amble, you should try it sometime; you really have no idea what exciting, unexpected locales you may find yourselves in when you do (that morning, I ended up in a strip mall parking lot with a Thai restaurant, a seasonal Halloween store, and what I am fairly certain was about three or four gay bars.)

Piedmont Park, for those of you out of the loop, is a really, really big park, and even though a majority of it was roped off for the festival, half of the place was still open and accessible to joggers and dog walkers. As pretty as it is, it’s also one of the more depressing sites in the city, as its often home to any number of impoverished people, sometimes sleeping on top of playground equipment until the police walk on over to them and tell them to scram. It’s an unfortunate plight, on so many levels, but at least the city’s ordinances don’t make them ILLEGAL by default, which is actually on the books in some places. Places that really, really ought to be ashamed of themselves. And by all of that, I mean “Columbia, South Carolina,” which by all contemporary measures of human decency, can go fuck itself anytime it so chooses.

After ambling around a bit, I found myself at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, which is sort of like Busch Gardens, only with a lot less roller coasters. We didn’t explore all of it, but we did manage to see this impressive sight -- a topiary toy canine, which almost looked like a bichon frise made out of moss. And in case you were wondering; there was a security camera placed right in front of it, so no take-home souvenirs of grass-puppy-chunks were collected that day, sadly.

Despite my well-established adulation for breakfast cereals, the actual meal of breakfast itself is something I rarely experience. Hell, most days, I don’t actually get around to eating anything until about 5 or 6 PM, and on the weekends, the wait is sometimes even longer (primarily because of the nature of this whole online writing business -- I’m more or less enslaved by my laptop a good ten or 12 hours a day, and even making a trip to the microwave could cost me a much-needed phone call or e-mail.) So, at around 10 AM, we decided to hit up the Flying Biscuit Cafe, one of Atlanta’s more popular non-franchised eateries. Yeah, it may not be a Gladys Knight- endoresed chicken and pancakes stand, but it’s own reputation remains fairly vaunted, nonetheless.

A ton of people were in the restaurant that morning -- mostly for Music Midtown, I’m assuming, but there was also the PGA Tour (who the hell wants to spend money to watch OTHER PEOPLE play golf, exactly?) and the Georgia Tech/Whoever Georgia Tech Was Playing game down at Bobby Dodd Stadium going on, too. Now, I’m sure you’ve heard lots of things about Atlanta’s demographics, but for those of you that think Atlanta is filled with nothing but Antebellum South leftovers and the likes of Curtis Snow, you’d be plum shocked by just how diverse the city ACTUALLY is. Black gay dudes into punk rock hobnob with forty year old white hipster dudes that really like Etta James, and really fat looking old dudes that wear tank tops and look like they hate all minorities live on the very same block as acoustic guitar virtuoso African-Americans and hardcore women’s rights Puerto Rican lesbian Georgia State professors. I haven’t seen any seven foot tall Filipino transgender strippers walking down the street holding hands with their live-in-albino-midget boyfriends yet, but at the same time, I haven’t checked out every street in Atlanta, either. For all I know, there could be an entire village of them living behind the Carter Center or something.

The interior of the Cafe is really something else, too. For one, there are indeed literal flying biscuits painted on the walls, and you can actually open up the windows while you eat -- which, I guess, is the kind of thing that makes dining and dashing a lot easier, but apparently, that's not much of a problem for the proprietors of the restaurant. Weirdly, there's this glass enclosure inside the building, so there's basically an inside part of the cafe and an outside-inside part of the cafe that's kinda' like a ring around a planet. Also, it makes you feel like you're eating behind a plate-glass window at the zoo (or prison), therefore making the dining experience, as a whole, that much more awesome.

So, what did my breakfast consist of at the Flying Biscuit Cafe that morning? Well, I had all of this deliciousness right here -- a MEGGSXICAN omelet, with potato chunks (like home fries, but way more Georgian in nature) and a complimentary biscuit (the red stuff in the thimble was the best goddamn jam anyone's ever had in their life, by the way.) You know you're in a major metro area when your vegetarian-friendly options entail the ability to substitute tofu for scrambled eggs, which is precisely what I did with my plate. Needless to say, the whole meal was freaking delicious, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who is in the ATL for any prolonged period of time. It's metropolitan-urban-alternative-soul-food at its finest, and just to remind you that you are still eating in the Deep South -- one of the menu offerings is a Coca-Cola glazed chicken. (And further proof you're still in Dixie: there were people in the eatery that morning chowing down on scrambled eggs and washing it down with Blue Moon ale at the same time.)

With about an hour to go until the festival officially kicked off, we decided to make the brief march back to Piedmont. At this point, not only did the lines start forming, so did a light drizzle -- which, over the course of an hour, turned into a medium-sized downpour. Thankfully, at least one of us in the relationship watches the Weather Channel, and as such, we both came prepared for inclement conditions. My little rain slicker thingy even had a sweet-looking flannel interior -- which would soon prove itself to be an utter and complete good time-killer a little bit later on in the evening.

The first thing I noticed about the line was that it was filled with some young folks -- I mean, like high school aged and shit. So many white people, with blonde hair and braces: yeah, I guess a few of them could've been sorority girls from Georgia Tech or rich kids from Nashville, but I was still aghast at just how much the demographics that day skewed towards those in their early 20s and late teens. And after an hour of being harangued by the park's ticket taker gestapo -- who made people give up their "oversized" umbrellas and pointed out people in the crowd smoking cigarettes illegally  -- the entry gates finally swung open, and the day's festivities had officially kicked off!

By the way, did I mention that it was raining like hell, windy as hell, and colder than hell throughout the entire day? Well, it was, and it made the entire foray about as much fun as realizing the interior lining of your jacket was melting and covering your entire body in a semi-permanent red dye -- which is exactly what all of that excessive moisture did my "sweet" flannel jacket parka thingy.

There were a lot of neat attractions there -- food trucks, a ton of vendor spaces and even a Ferris wheel -- but since a junior-sized tsunami had broken out, all of that shit went straight out the window. From there, "having fun" became a secondary function to "not being out in the open and having water seep into every nook and cranny of your body," so I ended up spending a good 95 percent of my time there hugging the bark of a tree and TRYING to not get any more rain in my socks.

It was a really great look into the psyche of humanity, too: it was clear that everyone there was totally miserable, but since they had already spent $200 on tickets, nobody had the willpower to leave. Even more fun was watching the impromptu entrepreneurs blossom, with park custodians turning around and (probably illegally) selling plastic garbage bags as makeshift ponchos. The one tent that was already selling actual ponchos probably had the biggest end-of-day purse of any vendor there, but I was just wondering why in the hell they were selling "pregnancy tests" next to the cash register...

I guess now's a good time to talk about the music at the festival, no? Well, the first couple of acts were far from impressive, in my humblest of opinions. Ever heard of the bands Mona or The Neighbourhood? If you haven't, long story short, they suck, and you didn't miss anything. Except for rain. A whole hell of a lot of it.

The first band that I actually cared about took one of three central stages at around 2:30 PM, which was around the same time the downpour got the most ferocious. While it was no doubt cool hearing Weezer torch through "Say it Ain't So" and "El Scorcho," the entire scenario was marred considerably by three factors:

#001.) You know how the park ranger Nazi from earlier told everybody that smoking was verboten at the festival? Well, a large throng of festival-goers decided that was more of a "suggested practice" than an official mandate, so while I was wedged up against a leaky oak for protection from the elements, I was forced to suck down approximately 43 metric tons of second-hand Camel Crush smoke, in tandem with the 88 metric tons of second-hand marijuana dust that was bellowing out of the mouths of a good 87 percent of the festival's attendee's collective maws.

#002.) So, while my lungs are being McGangBanged by all sorts of noxious fumes, a downwind from across the park cascades across the plains -- in short, the collective stench of EVERY SINGLE fried food being sold at the park, in one John Carpenter-esque miasmi, hung directly overhead during the entirety of the set.

#003.) Oh, and then there were the port-a-potties, which apparently began leaking a bit and mixing in with the mini-flood that was sweeping across the walkways of the park. So, to reiterate, the positive here was that Weezer sounded pretty all right. As for the negatives, for a solid hour, I was forced to stand shivering underneath a leaking branch, while a perfect storm of B.O, weed, tobacco, grease and various forms of poop and/or pee danced underneath my nasal passages.

The Black Lips -- one of Atlanta's finest home-grown acts, as we all know by now -- took the stage right after Weezer's set concluded. I caught a couple of their songs, and decided that it was time to scout the surroundings for both food, protection, and a clean place to urinate. And by the way: you've probably heard some bad things about music festival bathrooms before, and I assure you, EVERYTHING you've heard about them are true, and then some.

The line for vegetarian corn-dogs were the shortest, so that's where we decided to pick up some mid-day grub. Around this point, I had no option but to spend five bucks on one of those cheap-ass ponchos everybody was selling, and somehow, it was even LESS effective at preventing rain from seeping into my boxers and socks than my bleeding flannel overcoat. So, basically, if you missed out on Music Midtown in 2013, the only thing you really missed out on was pretending to be a Bosnian refugee for an afternoon.

Regarding the vendors, two in particular stood out to me; one was a Dunkin' Donuts truck, which instead of providing delicious, warm beverages that could've possibly saved my ass, was handing out mini-sample cups of iced coffee and allowing patrons to have their pictures taken inside a corporate branded photo booth. The other was a table selling various "cooling products," and needless to say, their money boxes looked quite vacant when I waltzed by.

Let's talk about the patrons of the festival, why don't we? As stated earlier, the demographics skewed pretty young, but there were quite a few older folks at the show, too. The security protocols for the festival were utterly perplexing to me; por exemple, large umbrellas were illegal, but people on five foot tall stilts were COMPLETELY all right with the guards. Similarly, totem poles -- basically, ten-foot-poles with flags and stuffed animals on them -- were permitted without hesitation.

There was a LOT of alcohol swirling around at the festival, which, I suppose, shouldn't be too surprising. A rain-drenched populace spent most of their day trying to improvise protective apparel, and some of their ideas were downright ingenious. In one instance, some Verizon spokeswoman was handing out free tote bags -- while under normal atmospheric conditions, nobody would even stop by her booth, people were FLOCKING around here like she was handing out free Chuck E. Cheese tokens. Why were they so desperate to procure one of the bags, you're probably thinking? Because they could be transformed into impromptu pope hats, and there were TONS of folks rocking the head wear...so much so, that they more or less become the most fashionable item at the entire festival.

By the time the Black Lips set was over, the park was a downright muddy mess. Flocking across the park to catch Tegan and Sara's performance, there was more or less a massive gulch of wet dirt...a couple of inches thick...separating patrons from the green space in front of the stage. And because so much of the park was corralled off, there was NO way to get over there WITHOUT wading through the bog. 

Conditions were miserable before, but now, things were just comically awful; so it's cold, rainy, everything smells like a septic tank, and there's mud encrusted on your leg all the way up to your ankle. So how do you make such a predicament worse? Easy, amigo: you add in people. 

So, we're huddled underneath the most anorexic looking oak tree you've ever seen, when this diminutive blonde girl -- probably 19 or 20 -- stumbles over to us, blows beer breath in our face, and asks us how we would "describe the place." I respond by telling her "rainy and muddy," and she then proceeds to drop her smart phone in the mud. "No," she responds, almost doubling over when she goes to pick up her phone. She points towards a text message on her phone, which I can barely read. Apparently, she's trying to tell one of her friends where she is, so my girlfriend responds by saying "well, it's the place next to the tree." The drunk girl's response? "OK. Which tree is this?" You know, because the things are so clearly labeled and shit. Eventually, she just wandered off, while another college-age looking kid literally dragged his near-comatose date right through the mud, like she was a flat tire or something. Cue the mid -20-something that decides to smoke one of those clove cigarette things right in our face with no regard to our own well-being, and that was when our worries REALLY started to blossom. 

I'm convinced that Tegan and Sara fans are the most sociable people on the planet. While I was hanging out on my flannel jacket -- it had long lost its utility as anything other than a makeshift blanket by this point -- this one 20-something decides to just hop on the jacket with us and start talking about her adventures.

"Tegan and Sara are the twin lesbians, right?" she asks us. "I'm here to meet up with these two girls, that actually ARE twin lesbians," she continues. "I mean, how cool is that?"

Now, I know what you're thinking -- here I am, surrounded by a bunch of drunk lesbians and drunk non-lesbians, gleefully splashing through the mud in their $250 dollar flip-flops and $30 emerald-puke-green toenail polish, and I'm COMPLAINING about the experience? Well, yes, I am, because perspectives are different once you're in your late 20s. Maybe 20 or 21 year old me would have LOVED getting sloshed on Coors and slip-sliding around in brown gunk and trying to hit on Savannah College of Art and Design co-eds that we're probably on ecstasy, but as a quasi-professional writer-person, who's in a committed relationship that more or less constitutes a common law marriage in 30 states, the event was, surprisingly, not that fun at all. And that's when HE showed up.

You shouldn't -- and really can't -- be surprised when you see people tanked out of their minds on Budweiser and rat weed stumbling around at a concert. But when the 300 pound, baby-faced lard-o in a bright yellow tee-shirt started stumbling through the bog RIGHT IN FRONT OF US like a monster truck, my reasonable disappointment with the evening quickly transitioned into my first sensations of mortal terror for the afternoon.

The guy falls down once, and just kind of lays there in the mud, like some sort of stillborn fetus. The poor bastard is so smashed out of his mind, its virtually impossible for him to pull himself up. Had some good Samaritans not been there to yank him upright, it's likely that he would've been petrified in the sludge for all eternity, like a woolly mammoth that fell into a tar pit or something. So he, starts stumbling forward, and stops, about five feet in front of us. And that's when he starts swaying back and forth, with his tongue hanging out, looking like he's about to do his best impersonation of a Jenga game.

The dude just STOOD there, for like, five minutes, slightly bobbing up and down, forward and behind, before suddenly correcting his posture and walking on out of the park like a normal bipedal creature. My girlfriend, now with some downright grisly blisters on her feet, asked if we could call it an early evening after that. I may not have gotten a chance to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the Queens of the Stone Age, but I really didn't care, either -- I wanted out of that madness just as much as she did by that juncture.

Now, I know you're thinking it: "Jimbo, had the day been really sunny and warm, wouldn't you have really enjoyed it, and had no grand sociocultural epiphanies while you were there?" The answer is pretty clear: yeah, but God made it rain, and rain makes you think about all of the inherent miseries of the world, and that's not all that bad of a place to be, because only seeds of distress bear fruit. Good times make you drink, after all, while bad times make you think.

First and foremost, the day made me realize that I'm old. Maybe not old-old, but certainly beyond the threshold of being "just another kid out there without a concern in the world." A lot of the younger folks there had a great time, being all wet and dirty and plastered out of their gourds. But to me, such an environment is utterly detestable; I mean, why do I need to be physically and mentally battered to enjoy myself? That's the kind of instant-gratification, sensorial-before-existential experiencing that young people like, and older people can't stand. Now, I still don't mind blasting some Monster Magnet or old school Emperor through my cochleas every now and then, but it doesn't have the same universal, experience-for-the-sake-of-just-experiencing-something appeal that it used to. I haven't had a sip of alcohol this decade, and I've never used any illicit substances -- looking at the kids that day, I really wondered if they were using that stuff to enhance the experience, or just because it was the only way they could experience anything at all. It was a sad observance, for sure: these poor kids HAD to be smashed to enjoy themselves -- the only pleasure they derived from the event coming through a chemically-brewed fog.

So, I'm in the parking garage, about to leave town at 6 PM -- the festival, remember, isn't supposed to end until midnight. I toss my dirty shoes in the trunk, and I think about how much I LOVED that morning, when I was just walking around in the park and having a quaint breakfast and just talking to my girl, and then I thought about how I utterly ABHORRED the rest of the afternoon, with its rain, and mud, and shit, and ZZ Ward (that bony-assed Adele wannabe had the audacity to do a cover "I Can't Stand the Rain" during her show, thus earning her my eternal contempt.) For a second, I felt like an old coot -- being an early bird and all that jazz -- but then, I realized something: my outlook on life had matured, past the phase of sheer experientialism to the phase of profound experientialism. I enjoyed the morning because of its holistic qualities -- the exploration of nature as a whole, the connection with my girlfriend, that sense of shared experiences. I was deriving pleasure form observance as opposed to participation, while at the festival, I was...well, really, really wet and muddy for the most part. In short, at the concert, I was amid a throng of (generally younger) folks that were deriving pleasure from what they were doing, while earlier that morning, while I was just parading around Midtown with my gal, I was deriving pleasure from what I was being. I was happy with existence as a whole, beyond my own meaty perspective, while at the show, there was only circumstantial happiness wholly focused on individual pleasure. The former is the mindset of the aged, while the latter is the mentality of the young; in that, I left with a bigger smile on my facing leaving the party than I did at any point while I was actively partying.

So here's to Music Midtown 2013 for being another one of those pivotal, life-changing experiences: henceforth, September 21st will always be that day where I realized I was kinda'-sorta' old...which, not coincidentally, was also among the happiest moments of my life.

Read More